Later victorian novelists

Conclusion
George Eliot was the first to write novels in the modern style. Other important novelists of the period were Meredith and Hardy. The year 1859 saw the publication not only of George Eliot’s Adam Bede but also of Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feveral. Though they are vastly different from each other, they stand in sharp
contrast to the works of established novelists that appeared the same year—as Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and Thackeray’s Virginians.
The novelists of the early Victorian period—Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope and others—had followed the tradition of English novel established by Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Their conception of themselves was modest, and their conscious aim nothing much more elevated than Wilkie Collins’s “make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait.” Set against this innocent notion of the novelist’s function, the new novelists of England as well of other countries of Europe, began to have high ambitions of making the novel as serious as poetry. The Russian novelists—Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and the French novelists like Flaubert, all began to look upon the novel as a medium of conveying profound thoughts. Flaubert especially arrogated to himself the rights and privileges of the poet, and he talked about his talent and medium as seriously as poets do theirs. He stated his ambition as a novelist thus: “To desire to give verse rhythm to prose, yet to leave it prose and very much prose, and to write about ordinary life as histories and epics are written, yet without falsifying the subject. It is perhaps an absurd idea. But it may also be a great experiment and very original”. These words of Flaubert show that the European novelists in the middle of the nineteenth century were making the same claims about their vocation as the Romantic poets in England did in the beginning of the century.

Glossary

1. 
   akimbo - having the hand on the hip and the elbow turned outward.
   
2.