ABSTRACT
British literary realism has a less heroic history than that of France. The literary field was not nearly so antagonistic as the French for the obvious reason that the larger field of national power politics was also less turbulent. The nineteenth century, after a period of oppressive reactionary politics in the two decades immediately following the French Revolution, saw the extension of parliamentary democracy to the middle class in the Reform Act of 1832 and to large numbers of working-class men in 1867. The growth of Empire in the last decades of the century helped to consolidate a sense of national identity that endowed even the least of Queen Victoria’s subjects with a pleasing sense of inherent superiority over the rest of the world. This more evolutionary form of social and political change resulted in a literary field in Britain that was relatively less polarised and interpenetrated by wider struggles for power. What is more, the absence in Britain of any equivalent to the Académie français and its concern to safeguard neoclassical correctness, also made for a far less antagonistic literary context in which new writers had to establish themselves. As in France, the novel was not really recognised in Britain as a serious literary form until after the mid-century, but unlike France it had already established a firm history and tradition during the eighteenth century. Early French novelists like Stendhal and Balzac had to look to Britain for the origin of their craft.
