5

Term 1, II English A & B

Assistant Professor Daniela Brown

COURSE ON VICTORIANISM
UNITS 1- 2
GENERAL PRESENTATION OF 19TH C. BRITAIN

A. Introductory notes
1.” Any cultural period suffers distortion from a generalised
indictment (accusation) however speciously formulated.” (Jerome
Hamilton Buckley)

So, Victorianism makes no exception. No matter how many

studies have been written by who knows how many specialists,
half true, half idealised perspectives on the 19th c. cultural
period in Great Britain mingle in various degrees.

2. The aim of this course:

An attempt to offer you a GENERAL THEMATIC
PRESENTATION of a complex controversial period of British
culture which is mainly associated with the reign of Queen Victoria
(1837-1901)

a./ The course is not meant to go into deep analysis of a

particular literary text ( the seminar will)
b./ The course will try to explain the British literary
phenomena within the larger context of British culture:
♦ influences from previous
periods
♦ social historical events in
the period
♦ religious fragmentation
♦ philosophical doctrines
♦ aesthetic views and artistic
c./ Examples from the styles.
painting, architecture and photography
will be provided for the literary event to be better understood
as a part of a whole range of thoughts and occurrences
contained within Victorianism .

B. Social cultural context of the 19th c Britain

a./ The influence of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). 1876- Empress
of India.
She brought to the British monarchy such 19th-century ideals as:
♦ a devoted family life
♦ earnestness
♦ public and private respectability
♦ obedience to the law.
♦ Christian morality also put a stress on the virtues of family
responsibility and happiness.

b./ Britain, the leader of the world (Afghanistan, Tibet, India,

Hong-Kong, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Nigeria, Egypt, South
Africa-after the 1890s). Between the 1830s and 1880s, the British
were self-confident in their economic and international political
powers, but in the 1850s, their illusion of peace and confidence was
broken by:
♦ the Indian Mutiny (1857-9)
♦ the Crimean War (1853-6) (the British and the French helped the
Ottoman Turks fight against Russia.)

c./ The industrial revolution: environmental and technological

changes, the success of the middle class:
♦ the invention of the telegraph— In 1837 by American F. B.
Morse and in Britain by the British physicist Sir Charles
Wheatstone and engineer Sir William F. Cooke.
♦ generalisation of steam power, (James Watt started it in 1769)
♦ photography, (1839 William Talbot)
♦ the rotary printing press
♦ the 1st railway system in the world, (1830 Manchester-
Liverpool, the 1st fully timetabled railway)
♦ the electric lamp, (in 1878 and 1879, British inventor Joseph
Swan and American inventor Thomas Edison simultaneously
developed the carbon-filament lamp. )
♦ the vacuum cleaner

d./ The rise of the middle-class and of the working class. The
factory system and vigorous capitalism offered these newly risen
classes a few small domestic comforts and cheaper mass products
which mimicked the artistically made objects of the aristocracy.

e./ The free market was based by the doctrine of laissez-faire

which gave complete freedom to capitalistic enterprise (“minimum
governmental interference in the economic affairs of individual and
society.” The British economist John Stuart Mill was responsible for
bringing this philosophy into popular economic usage in his
Principles of Political Economy –1848)

f./ England, the stage of cultural debate

♦ serialised novels
♦ scientific and religious debates
♦ mass literacy
♦ modernisation of education
♦ wide circulation of newspapers and magazines: the Edinburgh
Review, Westminster Review, the Cornhill Magazine

g./ Religious fragmentation and Charles Darwin’s Origin of

Species (1859)
1.Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would be at the expense of two?
2.No graven images may be
Worshipped, except the currency;
3.Swear not at all; for for thy curse
Thine enemy is none the worse;
4.At church on Sunday to attend
Will serve to keep the world thy friend:
5.Honour thy parents; that is, all
From whom advancement may befall:
6.Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive
Officiously to keep alive:
7.Do not adultery commit;
Advantage rarely comes of it:

h./ The utilitarian doctrine: Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and

John Suart Mill
♦ Adam Smith was the 1st to assume that progress is linked to
national wealth- 1776 treatise, The Wealth of Nations.
♦ Jeremy Bentham’s 1789 Introduction to the Principles of Morals
and Legislation develops the principles which bring about
individual contentment due to social checks and balances. “An
action is right if it tends to promote happiness and wrong if it
tends to produce the reverse of happiness… it is possible for
the right thing to be done from a bad motive.”
♦ John Stuart Mill: 1844—Essays on Some Unsettled Questions
of Political Economy, essays on the influence of consumption
on production, the definition of productive and unproductive
labour, and the precise relations between profits and wages.
i./ Reform Bills and Acts
♦ the Reform Act of 1832 enfranchised all male owners of property
worth between 10 to 50 pounds in annual rent
♦ the Education Act by 1870- generalised literacy
♦ the Factory Acts-1833-1878 eliminated child labour and
overworking
♦ Public Health Acts-1871-1875-some medical assistance to the
poor)

j./ Social unrest (the Chartist Movement -1836-1854)

C. The undermining consequences of progress

• Urban crowds living in filthy slums. Polluted waters, smog.
Professional diseases (of miners, chimney sweepers…).
Human misery.
• Family- an agent of oppression, especially for women
• The decay of religious belief and the obsession of scientific
materialism
• Exploitation of children and women
• Advantageous laws for the rich in the detriment of the poor
• Unemployment and social pressure of the working class
• In the world of the novel, the serialised strategies made
novels lack a coherent structure, plot and convincing
characters

D. The Victorian literary world inherits previous artistic elements

(see VIII), mirrors and is mirrored by whatever happened in the 19th
c.

I. Focus on town life and social classes in the novel (Charles

Dickens in Hard Times, Our Mutual Friend, William M. Thakeray
in Vanity fair, Anthony Trollope in Barchester Chronicles, Elizabeth
Gaskell in Mary Barton, A Tale of Manchester Life- 1848 and in
North and South- 1855)
II. Poetry weaker then the novel
III. Darwinian perspective in social life ( the idea developed by
Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species according to which the
fittest will survive) and utilitarianism
IV. False Puritanism (A. Clough’s poem The Latest Decalogue,
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre
V. Revival of a deep religious feeling (the poetry and creed of G. M.
Hopkins)
VI. The nostalgia for the pastoral setting seen as a Paradise Lost
(Thomas Hardy’s Tess, George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, Matthew
Arnold looks back to a harmony with nature in his poem In
Harmony with Nature, Hopkins finds the innocence and the
sacredness of nature through religious faith and illumination.)
VII. a./ The industrial revolution, scientific discoveries and access to
technology worried the Victorian writer who felt that his
contemporaries bore the miserable sometimes dangerous
consequences of a new era or made him depict prophetic triumphs
of the future (immediate gloomy realities of technology are
described by Dickens or science fictional perspectives of a dark
technological future are represented by Louis Stevenson- The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), or George Herbert
Wells- The Time Machine (1985), The Invisible Man (1897), The
War of the Worlds —1898)
VIII. The writers’ ironical attitude to the Victorians’ self-confidence
and authority (Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Ernest, Bernard
Shaw’s plays)
IX. Neo-classical and Romantic features :
Neo-classical Romantic
-the stress on reason and duty - the past revisited
-society seen as a perfectible (Medieval and
mechanism Renaissance themes)
- the individual is responsible -the stress on the irrational
-for the part he plays in and on feeling
society - the presence of outsiders:
- the picaresque structure of outcasts, children,
the novel (Great handicapped, eccentrics,
Expectations, Jane Eyre) thieves, criminals,
convicts (Dickens excels
in all that)
- society seen as corrupted
and the source of all evil