Jane Austen's Victorian Novel

Abstract

4HRONOLOGICALLY Mansfield Park cannot be called a Victorian novel. It was first published in I814; Oliver Twist, Vanity Fair, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, and Peg Woflington first appeared in I837-38, I847-48, I847, and I853 respectively. And it is equally impossible to put Mansfield Park into an artistic timetable, for any attempt to compare Jane Austen with any of her predecessors or to compare her successors with herself must invariably end in failure. She was one of literature's greatest artists and as such she was always and unmistakably Jane Austen. To read at random from any of her works, even the Juvenilia, is to recognize the balance and rhythm, the sprightliness, the terseness of her sentences; the delightful twist with which she so often ends a sentence; and the rapid ease of her progression. This is as true of Mansfield Park as of Emma. But any critic of Miss Austen, while recognizing the inimitable stamp that groups the six novels together, must also treat each novel individually, for, though they may appear alike, they are as unlike as their heroines. There is one novel, though, that is conspicuous in its difference from any of the others. Unlike the Victorian novel in most respects, Mansfield Park is suggestive of some aspects of some of them, and it is certainly a forerunner of the dowdy propriety and piety which blossomed in the 'fifties. The treatment of the clergy, the theater, and the sanctity of the family has been transferred from the vigorous sophistication of the eighteenth century to the high-minded and principled orthodoxy, strict propriety, and respectability of the nineteenth, the age of a bour-