13 - Innovation and experiment

Summary

Viewed in a perspective of innovation and experiment, few cultural periods have been more inadequately represented by twentieth-century critics and scholars than the age of Victoria. A nation of shopkeepers ruled by a dismal science and proud of its vulgar spirit of commonplace proprieties: the word ‘Victorian’ still carries such overtones, and not without reason. So how could one expect any adventurous aesthetic practices to emerge from such a world?

That question, that situation, was a central preoccupation for the Victorians themselves, and their responses produced one of the most fruitful periods of aesthetic innovation in British history. If Victorian commercial enterprise underwrote many of these innovations, as it did, many others emerged as acts of critical response to the age’s prevalent complacencies.

Between the death of Lord Byron (1824) and the death of Algernon Swinburne (1909) – two of England’s greatest literary innovators – a spirit of practical invention powered every part of the British empire, not least of all those sectors devoted to literature. This was an age of great publishing entrepreneurs. Aided partly by innovative business methods and partly by remarkable advances in papermaking, printing, the graphic arts, and communication networks, the many new commercial schemes and projects forced writers to rethink and re-invent their writing practices, often in very direct ways.