Few questioned that tremendous advances were taking place in science, public health, transportation, and the general standard of living, but each new idea or discovery seemed to have unexpected, distressing repercussions.
The critic J. A. Froude remarked in 1841 that "the very truths which have come forth have produced doubts.this dazzle has too often ended in darkness." Discoveries in geology, biology, and textual scholarship shattered belief in the literal truth of the Bible. The Industrial Revolution shifted power from the landed aristocracy toward an insecure, expanding middle class of businessmen and professionals, impoverishing millions of once-rural laborers along the way. Strident, riotous campaigns to extend voting rights to males of the middle and working classes produced fears of armed insurrection. Coupled with the agitations for and against trade unions, women's equality, socialism, and the separation of church and state, the fitful transformation of Britain's political and economic structure often teetered on the brink of open class warfare. In the national clamor for reform, every sector of the population fought for its privileges and feared for its rights. .
In the following pages, I wish to highlight the characteristics, form and the revolutionary aspects of the Victorian Novel, along with a brief analysis on three very important Victorian writers - William Makepeace Thakeray, Charles Dickens and George Eliot( Mary Ann Evans). Elaborating somewhat on these authors, I hope, gives the reader an insight to their wishes, their lives, and their beliefs, which were all central to their works, since they were all pivotal figures in this era, in regard to their contribution to the field of literature and otherwise.
The Victorian Novel.
Created by the new profession of "novelists," a group that now included women as well as men; printed quickly and inexpensively on the new steam-powered printing presses and distributed efficiently over the kingdom on the new railway system; welcomed as a source of moral and social instruction as well as of delight and entertainment by the newly expanded reading public, the novel stands as the central literary form of the Victorian era.
