The Victorian Age

1830-1901
 An Age of Expansion
• London becoming the main city in the
continent
• The new basis of urban economy on trade and
manufacturing
• Industrialization of England
• Accumulation of wealth
• The painful process of change
 Reactions to the Expansion
• Self-congratulation
• Horror
• A mixed feeling of satisfaction and anxiety
Queen Victoria and the Victorian
Temper
• Identification of Queen Victoria with the qualities
we associate with Victorian period:
earnestness, moral responsibility, domestic
propriety
• The feeling among intellectuals and many people
that it is the time for acting not dreaming
• The general atmosphere: the sense of historical
self-consciousness, of strenuous social enterprise
and of growing national achievement
 Different Critical Reactions to the
Victorian Age
• The early decades of the twentieth century:
Negative reaction
They (the Georgians) mocked their predecessors
Described them as prudish, old-fashioned and
complacent
Some 20th. Century writers who gave a negative
representation of Victorians in their works: Lytton
Strachey (Eminent Victorians (1918)), Virginia
Woolf (Orlando (1928))
 The early Period: A Time of Troubles
(1830-1848)
• Appalling conditions for the working classes
• 1840’s depression
• Very bad working conditions especially for women and
children; England close to revolution
• The Chartists: a large organization of working men
• The Reform Parliament:
• The reform bill (1832): extending the right of vote
• the abolition of the rotten boroughs (depopulated areas
which had representatives in the parliament) and the
redistribution of parliamentary representation
• Corn Law(1846)
• The novelists of 1840’s and 1850’s show a response
The Mid-Victorian Period: Economic
Prosperity and Religious Controversy
(1848-1870)
• A time of prosperity, satisfaction and
Optimism
• Passing of factory acts
• Great Exhibition in the Hyde Park (1851)
• Low Church, the Evangelical Church: A branch of the Church
of England called the Low church
zealously dedicated to good causes
advocating a strict puritan code of morality
censorious of worldliness in others
Their view of life and religion very close to the
Nonconformists( The Baptists, Methodists,
Congregationalists, and other Protestant sects)
• High Church:The followers of John Henry Newman who
believed in the importance of traditional religions
“The Oxford Movement”
“ Tractarianism”
 Mid-Victorian Period: Religious
Controversy 1
• Some Religious debates
• Debates between the Utilitarians and those who
believed in the importance of some faith
• Utilitarians: the followers of Jeremy Bentham (1748-
1832)
testing all institutions in the light of human
reason to determine whether they contribute to
to the greatest happiness of the greatest
numbers
A Utilitarian test of religion Unfavaroble results
for religion
 Mid-Victorian Period: Religious
Controversy 2
• Conflict between religion and science
the impact of scientific discoveries on
religious faith
• Thomas Henry Huxley popularizing the views
of Charles Darwin
Biology reducing humankind into nothingness
Darwin and the theory of evolution
Darwin and the theory of natural selection
• Geology reducing the stature of the human
race in time by extending the history of earth
backward millions of years
The Geologist Chronology or the Chronology
of Bible
• Astronomy likewise reducing the stature of
the human race in space by extending a
knowledge of stellar distances
• New discoveries in the sciences also led to a
new mode of reading the Bible: Higher
Criticism approached the Bible not as a divine
and infallible text but rather as an historically
produced set of documents.
 The Late Period (1870-1901):
Decay of Victorian Values
• For many, the late-Victorian period was
merely an extension, at least on the surface,
of the affluence of the preceding years.
• For many others, though, the late-Victorian
period became a time to fundamentally
question―and challenge―the assumptions
and practices that had made such affluence
possible.
 challenges
• Home-rule for Ireland became an increasingly
controversial topic of debate.
• In 1867 a second Reform Bill passed, extending
voting rights even further to some working-class
citizens.
• The political writings of authors like Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels empowered the working
class to imagine itself in control of the industry
that it made possible.
• Some European and international challenges
 The Nineties (1890-1900)
• The final decade of the Victorian period
marked a high point, both of English industry
and imperial control, and of challenges to that
industry and imperialism.
• Even while British empire-building continued
with great energy in Africa and India, in
England many were starting to see the
beginning of the end of the era (the breaking
down of Victorian standards).
• Gone was trust in Victorian propriety and
morality (Edward, Victoria’s Son embodying
irresponsibility and love of pleasure).
• Instead, many writers struck a "fin de siècle"
(or end-of-century) pose: a weary
sophistication with the optimism of forward
progress with the awareness of the limits of
that progress
• The Aesthetic movement
• the 1890s as a transitional phase between the
optimism and promise of the Victorian period
and the Modernist movement, during which
artists began to challenge just how genuine
that optimism and promise had been in the
first place.
 The Role of women in Victorian life
and literature
• Two important Texts:
The Subjection of women
A Vindication of the Rights of women
• Change in the women’s position
Industrial Revolution
Political Revolution
• “woman Question” inequalities in politics,
economic life, education and social relationships
• Parliamentary acts
the winning of women’s suffrage (1918)
Married Women’s Property Acts
Factory Acts
• Women’s education
• Employment opportunities for women
• The Victorian Conception about the nature of
women
Literacy, Publication and Reading
• Increase in Literacy
• Increase in the number of books, periodicals
and newspapers
• The growth of periodicals (reviews and literary
works)
• The serial publication of novels and other
works
feedback, curiosity, community
• Family reading as a common practice
• Readers’ expectations: poetry should instruct
and delight, should be about social problems
 The Novel
• The dominant form
• Novels showing a large social world, with a
number of characters and a number of plots
• Realistic novels
• Depicting a set of social relationships in a
middle-class society
The protagonist defining his/her place in
society
• Women writers as major Victorian writers
• The domestic world of the novel was what
women knew very well
• The variety of Victorian novel
• Novels stimulating social efforts
 Poetry
• Poets telling stories in verse
• Different subject matters; experimenting with
character and perspective
• Poetry developing in the shadow of
Romanticism
• Not keeping the emphasis of the Romantics on
imagination
• Art for its own sake
• Preferring objectivity to subjectivity
• Dramatic monologue (having a speaker other
than the poet)
Some other characteristics of Victorian
poetry
• Being pictorial
• A distinctive way of using sounds
• A poetry of mood and character
• Poets unsatisfied with their public role
• The struggle of women writers to establish
themselves
 Victorian Prose
• Prose aiming to instruct
• The periodicals
• The centrality of argument and persuasion to
Victorian intellectual life
• A variety of ways and styles
• Pater: the celebration of a beautifully ordered
world of art and literature
• The others use prose as an instrument of
persuasion and argument
• Mill and Huxley: Logical reasoning, lucid style
• Carlyle and Ruskin more Romantic, plays on
the feelings of the readers
• Prose writers claiming a place for literature
• Arnold and Pater thinking of literature as
having as an important role as religion
• Concern for the fate of humanity in an
industrial, democratic and secularized society
 Victorian Drama

• Active theatres
• Few great dramatists
• Oscar Wilde
• George Bernard Shaw
 Victorian Issues
1.Evolution
• Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species
(1859) : the theory of natural selection
• Some scientists and religious leaders
opposed Darwin.
• Two of Huxley’s supporters: T. H. Huxley
and John Tyndall
 2. Industrialism: Progress or Decline?
• Wealth and wretchedness; Industrial Revolution and
Machine age: a blessing or a curse?
What led to the industrial Revolution?

• Population growth
• Agricultural efficiency
• Mobility of capital
• Machinery in textile industry, steam engines, railway
• Profound economic and social changes: migration from
villages to industrial towns; bad living and working
conditions for workers
• Writers and intellectuals of the time criticizing
the industrial revolution
• Writers such as Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin,
William Morris, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
3. The woman question: the Victorian
debate about Gender
• Questioning the concepts of marriage ,family
and the traditional role of women
• Mixed opinion of Queen Victoria toward
women
• Belief of some people that the submission of
women is divinely-willed
• Belief of some people in the intellectual
inferiority of women; women then naturally
deserving a dependent role
• Many conduct books
• Women’s cultivating their intellect would be violating
nature and religion
• Valued tenderness, unworldliness, innocence,
submissiveness (The Angel in the House)
• The result of all this: change for women was difficult
• Contesting marriage , unfulfillment in marriage
• Boredom
• A quarter had jobs
• The job of a for women of higher classes
• Some women rebels
• The phenomenon of “New Woman”: a
confident and assertive figure
• Women emerging as major novelists
 Empire and national identity
• The British Empire (400,000,000 people governed by
Britain)
• Loss of America, but gaining new territories
• rivalry with the European neighbours over the colonies
• Economic motives for colonization: raw materials ,
markets for its own goods, securing trade routes
• National pride
• Physical violence, cultural devastation,
• The assumption that British people are morally and
culturally superior people
• A divine duty
• Scientific theories
• Generous role and noble duty
• Affecting the colonizers
• British identity
• Nationhood
• Who’s British?
• Anti-imperial critique
• Literature reflecting these issues
 Alred Lord Tennyson (1802-1892)

• His family
• His university education
• Friendship with Arthur Hallam
• In Memoriam
• Becoming the poet Laureate
• Maud, Idylls of the king
• Mariana
Some qualities o Tennyson’s poetry
• Melodic(great sense of meter)
• Linking scenery to the states of mind
• Preoccupation with the social, religious and
philosophical issues of the time
• Preoccupation with the past
• Ambivalent feelings about technology
• A poet of the countryside
 Robert Browning (1812-1889)
• Marriage to Elizabeth Barrett and residence in
Italy
• In the 20th. Century some admire him as a
moralist, wise philosopher or religious teacher.
• Others value him as a major artist.
 Browning’s literary world
• The dramatic monologue
• Experimentation with language and syntax
(grotesque rhymes, jaw-breaking syntax)
• Colloquial language, the use of harshly discordant
style(unlike Tennyson who preferred
• polished texture, elevated diction and pleasing
liquidity of sound)
• Obscurity
His similarity with the prose writers
• The prosiness pf his poetry
• The grotesque in his poetry
• Exposing the ways in which our mind works
and the complexity of our motives
(psychological analysis of characters)
 Browning’s personality, convictions
and concerns
• A shy person ( a poet preoccupied with masks)
• His concern with the problems of faith and
doubt, good and evil and problems of the
function of artist in modern life
• His belief that God has created an imperfect
world as a testing ground for human beings
• Some cannot stand his optimism, though his is
not blind optimism
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
• Childhood experiences
• A reporter of parliamentary debates
(reporting developed his eye and ear)
• His concern for family warmth
• Dickens as a great observer of English scenes
 Dickens’ literary world
• Dickens as the master of humor, pathos and
suspense
• The theatrical flair of his work
• His cinematographic vision
• A recorder and critic of Victorian life ( a rather
contradictory criticism of this society)
• Starting with the picaresque tradition
• Stress on some current issues
• Interest in reading his novels for groups of
people