Victorian Men of Letters

The Victorian Age has been described as having have a strong, if idealized, vision of history. In a review of Jenkyns's The Victorians and Ancient Greece, Harris cites the "Victorians' glorified vision of history" as consistent with the presumed ideals of British imperialism, noting that "George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde, architects, painters, and sculptors alluded to or imitated the classical style" (Harris 152). Jenkyns himself notes the "tendency for people to use the Greeks as a means of confirming their own prejudgments" (15) in Victorian England, in particular making the point that the British saw encouraging parallels between Greek and English aristocratic, class-conscious attitudes.

The seminal literary theorist of historical fiction is widely acknowledged as Georg Lukacs (Foley 143, et passim; Jameson passim), as is Lukacs's attachment to Sir Walter Scott as the prime mover and standard of the historical novel. With Scott's Waverley there begins "the coordination between an emergent new form, the historical novel, and an emer

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he rather daring mother-daughter-Henry love triangle. As Cecil puts it: "The dust lies thicker on Thackeray than on Dickens" (60). Elsewhere Cecil develops the idea that Thackeray's characters, in Henry Esmond as well as in other novels, are more types than fully realized individual personalities: "[L]ooking on the individuals as we do only as representatives of a common humanity, we stand farther away and are cognizant of the general curve of life, of the flight of time and change, of decay and renewal. . . . We see Esmond pass from childhood to youth, from youth to middle age, we watch his love for Beatrix wax, wane, and finally give place to that for Lady Castlewood" (70). Browning's "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" expresses the Victorian interest in historical settings and Important Emotions. The poem is set in the seventeenth century and tells the story of three soldiers sent from Ghent with news "which alone could save Aix from her fate," presumably information that could prevent a battle or stop a siege. Browning imagined the whole thing, according to one of his letters (Scudder 164); the poem is not connected to the 1814 Treaty of Ghent that closed the War of 1812 between Britain and America. Browning
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Approximate Word count = 3449
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)

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