TOPIC: VICTORIAN ERA: THE ERA OF
DARKNESS?
SUBJECT: VICTORIAN LITERATURE
NAME: AMI G. SOITRA
ROLL NO: 30
COLLEGE: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH,
MAHARAJA KRISHNAKUMARSINHJI BHAVANAGAR UNIVERSITY
SEMESTER: 2
EMAIL: amisojitra23@gmail.com
INTRODCTION:
Victorian literature, and
it's good to keep in mind that all literary periods, or movements, are really
just a scholarly construct to help readers understand and classify literature
from different time periods or that have been written in different styles. So,
it's not like Charles Dickens got together with George Eliot and Robert
Browning and went, 'Hey, we're Victorian writers, so our work better have a
strong sense of right and wrong.' That's not how it worked.
Characteristics of
Victorian literature are likely similar because the artists were inspired both
by the art that came before them and the events occurring during the time that
they were working. So, something can seem Victorian, but not have been written
in the Victorian era, or something written in the Victorian era might not
actually seem Victorian. For example, Charlotte and Emily
Bronte wrote Jane
Eyre and Wuthering Heights In what would be considered the
Victorian era, but those novels have much more qualities of the Romantic
period.
Major Events of the Victorian Era:
Victorian literature is just
literature written during the reign of Queen
Victoria in Great Britain. My
favorite British comedian, Eddie Izzard, refers to Queen Victoria as 'one of
England's more frumpy queens.' You can take a look at her picture and decide
for yourself. So, Queen Victoria reigned from 1837-1901. Currently her reign is
the longest of any British monarch - 63 years and 7 months - but it looks like
our girl, Queen Elizabeth II, is well-poised to steal that record.
Some major events that took place
during the Victoria era include:
Huge growth in population
Improvements in technology
Changing world views
Poor condition of the working class
Now let’s discuss about them in detail
Huge growth in population
- A huge
growth in population. During Victoria's reign, the population of England
more than doubled, from 14 million to 32 million.
Improvements in technology
- There
were also some significant improvements in technology. The
Victorian era slightly overlaps with Britain's Industrial Revolution,
which saw big changes to the way that people lived, worked, and traveled.
These improvements in technology offered a lot of opportunities for the
people in England but also represented a major upheaval in regards to how
people lived their lives and interacted with the world. Those of us who
were alive before the Internet should be able to relate. I mean, the
Internet has made a lot of things easier, but it's also brought a lot of
issues about personal privacy, how we communicate, and the potential for
terrible things, like identity theft.
Changing world views
- Another
characteristic of the Victorian era are changing world views.
In addition to the major developments in technology, there were emerging
scientific beliefs, like Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and those things
were changing how people in England thought about themselves and how they
interacted with the world around them. Most notably, a lot of people were
distancing themselves from the church.
Poor conditions for the working class
- And
finally, there were poor conditions for the working class. The
Industrial Revolution led to the distance between the haves and have-nots
growing at a really high rate, and a lot of people (especially artists,
like writers) felt obligated to speak out against what they believed to be
societal injustices, which if you've followed any of the 'We are the 99%'
movement, it might sound familiar to things that are happening right now.
There are main two important things
happens during Victorian time.
Ø Industrialization
Ø New Education
Let’s discuss
them in detail.
INDUSTRIALIZATION:
The Industrial Revolution — the changes
in the making of goods that resulted from substituting machines for hand labor
— began with a set of inventions for spinning and weaving developed in England
in the eighteenth century. At first this new machinery was operated by workers
in their homes, but in the 1780s the introduction of the steam engine to drive
the machines led manufacturers to install them in large buildings called at
first mills and later factories. Mill towns quickly grew in central and
northern England; the population of the city of Manchester, for example,
increased by ten times in the years between 1760 and 1830.
By the beginning of the Victorian period, the Industrial Revolution had
created profound economic and social changes. Hundreds of thousands of workers
had migrated to industrial towns, where they made up a new kind of working
class. Wages were extremely low, hours very long — fourteen a day, or even more.
Employers often preferred to hire women and children, who worked for even less
than men. Families lived in horribly crowded, unsanitary housing. Moved by the
terrible suffering resulting from a severe economic depression in the early
1840s, writers and men in government drew increasingly urgent attention to the
condition of the working class. In her poem The Cry of the Children, Elizabeth Barrett Browning portrays the suffering of children in mines
and factories. In The
Condition of the Working Class, Friedrich Engels describes the conclusions
he drew during the twenty months he spent observing industrial conditions in
Manchester. His 1845 book prepared the ground for his work with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto (1848),
which asserts that revolution is the necessary response to the inequity of
industrial capitalist society. Elizabeth Gaskell, wife of a Manchester
minister, was inspired to begin her writing career with the novel Mary Barton (1848) in order to portray the suffering of the working class. In Hard Times (1854), Charles Dickens created the
fictional city of Coketown to depict the harshness of existence in the
industrial towns of central and northern England. During the 1830s and 1840s a
number of commissions introduced testimony
about the conditions in mines and factories that led to the beginning of
government regulation and inspection, particularly of the working conditions of
women and children.
NEW EDUCATION:
Victorian
Prose:
Arguably the most well-known Victorian writer was Charles
Dickens. He wrote a lot of novels about the struggles of the poor and the
battle between right and wrong. His characters were really vivid but not
terribly nuanced, so it's pretty obvious from the get-go who's good, who's bad,
who can be reformed, and who can't.
Dickens'
novels usually end with every character getting the kind of ending they
deserve. So, the good people get happy endings, and the bad people get sad
endings, and there really aren't that many loose ends left at the end of the novel.
Emily Bronte’s
(see Bronte, family) single
novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), is a unique masterpiece
propelled by a vision of elemental passions but controlled by an uncompromising
artist
The fine novels of Emily's sister Charlotte Bronte, especially Jane Eyre (1847) and Valletta (1853), are more rooted in convention,
but daring in their own ways. The novels of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) appeared during the
1860s and 70s. A woman of great erudition and moral fervor, Eliot was concerned
with ethical conflicts and social problems. George Meredith produced comic novels noted for their
psychological perception. Another novelist of the late 19th century was the
prolific Anthony Trollope, famous
for sequences of related novels that explore social, ecclesiastical, and
political life in England.
Poetry:
The
preeminent poet of the Victorian age was Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Although romantic in subject
matter, his poetry was tempered by personal melancholy; in its mixture of
social certitude and religious doubt it reflected the age. The poetry of Robert Browning and his wife, Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, was immensely
popular, though Elizabeth's was more venerated during their lifetimes. Browning
is best remembered for his superb dramatic monologues. RudyardKipling,
the poet of the empire triumphant, captured the quality of the life of the
soldiers of British expansion. Some fine religious poetry was produced by
Francis Thompson, Christina Rossetti, and Lionel Johnson.
In
the middle of the 19th century the so-called Pre-Raphaelites,
led by the painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
sought to revive what they judged to be the simple, natural values and
techniques of medieval life and art. Their quest for a rich symbolic art led
them away, however, from the mainstream. William Morris—designer, inventor, printer,
poet, and social philosopher—was the most versatile of the group, which
included the poets Christina Rossetti and Coventry Patmore.
Algernon
Charles Swinburne began as a Pre-Raphaelite but soon
developed his own classically influenced, sometimes florid style. A. E. Housman and Thomas Hardy, Victorian figures
who lived on into the 20th cent., share a pessimistic view in their poetry, but
Housman's well-constructed verse is rather more superficial. The great
innovator among the late Victorian poets was the Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. The concentration and
originality of his imagery, as well as his jolting meter ("sprung
rhythm"), had a profound effect on 20th-century poetry.
During the 1890s the most conspicuous figures on the
English literary scene were the decadents.
The principal figures in the group were Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, and, first among them in both
notoriety and talent, Oscar Wilde. The Decadents' disgust with bourgeois
complacency led them to extremes of behavior and expression. However limited
their accomplishments, they pointed out the hypocrisies in Victorian values and
institutions. The sparkling, witty comedies of Oscar Wilde and the comic
operettas of W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan were perhaps the brightest
achievements of 19th-century British drama.
Thus, Victorian era was not an era of darkness but
there
Is also something beyond the darkness.
