**Victoria (1819-1901) on learning that she is the new queen: \n ** \n ● Journal entry, Tuesday, 20 June 1837: I was awoke at 6 o’clock by Mamma, who told me that the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Conyngham were here, and wished to see me. I got out of bed and went into my sitting-room (only in my dressing-gown), and alone, and saw them. Lord Conyngham (the Lord Chamberlain) then acquainted me that my poor Uncle, the King, was no more, and had expired at 12 minutes p. 2 this morning, and consequently that I am Queen. Lord Conyngham knelt down and kissed my hand, at the same time delivering to me the official announcement of the poor King’s demise. [. . . ] Since it has pleased Providence to place me in this station, I shall do my utmost to fulfil [sic] my duty towards my country. I am very young and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced, but I am sure, that very few have more good will and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have. \n \n \n \n \n \n Historical & Cultural Overview, Timeline and a Few Notes about Literary Periods \n \n To begin, let us reach a consensus on at least one assertion: Literary periods are artificial. That is to say that the fancy names, which to be honest usually are not always terribly fancy and are at times quite ambiguous if not outright misleading, function best when they are able to accurately define or otherwise delineate a certain epoch. Failing that, they work well when the convey a general (if narrow) sense or feeling of the period, of its zeitgeist or its "spirit of the time." Although we can view through historical or literary periods certain watershed events or other momentous occasions that seem to call for the end of one era and the beginning of another, it is often a critical argument that one must make to declare a change and how we can recognize it. \n \n Most of us, I suspect, do not tend to get up in the morning and think about what era we're living in at any moment, partly perhaps because it can change so rapidly. \n \n Similarly, writers, musicians, artists, and other expressive thinkers did not suddenly wake up in 1837 and declare, "Cor! I'm no longer a Romantic. Well, chaps, we must be Victorians now for a while." Obviously, there is more than a little hyperbole there, but my point is that such names--Romantic, Victorian, Modern, Postmodern, whatever--strive to convey an overall sense of the times, a figurative method that allows us to feel and otherwise perceive the dominant trends. It's something of a shortcut, but it's also a necessity. If you want to define the Victorian era as I have done above strictly by the years of Queen Victoria's reign, go right ahead. If you want to stretch it by a few years, or even abbreviate it at the end, you won't be alone. All I ask is that you formulate a clear and logical reason for doing so, and that you don't miss one essential point: periods result from processes, from events and historical accidents that shape them. \n \n Let's look at a bit of an extended timeline that will suit our purposes, one that begins with the publication of what is often cited as the first Gothic novel and ends with Victoria's death: \n \n \n 1764: Horace Walpole, Castle of Otranto 1780 (June): Gordon Riots, the greatest outburst of civil disorder in modern British history: 300 people killed, \n enormous amounts of damage to property; results from reactions to Lord George Gordon’s \n Parliamentary petition against concessions to Catholics and his charge of treason. \n \n \n \n \n \n \n 1782: First public exhibition (at the Royal Academy of Arts) of Henri Fuseli’s iconic painting The Nightmare 1789: Publication of Blake’s Songs of Innocence 14 July 1789: French Revolution begins with the storming of the Bastille 1792: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Women 1794: Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience 1796: Matthew “Monk” Lewis, The Monk 1798: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads 1800: Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent 1802: Founding of the Edinburgh Review Walter Scott, Ministry of the Scottish Border 1805: Wordsworth, The Prelude 1807: Abolition of slave trade (Abolition of Slavery Act passes in 1833) Byron, Hours of Idleness Chas. and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare 1809: 1st issue of Quarterly Review Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers 1811: Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility 1816: Byron exiled from England 1817: Keats, Poems Coleridge, Biographia Litteraria M. Shelley, Frankenstein 1st issue, Blackwood’s Magazine 1820: John Clare, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery 1821: Keats dies De Quincey, installments of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater 1822: Shelley dies 1824: Byron dies James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 1830: Passenger railway lines between Liverpool and Manchester Lyell, Principles of Geology begins publication Tennyson, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical 1832: 1st Reform Bill 1833: Carlyle, Sartor Resartus 1837: Accession of Victoria Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Great Western Railway Dickens, *Oliver Twist \n * \n \n \n 1838: Chartist Movement (continues to 1848) \n \n 1839: Victoria marries Albert (1819-1861), son of the Duke of Saxe-coburg; Victoria's cousin \n \n \n \n 1841: Peel becomes Prime Minister 1842: Browning, Dramatic Lyrics 1843: first volume of Ruskin’s Modern Painters 1845: Beginning of the Irish potato famine Disraeli, *Sybil, or The Two Nations \n * \n \n \n 1847: Charlotte, Brontë, Jane Eyre Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey 1848: Gaskell, Mary Barton 1848: Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto Chartist Rebellion 1849: Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor 1850: Notable publications: Household Words (Dickens), The Germ (PRB) Tennyson, In Memoriam Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese 1851: Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace Ruskin, Stones of Venice 1853: Arnold, Poems 1854: Onset of Crimean War Dickens, Hard Times Gaskell, North and South begins appearing 1857: Indian Mutiny 1859: Darwin, On the Origin of Species 1860: Dickens, Great Expectations 1861: Death of Albert. Victoria enters lengthy period of intense mourning and privacy 1864: First Contagious Diseases Act Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua 1865: Women’s Suffrage Campaign Transatlantic cable laid St Pancras railway station completed 1867: Fenian Rising (Ireland) 1868: Disraeli becomes Prime Minister in February Gladstone becomes PM in December Huxley’s On the Physical Basis of Life lecture 1869: Suez Canal opens Mill, The Subjection of Women 1870: First Married Women’s Property Act Spencer, Principles of Psychology 1871: Darwin, The Descent of Man Stanley meets Livingstone Eliot, Middlemarch begins serialization 1874: Disraeli, becomes Prime Minister again \n \n \n 1876: Queen Victoria named empress of India 1880: Gladstone becomes Prime Minister again \n \n \n 1881: First Anglo-Boer War \n \n 1882: Second Married Women's Property Act, which allows wives to acquire, hold, use, and dispose of their own property, \n giving them the same rights that they would have if they were unmarried (cf, Dickens, David Copperfield) \n \n 1883: Fabian Society founded 1885: Salisbury, PM 1886: Gladstone, PM (Feb.) Salisbury, PM (Aug.) Repeal of Contagious Diseases Act Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 1887: Victoria’s Golden Jubilee Doyle, A Study in Scarlet 1888: Five victims in the Whitechapel murders (“Jack the Ripper”) 1890: First underground railway in London Frazer, first two volumes of The Golden Bough Morris, News from Nowhere Wilde, first edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray 1891: Gissing, New Grub Street 1893: Independent Labour Party formed 1895: Wilde’s arrest, trial and imprisonment Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband 1896: Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee Stoker, Dracula 1899: Irish Literary Theatre founded (Abbey Theatre) Second Anglo-Boer War begins 1901: Death of Queen Victoria \n \n \n \n \n \n This isn’t, I hope, a list of irrelevant trivia. Instead, I want you to see that even a cursory survey of select events from this period, which spans nearly a century and a half, shows us the rise of what we might recognize a “modern” Britain in terms not only of its literature but also of its politics, customs and other social developments. Many of the concerns that some of the writers whose work we will read this semester appear in this timeline. Please, do not trouble yourself to learn all of these dates and events, unless some things simply strike you as particularly memorable or intriguing. (No, I will not give you a pop quiz or exam to make sure you have these dates and facts committed to memory. For you Dickensians, please don’t think of me as a Gradgrind—at least not in this regard.) Among other factors, I want you to see how easily the Romantic period melds into the Victorian era. Sure, it helps that so many of the second-generation Romantic poets so courteously vacated this earthly stage for us to begin to see a clear transition, but even had they not died Tennyson would still have published. And, I suspect, Keats might have gone to become a leading Victorian poet—or novelist, or critic. A few key motifs of Romanticism: \n \n • Self-consciousness \n • Celebrates the individual • within the social, political, and intellectual structures of society it stressed the separateness of the person; \n \n • in literature, turn toward humanity as a proper subject for art and increased acceptance of experimentation from writers determined to express their individuality through choice of subject matter and mode of representation \n \n • Tends to express strong faith in the fundamental goodness and perfectibility of human beings. \n • Emphasizes present and emotive experiences \n • Embraces nature \n • Egalitarian; social structure perceived as protecting and encouraging individual aspirations \n • For Wordsworth and contemporaries, instinct, emotion, and imagination were truer than the intrusive intellect \n • Representation of spontaneity (Wordsworth, especially): “Spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and “emotion \n recollected in tranquility” \n • Rejects 18th C. belief in and conception of rational control; instead, instinct, imagination, emotion \n • Places high regard on aesthetics and on the artist figure, who appears as a sage, philosopher, prophet and savior. Consider Shelley’s declaration that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” One convenient—and misleading—way of thinking of the distinctions between the Romantics and the Victorians involves the matter of ranking literary forms and genres. That is, up to and pretty well through the Romantic period poetry was celebrated as the highest achievement in literary art and thought while the novel was viewed with great suspicion. Put even more simply, poetry was for men while novels were for women. There are many reasons for such generalizations, which were often held dearly and dogmatically by their adherents. Sensibility, for example, became to be viewed as more appropriate for women than men since women were thought to be more delicate and more susceptible to emotion than those headstrong, rational men of the eighteenth century. Obviously, the reality is far more complex in practice than that, but such notions had been the norm for a long time. Novels, particularly those such as, for example, Richardson’s Pamela and Rowson’s Charlotte Temple predicated themselves on the reader’s ability to sympathize with the characters. But then something curious happened. Along with the emergence of a larger populace and a strong, recognizable middle class in the early decades of the nineteenth century, these individuals were more literate than ever before and the middle-class(es) and above had leisure time and a bit of extra money. They bought art (largely reproductions and facsimiles) and books, and they really took a fancy to novels. Not just the women, mind you, but both sexes. As the novel became less gendered it also became the dominant literary mode. Forget critical snobbery, at least for the moment: Popularity has definite impacts. This compels poets such as Robert Browning to reevaluate their art and to decide how they might be able to recapture for poetry some of those readers who are burning through the three-decker novels at a frenzied pace. Browning (and others, but let’s just use him as a kind of synecdoche for the moment) responds by adopting novelistic techniques in his poetry; this includes composing poems that in previous eras might have appeared as epics but suddenly looked more like novels, though novels where the words rarely ran all the way across the page. Novels—and fiction overall—continued to develop, moving from the so-called sentimental novel to tougher, grittier novels. This owes much to the rise of social realism as well as the type of psychological realism that Samuel Richardson championed, and it also becomes apparent in the increase of tragedy in the novels. The novelists still wanted you to sympathize with their characters largely, but they also didn’t mind slapping you in the face or kicking you in the abdomen to make sure you felt the pain of life in the cities or out in Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. \n \n \n \n \n Consider the image above: Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, constructed to house the Great exhibition (1851)—or, more accurately, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations—at London's Hyde Park. A forerunner of the World's Fairs, the Great Exhibition showed the world tangible proof of those quintessential Victorian ideals: progress, modernity, British dominance. Although the exhibition featured works of art and industry from other nations, Britain was meant to be seen as the leader and as a type of one-upmanship on the French. Just as the building seems to dwarf the people outside it in that engraving, so too did much of the machinery and other industrial developments of the era minimize human beings in certain respects. The enormity of the Crystal Palace and the complexity of actually staging the event combined two other typical Victorian ideals: earnestness and achievement. Although the Crystal Palace no longer stands—following its removal to a location now known, aptly enough, as Crystal Palace and eventual destruction by fire (1936)—its legacies remain highly visible in the form of the National Sports Centre, the Victoria & Albert Museum and others. If the Crystal Palace looks familiar to you, it's possible that it reminds you of the Infomart Building on the Stemmons Freeway in Dallas, an architectural homage to Paxton's Crystal Palace: Let us look briefly at Victorian language. Yes, just as you suspect there is—at least among the “proper” classes—emphasis on courtesy and formality, both of which can extend to the adoption of euphemisms. By the early 20th century, though, even the word “Victorian” seemed laden with meanings, coming to imply, fairly or not, sentimentality, prudishness, and adherence to convention. This also a period of British confidence in their superiority, which lasts until what we refer to as the “Late Victorian” period (1870-1901) when war and the threat of war with Germany becoming viewed as an international threat through the Franco-Prussian War. (Yes, Britons feared a German invasion—forget about the German lineages of the British monarchy for a moment—well before World War I.) • Popular perceptions of Victorians: earnestness; propriety in manners, language, and literature, but with a hypocrisy of idealized women (purity, Coventry Patmore’s image of the “Angel in the House”) and men who exploited the poor, visited brothels, and plundered colonies • Two widespread characteristics of the middle class: emphasis on materialism and respectability. Earnestness was considered part of respectability. • “Progress”: advancement, forging a better way of life than would have been possible without high Victorian ideals and inventions • “evolutionary ameliorism”: belief that the human race perfects itself over time, a kind of metaphysical Darwinism. This concept holds strong until the outbreak of the Great War. But this is also a time of what Benjamin Disraeli termed “The Two Nations,” that of the rich and the poor. Even with the continued rise of the middle class, there existed a tremendous disparity in wealth. At the same time it was also a time of production and consumption as the economy came to rely primarily on trade and manufacturing. Through industrialization, railways, the steam engine and factory production were just a few of the most obvious agents responsible for the explosion of population in urban areas such as London, Manchester and Birmingham, destabilizing rural and agricultural life and customs for countless individuals and families. During this period London went from being a city with a population of about two million people to having more than 6.5 million people and replacing Paris as the cultural and political center of the West. Even the animals went to the cities, as beasts of burden and livestock. In London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew estimated that in one year the horses that traverse London would leave over 36,600 tons of fecal waste; cattle, 1125 tons; sheep, calves and pigs, 1805; total, 39,592 tons of feces. Britain sustained itself on and enjoyed massive wealth from its multitude of colonies, creating additional heavy investment abroad. At its peak in the early 20th century, around 1920, the British Empire is reputed to have covered a quarter of the earth’s surface and a fifth of its population—perhaps 400 million people (“The sun never sets on the British Empire”): \n \n • largely commercial empire, run by monopoly companies and defended by the Royal Navy • 1880s on, imperialism: intentional design of expanded empire. This is a conscious mood of imperialism; empire sought deliberately instead of as a “fortunate” result and becomes justified through what Rudyard Kipling popularized in 1899 as “the White Man’s Burden.” Remnants of the global influence of the British Empire include the spread of capitalism, English as lingua franca, and even the popularity of cricket in many of its former colonies. (Not here: we have baseball.) Now think back on those middle-class men and women with money in their pockets and time on their hands. Even though they could get across the country more quickly than ever thanks to the railways, they sought to “kill” the time on trains through activities such as reading. Just as the technology for travel advanced, so did that of the printing press. Booksellers, publishers and libraries all sought a bit of capitalist endeavor in the publishing enterprise. Concerning the libraries, there emerged two types: the “free library,” much like what we consider a public library and catered to the middle and working classes, and the “circulating library,” which was more along the lines of a Victorian version of Blockbuster (before Netflix). Publishers sold books at a steep discount to circulating libraries such as Mudie’s and W.H. Smith's, who in turn rented them out to customers. This resulted in the popularity of the triple-decker, the three-volume novel format—ever wondered why those Victorian novels had so many pages? In essence, a single novel could be let on hire three times simultaneously by dividing it into distinct volumes. Moreover, may people in this age of acquisition wanted to own the book for their personal libraries, people who often purchased the same novel again when it appeared as the complete novel in a single, hefty volume. \n \n If you're interested in reading at some point a novelist's view of the difficulties that the triple-decker placed on younger, poorer writers, I highly recommend George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891). In Gissing's novel, one that with its story of frustration, misery and tragedy, falls into the mode of literary naturalism, and it uses social realism to capture late-Victorian society and publishing. \n \n \n \n Another crucial development in Victorian publishing is that of serialization, the practice of publishing in installments. People who could not afford, for example, even the circulating libraries might be able to afford a newspaper or magazine that featured an installment of a novel they had been following. The delay between installments meant that readers also had to devise new ways of reading, of following the plots and the exploits of the novel’s characters. Readers viewed the novel as more lifelike, not just due to the increase in realism but in the fact that the readers and characters had developed a relationship that could last for years as the readers looked forward to the next installment—all the more so due to the use of cliffhanger-plots to create suspense and an audience for the next installment. \n \n Along these lines the authors faced particular challenges of frequently only a little ahead of their readers. They novelists not only had to persevere, but it became difficult for them to make changes to either the story or characters they might have made otherwise. When you think of how richly populated a Dickens novel is, try to think of the difficulties he must have experienced in keeping those character details consistent throughout the course of serialization. In fact, Dickens seems synonymous at times with the practice of serialization, due not only to basically inaugurating the practice through the tremendous successs of his novel The Pickwick Papers, which appeared from 1836-1837 or the New York fans waiting anxiously at the New York docks to learn Little Nell’s fate. \n \n \n \n A true entrepreneur, Dickens also published Household Words, which featured episodic novels by himself and other writers. ReplyReply allForward
\n \n Historical & Cultural Overview, Timeline and a Few Notes about Literary Periods \n \n To begin, let us reach a consensus on at least one assertion: Literary periods are artificial. That is to say that the fancy names, which to be honest usually are not always terribly fancy and are at times quite ambiguous if not outright misleading, function best when they are able to accurately define or otherwise delineate a certain epoch. Failing that, they work well when the convey a general (if narrow) sense or feeling of the period, of its zeitgeist or its "spirit of the time." Although we can view through historical or literary periods certain watershed events or other momentous occasions that seem to call for the end of one era and the beginning of another, it is often a critical argument that one must make to declare a change and how we can recognize it. \n \n Most of us, I suspect, do not tend to get up in the morning and think about what era we're living in at any moment, partly perhaps because it can change so rapidly. \n \n Similarly, writers, musicians, artists, and other expressive thinkers did not suddenly wake up in 1837 and declare, "Cor! I'm no longer a Romantic. Well, chaps, we must be Victorians now for a while." Obviously, there is more than a little hyperbole there, but my point is that such names--Romantic, Victorian, Modern, Postmodern, whatever--strive to convey an overall sense of the times, a figurative method that allows us to feel and otherwise perceive the dominant trends. It's something of a shortcut, but it's also a necessity. If you want to define the Victorian era as I have done above strictly by the years of Queen Victoria's reign, go right ahead. If you want to stretch it by a few years, or even abbreviate it at the end, you won't be alone. All I ask is that you formulate a clear and logical reason for doing so, and that you don't miss one essential point: periods result from processes, from events and historical accidents that shape them. \n \n Let's look at a bit of an extended timeline that will suit our purposes, one that begins with the publication of what is often cited as the first Gothic novel and ends with Victoria's death: \n \n \n 1764: Horace Walpole, Castle of Otranto 1780 (June): Gordon Riots, the greatest outburst of civil disorder in modern British history: 300 people killed, \n enormous amounts of damage to property; results from reactions to Lord George Gordon’s \n Parliamentary petition against concessions to Catholics and his charge of treason. \n \n \n 
\n \n \n \n 1782: First public exhibition (at the Royal Academy of Arts) of Henri Fuseli’s iconic painting The Nightmare 1789: Publication of Blake’s Songs of Innocence 14 July 1789: French Revolution begins with the storming of the Bastille 1792: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Women 1794: Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience 1796: Matthew “Monk” Lewis, The Monk 1798: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads 1800: Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent 1802: Founding of the Edinburgh Review Walter Scott, Ministry of the Scottish Border 1805: Wordsworth, The Prelude 1807: Abolition of slave trade (Abolition of Slavery Act passes in 1833) Byron, Hours of Idleness Chas. and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare 1809: 1st issue of Quarterly Review Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers 1811: Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility 1816: Byron exiled from England 1817: Keats, Poems Coleridge, Biographia Litteraria M. Shelley, Frankenstein 1st issue, Blackwood’s Magazine 1820: John Clare, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery 1821: Keats dies De Quincey, installments of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater 1822: Shelley dies 1824: Byron dies James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 1830: Passenger railway lines between Liverpool and Manchester Lyell, Principles of Geology begins publication Tennyson, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical 1832: 1st Reform Bill 1833: Carlyle, Sartor Resartus 1837: Accession of Victoria Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Great Western Railway Dickens, *Oliver Twist \n * \n \n 
\n 1838: Chartist Movement (continues to 1848) \n \n 1839: Victoria marries Albert (1819-1861), son of the Duke of Saxe-coburg; Victoria's cousin \n 
\n \n \n 1841: Peel becomes Prime Minister 1842: Browning, Dramatic Lyrics 1843: first volume of Ruskin’s Modern Painters 1845: Beginning of the Irish potato famine Disraeli, *Sybil, or The Two Nations \n * \n \n 
\n 1847: Charlotte, Brontë, Jane Eyre Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey 1848: Gaskell, Mary Barton 1848: Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto Chartist Rebellion 1849: Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor 1850: Notable publications: Household Words (Dickens), The Germ (PRB) Tennyson, In Memoriam Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese 1851: Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace Ruskin, Stones of Venice 1853: Arnold, Poems 1854: Onset of Crimean War Dickens, Hard Times Gaskell, North and South begins appearing 1857: Indian Mutiny 1859: Darwin, On the Origin of Species 1860: Dickens, Great Expectations 1861: Death of Albert. Victoria enters lengthy period of intense mourning and privacy 1864: First Contagious Diseases Act Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua 1865: Women’s Suffrage Campaign Transatlantic cable laid St Pancras railway station completed 1867: Fenian Rising (Ireland) 1868: Disraeli becomes Prime Minister in February Gladstone becomes PM in December Huxley’s On the Physical Basis of Life lecture 1869: Suez Canal opens Mill, The Subjection of Women 1870: First Married Women’s Property Act Spencer, Principles of Psychology 1871: Darwin, The Descent of Man Stanley meets Livingstone Eliot, Middlemarch begins serialization 1874: Disraeli, becomes Prime Minister again \n .jpg?_&d2lSessionVal=47S1OcjdyTkrEKuZBiBdlH7xH&ou=110475 "Disraeli (Vanity Fair cartoon)")
\n \n 1876: Queen Victoria named empress of India 1880: Gladstone becomes Prime Minister again \n 
\n \n 1881: First Anglo-Boer War \n \n 1882: Second Married Women's Property Act, which allows wives to acquire, hold, use, and dispose of their own property, \n giving them the same rights that they would have if they were unmarried (cf, Dickens, David Copperfield) \n \n 1883: Fabian Society founded 1885: Salisbury, PM 1886: Gladstone, PM (Feb.) Salisbury, PM (Aug.) Repeal of Contagious Diseases Act Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 1887: Victoria’s Golden Jubilee Doyle, A Study in Scarlet 1888: Five victims in the Whitechapel murders (“Jack the Ripper”) 1890: First underground railway in London Frazer, first two volumes of The Golden Bough Morris, News from Nowhere Wilde, first edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray 1891: Gissing, New Grub Street 1893: Independent Labour Party formed 1895: Wilde’s arrest, trial and imprisonment Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband 1896: Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee Stoker, Dracula 1899: Irish Literary Theatre founded (Abbey Theatre) Second Anglo-Boer War begins 1901: Death of Queen Victoria \n \n \n \n \n \n This isn’t, I hope, a list of irrelevant trivia. Instead, I want you to see that even a cursory survey of select events from this period, which spans nearly a century and a half, shows us the rise of what we might recognize a “modern” Britain in terms not only of its literature but also of its politics, customs and other social developments. Many of the concerns that some of the writers whose work we will read this semester appear in this timeline. Please, do not trouble yourself to learn all of these dates and events, unless some things simply strike you as particularly memorable or intriguing. (No, I will not give you a pop quiz or exam to make sure you have these dates and facts committed to memory. For you Dickensians, please don’t think of me as a Gradgrind—at least not in this regard.) Among other factors, I want you to see how easily the Romantic period melds into the Victorian era. Sure, it helps that so many of the second-generation Romantic poets so courteously vacated this earthly stage for us to begin to see a clear transition, but even had they not died Tennyson would still have published. And, I suspect, Keats might have gone to become a leading Victorian poet—or novelist, or critic. A few key motifs of Romanticism: \n \n • Self-consciousness \n • Celebrates the individual • within the social, political, and intellectual structures of society it stressed the separateness of the person; \n \n • in literature, turn toward humanity as a proper subject for art and increased acceptance of experimentation from writers determined to express their individuality through choice of subject matter and mode of representation \n \n • Tends to express strong faith in the fundamental goodness and perfectibility of human beings. \n • Emphasizes present and emotive experiences \n • Embraces nature \n • Egalitarian; social structure perceived as protecting and encouraging individual aspirations \n • For Wordsworth and contemporaries, instinct, emotion, and imagination were truer than the intrusive intellect \n • Representation of spontaneity (Wordsworth, especially): “Spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and “emotion \n recollected in tranquility” \n • Rejects 18th C. belief in and conception of rational control; instead, instinct, imagination, emotion \n • Places high regard on aesthetics and on the artist figure, who appears as a sage, philosopher, prophet and savior. Consider Shelley’s declaration that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” One convenient—and misleading—way of thinking of the distinctions between the Romantics and the Victorians involves the matter of ranking literary forms and genres. That is, up to and pretty well through the Romantic period poetry was celebrated as the highest achievement in literary art and thought while the novel was viewed with great suspicion. Put even more simply, poetry was for men while novels were for women. There are many reasons for such generalizations, which were often held dearly and dogmatically by their adherents. Sensibility, for example, became to be viewed as more appropriate for women than men since women were thought to be more delicate and more susceptible to emotion than those headstrong, rational men of the eighteenth century. Obviously, the reality is far more complex in practice than that, but such notions had been the norm for a long time. Novels, particularly those such as, for example, Richardson’s Pamela and Rowson’s Charlotte Temple predicated themselves on the reader’s ability to sympathize with the characters. But then something curious happened. Along with the emergence of a larger populace and a strong, recognizable middle class in the early decades of the nineteenth century, these individuals were more literate than ever before and the middle-class(es) and above had leisure time and a bit of extra money. They bought art (largely reproductions and facsimiles) and books, and they really took a fancy to novels. Not just the women, mind you, but both sexes. As the novel became less gendered it also became the dominant literary mode. Forget critical snobbery, at least for the moment: Popularity has definite impacts. This compels poets such as Robert Browning to reevaluate their art and to decide how they might be able to recapture for poetry some of those readers who are burning through the three-decker novels at a frenzied pace. Browning (and others, but let’s just use him as a kind of synecdoche for the moment) responds by adopting novelistic techniques in his poetry; this includes composing poems that in previous eras might have appeared as epics but suddenly looked more like novels, though novels where the words rarely ran all the way across the page. Novels—and fiction overall—continued to develop, moving from the so-called sentimental novel to tougher, grittier novels. This owes much to the rise of social realism as well as the type of psychological realism that Samuel Richardson championed, and it also becomes apparent in the increase of tragedy in the novels. The novelists still wanted you to sympathize with their characters largely, but they also didn’t mind slapping you in the face or kicking you in the abdomen to make sure you felt the pain of life in the cities or out in Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. \n \n \n 
\n \n Consider the image above: Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, constructed to house the Great exhibition (1851)—or, more accurately, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations—at London's Hyde Park. A forerunner of the World's Fairs, the Great Exhibition showed the world tangible proof of those quintessential Victorian ideals: progress, modernity, British dominance. Although the exhibition featured works of art and industry from other nations, Britain was meant to be seen as the leader and as a type of one-upmanship on the French. Just as the building seems to dwarf the people outside it in that engraving, so too did much of the machinery and other industrial developments of the era minimize human beings in certain respects. The enormity of the Crystal Palace and the complexity of actually staging the event combined two other typical Victorian ideals: earnestness and achievement. Although the Crystal Palace no longer stands—following its removal to a location now known, aptly enough, as Crystal Palace and eventual destruction by fire (1936)—its legacies remain highly visible in the form of the National Sports Centre, the Victoria & Albert Museum and others. If the Crystal Palace looks familiar to you, it's possible that it reminds you of the Infomart Building on the Stemmons Freeway in Dallas, an architectural homage to Paxton's Crystal Palace: 
Let us look briefly at Victorian language. Yes, just as you suspect there is—at least among the “proper” classes—emphasis on courtesy and formality, both of which can extend to the adoption of euphemisms. By the early 20th century, though, even the word “Victorian” seemed laden with meanings, coming to imply, fairly or not, sentimentality, prudishness, and adherence to convention. This also a period of British confidence in their superiority, which lasts until what we refer to as the “Late Victorian” period (1870-1901) when war and the threat of war with Germany becoming viewed as an international threat through the Franco-Prussian War. (Yes, Britons feared a German invasion—forget about the German lineages of the British monarchy for a moment—well before World War I.) • Popular perceptions of Victorians: earnestness; propriety in manners, language, and literature, but with a hypocrisy of idealized women (purity, Coventry Patmore’s image of the “Angel in the House”) and men who exploited the poor, visited brothels, and plundered colonies • Two widespread characteristics of the middle class: emphasis on materialism and respectability. Earnestness was considered part of respectability. • “Progress”: advancement, forging a better way of life than would have been possible without high Victorian ideals and inventions • “evolutionary ameliorism”: belief that the human race perfects itself over time, a kind of metaphysical Darwinism. This concept holds strong until the outbreak of the Great War. But this is also a time of what Benjamin Disraeli termed “The Two Nations,” that of the rich and the poor. Even with the continued rise of the middle class, there existed a tremendous disparity in wealth. At the same time it was also a time of production and consumption as the economy came to rely primarily on trade and manufacturing. Through industrialization, railways, the steam engine and factory production were just a few of the most obvious agents responsible for the explosion of population in urban areas such as London, Manchester and Birmingham, destabilizing rural and agricultural life and customs for countless individuals and families. During this period London went from being a city with a population of about two million people to having more than 6.5 million people and replacing Paris as the cultural and political center of the West. Even the animals went to the cities, as beasts of burden and livestock. In London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew estimated that in one year the horses that traverse London would leave over 36,600 tons of fecal waste; cattle, 1125 tons; sheep, calves and pigs, 1805; total, 39,592 tons of feces. Britain sustained itself on and enjoyed massive wealth from its multitude of colonies, creating additional heavy investment abroad. At its peak in the early 20th century, around 1920, the British Empire is reputed to have covered a quarter of the earth’s surface and a fifth of its population—perhaps 400 million people (“The sun never sets on the British Empire”): \n \n • largely commercial empire, run by monopoly companies and defended by the Royal Navy • 1880s on, imperialism: intentional design of expanded empire. This is a conscious mood of imperialism; empire sought deliberately instead of as a “fortunate” result and becomes justified through what Rudyard Kipling popularized in 1899 as “the White Man’s Burden.” Remnants of the global influence of the British Empire include the spread of capitalism, English as lingua franca, and even the popularity of cricket in many of its former colonies. (Not here: we have baseball.) Now think back on those middle-class men and women with money in their pockets and time on their hands. Even though they could get across the country more quickly than ever thanks to the railways, they sought to “kill” the time on trains through activities such as reading. Just as the technology for travel advanced, so did that of the printing press. Booksellers, publishers and libraries all sought a bit of capitalist endeavor in the publishing enterprise. Concerning the libraries, there emerged two types: the “free library,” much like what we consider a public library and catered to the middle and working classes, and the “circulating library,” which was more along the lines of a Victorian version of Blockbuster (before Netflix). Publishers sold books at a steep discount to circulating libraries such as Mudie’s and W.H. Smith's, who in turn rented them out to customers. This resulted in the popularity of the triple-decker, the three-volume novel format—ever wondered why those Victorian novels had so many pages? In essence, a single novel could be let on hire three times simultaneously by dividing it into distinct volumes. Moreover, may people in this age of acquisition wanted to own the book for their personal libraries, people who often purchased the same novel again when it appeared as the complete novel in a single, hefty volume. \n \n If you're interested in reading at some point a novelist's view of the difficulties that the triple-decker placed on younger, poorer writers, I highly recommend George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891). In Gissing's novel, one that with its story of frustration, misery and tragedy, falls into the mode of literary naturalism, and it uses social realism to capture late-Victorian society and publishing. \n \n \n 
\n Another crucial development in Victorian publishing is that of serialization, the practice of publishing in installments. People who could not afford, for example, even the circulating libraries might be able to afford a newspaper or magazine that featured an installment of a novel they had been following. The delay between installments meant that readers also had to devise new ways of reading, of following the plots and the exploits of the novel’s characters. Readers viewed the novel as more lifelike, not just due to the increase in realism but in the fact that the readers and characters had developed a relationship that could last for years as the readers looked forward to the next installment—all the more so due to the use of cliffhanger-plots to create suspense and an audience for the next installment. \n \n Along these lines the authors faced particular challenges of frequently only a little ahead of their readers. They novelists not only had to persevere, but it became difficult for them to make changes to either the story or characters they might have made otherwise. When you think of how richly populated a Dickens novel is, try to think of the difficulties he must have experienced in keeping those character details consistent throughout the course of serialization. In fact, Dickens seems synonymous at times with the practice of serialization, due not only to basically inaugurating the practice through the tremendous successs of his novel The Pickwick Papers, which appeared from 1836-1837 or the New York fans waiting anxiously at the New York docks to learn Little Nell’s fate. \n \n 
\n \n A true entrepreneur, Dickens also published Household Words, which featured episodic novels by himself and other writers. 
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