DAN STONE NOVELS, POETRY AND DRAMA

DAN STONE NOVELS, POETRY AND DRAMA

The nineteenth century witnessed a very substantial growth in the production of the three major literary modes: the novel, poetry and drama. The novel developed to become one of the characteristic forms of nineteenth-century thought, capable of wide-ranging and inclusive representations of society, social change and individual psychology. Indeed, the simultaneous range and depth of the novel’s representation of social and individual life make it one of the outstanding achievements of nineteenth-century European and US culture. Poetry, more tied to differing national traditions, nevertheless prospered in the period, though its earlier situation of cultural centrality was generally displaced by the novel. Drama, meanwhile, developed in several directions, assimilating a range of popular forms such as melodrama and burlesque, but also diversifying at the end of the century into broadly differentiated elite and popular forms.

The growth in all three modes was linked to strongly rising rates of literacy in Europe and North America; to the establishment of national systems of education, occurring at different rates in different national contexts; to the assimilation and in some cases the displacement of traditional popular-cultural forms (such as the ballad, the chapbook and oral poetry) by literate and metropolitan ones; and to the success of capital-intensive publishing and theatre-building in catering for the large urban populations in place at the end of the century.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 492 The novel is a highly flexible and inclusive form, with a capacity to assimilate many

differing modes of life and experience, told in equally diverse ways. This remarkable flexibility enabled the novel to address, and articulate in powerful ways, many of the most important social and historical issues of the nineteenth century: of gender, social class, national and even imperial histories, and provincial and metropolitan relations. The form’s inclusiveness also meant that the novel assimilated, to varying degrees, popular narrative forms such as the romance and the fairy story; throughout the century the novel would retain both elite and popular readerships, and only in the last decades of the period did the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘mass’ versions of the form become more rigid.

It was the realist novel in particular that became the form in which the most ambitious attempts were made to write social and personal histories in large and inclusive ways. But realism only developed during the course of the century, and throughout the period it coexisted with a range of other kinds of novel: romance, Gothic, adventure story, social- problem novel and, towards the end of the century, science fiction and utopian romance. In all of these forms the presence or absence of formal realism varied, so realism is best thought of as an aspiration or formal possibility rather than a fixed characteristic. Towards the end of the century, especially in France but to a lesser degree in Britain and the USA, the realist social novel was transformed into the more strictly naturalist mode, in which the role of the novelist was conceived as comparable to that of the scientist or naturalist studying his human specimens; the work of Émile Zola (1840–1902) is pre- eminent in this trend.

At its most complex and sustained, the realist novel combined minute and psychologically compelling accounts of individual lives with a wider sense of society and social change. In ways that are cognate with the growth of contemporary disciplines such as sociology, psychology and anthropology, the novel, drawing upon various formal means, could simultaneously provide strikingly individual characters, yet also show how these people emerged from a whole way of life. The novel’s capacity in this respect represented as much a stage of national and social development as it did the individual capacities of the novelists. Walter Scott (1771–1832), Charles Dickens (1812–70), W.M.Thackeray (1811–63) and George Eliot (1819–80); Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), Stendhal (1783–1842), Victor Hugo (1802–85), Gustave Flaubert (1821–80) and Émile Zola; FEODOR DOSTOEVSKY (1821–81) and LEO TOLSTOY (1828–1910); all, in their different ways, managed to produce strikingly ambitious novels that mediated between the individual and the social, or between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’. That is, their novels held together these two poles: panoramic overviews of whole societies, often undergoing profound transformations; and psychologically complex individuals, produced by the contradictory forces at work within society, yet also agents in its movement.

If the novel in this respect was cognate with other emergent disciplines, it was also closely related to another predominant nineteenth-century mode of thought: the capacity to understand human affairs as subject to historical change and development. In fact the novel was one of the principal means by which the nineteenth century imagined both its own immediate past, and the longer historical vistas that preceded it. Walter Scott was the European pioneer of the historical novel, laying down patterns for understanding the pre- modern world that were remarkably influential throughout the century both in European and US fiction; but his importance is not only in the development of the novel, but also in

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establishing structures of feeling and perception that were sustained outside the novel also. The historical fictions of Balzac, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64), Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873) and Leo Tolstoy testify to Scott’s influence; the last-named writer’s War and Peace (1865–72) is perhaps the century’s most sustained effort at imaginative engagement with the dramatic and transformative process of world-historical change.

Scott’s novels also provided imaginative models for the ways in which pre-modern peoples had been, or were to be, assimilated into the modernity of the nineteenth-century nation-state. His portrayal of the clan or tribal society of the Highlands was to be replicated, obviously with different emphases, by Fennimore Cooper (1789–1851) in the USA, by Tolstoy in Russia and later still by the novelists of empire at the end of the century such as Rider Haggard (1856–1925). The structure of feeling that Scott established, by which the transition to modernity simultaneously meant the loss of affect and glamour, was one that was not confined to the novel but which received its first and most powerful articulation there.

The novel was thus one of the principal sites in which the national imaginary was developed, both with respect to the historic and developing nation-states of Europe and the emergent USA. The relation of province to metropolis was also extensively figured in the nineteenth-century novel; the charged movement from one to the other is one of its staple narrative motifs, and in telling this story the novel provided an imaginative map of the nation-state. London, Paris and St Petersburg all figure both as narrative destinations and socio-culturally advanced centres in the novels of Dickens, Balzac, Flaubert and Dostoevsky. The novel also provided maps of these cities themselves, with their distinctive social geographies of West and East Ends (or their equivalents), and the striking juxtapositions of wealth and poverty that characterized them.

The novel could thus give narrative and imaginative shape to the lives that people led, both their own and their countries’. An important imaginative pattern of this kind, throughout the nineteenth century, was the novel of personal development or education, of which the prototype was Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister (1777–1829). This kind of novel, known as a Bildungsroman, traces the individual’s development from childhood to maturity, and explores the possibilities for personal fulfilment made available by society. This story is evidently capable of being told with very different emphases and with widely varying outcomes: of successful assimilation, of resigned acceptance of failure, of outright disaster and despair. Versions of the Bildungsroman, whether or not in conscious imitation of Goethe’s novel, are especially significant in both France and Britain; important examples include Honoré de Balzac, Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions) (1837– 43), Gustave Flaubert, L’éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education) (1869), Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849–50), and W.M.Thackeray, Pendennis (1848–50).

It is arguable whether the Bildungsroman can be unproblematically adapted as a narrative of a woman’s life; certainly Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847), and George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860), dramatize in very different ways the blockages that prevent their female protagonists from assuming the career paths of their male counterparts. Women writers nevertheless were able to use the novel to explore the contours defining women’s lives; at times the form could be used to articulate an explicit feminism, though it could equally be used for more politically neutral explorations of domestic life. Thus at the beginning of the century Jane Austen (1775–1817) could write

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novels focused on small groups of gentry families in rural England; at the end of the century a group of women novelists could use the form to articulate the politics of the new feminism. In between novelists as various as George Sand (1804–76), Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–65), Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96), Charlotte Brontë (1816–55), Emily Brontë (1818–48), George Eliot (1819–80) and Margaret Oliphant (1828–97), as well as innumerable other writers, wrote novels that represented the whole range of the social and personal life of the age.

The novel is such a pervasive and even dominant form in the nineteenth century that it is possible to speak of the period as being ‘novelized’. That is, the way the nineteenth century represented itself to itself took shape most readily through the novel; many of the most important stories that the century wished to tell about itself were naturally cast into this medium. Novels were therefore written that presented, in innumerable conflicting narratives, crises of class relationships, reconfigurations of gender, agonies of religious doubt and the various social ‘problems’ of the age. But it was also the form that was most hospitable to stories of everyday life, whatever the extent to which these were formed by those larger social issues. The novel therefore performed functions that in the late twentieth century would be taken on by television: it became a space in which all the anxieties and fantasies of the age could be cast into narrative form and be resolved, or otherwise brought to a conclusion, often wish-fulfilling but occasionally tragic. The history of the novel in the nineteenth century is not therefore just the history of its outstanding achievements, but also of its place, in all its multiple popular forms, in the imaginative life of nineteenth-century people.

The formal variety of the novel was matched by its linguistic variety; just as the form could assimilate many other kinds of writing, so too it could draw life from the multiple varieties of national languages that, in the nineteenth century, were still in many instances in the process of development. While the practice of individual novelists obviously varied widely, all reproduce the complex national-linguistic situations that surrounded them, and thus the novel was a form that could both exploit and contain the linguistic variety represented by dialect, slang, jargon and demotic speech. The comic energy of writers as various as Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert can be traced to this capacity to draw upon the linguistic creativity and energy of their surrounding social world.

The history of poetry in the nineteenth century can be understood as differing national developments of, and reactions to, Romanticism. Though any definition of Romanticism is necessarily controversial, it can certainly be understood as a reaction against the neoclassicism and the rationalism of the eighteenth century; in all its manifestations, Romanticism stressed creative freedom and spontaneity, and sought to found poetic expression on the absolute authenticity of the creative subject. In differing national contexts it found inspiration in the Christian Middle Ages and in newly rediscovered popular poetic traditions. Its geographical and historical heartlands are Germany and Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; ‘Romantic’ poetry however became widely written in France in the 1820s, and, according to the particularities of national poetic traditions, at different periods of the nineteenth century elsewhere in Europe and the USA. Throughout the century, new movements in poetry either developed aspects of Romanticism (as in symbolist and decadent poetry at the end of the period), or reacted against it in ways that sought some ‘return’ to older classical values. Romanticism in its various poetic incarnations thus represents a major shift in mentality

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or sensibility, and can therefore be seen as a significant characteristic of nineteenth- century thought.

Although in general terms poetry lost its position of cultural centrality in the course of the nineteenth century, it was still capable of attracting a wide readership. At the beginning of the period the British poet Byron (1788–1824) developed a European-wide fame that was indeed one of the means by which Romanticism was transmitted; Byron’s influence upon the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), for example, was profound, and by this means he was influential on the course of Russian poetry throughout the century. Later in the century also the poetry of Alfred Tennyson (1809–

92) could become a bestseller. However, if it is true that literary history represents a secular competition between the genres, then the nineteenth century witnessed the triumph of the novel, and the poetic genres were relegated to a minority status from which they have never recovered. It is also the case that the means by which poetry was to renew itself in the twentieth century were prepared in the nineteenth: the poetry of the decadents in the 1890s, and the demotic idiom of writers such as Jules Laforgue (1860–

87) and William Henley (1849–1903) contributed to the dramatic shifts in poetic sensibility of the early twentieth century. But like the comparable late nineteenth-century developments in the drama and the novel, these shifts also reinforced distinctions between avant-garde and popular art that had not been so apparent earlier in the century.

One of the features of the Romantic shift in sensibility was a renewed interest in popular and ‘folk’ forms of poetry, especially the ballad. This resulted in widespread imitation of traditional forms, greatly increasing the range of available modes in the course of the nineteenth century. A seminal moment in this respect for English poetry was the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798–1802) by William Wordsworth (1770– 1850) and SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772–1834); comparable reuses of traditional and dialect forms can be found in most European traditions. Cognate with this interest was the rediscovery, in many national contexts, of previously neglected primary epics: The Kalevala in Finland, the Cid in Spain, the Chanson de Roland in France and the Nibelungen Lied in Germany were all rediscovered or rewritten at the beginning of the nineteenth century and were important episodes in the development of a national consciousness in those countries. More importantly for the writing of original poetry, these ancient poems formed the basis for repeated attempts, in the course of the century, for poets to forge a distinctive national idiom; the work of Tennyson and WILLIAM MORRIS (1834–96) in Britain, W.B.Yeats in Ireland (1865–1939) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82) in the USA can all be partly understood in this context.

The beginning of the century thus saw a considerable extension to the repertoire of available poetic forms in most European countries; and all poetic traditions were marked, during the course of the century, by widespread formal experimentation. The Romantic ode, the ballad, the comic epic and the expressive lyric all developed alongside or in opposition to poetry written in the traditional neoclassical forms. Evidently, differing constituencies were drawn to varying parts of this repertoire. British working-class poets, for example, generally found the older more public forms of a broadly neoclassical idiom more congenial than the romantic sublime. Equally, while in Britain at least there were numerous women poets of Romanticism, later nineteenth-century women poets such as Christina Rossetti (1830–94) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61) could use forms The beginning of the century thus saw a considerable extension to the repertoire of available poetic forms in most European countries; and all poetic traditions were marked, during the course of the century, by widespread formal experimentation. The Romantic ode, the ballad, the comic epic and the expressive lyric all developed alongside or in opposition to poetry written in the traditional neoclassical forms. Evidently, differing constituencies were drawn to varying parts of this repertoire. British working-class poets, for example, generally found the older more public forms of a broadly neoclassical idiom more congenial than the romantic sublime. Equally, while in Britain at least there were numerous women poets of Romanticism, later nineteenth-century women poets such as Christina Rossetti (1830–94) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61) could use forms

A roll-call of only the most famous nineteenth-century poets would include many, perhaps even a majority, of writers who became or have become canonical in both their own national literatures and in world literary history: Goethe (1749–1832); Hölderlin (1770–1843); Heine (1797–1856); LAMARTINE (1790–1869); HUGO (1802–85); Baudelaire (1821–67); Mallarmé (1842–98); Verlaine (1844–96); Rimbaud (1854–91); Leopardi (1798–1837); Pushkin (1799–1837); Lermontov (1814–41); Shelley (1792– 1822); Keats (1795–1821); Browning (1812–89); Clough (1819–61); Arnold (1822–87); Longfellow (1807–82); Whitman (1819–92)—in addition to those already mentioned. Clearly all these distinctive contributions, and those of the innumerable poets whose work surrounds theirs, cannot be simply summarized. Nevertheless, their place in the various national canons is partly a matter of the intersection of their personal trajectories with national and linguistic histories. Thus the absolutely central place of Goethe in the literature of Germany is partly a function of the intersection of his multiple and extraordinary talent with a historical moment of national awakening. In a different but related way, the distinctive and idiosyncratic poetry of Walt Whitman became canonical in part because of the peculiarly US and democratic idiom that he sought to forge. And in all cases the creation of a national poetic canon was partly a function of maturing national education systems that, in differing ways and at different times, sought to use poetry as a locus of national consciousness.

The history of the drama in the nineteenth century depended upon a wide range of factors beyond the individual creativity of its writers, actors and producers. Above all it depended upon substantial capital investment in theatres; throughout the course of the century the number of cities with theatres, and the range of theatres within the larger cities, increased greatly, so that at the end of the century most European and US cities had their own theatres providing both high-cultural and popular forms of drama. At the beginning of the century, by contrast, the outlines of this situation were only visible in London and Paris.

European theatre in the early nineteenth century inherited from the previous century traditions of prestigious theatrical performance (with an accompanying established classical repertoire) that depended to a greater or lesser degree on court or aristocratic patronage. In London and Paris, where theatres were large-scale commercial enterprises, this element of patronage had already greatly diminished at the beginning of the century; elsewhere in Europe, especially in Germany and Russia, such patronage was crucial to the development of the form. But accompanying such theatres, devoted to a classical repertoire, were new and predominantly popular theatrical spaces in which developing and demotic forms of drama were performed. The mode of this new drama was overwhelmingly that of melodrama; the story of the nineteenth-century drama is above all one in which this popular mode made its way up the escalator of cultural prestige to become the pre-dominant mode in nineteenth-century theatre of all kinds. And alongside this story, which is that of dramatic representation properly understood, the nineteenth century witnessed the development of various modes of mass popular entertainment, known variously as music hall, vaudeville, burlesque and boulevard. By the end of the century, therefore, most major European and US cities afforded a range of dramatic performance from popular-cultural and demotic entertainment, small-scale popular

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melodrama, lavish and capital-intensive burlesque performance, more prestigious drama in a broadly melodramatic mode, performances of the classical repertoire, and new and experimental forms of naturalist and expressionist drama.

The nineteenth century therefore witnessed an unprecedented programme of theatre building. This took the form of new or wholly refurbished national theatres such as Drury Lane and Covent Garden (London 1815), the Comédie-Française (Paris 1808) or the Bolshoi Theatre (Moscow 1856). But equally significant was the building of numerous suburban and working-class theatres for the performance of melodrama and other forms of popular-cultural theatrical entertainment (such as the Surrey Theatre [London 1814]). The century also witnessed a number of technical advances that enabled theatre to provide some spectacular effects; gas-lighting and technically complex and illusionistic stage-settings came to be features of most forms of theatre, but melodrama attracted audiences partly by its impressive and overwhelming recreations of explosions, shipwrecks, waterfalls, horse-races and other tremendous occurrences. The mid-century onwards saw attempts, in many European and US theatres, to provide historically authentic productions of historical plays, and naturalistically accurate recreations of the contemporary social world; these fed into the various European attempts to renew the drama in the last two decades of the century in the name of greater realism and naturalism.

The predominant theatrical mode of the nineteenth-century drama was therefore melodrama; it was partly against this that these emergent late nineteenth-century forms measured themselves. Melodrama was by no means confined to the theatre; it was a characteristic mode in nineteenth-century painting and the novel also. However the theatre provided its most visible setting; it is indeed a mode of theatre that seeks to dispose its actors into legible symbolic configurations, in which a highly marked language of gesture and movement indicates the now-visible moral and social relationships that are being enacted. It is moreover a mode that draws upon all the resources of the theatre: music, costume and spectacular effects are all deployed to emphasize the symbolic configurations that melodrama dramatizes. It is therefore a mode that is especially well placed to dramatize oppressive familial, class and gender relations; equally it tends to resolve the conflicts that it dramatizes by acts of simplifying heroism. Its greatest nineteenth-century writer was Guilbert de Pixerécourt (1773–1844), whose plays were produced not only in his native France but also widely translated and otherwise plagiarized in British, US and European theatres; Douglas Jerrold (1803–57) and Dion Boucicault (1820–90) also wrote widely produced melodramas—the relative unfamiliarity of these names compared to those of their contemporary novelists and poets bearing testimony to the disrepute into which melodrama fell in the twentieth century. But the real vitality of the mode is to be seen in the innumerable stage adaptations of famous novels, such as those of Dickens or Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), and in the widely disseminated and more anonymous popular productions that were the staple of the cheaper theatres throughout the century.

In the last quarter of the century, in most centres of theatrical production, attempts were made to renew the drama by means of a greater realism, understood as a repudiation of conventional theatrical gestures and language; by the establishment of greater historical accuracy in costume and setting; and by the introduction of the radical genre of naturalism, paralleling developments in the novel. These different developments can be

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seen, in varying ways, in the work of Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), August Strindberg (1849–1912), Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) and George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950). These playwrights, and the producers, critics and impresarios who championed them, undoubtedly revitalized the theatre in the sense of making it capable of addressing, in intellectually and artistically compelling ways, some of the great issues of the day; but they also reinforced an increasing division between elite and popular forms of theatre that had not characterized the older melodramatic modes. Furthermore, the increasing social segregation of nineteenth-century cities reproduced itself especially visibly in this most public and social art form; these social divisions were reproduced not only in the seating arrangements within the theatres (‘Dress Circle’ means precisely those seats in which the audience were expected to wear evening dress), but also in the gulf that divided the major ‘West End’ theatres and their more ‘artistic’ counterparts on the one hand, and the myriad forms of cheap theatrical entertainment to be found elsewhere in the city. These divisions long survived the nineteenth century in which they first became entrenched.