Satire in the Victorian novel

by Frances Theresa Russell

But even if the twentieth century has stated the problem, it has not yet solved it. And while neither the statement nor the solution of the nineteenth is reckoned adequate today, still the Victorians did accomplish something if not much, and all we can say for ourselves is that we have not accomplished much, if something. Moreover, to flatter ourselves that we are the first to discover the social onus of poverty and other ills, is to ignore the contributions not only of the novelists but of Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, and Henry George. When the remaining four-fifths of our century shall have been added to history, we may perhaps applaud ourselves. At present it will do us no harm to render unto Victorianism the acknowledgment that is its due.

CHAPTER III
TYPES

For that form of satire which deals with actual individuals, photographed or caricatured, the designation personal is sufficiently descriptive. But for that which deals with fictitious individuals, wherein the models that sat for the portraits have passed through the imaginative process that makes their portraiture a work of art, there is no satisfactory name. Typical, in distinction from individual and institutional, is tolerably expressive, but a term to be apologized for. The school of art known as realistic, which was theoretically adopted by the nineteenth century, repudiates creations that are “mere types,” and claims for itself the achievement of true individuals. The sign of individuality is a discordant complexity. Every man may have his humour but he is not always in it. He may be ruled by a master passion, but the rule is not a monopolistic autocracy. Its supremacy is constantly disputed and threatened by mob rebellion. Civil war is the usual rêgime, and the attainment of a stabilized government is rare.

Tamburlaine, Volpone, Othello, Tartuffe, Blifil, are not untrue, but they are only partial truths. We see much, undoubtedly the most significant and dominating traits, but we cannot see all when the searchlight is concentrated on a single spot. Agamemnon, Hamlet, Tom Jones, Jaffeir, swayed, perplexed, inconsistent, at once infinite and abject, are more nearly full length and complete drawings. Milton’s Satan becomes humanized when, entering the human abode, he grows hesitant, half regretful, half eager, a prey to conflicting emotions and cross purposes.

Yet those desirable factors of art, unity and emphasis, must be secured, and they can be secured only by throwing the emphasis on some one feature, thus giving unity to the character. In the field of satire a classification based on these qualities is the more easily made in that any given character is usually satirized for some particular trait, although the problem does not end there. We may construct encampments for our army of characters—and in Victorian fiction they come in battalions—and we may label them; but we shall find it less simple to assign the companies to their own barracks and keep them there.

The Father of the Marshalsea is a snob. He is also hypocritical and foolish. Moreover, he is a sentimentalist and an epicurean. Withal he is not villainous, but more pathetic than execrable. He has no apparent kinship with the Countess de Saldar, yet she also may be described in the above terms. The enumeration would not show the difference. Thus not only does each real character refuse to be known by one name and one only, but the congregation assembled under any one denomination shows such diversity as to make the category itself questionable. Mrs. Mackensie and Mrs. Clennam, Mr. Dombey and Bertie Stanhope, Tom Tulliver and Sir Willoughby Patterne, are all egoists; but they would find little congeniality in their mutual egoism.

All that can be done is to indicate the range and the concentration of the main types. These types will of course represent those elements in human character which seem to the satirist such deflections from an ideal as are amenable to comic exposure and perhaps correction. It does not seem possible to reduce them to fewer than seven or eight heads, as follows: hypocrisy, folly, snobbishness, sentimentality, egoism, fanaticism, and vulgarity.

These various fields have their specialists. Hypocrisy, including sycophancy and deliberate imposture of any kind, belongs to Dickens, with Thackeray, Trollope, and others following not far behind. He leads also in depiction of folly and incompetence, though these prevail widely in Victorian fiction; and Meredith excels in portrayal of mental incapacity and fallacy in reasoning. It is the latter who comes to the front with sentimentality and egoism, having but few predecessors. Thackeray handles snobbishness in all its ramifications of worldliness and elegant ennui. But although he contributes the name, the thing exists on the pages of Lytton, Disraeli, Trollope, and Dickens. Fanaticism, bigotry, all sorts of fads, make another common ground for Peacock and Butler, and crop up in Reade, Brontë, and Kingsley. Coarse vulgarity is the rarest of all, the Age of Propriety refusing to transplant this weed from life to literature, but it is admitted by Dickens, Thackeray, Reade, and Trollope.

Since satire is usually directed against the special thing in which the satirist feels superior, we may deduce the favorite Victorian virtues to have been sincerity, wisdom, rationality, refinement, and a sense of proportion; a large order, but the nineteenth century would scorn a smaller.

Dickens did not invent the hypocrite, nor did he supply anything new to the investigation of the nature of this most subtile of all the beasts of the field. He himself had not the subtlety to search out causes and discover possible extenuations and values in a thing he simply and flatly abhorred and saw no excuse for. What he does furnish is an immense amount of data, with many variations, showing in extenso this aspect of human nature. At least three dozen of his three hundred characters exhibit the seamy side of scheming and deceit. From Pickwick, wherein Mr. Winkle, unfrocked as to skates and branded as a humbug and an impostor because he assumed an accomplishment when he had it not, to Edwin Drood, harboring Luke Honeythunder, professional philanthropist, who, “Always something in the nature of a Boil upon the face of society, * * * expanded into an inflammatory Wen in Minor Canon Corner,” no volume is entirely free from the trail of the serpent.