The Victorian Age

Question 1

The Victorian Novel

Answer 1

•Serialisation —> literature as mass product
• Three-volume novels —> extra income for lending librarie
• Installments in magazines —> readers buy new issue every week
• Cliffhangers
• Themes:
- Progress vs Crisis
- Nostalgia
- Historical novel
- National tale
- Industrialisation —> Industrial novel

Question 2

George Elliot

Answer 2

• Born as Mary Anne Evans

• Main Works:
- Adam Bede
- Mill on the Floss
- Silas Marner
- Middlemarch
- Daniel Deronda

Question 3

Sir Walter Scott

Answer 3

• ‘Inventing’ national character of Scotland by retelling past

Question 4

The Industrial Novel

Answer 4

• “Condition of England Question”

• Rise of serialisation (e.g. Penny Dreadfuls)
• Rise of the Industrial novel
• Concerned with the England
Question, i.e. the most important issues in Victorian society (class inequality, workers’ rights, workers” revolts, etc.)
• Common themes: progress vs crisis, national folklore/tales, history, nostalgia, industrialisation

• Examples:
- Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil
- Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton; North and South
- Charlotte Brontë, Shirley
- Charles Dickens, Hard Times

Question 5

Charles Dickens

Answer 5

• Impoverished childhood
• Hugely successful

• Selected works
- Oliver Twist
- Christmas Carol
- David Copperfield
- Hard Times
- Great Expectations

Question 6

Political/ Social Concerns Victorian Age

Answer 6

• Poverty
• Child-labour; child-abuse
• Penitentary reforms
• New Poor Laws 1834 —> Workhouse System
• Forced labour
• Prison-like institution
• No “outdoor relief” —> no benefits outside the institution

Question 7

Themes in Hard Times

Answer 7

• Bleakness/Ugliness
• Numbers/Statistics/Facts
• Mathematics vs. Empathy
• Statics vs. Human Nature

Question 8

Thomas Hardy

Answer 8

• Poet and novelist

• Main works:
-* Far from the Madding Crowd
- The Mayor of Casterbridge
- Tess of the d’Urbervilles
- Jude the Obscure *
• Realism —> “novels of character and environment”
• Wessex Novels

Question 9

Sexual Themes Victorian Age

Answer 9

• Female Sexuality: Sensuality vs Fragility
• Sex vs ‘Pure’ Love

Question 10

Victorian Poetry

Answer 10

• Interest in the ‘medieval’ period, legends, fairy tales, etc.
—>* “The Lady of Shalott”
—> “Goblin Market”
—> “My Last Duchess”*
• Struggle between science and religion
—>* “In Memoriam A.H.H.”
—> “Dover Beach”*

Question 11

Matthew Arnold

Answer 11

• Poet and cultural critic
• Professorship at Oxford
• Also worked as a school inspector

Dover Beach

• Main works:
- *The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems
- Empedocles on Etna and other Poems *
• New Poems
- *On Translating Homer (lectures)
- The Study of Celtic Literature (lectures)
- Culture and Anarchy *

Question 12

Dover Beach Form

Answer 12

4 Stanzas, in a non-standard pattern, free-verse. lambic.

Question 13

Dover Beach Motifs + Summary

Answer 13

The speaker is speaking to a companion on the beach and laments that the current situation is not as good as it once was.

• Oscillating between description of beach and metaphorical use —> “turbid”: muddy water and opaque meaning
• Nature —> shift from Romantic tradition to a more unsettling view
• Individual: shift from security to isolation and confusion
• The poet: connected through the ages, but not able to conjure up a more optimistic worldview
• Loss of possibilities of ‘salvation’ (faith, nature, love, poetry)

Question 14

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Answer 14

• Poet Laureate
• Peerage
• Baron —> seat in House of Lords
• Admired by Queen Victoria (“much soothed and pleased” by In Memoriam)

Question 15

In Memoriam A.H.H.

Answer 15

• Inspired by the death of Arthur Henry Hallam
• 133 cantos; four line stanzas (abba) in iambic tetrameter —> “In Memoriam stanza”
• Motifs
- friendship
- mourning
- loss of trust
- insecurity, change
- Science/nature vs religion

Question 16

The Lady of Shalott

Answer 16

• Four parts:
1. Description of setting
2. Description of the Lady
3. Appearance of Lancelot
4. Death of the Lady
• 19 stanzas; rhyme scheme aaaa b ccc b (b always Camelot/Shalott à refrain)
• Song-like quality
• Repetition —> fairy tale, nursery rhyme
• Sensory descriptions

Question 17

The Lady of Shalott Motifs and Themes

Answer 17

Gender:
• Lancelot as object of female gaze —> described in visual terms
• Awakening of female desire
• Female desire is fatal —> curse

Art:
• Art is isolated from ‘real’ world
• Art is only imitation —> mirror, weaving
• Artist cannot survive outside her tower

Question 18

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Answer 18

• Founded by William Holman-Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais
• Against the Royal Academy’s championing of Renaissance painter Raphael
• Against genre paintings
• Medievalism
• Precursor of Symbolism

Question 19

Christina Rossetti

Answer 19

• Sister of Dante G. Rossetti
•* The Goblin Market and Other Poems *
• “Winter: My Secret”
• “In the Bleak Midwinter” (Christmas carol)

Question 20

Goblin Market

Answer 20

• Author: Christina Rossetti
• Narrative poem
• No set rhyme scheme or metrical pattern

• Themes:
- Sensuality
- Temptation (written while volunteering at the St Mary Magdalene Penitentiary for ‘fallen women’ in Highgate)
- Transgression
- Female resistance and solidarity

• Summary of content: Two sisters encounter evil goblins who wish to sell them delicious fruit. One sister falls victim to the goblins, but her sister saves them both by resisting temptation.

Question 21

Robert Browning

Answer 21

• Poet and playwright
• Married to Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Works
- “Porphyria’s Lover”
- “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”
- “My Last Duchess”
- “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”

Question 22

Dramatic Monologue

Answer 22

• Spoken by a specific character who is not the poet or a unspecified first person speaker (Duke of Ferrara in “My Last Duchess“, Robert Browning)
• Presence of an addressee, how the addressee responds to the speaker is not directly represented but might be construed (Emissary of the Duke’s potential father-in-law)
• Speaker’s character and the ‘whole’ story are revealed through the monologue; not explicitly told (Jealousy of Duke, Arrogance of Duke, Death of the Duchess seems suspicious: “I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.”)

Question 23

Rudyard Kipling

Answer 23

• Born in Bombay / British India; educated in both India and England
• Writer and journalist

• Works
- The Jungle Book/The Second Jungle Book
- Kim
- Short stories
- Just So Stories

Question 24

Kipling, “The White Man‘s Burden“

Answer 24

• Historical backdrop: Spanish-American War 1898; Philippine-American War 1899-1902

• Themes: colonial propaganda, racism, othering, civilizing

• Poem taken as imperative to enforce colonial rule; white race is morally destined to colonialise other, non-white and taken to be inferior, peoples
• Mission of civilisation
• Sparked critique; satiric responses that address the white supremacist
perspective (“The Black Man’s Burden”; ”The Brown Man’s Burden”)

Question 25

Victorian age Time

Answer 25

1832-1901

Question 26

“The White Mans Burden” summary + form

Answer 26

• Form: 7 stanzas, 8 lines each
ABCBDEFE
• Summary of Content: A coloniser is speaking to other imperial nations and instructing them to keep on colonising - because it’s a positive project for all involved

Question 27

Characteristics of Charles Dicken’s Novels

Answer 27

• Focus on working class characters and impoverished people
• Usually take place in urban environments (e.g. London)
• Themes of class inequality, poverty, child labour, child abuse, penetentiary reforms, urban life, logic/fact vs human nature

Question 28

Characteristics of Scott’s Novels

Answer 28

• Interest in generating a narrative for
Scottish national identity
• Historical novels

Question 29

Characteristics of Hardy’s Novels

Answer 29

• Focus on the English countyside and villages (particularly the Wessex region)
• Focus on environment and characters
• Realism
• Address the taboo subject of sexuality (particularly female sexuality)
• Sex vs ‘Pure’ Love: True love as something that is chaste and restrained

Question 30

Characteristics of Eliot’s Novels

Answer 30

• Reflective of Eliot’s philosophical interests
• Often focus on village life and village gossip