Victorian literature Flashcards
Rosalind Rosenberg: sexes placed in different spheres
‘The Victorian faith in sexual polarity’ seemed women ‘by nature emotional and passive’ and men ‘rational and assertive’
Donald H. Meyer - symphonic
‘They longed for a universe that was not just intelligible, reassuring, and morally challenging, but symphonic as well’
Great Paradox according to Donald H Meyer
‘The Great parad, oxof course, was that, in seeking that harmony, the Victorians depended on the moral dichotomy with its inherent divisiveness’
Donald H Meyer on uncertainty
‘The later Victorians were perhaps the last generation among English-speaking intellectuals able to believe that man was capable of understanding his universe, just as they were the first generation collectively to suspect that he never would’
Robert browning
‘I’ll look within no more’
Victorian Realism traits
- Realism, the Puritan code, the values and vices of a double standard society
- Concern with character and tends to guide / instruct reader
- Emphasis is placed on social aspects
George Henry Lewes on Realism
‘Art always aims at the representation of Reality, i.e. of Truth; and no departure from truth is permissible, except such as inevitably lies in the nature of the medium itself’
Henry James: identity and selfhood quote
‘…yourself includes so many other selves - so much of everyone else and of everything’
Tennyson on faith/doubt
‘There lies more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.’
Meredith on marriage/silence
‘She will not speak. I will not ask. We are /
League-sundered by the silent gulf between.’
Ruskin on seeing; visuality
‘To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, - all in one’
Arnold on ‘confusion’
‘The confusion of the present times is great, the multitude of voices counselling different things bewildering’
Clough on greed, excess, cynicism, hypocrisy
‘No graven image may be /
Worshipped, except the currency’
Wilkie Collins - gender quote (from Basil)
‘We live in an age when too many women appear to be ambitious of morally unsexing themselves before society, by aping the language and the manners of men…’
H.G.Wells - quote from theTime Machine; sky was black
‘All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black’
Benjamin Disraeli - Condition of England quote from Sybil; division between rich and poor quote;
‘Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets…’
Bulwer-Lytton on transition, doubt
‘We live in an age of visible transition - an age of disquietude and doubt’
Huxley Science quote
‘The whole of modern thought is steeped in science: it has made its way into the works of the best poets’
Bathsheba everyone in Far from the madding crowd quote; Victorian women’s poetry
‘It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in a language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs’
Robert Louis Stevenson on the novel and life
‘The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life… but by its immeasurable difference from life, a difference which is designed and significant, and is both the method and the meaning of the work’
Charles Kingsley on nature
‘There is poetry in natures till; ay, more than our forefathers ever dreamed.’
Jane Eyre Childhood quote
‘until she heard from Bessie… that I was endeavouring in good earnest to acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner - something lighter, franker, more natural, as it were - she really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy little children’
George Eliot quote home/family life from Felix Holt
‘There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life’
Wilde’s tenet moral/immoral
‘There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all’
Matthew Arnold on unpoetical age
‘…how deeply unpoetical the age and all one’s surroundings are. Not unprofound, not ungrand, not unmoving, – but unpoetical’
Nietzsche on God quote
‘The Christian conception of God… is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever attained on earth… God degenerated into the contradiction of life instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes!’
R.L.Stevenson on Realism
‘The question of realism, let it then be clearly understood, regards not in the least degree the fundamental truth, but only the technical method, of a work of art’
Gerald Manley Hopkins on Poverty
‘My Liverpool and Glasgow experiences laid upon my mind a conviction… of the misery of the poor in general, of the degradation even of our race, of the hollowness of this century’s civilization’
Edmund Wilson on Dickens
‘Of all the Victorian novelists, he was probably the most antagonistic to the Victorian age itself’
Charles Baudelaire on poetry
‘Poetry cannot, under pain of death or decline, assimilate itself to science or morality. It has not truth for its object. It has only itself’
Gerald Manley Hopkins on Browning Quote
‘I was greatly struck with the skill with which he presented the facts from different points of view: this is masterly’
Raymond Williams on Victorian Drama
‘Drama often shows more clearly and more quickly than other arts the deep patterns and changes in our general ideas of reality’
Holman Hunt on Revivalism
‘Revivalism, whether it be of classicism or medievalism, is a seeking after dry bones’
George Eliot on love and fear in Felix Holt
‘A woman’s love is always freezing into fear. She wants everything, and is secure in nothing’
George Henry Lewes quote on Victorian women’s writing
‘To write as men write, is the aim and besetting sin of women; to write as women is the real office they have to perform’
Hopkins prescription of the poetical language of the age
‘For it seems to me that the poetical language of the age should the current language heightened’
