'Now is there civil war within the soul': The English Civil War in nineteenth century British literature

While Victorian views of the past have recently been the subject of much scholarly scrutiny, little attention has been given to literary treatments of the English Civil War, a subject for which British authors of the Romantic and Victorian periods demonstrated a widespread and sustained interest. Through analysis of allusions to the Civil War in the works of such Romantic writers as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, Mary Shelley, and De Quincey, I show that it was common at the time to draw analogies between the English and the French revolutions, and that because interpretations of Civil War events were so distinctly divided along lines of political, religious, and social demarcation, a Romantic author's characterization of those events serves as a barometer of his or her political sentiments; and because such sentiments were often potentially controversial, references to seventeenth-century English history became a convenient avenue of indirect political discourse. I further demonstrate that this tendency persisted into the Victorian era, in part because British fears of revolution continued through the time of the Second Reform Bill, and Victorian writers employed the Civil War theme as a metaphor of division and reconciliation whereby they explored many of the most divisive issues of their day--issues involving polarities in class, politics, religion, sexuality, and aesthetics that Victorians associated with the seventeenth-century conflict between the Puritans and Cavaliers. Developing Walter Scott's device of casting heroes and heroines as lovers from opposite sides of the Civil War, Victorian authors--in such major works of fiction as Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, William Thackeray's History of Henry Esmond, George Eliot's Middlemarch, George Meredith's The Egoist, and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles--iconographically and allegorically expand their treatment of controversial themes. I also analyze related treatments of cultural division and compromise in Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil and Matthew Arnold's prose. The metaphorical unions in these works of political, religious, and social polarities, and of contrasting personal sensibilities, reflect a liberal ideal of humane tolerance and compromise that is one of the great contributions of Victorian literature to the intellectual development of that age, and one of its greatest legacies in our own.