Home For Fiction – Blog

I hate Victorian Literature. Actually, allow me to rephrase this: I hate Victorian literature with a passion. This isn’t very useful to you, but why I hate it can be. And the connection between why I think Victorian literature sucks and our present time, even more so.

I’ve been exposed to enough Victorian literature during my university years to have developed a pretty solid opinion of it. In other words, I’ve read enough abandoned enough texts of such authors as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, to know I hate them and the rest of their lot.

This is a subjective opinion, to be sure, but I think Victorian literature was a disaster for art. The repercussions are still with us ever since, and they boil down to one critical element: making money.

I Hate Victorian Literature Because of Its Destabilized Priorities

In plain terms: I hate Victorian literature because, arguably during the Victorian time, we began to see the full effect of the industrialization of the arts. The literary priorities – a narrative arc that made sense, a plot submitting to the demands of the narrative, and so on – took second place to marketability and making money.

I’ll give you an example, quoting from my doctoral dissertation, pages 28-29.

The creative process itself had to be adapted to the new reality. Whereas Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein – no pun intended – in the context of a friendly competition during a journey to
Europe, Charles Dickens… explicitly complained about the demands of his writing
schedule, going as far as calling himself a prisoner (Houston, Gail Turley. From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005., 78–79). This effect was caused by the demands of serialized, weekly publication practices, and there often was a direct conflict between authorial intent and temporal constraints. Elizabeth Gaskell is a notable example, as in the preface of her 1855 North and South she effectively disowns the serialized version that had appeared in Household Words, the weekly literary magazine edited by Dickens, due to the latter’s alterations.

“Imposed”, “Originally Intended”, “Improbable Rapidity”

Indeed, it’s interesting to see what Elizabeth Gaskell herself had to say about the matter (I’m quoting again from my dissertation, directly quoting Gaskell’s preface):

On its appearance in ‘Household Words,’ this tale was obliged to conform to the conditions imposed by the requirements of a weekly publication, and likewise to confine itself within certain advertised limits, in order that faith might be kept with the public. Although these conditions were made as light as they well could be, the author found it impossible to develop the story in the manner originally intended, and, more especially, was compelled to hurry on events with an improbable rapidity towards the close. In some degree to remedy this obvious defect, various short passages have been inserted, and several new chapters added.

It seems to me Gaskell fully admits that marketing and the demands of money-making directly interfered with the creative process. What she (and Dickens, as editor) prioritized was not the narrative itself but that “faith might be kept with the public”.

Narrative Reasons Why I Hate Victorian Literature

Again, a reminder: Though there is a cloak of objectivity here, this does remain a subjective opinion. I hate Victorian literature, but there are obviously many readers who can’t get enough of Dickens, the Brontë sisters, or (the pre-Victorian but writing like a Victorian on steroids) Jane Austen, whose writing I hate more than words can say.

With this little reminder on subjectivity out of the way, the narrative reasons I hate Victorian literature are:

• It’s drier than a rock in Sahara. No poetry, no conceptual foundation, no symbolic frameworks. No room for interpretations, nothing, nada, zip. Perhaps a determined reader could squeeze in some accidental meanings in there, with a lot of effort.
• It has no sense of narrative pace. Thirty pages on getting a description of a royal garden? Yawn.
• Huge relatability issues. And before you claim it’s a repercussion of the social context, kindly explain why there are no such problems with the far older Hamlet or Othello, or even, since I mentioned it, Frankenstein. If I can relate to an imaginary Danish prince of the late 16th – early 17th century, or a nonhuman creature made of dead matter, the problem is not the social context but something else.
• Little to no ambiguity, either in terms of narrative interpretations (see above), or in terms of character makeup. Victorian characters are flat as an iron.

Obviously, I’m exaggerating and generalizing. Hard-pressed, I could (probably; maybe; perhaps) find some counterexamples. But as a reader, with so many great books around that wait to be read, why would I bother spending any of my time on such dullness?

What Lessons Does Victorian Literature Have for our Time?

The writing (no pun intended) has been on the wall for quite some time. Writing-as-market is about similarity, uniformity, predictability, quantification, conformity. Writing-as-art is about divergence, dissonance, authenticity, chaos.

The problem is, most people don’t want any of the latter. Most readers indeed want entertainment, escapism, easily digestible pastimes; not complexity, not mental work, and certainly not existential agony. Which only perpetuates the cycle, because that means more entertainment, still.

Is any of that a problem? Not to me; I can find books I like to read, though more and more I have to search for them; which is fine. But it’s a problem to our societies, as we have fewer and fewer people able to understand writing-as-art, let alone enjoy it.

Ultimately, is there any Victorian literature that doesn’t suck I like? Perhaps, depending on the definition of “Victorian literature” – would certain Gothic works count as Victorian simply because they were written during that time? But, again, it’s a matter of ratio. I know for a fact I’ll like any work by Shakespeare, Byron, or – to approach our own era and prose – Mishima or Moravia. Why would I want to take my chances with something of an author I know I dislike?