CHAPTER II

RECENT WRITERS.-1830

THE year 1830 may conveniently be regarded as the beginning of the latest literary epoch of England. Not only did many of the great authors who stand as representatives and exponents of the Victorian age, begin to write in or about that year, but many surrounding conditions in society or in thought which have helped to give form and color to their work, then began to impress themselves upon the tone of literary production. It is never easy to select, out of the complex and multifarious life of a time, those particular social conditions or current modes of thought which have done most toward giving to the literature of the epoch its special note or personality. But in dealing with a past epoch at least some of our difficulties have been removed by the mere lapse of time. Rightly or wrongly, time has selected for us what we must assume to be the leading characteristics of the period. The confusion of innumerable voices has long ceased, thousands of daily happenings have passed out of mind, and the meaning and due relations of great events have grown more clear. Keeping in mind the obstacles to our gaining a just and comprehensive idea of that time to which we may be said to belong, we must try to understand its general meaning and personality, so far as our nearness to it will permit.

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We can detect three forces at work in the life and thought of recent England, which have been potent factors in the contemporary literature :

(1) The advance of democracy.

(2) The general diffusion of knowledge and of literature.

(8) The advance of science.

These are not separate but interdependent forces; each has acted on the others, and their combined influence has done much to determine the distinguishing spirit of our epoch and its literature.

The advance of democracy. By the year 1830 the conservative reaction which had followed the meeting of the Congress of Vienna, had given way before a fresh outbreak of the revolutionary spirit. In this year the Bourbon king, Charles X., was driven by the liberals from the throne of France. The event awakened in Germany a responsive agitation, and the progress of democracy in Europe, which had but suffered a temporary check, was resumed. In England this tendency showed itself in changes so radical that they constituted in fact a peaceable and legal revolution. The period of prophetic anticipation, the period of disappointment and oppression, were past, and the nation entered upon an era in which the ideas of democracy were to be actually put into practice through a series of important reforms.

For centuries the landholding class had governed the country and monopolized the government offices. Many people were also excluded from a share in political power by reason of their religious views.

By successive acts many of these religious disabilities were removed, dissenters and Roman Catholics permitted to hold certain town and government offices, and by the Emancipation Bill (1829) Romanists were allowed to sit in Parliament. Still more momentous was the overthrow of the political supremacy of the landowner. The passage of a

Reform Bill in 1832 extended the franchise to the middle class, which during the industrial and commercial growth of the past century had increased in wealth and importance; and by this and other changes Parliament became more directly representative of the people's will. A second Reform Bill in 1867 admitted the working class to a share in political power, while a third and still more sweeping act in 1884-1885 still farther extended the right of suffrage. Within half a century the real governing power in England has thus been peaceably transferred from an exclusive upper class to the great bulk of the nation. William IV. found England practically an oligarchy. Under Victoria it has become an almost unadulterated democracy. The widespread results of this transference of power are matters of history. It has tended to weaken class distinctions, to better the condition of the working class, and to give increased opportunities for popular education. It has been clearly related to that great growth of the reading public and those wider means for the spread of knowledge which are so intimately connected with the literature of the time. The social changes and agitations of which these Reform Bills are but a part are certainly one of the greatest

features in the history of our time. It has been said that "The most impressive thing in Europe to-day is the slow and steady advance of the British democracy."* Thus that wider human sympathy which we saw spring up and increase during the eighteenth century, uttering itself with gathering power and distinctness in a long succession of poets from Thomson to Shelley, has taken in our time an increasingly definite and practical form.

But these reforms have been far from satisfying many who long for a yet more adical change. The philanthropic efforts of Robert Owen (1771-1858) in behalf of the factory operative and the poor were followed toward the middle of the century by the Christian socialism of Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) and Frederic Denison Maurice (1805-1872), and later (in 1860) by the new economic teachings of John Ruskin (b. 1819), the importance of whose work as a social reformer is but beginning to receive due recognition. Labor on its part has banded itself together in organizations which have become a distinctive feature in our modern society, and on every side there are signs of expectancy and social unrest. These aspirations and uncertainties have written themselves in the pages of the literature. They are echoed in our poetry; they have been a great formative influence in the novel, the distinctive literary form of the day, either directly, from Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794) to Besant's All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882), and Mrs. Ward's Marcella (1894), or in less obvious and more subtle ways.

*V. Rae's Contemporary Socialism.

2. The more general diffusion of knowledge and literature.

The more general diffusion of education, the prodigious multiplication of cheap books and reading matter in every conceivable shape, is closely related to the democratic spirit of society and to the advance of applied science. Education, like political power, is no longer monopolized by an exclusive class; the readers are the people, and reading matter, if not literature in the stricter sense, is now produced by them and for them. This reading public has been widening since the days of Defoe and Addison. The early years of the eighteenth century gave birth to the periodical essay, and many of the great English newspapers-The Morning Chronicle, The Times, The Morning Post, The Morning Herald, founded during the last quarter of that centurybegan that wider influence of journalism which is one of the features of the present time. The rising literary importance of these great journals during the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is illustrated by the fact that Coleridge, Lamb, Thomas Campbell, and William Hazlitt, a noted English literary critic, were among their contributors. Newspapers have rapidly multiplied during the present century, and their circulation has enormously increased with the removal of the stamp and paper duties which were formerly levied upon them, and with the improved mechanical means for their production.* "A preaching Friar," wrote

*"In 1827 there were 308 newspapers published in the United Kingdom, of which 55 were in London. In 1887 the