When we're young, most of us hear stories of magic, of princesses and kingdoms, of invincible heroes and happily ever afters. In the eyes of the average child, the world is a wonderful place of dreams and hopes when everything is possible.

But we know better, right?

As we grow up, we learn that there are obstacles to our dreams, not everything is possible, and not everyone gets a happy ending. It's disappointing, but unlike the ideal stories children often read, it's part of real life. Over time, we get exposed to more and more stories that match our real life experience. Even stories about romance or far off lands feel like, if we could only find the right door, are worlds we can enter. This is the legacy of the Realist movement.

Before Realism

The goal of Realism is to faithfully represent reality. While nonfiction writing has been around since the beginning of, well, writing, to depict reality while fiction existed as artful pretend, Realism changed the way we think about the categories of fiction and nonfiction. Before Realism, fiction was clearly heightened and fantastic, whether it be through the use of the supernatural (like during the Classical movement), its use as moral allegory (like during the Medieval era), the use of verse and heightened language (like during the Renaissance), or the use of outright fantasy and satire (like during the Enlightenment). Meanwhile, nonfiction was more or less the same: essays and arguments on how to live one's life or expository texts explaining how things worked. Realism brought the qualities of nonfiction into the realm of fiction, making the invented stories we tell so close to the truth that it was often hard to tell the difference between the two.

So how did it do this? Realism actually got its start during the Romantic movement. Romanticism was everything Realism is not--it embraced sentimentality, it valued aesthetic beauty over plot and story, and it offered the American people a sense of escapism. Romanticism was a literary movement for a new American nation, embracing the ideals of self-reliance and individualism set forth by the founders. Romanticism celebrated the wisdom of youth, the nobility of age, and the sublime, or ability to connect beyond one's self to nature as a religious experience.

Not all Romantics were onboard with the entire Romantic ideal. A large group of Romantic authors rejected the escapism and sentimentality of their peers while continuing to extol self-reliance, individualism, and the experience of the sublime. The problem transcendentalists had with the "everything is beautiful" attitude of popular Romanticism was that not everything was beautiful. Manifest destiny was turning America into an empire. The government routinely committed genocidal acts against Native Americans in violation of treaties. Slavery was becoming more of a blight every day. People had to pay taxes! (Okay, maybe Thoreau had a moral objection on paying taxes to a government who would use them for war). The transcendentalists held onto the objective rationality of the Enlightenment movement, which allowed them to not get suckered into the myth of escapism.

The transcendentalists hated escapism. They believed that the American focus on escaping their worries through beautiful stories with happy endings was distracting the young nation from its more serious issues. While Romantics like James Fennimore Cooper waxed poetically about "the noble savage" of the Americas, the Transcendentalists pointed out that they were being forcibly removed via the Trail of Tears. While slavery was ignored by most Romantics, abolition was the main topic of discussion by essayists like Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau.

While their number was small, these objective cynics had a huge influence toward the end of the Romantic movement. Emerson's essays on faith led to the growth of Unitarianism and atheism in the United States; Thoreau's essays on self-reliance and civil disobedience was cited by Southerns wanting to secede from the Union; and Fuller's poems and essays on the rights of women and slaves inspired a growing abolition movement. Soon, Whitman and the Fireside poets started identifying with transcendental ideals, slave narratives like that of Frederick Douglas became widely read, and a young woman named Harriett Beecher Stowe published an antislavery novel called Uncle Tom's Cabin that, in the eyes of several historians including Abraham Lincoln himself, was the spark that lit the eventual flame of civil war.

The Rise of Realism

Ultimately, the war fueled by transcendental influences was the final nail in the coffin for Romanticism. The American Civil War essentially paused all literary development in the United States as the bloody conflict affected every aspect of American lives. Soldiers were dying in people's backyards. Cities burned on a regular basis. Wartime scarcity affected even those far from the conflict as both the Union and the Confederacy did everything in their power to defeat the other half of the nation. It became impossible to romanticize American virtue while the country tore itself apart.

Concurrent to the war was the widespread development of daguerreotype photographic technology. No longer were images mediated through the artful imagination of a painter--now, people could see things as they actually were. And what did they see? Carnage on the Union battlefields. The sick and dying in the military hospitals. Escaped slaves with their backs covered in deep scars from whipping. Piles of bodies from cavalry massacres of native tribes. These images removed the rose-colored romantic optimism from the publics eyes. In the months after the war was over, the public did not want to return to Romanticism and escape back to happier times. No, they had a desire to see the world how it really was--after all, if they could do that, maybe they could be as forward thinking as the transcendentalists had been, that offbeat group that warned them of the evils of slavery all along. The public believed that, perhaps if they saw things as they truly were, they could understand the world enough to prevent future tragedy. Thus, Realism was born.

The Popularity and Decline of Realism

While the Civil War birthed Realism, the Industrial Revolution made it popular. For most of human history, goods were produced by an expert individually by hand. A tailor would craft a shirt to exactly fit measurements, sewing each stitch by hand. A cobbler would take raw leather and shape a shoe. Usually, trades were passed down by parents to children, with fathers teaching sons the "family business." Trades became attached to a person's identity with surnames like Smith, Reeve, and Baker. This world made sense to people--they knew it.

Then the Industrial Revolution changed everything.

Cities grew as factories centralized labor; instead of every village having a potter, all the potters had to move to the city to the potting factory. Goods became uniform--with Henry Ford's introduction of the assembly line, craftsmen no longer needed to be skilled in the art of making an entire product. Instead of becoming a master tinker that could craft an entire clock, a worker would only be responsible for attaching a gear or securing the hands. Knowing they could replace a worker with any warm body, some employers created nightmarish conditions like 12-hour work days without a break or used blazing hot fires for production processes and had no fire exits. It was a brave new world.

Realism was a reaction against this change. Realists sought to expose the details of this new paradigm to the public, showing how ideas of family and community were shattering and changing. Famous dramatists Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekov became renowned for their serious drama where realistic sets and the new invention of electric lighting helped audiences see into the living rooms of the modern broken family. Henry James and Sinclair Lewis looked at the decaying small town and how Romantic idealism dies a painful death in the real world. Authors Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman revealed the true horrors of a sexist society that denied women their rights and institutionalized them without cause. Investigative journalist Upton Sinclair famously exposed the regular abuse of workers by corporations in his novels.

This isn't to say that Realism was all doom and gloom. Realist author Mark Twain wrote many humorous adventure books and even a time travel story. Speaking of time travel, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, and many of the other fathers of the science fiction genre were Realists, as was Charles Dickens and his Victorian peers. Victorianism was an interesting submovement of Realism that occurred in England, as it was a sort of inverse transcendentalism. While the transcendentalists were Romantics that rejected sentimentality, aestheticism, and escapism, Victorians were Realists who embraced all those old Romantic qualities. Still, even the most optimistic Realist fiction show the harsh realities that real people have to deal with. Huck Finn has to deal with parental neglect. The Richmond Traveler sees the dystopian future of the Morlocks. Dickens even has novels called Hard Times and Bleak House.

Realism grew and expanded with the Industrial Revolution and initially succeeded in its goal: to prevent future tragedy. Gilman's work helped popularize the Suffragist movement. The naturalism of Twain's Americana novels inspired a movement to preserve the character of unique American regions. Sinclair's The Jungle helped establish the Food and Drug Administration to keep dead rats and rope out of our sausage. Even the works of the transcendentalists influenced the populist movement and the creation of the National Parks system.

Unfortunately, Realism ended the same way it began: with a war. World War I began in 1914 as the death of Archduke Ferdinand triggered a landslide of treaties that brought Europe into full-scale war. The Realist tried to end the war, looking for an objective perspective to determine the best course of action--but they failed. The war seemed pointless, as it was not driven by ideology or land acquisition but through attempts to ensure peace. The new industrialized weapons of war mowed down hundreds of men in a minute and drove men off the battlefield and into trenches.

After the war ended, there were effects--the breakup of the Austria-Hungary and Ottoman empires, a democratic Germany, an aborted attempt at a League of Nations. Yet there was the resounding feeling that the war was a worthless fight. No matter how the Realists tried, there was no objective way to process what happened with World War I. While they could not fathom an answer, a group of new intellectuals led by Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein solved the issue: all three claimed that everything in the universe was relative and that objectivity was an illusion. With no objective moorings to ground them, the Realists disappeared and were replaced the Modernists.

It's important to note that all of the authors in the examples above wrote fiction. Even Upton Sinclair, who researched the abuses of the meatpacking and oil industries, didn't write expose novels. Rather, the Realists stuck to fiction because they valued verisimilitude. Verisimilitude uses the Latin roots veri (meaning "truth") and simil (meaning "resembling," and it literally means "resembling the truth." Writing with verisimilitude seems to have been taken directly from real life.

So why focus on writing that was similar to everyday life rather than just stating the facts? Remember that Realism came from Romanticism, and while the Realists rejected overwrought sentimentality, they kept in mind how powerful a good story can be. Instead of relying on nonfiction and rhetoric like the Enlightenment period, the Realists liked the idea that fiction provided a distance between the hard truth and the reader. Take Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House: the play was based on an actual friend of Ibsen's who hid a debt from her husband and was summarily placed in a mental institution against her will, but while telling the true story would expose the hypocrisy of men in Norwegian society, Ibsen's fiction makes Nora more independently-minded and ruthless than her real life counterpart. The realist believed that good fiction could tell deeper truth than nonfiction. Thus while the Enlightenment was about objectivity, Realism was about verisimilitude.

Verisimilitude can also be seen in the development of science fiction. While the works of Welles and Verne created unbelievable creatures and technologies, all were given logical explanations for their existence. These authors mixed the latest science with their fantasies to create impossible worlds still grounded in reality. This inherent contradiction in science fiction speaks to the importance of verisimilitude to the Realist movement.

So how does an author create verisimilitude? Stories are believable when everything is treated as it is an everyday and natural object or event. The more an author points out how ridiculous a concept they've written is, the less true to life it feels. So Realist characters speak using dialogue that sounds how people would speak in real life. Characters spend time waiting or dealing with a daily routine. Even the most noble characters have flaws that people in the real world have.

This principle is called the quotidian, or the everyday mundanity. Fictions of the past used to be matters of great importance, voyages and battles and whirlwind romances. While important things still happen in Realist works, everything is more grounded, more average. When Huck and Jim run away, they don't meet wizards or kings--they meet drifters and conmen that live along the river. When ghosts haunt Bly Manor in The Turn of the Screw, the characters seek logical explanations with a calm, almost dull demeanor. Even when a Connecticut Yankee time travels to King Arthur's court, the man treats it like a strange trip and inconvenience rather than the most mind-blowing even of several lifetimes.

This isn't to say Realist novels are boring. Dr. Jekyll's transformation into Hyde is disturbing and riveting. The narrator's insistence of a woman in the wallpaper in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is genuinely creepy. The sudden, violent illness and death of Daisy Miller is incredibly heartbreaking. However, all these events have normal explanations. A revolutionary potion. Madness caused by isolation. Malaria. For Realist, even the most extraordinary circumstances could be quotidian in their depiction and cause.

One way to execute verisimilitude well is to keep a story as simple as possible. The Realists loved simplicity, stripping down their plots to quick actions, little tension, and singular motivations. The Cherry Orchard revolves around the simple sale of a house. The reveal of why Mrs. White murdered her husband in "Trifles" is reveled with a simple birdcage. The reveal of Ethan Frome's emotional affair with Mattie comes down to a broken pickle dish, and chapters are dedicated to fixing it.

This isn't to say that Realist texts are dull or unimaginative--quite the opposite. To achieve the quotidian feeling of everyday life, Realist novels are packed to the brim with detail. Every facet of character, every wall of a house, every object in a room is catalogued and described. Instead of making things more complex, the intention was to simplify the story through clarity. Like a photograph, all the specific details are there so the picture has no nuance, no variance, no need for interpretation--it simply is what it is.

A great example of this are the stories of Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle describes the tiniest detail of ever scene for the reader so they, like Sherlock, get a full picture of what's going on. Yet the plots of his stories are as simple as possible: Holmes and Watson casually investigate, sometimes rushing to make it somewhere in time but never letting their passions get the better of them. There is a casual easy approach to their interviewing, and when Holmes reveals the outcome of every crime, he puts it plainly and easily. There is always a plain answer, logical and simple even if initially obscured.

Like the transcendentalist before them, the Realists believed that society should benefit those living in it. Thus, they became heavily invested in social critique. The exploitation of labor was a common target, as we've already discussed. Corrupt authorities was also central to several conflicts, whether those in charge were turning a blind eye to poisoning tourists in Enemy of the People or the submission to a husband's whims seen in The Awakening. Whereas the Romantics tended to feature wealthier, well-to-do characters in their stories, the Realists focused on poor characters and especially women, both of whom had to fight against the judgements of society. While Romanticism had its own fair share of female protagonists, the Elizabeth Bennetts and Hope Leslies of that age ultimately traded in their rebellious attitudes for a more acceptable role as wife, while the Jo Marchs and Nora Helmers of Realism keep their independent and rebellious natures until the end. Even Hedda Gabbler and Edna Pontellier win in the end despite their suicides, as they leave their lives on their own terms.

Touching on the idea of suicide, madness was also a common motif of the Realists. Whether its Anna Karenina jumping in front of a train or Miss Havesham refusing to remove her wedding dress or the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" becoming the woman in the wall, women being driven to the brink of insanity is common in Realism. Given that the industrial period saw the rise of asylums where rebellious women could be diagnosed with "hysteria" and indefinitely held in isolation against their will, the Realists worked to expose this abuse of the mental health system. More pointedly, every woman who goes mad does so because of a man, who either leaves them vulnerable or controls them to the point of breaking. It is no coincidence that first wave feminism came about during the Realist movement: their objective view of reality led them to see that women were people too.

Don't think that all the social critique found in Realist works meant that the Realists hated society. Far from it--the Realists were big believers in community and connection to others. A common motif in their works is the isolation that people feel when their community abandons them and the strength they gain through having strong social relationships. Take Oliver Twist, who is only able to succeed and survive thanks to Dodger and the other street urchins. There's also the March family, whose support of one another keeps each of the sisters strong through the turmoil of their lives. When Silas Marner adopts Eppie, he goes from social pariah to beloved member of the community through his sacrifice for the community.

By the same token, a broken community always spells disaster for the protagonist. The start of Silas Marner's troubles begins when the community turns their back on him, believing he stole the church funds. American Daisy Miller refuses to fit into the refined European aristocracy, and her rejection ultimately results in her death. Instead of being the hero for exposing a public health risk, Doctor Thomas Stockmann and his family are targeted by a community angry for the loss of tourist dollars. Note that in each of these circumstances the individual is facing a broken society, which is why the Realist believed so much in strong communities: the whole point of society is to support one another, not to hurt one another.

• Anton Chekov: Uncle Vanya (1900), The Three Sisters (1901), The Cherry Orchard (1904)
• Kate Chopin: "Desiree's Baby" (1893), "The Story of an Hour" (1894), The Awakening (1899)
• Stephen Crane: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
• Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist (1840), Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1861)
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Complete Sherlock Holmes (1892)
• George Eliot: Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1872)
• Henrik Ibsen: A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), Hedda Gabler (1890)
• Henry James: Portrait of a Lady (1881), Daisy Miller (1878), The Turn of a Screw (1898
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman: "That Rare Jewel" (1890), "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), "The Rocking Chair" (1893)
• Upton Sinclair: The Jungle (1906), King Coal (1917), Oil! (1927)
• Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island (1883), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Kidnapped (1886)
• Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace (1869), Anna Karenina (1877)
• Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
• H.G. Wells: The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898)
• Jules Verne: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), Around the World in Eighty Days (1872)