The Victorian Period 18321900

Chronological landmarks
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
1832 First Reform Act
An age of social problems
The Chartist movement wanted votes
for all and social reforms

 1846 Corn Laws abolished. Free trade

Population growth from 2 million to
6.5 million and the cities grew bigger
1848 Outbreak of cholera in city
slums
1842 Mines Act passed. Women and
children under ten cannot work
underground

 1847 Ten Hours Bill passed. Work in

textile factories limited to ten hours
1851 Great Exhibition at Crystal
Palace, London. It shows Britains
industrialization and imperial power

 Publication of On the Origin of the

Species by Means of Natural
Selection (1859), by Charles Darwin.
This book questioned the beliefs of
the age because it showed that man
was descended from apes
1868 Abolition of public executions

 1867 Second Reform Act

In the 1870s there is a growth of trade
unionism, socialism and womens
movements
Increasing demand for state education
1870 Forsters Act of Education
establishes a system of universal
primary education from the age of five
to eleven

1872
1876
1879
1884

Edisons telegraph
Telephone invented
Electric bulb
Third Reform Act

British imperial expansion

1840 New Zealand becomes officially British
1813-1873 David Livingstone opens up
central Africa to the influence of Christianity
1853-56 Crimean War
1857 Indian Mutiny. The British Government
takes over the rule of Indian from the East
India Company

Ireland
1845-1848 Potato crop ruined by a
plague. The Famine. Emigration to
the United States, Scotland, Canada
and Australia
1879 Charles Stewart Parnell and
Michael Davitt found Land League to
fight against evictions

 1881-1909 Land Acts passed by

English Parliament to reform Irish land
system
1886 Home Rule Bill for Ireland
debated for the first time in
parliament in London
1893 Gaelic League founded to
preserve Irish Gaelic and Irish folklore

 New colonies around India to protect

navigation and expand trade: 1841
Hong Kong; 1866 Burma; 1880 Malaya
1869 Opening of Suez Canal
1870s The most valuable gold and
diamond mines in the world discovered
in the Transvaal, South Africa
1899-1902 Anglo-Boer war

Victorian novels
The novel becomes the most popular
and important literary genre.
It comes to be considered worthy of
critical comment and study
Importance of the monthly part novel
Private commercial libraries became a
very important influence on the reading
public

Charles Dickens
The sufferings of children were a
main theme of Dickenss writing, as
we can see in Oliver Twist (1837-8)
David Copperfield (1849-50) is his
most positive story about growing up

 Great Expectations (1860-1) offers a

more gloomy vision of the pains and
pleasures of growing up
Dickens also wrote historical novels
like A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and
Christmas stories like A Christmas
Carol (1843)

 The writings of Friedrich Engels and

Karl Marx were very important
Engels studied the life of the workers
in Manchester.
Marx published Das Kapital in 186795. He criticized the whole capitalist
system

 Elizabeth Gaskell lived in Manchester

and had close knowledge of the lives of
the working people living there. Her main
novels are Mary Barton (1848) and North
and South (1855)
Charlotte Bront wrote Jane Eyre,
published in 1847. It is the story of a poor
child with not parents that goes through
many different sufferings until she meets
Mr Rochester

 Emily Bront wrote Wuthering

Heights (1847). It is a novel of
passion, an early psychological novel
The Bront sisters changed the way
the novel could present women
characters
Female characters became more
realistic, less idealized.

 George Eliot was Mary Ann Evanss pen

name.
Her best novel is Middlemarch (1871-2)
where she deals with a great variety of
themes
It ends with the heroine, Dorothea,finding
her own independence and happiness
William M. Thackeray wrote Vanity Fair
(1847-8). It describes the society of upperclass London with irony and wit

 The publication of Charles Darwins On the

Origin of Species in 1859 caused a great
crisis of faith, reflected in many writings of
the time
Thomas Hardys novels show the conflict
between the traditional and the modern in
the move from country to city.
His characters are often victims of destiny,
and often try to go beyond their own limits

 His major novels are The Mayor of

Casterbridge (1866), Tess of the
DUrbervilles (1891) and Jude the
Obscure (1895)

 Oscar Wilde wrote the novel The Picture

of Dorian Gray (1891), where the theme of
appearances reality reaches its highest
point.
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote novels of
adventure such as Treasure Island (188182). Another famous work is The Strange
History of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde
(1886), which is both a horror story and a
psychological novel

 Rudyard Kipling was the most

important writer to come from the
colony of India
The Jungle Book (1894) and The
Second Jungle Book (1894) made him
famous
He was the first English writer to win
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.

 Lewis Carroll wrote Alice Adventures in

Wonderland (1865)
Carroll plays with reality, language and
logic in ways that are both comic and
frightening
H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine in
1865, and The War of the Worlds in 1898

Victorian poetry
Alfred Tennyson. His poetry was quite
different from that of the Romantics
He shows a more realistic vision of
nature
His most famous work is In Memoriam
A.H.A (1850), which is an elegy to a
friend who died young

 Tennyson is usually considered a

poet of sadness and loss, but his
poems show a wide range of subject
matter.
In the 1830s he wrote a lot in the
dramatic monologue form

 This form uses a speaking voice which

shows his or her thoughts, and a full
idea of the character comes out from
the words
Tennyson also wrote many poems on
the legends of King Arthur and the
Knights of the Round Table, such as
The Idylls of the King (1859)

 Robert Browning was the master of

dramatic monologue in the Victorian
period
Many of his dramatic monologues
contain moments of violence, of
hidden emotions under the surface
Two of his most famous poems are My
Last Duchess, and Andrea del Sarto

 Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the

best-known female poet of the century
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) is her
most famous collection of love poems
Matthew Arnold wrote Dover Beach
(1867) about the crisis of belief of his
times
The poem shows a pessimistic mood
about the future

The Pre-Raphaelites 1850s-1880s

They have nostalgia for an idealized
medieval past
Return to nature and retreat from
industrialization
Heavy use of descriptive detail

 They use obscure symbolism

Concern for the interaction of poetry
and painting
They admire the work of Italian artists
who lived before Raphael
Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Poems (1870)
Christina Rossetti. Goblin Market and
Other Poems (1862)

Victorian Drama
In the early years of the Victorian
period, drama was not considered
part of serious literature
A new audience: the middle class
Emergence of the figure of the
producer and the critic

 Success of drawing-room plays: domestic

setting; dealing with everyday middle-class
concerns; attempt at visual and verbal
realism
Oscar Wilde was the most famous
playwright of the 1890s
His masterpiece is the play The Importance
of Being Earnest (1895), a complex story
of social behaviour and appearances

 George Bernard Shaw wrote plays

which discussed themes which were
politically and socially controversial
Widowerss Houses (1892) was about
greedy landlords, Arms and the Man
(1894) about war and heroism and Mrs
Warrens Profession (1898) about
prostitution