The Victorian Age

Question 1

From when it starts?
History and Politics

Answer 1

1832 - 1901
See Notability

Question 2

What’s the Victorian Compromise?

Answer 2

See Notability

Question 3

Religion

Answer 3

Low, High and Broad Church

Question 4

Gender Roles and the Woman Question

Answer 4

Prostitution was flourishing
We assist at the rise of the Feminist Movement to gain basic rights
Women were saturated with prescriptive literature filled with social instruction on the duties of womanhood and proper feminine behaviour, but some women rebel
The Fallen Woman
The “New Woman” literature
MEN —> self-made man (Dandy), homoerotic impulse (Oscar Wilde)

Question 5

Which are the main discoveries in science and technology?

Answer 5

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859)
Charles Babbage, “father of the modern computer”: he invented a machine capable of calculating mathematical problems
The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations (1851)
Medical technology: the stethoscope and microscope are steadily improved; the anesthesia is invented
National circulation system: Great Western Railway; London Underground; telegraph and then telephones (1870)

Question 6

What’s the reverse of the medal?

Answer 6

exploitation of workers, inhuman conditions, poverty, precarious lives, diseases, criminality, prostitution. Recurrent doubts about the past (sense of ending and fear of regression), about social justice, about religion (because of the scientific discoveries, the historical validity of the Bible is denied), about the values of the Empire and the idea of superiority. More rebellious against moral notions and stereotypical codes of behavior.

Question 7

Literary Overview

Answer 7

English classics were taught in the colonies
The Victorian era is considered a golden age for children’s literature —> Bildungsroman —> development of children’s literature with a didactic purpose
The Victorian Novel —> Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens —> These poets entered this scene eager to experiment in new ways with representing the social realities and the complex problems of urban and economic strife

RISE OF THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde combines elements of Gothic, detective and science fiction
The sensual experiences of the aesthete —> Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, that focus on the hero’s mind, and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Question 8

Drama

Answer 8

New theatres
The renaissance of Irish’ drama —> Oscar Wilde with Salome

Question 9

Class relations

Answer 9

The conflict between rich and poor is obviously one of the main themes in the Victorian Age literature
No contact between these two worlds
Chartist Poetry
With the rise of the trade unions, these problems were no longer so strikingly relevant.

Question 10

Landscape

Answer 10

In this period, the landscape of London becomes the foreground of every literature work
Victorian writers put the country and the city in symbolic opposition to one another: innocence and experience, the natural and the unnatural, the unchanging and the transient
The landscape also becomes an emblematic way of highlighting the psychological terrain and the personal perspective of the characters

Question 11

Readings

Answer 11

Charlotte Brontë – Jane Eyre (1857)
Charles Dickens – Bleak House (1852-3)
Christina Rossetti (pseudonym Ellen Alleyn) – Goblin Market (1862)
Robert Louis Stevenson – Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)