uch Victorian fiction. In the work of Charlotte Bronte, which is of course to say in Jane Eyre, the attributes of the social character that emerged from the Industrial Revolution have an overlay of Romanticism.
There is a depth of irony of character and action in a number of Dickens's novels. The dreams of success that Dickens deals-with are sometimes tinged with humor, as in the case of David Copperfield's Mr. Micawber, who is always waiting for something to turn up, and with a deep and serious irony, as in the case of Richard in Bleak House. Along with the impulse toward material success, the impulse toward social reform of conditions that the values of material success have created can be discerned in Dickens's work. The appalling social inequities exacerbated by the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the great influence of rationalist utilitarianism as a mode of respectable experience during the Victorian period are doubtless critical to the pattern of Dickens's novelistic ideas. The intrinsic emotional content of his stories derives in no small measure from the way in which individuals experience their environment, particularly their work environment.
Indeed, Jane Eyre contains many elements of Gothic fiction- for example, the grand manor house, the relationship between a young girl and a rich and powerful man, the man's dark secret. Yet within this environment the sharp observances of the heroine emerge as the locus of action in the story, and her sharpness is based on her position as a working woman. If Jane is an exemplar of the morally respectable early Victorian female, she is perhaps more a herald of the female type of the late Victorian era. She is an anomaly inasmuch as she must earn her living in the world, but that anomaly contributes strongly to her stature.
There is emotional as well as economic vulnerability for a woman who is thrust into the world to get a living; to be given a...