Critical Histories of Omniscience

Abstract

Omniscience and the Victorian novel have a long history together. In the nineteenth century, the corporate critical voice that anonymously reviewed novels and other books in the pages of periodicals was often described as ‘omniscient’ because of the magisterial tone it projected; its detractors complained that this voice used its ‘corporate authority’ to take on the illusion of more power than it deserved. The editorial voice that said ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ when offering opinions and making judgments was alternately criticised and praised for the impersonal power it expressed. But by the twentieth century, omniscience was no longer attributed to the critic; instead, it had come to be recognised as a characteristic of novelistic narration itself, though with varying levels of approval. For early twentieth-century critics of the Victorian novel, the dangerously intrusive voice of the ‘omniscient author convention’ inartistically linked the novel to real life; by the end of the century the all-pervasive, boringly normal façade of omniscient narration had become the nearly-undetectable expression of the impersonal and institutional operations of modern power. And in the twenty-first century, critics have come to find in the Victorian novel a less secure, more anxious omniscience embodying an aspiration to power, or acting as the shadow or defining double of embodied character. Nevertheless, for the last hundred years almost everyone has agreed that omniscience is one of the central and defining characteristics of the Victorian novel.