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Victoria’s Victorians and the Mid-Victorians

How might those who shared an 1819 birthdate be placed in a broader generational context? We, like the Victorians, speak of generations in indefensibly indistinct and inconsistent ways, and the members of the 1819 cohort have been grouped with various generational bedfellows. Take the poet Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861). For David Newsome, he is one of a generation which followed Thomas Arnold and John Keble, which included Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815–1881), Edward Meyrick Goulburn (1818–1897), Benjamin Jowett (1817– 1893), Stafford Northcote (1818–1887), Frederick Temple (1821–1902), and Matthew Arnold (1822–1888);1 for Bernard Reardon he is bracketed with Tennyson (1809–1892), Browning (1812–1889), Arnold, George Eliot (1819–1880), George Meredith (1828– 1909), Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), and Mrs Humphrey Ward (1851–1920);2 whereas P. G. Scott puts Clough in a generation of ‘Oxford Liberals including Jowett, Stanley, Arnold and [ James Anthony] Froude [(1818–94)]’.3 Such variety of association and of age demonstrates the problematics of achieving any form of useful, stable generational groupings. Our theoretical apparatus, such as it is, for generational analysis, is rooted in the twentieth century, at a point at which generations became self-conscious identities. Under the influence of the paradigmatic work of Karl Mannheim, the tendency has been to look to generational cohorts with birthdates spanning between 25 and 33 years, and associated with the cultural revolt of youth, developing out of specific conditions and influences coinciding broadly with a period of ‘emerging maturity’. But Victorian experience diverged from later dynamics in a number of ways. In the nineteenth century, the language of generations was almost as ubiquitous as in the twentieth, but generational affiliations were less readily adopted, and generational solidarities are much less obviously discerned.4 And most significantly, an initial exploration of patterns of authorship in the Victorian periodical press, and the configuration of artistic schools and cliques (see Figure 1), suggests that the traditional 25–33 year span is too long, perhaps unduly influenced by the natural cycle of generational succession within families, and that for the Victorians at least, it makes more sense to identify successive generations of roughly 15 years in duration.5 As a rough schematic, these can be divided as indicated in Table 1.