Satire in the Victorian novel

by Frances Theresa Russell

Realism in Victorian fiction, as we need only to be reminded, means not strictly that which is, but liberally that which might be. Its field is nominally the Actual but it encroaches unhesitatingly on the domain of the Probable, laps over into the Improbable, and barely halts at the Impossible. These expansive habits make it not incompatible with the Romantic, which indeed, in its soberer aspects, is a constant factor in the English novel up to and including this period.

Romanticism is reduced to a minimum by Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Mrs. Gaskell, and Anthony Trollope,[118] but the majority of our novelists have not been thus content to present life in its everyday garb, neat and prosperous enough, it may be, but neutral, inane, diffuse, inconclusive. They have insisted in the name of decorum and dignity on the dress costume and company manners which in civilized society are a prerequisite to public appearance and conspicuous position. Life is still life and not an impostor, even when robed in its best with some artifice of color and ornament and some evidence of decisive purposefulness in mien and bearing.

But however romantic in effect, the nineteenth-century novel was realistic in intent, and we may in a measure take the will for the deed. Of this devotion to reality we have several testimonies, from such important witnesses as Trollope, Dickens, Thackeray; but two are of especial interest as they come from two of the most undeniable romanticists, Lytton and Brontë.

In her Preface to the belated edition of The Professor, Charlotte Brontë declared her own preference for a depiction of a normal and unadorned existence to be thwarted by the lack of editorial enthusiasm. After stating the condition of things she adds—

“* * * the publishers in general scarcely approved of this system, but would have liked something more imaginative and poetical—something more consonant with a highly wrought fancy, with a taste for pathos, with sentiments more tender, elevated, unworldly. Indeed, until an author has tried to dispose of a manuscript of this kind he can never know what stores of romance and sensibility lie hidden in breasts he would not have suspected of casketing such treasures.”

An accurate description of Victorianism is contained in this ironic indictment, and perhaps also an explanation of the romantic trend of its realism on the ground of the law of supply and demand as well as that of natural propensity.

Lytton prided himself prodigiously on his true rendering of life, though of his two dozen novels, The Caxtons alone approaches the realistic type, and pictures in one of his heroes[119] a phase at least of his artistic ideal:

“The humblest alley in a crowded town had something poetical for him; he was ever ready to mix in a crowd, if it were only gathered round a barrel-organ or a dog fight, and listen to all that was said, and notice all that was done. And this I take to be the true poetical temperament essential to every artist who aspires to be something more than a scene-painter.”

That the satirical element in this romantico-realistic form of fiction should be characterized by humor, exposure, and comparative rarity, instead of wit, exaggeration, and ubiquity, is inevitable, since the former qualities accord not only with realism but with one another.

Humor is the comic sense which is amused by things as they are, whereas wit either creates the absurdity or ferrets it out of obscurity. Hence the former is allied to the actual more than to the fanciful, and uses the method of simple disclosure rather than caricature. While therefore the imaginative energy of wit is dynamic, that of humor is more quiescent, being sufficiently exercised by its function of interpretation, of showing wherein lurks the spirit of the laughable, however grave and solemn the appearance to the unseeing eye.