Books
How the Victorians Invented Speculative Fiction As We Know It
From Dickens to Conrad to Stoker and Beyond
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850–1894.
Tales of fantastic beings, ghosts, monsters, and imaginary societies have existed since the beginning of civilization. Whether it’s the legend of countless ancient Greek heroes or the numerous Middle Eastern folk tales in One Thousand and One Nights, these storytelling elements have long since transcended individual groups and have defined storytelling. But it wasn’t until the Victorian era that these elements morphed into the stories most people know today.
Whether it’s the legend of Count Dracula, Ebenezer Scrooge encountering three ghosts on Christmas Eve, a mummy’s curse, or the well-known storytelling trope of the mad scientist, Victorian writers did much to define speculative fiction as we know it in the twenty-first century. These Victorian writers include H.G. Wells, Algernon Blackwood, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Wilkie Collins, Sheridan Le Fanu, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, and W.W. Jacobs.
So why did Victorian-era writers have such a unique perspective that had a massive influence on genre fiction? In many ways, the Victorians were simply following the principle of “write what you know”. The Victorians were able to define modern speculative fiction in part because they were interested in shocking and bizarre things.
One way that interest took literary form was in vivid stories of monsters and grisly crimes in what were then called penny dreadfuls. Published serial style, it was cheap genre fiction intended as reading material for the average citizen that Victorian Britain couldn’t get enough of. One of the most famous ones was the story of Sweeney Todd, a barber who kills his own clients with a razor before his associate Mrs. Lovett bakes what’s left into pies. Over a century later, the story would be turned into an acclaimed Broadway musical.
However, Victorian interest in fantastic and grim things was well documented elsewhere in the era’s literature. One of the most enduring literary legacies of the era is the modern image of the vampire, and two of the Victorian writers at the center of this are Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker. The fact that they both wrote about monsters with an insatiable appetite is significant because, aside from the similarity in subject matter, both men were Irish, and one of the most horrifying and significant events of the Victorian era was when Ireland was devastated by The Great Famine from 1845 to 1852 that’s estimated to have cost one million lives due to starvation and disease.
H.G. Wells was writing The War of the Worlds (1897) and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) at the same time when Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection were becoming a powerful force in scientific and academic circles, so the concept of the survival of the human race was very much a matter of public discussion. The latter in particular is about a scientist whose theories and experiments make him a pariah in London circles, so he has to flee to an island.
Arthur Conan Doyle, who is most famous for his fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, also wrote about a mummy coming to life in the short story “Lot №249” (1892). The story, which would become widely influential particularly because of its uniquely ominous take on a mummy coming to life, came about in no small part because spiritualism was a huge interest of Doyle’s, and he lived in an era where fascination with ancient Egypt was a huge topic of national conversation in Victorian Britain.
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In 1878, Cleopatra’s Needle was brought to London from Alexandra. A massive granite obelisk that had existed for thousands of years, it was given to Britain in 1819 in honor of their victories against French forces in the Battle of the Nile and the Battle of Alexandria, but it wasn’t until almost sixty years later that a proper ship for the massive stone monument had been paid for. But on the journey, the ship encountered a nasty storm, and when a rescue boat was dispatched, six men died in the effort. Once it was safely in London, Cleopatra’s Needle took its place on the Victoria Embankment overlooking the Thames River.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) was published over two years before the crimes of Jack the Ripper shocked the nation, and the story of a man who appears respectable while having a dark side that can take over without warning and express itself in horrifying ways would’ve hit close to home for the British public. Especially since the character in question is a doctor, and the grisly crimes of Jack the Ripper have often included discussion over whether or not the killer had medical training.
The story is also irrevocably connected to the idea of Victorian morals and morality. One of the most enduring images of the Victorian era is its connection to the image of morality and public propriety, typically that of a very prudish and repressive nature. But having a moral image is very different from actually being a moral person, and the story of Dr. Jekyll is just one example of how those appearances were a key part of the era’s stories.
If something is a façade, then something else has to be lurking behind it. And typically, whatever is lurking beyond a façade tends to be surprising, disturbing, and generally unpleasant. One of the defining characteristics of Victorian writers was their eager puncturing of that moralistic façade to show what was going on often in plain sight, and a huge component of why the Victorian writers defined speculative fiction as we know it is that unprecedently unflinching look at what was going on in their own backyard, which was at the time the center of the largest empire in the world. They had the biggest storytelling canvas that had ever existed and an unprecedented abundance of rich material for storytelling to shock, frighten, absorb, unnerve, captivate, and even inspire.
One of the most famous examples of this is A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens. The tale of Ebenezer Scrooge isn’t just a defining Christmas story, if not the definitive fictional Christmas story, it was a defining story even during the lifetime of its author. Dickens became not just the most famous author of his age but one of the most famous authors in history, not by trying to minimize or conceal the grim conditions of the city and era in which he lived but by putting them front and center. And many of his fellow authors would do the same thing.
Because if the setting is an essential part of any good story, it’s hard to find a bigger feast for the imagination than Victorian London. With cobblestone streets lined with gas lamps and appalling poverty and disease coexisting alongside equally gigantic wealth and status, it was the center of the largest empire to have ever existed, which would come to take up approximately a quarter of the Earth.
Regardless of whether there was a speculative element involved or not, Victorian literature lacked for nothing when it came to vivid inspiration for the horrors and wonders of the mind. The term “Dickensian” came to represent the crushing squalor in which the poor of London lived and worked. It’s the era that’s synonymous with workhouses for the poor, a famine that devastated Ireland, and the brutal murders of women working as prostitutes in the crime-ridden East End of London. Victorian women were known to wear makeup that had mercury and arsenic as ingredients, while opium dens are immortalized in many of the era’s stories, including those by Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle.
The Victorians didn’t just write about fantastic and horrific things, they lived it. Because despite being an empire the sun allegedly never set on, there was no shortage of darkness. And the people who lived under it not only didn’t try to ignore it or hide it, they were interested in it and gave it their full attention. And the rest of the world took notice. Because regardless of whether it was considered literary or popular fiction, or if there was a speculative element or not, Victorian literature is full of shocking and horrific things. One of the most famous works of the era is literally called Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad, 1899), and it’s one of the most intensely discussed and debated pieces of fiction not just from the Victorian era, but in all of literature.
Victorian literature can feel bizarre, unsettling, and disorienting because it’s the result of an era that was often bizarre and unsettling, as it was a society that had never existed before, and it was all on a truly unprecedented scale. It was a heady, shocking time where things that had not seemed possible, both good and bad, now seemed all too real. Speculative stories had existed before, but the Victorians set them against this backdrop and often connected that setting to those storytelling elements. The speculative fiction element was and is merely a tool to explore their world, and a huge reason these genre stories, in particular, have endured so long and have had such a significant cultural impact is because not only are we interested in stories about Victorian ghosts, vampires, monsters, murderers, and mad scientists, we are interested in the Victorian era that created them. The speculative element is simply a tool to focus on what the heart of the stories is, which is the true nature of the age and the good and bad that uneasily coexist.
As Dickens himself famously said in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
It was only a question of whether the individual writer saw the potential for light in the darkness or thought the darkness conquered all.
Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” Visit our Patreon to join our fan community on Discord. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
