Victorian Era

Question 1

Swinburne

Answer 1

Poems and ballads

Medieval and lyric poetry. Scandalous, rebellion against Victorian values (homosexuality…)

Question 2

Robert Browning

Answer 2

“Porphyria’s Lover”
“My last duchess”
The Ring and the Book

Dramatic monologue. Morbid overtone.

Question 3

Dickens

Answer 3

Committed writer.

Father: navy, CD didn’t attend school, became a journalist (then serial publication), traveled a lot, public readings, died of a stroke.

• Pickwick’s Paper, Oliver Twist, American Notes for General Circulation (travelogue), Household Words (middle class newspaper), David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities (parallel editing).

Question 4

Charlotte Brontë

Answer 4

(Alias Currer Bell)

Jane Eyre: abuses orphan child, equality of all before god, love in marriage

Question 5

Emily Dickens

Answer 5

Wuthering Heights (1840s)
Extraordinary novel

Question 6

1850s

Answer 6

William Thackeray

Question 7

1860s

Answer 7

Anthony Trollope

Question 8

George Eliot

Answer 8

Real name: Marie Evans
(Pseudo because female = romanticism, not serious)

Isolated with her father until his death. London: literary circle, husband George Henri Lewes (not married: scandal)

• Adam Bede
• Middle March (1870s): psychological, realism

Question 9

Victorian Realism

Answer 9

(1850s)

Faithful representation of the world.
George Eliot: realism opposed to ideal. Reject imagination. Importance of characterization rather than description.
She criticized Dickens because “false psychology”, but in fact more realistic: Condition of England novel (Dickens: Hard Times; Disraeli: Sybil)

Question 10

Anti realistic elements (Vic)

Answer 10

Realism + Gothic, melodramatic

• Wilkie Collins: sensation fiction
  The Woman in White
• Brontë sisters

Question 11

Narration in Vic realism

Answer 11

1st person: confiding voice, experience (Jane Eyre)

Omniscient: George Eliot: observe real people not invented

Question 12

Thomas Hardy

Answer 12

(80s) Decay

Criticize modern civilisation and celebrate nature
Rural, tragic characters

• Far from the Madding Crowd
• The return of the native
• Tess of D’urbevilles: Alleck seduces Tess, denounces hypocrisy, questions sin (compassion for the heroin murderer)
• Jude the Obscure: social class, religion, marriage, education, loneliness, seduction, destruction. Jude working class can’t be a scholar (wife Arabella; cousin Sue)

Question 13

Joseph Conrad

Answer 13

1880s

Precursor or modernism. Fin de siècle (Henry James, Stevenson). Moral consciousness + narrative technique.
Born in Polish Ukraine, father translator, adventures in sea.
Moral dilemmas.

• Heart of Darkness: Congo, cannibalism and dark magic, corrupted civilization. Satire, psychology, travel.
• Lord Jim
• Nostromo

Question 14

Decadence

Answer 14

Swinburne

Wilde: Salome, The Importance of being earnest, The picture of Dorian Grey

Ideology of aestheticism
Against naturalism (representation of reality without judgment)