Background for Topics 6-11: The Victorian Period (1830 - 1901).

T h e  V i c t o r i a n  P e r i o d  ( 1 8 3 0 – 1 9 0 1 )

H i s t o r i c a l  B a c k g r o u n d :

- the 1^st Reform Bill (1832)

- Victoria becomes queen (1837)

- the Corn Laws repealed (1846)

- A. Tennyson succeeds W. Wordsworth as Poet Laureate (1850)

- the Great Exhibition in London (1851)

- Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859)

- Franco-Prussian War (1870 – 71)

- death of Victoria (1901)

T h e  V i c t o r i a n  E n g l a n d :

- shift from a way of life based on the ownership of land to a modern urban economy based on trade and manufacturing

(+) the world’s foremost imperial power (incl. more than a ¼ of all territory on the earth)

(─) social and economic problems consequent to rapid and unregulated industrialisation

(a) Early Victorian phase (1830 – 48)

(b) Mid-Victorian phase (1848 – 70)

(c) Late Victorian phase (1870 – 1901)

(d) + the 90s = a bridge btw 2 c.

- reactions in lit.: Thomas Babington Macaulay’s enthusiasm x Matthew Arnold’s melancholy and an anxious sense of sth having been lost

Q u e e n  V i c t o r i a  a n d  t h e  V i c t o r i a n  T e m p e r :

- Victoria’s self-identification with the qualities of her age = earnestness, moral responsibility, and domestic propriety <=> V. as a young wife, mother of 9 children, and the black-garbed Widow of Windsor in the 40 y. after her husband Prince Albert’s death

- Victorian temper = historical self-consciousness, a sense of a break with the past and call to action as distinguished from the attitude of the previous generation

> ‘Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.’ (Carlyle), i.e. abandon the introspection of the Romantics and turn to the higher moral purpose

x the Georgian period’s (1911 – 36) reaction against the achievements of the previous c., the separation from the Victorians <=> Victorian in a pejorative sense as prudish or old-fashioned

T h e  R o l e  o f  W o m e n :

‘ W o m a n  Q u e s t i o n ’ :

- few employment opportunities for ‘redundant’ women (= unmarried for the imbalance in numbers btw the sexes):

(a) governess: (−) isolated within the household for her ambiguous status btw servant x family member

(b) factory/coal mine worker: (−) under gruelling working conditions

(c) prostitute

- the basic problem not only political, economic, and educational x but: the problem of how women were regarded, and regarded themselves, as members of a society

(+) > the Married Women’s Property Act (1882) = the right of married women to handle their own property > oth. acts (1870 – 1908) > basis for the rights of women in marriage

(+) > admission of women to uni by the end of Victoria’s reign

R e a c t i o n s  i n  L i t e r a t u r e :

Challenge to women’s role in society:

> M. Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) > J. S. Mill’s The Subjection of Women and On Liberty (1959)

> Coventry Patmore’s “The Angel in the House” (1854 – 62), an immensely pop. poem with the concept of womanhood stressing woman’s purity and selflessness x T. Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) with the F protagonist justifying the leaving of her husband by quoting a passage from J. S. Mill’s On Liberty

Women’s education:

> W. M. Thackaray’s Vanity Fair (1847 – 48) with Miss Pinkerton’s Academy repres. the pop. finishing schools x A. Tennyson’s The Princess (1847), a fantasy women’s college with all M excluded

Women’s employment:

> the governess novel: C. Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), W. M. Thackaray’s Vanity Fair, & oth.

L i t e r a c y ,  P u b l i c a t i o n ,  a n d  R e a d i n g :

- the Education Act (1870) = elementary education compulsory and universal > by the end the c. basic literacy almost universal

- the growth of periodical magazines for every taste

- the growth of serial publ., immensely pop. since the publ. of C. Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836 – 37) in individual numbers

- until ca 1870s: a broad readership with a shared set of social conc. x by the end of the c.: no longer a unified reading public

- function: accord. to public expectation lit. should be continuous with the lived world > should illuminate social problems > should not only delight x but: instruct

T h e  E a r l y  V i c t o r i a n  P e r i o d  ( 1 8 3 0 – 4 8 )

A  T i m e  o f  T r o u b l e s  ( 1 8 3 0 s – 4 0 s ) :

< economic and social difficulties attendant on industrialisation > ‘The Time of Troubles’

(+) the 1^st steam-powered public railway line in the world, the 1^st underground railway system

(─) close to rev. = economic theory of laissez-faire > terrible conditions in the new industrial and coal-mining areas, employment of women and children under brutal conditions: Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s “The Cry of the Children” (1843)

- the 1^st Reform Bill (1832) = franchise for all M owning property ₤10 or more in annual rent, i.e. middle class

- People’s Charter (1838 – 48) = a large organisation of workers, advocated the extension of franchise and oth. legislative reforms

- abolition of the Corn Laws (1946) = i.e. high tariffs on imported grains > free trade system

R e a c t i o n s  i n  L i t e r a t u r e :

> Thomas Carlyle’s contrib. to the “Condition of England Question” in Past and Present

> Benjamin Disraeli’s (1804 – 81, a novelist to become a PM) Sybil (1845), subtitled The Two Nations = the En. of the rich x the En. of the poor

> Elizabeth Gaskell

T h e  M i d - V i c t o r i a n  P e r i o d  ( 1 8 4 8 – 7 0 )

P r o s p e r i t y :

- the Factory Acts (1802 – 78) = regulated the conditions of labour in mines and factories > child labour restricted, working hours limited > conditions of the working classes improved

- the 2^nd Reform Bill (1867, under Disraeli) = franchise for the working class + abolition of the rotten boroughs and redistribution of parliamentary repres.

(+) economic prosperity > an enormous expansion of infl. throughout the globe > the growth of Empire

(+) the Great Exhibition (Hyde Park, 1851) = symbolised the triumphant feats of Victorian technology

(─) but: serious conflicts and anxieties beneath the placidly prosperous surface of the period

R e l i g i o u s  C o n t r o v e r s y :

- division of the Church of En.:

(a) Low Church = for a strictly moral Christian life; responsible for the emancipation of all slaves in the Br. Empire (1833)

(b) Broad Church = open to modern advances

(c) High Church = for holding to its orig. traditions x against liberal tendencies

+ High Church Movement = The Oxford Movement (early 1830s):

< orig. in Oxford in the early 1830s as a Cath. revival within the Church of En.

- reacted against state interference in relig. matters

- for a revitalisation of the spirit of the great 16^th – 17^th c. divines, incl. J. Donne and Edward Herbert

> John Henry Newman (1801 – 90), the dominant figure among the orig. leaders: a thinker, preacher, essayist, prose writer, and poet of The Second Spring = the revival of the Roman Cath. Church (to which he converted) after 3 c. of persecution

> new hymn writers and poets, incl. John Keble (1792 – 1866)

> new attention to liturgy and liturgical celebration > transl. of Lat. and Greek hymns, incl. John Mason Neale (1818 – 66)

> new relig. Poets, incl. Christina Rossetti (1830 – 94)

- later generation: Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 89), & oth.

U t i l i t a r i a n i s m :

< derived from the thought of Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832) and his disciple James Mill (1773 – 1836, father of John Stuart M.)

- human beings seek to maximise pleasure and minimise pain > a morally correct action = the one providing the greatest pleasure to the greatest number

x but: failed to recognise people’s spiritual needs: criticized by C. Dickens’s Hard Times

S c i e n c e :

- biology: C. Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) diminished the assumption of the humanity’s special role in the world

- geology and astronomy with its new discoveries reduced the status of human species in time and space: A. Tennyson’s Maud, the stars as ‘innumerable’ tyrants of ‘iron skies’

- Higher Criticism: orig. in Ger. as a scientific attitude applied twd a study of the Bible, challenged the role of relig. in society

R e a c t i o n s  i n  L i t e r a t u r e :

> C. Dickens’s attacks on the shortcomings of the Victorian society x Anthony Trollope’s more characteristic reflection of the mid-Victorian attitude twd the social and political scene

> R. Kipling’s ‘the White Man’s burden’, i.e. the moral responsibility for the expansion of empire x Queen Victoria’s mission ‘to protect the poor natives and advance civilisation’

P r e - R a p h a e l i t e  B r o t h e r h o o d :

= a group of young anti-establishment painters

- against the establ. academic style of painting in favour of the superior directness of expression, simplicity, and pure colours of the pre-Renaissance artists before Raphael (1483 – 1520, a painter and architect of the Florentine school in the Ita. High Renaissance)

- founded by D. G. Rossetti (1848)

- incl. the painters D. G. Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, F. G. Stephens (1828 – 1907), and James Collinson (1825 – 81), and the sculptor Thomas Woolner

- cultural heroes: Christ; G. Chaucer, W. Shakespeare, J. Keats, & oth.

- The Germ (4 issues in 1850) = their short-lived journal, an experimental amalgam of poetry, prose, and essay

P r e - R a p h a e l i t e  P a i n t i n g

F o r d  M a d o x  B r o w n ( 1 8 2 1 – 9 3 )

The First Translation of the Bible into English (1847 – 48): pictures Chaucer standing by

The Seeds and Fruits of English Poetry (1845 – 51, 1853): pictures Chaucer in the central position

Also painted: the sleeping King Lear attended by Cordelia

J o h n  E v e r e t t  M i l l a i s ( 1 8 2 9 – 9 6 )

Ferdinand Lured by Ariel (1850): a scene from W. Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Isabella (1848 – 49): a scene of tender love x brotherly jealousy

W i l l i a m  H o l m a n  H u n t ( 1 8 2 7 – 1 9 1 0 )

The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro (1848): a scene from J. Keats’s “Eve of St Agnes”

P r e - R a p h a e l i t e  P o e t r y :

T h o m a s  W o o l n e r ( 1 8 2 5 – 9 2 )

My Beautiful Lady (1864): a poetic sequence

T h e  L a t e  V i c t o r i a n  P e r i o d  ( 1 8 7 0 – 1 9 0 1 )

D e c a y  o f  V i c t o r i a n  V a l u e s :

(+) a time of serenity and security = the age of house parties, longs weekends in the country, delights in London entertainment,…: the comfortable pace of these pleasant, well-fed gatherings immortalised in Henry James’s prose

(─) the cost of the empire apparent in colonial rebellions, massacres, and bungled wars, incl. the Boer War (1899 – 1902) to annex 2 independent rep. in the south of Af. controlled by Dutch settlers = Boers

- the 2^nd Reform Bill (1867, under Disraeli) > growth of labour as a political and economic force > growth of a variety of kinds of socialism

R e a c t i o n s  i n  L i t e r a t u r e :

- a sense of an overall change of attitudes:

- attack on the mid-Victorian idols: Samuel Butler’s (1835 – 1902) criticism of C. Darwin and A. Tennyson, and satire on family life in The Way of All Flesh (1903)

- notion of the pointlessness of the striving of the mid-Victorians > no answers to our problems to be found > our role = to enjoy the fleeting moments of beauty (Walter Pater)

T h e  N i n e t i e s

C h a r a c t e r i s t i c s :

- the changing values embodied in Victoria’s pleasure-seeking son and heir, Edward, Prince of Wales x the opposite of his earnest-minded father, Prince Albert

- the writers’ state of mind typical neither of the earlier Victorians x nor of the 20^th c. > styled as ‘Late Victorians’ or ‘the first of the ‘Moderns’’

- reactions in lit.: no more a sense of gaiety x but: of melancholy

T h e  A e s t h e t i c  M o v e m e n t :

- ‘art for art’s sake’ = art unconc. with controversial issues, restricted to celebrating beauty in a highly polished style

- art = independent for its having its own unique kind of value > poetry must be judged ‘as poetry and not another thing’ (T. S. Eliot)

- self-conscious about living at the end of a great c. > a deliberate fin de siècle (= end-of-c.) pose: the drawings and designs of Aubrey Beardsley

- consid. themselves anti-Victorians: the mid-Victorian earnestness of C. Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) x the late-Victorian comedy on earnestness of O. Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

- the last heirs of the Romantics going back through D. G. Rossetti and A. Tennyson to J. Keats x but: the Romantic sensationalism developed into melancholy suggestiveness, world weariness, or mere emotional debauchery > a time of decadence and degeneration

- the 1^st to absorb the infl. of the Fr. symbolist poetry: T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, & oth.

- the Aesthetes incl. O. Wilde, A. Beardsley, W. Pater, & oth. + The Rhymer’s Club members, incl. W. B. Yeats, Lionel Johnson, E. Dowson, John Davidson, Arthur Symons, & oth.

R u d y a r d  K i p l i n g  &  O t h e r s :

- the dandyism and effeminacy of the Aesthetes

x R. Kipling’s life of masculine action, and bearing of ‘the white man’s burden’ of responsibility for the civilizing mission of the Br. imperial power

P o e t r y  o f  t h e  1 8 8 0 s – 9 0 s :

- older generation: R. Browning, A. Tennyson, and C. A. Swinburne; to a certain extend T. Hardy

- younger generation:

> R. Kipling’s balladry gave voice to the otherwise inarticulate, ordinary soldiers, and ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’ > expressed middle-brow sentiments > pop. success: “Recessional”, on the Queen’s Jubilee; “The Ballad of East and West” and “Gunga Din”, on the Empire; “The Female of the Species” and “The Ladies”, on uppity women

> O. Wilde’s Fr.-inspired decadents: “Les Ballons” and “Symphony in Yellow”, precise, refined, impressionistic, conc. with beauty x The Ballad of Reading Gaol, vulnerable and protesting

> the Rhymer’s Club’s poised lyricism

> A(lfred) E(dward) Housman’s (1859 – 1936) preocc. with lost illusions, death, and homoeroticism

> Charlotte Mew’s (1869 – 1928) preocc. with unfulfilment, death, and burial

T h e  V i c t o r i a n  P o e t r y

C h a r a c t e r i s t i c s :

- developed in the context of the novel

- experimented with long narrative poems: A. Tennyson’s Maud, E. Barrett-Browning’s Aurora Leigh, R. Browning’s The Ring and the Book, & oth.

- function: accord. to public expectation poets should be sages with sth to teach x but: older generation poets discomforted with the public role: A. Tennyson, R. Browning, and M. Arnold > younger generation poets distanced themselves from the public, embracing an identity as bohemian rebels

F o r m :

- experiments with character and perspective: R. Browning’s The Ring and the Book with the plot presented through 10 different perspectives

- dramatic monologue

- visual detail = use of detail to construct visual images repres. the poem’s dominant emotion => brings poets and painters close together

- sound = use of sound to convey meaning ‘where words would not’ (Arthur Hallam): the beautiful cadences of A. Tennyson and C. A. Swinburne x the roughness of R. Browning and G. M. Hopkins

S u b j e c t :

- heroic materials of the past: M. Arnold

- materials of the poet’s own age: E. Barrett-Browning

< strongly infl. by the Romantics x but: lacked the confidence the Romantics felt in the power of the imagination

> W. Wordworth’s “Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey”, an address to his sister upon revisiting a landscape x M. Arnold’s “Resignation”, the same subject x but: his rocks and sky ‘seem to bear rather than rejoice’

> J. Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” x T. Hardy’s “The Darkling Trush”, the nightingale becoming ‘an aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small’

- Victorian reaction to the Romantic subjectivity:

(a) attenuated Romanticism = art pursued for its own sake: D. G. Rossetti, C. A. Swinburne, & oth.

(b) dramatic monologue = a lyric poem in the voice of a speaker ironically distinct from the poet, ‘lyric in expression’ x but: ‘dramatic in principle’ (R. Browning): R. Browning, A. Tennyson, & oth.

T h e  V i c t o r i a n  N o v e l

C h a r a c t e r i s t i c s :

- novel = dominant form, extraordinary various in style and genre:

> C. Dickens’s extravagant comedy

> the Brontë sisters’ gothic romance

> W. M. Thackeray’s satire

> G. Eliot’s psychological fiction

> by the end of the c. also crime, mystery, and horror novels, sci-fi, detective stories, etc.

- function: accord. to public expectation the novel should depict social problems to stimulate efforts for social reform: C. Dickens, E. Gaskell, & oth.

F o r m :

(a) a sprawling, panoramic expanse: orig. publ. in a serial form encouraging a certain kind of plotting and pacing > novels = ‘large loose baggy monsters’ (H. James)

(b) a multitude of characters, a number of plots: repres. a large and comprehensive social world

(c) a realistic presentation: repres. a social world sharing the features of the one we inhabit

C o n c e r n :

(a) the protagonist’s effort to define his/her place in society:

- stratified society x but: a chance for upward mobility: C. Dickens’s Pip can aspire to the ‘great expectations’ of the novel’s title, and C. Brontë’s Jane Eyre can marry her employer = a landed gentleman

(b) the woman’s struggle for self-realisation:

- woman = the repres. protagonist whose search for fulfilment emblematises the human condition

- ‘a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with meanness of opportunity’ (G. Eliot, Prelude to Middlemarch): Jane Eyre, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, even Becky Sharp, & oth.

> women for the 1^st time major authors: J. Austen, the Brontës, E. Gaskell, and G. Eliot <=> the novel easily accessible for women writers = conc. with the domestic life they knew well, not built on uni education, not burdened by an august tradition as poetry, etc.

T h e  V i c t o r i a n  P r o s e  ( i . e .  N o n - f i c t i o n )

< the term used to distinguish non-fiction prose writers from fiction writers and: to stress the centrality of argument and persuasion to Victorian intellectual life

- incl. history, biography, theology, criticism, etc.

- conc. with a wide range of controversial relig., political, and aesthetic topics

- the periodical = the vehicle of the Victorian prose

- function: didactic mission in urgent social and moral issues

> M. Arnold + W. Pater: culture, i.e. the serious appreciation of great works of lit., provides the immanence and meaning people once found in relig.

> M. Arnold x W. Pater: A.’s culture = a moral experience x P.’s culture = an aesthetic experience

=> moral + aesthetic experience = the basis for the claims of modern lit. criticism

 

T h e  V i c t o r i a n  D r a m a  a n d  T h e a t r e

- theatre = a flourishing and pop. institution

=> wide appeal x but: limited artistic achievement

- comedy of Victorian pretence and hypocrisy: G. B. Shaw’s ‘problem plays' on difficult social issues, infl. by the socially controversial plays of Henrik Ibsen (1828 – 1906) x O. Wilde’s comedies

- infl. of drama in the novel:

> C. Dickens composed many scenes in his novels with theatrical techniques

> W. M. Thackeray repres. himself as the puppetmaster of his characters + employed the stock gestures and expressions of melodramatic acting in his illustr. in Vanity Fair

> + A. Tennyson, R. Browning, and H. James = unsuccessful playwrights