The Concept of Self-Help in Victorian Literature

George Gissing's New Grub Street demonstrates the Utilitarian values that characterized Victorian social and cultural life, while Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles demonstrates the Evangelical values also dominant during the period. The concept of self-help factors into both novels because Utilitarianism and Evangelicalism stressed the concept as the route to earthly and heavenly rewards, respectively. The tone of the two books differs significantly, most notably in the sense that Gissing uses the commercialization of literature to question the effect of Utilitarian values on daily human life and Hardy uses Tess's life to question Evangelical religious tenets. However, the novels also demonstrate the similarity between the two philosophies. The position of the main characters at the end of the novels is a logical result of their lives and philosophies throughout the novels. This conclusion is an outgrowth of the philosophies that dominated the period.

Generally, social and cultural life in the Victorian era was molded by two distinct yet not necessarily opposing philosophies: Utilitarianism and Evangelicalism (Altick 114). Altick observes that working from sometimes antithetical premises, these two philosophies joined to create and rationalize what came to be known as middle-class values (Altick 165). The concept of self-help served as this unifying middle-class value. Utilitarianism stressed education as t

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licalism that the philosophy believed worked in tandem with one's duty to search oneself for moral and religious rightness. It is the element of fate--divine grace--without which one cannot hope to ascend to Heaven: "Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?" "Yes." "All like ours?" "I don't know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound--a few blighted." "Which do we live on--a splendid or a blighted one?" "A blighted one." Tess lives in a blighted world and Hardy demonstrates that despite all her personal initiative to improve her position, divine grace has determined that she will be doomed at the end of the novel: "`Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess" (Hardy 314). Thus, Hardy demonstrates that life on earth is a combination of self-help and divine grace, as the Evangelicals maintained. In Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Tess comes to learn about herself through her own personal initiative, but she is still constrained in her actions by divine grace. Utilitarianism was responsible for Victorian thought and manners as well as for social reforms that slowly mitigated t
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Approximate Word count = 1479
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)