Transcript The Victorian Age

The Victorian Age
The Age and Its Double
Lesson Outline
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Queen Victoria.
Some common ideas about the age.
Periodization: Conventional subdivisions.
Diversity. Compromise. Contradictions.
Victorian values.
Poverty, unrest and reform
Change and progress
The Woman Question.
Science.
Religion
High culture and popular culture.
Architecture
Art.
The genres. The canon.
The construction of Victorianism
Modernist attitudes regarding the Victorian age and their influence on its
construction.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of
times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age
of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was
the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of
Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the
spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we
had everything before us, we had nothing
before us, we were all going direct to heaven,
we were all going direct the other way - in
short, the period was so far like the present
period, that some of its noisiest authorities
insisted on its being received, for good or for
evil, in the superlative degree of comparison
only.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Queen Victoria, an Icon
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Victoria b. 1819. German family: House of Hanover .
Father Duke of Kent (George III’s son) d. 1820 Victoria heir presumptive. Her
uncle, King William IV, had no heirs. Educated for the throne in native German
and English, by mother (House of Saxe-Coburg)
Came to the throne 1837 (coronation 1838)
1840 married Albert Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a German prince, her cousin. Image
of bourgeois happiness. A strong morality and family values, in contrast to the
sexual, financial and personal scandals that had been associated with previous
members of the House of Hanover and which had discredited the monarchy. Lived
at Buckingham Palace
Had 9 children. 42 grandchildren. The grandmother of Europe.
Albert died 1861. Mourned for 10 yrs. No public appearances. Victoria wore black
ever since. Albert Memorial. Later established close relationship with a Scottish
manservant, John Brown. Maybe secret marriage.
1876 Empress of India. Under Prime Minister Disraeli’s influence, expansionist
foreign policy.
Golden Jubilee (1887). Diamond Jubilee (1897): parade with representatives of all
colonies.
Died 1901. Longest reigning British sovereign.
An Age of Contrasts
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Named by extrinsic facts.
Single label for a long and heterogeneous age.
No clear-cut features to characterize it.
Actually, an age of contrasts
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Faith in reason vs fantasy, sensationalism, the gothic
Earnestness vs nonsense, fun
Moralism vs unbridled sexuality, erotic lit., the nude
Patriarchal repression of women vs emancipation, the
New Woman, women’s achievements in lit.
• Victorianism is all but stuffy. It contains the seeds
of modernity.
The Victorian compromise
• The coexistence of contrasting realities:
– prosperity and progress on the one hand, and poverty, ugliness and
injustice on the other.
– Ethical conformism vs corruption
– Moralism and philanthropy vs capitalistic greediness. ,
– Private life vs public behaviour.
• Victorian culture was dominated by a capitalist economy and a
patriarchal structure which however were subtly undermined and
challenged.
• “The Victorians are interesting not only because they are complicit
with the ideological systems they often thought themselves
resisting, but because they often tried to be oppositional and were
remarkably alert to the constraints that language and conventions
imposed on them” (George Levine)
Victorian Values
• Earnestness.
• Self help.
• Respectability: a mixture of both morality and
hypocrisy, severity and conformity to social
standards.
• Puritanism, all sorts of taboos, even linguistic.
Influence of Queen Victoria.
• Family values.
Periodization
• Victoria’s reign: 1837-1901
• Victorian Age: 1830 – 1890
– 1830-1848
• Ruthless Industrial Revolution; laissez-faire policies; move to the
cities; growth of slums; social unrest, Chartism, 1832 Reform Act;
Marx & Engels, cf Dickens
– 1848-1870
• Wealth and well-being; triumphalism (Victorian compromise), Great
Exhiition 1851, Empire, Expansion, Identification of middle-classes
with monarchy. The Crimean war
– 1870-1890
• Military and economic set-backs. Uncertainty. Loss of continental
power status. Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. The Boer war.
– 1890 -- decadence, fin de siècle.
• Debunking of earnestness. Art for art’s sake movement. Aestheticism.
Change in the social sphere
• Social change
– Reform Bill 1832 Democratic process: (partial extension right of vote
to middle classes)
– Chartism (Radical movement; male suffrage): failed but Created a
framework for future working-class organisations.
– Repeal Corn Laws (free trade, anti-protectionism)
– Poor Laws 1834
• Growth of cities, new cities. Growth of slums and dire poverty
• The Industrial Revolution
– meant that the balance of power shifted from the aristocracy, whose
position and wealth was based on land, to the newly rich business
leaders.
• Education Acts extended compulsory education. Literacy
Urbanisation
• On the home front the Industrial Revolution accelerated
the migration of the population from country to city.
• The result of this movement was the development of
horrifying slums and cramped row housing in the
overcrowded cities.
• Misery and distress among the working classes. The new
urban conditions created a lot of health problems. Whole
families were often crowded in single rooms, where lack of
hygiene occasionally led to cholera.
• By 1900 80% of the population lived in cities,-the poor
living further away from the city core.
– Suburban rail transit
Advances in Technology
• Mining (coal)
• Industrial production
– Rise of capitalism.
– Benefits for middle classes (heating, lighting etc.).
– Exploitation of minors and women.
• Transportation.
• High-speed printing.
• Communications (telegraph; photpgraphy)
Problems and events of the early
Victorian period
• Age of extreme poverty and social unrest. The establishment of
Poor Houses.
• The Chartist movement began in 1839 with demands for electoral
reform and universal male suffrage.
• The movement was taken over by radical reformers and was dealt
with very harshly by the authorities.
• The Anti Corn Law League was another voice for social reform. They
advocated total free trade, but it was not until 1846 that the Corn
Laws were completely repealed
• 1846 Irish Famine
• Marx and Engles were inspired by the conditions of England. It
seemed as if a revolution would break up, any moment.
• Dickens, Gaskell, Kingsley portrayed the poverty and unrest of this
era .
From Friedrich Engels’ The Condition
of the Working Class (1845). 1
• Every great town has one or more slum areas into
which the working classes are packed. Sometimes, of
course, poverty is to be found hidden away in alleys
close to the stately homes of the wealthy. Generally,
however, the workers are segregated in separate
districts where they struggle through life as best they
can out of sight of the more fortunate classes of
society. The slums of the English towns have much in
common—the worst houses in a town being found in
the worst districts. They are generally unplanned
wildernesses of one- or two-storied terrace houses
built of brick. Wherever possible these have cellars
which are also used as dwellings.
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• These little houses of three or four rooms and a
kitchen are called cottages, and throughout
England, except for some parts of London, are
where the working classes normally live.These
streets themselves are usually unpaved and full
of holes. They are filthy and strewn with animal
and vegetable refuse. Since they have neither
gutters nor drains, the refuse accumulates in
stagnant, stinking puddles. Ventilation in the
slums is inadequate owing to the hopelessly
unplanned nature of these areas. A great many
people live huddled together in a very small area,
and so it is easy to imagine the nature of the air
in these workers' quarters
Events of the mid-Victorian period
(1848-1870)
• The Great Exhibition.
• Improvements in working conditions (Factory
Acts), education and health.
• The Crimean War
• The Indian Mutiny and transfer of India from
the East India Company to the Crown.
The Great Exhibition
• 1851 Great Exhibition marked the triumph of the
middle classes, advances in technology and
imperial expansion.
• Victoria's consort, Prince Albert, was the main
backer of the 1851 Great Exhibition. This was the
first "world's fair", with exhibits from most of the
world's nations.
• The exhibition was held in Hyde Park, and the
showpiece was the Crystal Palace, a prefabricated
steel and glass structure like a gigantic
greenhouse, which housed the exhibits.
The Crimean War
• Overseas, England became involved in the Crimean War (1854, a
contest between the major European powers and Russia for
influence over territories of the declining Ottoman empire.
– Military incompetence. Riots against the war and parliamentary
interrogations.
– See poem"The Charge of the Light Brigade", by Alfred Tennyson.
• First of the modern wars: technical changes
– tactical uses of railways, telegraph
– Live war reporting: public kept up-to-date. Documented by
photographs
• Establishment of more humaneand modern nursing practices under
the influence of Florence Nightingale, the "Lady with the Lamp".
Use of anesthetics.
The Indian Mutiny 1857
• India until 1858 was governed by the Est India
Company with government assistance.
• The Mutiny in the Hindu army was sparked off by
religion causes. The army rebelled and massacred
many British officers, administrators, and families.
• The rebellion led to the dissolution of the East India
Company in 1858. It also led the British to reorganise
the army, the financial system and the administration
in India. It was the beginning of the Raj and of the
Indian empire. Queen Victoria became Empress in
1876.
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Unprecedented change in the
condition of women.
• At the beginning of the century, women had no legal existence, no right to
property, no guardianship over children, no right to education.
• Debate over a” woman’s sphere,”” Angel in the house” ideology.
• Woman idealized: Angel in the house”
• The New woman
• Woman reified:
– Rise of prostitution
– Erotic literature
– Painting of nudes
• Yet, social movements and legal reform secured many rights for women:
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Factory Act
Married women’s property Act,
Education extended to women. 1848 Queen’s College.
The suffrage movement
Leisure and Tourism
• Technology changed leisure in Victorian Britain
• Influence of railways and of the invention of the bicycle.
– On working-classes
• Outings in the country-side
• Bank holidays made escapes to seaside resorts (Blackpool, Brighton) possible.
Development of seaside resorts.
• Holiday packages: a day at the seaside (train and meal)
– On the middle-classes
• mass tourism.
• Thomas Cook, first travel agent (1841)
– Organized trips to the Continent.
– Travellers’ cheques.
• The Music Hall. Theatres
• The amusement-pier at the seaside resort.
Science
• Progress in science and technology (steam,
electricity, medicine, sanitation).
• Mostly scientific knowledge had the purpose of
supporting a theological vision of nature. Science
had to prove the existence of God.
• Development of some specific scientific areas had
a great impact on culture, religion and society:
– Geology
– Biology
– Anthropology
Lyell and Darwin
• Lyell’s Principles of Geology prove that
research on transformations of the globe
contradict the creationism of the Scriptures.
– Tennyson In Memoriam
– George Eliot
• Darwin’s natural observations on the “Beagle”
and the publication of The Origin of Species
(1859) introduce evolutionism, which goes
against the Bible also in the field of biology.
Anthropology
• Anthropology affirms itself as the modern science of man in
the Nineteenth cent
• John Lubbock: Notions of “primitive” people (prehistoric
man compared to populations living in colonized countries)
• Idea of bringing civilisation to primitive people used in
order to justify economic expansion, colonialism.
• Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture introduced the
ethnological concept of culture: there is an essential
uniformity among different people but there are various
stages of development and evolution.
– Frazer, The Golden Bough
• The knowledge of primitive cultures helped prove that
England had reached the highest point of civilisation.
Victorian Ecocriticism
• Ruthless expansion, exploitation of the soil,
inconsiderate building, transformation of
inner cities.
• Many Victorian writers show an awareness of
the degradation the physical environment was
undergoing. (Dickens, Hopkins.
• Economic policies of laissez-faire, colonialism
and capitalism increased rural poverty and
hunger and exacerbated famine.
Architecture
• Because of great fire of London (1666), the
image of London is mostly Victorian.
• Economic and social development matched by
great architectural development.
• Various revivals, but especially gothic revival.
• Monumental buildings:
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Covent Garden.
Victoria and Albert Museum
Royal Albert Hall
Albert Memorial
Art
• Much indoctrinating, anecdotical painting with a moral message.
Showed how ordinary people lived. Pictured the condition of
Victorian society.
• Often too sentimental.
• A visual record of an era before photography was used to document
reality (photography, however, sed as a model for painting) .
Celebration of the city and of a changing landscape.
• Main focus: the world of bourgeois Britain: family portraits and
paintings to decorate their houses. Great market for artists who
opened their studios to the public and became rich.
• Even the great Romantic painter William Turner Turner became
interested in contemporary technology and painted bridges, trains,
ships etc. documenting progress in an expressive way.
• (Frith Ramsgate Sands and Turner Rain, Steam and Speed
Revolutions in the Victorian Art Scene
• The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Founded in 1848 by William
Holman Hunt. Rossetti, Millais.
– Painters and poets. Refusal of academic painting. Go back to Italian
Quattrocento.
– Magazine The Germ
– The first avantgarde movement.
• Arts and Crafts Movement (1860-1910)
– Inspired by Ruskin. A reaction to the ugliness of industrialized England.
– Design. Decorative objects for homes, including wallpaper, textiles,
furniture and stained glass.
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William Morris.
Liberty’s Department Store
Kelmcott Press
Victoria and Albert Museum
Religion
• Contested from the right: Tractarianism; Oxford
Movement; Newman
– HG.M.Hopkins
• Contested from the left. Dissent (Evangelical
movement, Methodists. Anti-slavery movement.
Child Labour).
• Put into question by recent scientific theories and
especially by Darwin (although he never excluded
the possibility of a higher purpose behind the
order of nature).
Relevant Topics in Literature
• Residual Romanticism in the novel and in poetry
• On the whole an engaged literature responding to relevant issues;
• Imaginative responses to industrialisation and urbanisation;
representation of social upheaval.
• Literature reflects the crisis of faith and religious belief.
• Takes the place religious teaching. Denounces sins; offers moral
lessons.
• A destabilized age reflected in a literature weighed with doubts,
angst and contradictions
• A literature challenging ways to deal with morally and socially
repressed topics; experimental
• Complicit with Capitalism, Colonialism and the rise of the empire
The Great Victorian Novel
• Major achievement of the age. Vital. Comprehensive.
Portrays various aspects of society.
• Expression of the middle-classes and of their values.
• Realism. Self-referentiality.
• But also desire to improve, to correct. Didactic.
Engaged. Yet complicit with the ssytem.
• Mixes sentimentalism with humour.
• Henry James defined Victorian novels: “Loose baggy
monsters”:
– 3 vols. Instalments. Cliff-hangers. Cf. Soap operas.
– Circulating libraries. Family reading.
Major Novelists
• Charles Dickens –evolution from optimism to
pessimism.
• William Thackeray.
• The Brontes, a literary myth.
• Elizabeth Gaskell
• George Eliot
• Anthony Trollope
• Thomas Hardy
• George Gissing
• Rudyard Kipling
Unconventional genres
• Even realistic novels contaminated by other genres.
– The irrational.
– A literatre devoid of “high seriosness”,withot a prpose,
intended for entertainment
• The supernatural, the uncanny, the gothic. (Bram Stoker, Le Fanu,
Stevenson, Wilde).
• Psychological enqiry.
• Sensationalism.
• Erotic literature
• Detective novels. (Dickens, Collins, Conan Doyle)
• Science fiction. (Wells, Butler)
• Fantasy, nonsense. (Lewis Carroll, Esdward Lear)
• Children’s Literature
Questioning Victorianism
• Samuel Butler. The Way of All Flesh
• The Aesthetic Movement.
– Walter Pater
– Oscar Wilde
Poetry
• Residual lyricism ( Romanticism).
• More innovative than other genres.
• Contamination with other genres and epistemic
fields.
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Tennyson / Science
Arnold: philosophy
Hopkins / theology, linguistics
Robert Browning: theatre (dramatic monologue);
detective novel The Ring and the Book
– E. Barrettt Browning: Aurora Leigh: a novel in verse.
– Pre-Raphaelites: fantasy, fairy - tales.
– Swinburne / erotica
The Victorian Sage
• Age characterized by great prose works
addressing varios problems and criticizing the age
and its shortcomings.
• Carlyle, on the effects of industrial capitalism.
• Ruskin against machines, industry and the evils of
British society.
• Newman on drying up of religiosity
• Matthew Arnold on absence of ideals and
hypocrisy (philistinism)
• J. Stuart Mil, on absence of freedom and on the
“sbjection” of women.l
Journalism
• The extension of British journalism in the Victorian age
has been the result, largely, of technology resulting in
cheapness and of ability to obtain news in increasing
quantity and speed, and, in some respects, with
greater accuracy.
• Freedom of press; little censorship.
• Multiplication in the number of daily and weekly
journals
• Increased circulation (by 100 times, over the century)
• Speed printing, cheap paper made from wood pulp led
to low prices. Advertising brought prices down.
• Speed:
– Distribution (railways)
– Use of telegraph
Various constructions of Victorianism
• Early constructions underline
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Realism
Referentiality
Character
Moral intention
Earnestness,Work ethic
Prudishness, repression
Bourgeois values
Patriarchism, capitalism, Imperialism
Hypocrisy
Images of the Victorian Age
• What Victorians told us
– e.g. Ruskin agst. Evils of industrialisation and
materialism
– Arnold: Philistinism
– J.S. Mill, The Subjection of Women
• What Modernists told us
– Strachey: Eminent Victorians
– Woolf (read from Orlando)
From Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
chap. V
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The great cloud which hung, not only over London, but over the whole of the
British Isles on the first day of the nineteenth century stayed, or rather, did not
stay, for it was buffeted about constantly by blustering gales, long enough to have
extraordinary consequences upon those who lived beneath its shadow. A change
seemed to have come over the climate of England. Rain fell frequently, but only in
fitful gusts, which were no sooner over than they began again. The sun shone, of
course, but it was so girt about with clouds and the air was so saturated with
water, that its beams were discoloured and purples, oranges, and reds of a dull
sort took the place of the more positive landscapes of the eighteenth century.
Under this bruised and sullen canopy the green of the cabbages was less intense,
and the white of the snow was muddied. But what was worse, damp now began to
make its way into every house — damp, which is the most insidious of all enemies,
for while the sun can be shut out by blinds, and the frost roasted by a hot fire,
damp steals in while we sleep; damp is silent, imperceptible, ubiquitous. Damp
swells the wood, furs the kettle, rusts the iron, rots the stone. So gradual is the
process, that it is not until we pick up some chest of drawers, or coal scuttle, and
the whole thing drops to pieces in our hands, that we suspect even that the
disease is at work.
Continued
• Thus, stealthily and imperceptibly, none marking the exact day or hour of
the change, the constitution of England was altered and nobody knew it.
Everywhere the effects were felt. The hardy country gentleman, who had
sat down gladly to a meal of ale and beef in a room designed, perhaps by
the brothers Adam, with classic dignity, now felt chilly. Rugs appeared;
beards were grown; trousers were fastened tight under the instep. The
chill which he felt in his legs the country gentleman soon transferred to his
house; furniture was muffled; walls and tables were covered; nothing was
left bare. Then a change of diet became essential. The muffin was
invented and the crumpet. Coffee supplanted the after-dinner port, and,
as coffee led to a drawing-room in which to drink it, and a drawing-room
to glass cases, and glass cases to artificial flowers, and artificial flowers to
mantelpieces, and mantelpieces to pianofortes, and pianofortes to
drawing-room ballads, and drawing-room ballads (skipping a stage or two)
to innumerable little dogs, mats, and china ornaments, the home — which
had become extremely important — was completely altered.
Continued
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Outside the house — it was another effect of the damp — ivy grew in unparalleled
profusion. Houses that had been of bare stone were smothered in greenery. No
garden, however formal its original design, lacked a shrubbery, a wilderness, a
maze. What light penetrated to the bedrooms where children were born was
naturally of an obfusc green, and what light penetrated to the drawing-rooms
where grown men and women lived came through curtains of brown and purple
plush. But the change did not stop at outward things. The damp struck within.
Men felt the chill in their hearts; the damp in their minds. In a desperate effort to
snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth one subterfuge was tried after
another. Love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases. The
sexes drew further and further apart. No open conversation was tolerated.
Evasions and concealments were sedulously practised on both sides. And just as
the ivy and the evergreen rioted in the damp earth outside, so did the same
fertility show itself within. The life of the average woman was a succession of
childbirths. She married at nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen children by the
time she was thirty; for twins abounded. Thus the British Empire came into
existence; and thus — for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it
gets into the woodwork — sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became
epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now
encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes.
What have we inherited from the
Victorians?
• Modern cities.
• Established industrialism (factory and manufacturing
life had come to stay);
• 'multiple national identities' (the separate traditions of
England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland) opening the way
for a multiracial society.
• A divided public culture.
– Middle-class taste drove the increasing commercialisation
of publishing, painting and architecture,
– Largely working-class readership depended on hack
writers, producers of penny dreadfuls and gallows
speeches who sold in their hundreds of thousands.