The Victorian Experience

English critic of art, architecture, and society

Painter and distinctive prose stylist,

A ‘Victorian Sage’ - a writer of polemical prose who seeks to cause widespread cultural and social change.

Great influence on 19thC Gothic Revival

Major inspiration for the Arts and Crafts Movement

Praised contemporary artists Turner and PRB

Contributed to 19thC discussions of fantasy, the grotesque, and pictorial symbolism.

Starting in the mid-18th century, there was an increasing interest in the architectural style of medieval Europe from the early 12th to the late 16th century.

Medieval Gothic is the architecture of the great Northern European Cathedrals.

Largely a religious architecture designed to evoke feelings of grandeur, transcendence, spiritual inspiration, illumination and respect for God’s handiwork, including the craft and ingenuity of human beings.

Typical architectural features are the pointed arch, the rib vault and the flying buttress, as well as a highly decorative and ornate stonework on exteriors, the use of stained glass and the creation of dramatic natural light effects in interiors.

Because the Victorians fantasised about a moment in British history when …

a supposedly organic society existed

a holistic relationship existed between all members of society

a harmonious connection existed between civic, economic, cultural and religious life

a moment in which manual craftsmanship and physical skill, allied to aesthetic principles and spiritual principles were central to most people’s lives.

Argues that because the Gothic style permits and even demands the freedom, individuality, and spontaneity of its workers, it both represents a finer, more moral society and means of production and also results in greater architecture than does the Renaissance style, which enslaves the working man.

Becoming a stonemason, a stained-glass window-maker, a weaver, and working together on a collective architectural project to the glory of God -a counter to the standardisation and mechanisation of people’s working lives, and as a return to a holistic relationship between work and spiritual values.

‘Now it is only by labourthat thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labourcan be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity’

a celebration of detail and nuance

an invitation to contemplation

an excess of detail and ornamentation

a celebration of physical dynamism

an appeal to solidarity, community and feeling

a return to pre-industrial arts and crafts

a recuperative attitude towards the past

As we shall see next lec, is the physical equivalent of what you find in Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

"A fine grotesque is the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in a bold and fearless connection, of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character" (5.132).

‘From what we have seen to be its nature, we must...be led to one important conclusion; that wherever the human mind is healthy and vigorous in all its proportions, great in imagination and emotion no less than in intellect, and not overborne by an undue or hardened preeminence of the mere reasoning faculties, there the grotesque will exist in full energy. And accordingly, I believe that there is no test of greatness in periods, nations, or men, more sure than the development, among them or in them, of a noble grotesque; and no test of comparative smallness or limitation, of one kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque invention, or incapability of understanding it. ‘

A type of lyric poem that was perfected by Robert Browning. In its fullest form…it has the following features:

1. A single person, who is patently not the poet, utters the entire poem in a specific situation at a critical moment.

2. The person addresses and interacts with one or more other people; but we know of the auditors’ presence and what they say and do only from clues in the discourse of the single speaker.

3. The main principle controlling the poet’s choice and organisation of what the lyric speaker says is to reveal to the reader, in a way that enhances its interest, the speaker’s temperament and character.

Abrams 1993: 48

‘One way of thinking of the dramatic monologue would be as a play that had shrunk to one speech by one character. From that one speech we can infer a wider dramatic situation, but the speech is all we have of the larger reality.’

Stefan Hawlin, Robert Browning (Routledge Guides to Literature), p. 61

‘In every monologue we hear the speaker (or what I think of as the consciousness of the poem) working through a crisis, conducting an argument, or rationalizing inclinations, actions, and beliefs.’ (W.S. di Piero, Poetry Foundation)

Browning’s first collections of dramatic monologues were Dramatic Lyrics (1842) and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845).

Browning’s Men and Women (1855) - arguably the best-known collection, made up chiefly (all but one of the poems) of dramatic monologues.

Browning probably based his speaker on Alfonso II (1533-97) the fifth duke of Ferrara and last of the Este line, and responsible for the imprisonment of Renaissance poet TorquatoTasso.

Portrait of Lucrezia D’Esteby Bronzino – inspiration?

‘Fearful that her indiscriminate ‘looks’ might deprive him of the ‘regard’ he deems appropriate to his position at the centre of their world, he has reduced her to the beautiful object which...can never be lost...

It is ironically appropriate...that he has made her what he fears he himself is, one of the living dead, absent yet also there, ‘as if alive’. (Earl Ingersoll, ‘Lacan,

Browning and the Murderous Voyeur’, Victorian Poetry 28: 151-7 1990).

‘Browning lays bare the misogyny of Ovid’s Pygmalion, for whom no living woman is good enough. His poems show how male subjects [like the Duke], threatened by woman’s independent spirit, replace her with statues, pictures, prostheses, corpses, which seem to them more acceptable than the real thing. Browning’s male speakers typically invert Ovid’s myth, reducing a woman, even through her death, to a composition of their own making.’

Catherine Maxwell, ‘Browning’s Pygmalion and the Revenge of Galatea’ English Literary History 60, 1993)

Browning has his character argue for the realistic style developed in Renaissance art - he wants to make a case for the vivid textures and psychological realism of his own poems.

Gr-r-r--there go, my heart’s abhorrence!

Water your damned flower-pots, do!

If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,

God’s blood, would not mine kill you!

What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?

Oh, that rose has prior claims--

Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?

Hell dry you up with its flames!

…

At the meal we sit together;

Salve tibi! I must hear

Wise talk of the kind of weather,

Sort of season, time of year:

Not a plenteous cork crop: scarcely

Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt;

What’s the Latin name for “parsley”?

What’s the Greek name for “swine’s snout”?

‘The conflict between Brother Lawrence and his hater may be thought of in moral terms as a conflict between good and evil, or in aesthetic terms...as one between the art of obedience and the art of rebellion. Behind Brother Lawrence stands the unfallen Adam, gardening in Paradise; behind his hater...stands Milton’s Satan – like the speaker of the soliloquy, a leering, jealous voyeur, but also (for Shelley, Blake and others) an embodiment of radical energy’. (1993: 78).

‘Grotesque metaphors, ugly words heavy with consonants, stuttering alliteration, strong active verbs, breathless rhythms, onomatopoeia, images of rank smells, rough textures, and of things fleshly, viscous, sticky, nubbly, slimy, shaggy, sharp, crawling, thorny or prickly – all these work together in Browning’s verse to create an effect of unparalleled thickness, harshness and roughness.’ (1963:119-20)(J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers)

The most interesting poems in Victorian English are Browning’s Men and Women, or, if that statement is too absolute, let me contend that the form of these poems is the most vital form of that period in English, and that the poems written in that form are the least like each other in content...since Browning there have been very few poems of this sort. Mr Eliot has made two notable additions to the list [‘Prufrock’ and ‘Portrait of a Lady’] .

Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, 1963