"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[1] Death
Peacock 1785 1816-1861 1866
Lytton 1803 1827-1873 1873
Disraeli 1804 1826-1880 1881
Gaskell 1810 1848-1865 1865
- ↑ This theoretically includes only the novel, though the term is used in the
widest sense. In the cases of Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot, and Meredith, the
line is rather hard to draw between the novel and sketches, tales, short stories,
and burlesques. Peacock, Lytton, Disraeli, and Butler force us to make the
limits of the novel decidedly flexible.
