We had Harry Potter and the Hunger Games. What kind of books did the people of the 19th century like to read?
People like to criticize the younger generation of this age for using their phones to distract themselves when they could be reading or doing better things, but did you know, some people of the 19th century considered reading to be dangerous. They feared that people who read books would not be able to tell the difference between reality and fiction. These people would spend hours engrossed in a book.
What kind of books were they reading for them to not be able to put it down? Many books during this time were of the realist kind. A popular literary movement during the 19th century, realism was a literary movement that started in France during the mid 19th century and spread to the rest of Europe, Russia and the USA. This movement came about as a response to the Romantic movement, which emphasized imagination, prose, exotic themes and outstanding heroes. Books of this movement had characters of various classes, usually of middle to low classes of society.
In Europe, there were writers like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Jane Austen’s novels addressed the limited opportunities women of all classes had. The dialogue is natural and realistic, which was her way of critiquing the unrealistic portrayal of women in books of the 18th century. In her novels, she does not portray all couples as perfect, despite being novels about finding love. Charles Dickens’s novels are thought to have been used for social reform. His books criticized Victorian society for their treatment of the lowest class of people. His characters were often poor, working-class people tackling poverty and injustices.
In the USA, William Dean Howells and Mark Twain were two of many American realist novelists. Howells wrote novels about situations that were realistic such as a marriage falling apart and the rise and fall of businesses. What made Mark Twain’s novels so realistic was that he used colloquial speech that was unique to the United States. During this time, American writers were trying to imitate the fancy writing style of the English, so Twain’s use of American slang was revolutionary and gave American writing a distinctive voice. Twain’s novels had characters that were highly believable and put in tiny details that made his stories highly realistic.
Not only did books help pass the time by immersing readers into the lives of different people and scenarios, but they also brought awareness to social problems that would have otherwise gotten ignored. By writing to fight against the idealization and the dramatization of life in literature, realist writers allowed the voices of the impoverished or less fortunate to be heard.
Sources:
www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3753924#targetText=More%20specifically%2C%20the%20term%20%22realism,in%20much%20more%20idealized%20terms.&targetText=Almost%20every%20work%20of%20literature%20has%20some%20degree%20of%20realism.
www.shmoop.com/realism/omniscient-narrator-characteristic.html
www.sparknotes.com/lit/huckfinn/context/literary/mark-twain-and-american-realism/#targetText=Mark%20Twain’s%20The%20Adventures%20of,of%20realism%20known%20as%20regionalism.&targetText=Twain’s%20Explanatory%20at%20the%20beginning,only%20realistic%2C%20but%20regionally%20accurate.