My students think they know Victorian literature. They have impressions of it as dull, as overly concerned with decorum, as fantasias of the upper-classes in elegantly appointed drawing rooms drinking tea and eating cucumber sandwiches. Few of my students who have these impressions have read much Victorian literature. Many of my students, in fact, think that Jane Austen is the epitome of the Victorian writer. I remedy this particular belief by marking Austen’s dates (1775-1817) next to the publication date of that emblematic Romantic text Frankenstein (1818) on the board. This tends to shock my students as it shows that Austen’s work is clearly demarcated within the timeframe that we consider Romantic or at least Romantic Era.

Still, faced with these kind of flawed preconceptions, I am left with the task of trying to express to them what is so interesting and exciting about the Victorian period. It isn’t the easiest thing to do, particularly in a survey class where we have just traced the flamboyant lives and works of figures such as Blake, the Shelleys, and Lord Byron. I’ve had to think a lot about what it is that attracts me to this period, and after really examining it myself I’ve come to the conclusion that it is the following: I think the Victorian era is the first time in British literary history where the primary focus of writing is an examination of and a striving for coherence. Numerous works, ranging from the three-decker realist novels by George Eliot to the natural and metaphysical speculation of Tennyson in In Memorium are projects that seek to examine and understand the world in a coherent way. And while at first blush that might not seem so startling, it is in fact tremendously important.

To understand what I mean by coherence it is necessary to think about the usages of language and how language relates to the rest of the world, that is the world outside of our art and artifice; the world outside of the language we use to characterize it. Jean Baudrillard writes in Simulacra and Simulation of the “murderous capacity of images,” that is the ability for the words we use to efface what they signify. This is the perennial linguistic question we ask: how do the words I use (the signs as theorists call them) relate to the objects they stand for (the signified.) According to Baudrillard the only bulwark against this linguistic chaos was a faith in God preserving the transparency of the sign: “To this murderous capacity is opposed the dialectical capacity of representations as a visible and intelligible mediation of the Real. All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange—God, of course” (5). In Baudrillard’s analysis the thing that guarantees coherence, guarantees the transparent connection where words can create actual meaning and relate to what he calls “the Real” was the belief in a deity that regulates and assures us that sign can indeed represent the signified. Without this assurance our ability to create meaning loses all surety.

One doesn’t have to buy Baudrillard’s arguments whole hog in order to recognize the important role that the belief in God played throughout Western culture in assuring people that the world was indeed intelligible. But in the nineteenth-century scientific developments in geology and of course evolutionary theory, as well as the important emergence of a powerful set of scholarly tools in Biblical studies known as Form Criticism, made many religious positions ultimately untenable.

The concern with coherence is not entirely a product of religious uncertainty (though I think that is the major contributing factor) but also the product of the rapid technological shifts that give rise to capitalism, the more in-depth discoveries of the globe as made possible by imperialism, and other factors. But it is this sense of coherence that so much literature of the period strives for, as the evolving scholarly understanding of the “Realist novel” the dominant form of the period points out.

In his influential 1974 work, The Realist Novel in England: A Study in Development, Ioan Williams contends that the defining characteristic of Victorian realism is “a vision of contemporary life as organically unified” (116). This vision of an organic unified whole that encompasses both internal subjective coherence and the objective world is evidence, Williams argues, that we “associate mid-Victorian literature with a naïve confidence that Reality consisted in the material and social world around them. There is no doubt that the mid-Victorian novel rested on a massive confidence as to what the nature of reality actually was, and that although it could not be identified with matter itself, it certainly lay in the material world” (x). And while Williams’ contention regarding the Victorians’ “naïve confidence” might itself seem naïve in retrospect, he has a point in that the Realist novel sought to represent a unified vision of the world. That is, it sought for coherence, though not because it was assured that coherence was there, but precisely because it wasn’t.

More nuanced analyses of the genre followed with Catherine Belsey and George Levine. Belsey writes in Critical Practice (first published in 1983)

Classic realism, still the dominant popular mode in literature, film and television drama, roughly coincides chronologically with the epoch of industrial capitalism. It performs, I wish to suggest, the work of ideology, not only in its representation of a world of consistent subjects who are the origin of meaning, knowledge and action, but also in offering the reader, as the position from which the text is most readily intelligible, the position of subject as the origin both of understanding and of action in accordance with that understanding. (56)

Levine in 1983’s The Realistic Imagination writes: “Realism, as a literary method, can in these terms be defined as a self-conscious effort, usually in the name of some moral enterprise of truth-telling and extending the limits of human sympathy, to make literature appear to be describing directly not some other language but reality itself (whatever that may be taken to be.)” Realism according to Levine’s perspective, attempts to break out of the cycle of referentiality whilst demonstrating a paradoxical awareness of its impossibility: “No major Victorian novelists were deluded into believing that they were in fact offering unmediated reality, but all of them struggled to make contact with the world out there” (8).

Relating these two critics together, Belsey condemns realism for the very sins for which Levine champions it. Or to relate back to Williams, for Belsey realism is not problematic because it is naïve, but because it is successful and thus does the ideological work of capitalism. Whether one sides with Belsey or with Levine, or seeks a middle-ground between the two, what both critics acknowledge is the importance of Realism (the dominant mode of the novel during the Victorian era) in forming coherence in a world that is fractured.

This necessity of striving for coherence is an interesting and exciting development, and it is what gives shape to the work of writers as diverse as Eliot and Tennyson, but also Dickens who seeks through the force of his imagination to reintegrate the fractured world, and Bram Stoker whose vampire is defeated not truly by sunlight or stake, but by a tangle of documents woven into a coherent dossier. This fracture is the anxiety that prompts Matthew Arnold to write “Dover Beach” which he famously concludes with:

                   for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

We’ve become inured to this kind of lack of coherence. Many of us (even the religious amongst us) have internalized a kind of day to day existentialism with which we imbue our lives with humanistic meaning. But during the Victorian era this was new, and writers were finding ways to grope powerfully through the darkness to something they could hold onto. In In Memorium, Tennyson racked by grief at the loss of his dear friend and suddenly uncertain in a world that Darwin has bequeathed as “Red in tooth and claw,” pushes through the rent and finds assurance on the other side. However, that assurance is only necessary and the poet’s reaching of it is only so beautiful, because that divine guarantee Baudrillard talks about is no longer there. That in several nutshells, is what is so interesting and important about Victorian literature, and it is why I study it and it is especially why I teach it.