The narrator of Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1859 story, ‘My Lady Ludlow’ is rattled and deafened by her accelerated entry into a technological age. Railway speed shrinks both distance and time and two days contract into two hours. She is baffled by a synaesthetic overload of speed, sound, and light: ‘a whizz and a flash, and a screaming whistle’: the history of technology is symbiotically linked to the history of perception. In her retrospect, the new technologies have affected the very way in which people communicate – letters have become ‘short jerky notes … without beginning or end’.

Education is the process underlying the production, transmission, and interpretation of all texts, and as such it is the bedrock of literary culture. Its purposes and methods were debated with particular intensity during the nineteenth century. What was at stake was the means to power and self-determination. Some saw its development as a necessary social control; for others, it could provide a way of escaping constraint. The politics and practice of schooling were often a central theme for Victorian writers. But literature could also be in itself a vehicle for teaching, and many saw it in these terms. Conflicting definitions of the pedagogies of writing shape the most prominent features of the literary landscape, defining the fundamental premises which were extending the scope of every genre, whether fiction, poetry, drama, journalism, or criticism.

Education and reform

Numerous campaigns throughout the nineteenth century drove a wholesale transformation of schools, colleges, and universities, and the consequences were far-reaching. By 1901, the entangled and often chaotic condition of education in England and Wales that had characterized the early 1830s had developed into a more heavily regulated system, supported and supervised by the state. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, educational provision at all levels was still heavily dominated by religious institutions, as it had been for centuries. The role of organized religion was particularly crucial in supplying elementary education for the poor.

Epic came to the Victorians trailing clouds of glory, and casting shadows of doubt correspondingly profound. Poets not besotted by ambition had to wonder whether that could still be the supreme muse’s call they were hearing and, if it was, how it could possibly be meant for them. Their reluctance was only deepened by the genre’s immediate prehistory. During an enthusiastic Romantic revival the fallen king of kings had been exhumed, stuffed, and reseated on its throne. Cross-dressed and class-slummed, radicalized and commodified, epic had declined far towards the categorical shorthand which mass culture has made it for us – bigness aspiring to grandeur – but which, for the Victorians, it had not yet become. Epic’s abiding prestige kept it eligible for purposes of national promotion and imperial reassurance, even as Britannia’s place at the top of a modernizing world entailed institutional and intellectual developments that seemed hardly compatible with the traditions of the genre. Accordingly this chapter grasps epic as something between a genre and a mode, whose formal conventions laboured under peculiar stress because the cultural functions they represented did too. Our core narrative will trace the historically unbroken if largely unacknowledged verse-epic tradition that connects the age of Byron to that of Pound, with collateral attention to an epic modality that emerged in prose narratives when they sought to bind Victoria’s tribe by linking distant origins to present ends and common history to heroic values.

From grand opera to soap opera, from Gothic and nautical to domestic, urban, and imperial, from stage to screen, melodrama has been a dominant shaping force of modernity for over two hundred and fifty years. We live, still, within its aesthetic regime in the twenty-first century. Ignored as bad drama until its rehabilitation began in the 1960s, melodrama is now both widely acknowledged as an important dramatic genre, with its own coherent set of conventions, and also understood more broadly as a mode of apprehension, behaviour, and social action.

In its most literal definition, melodrama consists of a combination of music and drama in which passages of music either alternate with passages of dramatic speech or subtend them almost continuously and in which speech and action are interrupted by moments of static pictorial composition, the tableaux. Thus melodrama is an organized audio-visual field, dialectically working back and forth between music and pictures, music and speech, movement and stasis, sound and silence. As Juliet John argues, ‘the emotional economy of melodrama is best figured as a series of waves’; as Martin Meisel puts it, melodrama offers ‘a style of punctuated discontinuity, visually marked’. Music and tableaux provide punctual markers of the narrative structure as well as guides for the audience’s affective response; they articulate its shifts in mood or tone as the drama moves between high and low plots, terror and comedy, complications and resolutions, absorption and shock.

Everyday life takes the space of our three-dimensional world for granted. Length, breadth, and depth, as the elements of our spatial consciousness and the medium of social experience, are so much a part of existence that they can be ignored. When they are encountered in the novel, they can also be passed over as one of the necessary and relatively unimportant obligations of realism. Yet in a novel, as Bakhtin realized, ‘Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.’ How then does a writer convince us through the abstractions of language that spatial experience created in a text is, by an extraordinary transposition, recognizable, vivid, a lived experience? How, in other words, does the novelist effect a mimesis of the a priori of space? This is the problem I address here. With the category of space uppermost, the ‘thickening’ of space in the novel, and the ways that it creates inter-spatial consciousness and social interaction, can be opened up.

Subtract the element of space from the nineteenth-century novel and it would be hard to say what is left. Most models of the novel, though, while they admit the indivisibility of space and time, begin with time. The criticism of Mikhail Bakhtin and Paul Ricoeur offers outstanding examples of this. To begin with space: this would mean reversing the historical poetics of the chronotope, Bakhtin’s term for narrative elements where time and space mutually intensify and become dynamic.

In June 1829, a remarkable essay appeared in the Edinburgh Review. Entitled ‘Signs of the Times’ it prophesied, in an unusually energetic and compelling style, the crisis facing an industrializing – indeed mechanizing – society. Urban experience was in the ascendant and responding to an increasingly complex, rapidly expanding social machine. Exploring the ways in which traditionally constituted modes of inward reflection, such as religion, were fragmenting under the pressure of speculative and journalistic over-production, the essay feared that even ‘literature’ had been re-organized by the ‘Genius of Mechanism.’ Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Signs of the Times’ has long been regarded as a seminal work for appreciating the onset of the urban, industrial, and intellectual expansion that characterized the distinctive tensions organizing Victorian culture. It needs also to be seen as part of a wider challenge: how should one see, understand, and record the vast material expansion that was being experienced? One answer came in the form of the compendious Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of All Nations, the catalogue which preserved for posterity the contents and layout of the great Crystal Palace in South Kensington in 1851. The three volumes might be seen as the triple-decker novel to end all triple-deckers, nothing less than a vast map of mid-Victorian ‘things’ and the machinery that produced them.

While national and regional literatures are hardly the same thing, no distinct line separates them in the nineteenth-century British Isles. Regional literature documented small pockets of culture it treated as truly national in its characteristics. Thus Wordsworth’s vision of the natural beauty of the Lake District promises readers a locality from which their English love of liberty might be revived, free of corrupting urban (or French) influences. Almost a century later, J. M. Synge’s documentation of the life of Aran Islanders on the westernmost reaches of Ireland holds out a similar promise for Ireland, detailing the cultural peculiarities of the islands where he imagined that an essential Irishness remained intact. But these examples also expose the contradiction inherent in a literature that treats a specific region as authentically national: what makes a region recognizable as national is the alien element it contains, be it the sublimity of Wordsworth’s wild landscapes or the musical inflections through which Synge apprehends a Gaelic he neither understood nor spoke.

The dynamic between region and nation in the British Isles was further vexed by the multi-national state that was the nineteenth-century United Kingdom. In this configuration, England, Wales, and Scotland, in their corporate identity as Great Britain, were united with Ireland under one Crown and one Parliament although each were to retain the distinct cultures that made them – nominally at least – separate nations. The multi-national composition of the British state complicates almost everything we might otherwise assume about the relationship between literature and national identity.

One day late in November of 1859, Matthew Arnold decided to stay home for dinner. Doing so, he thought, would keep his ‘cook’s hand in’, but Arnold had another reason for taking an early meal: that evening he was planning to participate in the drill exercises of his amateur rifle corps, the Queen’s Volunteers, which met three times a week in Westminster Hall. Like a number of his fellow writers – Thomas Hughes, William Morris, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti – Arnold was taking part in the volunteer movement, one of the most revealing oddities of high-Victorian culture. Although members of this force were sometimes mocked for their military incompetence and their vanity – the chance to wear fanciful uniforms was one of its many attractions – most contemporaries viewed the volunteers as a serious response to the threat to British security posed by the ambitions of Napoleon III and the eagerness of the French military to build a steam-powered, iron-clad fleet. Reacting to fears of a French invasion, Parliament moved quickly in May of 1859 to authorize the formation of units of volunteer riflemen who would be trained to defend the southern coast of England. By 1861, forty-eight members of Parliament had joined up, a figure that almost tripled between 1868 and 1880. The movement, however, was less remarkable for the noteworthy individuals whose efforts it engaged than for the numbers of otherwise ordinary men who chose to enlist. Enrolling approximately 100,000 men in its first year, this Victorian auxiliary army rose in strength to 200,000 by the 1870s. It therefore virtually equaled in size and arguably exceeded in visibility the regular army, half of whose units were at any given time stationed overseas.

The Victorian period is one rich in comic writing. Indeed, a high proportion of its major literary achievements and much of its most innovative work, from Dickens through Carroll to Wilde, are comic in one form or another. Within that pattern, however, there is a wide range of kinds of writing and significant changes in their nature as the century proceeds. Victorian comic verse is relatively weak in satire but strong in formal invention, deploying parody, pastiche, and grotesque verbal facility in often unsettling ways. The dominant kinds of novel that the Victorians inherited from their major eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century precursors – Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Burney, and Austen – were essentially comic ones, both in mode and plotting, but novelists found the essentially providential assumptions that had underpinned those authors’ comic resolutions increasingly unsustainable as the century went on. Victorian readers were also much less happy than their Augustan and Romantic precursors with satire, whether in prose or verse, and the cruelty and vulgarity that often accompanied it.

The 1820s have with reason been seen as marking something of a ‘watershed’ in the English comic imagination, separating the frank and bawdy satirical world of Gilray and Rowlandson from the more seemly and genially humorous comic landscape of the Victorians. Bums, farts, and extra-marital sex would have no place in Punch; or the London Charivari (1841–2002), the most enduring and significant home of graphic humour in the period.

Viewed in a perspective of innovation and experiment, few cultural periods have been more inadequately represented by twentieth-century critics and scholars than the age of Victoria. A nation of shopkeepers ruled by a dismal science and proud of its vulgar spirit of commonplace proprieties: the word ‘Victorian’ still carries such overtones, and not without reason. So how could one expect any adventurous aesthetic practices to emerge from such a world?

That question, that situation, was a central preoccupation for the Victorians themselves, and their responses produced one of the most fruitful periods of aesthetic innovation in British history. If Victorian commercial enterprise underwrote many of these innovations, as it did, many others emerged as acts of critical response to the age’s prevalent complacencies.

Between the death of Lord Byron (1824) and the death of Algernon Swinburne (1909) – two of England’s greatest literary innovators – a spirit of practical invention powered every part of the British empire, not least of all those sectors devoted to literature. This was an age of great publishing entrepreneurs. Aided partly by innovative business methods and partly by remarkable advances in papermaking, printing, the graphic arts, and communication networks, the many new commercial schemes and projects forced writers to rethink and re-invent their writing practices, often in very direct ways.

Crossing the Channel for the first time, Lucy Snowe, the autobiographical voice of Charlotte Brontë’s 1853 Villette, beholds a vision:

Brontë’s description of Europe imagined, or seen, for the first time by a rootless, adventuresome British woman has often been taken as emblematic of the Victorian experience of the Continent: a quasi-Gothic, quasi-Romantic land offering pleasures both gemütlich and ‘imperial’, pleasures that promise a release from British social strictures. It accords well with our experience of a large number of Victorian writers, from the Brownings to George Meredith, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde, to name only a few, for whom ‘Europe’ represented both inspiration and refuge, whether that Europe be Bohemian Paris or the Italy of the Risorgimento. The passage does not end on such a rainbow-tinged note, however. Characteristically, Lucy Snowe retracts: ‘Cancel the whole of that, if you please, reader – or rather let it stand, and draw thence a moral – an alliterative, text-hand copy – “Day-dreams are delusions of the demon.”

In Catherine Spence’s novel, Gathered In (1881–2) a group of Australians stop to pay their respects at Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s grave in Florence. Marvelling at how the poet’s reputation attracted people from the ‘Australian wilds’ to ‘the busy centre of old civilization’, the hero Kenneth suggests that ‘genius is the strongest link to bind the world together’. Edith, the heroine, replies that Australians should be grateful to Britain, more than anything else, for producing English literature – a benign force that binds all English-speaking people together. Kenneth goes on: ‘We are nearer to England for all practical purposes … in Melbourne than the American colonies ever were, and I feel sure that its literature takes a very strong hold on the colonial mind.’ This idea of a globalized English literature is found, amongst other places, in the preface of a West Indian novel, Creoleana (1842). After claiming that he was not able to judge the general merit of West Indian literature, the author, J. Orderson, says that Barbadian authors had nonetheless contributed lavishly to its making, and moreover, ‘there are some of her children, who should not be considered as mere drones in the republic of letters; but rather as having contributed to enlarge the hive and dilate the comb’. Australia, Barbados, Florence – the physical distance between these places is apparently annulled by the power of English literature.

In May 2008 Victorian science fiction came to life as installation art in London and New York. Two enormous drills burst upwards through piers on the South Bank and in Brooklyn, the bits still rotating from the stupendous effort supposedly required to dig a transatlantic tunnel. Michel Verne, son of Jules Verne, published a story in The Strand Magazine in 1895 about a tunnel beneath the Atlantic. More than a century later, the artist Paul St George imagined the completion of such a tunnel and the construction of a Telectroscope, another Victorian technological fantasy, a never perfected machine that could transmit images along a telegraph wire. The artist installed a 37-foot long, 11-foot tall, brass and wood viewing tube in each of the cities and connected them via a video conferencing link, so that spectators, for a small fee, could wave and dance and scrawl messages to their counterparts across the pond. The massive faux-Victorian viewing tubes were only the tangible manifestations of a more elaborate fiction. On an accompanying website and blog, the artist tells the story of his (imaginary) great-grandfather, Alexander Stanhope St George, who began construction of the 3,460 mile tunnel in the 1890s but was forced to abandon the dig because of a series of disastrous mishaps. Lost from history, the project lay dormant until Paul St George ‘rediscovered’ his fictitious great-grandfather’s plans and set out to complete both the transatlantic tunnel and the Telectroscope.

… let me ask myself one question – Which is better? – To have surrendered to temptation; listened to passion; made no painful effort – no struggle; – but to have sunk down in the silken snare; fallen asleep on the flowers covering it; wakened in a southern clime, amongst the luxuries of a pleasure-villa: to have been now living in France, Mr Rochester’s mistress; delirious with his love half my time – for he would – oh, yes, he would have loved me well for a while. He did love me – no one will ever love me so again. I shall never more know the sweet homage given to beauty, youth, and grace – for never to any one else shall I seem to possess these charms. He was fond and proud of me – it is what no man besides will ever be. – But where am I wandering, and what am I saying, and above all, feeling? Whether is it better, I ask, to be a slave in a fool’s paradise at Marseilles – fevered with delusive bliss one hour – suffocating with the bitterest tears of remorse and shame the next – or to be a village-schoolmistress, free and honest, in a breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of England?

Yes; I feel now that I was right when I adhered to principle and law, and scorned and crushed the insane promptings of a frenzied moment. God directed me to a correct choice: I thank His providence for the guidance!

In one of John Ruskin’s most celebrated passages of elegy, he recalled the pleasures of Croxted Lane, Dulwich. ‘In my young days’, he said, in Part 1 of Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880):

Manufactured calico, tea cups, dresses, pins, and forks flowing from the factories and workshops of the ‘great’ towns; imported sugar, coffee, tea, Madeira, silk, and diamonds arriving from the colonies and zones of ‘free trade’; handmade crafts fashioned by middle-class women and by William Morris; souvenir postcards and plates returning home from Blackpool, Skye, and the Alps; collections of butterflies, ferns, and cacti lovingly bought, gathered, and displayed by amateur and professional naturalists; rubbish and ‘dust’ piling up uncomfortably and often dangerously in streets and alleys: the material world of the Victorian period and its literature delights and daunts us in its variety and vastness. How do we read and interpret this array of stuff when we encounter it in the varied genres of Victorian literature? This chapter will enlarge on the possibilities that inhere in these questions, both as they pertain to modes of Victorian writing and to the way we read them now.

‘Even the humblest material artefact, which is the product and symbol of a particular civilization, is an emissary of the culture out of which it comes’, T. S. Eliot writes in Notes towards the Definition of Culture. This is one of the epigraphs of the historian Asa Briggs’s monumental Victorian Things and might be its credo as well. Briggs takes us on an incomparable tour of the Victorian object world: daguerreotypes, spectacles, matches, needles, bonnets, Staffordshire figures, medals, souvenir heads, hankies, penny postage stamps, and cookery books connect us to the people who made and bought and used them, to wars, laws, strikes, fashion, and gender roles, to ideas about home and hearth, many of which were invented by the Victorians and are still practised by us.

On 29 November 1814, a printing revolution shook the world of British printing and publishing. After months of secret work, the owners of The Times of London used imported Koenig presses, steam-powered, flat-bed cylinder machines to issue overnight that morning’s edition. Churning out material at 1,000 impressions an hour, they produced an entire run of 4,000 copies and delivered them to readers at an unrivalled speed. The Times editorial announced its triumphant entry into the industrial age with typical hyperbole. ‘Our journal of this day’, it intoned, ‘presents to the public the practical result of the greatest improvement connected with printing since the discovery of the art itself.’ Further refinements by Augustus Applegarth and Edward Cowper in the 1820s led to wholesale adoption of more efficient presses by the industry, so that by the late 1830s its use was ubiquitous throughout Britain. The steam press, which replaced the hand-operated, metal Stanhope press, joined innovations such as the Fourdrinier papermaking machine in mechanizing the process and lowering the cost by which texts reached the market, so powering print to its key place in Victorian cultural life, and thus conjoining steam in the public mind with print activity. As James Secord notes, ‘The steam-powered printing machine, machine-made paper, public libraries, cheap woodcuts, stereotyping, religious tracts, secular education, the postal system, telegraphy, and railway distribution played key parts in opening the floodgates to an increased reading public.