Sunday 8 March 2020

Assignment paper No 6 : Victorian Novelist



Name  : Gondaliya pina k
Sem : 2
Paper No : Victorian Literature
Topic : Major novelist of Victorian era 
Enrollment No :
Email ID : pinagondaliya09@gmail.com 


Victorian Novelist : Charles Dickens and George Eliot

Victorian period


The Victorian period (1850-1900) is the Modern period of progress and unrest. The Victorian era was a long struggle of the Anglo-Saxon for personal liberty is definitely settled, and democracy became the established order of the day. Victorian age an age of democracy, it is an age of popular education, religious tolerance, growing brotherhood, and of profound social unrest. Victorian age is remarkable rapid progress in all arts, sciences and in mechanical inventions. 


  • Literary characteristics of the Victorian era. 


  1. An Age of Prose 
  2. Moral Purpose 
  3. Idealism 


  • Novelist of Victorian era 


The Victorian age was known as the richest age of English literature. During the vacation era there was a rise in various writing in terms of prose, fiction, novel and poetry. The Victorian era was the age of English novels. In the Victorian period the novel made wide progress. Novel reading was a chief occupation of Victorian public. A many brilliant novelist showed that it was possible to adapt the novel to almost all purposes of literature whatsoever. It was the ideal form to describe contemporary life and to entertain the middle class. Victorian novels tend to be idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end.Charles Dickens wrote about poverty and social issues in his writing. 


Victorian Novelist 

  1. Charles Dickens 
  1812 - 1870
  1. George Eliot 
  1819 - 1880
  1. Thomas Hardy 
  1840 -  1928
  1. William Makepeach Thackerav 
  1811 -  1163 



Charles Dickens 

Charles Dickens was one of the best representatives of his age as a novelist. His representation of the essential human conditions is outstanding. His realism, prose Style, characterization and social criticism in his novels are works of social commentary. He was a fierce critic of poverty with social stratification.


Charles Dickens, in full Charles Huffam Dickens, English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian era. He enjoyed wide popularity, his works appealing to the simple and sophisticated. Charles Dickens,  a poor, obscure, and suffering child, was helping to support a shiftless family by pasting labels on blacking bottles, sleeping under a counter like a homeless cat, and once a week timidly approaching the big prison where his father was confined for debt. In 1836 his Pickwick was published, and his life was changed as if a magician had waved his wand over him. While the two great poets were slowly struggling for recognition, Dickens with plenty of money and too much fame, was the acknowledged literary hero of England, the idol of immense audiences which gathered to applaud him wherever he appeared. 


  • Works of Charles Dickens 


Charles Dickens wrote lots of works during the vacation era. He wrote many short stories and novels. 


  • Novels of Charles Dickens 



  • Novels of Charles Dickens 
  1. The Pickwick Paper 1836 
  2. Oliver Twist 
  3. Nicholas Nickleby 1838
  4. The Old curiosity shop 1840 
  5. Barnaby Rudge 1841
  6. Martin chuzzlewit 1843
  7. Dombey and son 1846
  8. David Copperfield 1849
  9. Bleak house 1852 
  10. Hard Times  1854 
  11. Little Dorrit 1855
  12. A tale of two cities  1859 
  13. Great expectations  1860 
  14. Our mutual friend  1864 
  15. The mystery of Edwin Drood 1870




  • George


George Eliot is widely known as a Victorian novelist. Eliot was her pet name her full name Mary Anne evans. George Eliot was born Mary Ann Evans in Warwickshire in 1819. Before she died in 1880, she had become one of the most notable women of the century and one of its leading novelists. Eliot's early life in warwickshire was crucial to her life as a writer: her surroundings provided her with material and inspiration for her later work and instilled a sense of the importance of  memory to the individual's development. In 1828, she became a fervent Evangelical, but when Eliot and her father moved to Coventry in 1841, she encountered the free-thinking Bray family, who initiated in Eliot an intellectual inquiry into the tenets of evangelicalism, which led her to disavow her earlier faith. In this new intellectual context, Eliot began her translation of Strauss's Das Leben Jesu. 


Eliot was a prolific essayist, reviewer, poet, and letter writer, but it is for her full -length fiction that she is best known. Her long fiction includes Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bed, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. In her fiction Elio developed the primary tenets of Victorian realism, and she insisted on the fundamental moral importance of the text. 


George Eliot was perhaps unique among the major novelists up to her time in formulating a coherent set of ideas about life and art before she started to write her first novel. Eliot was known as an important figure in the intellectual life of London during the fifties, as the sub editor of the Westminster Review, the most important organ of liberal thought in England at that time. Eliot was also a prolific writer of articles for magazines and a reviewer of belles-lettres for the Westminster for three years, 1855-57. 



  • Conclusion :


Critics have long insisted on the radical difference between the works of George Eliot and Dickens, and George Eliot mounted a strong attack on Dickens's writing in order to promote George Eliot's kind of fiction writing, there are important similarities between the two writers that are fundamental to the condition of writing novels in the Victorian era. Both write long multiple fiction; both imagine individual lives as bound up in complex social webs; both achieve their "realism" by the way of extravagant, fairy-tale like manipulation of plot. Despite a critical tradition that tended to oppose them, admiration for one does not exclude admiration for the other. 




Citation :


Levine, George. "The Dickensian George Eliot." Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 50, no. 1,2019,pp. 48-65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/dickstudannu.50.1.0048. Accessed 5 Mar. 2020.


Long. “English Literature by William J. Long.” Project Gutenberg, 1 Jan. 2004, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10609.




Marshall, Gail. “George Eliot -Victorian Literature .” George Eliot - Victorian Literature - Oxford Bibliographies, 2 Mar. 2011, www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199799558/obo-9780199799558-0026.xml.


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