Jonathan Swift

Early Victorian nonfiction prose

Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution (1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing, in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great autobiographies of this introspective century.