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In this essay I will be discussing the statement that ‘the dominant movement in Victorian Comedy is from chaos to consensus’ with reference to Thackeray’s ‘A Little Dinner at Timmins’, Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘Money’, and Jerome’s ‘Three Men in a Boat’. Though these three stories end in consensus, each consensus is different in the way it is achieved, in what it represents for the characters and the readers, and in the reasons it is comedic. The importance of consensus in comedy can be seen as a remnant of Elizabethan comedy which demanded that a comedy end in marriage. In the case of Victorian comic literature consensus is represented by romantic or personal equilibrium between the characters in which deceit is revealed and challenges are resolved. Todorov’s (1969) structural theory of plot provides the following formula: an initial equilibrium is followed by the same equilibrium except for one change in the latter, with a state of imbalance in between the two equilibriums. If the word ‘equilibrium’ is substituted with ‘consensus’ and ‘imbalance’ substituted with ‘chaos’ then this formula provides an apt alternative to ‘the dominant movement in Victorian Comedy is from chaos to consensus’. Each of the comedies I will be discussing arguably fits this mould though often consensus and equilibrium can be bittersweet and do not equate to success or victory. It is the extent to which the stories do not present a dominant movement from chaos to consensus but movement-by-proxy, meaning the failure of the characters which brings about consensus after chaos, that Victorian comedy does not accord with the statement. Chaos followed by consensus does not constitute a dominant movement from the former to the latter.
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