Victorian England
...of several
unsettling social developments that forced writers more
than ever before to take positions on the immediate issues
animating the rest of society. Thus, although romantic forms
of expression in poetry and prose continued to dominate
English literature throughout much of the century, the
attention of many writers was directed, sometimes
passionately, to such issues as the growth of English
democracy, the education of the masses, the progress of
industrial enterprise and the consequent rise of a
materialistic philosophy, and the plight of the newly
industrialized worker. In addition, the unsettling of religious
belief by new advances in science, particularly the theory of
evolution and the historical study of the Bible, drew other
writers away from the immemorial subjects of literature into
considerations of problems of faith and truth. Nonfiction
The historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his History
of England (5 volumes, 1848-1861) and even more in his
Critical and Historical Essays (1843), expressed the
complacency of the English middle classes over their new
prosperity and growing political power. The clarity and
balance of Macaulay's style, which reflects his practical
familiarity with parliamentary debate, stands in contrast to
the sensitivity and beauty of the prose of John Henry
Newman. Newman's main effort, unlike Macaulay's, was
to draw people away from the materialism and skepticism
of the age back to a purified Christian faith. His most
famous work, Apologia pro vita sua (Apology for His Life,
1864), describes with psychological subtlety and charm the
basis of his religious opinions and the reasons for his
change from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic church.
Similarly alienated by the materialism and commercialism of
the period, Thomas Carlyle, another of the great
Victorians, advanced a heroic philosophy of...
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