Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Victorian life writers felt the lure of the romance. They also felt its limits. Understood as a progress narrative, a history of attainment, the romance plot could easily be assimilated into a dominant discourse of early and mid-Victorian culture. The narratives of self-improvement and self-advancement, potent in their appeal and in their possibilities for ironization, have long been recognized as having helped define working-class identity in the mid-nineteenth century, giving new, culturally specific life to the narrative of attainment. Such trajectories lay beneath the influential exhortations of Samuel Smiles' Self-Help, with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859), and his later encouragements to manly fidelity in Duty with Illustrations of Courage, Patience, & Endurance (1880), both key documents in the middle of the period's construction of a nonprofessional male identity. The history of progress, fashioned into a plot of quest and conquest over adversity, the arduous search for reward and fulfillment (often sexual) was a tempting paradigm for some fictional autobiographers from the middle classes in the early part of the Victorian period, who were often also interested in the vectors of class. Charlotte Brontë explored something of its potential in Jane Eyre (1847), fusing it with a version of the bildungsroman; Dickens tested its serviceability for a critique ... log in or subscribe to read full text