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THE VICTORIAN AGE The Victorian Age coincides with the reign of the Queen Victoria, which lasts from 1837 to 1901 and so it is a huge period of time and its themes are various. It is divides into two parts: -The High Victorian and -The Late Victorian The most important themes of the High Victorian are the condition of England and its social problems, the poor condition of working class, the conditions of the industrial cities. This period is also named Puritan age because sex became a taboo and the family’ structure was strictly patriarchal - women were constantly under the authority of their fathers or husbands. [During the Victorian age women began to fight for freedom and emancipation]. Three main literary currents: 1. Victorian Literature 1830 – 1880 – 1920 [High Victorian vs Late Victorian & Edwardian Literature] 2. Modernism 1920 - 1945 3. [Post war] and Post-Modern Literature Important events during the Victorian Era: 1. Industrial Revolution: improvements in technology (ex: telegraph, railway, gas and water supplies, electrical power, photography, telephone) Railway > faster and less expensive travels Photography > new definitions of what is real (John Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, Arthur Conan Doyle, Victor eugo and Émile Zola were photographers) + movement of people and ideas: new wave of globalization 2. Growth of population: from 14 million to 32 million; 3. The Great Exhibition (1851): massive trade show held in London at the Chrystal Palace; it symbolised Britain’s industrial and economic power in the world. 4. Scientific developments in biology and geology. 1859: “On the Origin of the Species” by Charles Darwin [Theory of evolution and natural selection VS Theory of the creation from the Bible] Theory of evolution: “All living creatures have taken their forms through a slow process of change and adaptation in a struggle for survival. Only the strongest can survive.” - Charles Darwin, “On the Origin of the Species

THE VICTORIAN AGE Fiction: Charles Dickens Wilde* Thackeray The Bronte Sisters George Eliot Gaskell Carroll hardy Conan Doyle Stoker Stevenson Kipling THE VICTORIAN LITERATURE High Victorian (1830-1880) 1900) NOVEL: Dickens Thackeray The Bronte Sisters Gaskell George Eliot Carroll POETRY: Tennyson Pre-Raphaelites Robert Browning

Poetry: Tennyson Pre-Raphaelites Browning

Theatre: Wilde Shaw

Late Victorian (1880Thomas Hardy Conan Doyle Stoker Stevenson Kipling Bordering WITH MODERNISM Conrad H. G. Wells THEATRE Wilde Shaw

THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE – It refers to the Paradox of the Victorian Age. The Victorian age was the age of progress, stability and great social reforms but at the same time was characterised by poverty, injustices and social unrest. On the one hand, prosperity, wealth, progress; on the other, labour exploitation, appalling living conditions of the working class, crimes and violence. On the one hand faith in God and on the other the new scientific discoveries.

PRO

CON

 Progress brought by the industrial revolution  Rising wealth of the upper & middle classes  Expansion of the Britain’s power and its empire (India, large parts of Africa…)

 Poverty, disease and deprivation in the working class in the working classes; prostitution  Young children forced to work in textile mills and mines  Poverty and debt crimes were punished with imprisonment  Colonization & slavery of other races THE VICTORIAN VALUES Morality, church, family, home Idea of respectability of the middle-upper classes (good manners, regular attendance at church, charitable activity) Puritan society and repressed sexuality Family as patriarchal unit; submissive role of the woman Patriotism and ideas of racial superiority THE MIDDLE CLASS - writers and readers shared, for the first time, the same interests and opinions; - Literature became the most powerful form of entertainment; - publication through a series of chapters on periodicals; - circulating libraries. The philosophical context: John Stuart Mill, one of the most influential thinkers in the history of liberalism. Liberalism: Bourgeois democracy Freedom of citizens / interference of the government only for the protection of society The emancipation of women He wrote On Liberty and The Subjection of Women. Liberty: the individual ought to be free to do as he wishes unless he harms others. No convention or morals of the society. Addresses the nature and limits of the power that can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. - Happiness: state of the mind and spirit – no selfish pleasure - Legislation should try to help people develop their talents - Good society: free interplay of people - Progress from mental energy > importance to EDUCATION and ART VICTORIAN ESSAYIST - Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881): he is Scottish. He is defined as “an intellectual force to be reckoned with the borders of Scotland”. His writing is very powerful due to the classical rationality of the 18th Century Scottish philosophy. He was well read in modern German thought. He influenced an important group of early midVictorian writers, such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Kingsley. -Against Victorian hypocrisy, materialism and faith in progress

-Analysis of the EVILS of industrialism and capitalism -Rejection of Utilitarianism and Positivist optimism • Sartor Resartus: it combines a theorizing German central character with a mediating and English editor. The work conveys the central precepts of his philosophy: energy, earnestness and duty. The style in which it is written intermixes German and English, by echoing earlier literature and by playing games with meanings; it works through a process of amalgamation and assimilation. Important message “Everlasting Yea”, which solves all contradiction and demands a submission to the will of God, contrasted to the “Everlasting No”, the name for the spirit of unbelief in God. • Chartism: essay in which he confronted the growing threat of class war posed by its new political articulacy of industrial workers. This essay begins by offering definitions of what Carlyle styles “The condition of England Question”, definitions which derive from the observation of the state of nation attempting to come to terms with its parliamentary and social reforms aimed at deflecting revolution. John Ruskin writer, painter, poet -Importance of artistic values in society VS economic values of Victorian society -Theory of painting and art - Modern Painters -Artistic values linked with moral values -The Stones of Venice Beauty of the Gothic style – gothic artisans are considered free. They expressed individual talent + spirit of society Vs industrial workers “degradation of the operative into a machine Matthew Arnold poet & cultural critic -Tries to establish allembracing notion of culture -Need of redefined high culture VS decay in politics and religion Need of bonding classes together Ends in authoritarianism + repression -Essays on Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats -Idea of an age full of confusions and uncertainties VS achievement of an expressive modern poetry High Victorian (1830-1880) FICTION: • Dickens • Thackeray • The Brontë Sisters • Eliot • Gaskell • Carroll POETRY: • Tennyson • Pre-Raphaelites • Browning Charles Dickens (1812-1870): a disciple of Carlyle. He wrote revolutionary novels because he directed his fiction to a questioning of social inequalities, to a distrust of institutions and to a pressing appeal for action and earnestness. He took up issues and he campaigned against them using fiction as his vehicle. He is associated with social abuses because he was the most persuasive and influential voice. He was faithful to the teaching of Christianity as a moral basis for his thought and writing. There was something wrong with the society and this became the nature of his fiction, which was multifarious, digressive and generous: it reflects the nature of Victorian urban society with all its conflicts and disharmonies, its eccentricities and its constrictions. • Sketches by “Boz”: They are his own first experiments and they reveal an acute ear for speech and an acute observation of gesture, habits and misery of London interiors. The Sketches are anecdotal and descriptive • The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club: series of anecdotal stories concerning the members of a London club. The characters move around England and make various comic encounters.

• Oliver Twist: it is the reflection of the darker side of Dicken’s imagination. He attacks the effects of the workhouse system in the opening chapters, but he succeeded in damning workhouse abuses in the popular imagination and even in eliminating them from reality. A contrast of scene, mood and narrative style describe the opposition of the insecurities of criminal life middle-class respectability Some of his most important works: • “Oliver Twist” (1838) • “David Copperfield” (1849-50) • “Little Dorrit” (1857) • “Bleak House” (1853) • “Hard Times” (1854) • “Great Expectations” (1860-61) The first three are symbols of an exploited childhood, put in the bitter realities of slums and factories. The other have social issues: they bring out the conditions of the poor people and the working class in general. Dickens was the dominant novelist of his time. He had an intimate relationship with his readers and in the earlier fiction he readily responded to the evident popularity of his novels and characters. THE NOVEL The 19th century saw the novel becoming the leading form of literature in England and the main form of entertainment. Novels were first published in instalments in the pages of periodicals. The novelists described society as they saw it - they denounced its negative aspects, however, their criticism was not radical. A great number of the novels published in this period were written by women, some of which decided to adopt a male pseudonym: it wasn’t easy for a woman to be published and “considered”. Most of readers were also women, they spent most of their time at home while men worked. - Moral and social responsibility of the writers; - reflected the social changes (industrial revolution, growth of the city, working class conditions) ; - Third person narration = omniscient narrator - “Good” characters are rewarded, “bad” ones are punished. - The city as the main setting

THE INDUSTRIAL SETTING Industrial revolution: growth of the cities and extinction of rural communities; The city as a newly experienced world; London as the symbol of the new social system, with signs of progression and despair. Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell: realistic representations of the industrial setting 18th century novel had insisted on the values and qualities such as reason, morality, sympathy and the will to be oneself against all odds. Individual independent of birth and inherited wealth. 19th century novel wanted to contain and normalize this individual in the society. Less importance to moral values. Last decades of the century: the SENSATION NOVEL & similar - 1860 Attention is given to physical description. Great importance of the “senses”. No conformity with the Victorian era values GOTHIC NOVEL

Gothic fiction is a genre or mode of literature that combines fiction and horror, death, and at times romance. -Its origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled (in its second edition) "A Gothic Story". -The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror, an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole's novel. -It originated in England in the second half of the 18th century where, following Walpole, it was further developed by Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, William Thomas Beckford and Matthew Lewis. The genre had much success in the 19th century, as witnessed by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the works of Edgar Allan Poe, as well as Charles Dickens with his novella, A Christmas Carol. Another well-known novel in this genre, dating from the late Victorian era, is Bram Stoker's Dracula. The name Gothic refers to the (pseudo)-medieval buildings, emulating Gothic architecture, in which many of these stories take place. This extreme form of romanticism was very popular in England and Germany. VICTORIAN GOTHIC NOVEL In the Victorian era, Gothic fiction had ceased to be a dominant literary genre. eowever, the Gothic figures & aspects used earlier in the eighteenth century in texts were transported and interwoven into many late-nineteenth century narratives – they included psychological and physical terror; mystery and the supernatural; madness, doubling, and heredity curses. The gloomy atmosphere and persistent melodrama present in Dickens' Bleak eouse and Oliver Twist, exemplifies the transference of Gothic components into an urban, modern setting. The Victorian Gothic moves away from the familiar themes of Gothic fiction - ruined castles, helpless heroines, and evil villains - to situate the tropes of the supernatural and the uncanny within a recognisable environment. This brings a sense of verisimilitude to the narrative, and thereby renders the Gothic features of the text even more disturbing. - house (no religious place) - The patriarchal structure of Victorian society (no antagonist that kidnaps the girl) The Victorian Family: Structures and Stresses by Anthony S. Wohl The novel attacked the artifice of the façade, the social contract (Victorian compromise). Detective fictions: rationality VS irrationality.

The portraits of the women in the novel were so unlike the prevailing stereotype of the docile, apathetic Victorian lady that they were often considered bizarre and inartistic inventions. In the Victorian period, female gothic became an increasingly complex and contradictory genre. It not only represented women’s fears of domestic imprisonment, but also managed and contained their fantasies of escape from the physical and psychological confinements of the domestic and conventionally defined femininity. By the 1860s the category had come to include work by male novelists, such as Wilkie Collins. [Dickens’ friend] BRONNTE SISTERS Main works: • “Wuthering Heights” (1847) by Emily: it talks about a tragic story of Catherine and eeathcliff, it has a complex narrative structure with two narrators, no chronological order and describes individual personality (Gothic element: Catherine’s ghost). • “Jane Eyre” (1847) by Charlotte: it deals with the story of Jane, an orphan who becomes a governess by Mr. Rochester and falls in love with him. The character of Jane is seen as a different kind of heroine: independent, compelling and capable. The story is filled with strong feelings of passion and intensity from a woman’s standpoint. Other characteristics: first person narrator and emotional use of language.

• “Agnes Grey” (1847) by Anne Common characteristics: • Gothic and romantic elements • Violent passions of love and death • Wild natural landscapes Elizabeth Gaskell (1810 – 1865) English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor, and are of interest to social historians as well as lovers of literature. Mary Barton (1848) Cranford (1853) > Social novels North and South (1855) She lived in Manchester (2nd industrial city after London). Denounces inequality and injustice on the workers comparison between the old rural and new industrial societies contrasting values and ways of life between rural life and industrial city (Manchester) THE SENSATION(AL) NOVEL Sensational = plots taken from sensational newspaper reports of criminal or divorce cases.

Sensation fiction was a literary genre that achieved enormous popularity during the 1860s in Britain. The first and best-known sensation novels were Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861), and Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). The genre derived its name from the contemporary theatre’s “sensation drama” noted for spectacular effects and displays of intense emotion. Sensation fiction drew on a variety of popular forms including melodrama, domestic realism, newspaper reports, Newgate novels, and gothic tales. The gripping plots of these novels involved scandalous events including murder, adultery, bigamy, fraud, madness, and sexual deviance often perpetrated by seemingly moral and upright individuals in familiar domestic settings. The genre’s popularity provoked alarm and hostility on the part of literary, political, and religious authorities who denounced sensation novels for eliciting intense physical responses from their readers. - English country house or bourgeois villa - Addressed contemporary anxieties and fantasies about marriage and family & about changing gender and social class - Murder, blackmail, fraud, adultery, bigamy: unveiling the secrets of respectable society - Readers and characters as detectives - female protagonist not simply as passive victims of male power but also as actively desiring. In some cases, self-consciously manipulating others. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) “What do we know of the mysteries that may hang about the houses we enter? […]” MALE GOTHIC - Tales of monstrosity: undeveloped wild beast in one’s own heart 1886: Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 1891: Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray 1896: e.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau 1897: Bram Stoker, Dracula Self-splitting Repression of desire and its enactment. Lord entry Wotton: if we repress our desires in conformity with social mores, «we degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid”. High Victorian (1830-1880)

FICTION: Dickens Thackeray George Eliot Gaskell Carroll The Bronte Sisters

POETRY: Tennyson & Browning

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) Dickens was born in 1812. He had an unhappy childhood: his father went to prison for debt and he had to work in a factory/workhouse at the age of 12. Most of his novels have autobiographical aspects & there are also themes as repressive education, capital punishment and conformism masked by religion and justice. Flat and stereotyped characters. - writes in episodes to conform to the public taste - set in contemporary London - main theme: the fight between right and wrong - radical view of the social scene: negative effects of industrialism - characters from the middle and lower classes (house-keepers and little orphans) - didactic aim Oliver Twist (1838) David Copperfield (1849-50) > symbols of an exploited childhood put in the bitter realities of slums and factories Little Dorrit (1857) Bleak House (1853) Hard Times (1854) > social issues: the conditions of the poor and the working class in general Great Expectations (1860-1) William M. Thackeray Writer known for his satirical works, particularly Vanity Fair, a panoramic portrait of English society. Born in Calcutta, India. Back to England at the age of 6. Worked as a journalist Master of novel of manners. Thackeray began as a satirist and parodist, writing works that displayed a sneaking fondness for roguish upstarts such as Becky Sharp Dealing with economic and social problems Describing particular class or situation. 1844 The Luck of Barry Lyndon 1847 Vanity Fair Social rise and fall of Becky Sharp Exposes the hypocrisy and snobbery of the RESPECTABLE society Condemns who violates the moral principles of the society Vanity fair – English novel about the lives of Becky Sharp and Emmy Sedley amid their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars A novel without a hero Unreliable narrator, repeating a tale of gossip of second or third hand Social satire and humour Vs middle class Puritan opportunism Critique of the “snob” Obtrusive omniscient narrator > expresses personal comments and ironical remarks Disapproval of unrealistic heroes and heroines Everyone is dominated by selfishness and vanity Becky: social climber

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810 – 1865) English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor, and ...