The 1830s and 1840s: Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, and William Thackeray.

Sun Setting Over a Lake, Turner (1840)

This week I've been reading from the 1840s for Allie's Victorian Celebration. I read Shirley by Charlotte Bronte, Vanity Fair by William Thackeray, The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, the first chapter of The Victorians by A. N. Wilson (which focused on the early Victorian period), and I finished Dombey and Son (which I started in May). I also read William Wordswoth: Selected Poems, which were largely from the early part of the 19th Century, however as he was the first Poet Laureate appointed by Queen Victoria, I thought it would be a worthwhile endeavour for this project! And, I have to say, I have thoroughly enjoyed this approach to reading: reading first the chapter by A. N. Wilson, then reading the novels, poems, and any other bits and pieces I could find from this decade.

There are many books to choose from, Dickens in particular was especially prolific in the late 1830s - 1840s, writing -

• The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836 - 1837)
• The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1837 - 1839)
• The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1838 - 1839)
• The Old Curiosity Shop (1840 - 1841)
• Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty (1841 - 1841)
• A Christmas Carol (1843)
• The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843 - 1844)
• Dombey and Son (1846 - 1848)
• David Copperfield (1849 - 1850)

The 1840s also saw the publications of Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) by Anne Brontë, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1845 - 1846), and Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë,as well as Shirley in 1849. Vanity Fair was published between 1847 - 1848 in competition with Dombey and Son, and in 1842, Tennyson's Poems was published.

It was easy for me to pick what to read, because by chance I have read many of these titles. For Dickens, I chose Dombey and Son, not feeling ready for Barnaby Rudge, and because A. N. Wilson mentioned it in passing (Oliver Twist rightly, in my mind, got most of the attention in his first chapter). Martin Chuzzlewit is the only one left unread on that list. And, sadly, I had already read all of the Brontës aside from Shirley (I say sadly because what a thrill it was to read them for the first time, I miss that period of discovery!). Vanity Fair has been on my to-read list for a very long time, so this seemed perfect (I can't say I loved it, however). And, finally, to compliment this list, I read The Communist Manifesto, which was published in 1848.

I think, perhaps, the ideal books to read to understand the early Victorian age would have been Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, but I feel like I have so many hundreds of undiscovered books, I'm not a big fan of re-reads at the moment. Oliver Twist, in particular, would have made the perfect read.

The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, Turner (1836)

A. N. Wilson begins with 16th October 1834, when the Houses of Parliament were burned down. Referring to Dickens, A. N. Wilson suggests that there was almost a fittingness to this destruction, arguing that "The Reform Bill of 1832 had selfconsciously ushered in a new era". The Age of Reform was a modernising of British politics, and one of the greatest concerns was the massive population growth that Malthus drew attention to in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798, and revised in 1803, 1806, 1807, 1817, and 1826). Wilson writes,

The statistics speak for themselves. Over the previous eighty years, the population of England, Wales and Scotland had doubled - 7, 250, 000 in 1751, 10, 943, 000 in 1801, 14, 392, 000 in 1821; by 1831, 12, 539, 000 - and in Ireland 4, 000, 000 had become 8, 000, 000.

Malthus went on to estimate that by 2050 our world population would be ten billion (the World Bank estimates that it currently stands at nearly 7 billion), and believed an inevitable consequence was starvation, disease, disruption, and misery (Dickens used Scrooge as a mouthpiece for Mathusian economics - "If they want to die they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population"). One way to help combat this was encouraging the poor to live and work in Workhouses. Those who would not, by accordance with the New Poor Law of 1834, would be refused relief (it was estimated that £7 million per year was spent on poor relief, and the impact of the Napoleonic War and bad harvests put the system on the verge of collapse). This, as Wilson put it, was a part of Victoria's inheritence.

William Wordsworth, a Tory, found beauty in poverty. He wrote in The Old Cumberland Beggar spreading grace, living in the eye of Nature, however was really was spreading was dirt and disease:

With hunger, filth, poverty, there came, inexorably, disease. On 7 November 1837 a doctor in poverty-striken Limehouse district of London's East End recorded the case of Ellen Green, aged seven years, of Irish extraction, living with her parents in a miserable apartment, on the second floor of a small house, situated in Well-alley, Ropemaker's Fields, Limehouse, a low, dirty and very confined situation.... The doctor, Charles Johnston, observed the squalid apartment abutted on to a pigsty and that the floor was a heap of manure and filth, 'the joint produce of house and pigsty'. Little Ellen was attacked with her first fit of vomiting and purging on 26 October; then with cramps in her legs and thighs. Within days her features had shrunk, her eyes sunk deep into the orbits, the conjunctiva had become effused, the lips were blue, the tongue was white. These were the sure signs of cholera, which killed her about a day later.

As I say, I feel Oliver Twist is the book of the decade, and I almost wish I hadn't read it until now. But, I opted for Dombey and Son, and it was the only contemporary novel of the three, as both Shirley and Vanity Fair were looking back several decades. Wilson refers to it only fleetingly in a chapter on J. S. Mill -

Beyond, the steeples and spires of many City churches kept the hours. Money, by a thousand Mr Dombeys, was being made, by investment in domestic industry, by foreign trade, by insurance, by shipping. Here was the epicentre of that rentier world which, by learning to manage money, was building an economy, a political system, an empire of strength and size without parallel in the world.

Paul Dombey is the owner of a shipping company. Like Scrooge, Dombey is rich and powerful in money, but not so much emotionally. He lacks humanity entirely, devoted to his son who will continue his business, and utterly neglected his daughter Florence, our heroine, who is desperate to earn his love. It's grim; a painful account, and I sympathised greatly with Florence for I once loved a Mr. Dombey.

A recurrent theme in Dombey and Son is railways: in 1830, the first intercity railway was built between London and Liverpool, and by the early 1850s, there was believed to be around 7 000 miles of track throughout the country. I believe Dickens had mixed feelings, aware of the good it would do the cities, however sometimes representing the trains as a "monster", a thundering "fiery devil", and a portent of death. Dickens describes the death of one of Domeby's employees, run over accidentally by a train -

[He] felt the earth tremble—knew in a moment that the rush was come—uttered a shriek—looked round—saw the red eyes, bleared and dim, in the daylight, close upon him—was beaten down, caught up, and whirled away upon a jagged mill, that spun him round and round, and struck him limb from limb, and licked his stream of life up with its fiery heat, and cast his mutilated fragments in the air. 

Following the death of his son (I don't think that is a spoiler, the very point of young Paul Dombey was that he died), Mr. Dombey travels by train -

He found no pleasure or relief in the journey. . . . The very speed at which the train was whirled along, mocked the swift course of the young life that had been borne away so steadily and so inexorably to its foredoomed end. The power that forced itself upon its iron way — its own — defiant of all paths and roads, piercing through the heart of every obstacle, and dragging living creatures of all classes, ages, and degrees behind it, was a type of the triumphant monster, Death. 

Rain, Steam and Speed, Turner (1844)

Thackeray wrote of Turner's Rail, Steam and Speed: The Great Western Railway (right) -

Mr. Turner . . . has out-prodigied almost all former prodigies. He has made a picture with real rain, behind which is real sunshine, and you expect a rainbow every mimute. Meanwhile, there comes a train down upon you, really moving at the rate of fifty miles an hour, and which the reader had best make haste to see, lest it should dash out of the picture, and be away up Charing Cross through the wall opposite. All these wonders are performed with means not less wonderful than the effects are. The rain, in the astounding picture called "Rain-Steam-Speed," is composed of dabs of dirty putty slapped on to the canvas with a trowel; the sunshine scintillates out of very thick smeary lumps of chrome yellow. The shadows are produced by cool tones of crimson lake, and quiet glazings of vermilion. Although the fire in the steam-engine looks as if it were red, I am not prepared to say that it is not painted with cobalt and pea-green. And as for the manner in which the "Speed" is done, of that the less said the better.-- only it is a positive fact that there is a steam-coach going fifty miles an hour. The world has never seen anything like this picture. 

Thackerary was envious of Dickens, and when the nation was in mourning for the death of young Paul, he said, "There’s no writing against such power as this — one has no chance!" Vanity Fair was published in serial form between 1847 - 1848 in competition with Dombey, and was favourably received by The Edinburgh Review, Mrs. Carlyle, who told her husband is "beats Dickens out of this world", and Charlotte Bronte, who said that "His wit is bright, his humour attractive but both bear the same relation to his serious genius that the mere lambent street-lighting playing under the edge of the summer cloud does to the electric death-spark hidden in its womb". Bronte dedicated Jane Eyre to Thackeray.

Like Bronte's Shirley, Vanity Fair looks back, however it had much to say about the times in which it was published. It is set during the Napoleonic Wars, and his characters are all flawed to varying degrees. Vanity of course, greed, lies and deceit are all there in it, and Becky Sharpe is the reprehensible anti-hero that steadily gets worse: at first, she is rather fun in her badness - hurling the dictionary out of the window as she leaves Miss Pinkerton's academy - I had sympathy with her. By the end, not so much. I didn't like her, and I found I didn't particularly care what happened to her I'm sorry to say, though I did enjoy reading it (perhaps I read it a little too fast, though). But Bronte's Shirley blew me away.

Why, I'm not sure, but I got it into my head that I ought to read Shirley after Villette, and as I have so far been unable to finish Villette, I never got to Shirley. I think, perhaps, someone wrongly told me Villette was published first, perhaps that was my thinking. But it wasn't, it was published in 1849 and so I read it this week for my early Victorian theme! I loved it, loved it, loved it, and want everyone to read it! It was beautiful, some of the descriptions blew me away. I've shared one on this blog, and a couple on my Tumblr (here and here), and I think this is one of the best books ever written (I'm very much looking forward to re-starting Villette this time).

As I've said, Bronte looks back, focusing on the Luddite uprising and the depression resulting from the Napoleonic Wars, however she had much to say on her own times through Shirley. Early in the novel, she wrote,

At this crisis, certain inventions in machinery were introduced into the staple manufactuers of the north, which, greatly reducing the number of hands necessary to be employed, threw thousands out of work, and left them without a legitimate means of sustaining life. A bad harvest supervened. Distress reached its climax.Endurance overgoaded, stretched the hand of fraternity to sedition. The throes of a sort of moral earthquake were felt heaving under the hills of the northern counties. But, as is usual in such cases, nobody took much notice.

The friendship between Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone is close, intimate (perhaps this is my 21st Century mind, but I can't help but wonder how intimate it might have been had it have been written today). Bronte explores themes of love, and of marriage, as well as social and political upheavals. Shirley is very masculine, even down to her name: Shirley was traditionally a male name, and it was the name her father intended to give to a son (not unlike Radclyffe Hall's character Stephen Gordon in The Well of Loneliness). She is now one of my favourite characters in literature. As ever, I don't want to say too much in case I spoil it for someone, but if you haven't read it, please do read this and tell me all your thoughts!

So, as you can probably tell, I've loved the first week of the Victorian Celebration! I've not tended to take much note on when the book I've been reading was published, and I've never shown much interest in its historical context, so this way of reading is new to me and I'm enjoying it. Next week, I want to focus on the 1850s, though I think I'll need two or three weeks to focus on it. I've been picking out various books, and my 1850s pile is double my 1860s - 1890s pile! I'm so excited to start the 1850s - I'll begin by reading the relevant chapter in The Victorians, and then... Well, here is my pile, and I want to read as many as I can (but I can't read them all, I'm not that fast):

• The Cranford Chronicles, Elizabeth Gaskell (1851 - 1858)
• On Art and Life, John Ruskin (1853, abridged)
• Villette, Charlotte Bronte (1853)
• On Liberty, John Stuart Mill (1854) 
• North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell (1854 - 1855)
• The Warden, Anthony Trollope (1855)
• Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens (1855 - 1857)
• Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope (1857)
• The Life of Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell (1857)
• Tom Brown's School Days, Thomas Hughes (1857)
• On Natural Selection, Charles Darwin (1859, abridged)

 I'm most looking forward to Villette and then The Life of Charlotte Bronte, but perhaps I'll try and read them all in this order. I'm not sure, but I'll definitely be starting with the second chapter of The Victorians by A. N. Wilson.

I hope everyone else is enjoying the Victorian Celebration!