A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 16

 A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers ( Victorian Novel)

a. Charles Dickens was the most genuine story-teller of the complex life of London of his time, the greatest romancer of the life of the streets, workshops, and slums of which he had a direct personal knowledge.

b. The most impressive in Charles Dickens’ works is humour blended with pathos. Crime and villainy play a large part in his novels for he had a peculiar weakness for the ugly and eccentric characters.

c. Thackeray recaptures the Addisonian style, full of typical homely humour and light burlesque.

d. A rich and genial humour and sometimes a caustic irony light up George Eliot’s pages.

e. In 1859, George Eliot, already before the public as author of Scenes of Clerical Life, published Adam Bede, followed, in 1861, by that most artistically balanced novel, Silas Marner. Perfection of form was at last achieved.

f. Hardy has accepted and executed in his novels the same programmers that words worth has undertaken in his poetry, namely to choose incidents and situations from humble and rustic life and at the same time to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination so as to make them more appealing than reality. 

g. Hardy’s style is bold, artistic, picturesque, tortuous and sometime high-flown.

h. The novels of Jane Austen is a study a small segment of society in order to explore individual character. They generally address two themes: the loss of illusions—usually leading characters to a more mature outlook—and the clash between traditional moral ideals and the everyday demands of life.

i. Goldsmith’s the plot of The Vicar of Wakefield is poorly constructed, but the book is one of the most delightful domestic tales ever written. The charm, the humor, the wholesome details, the fidelity to truth, the individuality of the vicar and his family all these give it a cherished place in our heart.

j. Dickens's Tale of Two Cities puts before us in all their poignant and terrible detail the days of the French Revolution.

k. Character study is more important in the work of Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot.

l. Thackeray's Vanity Fair, The title, taken from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, represents the world of society as that fair where all the rogues and adventuresses crowd its booths and cheat one another.

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m. In Thackeray's Vanity Fair the reprehensible adventuress of Becky Sharp shows the English society at the time of the battle of Waterloo. Interest centers in the amazing experiences of Becky as she makes her way through the different grades of society, developing the worst in herself as she goes.

n. Dickens's David Copperfield is largely autobiographical, and David, Traddles, Steerforth Dora, Agnes, Uriah Heep, Mr. Peggotty and Micawber are immortal characters in the book. They confront us again and again, upon the street, in business, and in social life. They are now types.

o. Critics find in Dickens some serious faults: the mawkishness and sentimentality of his pathos, and the exaggeration of his studies of character.

p. Thomas Hardy’s novels tend to set forth a rather grim view of human life—people are doomed by bitter cosmic ironies, thing keep turning out as bad as possible.for examples:  In Tess of the D’Urbervilles we sympathize with the heroine, who is driven to murder and ends up hanged; in Jude the Obscure a whole doomed family of children hang themselves “because we are too many.

q. After the hostility that greeted Jude (1896) Hardy gave up novel writing for good and—the turn of the century being at hand—turned himself into a twentieth century poet.

r. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), which satirized the attitudes of the rural middle and upper-middle classes, is centered on the Bennett daughters: Elizabeth, Jane, and Lydia. Elizabeth, a spirited girl, is “prejudiced” against the wealthy landowner Fitzwilliam Darcy, scorning his lofty attitudes and “pride.” 

s. Late Victorians, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad restored the spirit of romance to the novel. They had exotic locale, adventures and actions. 

t. Late Victorians, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells attempted to represent the life of their time with great accuracy and in a critical, partly propagandistic spirit. 

u. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is unique in penetrating, psychological setting of rural England during the early 19th century. Here in the novel the town of Middlemarch and its inhabitants seem true to life.

v. Emily Bronte herself bear the costs of printing Wuthering Heights (1847) after her publisher refused to pay the initial expenses, unsure that the novel would sell enough copies.

 

w . Emily Bronte‘s Wuthering Heights is a rugged creation, perverse and elemental, its interest lies in its author’s insight into abnormal psychology. After more than a century, the narrative and the psychology novels merge into one another. It gives a morbid and stormy story, mystic and wonderful. Its chief characters are conceived on gigantic scales. They are rather the primal forces of nature. In a word, it is a strange, amazing, and terrible book.

x. Wuthering, Emily Bronte herself explains, is ‘a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed, one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house’. 

y. Emily’s style is strong and stormy, manly and confident, picturesque and jerky.

z. In 1848 Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre were published.

Ardhendu De

Ref: Wikipedia, Literary Timelines, History of English Literature- Albert