The Victorian Period: Great Change and Great Peace

Peace and Economic Growth: Britain Rules

• Queen Victoria has long reign: 1837-1901

• Political and social stability– Napoleon had been defeated at

Waterloo in 1815– “Empire” of 1600s and 1700s w/

interests in India and U.S. continued to grow

Peace and Economic Growth: Britain Rules (cont.’d)

• Political and social stability (cont.’d)– Queen Victoria was empress to over

200,000,000 people living OUTSIDE Britain– “The sun never sets on the British empire.”

Industrial Revolution• new towns

– Liverpool• new goods• new wealth• new jobs• gradual political reforms• middle-class and working-class politicians achieve political

power• monarchy and aristocracy left in place

– monarchy left as figurehead of today

The Idea of Progress• “An Acre in Middlesex” (Thomas

Babington Macaulay)– For him (and other Victorians), history

meant material possessions– He had an amazed regard for squalor

and disorder of the past. – He had typical confident Victorian

pride on their material advances and on their ability to solve social problems

Religious Movements• Growth of Evangelicalism and

Utilitarianism• Wide sweeping reforms

Questions and Doubts• Victorian writers begin asking, “Does

material comfort fully satisfy human needs and wishes?”

• Exploiting of the earth and humans is questioned

• Codes of authority/decorum mocked• Some writers state that materialist ideas of

reality overlook the spirit and the soul that made life beautiful and just

Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman views of Macaulay’s

and Huxley’s ideas of history and nature as flawed

• Other writers were saying that man didn’t see the universe the way it really is– Charles Dickens (wrote in 1830s to 1865)

• He writes about hollow, glittery, superficial and excessive people

• Cost of progress resulting in description of huddle and waste of cities and the smoke and fire of industrial landscapes

Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman thought Macaulay’s

and Huxley’s ideas of history and nature were flawed (cont.’d)

• Other writers (cont.’d)– Robert Browning in

“My Last Duchess” writes about a murderously possessive (hence excessive) duke

Thomas Hardy

“Smog” is described in 1871 by historian and social critic John

Ruskin as…• “the plague wind”• “the storm-cloud of the

nineteenth century”• “[m]ere smoke [that] would

not blow to and fro in that wild way… [which] looks more to me as if it were made of dead men’s souls.”

From Trust to Skepticism and Denial• Trust in transcendental

power true of EARLY Victorian thought because they’re heirs of Romantic idea of the finite world interfused with divinity

• Later in Victorian Era this idea would change radically.

From Trust to Skepticism and Denial (cont.’d)

• The highest function of writer and poet was to make man aware of connection between earth and heaven

• Thomas Carlyle expressed this idea in his essay “The Poet as Hero”

Thomas Carlyle

Newer Victorian Writers• Gerald Manley Hopkins• Christina Rossetti

– Some thought it unnecessary; these two, and others, celebrated relationship between man and nature that could be redemptive and joyous:

• Algernon Charles Swinburne• Rudyard Kipling

Gerald Manley Hopkins

Newer Victorian Writers (cont.’d)• Others are saddened by

what seemed to be the withdrawal of the divine from the world:– Matthew Arnold (“Dover

Beach”)• the only thing certain is that

existence is not governed by a benevolent intelligence that could care for its creatures

Matthew Arnold

Newer Victorian writers (cont.’d)• Whereas Dickens and

George Eliot, a woman, had shown achievement through sympathy and unselfishness, Hardy and Housman pessimistically showed relationships bereft and betrayed by unfaithfulness, war, and other problems.

Charles Dickens

Newer Victorian writers (cont.’d)• Over the century, the trust in a

transcendental power inherited from the Romantics eroded, giving way to uncertainty and spiritual doubt. Late-Victorian writers turned to a pessimistic exploration of the human struggle against indifferent natural forces.

Revealing Reality, Creating Coherence• Victorian writers have a variety of

purposes:• scare/shame into effective moral and political action• What it’s like to live in a pleasurable moment of

intense feeling (ex., dramatic monologue of a character)

• entertained• inform• reassure

Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde show two purposes:

• One, make readers hope or wonder if reality was really like it had been painted (ex., in Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” or in Browning’s poetry or in an essay by Macaulay)

• Two, however bleak, the writer could make a pleasurable order in the world

Oscar Wilde