The Eighteen Nineties by Holbrook Jackson — Read

The realist movement spread among novelists and writers of fiction with even more rapidity than it invaded the dramatic realm. With epidemic suddenness writers of all kinds began to be realistic in their fiction. The reading public was not unprepared for the new tendency, for, at about the same time, a cheap edition of the novels of Zola was put upon the market and devoured eagerly without anybody appearing to be more than pleasantly shocked. The edition was expurgated somewhat, but even then passages were left untouched which only a very few years earlier would have aroused the condemnation of the Nonconformist conscience. Still, what a Frenchman might do with impunity did not go without question when repeated, even in a milder way, by native writers. There was a storm-in-a-tea-cup in certain circles, for instance, when Thomas Hardy issued _Jude the Obscure_, and George Moore, _Esther Waters_; and the storm was heightened on the appearance of Grant Allen's _Woman Who Did_, and such realistic studies of slum life as Arthur Morrison's _Tales of Mean Streets_ and _A Child of the Jago_. But even this blew over when the newspapers considered their readers had had enough of the subject, and no more serious damage was done than a few suppressions by the autocrats of the popular lending libraries, notably in the cases of _Jude the Obscure_ and _Esther Waters_, which prohibitions, as might have been expected, had the result of drawing more than usual attention to these remarkable books. The matter in the end was not settled one way or the other; it simply lapsed, and publishers and authors proceeded to develop from frankness to frankness without either endangering their reputations, their readers' morals, or, ultimately, of causing surprise or sustained opposition from any quarter.

It is a curious fact, however, that, whilst the more daring of the realists aroused a new interest in the art of the novel, there were still more critics to denounce than to uphold the new method. Not only was this the fact with reference to realism, but it was the fact also with reference to the problem novel, what was called "the novel with a purpose," and also to the still more modern fiction of temperament and psychological analysis represented by such writers as George Egerton and Sarah Grand. Discussions were lengthy and heated, and many good people of the time, looking backward at the large geniality and splendid sanity of Charles Dickens, the high moral purpose of George Eliot, and the fine culture and unimpeachable respectability of Thackeray, had grave forebodings for their own times and serious doubts as to the wisdom of the successors of the accepted masters. They forgot, of course, that the realism of _Oliver Twist_ had been criticised in its day, and that there were even people who doubted the wisdom of Thackeray's mild frankness in _Vanity Fair_.