The Victorian Age

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THE VICTORIAN AGE
1832-1900
Lecture 10
Senior Lecturer: Sartbayeva E.K.

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Lecture 10. English literature of the
Victorian Age (19-th century)
1.Historical background: the Victorian age
2. Outline of the English Literature of the
Victorian period
3. Main peculiarities of the Victorian age
• The main concepts: critical realism,
materialism

3.

General Information About the Time
• Enormous changes occurred in political and
social life in England and the rest of the world
• The scientific and technical innovations of the
Industrial Revolution, the emergence of modern
nationalism, and the European colonization of
much of Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East
changed most of Europe
• Far-reaching new ideas created the greatest
outpouring of literary production the world has
ever seen

4.

Queen Victoria (1819-1901)
Reign: 1837-1901
• She had the longest reign in British history;
• Became queen at the age of 18; she was graceful and self-
assured. She also had a gift for drawing and painting;
• Throughout her reign, she maintained a sense of dignity
and decorum that restored the average person’s high
opinion of the monarchy after a series of horrible,
ineffective leaders;
• 1840-Victoria married a German prince, Albert, who
became not king, but Prince-consort;
• After he died in 1861, she sank into a deep depression and
wore black every day for the rest of her life.

5.

The longest reign in British History
• Queen Victoria ruled from
1837-1901, over seven
decades.
• Represented the strict
morals of the era: duty,
family, and propriety.

6.

The Growth of the British Empire
• England grew to become the greatest nation on earth;
• Empire included Canada, Australia, New Zealand,
Hong Kong, Singapore, South Africa, Kenya, and India;
• England built a very large navy and merchant fleet (for
trade and colonization)

7.

The Growth of the British Empire
• Imported raw materials such as cotton and silk and exported
finished goods to countries around the world;
• By the mid-1800s, England was the largest exporter and
importer of goods in the world. It was the primary manufacturer
of goods and the wealthiest country in the world;
• Because of England’s success, they felt it was their duty to bring
English values, laws, customs, and religion to the “savage” races
around the world.

8.

The Industrial Revolution
• Factory systems emerged;
• The shift in the English economy moved away from agriculture
and toward the production of manufactured goods;
• Great Exhibition of 1851-Prince Albert-housed in the Crystal
Palace (made of glass and iron) exhibited hydraulic presses,
locomotives, machine tools, power looms, power reapers, and
steamboat engines.

9.

Victorian Ladies
• Women won the right to vote by the late 1800s;
• Strong Women e.g: George Eliot, Charlotte and Emily Bronte,
Florence Nightingale, & Queen Victoria were considered
aberrations and unfit for motherhood;
• Fewer women were able to stay at home, becoming one third of
the work-force, and 90% of household workers, but many women
became prostitutes due to low wages and unemployment
(Henderson and Sharpe 1795);
• Upper-class women: made social visits, did needlework, sketched,
learned flower arranging, and by the 1860’s became a target
audience for advertisers.

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Victorian Literature
•Four types of writing were popular
during the Victorian Era:
•Realist
•Naturalist
•The Novel
•Poetry

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Realism
• The attempt to produce in art and literature an accurate
portrayal of reality;
• Realistic, detailed descriptions of everyday life, and of its
darker aspects, appealed to many readers disillusioned by
the “progress” going on around them;
• Themes in Realist writing included families, religion, and
social reform.

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Naturalism
• Based on the philosophical theory that actions
and events are the results not of human
intentions, but of largely uncontrollable external
forces;
• Authors chose subjects and themes common to
the lower and middle classes;
• Attentive to details, striving for accuracy and
authenticity in their descriptions.

18.

Emily Bronte
• Wuthering Heights is an 1847 novel
by Emily Brontë, initially published
under her pen name Ellis Bell. It
concerns two families of the landed
gentry living on the West
Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and
the Lintons, and their turbulent
relationships with the Earnshaws' foster
son, Heathcliff. The novel was
influenced by Romanticism and Gothic
fiction.

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Charlotte Bronte
• Jane Eyre is a novel by the English
writer Charlotte Brontë. It was published
under her pen name "Currer Bell" on 19
October 1847 by Smith, Elder &
Co. of London. The first American edition
was published the following year by Harper
& Brothers of New York. Jane Eyre is
a Bildungsroman which follows the
experiences of its eponymous heroine,
including her growth to adulthood and her
love for Mr Rochester, the brooding master
of Thornfield Hall.

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• Charles Dickens: Many of his
novels were published in serial form.
His comic and sentimental
descriptions of the lives of people in
diverse occupations and social
classes made Dickens the most
popular Victorian novelist.
Charles Dickens

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LITERACY and LITERATURE
• Literacy increased significantly during the Victorian Period.
• In 1837, about half the male adult population could read and write to some
extent; by the end of the century, basic literacy was universal.
• Compulsory national education was instituted in 1880, requiring children
to attend school until the age of ten.
• Steam-powered printing presses, paper made with wood pulp, and new
typesetting machines allowed publishers to print more material more
cheaply than ever.

22.

• Periodicals became the most popular form of
literature. In the first 30 years of the
Victorian period, 170 new magazines were
started in London alone (sensational tales,
religious monthlies, weekly newspapers,
political satire, women’s magazines, monthly
miscellanies publishing fiction and poetry).
• The reputations of many of the major writers
of the period were established in this
magazines (Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot,
Tennyson, Browning to name a few).

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Novels and long works of nonfiction prose
were published in serial form.
Communities of readers grew as they
followed their favourite stories, read aloud
especially in family gatherings.
A broad readership, especially middle-class
readers, developed; many readers expected
that literature would not only delight but
instruct, that it would reflect the world they
lived in and illuminate social problems.
(Abrams 1058)

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The Victorian Novel
The novel was the most dominant form in
Victorian literature.
Victorian novels sought to represent their
social world with the variety of classes and
social settings that defined their
communities, but with new emphasis on the
possibility of social mobility (Jane Eyre,
Great Expectations).
For the Victorians, the novel was a principal
form of entertainment and a spur to social
sympathy as the heroes and heroines
struggled within their living conditions to
determine their social position and find love
and happiness.

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VICTORIAN POETRY
Victorian poetry developed in the context of the novel.
As the novel emerged as a popular form, poets sought new ways of
telling stories in verse through the creation of long narrative poems that
experimented with characterization, point of view, rhythm and meter.
Victorian poetry also developed in the shadow of Romanticism. Poets
such as Rossetti and Swinburne mirrored the Romantics in their
expression of intimate thoughts and personal emotions.
Others, such as Arnold, rejected this Romantic quality in his writing,
preferring to write from a more objective point of view in order to
comment on social and political issues.

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The Dramatic Monologue
• The dramatic monologue in which Browning specialized,
seems an appropriate compromise between these two
approaches. It allowed for a lyric poem (expressing personal
emotion) presented by the voice of a speaker that was distinct
from the poet himself.
• Dramatic Monologue: A type of lyric poem in which a
character (the speaker) addresses a distinct but silent
audience imagined to be present in the poem in such a way as
to reveal a dramatic situation and, often unintentionally, some
aspect of his or her temperament or personality. (“Dramatic
Monologue”)

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Characteristics of Victorian Poetry
• A key characteristic of Victorian poetry is variety both in style and
subject matter as poets responded to the complex social and political
changes of their time. It is almost impossible to generalize a set of
characteristics common to all writers.
FORM
• There was a focus on long narrative poems.
• The development of the dramatic monologue is often said to be the great
achievement of Victorian poetry.
• Some poets stuck to traditional forms such as the sonnet, while others
experimented with new or unusual forms such as free verse (such as
Matthew Arnold).

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STYLE
It is pictorial in nature in that it uses detail to construct visual images that
represent the emotion or situation of the poem. [For this reason, many
artists illustrated Victorian poems, and poems were often inspired by
paintings.]
Victorians use sound in a distinctive way. Some poems offer mellifluous
rhythms, alliteration, gentle vowels, and liquid consonants, while others
create rougher, harsher sounds. Overall though, Victorian poets use sound
to convey meaning.
Some poets wrote with a tone of pessimism and saw society and mankind
in a period of doubt and degradation. Others wrote optimistically about the
power of social change and hope for the future.
Diction could present an elevated or lofty tone, but at times could also
become colloquial and vulgar even within the same poem.

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SUBJECT
Subjects include love, nature, expression of intense personal emotion, and
quest for the strange and exotic (like the Romantics) (Brown and Bailey ).
For some Victorian poets, the intimate disclosures of the heart were
repulsive. The true poet was one who remained impersonal, presenting
great ideas without being distorted by the poet’s personal values (Brown and
Bailey xv).
But poetry was also used to “preach or teach” addressing topics such as the
conflict between science and religion and humanity’s relationship to God,
the problem of poverty and social inequality, and the social issues raised by
capitalism, consumerism, materialism, and the industrial revolution.
For many, realism was key. It was believed poets should speak frankly and
realistically about society and human emotionally states, even if this
involves revealing the darkest and most sordid aspects of human existence.

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Victorian Poets
Some of the most famous Victorian Poets were:
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Robert Browning
Matthew Arnold
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Edgar Allan Poe (American)
Emily Dickinson (American)
Christina Rossetti
Elizabeth Barrett Browning