Victorianism

Victorianism The literature of 18th century England was revolutionary, but the politics were not - the opposite of what happened in France. Whereas the peasants revolted against the aristocracy in France, the only political revolution in England, says Chesterton, was the victory of the rich over the poor. Puritan theology was rejected but Puritan practices remained in all their stiffness and exclusiveness and "phosphorescent and corpse-like brilliancy." Though the society tried to maintain a moral face, underneath was a heartless philosophy known as Utilitarianism. This philosophy was responsible for "atheist industrialism" and the worship of wealth. Utilitarianism was already whispering about breeding the poor, hinting at infanticide and murmuring at "the folly of allowing the unfit to survive." It was in this context that the great writers of the Victorian era wrote. Almost all of them reacted against Utilitarianism, but from a variety of perspectives and with a variety of results. They knew something fundamental had been lost from their society, and they were trying to grasp it, but most of them had an incomplete understanding of what it was. Thus Ruskin "wanted all the parts of the Cathedral except the altar." And the Pre-Raphaelites "used medieval imagery to blaspheme medieval religion." And Thomas Hardy "was a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot" (a line that so shook Hardy that he railed against Chesterton for the rest of his life, even on his death bed - which more or less proved the truth of what Chesterton had said, even if he himself had to play the role of the idiot to Hardy's atheist.) It was only John Newman and the Oxford Movement who "patiently unraveled the tangle of Victorian ideas" and went all the way to embracing the whole of the lost historical faith. Yet Chesterton has even higher praise for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. Dickens, he says, was the most human of the Victorian writers and most... [continues]

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