Realism In The Victorian Novel

The novel is at once one of the most diverse, one of the most complex and one of the most popular of literary genres. As Andrew Michael Roberts defines in Introduction: The Novel as a Genre,
A genre of written prose fictional narrative… is characterized by a strong interest in plot; by a degree of psychological and/or social realism, and frequently by the presence of elements of moral, political or social comment. (Robert 150)
The English Novel, from its beginning in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to its great popular flowering in the nineteenth, had been essentially what might be called a ‘public instrument’, basing its view of what was significant in human affairs on a generally agreed standard. Realism used to be considered as one of the most important element in the novel. This realism means the presentation of a social, familiar life of an everyday world. Its plot patterns were constructed out of incidents and situations which were seen to matter in human affairs equally by writer and reader. The changes which occurred in social or economic position or in marital situation were obvious and they altered a character’s state significantly, such changes marked the crises of all eighteenth and nineteenth century …show more content…
G. Wells