Critical Realism in EnglandTHE HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL BACKGROUND OF THE EPOCH. THE VICTORIAN AGE. The 19th century was characterized by sharp contradictions. In many ways it was an age of progress: railways and steamships were built, great scientific discoveries were made, education became more widespread; but at the same time it was an age of profound social unrest, because there was too much poverty, too much injustice, too much ugliness; and above all, fierce exploitation of man by man. The growth of scientific inventions mechanized industry and increased wealth, but this progress only enriched the few at the expense of the many. Dirty factories, inhumanly long hours of work, child labour, exploitation of both men and women workers, low wages, slums and frequent unemployment — these were the conditions of life for the workers in the growing industries of England, which became the richest country in the world towards the middle of the 19th century. By the thirties of the 19th century English capitalism had entered a new stage of development. England had become a classical capitalist country, a country of industrial capitalism. The Industrial Revolution gathered force as the 19th century progressed, and worked profound changes in both the economic and the social life of the country. Quiet villages, sailing vessels and hand-looms gave way, within a hundred years, to factory towns, railroads, and steamships. Queen Victoria was monarch of England from 1837 to 1901, and it has been found convenient to group the writings produced during that long stretch of years as "Victorian". But the classification is perhaps too facile. To begin with, the Queen had very little to do with the best productions of her times. In an age that abounded in great literature and music, her own preferences were for second-rate authors and composers whose works are already forgotten. Moreover, no earlier period of English literature exhibits so vast a variety of traits, style, and ideas. It is absurd to pretend that the label "Victorian" communicates any idea common to the works of writers so different as Macaulay, Dickens, Emily Bronte, Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, Arnold, Swinburne and Meredith. The term "Victorian" itself is often used in a fashion that is, misleading. Popularly it connotes bad taste, stuffy morals, and moral priggishness. These were attributes true enough of the Queen's private household and for that reason they are indeed "Victorian". But they are certainly not to be found among the ideas and beliefs of Browning, Rossetls, Arnold or Meredith, to mention only a few. Finally, although our own contemporaries are fond of thinking of themselves as reacting against "Victorianism", in the field of political theory the dogmas of the 20th century are essentially only elaborations of principles "laid down in the 19th. The concern with specific social problems is the most noticeable distinction between Victorian literature and the literature of the preceding centuries. The impulse is generally recognized to have started before Victoria came to the throne, with the First Reform Bill (1832). That act of Parliament recognized the economic dominance of the middle class by finally placing direct political power in its hands. The vote was thus extended to all members of this class. At this time the old concepts of "Whig" and "Tory" made way for "Liberal" and "Conservative." Liberals were anxious to see operating in full effect the principle which Adam Smith had laid down — the economic "law" of unlimited free Competition"-in trade. They flattered themselves that the world, under their leadership, was becoming more and more attractive, in 1829 the Catholic Emancipation Act had been passed; in 1833 slavery was abolished; in 1846 free trade became a national policy with the repeal of the Corn Laws; in 1845 Jews were made eligible for public office; and in 1872 the institution of voting by ballot was inaugurated. The Conservatives were as responsible as the Liberals for the passage of these acts; for a long time there was little difference between the two parties. Both were committed to the teaching of Utilitarianism, as promulgated by Bentham, that it was necessary to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. Bentham's disciple was James Mill: and Mill's son, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), became the most influential of Victorian Utilitarians. The last-mentioned taught that the only reason that can be adduced for limiting the rights of any Individual in the community "is to prevent harm to others." This philosophy of unrestricted individualism in economics vastly increased the holdings of the middle class as well as its material comforts. The British Colonial Empire expanded in Asia and Africa by conquest and colonization. There were many who could exclaim with the Mr. Boebuck whom Matthew Arnold made immortal by attacking, "I pray that our unrivalled happiness may last." But there was a less attractive side to the picture which industrialists chose to overlook. The philosophy of noninterference by the government meant unrestricted hardship to the legions of workers who were dependent for their very existence upon their employers. Labor was cheap, the birth rate high, and slum conditions became increasingly worse. The earliest attempt of workingmen to combine for better living conditions met with ferocious opposition in Parliament. A law of 1825 fixed punishment at hard labor as he penalty for attempting any act inconsistent with the freedom of employers to make contracts. The Victorian Age, from a working-class point of view, is the record of a long struggle of wage-earners to win recognition from the government. A People's Charter was drawn up in 1838, and began the so called Chartist movement, which demanded universal manhood suffrage, the secret ballot, and abolition of property qualifications for members of Parliament. Universal manhood suffrage was perhaps inevitably the foundation of any further progress. Actually it was not until 1917 that the point was won in the Manhood Suffrage Bill. Before that act was passed, the decades were punctuated by a series of strikes and riots in urban centers. Though the Chartist movement was for a long time unsuccessful, it served the function of making the general public aware of the problems involved. By unceasing protest small gains were realized. In 1847 a ten-hour working day was established. In 1842 women and children were forbidden employment in the mines. In 1867 and 1873 women and children were excluded from heavier agricultural work. By 1875 a series of public health acts had become law. Meanwhile, Liberal and Conservative alike had no intention of impeding the solid profits of British Industry. As long ago as 1798, Malthus (in his answer to Godwin) had given them the theory which justified governmental indifference. Malthus's Essay on Population had insisted that poverty, disease and war are necessary to prevent the greater catastrophe of overpopulation; to coddle the people, it warned, was to upset natural law. Among the many idealists who arose to dispute this official view were some who dreamed of a return to manufacture by hand — an idea that appealed powerfully to certain important authors. One of the few-who looked to the future instead of the past was Robert Owen (1771-1858), who originated the idea of cooperatives. He was convinced that the machine must be controlled for the benefit of the people who run it. His socialistic self-supporting communities made their experiments in Ireland, Scotland and the New World. Some succeeded at first; all eventually failed. But Owen's teachings have had important bearing on the history of trade unions, and various species of socialistic theory. Science took on a heretofore undreamt-of importance in the Victorian age. The whole world was brought closer together, first by the building of railroads, then by the telegraph, the telephone, the automobile, and the beginnings of travel by air. Everywhere machinery was revolutionized by the use of steam and electricity. Superficially scientists could claim that they were vastly improving the pleasures of living — though their inventions benefited as yet only the few. The growth of material well-being of the middle class and the development of scientific invention provoked violent reactions on the part of some writers. There were men then alive who felt that all this progress was suicidal to the soul. Carlyle — was sick at the sight of the sordid lives led by men and women in the factories and he sought refuge from the tentacles of the machine by preaching the doctrine that human labor alone was sacred. An enemy of industrialization, he looked back to the Middle Ages to prove that consecration to humble labor had made great souls. John Ruskin was 10 a certain degree his disciple. Pre-eminently concerned with art, Ruskin concluded that only great spiritual values can make for great art; he denounced Utilitarianism as an apology for the evils of industrialized society. He too found in the Middle Ages a noble spiritual ideal which the modern world had lost. In the Victorian Age this escape to the Middle Ages became a favorite resource for many who could not bear the ugliness, of contemporary life. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, of which the leaders were Rossetti and Morris, franidy imitated medieval painters and poets in their own work. In the field of religion, John Henry Newman, leader of the Oxford Movement, found in the ritual of the Medieval Church a beauty nourishing to the soul; he sought to annihilate the traditions of Puritanism which he felt had impoverished the English Church. In the end he was drawn to the Roman Catholic Church, of which Le became a Cardinal. His own spiritual struggles mark the beginnings of a rebirth of Roman Catholicism and the conversion to that faith of thousands in England. Perhaps most cataclysmic of all new ideas were those advanced in natural science. The Theory of Evolution, which for some time had been undermining the prestige of the idea that the universe had been created for man, was finally summed up in the writings of Charles Darwin. He was able to put before the public a mass of facts justifying the theory of organic evolution, in a manner which could no longer be gnored. The very foundations of religion began to rock, and the authority of the Bible was subjected to such doubts as the world had never known before. Many felt that the whole groundwork of ethics and morals was crumbling. The doubt and despair occasioned by the Darwinian theories can be read in a number of Victorian writers, notably in the poetry of Matthew Arnold. But Darwin's disciple, Thomas Huxley, went up and down the English-speaking world to acquaint the average man with what the Darwinian teachings actually were. Through his influence agnosticism was understood to be by no means inconsistent with high ethics, and towards the close of the century Huxley's view became increasingly that of the English intellectual. Towards these various currents of Victorian experience and thinking, we find individual writers adopting their own views, offering their own solutions. CHARTISM IN LITERATURE The Chartists introduced their own literature, which was the first-attempt to create a literature of the working class. The Chartist writers tried their hand at different genres. They wrote articles, short stories songs, epigrams, poems. Their leading genre was poetry. Though their verses were not so beautiful as those of their predecessors, the romantic poets, the Chartists used the motives of folk poetry and dealt with the burning problems of life. They described the struggle of the workers for their rights, they showed the ruthless exploitation and the miserable fate of the poor Ernest Jones, a leader and a poet of the Chartist movement, wrote in The Song of the Lower Classes: We're low — we're low — we're very, very low As low as low can be; The rich are high — for we make them so — And a miserable lot are we! And a miserable lot are we! are we! A miserable lot are we! The same idea is expressed by Thomas Hood,one of the most prominent of the Chartist poets, in his popular The Song of the Shirt: With fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A woman sat, in unwomanly rags, Plying her needle and thread — Stitch! stitch! stitch! The Chartist writers called the toiling people to struggle for their rights and expressed a firm belief in the final victory of the proletariat. THE NEW LITERARY TREND AND ITS CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES The ideas of Chartism attracted the attention of many progressive-minded people of the time. Many prominent writers became aware of the social injustices around them and tried to picture them in their works. Thus this period of fierce class struggle was mirrored in literature by the appearance of a new trend, that of Critical Realism. The greatest novelists of the age are Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell. These writers used the novel as a means to protest against the evils in contemporary social and economic life and to picture the world in a realistic way. The critical realists introduced new characters into literature: they described the new social force in modern history — the working class. They expressed deep sympathy for the working people; they described the unbearable conditions of their life and work; they voiced a passionate protest against exploitation and described their persistent struggle for their rights. Hard Times by Charles Dickens and Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell are among the best works of 19th century Critical Realism in which the Chartist movement is described. The greatness of these novelists lies not only in their truthful description of contemporary life, but also in their profound humanism Their sympathy lies with the ordinary labouring people, They believed in the good qualities of the human heart. CONTRIBUTION OF THE CRITICAL REALISTS TO WORLD LITERATURE They wanted to improve the existing social order by means of reforms. Some of them wanted to reconcile the antagonistic classes - the, bourgeoisie and the proletariat, to make the rich share the wealth with the poor, but being great artists they showed social injustices in capitalist England in such a way that the reader cannot help thinking that changes in the existing social system as a whole were necessary. Charles Dickens began to write at a time when the labour movement, known as the Chartist movement, was at its height. Continuous demonstrations in defence of workers' rights took place in many manufacturing towns and in London as well. The actions of the Chartists had considerable effect on Dickens. Though he did not believe in revolutionary action, he was on the side of the people with all his heart. He wanted what the people wanted. Dickens wrote about the poorest, the most unprivileged sections of the population. He looked into the darkest corners of the large cities and there found the victims of capitalism. Thus Dickens's immortal works became an accusation of the bourgeois system as a whole.
Розробив канд.філол.н, доц. Доцент каф.фонетики та граматики Л.В.Горішна
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