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Khristy Gibson
Mrs. B. Williams
Advanced English
IV
2 February 1997
The Year 1837 was very significant. It was not only the year that Queen Victoria
acceded the throne, but also the year that a new literary age was coined. The Victorian Age, more formally known, was a
time of great prosperity in Great Britain's literature(Keach 608). The Victorian Age produced a variety of
changes. Political and social reform
produced a variety of reading among all classes(Stuart 5). The lower-class became more self-conscious, the middle class
more powerful and the rich became more vulnerable(6). The novels of Charles Dickens, the poems of
Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, the dramatic plays of Oscar Wilde,
the scientific discoveries of the
Darwins, and the religious revolt of Newman all helped to enhance
learning and literacy in the Victorian society.
Of all of the Literary eras, the Victorian age gave a new meaning to the
word controversy. Writers of that time
challenged the ideas of religion, crime, sexuality, chauvinism and over all
social controversies(Brown 16).
Queen Victoria influenced the literary age
herself. She loved to read and she was
educated in the finest schools in Great Britain(Fraiser 278). Queen Victoria encouraged reading among all
of her people. She gave out free books
to children and she built schools for the lower classes. Also the Queen invited prominent Victorian
age writers such as Alfred, Lord
Tennyson and Charles Dickens to read privately to her in Buckingham
Palace(Packard 59).
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The Victorian Age was also an era of several
unsettling social developments. This
forced writers to take positions on immediate issues animating the rest of
society(Brown 23). Hence, romantic forms
of expression in poetry and prose continued to dominate English literature
throughout much of the century. The
attention of many writers was directed to the growth of the English democracy,
education, materiallism, religion, science and the theory of evolution. In "Opposition of Matter" Thomas
Caryle spoke out against materialism.
Historian Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote History of England and
Critical Historical Essays. Maculay expressed the complacency of the English
middle class over the new prosperity and growing political power(29).
The Oxford Movement caused corruption during
the Victorian age. The Tractarians
insisted that the Anglican Church was Catholic, not Protestant and they wanted
to establish independence from the rising middle class(Richardson 8). The movement began under the leadership of
John Keble and Paul Newman. Newman
attacked the national apostasy in Tracts for the Times(9). The book caused an outburst in England. Newman was forced to resign his position as
head of the movement. With his
resignation, the Oxford Movement came to an end. Following the Oxford Movement, many Orthodox
Victorians believed that God had created each species and the world was created
in seven days(Packard 58). As the
nineteenth century proceeded, these traditional customs were put into question
by Erasmus Darwin and his grandson, Charles Darwin. Erasmus Darwin found that the world was not
created in seven days in Zoomina, where he discovered that the evolutionary
theory
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was unscientific.
Charles Darwin wrote Origin of the Species, causing full scale controversy in
Europe(59). Darwin said that species
survive and evolved by natural selection, or the survival of the fittest. The public debate over the evolution marked
for Victorians a radical change in intellectual and religious life.
The literature of
the first four decades of the Victorian period could not help but reflect the
social and intellectual controversies of the era(Richardson 9). Writers including Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin attacked the problems
directly, while Charles Dickens, George Eloit and Alfred Lord Tennyson
dramatized the conflicts and challenges in their works. The most popular form for this type of
dramatization was the novel. Victorian novels represented almost every
aspect of nineteenth century Victorian life(Keach 629). Though poetry and prose were certainly
distinguished, it was the novel that ultimately proved to be the Victorians
special literary achievement(Keach 682).
The Victorian novel's most notable aspect was its diversity. The Victorian period produced a number of
novelists whose work today would fit between popular fiction and
literature. Novelist Wilkie Collins
excited his audience with The Woman in White, Elizabeth Gaskell with Wives and
Daughters and M.E. Braddon with her much underrated Lady Audley's
Secret(Richardson 35). All three of
these authors wrote for large audiences; increasing literary rates and
increasing publication sales(36). Motifs of Gothic fiction also found their way
into the Victorian novel.(Summers
18) The two authors who illustrated this
form of Gothism were Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights. Wuthering Heights was a
masterful combination Gothic motifs in which the strange love experiences of
Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. The
book has been considered as on of the finest novels in English history.(20)
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The Victorian interest in social life led to a
flowering on the novel of romance.
Elizabeth Gaskell wrote Cranford, producing a charming picture of
Victorian Village life
and the complex
studies of family life in Wives and Daughters (Brown 53). Jane Eyre and Villette by Charlotte Bronte,
expressed the daily lives of ordinary young women. Bronte also took an even broader step in her
novels. She wrote about women's sexual
passions (Summers 14). Never before had
a woman wrote a novel of this content.
Unquestionably, the three great masters of Victorian novels were Charles
Dickens, William Thackerary and George Eliot.
Of the three, Dickens was the most popular with the Victorian public and
the most difficult to evaluate today.
Dickens novels cannot really be judged.
He used a difficult more inclusive type of writing. His novels are read more often because
readers are fascinated by his picturesque types of social realities: incest, crime, pain, adulation and antagonism
toward women. Bleak House for example,
ends with a happy couple, but as in most comedies, their marriage does not
resolve the social and physiological issues raised by their work("Charles
Dickens", online). Dickens other
noted novels were Oliver Twist, David Cooperfield, Great Expectations and Our
Mutal Friend. William Thakerary's
greatest novel, Vanity Fair, refused both to elevate the heroine onto
traditional pedestal and to conflict upon her antagonists complete
defeat.(Brown 40) George Eliot (Mary Ann
Evans) was perhaps the most learned of the Victorian novelists. She wrote The Mill on the Floss, a novel about a girl growing into
maturity and the problems she faces(Liston 19).
Also during the Victorian age that male writers
wrote about the injustices of women.
During the age women were treated unfairly as all women of the 1800's (Stuart
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215). Women were considered as outcasts and the law
did not look out for their welfare(216).
Thomas Hardy wrote about the injustices of women in Tess of the
d'Ubervilles(Brown
22). John Stuart Mills wrote On
Subjection of Women, extending his area of individual freedom and self reliance
of his opinion of how women were treated(24).
Victorian poetry was also popular during the
Victorian Age. Robert Browning, Matthew
Arnold and Lord Tennyson were among the most popular Victorian poets(Harris
129) The major themes of Victorian
poetry were loneliness, religious anxiety and social change. Matthew Arnold expressed these themes most
powerfully in "Dover Beach."
The Speaker sees his unbelieving society as a darking plain, where
ignorant armies clash at night(Keach 635).
In stanzas from the "Grand Chartreuse," Arnold described his
society between two worlds, one dead and the others powerless to be born (Keach
708). Tennyson's "In Memoriam, is a
product of seventeen years reflection and meditation engendered by the death of
Tennyson's college friend, Arthur Henry Hallam.
Robert Browning wrote "An Epistle" which is a contribution of
the narrator's description of a madman.
The man is a prophet, yet he does not understand the true meanings of
right and wrong.
As Victorian novelists, Victorian dramatists
attempted to present life realistically.
The popular dramatist Oscar Wilde, wrote plays that dealt with social
problems directly. In his masterpiece,
The Importance of Being Earnest, he attacked Victorian strictness in his play.
The plot of the play turns upon the fortunes and misfortunes of two young
Englishmen, John Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff. Each of them lived a double life. They create themselves another personality to
provide an escape from social and family
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obligations. The plot becomes hilariously complicated when
Algerton decides to pass himself off as Earnest in order to spend time with
Cecily, his girlfriend. John on the
other hand, announced to Gwendolen, for courtship reasons that his poor brother
Earnest, died of a chill in Paris(Keach 711).
The plot of the play is brilliantly constructed with its witty and polished dialogue. Even the title of the play has a satirical
double meaning: "Ernest" is
the name of a fictitious s character, but he designated the moral virtue of
sincere aspiration which was so important in the earlier Victorian Period. Wilde made the earnestness of Ernest the key
to an outrageous social comedy and he poked fun at conventional Victorian
seriousness by fitting solemn moral language to frivolous and ridiculous
action(712). The Importance of Earnest
ranks among one of the most brilliant comedies in English history.
The Victorian age was an age of rapid growth
and social change(Keach 612). By the
time of Queen Victoria's death in 1901, Great Britain had became the literary
capital of the world(Fraiser 23). The
Victorian writers wrote about their changes in their society. Late in the nineteenth century, the final
blow to the Victorian age did not come until the outbreak of World War One in
1914. For the next four years,
novelists, poets and dramatists directed their energies primarily to war. After the war ended, the British Empire was
shaken badly by the Labour Party. The
ideas and popular forms of the Victorians no longer adequated the radically
different society. The Victorian age
came to an end around 1916, ending one of the most fascinating times in English
history.Literature was greatly affected during the Victorian Age. Victorian literature helped to strengthen
modern literature in all aspects.
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