Victorian Novel

The Victorian Novel is characterized by a focus on adventures, of either social outcasts or virtuous heroes, primarily built upon an episodic structure. The great success of the Victorian Novel is owed to a renewed interest in prose, the highest expression of which is the novel. The Victorian Age saw—at last—-a unity of interests and opinions between writers and their readers caused by the growth of the middle class, to which many authors belonged.

Much of the publishing took place in the serial form: essays, verse and novels appeared in installments within periodicals. This created a close contact between the writer and the reader, but also compelled the former to capture and maintain the interest of the latter: one bad installment is all it would take to lose readers. The ability to alter the story as it progresses through installments and the activity of reviewers played at the writers' advantaged, and had a deep impact on their public opinion.

Novelists in the 1840s felt a moral and social responsibility to carry out: reflecting through their art on the great changes and struggles of the time, including the struggle for democracy and the Industrial Revolution, as well as the rapid development of towns and cities. They portrayed reality as they saw it, and often inserted a profound certain political message addressing the harsh conditions of workers (albeit not as radically as their European counterparts) and attempting to correct the vices of their contemporaries through Didacticism. Sex and the other few subjects which constituted an offense to the morality of the time were still taboo.

Some specific structural characteristics, traits and examples:

• Omniscient narrator, commenting on the plot and actively judging between right and wrong, light and darkness
• Retribution and punishment of characters in the final chapter
• Jane Austen: thematic unity (girl's choice of a husband)
• Gothic writers: distant, exotic past setting