"The Virtuous Victorian" is an essay by Agnes Repplier that examines the nature and legacy of Victorian literary conventions, challenging the widespread tendency to dismiss the entire Victorian era as an age of smug hypocrisy and sentimental falseness. Repplier opens by questioning the casual use of terms like "Victorian" and "mid-Victorian" as synonyms for moral prudishness and sentimental dishonesty. She points out that many attitudes attributed to Victoria's reign actually originated in the Georgian period, and that the blanket condemnation of Victorian writing as hypocritical fails to account for the genuine intellectual and creative vitality that characterized much of the era's output. She distinguishes between two main forms of Victorian reticence: the superficial observance of religious practice, which affected life more than literature, and the artificial silence surrounding illicit sexual relations, which affected literature more than life. Moving through the major Victorian writers, Repplier offers nuanced assessments of each. She notes that Tennyson, despite bending to the propriety of his age in works like his treatment of Maid Marian and Fair Rosamond, nonetheless produced in "Ulysses" one of the most magnificent rejections of domesticity and duty in all of English verse. The same poet who chilled his pen in deference to convention also gave voice to an insatiable adventuring spirit that scorns safety, home, and obligation. This contradiction within a single writer illustrates Repplier's central argument: that Victorian literature cannot be reduced to a simple formula of repression. Repplier examines Dickens and finds that his novels, while perfunctory and even laughably mechanical in their treatment of romantic love, are nevertheless alive with comic genius and deeply human observation. The romantic plots of Nicholas Nickleby are mere scaffolding, she argues, while the real energy of the novel resides in characters like Mrs. Nickleby, Fanny Squeers, and the Kenwigs family. The charge of conventionalism carries more weight when applied to Thackeray and Trollope, who genuinely aspired to portray life truthfully, yet she defends even them against simplistic dismissal. Thackeray's reticence about sexual matters, she argues, reflects the standards of any gentleman of his day and does not fundamentally cripple his art. What she finds genuinely troubling in Thackeray is not his decency but his severe moral judgment of his own characters and his conspicuous favoritism, particularly his cold hostility toward Becky Sharp, whom Repplier regards as one of the supreme creations in English fiction. Trollope she treats with affectionate irony. She quotes his proud claim that no girl rose from his pages less modest than before, noting that while technically true, the sentiment is more fitting for children's fiction than for his richly populated adult world. In Trollope's novels, as in real life, most people are occupied with politics, ambition, money, and professional rivalry rather than with romantic passion. His Archdeacon Grantly, worldly, unspiritual, and socially conservative, she holds up as a figure of genuine human worth, and she imagines with relish what that solidly patriotic churchman would have made of the more earnest and self-congratulatory liberalism represented by H.G. Wells's Mr. Britling. Repplier further dismantles the anti-Victorian caricature by pointing to works and thinkers who defy it entirely. Darwin's publications, the Reform Bill, Browning's "The Ring and the Book," Swinburne's poetry, George Meredith's "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," and the thundering social criticism of Ruskin all belong to the Victorian period and carry no trace of comfortable smugness. Ruskin in particular she presents as a relentless critic of English self-satisfaction, insisting that England was not divinely favored and that inherited wealth carried no providential blessing. Such truths, she remarks, were no less uncomfortable in their own day than they would be in America at the time of her writing. The essay closes with a meditation on what literary freedom has actually produced. The removal of taboos and the end of reticence have brought candor but not necessarily art. The successors to Becky Sharp sin exhaustively and without wit; their fully illuminated transgressions are less engaging than Becky's most minor peccadillo. Repplier quotes Edith Wharton's lament about freedom of speech that never arrives at wit and freedom of action that never makes for romance, endorsing the view that the conventions the Victorians observed, whatever their limitations, were not without aesthetic and human value, and that their disappearance has not automatically produced a richer or more honest literature.
By Agnes Repplier · First published 1907 · Genre: Essay, Literary Criticism, Social Commentary