CULTURA Y LITERATURA INGLESAS

Grado Oficial Online en Español: Lengua y Literatura

TEMA 5. VICTORIAN AGE AND

XIXTH-XXI ST CENTURY OF THE
UK.

Docente: María Amor Barros del Río

Área de Filología Inglesa
Universidad de Burgos
Curso 2014/2015

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 TEMA 5. Victorian Age and XIXth-XXIst century of the UK.

5. 0. Introduction

5.1. Victorian Age: history and literature

5.2. The XXth century: history and literature

5.3. Bibliography

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5. 0. Introduction

Progress, expansion, mobility. These keynotes of Victorian history and culture (1832-1901) evoke
in their different ways a society keenly attuned to and preoccupied with transformation in nearly
every arena of daily life. As time passes by, we travel from steam age to the nuclear age (1901-
1939), the first forty years of the twentieth century that saw both the consolidation of a century-and-
a-half's industrial growth and development, and a decisive transition towards the now-famiiar
modernity of our won technologically advanced, mass-democratic and mass-consumerist society.
Later, as we approach the contemporary, it is possible to recognise that there have been huge
changes in British society and culture since 1939, most notably the effects of the Second World
War, the decline of the British Empire, the rise and fall of the welfare state, the liberalisation of
sexuality and gender roles, and the influence of immigration and devolution on contemporary
meanings of English and British national identity.

5.1. Victorian age: history and literature

The evolution of industrial society, the rise of great towns and cities, and dramatic increases in
population enabled, maybe even forced, government activities to expand exponentially; literacy
rates increased, print culture proliferated, information abounded, the circulating library took hold
and a mass reading public was born; technological developments broadened and quickened
opportunities for travel and communication; uncharted lands were explored and mapped, and for
much of the century, Britain enjoyed an expansion of commerce with the wider world.

These transformations and the optimistic embrace of progress upon which they depended inevitably
wrought their fair share of anxious reponse. The central metaphors of Dickens's fiction -fog,
contagion, the prison- evoke the capacity of disease, both literal and figurative, to spread throughout
modern society, eventually to immobilise it. Morover, if fundamentally outward-looking, the
trademak Victorian emphases on progress, expansion and mobility also helped to produce a
corollary preoccupation with interiority. Curiosity is arguably the premise of major works as
different as Jane Eyre, Litlle Dorrit and Alice in Wonderland. The idea and ideal of transformation
is also central to the Victorian study of self than of sociedty. Figures such as Dr Jekyll and later
Dracula, embody a deep-seated uncertainty about the stability of identity itself in a changing and
modern world.

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The contradictions and complexities of Victorian England account in no small measure for its
enduring appeal.

This period is marked by the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), what gave Britain a strong sense
of continuity. Queen Victoria is associated with Britain's great age of industrial expansion,
economic progress and, especially, empire. At her death, it was said, Britain had a worldwide
empire on which the sun never set. Victoria's popularity grew with the increasing imperial sentiment
from the 1870s onwards. After the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the government of India was transferred
from the East India Company to the Crown with the position of Governor General upgraded to
Viceroy, and in 1877 Victoria became Empress of India under the Royal Titles Act passed by
Disraeli's government. During Victoria's long reign, direct political power moved away from the
sovereign. A series of Acts broadened the social and economic base of the electorate. Although
conservative in some respects - like many at the time she opposed giving women the vote - on
social issues, she tended to favour measures to improve the lot of the poor, such as the Royal
Commission on housing. She also supported many charities involved in education, hospitals and
other areas. Victoria and her family travelled and were seen on an unprecedented scale, thanks to
transport improvements and other technical changes such as the spread of newspapers and the
invention of photography. Victoria was the first reigning monarch to use trains - she made her first
train journey in 1842. In her later years, she almost became the symbol of the British Empire.

The establishment of free trade and legislation of trade unions, the repeal of the Corn Laws, passage
of the Poor Law Amendment Act, gradual improements in the position of the working classes and
conditions of factory life, the passage of the Education Act of 1870 and legal reforms in favour of
women's rights are among the many noteworthy achievements of ths period, together with the need
to improve sanitary conditions, especially in the cities.

Victorian literary history provides many examples of innovative appropriation of both forms and
themes inherited from the eighteenth century and the Romantic era. Also Shakespeare was an
enormous influence on Victorian writers. All in all, Victorian writing addresses four main
controversies: evolution, industrialism, what the Victorians called "The Woman Question", and
Great Britain's identity as an imperial power.

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) dominated the first part of Victoria's reign. Extraordinarily popular
in his day with his characters taking on a life of their own beyond the page, Dickens is still one of
the most popular and read authors of that time period. His first novel, The Pickwick Papers(1836),

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written when he was twenty-five, was an overnight success, and all his subsequent works sold
extremely well. The comedy of his first novel has a satirical edge and this pervades his writing.
Dickens worked diligently and prolifically to produce the entertaining writing that the public
wanted, but also to offer commentary on social problems and the plight of the poor and oppressed.
His most important works include Oliver Twist (1837–1838), Dombey and Son (1846–1848), Bleak
House (1852–1853), Great Expectations (1860–1861), Little Dorrit (1855–1857), Our Mutual
Friend (1864–1865) The Old Curiosity Shop, and A Christmas Carol (1843). There is a gradual
trend in his fiction towards darker themes which mirrors a tendency in much of the writing of the
19th century.

William Thackeray's (1811–1863) most famous work Vanity Fair appeared in 1848. Anne,
Charlotte and Emily Brontë produced notable works of the period, although these were not
immediately appreciated by Victorian critics. Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily's only work, is an
example of Gothic Romanticism from a woman's point of view, which examines class, myth, and
gender. Jane Eyre (1847), by her sister Charlotte, is another major nineteenth century novel that has
gothic themes. Anne's second novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), written in realistic rather
than romantic style, is mainly considered to be the first sustained feminist novel.

Later in this period George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), published The Mill on the Floss in 1860, and
in 1872 her most famous work Middlemarch. Like the Brontës she published under a masculine
pseudonym.

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was 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.[1]
Charles Dickens was another important influence.[2] Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much
in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society. Some of his novels are
Under the Greenwood Tree, (1872) and Jude the Obscure, (1895).

Robert Browning (1812–89) and Alfred Tennyson (1809–92) were Victorian England's most
famous poets, though more recent taste has tended to prefer the poetry of Thomas Hardy, who,
though he wrote poetry throughout his life, did not publish a collection until 1898. Early poetry of
W. B. Yeats was also published in Victoria's reign.

With regard to the theatre it was not until the last decades of the nineteenth century that any
significant works were produced. This began with Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas, from the
1870s, various plays of George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) in the 1890s, and the Oscar Wilde
(1854–1900) The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895.

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The Victorians are credited with 'inventing childhood', partly via their efforts to stop child labour
and the introduction of compulsory education. As children began to be able to read, literature for
young people became a growth industry, with not only established writers producing works for
children, such as Dickens' A Child's History of England and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland (1865), and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871).

5.2. The XXth century: history and literature

Despite evident continuities from the late Victorian period up to the First World War, the cumulative
effect of the profound changes wrought by industrialisation throughout the nineteenth century gave
the twentieth century a wholly new temper and texture almost from the start. Britain was now
irreversibly an urban, and increasingly a suburban nation. The democratic and educational reforms
of the late 1800's gave impetus to more radical demands for reform in the 1900's, as did the
continuing rise of organised labour and of socialism and feminism. The “Irish question” becomes a
mayor issue ending officially with the Government of Ireland Act of 1920 that particioned Ireland
into Ulster and the South, though the Anglo-Irish War continued until December 1921 when the
Anglo-Irish Treaty finally gave Southern Ireland, now the Irish Free State, the status of a self-
governing dominion within the British Empire, leaving Ulster separate as part of the United
Kingdom. A whole raft of scientific and technological advances had led to striking material
expressions of a new age in the form of the motor car, cinema, wireless telegraphy, the aeroplane
and electric power. The “Great War” cuts this period in two.

Various complex international tensions led to the outbreak of war in 1914. Germany had ambitions
to overtake Britain as the world's dominant economic, naval and imperial powwer and strategic
alliances had brought about two loose blocks, the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and
Italy on one side and the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia on the other. At the Paris
Peace Conference which concluded the war, the allies imposed punitive reparations on Germany
which sowed the seeds of the Second World War by damaging the Germann economy and creating
the conditions for the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. In the period between the wars, Britain began to
restructure its economy with the development of new industries focused more on the domestic
market than on exports, with particular expansion in the fields of motor-vehicle production,
chemicals, consumer goods and elecrtirc power. However, unemployment in 1929 was already high
at 1.5 million and it rose to 17 per cent by 1932. In 1939, the outbreak of the Second World War
changed life in Britain considerably. The declining world power of Britain and the loss of its empire

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has resulted in a complex process of redefining and revisiting ideas of national identity. The story of
Britain's declining imperial power was intricately related to the rise of American and Russian global
power and the “Cold War· between them. Britain ' s attempts to suppress colonial insurrections since
1945 have been mostly interconnected with its alliance with America against the spread of
communism, and as the Suez crisis in 1956 showed, when British colonial interests clashed with
Amercian Cold War policies, the latter prevailed.

Despite it all, Britain has had a permanent seat on the security council of the United Nations (UN)
since 1945 and played an important role in the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
(NATO) with the USA and other Western European states. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Britain
scaled down its military forces and commitments, amalgamating traditional regiment and, handing
over control of its naval ad military facilities overseas to its allies.

The “new world order” pursued by the USA has found Britain partnering America in closer military
and political alliance than ever, fichting in Iraq side by side both in 1991 and 2003, in Afghanistan
in 2002, and with NATO in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This “special relationship”
continues to define Britain as a global power. Since 1972, Britain has also been a member of the
European Community though always showing reluctance to cede any power over its own
sovereignity to the institutions of European integration. The idea of European integration has often
been represented in British political discourse as a threat, not just to political sovereignity but also
to cutlura identity, and as an unattractive and problematic alternative to the USA. The choce
between America and Europe, as the vehicles for maintaining Briatin's role as a global power,
remains the central, divisive issue in contemporary British foreign politics.

All these historical changes find a sequel in this brief summary of the most relevant authors of the
English litearture in the second half of the twentieth century:

Post-War Literature

1. F. R. Leavis and the Moral Centrality of English Studies. The Question of Englishness and
the English Canon.
2. Fiction: The Novel as Exploration of the Ethos of the Age.
1. Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966). A World in Decline. Nostalgia for the Past: A Handful of
Dust (1934), Brideshead Revisited (1945).
2. Muriel Spark (1918- ). The Novel as Exploration of Evil. The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie (1961), The Driver’s Seat (1970).

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 3. William Golding (1911-1993). Questioning the Ethos of Englishness. Lord of the
Flies (1954). A 1954 dystopian novel about a group of British boys stuck on an
uninhabited island who try to govern themselves with disastrous results. It deals with
the controversial subjects of human nature and individual welfare versus the common
good.

Poetry in the Fifties: Writing Against the Grain

1. “The Movement”: Philip Larkin (1922-1985). The Democratising of Poetry.

2. John Betjeman (1906-1984). Delighting in the Well-made Poem: Technical Skill and
Dramatic Urgency.
3. Stevie Smith (1902-1971). Dark Emotions Cloaked in Humour.

Drama in the Sixties and Seventies: Anger and Counter Culture

1. John Osborne (1929-1994). Revolution in the Scene: Look Back in Anger (1956). It is
aplay that concerns a love triangle involving an intelligent and educated but disaffected
young man of working-class origin (Jimmy Porter), his upper-middle-class, impassive wife
(Alison), and her haughty best friend (Helena Charles). Cliff, an amiable Welsh lodger,
attempts to keep the peace. The play was a success on the London stage, and spawned the
term "angry young men" to describe Osborne and those of his generation who employed the
harshness of realism in the theatre in contrast to the more escapist theatre that characterized
the previous generation.
2. Edward Bond (1934-). Explorations of Contemporary Violence and Oppression. Revisions
of Shakespeare: Lear (1971), Bingo (1973).
3. David Hare (1947-). The Theatre as Exploration of Political and Social Issues: Plenty
(1978), The Asian Plays, Pravda (1985).
4. Harold Pinter (1930-). Power Plays and “the Comedy of Menace”. The Dumb Waiter (1957).
5. Caryl Churchill (1938-). Women, Power and Subjection. Top Girls (1982).
6. The Politics of Comedy: Tom Stoppard (1937-) Theatricality and the Comedy of Ideas.
Travesties (1974), The Real Inspector Hound (1968).

The postmodern turn. Fiction

1. Brief Account of the Postulates of Postmodernism. The Crisis of Epistemology and

Representation. The Experimental Thrust.
2. Doris Lessing (1919-). The Novel as Exploration of the “Great Whirlwind of Change”. The

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 Golden Notebook (1962). This book, and the two that followed it explore mental and
societal breakdown. The book also contains a powerful anti-war and anti-Stalinist message,
an extended analysis of communism and the Communist Party in England from the 1930s to
the 1950s, and a famed examination of the budding sexual and women's liberation
movements.
3. John Fowles (1926-2005). Metafiction, or, the Novel’s Self-conscious Reflection Upon its
Own Structure as Language. The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969).
4. Julian Barnes (1946-). Historiographic Metafiction. A History of the World in Ten 1/2
Chapters (1989).
5. Margaret Drabble (1939-). The State-of-the-Nation Novel. The Radiant Way Trilogy (The
Radiant Way, 1987; A Natural Curiosity, 1989; The Gates of Ivory, 1991).
6. Martin Amis (1949-). Tapping the Contemporary, Grappling with History. Time’s Arrow
(1991).
7. Ian McEwan (1948-). Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel. "Butterflies" (1975); Atonement
(2001).

The New Poetry

1. Ted Hughes (1930-1998). The World of Primitivism, Folk-Tales and Myth. Fantasies of
animal violence. Crow (1970), Wolf Watching (1989). Hughes's earlier poetic work is rooted
in nature and, in particular, the innocent savagery of animals, an interest from an early age.
He wrote frequently of the mixture of beauty and violence in the natural world. Hughes's
later work is deeply reliant upon myth and the Britis bardic tradition, heavily inflected with a
modernist, Jugian and ecological viewpoint. He re-worked classical and archetypal myth
working with a conception of the dark sub-conscious.
2. Douglas Dunn (1942- ). Nostalgia and Self-Observation Made Universal. Northlight (1989).
3. Postcolonial issues.
1. Grace Nichols (1950-). The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984), Lazy Thoughts of a
Lazy Woman (1989).
2. Fred D’Aguiar (1960-) New and Selected Poems (2002).

5.3. Bibliography

 Clemen, G & Stagno L. Britihs History seen through art. Balck Cat Publishing, 2001.

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  O'Driscoll, J. Britain for learners of English. OUP, 2009.

 Poplawski, P. (ed.). English Literature in Context. CUOP, 2010.

 Rodríguez, B. & Varela R. (coords). Language, Literature and Culture in English Studies.
Alianza Editorial, 2010.

 Abrams, M. H., and Stephen Greenblatt (eds.). The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
Seventh edition. Volume 2. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2000, or 2006.

On line resources:

Wikipedia: www.en.wikipedia.org

Encyclopedia Britannica: www.britannica.com

Official website of the British Monarchy: http://www.royal.gov.uk

The Norton Anthology of English Literature: http://www.wwnorton.com

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