The Victorian Age (1837-1901)

The Modern Historical and Cultural Context

The reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) was the climax of Britain’s imperial
ambitions and was unique in its solidity of purpose and outlook, and its
tremendous energies and achievements.
→ the Victorian Age = the last coherent cultural, social and creative age in
modern history.
→ an introduction to modern literature
(a) realistic fiction
(b) idealistic, critical and polemical essays (prose of ideas/thematic literature, by
comparison with fiction, or the novel)
(c) post-romantic poetry
(d) the Victorian comic and satirical drama.
Victorian Ethos
The Victorian age was divided between
a self-important ethos, which was quite natural for an imperial nation
an idealism with puritanical (humble ethical) roots, which shared the
Enlightenment belief in nature and universal ideas, in perfection and
progress.
Victorian ethos = a model of the world (or a system)
= combines the ideal with the practical, in an organic, rational way.
What were the paths that the Victorians strove along in order to attain the ideal?
 Victorian ethos was not only idealistic but also extremely materialistic (since
all capitalistic economies, states and societies administer wealth successfully –
it took natural science for its source of inspiration in devising the rules and
institutions of democracy and the economic, social and political laissez faire
state – which saw itself as a polity.
» in practical terms, the Victorian ethos was expressed in a laissez-faire,
non-interventionist state that wished to administer the free market successfully.
The lower classes were excluded from the Victorian polity which caused
social unrest.
The Victorians sought the ideal man, capable to live in a harmonious, just
society.
→man = a virtuous person, endowed with good will and capable to develop
in several directions, developing all one’s personal powers or faculties – both
the traditional powers and faculties recognized by humanism – and the newer
power to control and understand nature with modern science and technology
[as stated by Matthew Arnold].
We should discriminate between
the traditional humanist liberalism advocated by J. H. Newman or
Thomas Carlyle’s puritanism, stemming from religion and theology
the modern liberalism of the Victorian middle class ethos, that had its
roots in science and the modern progressive spirit.
Social history terms
- utilitarianism (a term derived from practical philosophy)
- liberalism and the doctrine of the laissez faire state (Victorian socio-
economic ideas - ideals and critiques); Thomas Carlyle: Signs of the Times;
Chartism, chapters VI (Laissez Faire) and VII (Not Laissez Faire); Past and
Present
- democracy in faith: John Stuart Mill On Liberty, Chapter II – “On the
Liberty of Thought and Discussion”
- reformism/modernization and imperialism
- chartism
- socialism
Chartism
In 1838 a meeting of London radical working men and some of the most
radical MPs met to draw up the People’s Charter of 1838. This consisted of six
points of Parliamentary reform:
• Universal Suffrage: the vote for all men over 21.
• Vote by ballot: a secret vote would avoid intimidation on the part of the
richer or more powerful candidates.
• The payment of MPs: to guarantee that working people could stand for
Parliament, and not just with independent means.
• Annual elections: to ensure that MPs took notice of what their electors
wanted, since at the time elections were called only every seven years.
 The middle and upper classes, manufacturers and landowners had little
sympathy with Chartism, and were hostile from the first, since they saw it as the
end of everything they considered important, and were frightened that it would
lead to the abolition of property, the Monarchy, the Church and Parliament.

General cultural terms

- traditionalism/fundamentalism in T. Carlyle’s missionary puritanism and in
his campaign for meritocracy and in John Henry Newman’s old-style liberalism:
the polemical, sermonic and emotional prose style; activism; anarchism;
medievalism
- intellectual liberalism in J. S. Mill: the deliberative style of argumentation
- mass culture and the mission of massive education
- agnosticism
- individualism

Cultural history and history of literature terms

- realism in fiction
- the post-romantic literary miscellany in poetry
- pre-Raphaelite art
- hedonism, epicureanism
- decadent art for art’s sake
- fantasy and nonsense verse
The Past
The Victorian Age was somewhat obsessed by time and history. Tennyson called
geology and astronomy, time and space the “terrible muses”.
In almost every area of Victorian intellectual life there was a preoccupation with
ancestry and descent, with tracing the genealogy of the present in the past. This also led
to a vogue for autobiography, the search for meaning and coherence in one’s own life.
Literary and artistic circles were also intensely backward looking: inspiration and
guidance were sought from the Middle Ages (Tennyson’s poetry, Pre-Raphaelite
painting and the poetry, the Gothic revival), from the Classical period (in particular the
Hellenism of M. Arnold), from the Renaissance (Browning’s poetry) and this extended to
biblical history and even prehistory.

Aesthetics
Many writers were preoccupied with the apparent Philistinism of the middle classes,
heavily criticised for their complacency and vulgarity, and the seeming lack of spiritual
values which industrialization and the decline of religion had caused.
Writers such as Ruskin explored the moral basis of art and the dignity of the working
classes, but there was intense pessimism in writers such as Thomas Carlyle and
Matthew Arnold, who wrestled with the central question of the age: is society spiritual or
material and mechanical?
 The Victorian view of art and its function was essentially handed down from the
Romantics and in particular Coleridge and Shelley, some critics even considering
Victorian poetry as essentially the continuation of Romantic poetry into further
generations, although Arnold considered poetry to be “the criticism of life.”
It was, however, the prose writers who took on the high ambitions of the
Romantics. Victorian poetry was at a lower level of intensity perhaps because the ‘all-
pervading naturalism’ of the age was in fact the negation of high poetic ambition.

a. A contemporary cartoon from ”Punch” showing the evolutionary process by Darwin

in a satirical way. (340)