Realism In Victorian Literature

DISCUSSION ON REALISM AS A LITERARY MODE BY VICTORIAN WRITERS
Sergio Ramírez Pascual
Realism is a movement that takes place during the 19th century. But how do Victorian writers make use of it in their works? Throughout this essay we will try to give an answer to this question by defining what realism exactly is, and examining texts from 19th century authors such as Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton in order to find its main features reflected in them.
First of all, it is worthwhile describing the context in which Victorian writers lived, so as to have, if not the same, at least a very close perspective to that of them. The Victorian Age was an age of industrialization that came with a sort of dehumanization.

This is most noticeable in Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860) and Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848).
Dickens depicts, in his work, his vision of a world where there are evident class distinctions and a strong desire for reaching higher classes, that is, class mobility. All of those features focus on Pip, the protagonist, an orphan who lives with his sister and her husband Joe, a blacksmith. Pip’s dream is to become a gentleman in order to win the love of a high-class lady, Estella, who lives with Mrs Havishan, a rich woman.
The first visions that the author has of reality and the symbolism implied from it, we can find them at the beginning of the novel, when we are set in the middle of the marshes and Pip is in the graveyard:
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. […] this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard (DICKENS, Ch.

In this sense, both father and daughter seem to complement each other.
Ultimately, we understand that part of Dickens satire is directed to the fact that you cannot just throw money to someone to make a gentleman out of him. As for Gaskell, the whole purpose of her work is to create a world that the reader wants to get lost in. The text is based on Realism, an illusion of reality in which the characters are familiar to the reader in the way that they act. This is noticeable in the character of Mary, a girl whose mother and unborn brother die, whose father turns into a mad man, and who is also the focus of two men’s love from different social classes. For the reader to put in the skin of them, he needs to perform a suspension of his disbelief.
There are some similarities to Dickens’ novel, in the sense that in both texts the protagonists have lost their families, also they belong to the working class, they long for social mobility, and they neglect worthy working-class potential