The Victorians

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The Victorians
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• British history is two thousand years old, and
  yet in a good many ways the world has moved
  farther ahead since the Queen was born than it
  moved in all the rest of the two thousand years
  put together.
• Mark Twain, 1897
• at Queen Victorias
• Jubilee

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Queen Victoriareigned 1837-1901

• May 24, 1819 born at Kensington Palace only
  child of Edward, Duke of Kent, the fourth son
  of George III
• 1837 on the death of her uncle, William IV, she
  became queen at the age of 18
• 1840 married her cousin, Prince Albert of
  Saxe-Coburg-Gotha
• 1861 Prince Albert died
• Nine children
• Presided over an Empire upon which the sun
  never set
• It was during Victoria's reign that the modern
  idea of the constitutional monarch, whose role
  was to remain above political parties, began to
  evolve.
• January 22, 1901 died after a reign of 64 years
  longest in British history

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Prince Albert

• Son of Duke Ernest of Coburg, Victorias
  maternal uncle he and Victoria were first
  cousins, born the same year
• Became Victorias closest advisor
• A serious patron of the arts, a composer and a
  painter, an architect and an educator
• As chancellor of Cambridge, he modernized the
  traditional classics-and-theology curriculum with
  science and technology
• Arranged for the design and building of
  experimental houses to better serve working class
  families
• Organized and oversaw the Great Exhibition of
  1851 -- the first World's Fair.
• "Machinery, Science, and Tasteare of no country,
  but belong, as a whole, to the civilized world."

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The Crystal Palace in Hyde Parksite of the 1851
Great Exhibition
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The Royal Family
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Political Reform

• 1832 The Reform Bill extended voting rights to
  all males owning property worth 10 in annual
  rent lower middle classes
• 1832 redistribution of parliamentary
  representation elimination of rotten boroughs
• 1838-48 Chartist Movement Peoples Charter
  advocated universal suffrage, secret ballots and
  legislative reforms
• 1867 Second Reform Bill extended right to vote
  to some of working class
• 1870-1908 Married Womens Property Acts
  granted women the right to own property women
  were legally recognized as individuals in their
  own right for the first time in history.

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Social Reform and Education

• 1846 Repeal of Corn Laws elimination of tax
  on grains free trade
• 1833-78 Factory Acts restricted child labor,
  limited work hours, required public education
• 1839 Custody Act
• 1857 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act
• Higher Education for Women
• 1848 establishment of first Womens College in
  London
• By the end of Victorias reign, women could get
  degrees at 12 universities and study at Oxford
  and Cambridge

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Technology

• 1830 Liverpool and Manchester RR first public
  steam railway in the world
• steam ships
• telegraph -- intercontinental cables
• photography
• high speed printing
• cast iron for building
• anesthetics -- ether
• Technology on the Victorian Web

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Gustav Doré, London Underground
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Science Geology and Astronomy

• Geology
• the hottest science going
• all accredited geologists agreed that the earth
  was millions of years old, that strata were
  layers from different times and that Genesis was
  incompatible with the findings of modern geology
  or irrelevant
• many discoveries about dinosaurs throughout the
  19th c. http//rainbow.ldeo.columbia.edu/courses/v
  1001/dinodis3.html
• Astronomy new planetary and cosmic discoveries
• Geology gives one the same sort of bewildering
  view of the abysmal extent of Time that Astronomy
  does of Space. John Sterling, 1837

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included first exhibition of dinosaurs
The Great Exhibition 1851
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Science Biology

• Charles Darwin (1809-82)
• 1859 On the Origin of the Species
• 1871 The Descent of Man, and Selection in
  Relation to Sex
• 1872 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and
  Animals
• Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95)
• Populizer and advocate of Darwins theories
• On a Piece of Chalk influenced thinking about
  education
• Huxley advocated broad primary school
  instruction reading, writing, arithmetic, art,
  science, and music.
• The basic form of nearly every American college
  curriculum is what Huxley advocated more than 100
  years ago two years of more liberal basic
  studies followed by two years of specialization
• Huxley emphasized doing and observing in science
  classes

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Religion

• 1829 Catholic Relief Act granted Catholics
  the same political rights as Protestants
• 1835 Jews are granted the right to vote
• 1857 Sir David Salomons elected Lord Mayor of
  London
• 1868 Benjamin Disraeli, a convert to
  Anglicanism, becomes Prime Minister
• The Church of England
• Low Church evangelical, highly individual,
  abolitionists, Puritanical ( Christian right )
• Broad Church open to modern advances in
  science, emphasized inclusion ( liberals )
• High Church emphasized tradition, ritual and
  authority the Oxford Movement resistant to
  liberal ideas (conservatives)

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Biblical Studies

• Linguistic and Historic Higher Criticism
• Study of original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic
  texts history of composition
• Historical contexts
• David Friedrich Struasss Das Leben Jesu
  translated by George Eliot as The Life of Jesus
• Biblical Archaeology vs. Mesopotamian
  Archaeology Sumerian texts

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Philosophy Utilitarianism

• Philosophical Radicalism
• All humans seek to maximize pleasure and
  minimize pain.
• Morality that which provides the greatest
  pleasure to the greatest number
• Religion outmoded superstition
• Fails to provide for spiritual needs
• Attacked by
• Carlyle, Sartor, Resartus (1833-34)
• Dickens, Hard Times (1854)
• Ruskin, Unto This Last (1860)
• John Stuart Mill, Autobiography ( 1873)

Jeremy Bentham
James Mill
John Stuart Mill
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Philosophy Marxism
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in London, 1867

• Friedrich Engels
• 1844 The Condition of the Working Class in
  England in 1844
• 1884 The Origin of the Family Private Property
  and the State
• Karl Marx
• 1867-94 Das Kapital
• 1848 Co-authored The Communist Manifesto

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The British Empire
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Imperialism The British Empire

• 1853-1880 Over 2 million Britons emigrated to
  settle in British colonies especially Canada
  and Australia
• 1839-42 1856-60 Opium Wars with China
• 1857 Parliament took over rule of India from
  East India Co. and set up a civil service
  government
• 1867 Canadian provinces united into Dominion of
  Canada
• 1876 Victoria declared Empress of India
• 1880s the Irish question Home Rule
• 1899-1902 Boer War in South Africa
• By 1890, the British Empire contained ¼ of the
  earths territory, and ¼ of the earths
  population.

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Victorian Literature
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The Novel

• Dominant Victorian literary form
• Initially published in serial form in
  periodicals
• Usually appeared in 3 volumes three deckers
  in book form
• Focus on social relationships in middle class
  world
• Ample opportunities for women novelists although
  many choose male pseudonyms to be taken more
  seriously

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Novelists
Thackeray
Eliot
Trollope
Gaskell
E. Bronte
C. Bronte
Dickens
Disraeli
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Social Realism

• Social novels deal with the nature, function and
  effect of the society which the characters
  inhabit often for the purpose of effecting
  reform
• Condition of England novels in 1840s and
  1850s response to . the condition of laborers in
  the Industrial Revolution Dickens Hard Times,
  Gaskells Mary Barton Disraelis The Two Nations
• Social and political realism Trollopes The
  Palliser Novels, The Barsetshire Chronicles, etc.
• Satirical social commentary Thackerays Vanity
  Fair
• Probing psychological realism Eliots
  Middlemarch

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Non-fiction Prose

• Instructional purpose history, biography,
  theology, literary and artistic criticism
• Centrality of argument and persuasion
• Professional writers

Matthew Arnold
Walter Pater
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Victorian Poetry

• Highly pictorial picturesque combines
  visual impressions to create a picture that
  carries the dominant emotion of the poem
• Narrative
• Long narrative stories poetic novels
  Tennysons Idylls of the King, Elizabeth Barrett
  Brownings Aurora Leigh, Robert Brownings The
  Ring and the Book
• Dramatic monologues esp. Robert Browning
• Distinctive sound experimentation
• Poetry of mood and character

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Poets
Elizabeth BarrettBrowning
Robert Browning
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Aestheticism

• Art for arts sake
• A cult of beauty Life should imitate Art
• Strong connection between visual and literary
  arts
• Anti-Victorian reaction, post-Romantic roots
• The Arts should provide refined sensuous
  pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental
  messages
• Pre-Raphaelites and Arts and Crafts Movement

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Christina Rossetti
Algernon Swinburne
William Morris
William Holman Hunt
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Aubrey Beardsley
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Dramatists
Gilbert and Sullivan
George Bernard Shaw
Oscar Wilde