Literature
Victorian Period
The Victorian Period refers to the time during the reign of Queen Victoria of England, from 1837 to 1901. This era was characterized by significant social, political, and economic changes, which greatly influenced literature. Victorian literature often reflected the moral and social concerns of the time, addressing issues such as industrialization, class struggles, and the role of women in society.
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10 Key excerpts on "Victorian Period"
eBook - PDF- Peter Widdowson(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Red Globe Press(Publisher)
It is probably safer, therefore, to use the term ‘Victorian’ simply to define the temporal limits of the period, both in historical and literary terms. So we may then say that ‘Victorian literature’ (i.e. that produced within the period so designated) witnesses the novel becoming the dominant literary genre – especially as widening literacy expanded the reading public – and the vehicle of both social comment and popular entertainment. As evidence of the diverse range of British fiction published between 1837 and 1901, we may cite the work of, inter alia , Harrison Ainsworth, Bulwer Lytton, Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, W. M. Thackeray, the Brontë sisters, Charles Kingsley, Charles Reade, Charlotte Yonge, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, R. L. Stevenson, George Gissing, Henry James, Samuel Butler and Joseph Conrad. Non-fictional prose – but often deploying literary language of equivalent imaginative range and inventiveness – is a feature of the period, too; for example, that written by the so-called ‘Victorian Prophets’ or ‘Sages’: Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, J. H. Newman and William Morris. Poetry may not have retained quite the position it held during the Romantic* era [see Chapter 4], but the Victorian Period again sees enormous diversity of range and register (from public utterance to private doubt) in the work of the later William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Clough, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, Coventry Patmore, William Morris, Algernon Swinburne, Robert Bridges, William Barnes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.
eBook - PDF- Alexandra Warwick, Martin Willis, Alexandra Warwick, Martin Willis(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
The Victorian Literature Handbook events, but also to think about the ways in which the kinds of relationships between text and context function. Throughout this chapter there are cross-ref-erences to other sections of the book where more details of particular aspects are given and relevant writers are suggested. The Victorian Period Victoria's reign, from 1837 to 1901, encompassed enormous changes, seeing a country that was essentially still rural and governed by systems that were centuries old, transformed to what is recognizably our modern world, with powered flight, telephones, cinema, tanks and machine guns. Over the course of the nineteenth century Britain was transformed from an agricultural base dominated by a small landowning interest to an industrial economy with a broader political class. Machinery came to be driven by power other than that of the human or animal, and the work that people did was very different from what it had been in 1800. Over the century the population tripled, and for the first time in Britain's history a greater proportion lived in the urban areas rather than in the countryside. Society became increasingly stratified by the creation of a large industrial working class and the considerable expansion of the middle class. The situation of women changed, most obviously in the middle class, and although the right to vote was not granted until 1918, by 1900 women had gained other significant legal and social rights. The wider world too had changed, politically and in the balances of national power, but also in the way it was viewed. Work in the sciences, especially in geology, biology and physics, had altered the idea of the earth as a single creation with only 6,000 years of history to a view of it as a planet with continuously evolving living creatures and a past of hundreds of thousands of years.
eBook - PDF- Ashley Chantler, David Higgins, Ashley Chantler, David Higgins(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
However, as a description of a period spanning sixty-four years, ‘Victorian’ is necessar-ily a shorthand term. It covers a period when Britain was transformed from a predominately rural society to an urban industrialized nation. Princess Victoria was supposedly reading Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1837) the night before her coronation; however, at this time most of her subjects lived in isolated rural communities and were illiterate. By the time she died in 1901, the motor car was replacing horse power, the telephone and cinema were transforming communication and entertainment, and most people in Britain were able to read and write. As the Victorian Period advanced, there was a voracious appetite for literature, whether sensational cheap ‘railway novels’ bought to pass the time on journeys, or the books borrowed from ‘circulating’ (subscription) libraries and the newly created public libraries, or the part-issues of serialized novels which came out in monthly instalments. Never before had so many people been able to read and have access to affordable reading matter (see Sutherland for a useful discussion of Victorian publishing and reading practices). Victorian writers were aware of the potential to reach vast numbers of 134 readers and found a wealth of subject matter for their fiction, plays, and poetry in the dramatic social, political, cultural, and economic changes that were taking place. The 1840s, for example, was a decade of economic hard-ship, which saw the Irish Potato Famine, instability in the financial markets, and political unrest from the Chartists, who sought to improve working-class representation in Parliament. Numerous writers, such as the Brontë sisters, reflected the turmoil of the decade in their work.
eBook - PDF- Sean Purchase(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
Victorian age of industry and application. Indeed, the age of industry brought with it a series of socioeconomic and cultural divisions which defined the Victorian century and beyond, those between work and leisure; the male sphere of work and the female sphere of the home (especially for middle-class families); city and country; and the ‘indus-trial’ north and the ‘rural’ south. Of particular concern, however, was the blurring of the division between the ‘human’ and the ‘mechanical’, which the Industrial Revolution also helped establish. Victorian literature dealt with the industrial epoch in a range of ‘industrial novels’, which were often called ‘social problem’ or ‘Condition of England’ novels. As a sub-genre, the industrial novel peaks during the 1840s and 1850s, and then goes into decline after the 1860s. Titles include Frances Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong: the Factory Boy (1839), Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1844), Benjamin Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844) and Sybil , or the Two Nations (1846), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) and George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), although industrial strife is also reflected in the work of Victorian woman poets such as Caroline Norton and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Most of the novels contain set-piece industrial strikes, worker–industrialist tensions, problems of hunger or riots around mills. One of the major tensions in the texts is that of the transition from manual to machine-driven labour in the period. Stephen Blackpool in Dickens’s Hard Times , for example, is one of many ‘human’ beings whose identity is both created by the age of industry, as a working-class man, and reduced in Dickens’s language to a synecdoche, or ‘hand’. He is deminished by the ‘discourse’ of Victorian industry, that is, to that most functional part of his body to which machines have also reduced him.
eBook - PDF- A. Jenkins, J. John, A. Jenkins, J. John(Authors)
- 1999(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
The rise of the novel to become the dominant genre of the Victorian age, likewise, has a more mundane, material rationale than evolution- ary metanarratives about its synonymity with the rise of the middle class sometimes emphasize. Though histories of early Victorian litera- ture commonly and rightly chart those momentous social and political changes which shaped Victorian and ‘modern’ Britain (including the 1832 Reform Bill, changes to the criminal law, industrialization and Chartism), the transformation of a nation’s structures of power and its literary landscape demands more than political legislation, however radical that legislation may be. In 1837 the country was in the midst of a cultural revolution, quieter perhaps than the political and industrial revolutions afoot, but no less formative in the emergence of the novel as the genre of the age – and formative, further, in the development of a modern state. Literacy was increasing and developments in the pub- lishing trade meant that books and newspapers were expanding their readership, moving further down the social ladder in the early Victorian Period than ever before. As Engel and King argue in The Victorian Novel Before Victoria, ‘Forces outside the court in 1830 […] were radically reforming the dissemination of fiction so that it began to reach the same class which the Reform Bill enfranchised’. 9 Until Introduction 3 1830, the cheap fiction market had largely been left to small and dis- reputable publishers like the Minerva Press, but in June 1829 when Tom Cadell issued the Author’s Edition of the Waverley novels in five- shilling volumes, ‘he inaugurated the vogue of inexpensive recent fiction imprints’. 10 In 1831, Colburn and Bentley’s Standard Novels were being published at six shillings each. These developments began a sharp fall in book prices leading to a broader readership, a trend which continued until 1850.
eBook - PDFNeo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative
The Victorians and Us
- L. Hadley(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
1 Introduction: Writing the Victorians ‘The history of the Victorian age will never be written. We know too much about it’, or so Lytton Strachey declared in the preface to his book Eminent Victorians in 1918 (p. 10). Yet since the death of Queen Victoria more than 100 years ago, the history of the Victorian era has been continuously rewritten. Indeed, Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was itself part of a Modernist rewriting that reflected an oedipal desire to emphasize the distance between the Victorians and the Modernists. As J. B. Bullen writes, ‘For [Strachey], and for many of [his] contem- poraries, “Victorian” was a way of distinguishing [his] own attitudes from those of [his] parents’ (p. 2). Bullen recognizes that ‘Victorian’ here is a connotative, rather than merely denotative, term; what the Modernists sought to distance themselves from were the systems of ‘repression, realism, materialism, and laissez-faire capitalism’ that they felt characterized the Victorian Period (p. 2). Confirming the oedipal nature of this relationship, Bullen suggests that the Modernist drive to assert difference from the Victorian generation was ‘so strident that it now seems [...] like the nursery tantrums of children rebelling against the despotic regime of their parents’ (p. 2). Although the contemporary relationship to the Victorians continues to be conceptualized in such familial terms, the Victorians, as we shall see, seem to have moved from the position of oppressive parent-figures to benign grandparents. It is not only the nature of the engagement with the Victorians that has altered over the last 100 years; both the frequency and popularity of rewritings and re-imaginings of the Victorians have increased in the second half of the twentieth, and on into the twenty-first, century. 1 The contemporary fascination with the Victorians seems to be particularly marked within the realm of fiction, where it has spawned the genre of L.
No longer available |Learn more- Joseph Black, Leonard Conolly, Kate Flint, Isobel Grundy, Don LePan, Roy Liuzza, Jerome McGann, Anne Lake Prescott, Barry Qualls, Claire Waters(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Broadview Press(Publisher)
Domestic magazines aimed at female readers, children’s magazines, satirical or humor maga-zines, and monthly and quarterly miscellanies pub-lishing fiction, poetry, criticism, and news all competed with each other for readers’ interest, loyalty, and purchasing power in an increasingly diverse literary marketplace. Nearly all of the best-known literary writers across the genres saw their work published in magazines and newspapers: Barrett Browning’s “The Cry of the Children” (1843) in Blackwood’s , Dickens’s Oliver Twist in Bentley’s Miscellany , Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy in the Cornhill Magazine , Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family (1865) in the Churchman’s Family Magazine . The periodical press was also instrumental in the development of modern literary criticism. Book reviews in influential periodicals, such as the Athenaeum , could make or break a writer’s reputation; prominent literary reviewers—some of whom, such as Henry James, were also celebrated authors in their own right—both forged a professional identity for themselves as literary critics and formulated principles of literary analysis that are today’s tools of the trade. Victorians were, in general, fascinated with characterizing their “age”: Carlyle’s “Signs of the Times,” Mill’s “Spirit of the Age,” and Eliza Lynn Linton’s “Girl of the Period” became popular catch-phrases that signaled a self-conscious awareness of a society in transition. It was the “age of steam,” the “age of doubt,” and, perhaps most notably for students of literature, the “age of reading.” Reading, like many other social institutions and cultural practices, gradually lxxx Broadview Anthology of British Literature became democratized during Victoria’s reign. The 1870 Education Act instituted compulsory elementary edu-cation in England and Wales for the first time; adult literacy was nearly universal by century’s end.
eBook - PDF- William Baker, Kenneth Womack, William Baker, Kenneth Womack(Authors)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Greenwood(Publisher)
New York: New York UP, 1995. Tillotson, Geoffrey. Criticism and the Nineteenth Century. London: Athlone, 1951. Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign: A Book of Appreciations. By Mrs. Oliphant, Mrs. Lynn Linton, Mrs. Alexander, Mrs. Macquoid, Mrs. Parr, Mrs. Marshall, Charlotte M. Yonge, Adeline Sergeant, and Edna Lyall. 1897. London: Folcroft, 1969. Page 403 Otherness and Identity in the Victorian Novel Michael Galchinsky Much recent journalism to the contrary, migrations, diasporas, and even globalization are not phenomena originating in the postcolonial, postindustrial, post–Cold War period of our own day (Crossette). Population transfer, at least, was already a prominent feature of the postEnlightenment, post–French Revolution era of national consolidation and imperial expansion that we call the Victorian Period. The increased mobility of populations and their concentration in cities were distinctive signs of this period, driven by the Industrial Revolution’s vast production of wealth, by the slave trade and colonial expansion, and by new technologies like the train, the canal, and the steamship. Such mobility inevitably compelled the Victorians to experience greater regional, religious, racial, and national diversity. Yet until relatively recently literary critics paid little attention to the way Victorians represented such experiences. To be sure, since the 1960s, Victorian critics have been aware that the Victorian writers and readers did not comprise a unified body. Histories like E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1966) helped to nuance critics’ awareness of Victorian class divisions. Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians (1966) helped to dispel our sense that Victorians were unified by sexual prudishness. During the 1970s, Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic (1979) and other early feminist texts helped inspire the production of an increasingly sophisticated analysis in the
eBook - PDF- Louis James(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
They transformed the English landscape, and altered the con-sciousness of space and time (see below, p. 97). In the world of publish-ing, over time they centralized the book market, rapidly distributing books and periodicals across the nation and extending the circulating libraries of Edward Mudie and W. H. Smith, which used rail to send boxes to the provinces and overseas. With rapid circulation, periodicals catering for every interest and occupation flourished, and it has been estimated that the Victorians published over 25,000 journals, not counting hundreds of reviews, magazines, weeklies and papers. 3 Books became part of travelling, and railway station shops sold pocket-sized ‘railway novels’ for passengers. With rail and canals servicing its commerce, its overseas trade pro-tected by naval supremacy, British industry was to expand at speed, moving the nation into a period of unprecedented prosperity. But this was in the future. For the masses surviving the economic depression and food shortages that followed the Napoleonic Wars, the turbulence of the 1830s P : 1830–1846 12 2 Frances Trollope, Town and Country (1848), p. 1. 3 Walter E. Houghton, ‘Periodical Literature and the Articulate Classes’, in Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff, eds, The Victorian Periodical Press (1982), pp. 3–27. was followed by continuing social distress in the 1840s. In rural areas, the effects of agricultural depression were intensified by draconian game laws and enclosures that drove cottagers to become exploited labourers, or to emigrate. The industrial population suffered cholera, unemployment, strikes and lockouts, and lived in the subhuman conditions Engels exposed in The Condition of the Working Classes in England (1845). Yet, remarkably, Britain remained free of the revolutions that devastated con-tinental Europe in the 1840s.
eBook - PDF- David Amigoni(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- EUP(Publisher)
‘Victorian’ literature was deeply attached to melodrama, in which authority and power, and the forms of gender and class ‘feeling’ that they inflected, were dramatised as elaborate forms of performance. Finally, the monuments of Victorian literature not only gave rise to criticism and argument; they were in themselves elaborate acts of criticism and argument. Consequently, it is helpful to begin to examine some of the forms of literary critical discourse that have, historically, sought to understand and explicate the acts of ‘criticism’ in Victorian literature. ‘CIVILISATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS’: PRODUCTIVITY, POWER AND GOVERNANCE IN DICKENS’S HARD TIMES Through the focus on Taine we have seen how, even in its earliest manifestations, literary criticism from the Victorian Period which reflected on the literary creativity of its own era, was preoccupied by questions of productivity, and the means by which the govern-ance of such a productive and pressured society was maintained. These themes have been persistent concerns of the criticism of Victorian literature, and they continue to be important not only in the criticism of today, but also the earlier twentieth-century criti-cism that in a sense ‘founded’ the more recent study of Victorian literature. In order to appreciate these it is helpful to shift the 20 victorian literature focus towards critical reactions to what has become a classic novel by the representative figure from the field of prose fiction – Hard Times ( 1854 ) by the great Victorian novelist Charles Dickens.
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