Realism: Ordinary Lives, Told Truthfully

1Why the 1840s?

• The industrial city. Railways, factories and fast-growing towns created new classes of workers and managers, and new social problems.
• A new reading public. Cheaper printing and wider schooling meant that the middle class, and many workers, read novels, often in monthly parts or in magazines.
• Science. Observation and evidence were winning prestige. Darwin's On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859; photography had been public since 1839. Writers wanted the same honesty of observation.
• Disappointment with Romantic dreams. After the failed European revolutions of 1848, many writers distrusted heroes and grand ideals and turned to the details of daily life.

2The texts

1. A writer states her aim. George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans) stopped her first novel, Adam Bede (1859), in the middle to explain what kind of story she was telling:

So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of one's best efforts, there is reason to dread.

George Eliot, Adam Bede, Chapter 17

Thirteen years later, the last sentence of Middlemarch (1871–72) honours the ordinary people who are usually left out of history:

… for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

George Eliot, Middlemarch, Finale

2. A town seen through the smoke. In Hard Times (1854), Charles Dickens describes Coketown, a fictional northern English factory town:

It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.

Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Book 1, Chapter 5

3Close reading

Eliot's promise. The key words are "simple", "falsity" and "dread". Eliot is not afraid of dullness or of unpleasant truth; the only thing she fears is lying. Notice too the modest phrase "in spite of one's best efforts": she admits that complete truth is hard to reach. Realism, at its best, is an honest effort rather than a boast.

Eliot's tribute. The Middlemarch sentence moves from "the world" down to "you and me" and ends on the quiet image of "unvisited tombs". The heroes of Realism are not kings and warriors but people whose good deeds nobody records. This is Realism as a moral position, not just a style.

Dickens's Coketown. The passage is packed with checkable, physical detail: chimneys, a canal, a river coloured by dye, rows of windows, the noise of machines. That detail is realist. Yet look at the figures of speech: smoke as "serpents", the engine as "an elephant in a state of melancholy madness". Dickens exaggerates to make readers feel how inhuman the factory town is. He is a realist in subject (industrial poverty) and a caricaturist in style. Exam answers that notice this mixture are more convincing than those that call every Victorian novel "realistic".

Rhythm as meaning. The second sentence piles up clauses with "and … and … and where … and where", so that it seems to go on as long as the working day. The sound of the sentence imitates the monotony it describes.

4Features of Realism

5An African comparison: realism as an answer

When Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart in 1958, he used realist techniques for a purpose of his own. European novels about Africa had shown Africans as people without history or reason. Achebe answered with exact, unhurried detail of Igbo village life in Umuofia: the yam harvest, the wrestling match, the rules of the clan's courts, the conversations over kola nut. The realism is a form of argument: this was a complete, ordered society before the missionaries and administrators arrived. Like Eliot, Achebe chose an ordinary man, Okonkwo, a farmer and wrestler, rather than a king, and like her he lets events follow from character and social change. Unlike the Victorian realists, he writes partly to correct how another culture saw his own. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's early novels, such as Weep Not, Child (1964), use the same tradition to show colonial Kenya through the eyes of one family.