They were themselves of the Victorian Age. Each one might say Pars fui, if not magna. None therefore had a detached point of view, nor a long perspective. But though their vision was microscopic rather than telescopic, it was searching and enthusiastic, and the report it made was honest if not always dispassionate. It could hardly be otherwise for those who were alive and awake at a time when new information was creating new ideas, and these in turn were becoming dynamic in new movements, political, religious, educational, social. All these things were too tremendous and important to be taken otherwise than seriously. The dominant feeling was grave and earnest, as one of its interpreters has said:[72]
“In the Victorian era, which we have found so neglectful of literary standards, Literature has been of greater social and ethical stimulus than ever before. * * * It throbs with a new sympathy for those who toil unceasingly in poverty, and a new bewilderment upon the realization that the world which is changing so rapidly is still so full of misery and hopelessness. * * * But, as the world went, the main impulse and the main characteristic of Victorian Literature became this great sense of pity for things as they are and of an imperious duty to make them better.”
But the sense of pity was sometimes voiced with wit, and one of the sharpest weapons at the service of duty was the shaft of ridicule. With nothing to satirize, society would be a paradise. With no satirists, it would be rather a dull inferno. But it is our human world that is purgatorial.
Since the purpose of our present study is to discover the proportion and nature of the satiric element in Victorian fiction, to note its relation to the rest of the work, and to reach some conclusion as to the total effect of its presence and use, it might aid in clearness to subjoin a table of names and dates of the novelists with whom we are concerned.
| Name | Birth | Period of Publication[73] | Death |
| Peacock | 1785 | 1816–1861 | 1866 |
| Lytton | 1803 | 1827–1873 | 1873 |
| Disraeli | 1804 | 1826–1880 | 1881 |
| Gaskell | 1810 | 1848–1865 | 1865 |
| Thackeray | 1811 | 1844–1862 | 1863 |
| Dickens | 1812 | 1837–1870 | 1870 |
| Reade | 1814 | 1853–1884 | 1884 |
| Trollope | 1815 | 1855–1880 | 1882 |
| Brontë | 1816 | 1847–1853 | 1855 |
| Kingsley | 1819 | 1848–1871 | 1875 |
| Eliot | 1819 | 1859–1876 | 1880 |
| Meredith | 1828 | 1859–1895 | 1909 |
| Butler | 1835 | 1872–1901 | 1902 |
This list, reaching from Scott to Hardy, not inclusive, has been reckoned as a round dozen, but it actually numbers a baker’s dozen.[74] The noteworthy thing about it is that it would probably be agreed upon as the preëminent list on any count; so that those who are excluded on the score of being too consistently serious or romantic, as Yonge, Collins, Blackmore, Henry Kingsley, MacDonald, would hardly be included on the score of quality, although some of them might rival some of the least among those chosen as members of the satirico-realistic group.
A glance at the preceding table reveals an obvious chronological division into five parts; although the first and the two last consist of one man each. The second contains only two names; and their separation from the main group occurs at the beginning rather than at the end, for Lytton’s race ran beyond five of those who started later, and Disraeli’s beyond seven. Of those, only Reade published novels after 1880.
This main group is one of those remarkable concentrations in which destiny seems to delight. When the second decade of the century gave to the world eight great names in this field alone, and some equally distinguished ones in others, it surely filled its quota toward the advance of civilization.
Meredith comes enough later than this outpouring of God’s plenty to be classed by himself chronologically, especially as he must be by the character of his work also, in spite of the fact that his first novel belongs to the same prolific year as the first of George Eliot’s.
The middle of the century is thus also the center of a circle of activity whose radius extends for about two decades on either side, passing thence into thinner aired intermediate zones,—transition periods from the eighteenth and to the twentieth centuries, seasons whose energies are potential, or spent, rather than vigorously kinetic.