Transcript The Victorian Era

The Victorian Era
1832-1901
Learning Objectives
• To identify the major authors and literary
contributors of the Victorian period.
• To recognize the major literary characteristics
of the period.
• To understand how the politics of a time
period can influence its literature.
• To identify major vocabulary needed to
analyze the literature of the period.
Only One Queen… Victoria
• 63 year reign (longest British
reign and longest ever female
reign)
• Thank her for…
– Christmas Trees
– Brides in White
– Valentine’s Day Greeting Cards
• Model wife, mother, and queen
• Weird Stuff: The Kensington
System
• Married her cousin Albert (she
asked him)
Early Victorian Era: 1832-1848
A Time of Troubles
• 1830 – Reform Parliament,
Opening of first public
railroad – Liverpool and
Manchester Railway
• 1832 – The First Reform Bill
– Right to vote to
landowners worth £10 or
more
• 1837 – Victoria becomes
Queen of England
Early Victorian Era: 1832-1848
A Time of Troubles
1840s – Depression,
widespread
unemployment, bad
environmental
conditions caused by
manufacturing and
mining. Rioting.
1842 – The Mine Act prevents women and children from
working in mines.
1844 – Factory Acts – Limits workers under age 18 to only
12 hours of work per day
Early Victorian Era: 1832-1848
A Time of Troubles
• 1845 – English crop
failures / potato blight
begins in Ireland
• 1846 – Corn Laws
Repealed (takes away
high tariffs on imported
food)
• 1848 – Cholera Epidemic
Mid-Victorian Era: 1848-1870
Prosperity & Religious Controversy
• 1850 – Roman Catholic
hierarchy restored in
England
• 1850s – Debates between
the Utilitarians w/ Jeremy
Bentham and Conservatives
w/ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
argue the necessity of
religion in the modern
world. Heyday of Dickens.
Mid-Victorian Era: 1848-1870
Prosperity & Religious Controversy
• 1851 – The Great
Exhibition and the
Crystal Palace (1st
World’s Fair)
• 1854 – Crimean War
• 1857 – Indian comes
under British rule
• 1859 – Darwin
publishes Origin of the
Species
Mid-Victorian Era: 1848-1870
Prosperity & Religious Controversy
• 1861 – Death of Prince
Albert – Victoria refuses to
go out in public for many
years, wears black ever
after.
• 1867 – The Second Reform
Bill gives working class men
the right to vote,
strengthening the Labor
Party.
Late Victorian Era: 1870-1901
Decay of Values & the Gay Nineties
Late 1800s –
Bismarck’s Germany
confronts England
w/ powerful threats
to navy and industry
• 1870 – Elementary Education Act – basic education
became free for children under 10
• 1871 – Darwin publishes The Descent of Man
• 1873 – massive emigration due to economic depression
Late Victorian Era: 1870-1901
Decay of Values & the Gay Nineties
• 1874 – Geologists extend the history of the earth
back millions of years, contradicting the human
timeline provided by the Bible.
• 1875 – England buys shares in the Suez Canal in Egypt
• 1880s – The “Irish Question” – Home Rule for Ireland
Late Victorian Era: 1870-1901
Decay of Values & the Gay Nineties
• 1882 – Electric Lighting
introduced to London streets
• 1888 – Jack the Ripper
terrorizes London
• 1890s – The “Gay Nineties”
describe the open
affairs/partying of Prince
Edward, Victoria’s son.
• 1901 – Queen Victoria dies
Morality and Home
• Decorum & Authority –
Victorians saw themselves
progressing morally &
intellectually
• Powerful middle-class
obsessed with “gentility,
decorum” =
prudery/Victorianism
• Censorship of writers: no
mention of “sex, birth, or
death”
Morality and Home
• Decorum – powerful ideas about
authority
– Victorian private lives – autocratic
father figure
– Women – subject to male authority
– Middle-class women expected to
marry & make home a “refuge” for
husband
– Women had few occupations open
to them
– Unmarried women often portrayed
comically by male writers
Empire and Imperialism
• England reaches highest
point of development as
world power
• Colonies by 1890 cover ¼
of earth’s surface
• England the world
foremost imperial power
• Celebration of superior
qualities of English
people
• “The sun never sets on
the British Empire”
Religious Outlooks
• Utilitarians – test all institutions in light of human reason to
determine whether they were useful – believed religious
belief was outmoded superstition. Headed by Jeremy
Bentham/John Stuart Mill (typical of the Enlightenment)
• Conservatives – If “reason” seemed to demonstrate the
irrelevance of religion, then reason must be an inadequate
mode of arriving at the truth. Headed by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge (typical Romantic).
• Evangelicals – branch of Church of England responsible for
emancipation of all slaves in British Empire (as early as
1833). Advocates of strict puritan code of morality.
– Sobriety, hard work, joyless abstention from worldly
pleasures, respectability (Typically Victorian)
Characteristics of the Literature
•
•
•
•
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Serialized novels
• Attention to Expanding
Empire/Imperialism
Detective Fiction
• Taking up “The White
Science Fiction
Man’s
Burden”
Children’s Books/Fiction
• Christian Missionary
Attention to Social
concerns
in
colonized
Problems
countries.
– Industrial Revolution
•
Attention
psychology
– Theory of Evolution
– Women’s Rights
– Child Labor
Common Themes
•
•
•
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The growth of the English democracy.
The education of the masses.
The rise of the feminist movements.
Growing class tensions, as well as the troubles of the
newly industrialized worker.
• The progress of industrial enterprise and the
consequent rise of a materialistic philosophy.
• Pressures towards political and social reform.
• Questioning of Faith and Truth (due to scientific
discoveries like the theory of evolution by Darwin).
What’s going on in America?
• Transcendentalism: Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott
• Romanticism: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar
Allan Poe, Herman Melville, James Fennimore
Cooper, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman
• Realism/Local Color: Kate Chopin, Charlotte
Gilman, Hart Crane, Mark Twain, Henry James
• Naturalism: Ambrose Bierce, Jack London,
Stephen Crane
Terms to Know
• Realism: attempts to
describe human behavior
and surroundings or to
represent figures and
objects exactly as they act or
appear in life.
– Examples: George Eliot
(Middlemarch) and Thomas
Hardy (Tess of the
d’Urbervilles)
Terms to Know
• Pre-Raphaelite: a group of
19th-century English painters,
poets, and critics who reacted
against Victorian materialism
and the neoclassical
conventions of academic art
by producing earnest, quasireligious works.
– Example: “The Goblin Market”
by Christina Rossetti
– Artwork of her brother, Gabriel
Rossetti
Terms to Know
• Social Satire: Satire is
literature that uses humor
or sarcasm to ridicule
human vices or follies.
Dickens was interested in
social reform, and
passages of the novel
often reflect his feelings
toward people and
institutions in nineteenthcentury English society.
– Ex. Vanity Fair - Thackery
Terms to Know
• Dickensian: the grotesque—a
type of literature in which
characters’ outstanding
physical or personality traits
are exaggerated for comic or
dramatic effect. This style has
come to be known as
Dickensian, and this term is
today used to refer to any
work that has characteristics
of Dickens’s writing.
Terms to Know
• Dramatic Monologue
– poetry that
presents a speaker
who unwittingly
provides
psychological insight
through his words to
the audience.
• Ex. “My Last Duchess” or “Porphyria’s Lover”
by Robert Browning