The Victorianism of Victorian Literature

Abstract

T IS A TRIBUTE to criticism published during the last decade that the Victorians are in danger of losing their identity and becoming mid-nineteenth century or premodern. In reaction perhaps to the stigma that the term carried, literary historians and critics have attempted to demonstrate the un-Victorian characteristics of the age and to indicate what consider to be its true nature. Three influential studies reveal their approach by the subtitles: Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition; Essays on the Continuity of Nineteenthand Twentieth-Century Literature; and Five Nineteenth-Century Writers. No longer, it seems are such titles as The Victorian Frame of Mind or The Victorian Temper or even Victorian England: Portrait of an Age suitable.1 Perhaps the most influential studies in this tradition have been Robert Langbaum's The Poetry of Experience and The Modern Spirit, both of which focus on the similarities rather than the differences of Romantic, Victorian, and modern. In the former, Langbaum stresses particularly the way that the writers of all three periods were influenced by the Enlightenment: Whatever the differences between the literary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he writes, they are connected by their view of the world as meaningless, by the response to the same wilderness. In The Modern Spirit his approach is best indicated by the subtitle.2 One other example will help define this tradition. In his perceptive analysis of the reactions of De Quincey, Browning, Bronti, Arnold, and Hopkins to the disappearance of God, J. Hillis Miller places all five in the tradition of Romanticism. After citing other possible reactions to the withdrawal of God-that is, humanism,