THE VICTORIAN AGE

1837-1901

THE VICTO RIAN AGEQU ESTIO NS TO K EEP IN M IND

How were Britain and the British Empire changing during the Victorian age?

What conditions helped stimulate Victorian optimism?

How did the mood of later Victorian writers change?

REIGNED FOR 64 YEARS

During her reign Britain experienced unprecedented economic and technological

growth and dramatic politicial and social change.

1847-Emily Bronte publishes Wuthering Heights

1850- Alfred Lord Tennyson becomes England’s poet laureate

Dickens publishes Great Expectations

Lewis Carroll pub. Alices’s Adventures in Wonderland

EVENTS IN BRITISH LIT.

1884 – First Oxford English Dictionary published

1895- The Importance of Being Earnest published

1896- Housman publishes A Shropshire Lad

1897- Stoker publishes Dracula

1837- Victoria is crowned

1840- Victoria marries Albert

1841- Hong Kong comes under British rule

1845- Irish Potato Famine begins

1854- Britain enters Crimean War

BRITISH EVENTS

1865- Great Eastern lays first successful transatlantic cable

1869- Debtors prisons abolished

1899- Boer War begins in South Africa

1901 Commonwealth of Australia established

1901- Victoria dies, Edward VII becomes King

1837- John Deere invents the steel plow in U.S.

1848- Marx and Engels write the Communist Manisfesto

1861 – Alexander II emancipates Russian serfs

WORLD EVENTS

1865- Civil War begins in US

1866- Alfred Nobel invents dynamite

1876- A.G.Bell invents the telephone in the U.S.

1885- Leopold II of Belgium acquires Congo in Africa

1900- Boxer Rebellion occurs in China

VICTORIAN IDEALS

Britain had become a world power, covering ¼ of the world’s population.

A strong middle class had formed defined by rigid standards and a strict moral code.

CLASS AND EDUCATION

Victorian upper class saw no benefit to sharing education with the masses and lower class families needed their children’s wages. Child labor was rampant.

Half the funerals in London were for children younger than 10 years old.

Servants were the mark of middle-class respectability. In 1891 16% of British workforce were servants.

INTERESTING FACTS

Australia was settled by criminals from the ages of 9-84.

By 1891, around 7% of men and women still could not sign their own names- a great decrease from the beginning of the century.

The British Empire included Canada British Guiana,7 countries in Africa, India, and Australia

After Prince Albert died, Victoria became a remote figure.

Electric lights, vaccines, and pasteurization of milk improved life.

MORE INTERESTING FACTS

Karl Marx moved to London in 1849 after being exiled from Paris for his radicalism. In 1886, he published Das Capital.

He believed class warfare was inevitable

In 1895 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection.

Social Darwinism and the phrase Survival of the Fittest, embraced by the rich, were not words of his. He did not wish to apply his theories to human social policy.

BIG IDEAS OF THE VICTORIAN AGE

1. Optimism and the Belief in Progress

2. The Emergence of Realism- a reaction to Romanticism (focused on individuals dealing with everyday problems, Victorian Realist writers often sought to reform society.)

3. Disillusionment and Darker Visions: Naturalism developed out of Realism. Naturalists tended toward pessimism, suggesting that fate was predetermined and meaningless.

OPTIMISM AND THE BEL IEF IN PRO GRESS

Victorian ideals preached a gospel of thrift, hard work, and patience.

“Honorable industry travels the same road with duty; and Providence has closely linked both with happiness.” Samuel Smiles

Tennyson’s “In Memorium” became a favorite of Queen Victoria after the death of Prince Albert.

THE EMERGENCE OF REALISM

In the mid-1800s, a reaction to Romanticism began to appear in both art and literature. Known as Realism, this new movement aimed to explore contemporary life and ordinary experience. Focusing on individuals, dealing with everyday problems, Victorian Realist writers often sought to reform society.

VICTORIAN PROGRESS

Middle classes spend a lot of money on books and reading for self-improvement

Periodicals were crammed with serialized novels and other educational pieces.

Many British workers were literate and able to improve because of cheaper books and lending libraries.

EXPANSION OF DEMOCRACY

1832 brought the vote to middle-class men.

1867 enfranchised many workingmen, doubling the electorate.

By the end of the 19th century, women could vote in most local elections.

It was not until the end of WWI that all men over 21 and women over 30 could vote.

IMPERIALISM

Although British colonial rule could be officious and insensitive, many people in Victorian Britain truly believed they were bringing their colonial subjects the benefits of Western culture.

Mohandas Gandhi was admitted to the British bar in London in 1889.

His work to end discrimination against Indians in South Africa, another British colony, started him on his path to become the leader of the movement for Indian independence.

WRITERS

Thomas Carlyle – one of the most influential critics of Victorian culture – historian and essayist.

He said…All true work is sacred; in all true Work, were it but true hand-labor, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven…sweat of the brain, sweat of the heart…all Sciences, all spoken Epics,..which all men have called divine!...

THEORY OF UTILITARIANISM

Bentham and Mill – the view that the ethical value of an activity is measured by the extent of its usefulness. Utilitarianism strongly influenced the ethical decisions that Victorians made in political and economic life. Many factory owners and businessmen, particularly in the industrial north of Britain, became strong advocates for putting free-market and Utilitarian doctrines into practice. How did this practice negatively effect the poor?

VOICES OF REFORM

Carlyle, Marx, and Dickens were among the writers who disagreed with the whole theory of Social Darwinism.

Other reformers included doctors, ministers, journalists, and private philanthropists who organized many charitable organizations.

Among them the YMCA, Ladies’ Society for the Education and Employment of the Female Poor, the SPCA.

DIS ILLU SION MENT AN D DARKER VIS IO NS

One of the most admirable characteristics of the Victorians was their capacity for self-criticism. Even at the height of Victorian optimism-when technological and material progress seemed to many to be limitless-doubting voices were already heard.

THE NOVEL

Victorian novels proved to be powerful instruments for instructing middle-class readers. As they sat in their parlors, these readers began to imagine the humanity of those whom they might never meet.

Examples: Hard Times – Charles Dickens

Two Nations – Benjamin Disraeli

North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell

PESSIMISSM AND NATURALISM

The Realist novel, which had proved itself so effective in rousing emotion, began to seem too good at raising falsely comforting feelings such as sentimentality or smugness. A new generation of novelists were influenced in part by Darwinism to look for inevitable natural, rather than spiritual, forces guiding the course of human life.

Emila Zola, in France, wrote Naturalism, a grim, fatalistic view of the world in which mostly lower-class characters are trapped by circumstances beyond their control for reasons that they cannot determine.

ZOLA AND HARDY

Zola’s goal was to use the novel almost as a scientific instrument. By subjecting his fictional characters to “the same analytical examination that surgeons perform on corpses.” For novelists following in the path of Zola, clinical knowledge of the human condition replaced teary sympathy.

Although Thomas Hardy did not necessarily share all the views of the naturalists, he does share the somber tendency of life’s randomness. Give an example of his work.

DECADENT LITERATURE

A new mood that arose at the end of the 19th century as a reaction to the optimism of the Victorian Age (like Naturalism) was Decadence. Naturalists hoped that their works would influence people’s opinions. Decadent writers rejected the idea that works of art had to serve any useful purpose. One of the most famous of these writers was Oscar Wilde, an Iris-born comic genius who enjoyed upending Victorian values-but always with a subversively serious intent.