Ethics

Abstract

While Victorians enjoyed lyric poetry and nonsense verse, many Victorian realist novels were highly didactic, with the experience of reading ideally directed toward the moral and spiritual renovation of the reading subject. Influenced by the teaching of the New Testament, many nineteenth‐century novels advocate the practice of “goodness,” an ethics of mutual sympathetic identification which promotes self‐sacrifice as the means by which to reconcile the sometimes competing claims of the individual and the community to which they belong. But at the same time, imaginative literature is always richly complex and Victorian novels often illustrate the human costs of these moral transactions, thus problematizing and even undermining the idea of sympathy as the foundation of a wider ethical or political system.