The Victorian Age

(Queen Victoria’s reign, that lasted from 1837 to 1901)

Historical Background• Three Reform Bills: the first one of 1832 just permitted to men of aristocracy and highest classes the right to vote. The second

one of 1867 (reached thanks to the Chartists’s movement) gave the franchise also to town workers but all other men had to wait until 1884 when the suffrage was extended all male sex.

• England was the most powerful country: The introduction of free trade commerce of 1846 strongly improved economical condition of the country and the “Great International Exhibition of London” opened by Queen Victoria and her husband Albert, showed it to an admiring world.

• This century is also known as the triumph of industry, steamboat services started linking England with USA, railways developed quickly too and scientific research in general brought a lot of new things in everyday life as the gas lighting used for the first time in London.

• However the poor endured terrible conditions and nor the Poor Law, that just amassed them in workhouses, nor social reforms improved their situation. In fact the “Mines act”, “the Emancipation of religious sects” and the “Trade Union Act” helped just a small quantity of workers.

• New political parties were born: the Conservatives grew out of the old Tories while the Liberals out of the Whigs. Moreover the political importance of workers was stressed by the foundation of the Labour Party in 1900.

• The Irish question, already dangerous, collapsed after the potato blight of 1845: great amount of people emigrated towards USA while movements for Irish Independence, asking for home rule, started led by Charles Parnell

• Britain’s European policy was opposed to those of other monarchies as Austria and Russia that preferred protectionism rather than free trade. The situation worsened and when Russia tried to expand her borders against Turkey, England and France sided with Turkey defeating Russia. During this “Crimean War” Florence Nightingale became famous as the first nurse and then founded the Red Cross foundation in Geneva.

• During that century also grew up the firsts colleges for women with some movements asking for woman’s suffrage. “The Married women’s property acts” gave women the right to own their own property after they got married (before it passed to their husbands)

• Colonialism was also a leading point of England, moved by the impulse to consolidate overseas markets and to solve the surplus of population at home, Australia (big jail), New Zealand (cattle and sheep raising), Canada, many parts of Africa (the Suez Canal: Red Sea- Mediterranean Sea) and the most important, India. From this last one English ships imported jewels and silk that were then sold to other European countries.

Coltural Background• Nowadays the term “Victorian” has gained a negative meaning, it suggests an idea of “prudery”, in fact during the Victorian

Age an excessive moralism developed based on values as the family and respectability. All excessive things were forbidden, actually just hidden.

• The utilitarian philosophy came out with Bentham who said “everything that is profitable is justified” but the Victorian establishment always refused to admit the existence of it preferring hypocrisy to reality. Victorian society didn’t tolerate the world “leg” spoken by the polite society but was guilty of having thrown lots of women into prostitution.

• Reaction to liberalism and industrialism was strong, Disraeli defined Britain as “the two nations” made by just two classes while Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels started diffusing their ideas.

• The new evolution theory made by Darwin about the origin of human specie strongly shocked the society. Saying that man derived from apes he introduced an idea of natural selection in which just people who were able to adapt themselves to changes could survive and moreover, his theory, challenged the Christian belief in the God’s existence.

• The novel became the leading genre, it reflected the practical bent of the age and was read aloud by rich and poor families, especially in the evening after dinner. For this reason novelists avoid embarrassing topics.

• English literature also influenced all Europe, Realism developed in France in the first half of the nineteen century with Honorè de Balzac who made a faithful reproduction of reality with “La Comedie Humane”. After him Gustave Flaubert with “Madame Bovary” introduced the principle of the impassibility of the narrator.

• In the second half of the century Positivism was born in France. French philosopers and Charles Darwin too postulated that the physical and psycological worlds could be described and classified with scientific precision.

• After Positivism Naturalism came out bringing an objective description of reality, Zola in France gave voice to the lower classes and their miserable lifes; in Italy it was called “Verismo” and it was represented by Verga’s “Malavoglia” and Luigi Capuana.

• In the last part of the century Decadentism grow up as a reaction against the bourgeois hypocrisy, artists of that movement wanted to shock their society with scandalous behaviour. The archetypal of the Aesthetic movement was Huysmans’ “Des Esseintes” (the hero of “A rebours”) who decided to live alone and devote himself to the cult of beauty and pleasure in a isolated house in the loneliness. He influenced Oscar Wilde’s “Dorian Gray” and Gabriele D’annunzio’s life.

Victorian Literature• For the first time there was a communion of interest and opinions between writers and readers also

thanks to the diffusion of periodicals. We can divide Victorian novels into three groups:

1. The Early Victorian Novel: In this phase novelists like Charles Dickens (the creator of Oliver Twist) wrote about social and humanitarian themes but the just seemed to be critical of their age because actually they still tent to identify in it. It’s the so called “Victorian Compromise” in which the division between writers and the hypocritical society of the bourgeoisie was not so strong

2. The Mid Victorian Novel: This phase was linked to the persistence of Romantic and Gothic traditions recognizable in writers as Emily and Charlotte Bronte (who wrote respectively “Wuthering Heights” and “Jane Eyre”) who still dealt with passionate, wild and impossible love. In Wuthering Heights for example you can clearly see the “dark” Romantic hero of Heathcliff inserted in a Gothic background given by a sense of mistery. In this phase writers didn’t criticize so much the establishment but just introduced some innovative character for the time. Always speaking about Emily Bronte’s novel, the main subject, Catherine, is a woman completely different from the usual ones of the time (respectable, always polite and kind, that prefers avoid their feelings in order to follow social conventions). She is torn between love and strict rules of society, she is impulsive and sometime also aggressive.

3. The Late Victorian Novel: In this last phase the sense of isolation of writers is a reaction of the strong division that there was between them and the establishment. Represented by writers as Robert L.Stevenson (the author of “The Strange Case Of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde”) and Oscar Wilde (author of “The picture of Dorian Gray” and also founder of the Aestheticism in England) dealt with new themes as the two sides that are in every man: a good and an evil one, they can’t be controlled or divided but just accepted as showed in Dr.Jekyll’s story. On the other side Decadentism and the search of beauty became very popular. Oscar Wilde wanted have a life based on pleasure in order to escape from a corrupted reality in which feelings weren’t accepted but just condemned by the sharing with animals. Instead Dorian Gray, as all other Aesthetic people, wanted to change this idea in order to save human feelings