Victorian Era Texts

Elizabeth Barret Browning - The Cry of the Children

• raise awareness of the child labour in the mines

  • child labour reform and education acts

• speaker addresses you directly

• narrative poem that tries to pull at our heartstrings

  • crying children → know they aren’t going to die any time soon

• we accept this to be normal if we want to keep the world turning

• there will be penance for this

Christina Rossetti - Goblin Market

• suggestive poem, implied incest between the 2 sisters

• 2 sisters hear goblins who want them to buy their fruit, as soon as one of them eats it she begins to waste away

• can be read as either a nursery rhyme or a cautionary tale to not go with strangers

• dangers of men and domestic abuse

• also a Christian allegory, do not eat the fruit → just like Eve ate the apple

Gerald Manly Hopkins - The Windhover

• dedication to God

• experimental poem

• in awe of everything

• experimenting with sonnet form but does not read like a sonnet

Gerald Manly Hopkins - I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day

• expresses dejection, he is sceptic of the presence of God in his life

• ‘dead letters’ prayers to God that were not answered

Rudyard Kipling - The White Man’s Burden

• about bringing civilization to the colonies

  • Christianity and education

• received a reply from Mark Twain To the person sitting in Darkness

  • trying to rehumanize the people from the colonies