Prose.— Important as is the poetry of the era, it is many ways surpassed by the amount and richness of the prose. Dunng the period the great popular form of imaginative litera ture was the novel. Sir Walter Scott, in the preceding part of the century, did more than any one else in the history of English literature to establish the widespread vogue of fiction, and in the field of historical romance he re mains an object of the detracting envy and real despair of his successors. The main develop ment of the novel in the Victorian penod was, however, along a different line from that es tablished by Scott, whose more immediate suc cessor, Edward Bulwer-Lvtton, a prolific writer, marked a decadence of the romance from the standard of the great master. Rather the novel developed according to the principles laid down .ind exemplified by the great writers of the 18th centurv, Richardson, Fielding and Smollett, and brilliantly carried on in the early 19th century by Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen. Ac cordingly the great fiction of the Victorian period is largely realistic in tendency. The most brilliant and most popular, as well as the earliest of the men of the period, was Charles Dickens, who, in the type of story and the method of narrative, followed the school of LeSage and Smollett, but added to the English novel, considered as a whole, a new kind of buoyant humor and a warm and polemic hatred of wrongdoing and oppression. Almost con temporary, though flowering later and declining earlier, was William Makepeace Thackeray, often spoken of as the chief of English novel ists. Like that of Dickens, his material was largely drawn from contemporary life, but he wrote of higher social strata, and viewed his world more as a panorama, calmly and with less personal intensity and less polemic sense. Almost contemporary with the finest work of these masters, was represented a very different and highly original impulse in Charlotte Bronte, whose
Of the types of material furnished by these novelists, that represented by the humanistic novels of Dickens was the most conspicuous in the group of slightly less great novelists of this early Victorian period. The purposeful spirit found a very interesting expression in the religio-historical, and modern ethical, novels of Charles Kingsley, the gist of whose teach ing is that no earthly happiness exists, save in the surrender of self to the faith of Christianity (understood in an Anglican sense) ; in Eliza beth Gaskell, whose classic and charming
Charlotte Bronte and her sisters may be called specialists in representing emotional in tensity. The term °specialist" may also be applied to several writers of the early Victorian period. Frederick Marryat was a specialist in
the writing of sea-stones, and some of his nautical creations are famous. Charles Lever dealt chiefly with the military hero. An inter esting picture of the out-of-the-way life of peasants and gypsies is to be had in the works of George Borrow. A nopular writer on school and college life was Thomas Hughes. There may be named also Benjamin Disraeli, G. P. R. James, Samuel Lover, and of a somewhat later period, contemporary with George Eliot, Rich ard Doddridge Blackmore and Margaret Oli phant.
Since the time of the great panoramic novel ists of the early Victorian period, the novel has tended to specialization, such as has been described, though of a larger kind. Among writers belonging to the so-called later Victorian period, stands out the name of the great special ist in states of the human mind, in questions of duty, in ethics, °George Eliot" (Marian Evans Cross). Though in one or two novels, as
Quite as important and striking as either the poetry or the fiction of the Victorian period is the large body of humanistic, critical and scientific prose that is regarded by Victorian writers as among the chief glories of English literature. During the period, the essay form, owing largely to the growing prevalence of magazines and reviews, was, and still is, in vogue, but it was used more and more widely for other than strictly literary purposes. There have been practically no important successors of such essayists as Lamb, Hazlitt and DeQuincey (who, like Landor,• falls also within the early Victorian period). The ancestry of the litera ture of 1830-1900 is rather to be traced back, in humanism, to Burke and the French Revolu tion, with some diffusion and dispersion; in criticism, to Coleridge; in history, to Gibbon; in economics, to Adam Smith and Bentham; in science and philosophy, to Hume and Ben tham; with the infusion, from time to time, of ideas from Germany.