Nostalgia in Victorian Literature
The Victorians had a bad case of nostalgia. They could get wistful and sad about just about anything that was over. Victorian literature is riddled with nostalgia: from historical novels about Robin Hood (Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe), to epic poems about the golden days of Camelot (Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King).
But it wasn't just literature that was nostalgic; it was also art and politics. John Ruskin talks up Gothic architecture in his Stones of Venice and argues that those crazy gargoyle-studded buildings were part and parcel of the way that old society worked. You have to be really nostalgic for this one—when's the last time you were like, okay, modern comforts and technology are great and all, but you know when I'd like to time travel to? The medieval period.
This nostalgia probably had more to do with the present than with the past. Many Victorian writers and thinkers—especially Thomas Carlyle—were convinced that the nineteenth century was facing a crisis. For example, see everything Carlyle ever wrote. (You may as well start with Signs of the Times.)
Even if you weren't thinking the end times were near, you might just have been tired of all the progress. What better way to escape from new fashions, new machines, and new inventions than to curl up with a novel about knights and jousting?
Chew on This:
Whenever something's drawing to an end, it's easy to get nostalgic about it. That seems to be what happens to David Copperfield when he's wrapping up the story of his life. What do you make of the tone of this final chapter, beginning with the line "And now my written story ends. I look back, once more—for the last time—before I close these leaves"?
It's hard to make major transitions without getting nostalgic. Take Ulysses' adventures: as soon as he's home, he's imagining that things were so much better when he was fighting in foreign wars and getting chased by a Cyclops. Do you read Tennyson's "Ulysses" as a serious plea for adventure, or as an ironic comment on how nostalgia works?