Key Concepts in Victorian Literature

Sean Purchase

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781403948076
• eBook ISBN: 9781350310384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

Key Concepts in Victorian Literature is a lively, clear and accessible resource for anyone interested in Victorian literature. It contains major facts, ideas and contemporary literary theories, is packed with close and detailed readings and offers an overview of the historical and cultural context in which this literature was produced.

1Contexts: History, Politics, Culture

Introduction

The logic of this section has to some extent been explained in the introductory essay to this volume. Here I want to clarify the scope – and the basis of selection – of the entries that appear in Contexts, and how they relate to what follows in the next two sections. In any historical period there are ideas, of a social, political, economic and ideological nature, that are central to people’s thinking. In broad terms, we refer to the sum of these ideas as the cultural context in which people live. In the medieval period, for example, religion would have been a key factor in people’s lives, and this continued to be the case in the Victorian period. But the Victorians experienced a different kind of religious faith, one which competed with a whole range of other key concepts: industrialism, capitalism, science, evolution, consumerism, the law, the nation, the ideology of family, to name only some of the most significant or obvious. All these concepts (and more) vied with religion for the hearts and minds of private individuals and public opinion alike, and it is these central aspects of Victorian life that are discussed in the essays in this section.

Contexts provides a starting point for a fairly specific kind of investigation. As comprehensively as possible, it covers the many ideas and concepts the Victorians clung to, or rather the complex array of issues and problems which underpinned their cultural framework and which both reassured them and caused them anxiety, often at the same time. The section ranges across obviously significant contexts, including Class, Religion, Science, Sex and War, to those less obvious, at least perhaps to literary critics, such as Architecture, Body, Clothing, Drugs, Madness and Music. Although it is, it need hardly be pointed out, within such contexts that literary texts are produced, literature is also our principal means of gaining access to the culture of attitudes and neuroses which have contributed to our understanding of the Victorians. At the same time, the section is designed to work in such a way as to encourage readers to think about the Victorians and their age from a combination of perspectives which should be construed as inseparable. The first is in terms of the broader historical picture of the nineteenth century provided by the section; the second is in terms of the endless churning of ideas, attitudes, contradictions, nuances and idiosyncrasies which made the Victorians tick and which are, crucially, such an integral and exciting feature of their literature. To that end, the entry on Childhood, for example, provides readers with vital information on the horrors facing Victorian children – especially poor Victorian children – such as infant mortality rates, child labour systems, prostitution, and the enduring miseries of nineteenth-century education systems. It proceeds from these facts to the highly sentimentalized and often paradoxical idea of childhood in Victorian consciousness, and from there to representations of childhood in Victorian literature. Each entry offers, along these lines, a detailed and thorough explanation of the key concept or context under discussion. Each, similarly, within the limited space provided, has the aim of arriving at as full a picture of the Victorians and their literature as possible.

‘Contexts’ is not, however, intended in any way to be encyclopaedic or comprehensive. On the contrary, it is intended to give readers a historical and contextual framework through which to approach Victorian literature, but with the added aim of encouraging readers to work out from each entry and pursue their research further. Readers of the section (as with the other two sections in the volume) can, with these objectives in mind, expect to find each entry supplemented by two sub-sections. The first is the ‘See also’ feature, which indicates where other entries elsewhere in the volume might be useful or helpful, either within the Contexts section itself or in the Texts and Criticism sections. The second, ‘Further reading’, provides suggestions for research outside of this volume. Both sub-sections can be found at the foot of each entry, and, as with the section as a whole, they have two major aims. One is to enrich the depth and scope of the reader’s understanding of Victorian contexts, by encouraging a method of cross-examination, and the other is to urge readers to read Victorian literature critically and theoretically at all times. The suggestions for further reading, in particular, point readers towards the wide and ever-expanding world of modern literary studies and criticism. This is a world which, in its own richness and complexity, has contributed significantly to the rich and complex way in which the Victorians and their age must be understood.

Age of Victoria

Commentators tend to separate the Victorian age into early, mid and late periods. Victoria’s reign (1837–1901) began shortly after the establishment in 1829 of Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police Force and the passage of the first great Reform Act of 1832. The police force heralded the new Victorian age of greater state discipline and a clampdown on crime, while the Reform Act, the first of three (one, it seems, for each of the early, mid and late Victorian periods) doubled a very small electorate. Although the proportion of Victorians eligible to vote rose again, following the subsequent great reform acts of 1867 and 1884–5, only around 12 per cent of the population were enfranchised in 1886, and women were all but excluded until 1918. Poor and destitute early Victorians also suffered under the Poor Law (Amendment) Act (1834), which forced more of them into the workhouse systems and orphanages famously condemned in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837). Meanwhile, early Victorians witnessed the dismantlement of slavery in the British colonies (1833–8), the age of working-class radicalism and the democratic reforms called for by the Chartist movement (c.1830s–40s), and momentous engineering and technological achievements such as the establishment of the railway system.

The economic depressions and the resultant socioindustrial crises of the ‘hungry forties’ and the Irish Famine (c.1845–1852), brought about other momentous events such as the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846). These laws, since 1815, had set British corn prices at an artificially (and unfeasibly) high rate, and they were blamed for causing much of the hunger and unrest in the period. Although Robert Peel’s Corn Laws repeal legislation tends to sound somewhat insignificant in the more grandiose story of Victorian achievement and progress, it is important to stress that it did lead to two major developments, the impact and implications of which are obvious: cheaper bread (eventually) for starving Victorians, and the triumph of Britain’s free-trade system. Indeed, the political and economic debates surrounding the repeal of the Corn Laws proved to be hugely influential. They had a direct bearing on the way the balance of power in nineteenth-century Britain was beginning to shift from the old landowner class to a burgeoning class of industrialists, manufacturers and tradesmen, who were spurred on by the new spirit of laissez-faire (non-state interference) economics heralded by repeal. Such a shift, albeit gradual, transformed Victorian Britain from a largely rural and agricultural society, based on a monopoly of landed and state-controlled interests, to an urban and industrial society, based on an increasing culture of individualism and capitalism. The change further ensured that Victoria reigned over a nation which, temporarily at least, had by the 1850s–60s begun to enjoy a period of relative prosperity and peace.

The new balance of power in society also intensified class tensions. Despite the creation of a disaffected but increasingly well-organized – and in some quarters militant – working class, it was not, however, until 1871 that government legislation permitted the establishment of Trade Unions (the first Women’s Trade Union League was formed in 1874). This legislation followed a history of complex ‘Combination’ laws typified by those promulgated before Victoria’s reign. One, for example, in 1824, permitted the peaceful ‘combinations’ of some workers, while another, in 1825, swiftly prohibited them. A Factory Act of 1874 further recommended the relative leniency of a 56-hour week for the nation’s workforce, although children under the age of 12 were still working in Britain’s factories and industries as late as 1901 (the year of Victoria’s death), when another Factory Act made this particular form of exploitation illegal. Although, then, the general story of the Victorian period is one of astonishing economic progress, the vast majority did not enjoy the benefits of prosperity. Indeed, by the last third of the century it begins to become clear that the Victorians lived under a capitalist system of free-trade economics which was at the increasing mercy of periodic booms and slumps. The most notable slump began in the early 1870s, when the ‘great depression’ set in, a downward trend which was to last well into the mid-1890s.

The economic changes of the Victorian period affected every aspect of life. Most obviously, Victoria presided over a population which after decades of industrialism and urbanization had swollen from around 9 million in 1801 to around 18 million in 1851. At her death in 1901, this figure had risen again to around 30 million. Intriguingly, though, the religious consensus of 1851 revealed that only a third of Britain’s mid-century population attended church regularly. Although such figures do not necessarily mean that religion was less important to everyday British lives at a personal level, the faith of Victorians would nonetheless be increasingly shaken as the century wore on. It is illuminating, in this respect, to juxtapose these attendance figures with the fact that the 1851 census was carried out in the same year of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, that most visible monument to Victorian industrialism and capitalist might. That is to say, if Victorians were not worshipping at church, they were certainly worshipping their own less spiritual and more material achievements, and over 6 million paid to walk through the doors of the Crystal Palace in the half-year it was open to the public. Other Victorians adopted a more conservative religious stance in the period. The assertiveness of the Oxford Movement of Tractarians (c.1830s–40s) for example – a complex but devout group that campaigned for greater spiritual observance in the face of industrial modernity, and which saw leading exponent John Newman’s controversial conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845 – reflected a grasping after traditional values. Such values were something perhaps particularly to be desired when the public and private consciousness of all Victorians, either consciously or otherwise, became subject to the increasing sway of more rationalist and scientific ideas and practices. Eventually, these influences led to the steady retreat or rather the displacement of faith, and the emergence of a more secular British society overall.

Underlying everything, however, was the economic strength of the nation. The early to mid-Victorian years, between roughly 1830 and 1875, were the triumphant years of British self-confidence, and in these decades the Victorians established a buoyant but increasingly productive economy, which ultimately created greater prosperity for a larger proportion of society. But they were also decades that witnessed a period of British isolationism from European affairs, a situation which, according to some commentators, only really came to an end after Victoria’s death in 1901, with the Entente Cordiale (1904) between Britain and France. By that stage, in a context of increasing national hostilities and empire building, Britain had again started to cast about for European allies against the perceived new threat to national security posed by Germany. Although Victoria’s ‘dear soldiers’, as she called them, fought in numerous imperial skirmishes and wars of conquest throughout the nineteenth century, in Europe they were involved in only one major conflict during her reign, the disastrously mismanaged Crimean War (1853–6). In this war, Britain allied itself with its historical enemy, France, against Russia, largely to prevent what the allies feared to be Russian expansionism south into Europe, Britain being largely concerned with protecting its maritime routes to its Eastern empire. In the British Empire itself, Victoria’s armies became embroiled in other major incidents, especially, again, in the earlier period, and most notoriously during the Indian Mutiny (1857). But they were also involved in the later contexts of European nationalism and colonialism, in tumultuous events which were to reach their climax in the Boer Wars (1899–1902) in South Africa, between British forces and settlers of Dutch descent. At home, in the same period (c.1899), Victoria’s shipyards and armaments factories had begun manufacturing again in earnest, primarily to keep up with Germany’s increasingly dangerous-looking battleship programme. The subsequent naval race between Britain and Germany underlined the growing threat of national crises and conflict in nineteenth-century Europe, which would culminate in the First World War of 1914–18.

On the domestic stage, political affairs were dominated by tensions and rivalries which also climaxed in the late Victorian period. As if to underline the radical uncertainties and sociopolitical upheavals which would come to define the nineteenth century, in fact, between 1868 and 1892 virtually alternate governments were formed by the Liberal and Conservative parties, and by two of the most influential statesman and individuals of the age: the Liberal William Ewart Gladstone, and the Conservative Benjamin Disraeli. When, for example, Gladstone succeeded Disraeli as prime minister for the second time in 1880, he inherited, (along with a series of complex foreign affairs), one affair which was much closer to home, the implications of which would dominate British politics in the twentieth century and beyond. During the so-called ‘Home Rule’ crisis, late Victorians were repeatedly asked to reconsider Britain’s long history of involvement and colonial settlement in Ireland. In the face of growing demands from Irish nationalists for Ireland’s secession from Britain, Gladstone’s mission was to disestablish the Irish church and ‘pacify Ireland’. His ‘Home Rule’ bills were, however, successively defeated in parliament, first in 1886, and again in 1893, five years before his death in 1898.

Other important shifts in the sociopolitical and cultural contexts of the later Victorian period were signified by W. E. Forster’s Education Act of 1870. This legislation eventually ensured that elementary education for all British children was compulsory, and it was instrumental in helping them out of the nation’s industries and factories. In the same year, women gained better monetary rights (after marriage) over wages earned, and in 1878, after the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act, they were permitted separation from their husbands on the grounds of assault or cruelty. Following the Married Women’s Property Act (1882), women also gained full rights over their property. This act overturned a timeworn legal concept and custom known as ‘coverture’, which for centuries had effectively placed the woman – and everything she owned – under her husband’s ‘protection’. In 1886, women were also granted more equitable custody rights over their children, although only in the event of the father’s death, and by the early 1870s–1880s, the so-called ‘Woman Question’ had increasingly come to the foreground in Victorian popular consciousness. Politically, the plight of women was made most visible (and audible) by the suffragette movement’s calls for the women’s vote, and culturally by the changing social roles and economic status of women dealt with in the controversial ‘New Women’ drama and literature of the day. Morever, the late Victorian period, even more so than earlier periods, was marked by growing anxieties about gender roles, promiscuity and sexuality in general. Such anxieties were signified, most obviously, by the raising of the age of consent to 16 in 1885, most violently, by the furore surrounding the ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders of prostitutes in Whitechapel in 1888, and, most controversially, by the Oscar Wilde trial for homosexuality in 1895.

In an age of conflicting ideas and changing attitudes, a range of celebrated social and political commentators emerged. The Victorians produced critics, essayists, historians, rhetoricians, polemicists, satirists, wits and moralists, most of whom seemed capable of holding forth on just about everyone and everything. Certain individuals did, more importantly, have a massive influence on the intellectual and cultural contexts of the age. Amongst the names which made such an essential contribution are: Thomas Carlyle, with his diatribes on everything from the so-called ‘Condition of England Question’, to the French Revolution, God, work, Chartism, the idea of the hero, the ‘negro question’, race and slavery; John Ruskin, with his influential criticisms of art, architecture and morality; the educationist and poet Matthew Arnold, with his speculative and satirical ideas about high and low culture; the utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill, with his writings on individual liberty and women’s subjection; and Thomas Babington Macaulay, who was, amongst other things, a reactionary advocate of political ‘evolution’ or ‘gradual’ – and above all peaceful – progress. One must, inevitably, add to this list the ground-breaking scientific work of Charles Darwin, especially the publication of his On the Origin of Species (1859); the revolutionary writings of Karl Marx; and Sigmund Freud’s controversial ideas about psychoanalysis towards the end of the century. All of these writers and thinkers (mainly, but not exclusively, men), form an integral feature of the intellectual, philosophical and ideological contexts of the Victorian period, and much of the social and political conflicts they gave rise to. It is, indeed, against the fervent and complex historical backdrop of such conflicts that we need to contextualize the broad changes and movements in Victorian literature.

See also General Introduction; Contexts: Economics; Criticism: Introduction.

Further Reading

Roberts, Adam C., Victorian Culture and Society: The Essential Glossary (London: Edward Arnold, 2003).

Wilson, A. N., The Victorians (London: Hutchinson, 2002).

Architecture

Architecture in nineteenth-century Britain is full of contradictions. On the one hand, the Victorians built largely to accommodate what was, by Queen Victoria’s accession in 1837, the first and most heavily industrialized nation the world had ever seen. Their innovative designs for factories, railway stations, civic buildings and working-class terraced housing in industrial centres earned them their reputation for utility, purpose, common sense and functionalism. On the other hand, for all the British ‘strength’ and ‘solidity’ associated with Victorian building materials, such as red brick and ferroconcrete (concrete fortified with steel), and despite the fact that many Victorian architects removed stuccoed façades in order to expose the ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ of the rawer materials beneath, much of Victorian architecture remained elaborate, not to say f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• General Editors’ Preface
• General Introduction
• 1 Contexts: History, Politics, Culture
• 2 Texts: Themes, Issues, Concepts
• 3 Criticism: Approaches, Theory, Practice
• Chronology
• Index