THE VICTORIAN AGE

1837-1901

THE VICTORIAN AGEQUESTIONS TO KEEP IN MIND

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 BELIEF IN PROGRESS

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.

DISILLUSIONMENT AND DARKER VISIONS

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.