• • Victorian Period The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death, on 22 January 1901.

It was a long period of peace, prosperity, and national self-confidence for Britain.

QUEEN VICTORIA      Born on 24 May 1819.

On 10th June 1837, following the death of her uncle, William IV, she became queen at the age of eighteen.

She fell instantly in love with her German cousin, Prince Albert and they were married on 10 February 1840. Between 1841 and 1857.

Queen Victoria had nine children - four sons, five daughters.

Prince Albert was very interested in art, science and manufacturing and took a keen interest in the building of the Crystal Palace. He died suddenly of typhoid in 1861. His widow was overcome with grief and wrote in her diary, "My life as a

happy person is ended!" She wore black for the rest of her

life. For a long time she refused to appear in public, which made her very unpopular.

Queen Victoria died aged 80 on 22 January 1901 and a new age - the Edwardian - began.

• • • • IMPERIALISM The prevailing attitude in Britain was that expansion of British control around the globe was good for everyone.

Firstly, England had an obligation to enlighten and civilize the 'less fortunate savages' of the world (often referred to as the "White Man's Burden").

Secondly, they (as a chosen people) were 'destined' to rule the world. Finally, they needed money, resources, labor, and new markets for expanding industry in England.

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Imperialism

The British Empire (map) was the

largest empire ever, consisting of

over 25% of the world's population and area.

It included India, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Hong Kong, Gibraltar, several islands in the West Indies and various colonies on the African coast.

In 1750 the population of Britain was 4 million. By 1851 it was 21 million. By 1900, Queen Victoria

reigned over 410 million people.

• • • • • Science and technology Victorian period is often considered as an age of doubt due to the influence of science. Steam power, mass production, powered fast railways, introduction of telegraph, photography, anesthetics etc. were introduced. Especially, the Victorian age was marked by advances they brought. For the first time humans didn't have to rely on animals or other humans to complete tasks, steam driven machines could do more work and do it quicker. This allowed for the creation of new technologies like blast furnaces for mass-producing steel as well as the factory system. However, like all things these advances had an impact, both positive and negative on society.

steam engines,

and the The developments transformed Great Britain from a largely rural population making a living almost entirely from agriculture to a town centered society engaged increasingly in factory manufacture.

• • • Positive outcomes of the scientific changes Mass production allowed for cheaper goods, opening up products to people who couldn't afford them before.

New agricultural equipment allowed for a booming population.

Faster transit allowed for people to move across the globe quicker and more safely than previously, and new technologies like the telegraph improved communication. All of this led to a more connected, and global world and eventually a higher standard of living for citizens of industrialized nations.

Negative outcomes of the scientific changes • • • • • Air pollution in most large cities.

The creation of factories and mass production put many professional craftsmen out of work and replaced them with armies of unskilled workers in cramped, dirty, and dangerous factories.

Child labor Widespread overcrowding, poverty, and disgusting conditions in many cities. This in turn drove up crime rates and caused many social problems.

Single women were hit especially hard by poverty as it was difficult for a woman to find work (it was a male dominated society) and even if they did it was usually very low paying such as working in a textile mill. Luckier women may be hired as servants by the wealthy and be provided with room and board. However, many poor women turned to a life of prostitution. The fact that prostitution was illegal and modern medicine didn't exist meant that sexually transmitted disease was quite common as well, particularly syphilis.

 SOCIAL CLASS  Working class wages men and women who performed physical labor, paid daily or weekly  Middle class men performed mental or "clean" work, paid monthly or annually  Upper class did not work, income came from inherited land and investments

Typical Incomes (annual)

       Aristocrats £30,000 Merchants, bankers £10,000 Middle-class (doctors, lawyers, clerks) £300-800 Lower middle-class (head teachers, journalists, shopkeepers, etc.) £150-300 Skilled workers (carpenters, typesetters,etc.) £75-100 Sailors and domestic staff £40-75 Laborers, soldiers £25

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Views of marriage

Upper Class- Marriage was based on cementing

economic or political

among families, love typically had little or any to do with marriage.

alliances Middle Class- Marriage was supposed to be a union based on homemaker.

love

, its from this view that we now think of marriage. The man was supposed to work and provide for the family and the wife was to be a Lower Class- Marriage was often not a formal ceremony but based more in common law. It was often seen as a union based on

both economic and romantic factors.

• • • • • EDUCATION Education in nineteenth-century England was not equal not between the sexes, and not between the classes.

The upper class typically paid for private tutors to teach their children or sent them to private schools.

Middle class children could sometimes afford this luxury, but were often sent to these primitive public schools. Lower class children rarely attended school, instead working in manual labor and when they did it was surely the public schools.

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Women in the Victorian era

Women did not have the right to vote, the right to sue, or the right to own property.

Feminist ideas spread among the educated female middle classes in the last years of the Victorian Era.

In the Victorian Era women were seen, by the middle classes at least, as belonging to the domestic sphere, and this stereotype required them to provide their husbands with a clean home, food on the table and to raise their children. Women’s rights were extremely limited in this era, losing ownership of their wages, all of their physical property, excluding land property, and all other cash they generated once married. When a Victorian man and woman married, the rights of the woman were legally given over to her spouse.

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Woman Suffrage Timeline

1869: Britain grants unmarried women who are householders the right to vote in local elections. • 1881: Some Scottish women get the right to vote in local elections. • 1894: The United Kingdom expands women's voting rights to married women in local but not national elections. • • 1918: The United Kingdom gives a full vote to women of age 30 and older and men age 21 and older. 1918 Women in Britain vote in a General Election for the first time on 14 December. • 1928: The United Kingdom grants equal voting rights to women

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Charateristics of the Victorian literature

The scientific and social transformations had particular effects upon the literature of the age.

The Victorian era served as a transition between the Romantic period and the literature of the twentieth century.

Writers of the Victorian era created literature that commented on societal, economical, religious, and philosophical ideas of the time.

Much of Victorian literature criticized the increased industrialization of England, and on the other hand, the deterioration of the rural lifestyle. Victorian literature addressed the themes of conflict among the classes as well as the burgeoning push for women's rights.

The defining characteristic of Victorian literature is a strong focus on morality. Heroes of Victorian literature are often the oppressed members of society, such as the poor.

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Characters with good morals were usually rewarded, while characters who acted poorly received their just desserts in the end.

Idealism: Though, the age is characterized as practical and materialistic, most of the writers exalt a purely ideal life. It is an idealistic age where the great ideals like truth, justice, love, brotherhood are emphasized by poets, essayists and novelists of the age.

10. The notion of «art for art’s sake» was mostly abandoned in the Victorian literature.

• Significant Victorian novelists and poets include: Matthew Arnold, the Brontë sisters (Emily, Anne and Charlotte Brontë), Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Joseph Conrad, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, George Meredith, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, Richard Jefferies, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Philip Meadows Taylor, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Thackeray, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll

Victorian Novel

The novelists of the Victorian era: • • • • • accepted middle class values treated the problem of the individual's adjustment to his society emphasized well-rounded middle-class characters portrayed the hero as a rational man of virtue believed that human nature is fundamentally good The Victorian novel appealed to readers because of its: • • • • • • realism impulse to describe the everyday world the reader could recognize introduction of characters who were blends of virtue and vice attempts to display the natural growth of personality expressions of emotion: love, humor, suspense, melodrama Focus on moral values

Victorian Novel and important figures

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Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte

Sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte—three of the most popular writers of the Victorianera—published under the male pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Writing under a pseudonym in the Victorian era was a common practice of female writers who wanted their novels to be taken more seriously by critics as well as the public.

Charlotte Bronte: was the eldest and she was the first to write a novel, but her novel was not published when she was alive. Her most famous novel is Jane Eyre. Emily Bronte: Her most popular work was Wuthering Heights.

It is full of Gothic elements.

Anne Bronte is the youngest sister. She is known for Agnes

Gray.

Charles Dickens:Novelist Charles Dickens is perhaps the most widely read novelist of the Victorian era. His novels were extremely popular at the time they were published, and gained popularity and cemented Dickens as a notable author on the literary scene. Like many Victorian novels, Dickens's stories criticized social issues of the time and usually saw the morally sound characters thrive despite the extraordinarily difficult circumstances thrown their way.

His most popular novels are: Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist , Nicholas Nickleby , The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

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William Makepeace Thackeray:

London, its societal morals, and corruption William Makepeace Thackeray also wrote novels during the Victorian era, although his stories focused on middle-class characters rather than those that dealt with poverty. Thackeray is most noted for his novel Vanity Fair, which he published in 1847.

Thackeray satirizes upper middle-class Victorian

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GEORGE ELIOT (MARY ANN EVANS)

Eliot is considered to be the first modern novelist, a creator of psychological fiction. She is known for her penetrating character analyses and convincingly realistic scenes.

In Eliot's novels plot did not need to depend upon external complications; it could rise from a character's internal groping toward knowledge and choice.

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Major Works:

Adam Bede (1859), a love triangle set in pre-industrial agricultural England Silas Marner (1861), the nearest thing to a perfect George Eliot novel with a plot about a miser who adopts a foundling and the theme of the regenerative power of humanity and love Middlemarch (1871-72), the first English novel concerned with the intellectual life, the story of a city during the agitated era of 1832 reforms, the Industrial Revolution, the Evangelical movement, and the new scientific outlook

• Anthony Trollope Anthony Trollope was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of his best-loved works, collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire.

He also wrote perceptive novels on political, social, and gender issues, and on other topical matters.

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Thomas Hardy

He wrote a long and varied body of major novels reflecting his view of mankind struggling against an indifferent force that rules the world.

A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially

William

Wordsworth.

Charles Dickens was another important influence. Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society.

Some of his major novels are Far from the Madding Crowd, the Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess of the D’urbervilles.

• Poetry • Alfred Lord Tennyson The foremost poet of the Victorian period was Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who served as poet laureate of the United Kingdom from 1850 until his death in 1892. Much of Tennyson's poetry focused on the retellings of classical myths. His work often focused on the conflict between allegiance to religion and the new discoveries being made in the field of science.

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Robert and Elizabeth Barret Browning

Husband and wife team Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning became famous for the love poems they wrote to each other. Elizabeth was already an accomplished poet when she met her future husband in 1845. He influenced her to publish her love poems, which significantly increased her popularity.

Elizabeth wrote some of her works in Romantic style.

Her masterpiece «Aurora Leigh» was written in the style of «novel verse».

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Children's Literature

During the Victorian era, children's literature became very popular. Writers produced work for the growing market of young readers.

Stories about experiences at school were very popular among readers. Lewis Carroll (Alice in

Wonderland) and Rudyard Kipling (Kim) were

two of the leading children's writers of the Victorian era.

• Anti-Victorian Novelists Samuel Butler, Lewiss Carroll, and George Meredith were opposed to the sentimentality of the Victorian period.

• Victorian Drama

• •

Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities

Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities for the purpose of bringing out the ills he recognized in his world.

He chose to write historical fiction, about the French Revolution, to remind his people of a time in history when the abuses of the upper classes

resulted in bloodshed.

Consider Dickens's subject (the uprising of the poor in France) and his message (abuses of the poor can result in violence). The theme that results might be:

If people suffer prolonged abuse, they will rise up to end their suffering.

• • • In this book , love and sacrifice are two themes that are interconnected with each other.

According to the statement that says, " Genuine love entails sacrifice " we can say that the greatest sacrifice in the book is Sydney Carton's death. He sacrifices his life for his love for Lucie Manette.

For this is what love and sacrifice all about ; to give up something that is a part of your life that you do not really want to give up.

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The Tendency Toward Violence and Oppression in Revolutionaries

• Throughout the novel, Dickens approaches his historical subject with some ambivalence. While he supports the revolutionary cause, he often points to the evil of the revolutionaries themselves.

Dickens deeply sympathizes with the plight of the French peasantry and emphasizes their need for liberation. The several chapters that deal with the Marquis Evrémonde successfully paint a picture of a vicious aristocracy that shamelessly exploits and oppresses the nation’s poor. Although Dickens condemns this oppression, however, he also condemns the peasants’ strategies in overcoming it. For in fighting cruelty with cruelty, the peasants effect no true revolution; rather, they only perpetuate the violence that they themselves have suffered.

• • • Resurrection Resurrection in this book helped to bring the story , characters and their destinies together . Dr Manette is the first to experience resurrection when he was taken away from his pregnant wife and then was imprisoned for a long eighteen years . His rebirth after he won his freedom was not completed until he was reunited with his daughter Lucie.

The narrative suggests that Sydney Carton’s death secures a new, peaceful life for Lucie Manette, Charles Darnay, and even Carton himself. By delivering himself to the guillotine, Carton ascends to the plane of heroism, becoming a Christ like figure whose death serves to save the lives of others.

His own life thus gains meaning and value.