ABSTRACT
The Victorian novel illustrates the gradual transition from what might be called the Jane Austen position to the modern one. Certainly, the level of literary and linguistic self-consciousness increased during the period, but not usually with a view to sawing off the branch one was sitting on. In so far as there is a dominant tendency in the Victorian novel, it is a tendency in the direction of writing novels as if they were histories of some kind. To cite just one of many examples, George Meredith says, in Beauchamp’s Career, that the novelist is an ‘afflicted historian’. Victorian fiction likes the textured layers which are provided by a mixture of styles, and an elaborate interplay of different categories of narrative. Victorian novels liked to give a basis of certainty though, and when all is said and done, gossip is something other than intimate fiction. Other aspects of novel writing are also scrutinized within the novels themselves.
