A History of Victorian Literature
Chapter One
"The Times are
Unexampled": Literature
in the Age of Machinery,
1830-1850
Constructing the Man of Letters
"The whole world here is doing a Tarantula Dance of Political Reform,
and has no ear left for literature." So Carlyle complained to Goethe in
August of 1831 (Carlyle 1970-2006: v.327). He was not alone: the
great stir surrounding prospects for electoral reform seemed for the
moment to crowd aside all other literary interests. The agitation, however,
helped to shape a model of critical reflection that gave new weight
to literature. The sense of historical rupture announced on all sides was
on this view fundamentally a crisis of belief - what a later generation
would call an ideological crisis. Traditional forms of faith that under-girded
both the English state and personal selfhood were giving way;
the times required not merely new political arrangements, but new
grounds of identity and belief. Of course, that very ... read full excerpt from A History of Victorian Literature ebook
