THE VICTORIAN ERA1830s-1900

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

QUEEN VICTORIA

1837-1901

“high values on such qualities as honor, duty, moral seriousness and sexual propriety”

“A GROWING POWER”

• Population growth• 1801: 11 million

• Late 1800s: 37 million

• Imperial expansion

IRISH POTATO FAMINE1845-1852

MILLS AND POVERTY

• Shift from agrarian to industrial economy

• The middle class

• Child labor

• Worker strikes and reform

GENDER AND DOMESTICITY

• House = sacred space

• Gender roles viewed as “innate” and “natural”

• “One of the key signs of a man’s professional success was his wife’s ‘idleness’ within the home”

• “Angel in the house” vs. “Fallen woman”

• Victorian gentleman

• “New Woman”

FAITH AND DOUBT

• Evolution and fossil record

• “Agnostic” coined in 1869

• Changing social order

ENTERTAINMENT

• Increased income and leisure time

• Circuses, sporting events, public gardens, theaters, wax museums, etc.

• New technology: photograph, cinema

VICTORIAN LITERATURE

THE NOVEL

• Long novels (often in installments) with many characters

• Realism• The “social problem novel”

• “We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness.” –George Eliot

• Romantic elements still present in Victorian works

AESTHETICISM

• Attack on realism

• “Art for art’s sake” –Walter Pater

• “Art never declares anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being a creation of its own time, it is usually in direct opposition to it.” –Oscar Wilde