The Victorian novel: a comparative study of Dickens’s Great

Expectations and Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Victorian literature was produced during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) and
it was considered a bridge between the romantic-era works of the previous century and what
would become the literature of the newly industrialized world of the twentieth century. It is
characterized by a strong sense of morality, and it frequently champions the downtrodden.
While it is often equated with prudishness and oppression, Victorian literature is also known
for its attempts to combine imagination and emotion with the neoclassical ideal of the
accessibility of art for the common person.
Charles Dickens is considered to be the most prolific 19th Century author of short
stories, plays, novellas and novels. Dickens became was highly acclaimed for his remarkable
characters, his mastery of prose in the telling of their lives, and his depictions of the social
classes, mores and values of his times. Some considered him the spokesman for the poor, for
he definitely brought much awareness to their plight, the downtrodden and the have-nots. His
most famous novel, Great Expectations, is both a bildungsroman and a commentary on many
social issues including, but not limited to, prison reform, the monarchical system, and public
education. Most prominently critiqued however, would be the common Victorian gentleman,
and this achieved through the character of Pip. Through Pip the reader can surmise that
Dickens was extremely disenfranchised with, if not also critical of, both the behaviour and the
image of the Victorian gentleman. During this Age, a true gentleman was characterized by his
virtues and not his gentility. He was capable of maintaining a delicate balance between social
and moral features. He was a noble and honorable man – a man who had fine ethical values.
In following Pip's arc throughout the novel one can get a collective sense of how
Dickens perceives the "gentleman" of his day. As Pip comes to understand the social
hierarchy it is immediately his desire to escape his class standing. His escape from the lower-
middle class is made possible by the will of a convict. A man put down by Victorian society
escapes and creates a fortune to bestow upon Pip. Pip then loses sight of what's important in
life, accumulates debt, and ultimately finds himself unable to live the life of a Victorian elitist.
Pip is rescued by Joe, a representative of the lower working class, and lives his life as a
middle-class working man. At every turn Dickens praises the lower-class and seems to
critique the elitist. Pumblechook is made to be a fool, Havisham is destroyed, and Pip
becomes completely disagreeable to the reader. It is certainly a narrow look at a novel

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containing many serious and equally scathing critiques of Victorian society, but the
representation of the "gentleman" is a glaring comment on the social misconception on the
value of a man.
In his novel, Dickens used characterization as means to advance certain social
ideas. What Dickens is interested in by the story he tells in Great Expectations isn't the
psychological drive behind Pip's life, but rather the grand panorama which envelops not only
Pip, but indeed all the characters. Characterization becomes, then, the key to understanding
what kind of social critique Dickens was forming. The fanciful names that Dickens typically
gave to his characters are often used as ammunition by those critics who say his
characterizations are shallow. What better name for a greedy group of people than the
Pockets? It is anything but coincidental that Dickens provides names for characters that match
their personality. Dickens is far less interested in creating realistically named characters that
in using characterizations as a means for furthering his social critique.
The use of words is very precise in Great Expectations and it reflects the setting, the
social condition and the family background of the characters. The use of language is vitally
important to understanding the social critique that Dickens is working toward. Before Pip
achieves wealth, he is a great admirer of Joe and can overlook his uneducated speech patterns
filled with contractions and words that run together. That same language comes to be seen in
counterpoint once Pip achieves his riches and begins to see Joe in a new light. He becomes
ashamed of him and that shame is foremost represented by Joe's backward language.
It is not just speech patterns and language development that serves to turn characters
themselves into larger critiques of the time. Dickens also uses setting in relation to his
characters to define them against the milieu of the story. Setting is always an important
component in any story, of course, but Dickens actually employs setting almost as a means of
drawing out the deeper mysteries of his characterization in order to more fully define how his
characters relate to his social concerns.
Throughout Great Expectations, Dickens explores the class system of Victorian
England, ranging from the most wretched criminals (Magwitch) to the poor peasants of the
marsh country (Joe and Biddy) to the middle class (Pumblechook) to the very rich (Miss
Havisham). The theme of social class is central to the novel's plot and to the ultimate moral
theme of the book—Pip's realization that wealth and class are less important than affection,
loyalty, and inner worth. By connecting the theme of social class to the idea of work and self-
advancement, Dickens subtly reinforces the novel's overarching theme of ambition and self-
improvement.

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 In the 20th century, John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman brought
to the public attention the parody of Victorian social, sexual and literary conventions. He
reveals his personal disdain for Victorian England as well as his espousal of
existentialism. Fowles projects his consciousness onto a period rife with dogmatism and
unreflected beliefs. From his vantage point, it is easier to see the shallow propriety of being a
“gentleman”, the hypocrisy of professing piety and then viciously judging others, and the
oppressive, unnatural views people held about sex. By reflexively narrating a story set in
Victorian England, and more specifically the provincial town of Lyme Regis, Fowles shows
how unexamined lives can have such non-existent foundations.
Fowles parodies the Victorian novel and the way authors treated themselves as
puppeteers. In the Victorian Age, the characters of a novel were particularly shaped by the
will of the author. Every event in the novel was ineluctable—out of the myriad of
possibilities, whatever actually happened was regarded as the only possibility that could have
happened. The Victorian novelists operated from an unreflected position; the authority they
accorded themselves allowed no room for alternative possibilities. Therefore, the novelists
permitted themselves to artificially impose definitive endings on their works. The
conventional Victorian romance novel frequently ended in marriage. After the marriage, it is
implied that a state of perpetual marital bliss ensues, and thus there is nothing left to narrate.
Fowles subverts these Victorian conventions by investing his characters with the freedom to
make their own decisions, allowing for the numerous possible conclusions explained in my
introduction.
In this novel, the author-narrator is the agent of the convergence of the modern and
the Victorian modalities who tells the story of the respectable Charles Smithson and his
involvement with a “fallen woman”, Sarah Woodruff. He is contemporary in his perspective
on the earlier period and in the chronological scope of his reference. Indeed, in Chapter 13,
the omniscient narrator explicitly informs the readers that he ‘live[s] in the age of […] Roland
Barthes”. Fowles’s novel can be regarded as an example of a pseudo- Victorian novel
adopting a contemporary perspective.
Fowles' technique is to take a ready-made 1860s plot and tell it from a 1960s point
of view. On one level, this yields an engaging parody of the Victorian novel—with chatty
narrator, digressions, subplots involving cockney servants and narrative juggling. The
technique also enables Fowles to compensate for some of the Victorian novel's omissions and
evasions, particularly that dark side of the Victorian moon, the bedroom.

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 The English novelist gives to his narrator a self-consciousness about his activity
similar to that which Thackeray gives his “puppeteer” persona in “Vanity Fair”. More directly
than Thackeray, however, Fowles’s narrator admits that knowledge is limited, that the novel’s
realism is a deception, and that the reader is complicitous. The result is an undermining of the
kind of narrative authority the Victorian novel took for granted. While the Victorians believed
that "the novelist stands next to God," Fowles takes his stand next to Godot. He proclaims that
the novelist's first principle is the "freedom that allows other freedoms to exist," namely those
of his characters. To illustrate the point, he twice ties up his narrative strands in tidy
traditional endings, then backs up and unwinds them again in tangled, less conclusive but
more believable alternate endings.
The most notorious aspect of the narrator’s subversion of the novel is his refusal to
bring the story to a conventional end. Instead, he provides three different endings and invites
the reader to choose which he likes best: one is a conventional Victorian ending in which the
hero represses his desire for the fatal woman and returns to his fiancée, and then two
variations of the results of his not doing that. Both of these two endings involve his disgrace
and the loss of his fiancée; in one version, he ultimately gets Sarah, the girl of his dreams, and
in one he does not. This ending has a kind of authority that the other two do not.
Through the manipulation of Victorian plot structures, as well as the pseudo-
Victorian style of many passages, The French Lieutenant's Woman reveals itself to be an
affectionate parody of novels such as those of Hardy and the “sensation” writers like Wilkie
Collins and Mary Braddon. And yet, it is thoroughly of its time: the plot and setting are
Victorian, but the novel's narrative stance is deliberately self-referencing and metafictional,
and the two main characters, especially Sarah, think and act in a twentieth-century way. They
are existentialists before their time, following the dictates of their own drives to self-
realization rather than the morals imposed by society.