An age of expansion Different critical reactions to the victorian age The early period The mid_victorian period The

late period The ninties Earnestness,respectability,and the evangelicals The role of women in victorian life and literature

AN AGE OF EXPANSION 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 put together. A change that brought England to its highest point of development as a world power. A shift from a way of life based on the ownership of land to a modern urban economy based on trade and manufacturing

Because England was the first country to become industrialized it is transformation was an especially Pain full one.

but

Increase in wealth

The profits gained from trade led also to extensive capital investments in all continents. Progress gaind by abandoning the trditional rhythms of life and pattern of human relationships. Satisfaction anxious

It was fashion for most literary critics to treat their Victorian predecessors as somewhat absurd creature: 1 .Early period 2 .Mid Victorian period 3 .Late Victorian period

THE EARLY PERIOD (1830-48): A TIME OF TROUBLES 1_Liverpool and Manchester Railway =the first
locomotive-operated public line In the world (1830)

2_ Reform Bill of 1832 right to vote 1840s A severe depression, with widespread unemployment, led to rioting Life in early Victorian mines and factories was much like Thomas Hobbes's "state of nature" "Poor, nasty brutish and short"

In 1846 the Corn Laws were repealed by Parliament, Free trade whereby goods could be imported with the payment of only minimal tariff duties .It worked well for many years and helped to relieve the major crisis of the Victorian economy. A large Chartist demonstration in London seemed to threaten revolution, but it came to nothing.

This Time of Troubles left its mark on some early Victorian literature " Carlyle's history The French Revolution(1837). It is the novelists of the 1840s and early 1850s However Who show the most marked response to the industrial and political scene. Vivid records of these conditions are to be found in the fiction of Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) and Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)

Dickens make critical attacks on the shortcomings of the Victorian social scene. Even more critical and indignant than Dickens was John Ruskin The Stones of Venice (1853), which combines a history of architecture with stern prophecies about the doom of technological culture.

In unto this last (1862) = laissez-faire economics As Robert Adams has described it ="solid substance by Anthony Trollope more characteristic reflection of the mid_ Victorian attitude toward the social and political scene than Rescans lamentations

Victorian period time of prosperity agriculture flourished together with trade and industry. the condition of the working classes was also being gradually improved. Mid _Victorian phase = the age of improvement In 1815 prince Albert opend the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. The Crystal Palace = the first buildings constructed according to modern architectural. Benjamin Disraeli 1862 age of rapid and brilliant events. it is one of infinite romance

Equally significant is the conflict between religion and science. Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850) religious debates had been between Utilitarian, the followers of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and the philosophical conservatives, the followers of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Benthamites = religious belief was merely an outmoded superstition.

Anti-Utilitarians were of two types. The first were those such as Carlyle, who abandoned institutional Christianity yet sought to retain some sort of substitute religious belief. Others led by John Henry Newman, argued that only a powerful, dogmatic, and traditional religious institution could with stand the attacks of irreverent thinkers of the benthamtie stamp Newman (1830) = the oxford movement 2- tractarianism . Whatever name it went by, Newman's campaign produced a lively controversy.

Arthur Hugh Clough and Matthew , the university was seething with religious debates, which were to have a marked effect on the poetry written by both men in the 1850mid-Victorian England controversies continued Leadership in the anticlerical position passed gradually from the Utilitarian to some of the leaders of science, in particular to Thomas Henry Huxley, who popularized the theories of Charles Darwin.

The damage lamented by Ruskin was effected in two ways. First the scientific attitude of mind was applied toward a study of the Bible itself. Bible = Text of history S econd kind of damage was effected by the view of humanity discovery of astronomers, by extending a knowledge of stellar distances to the dizzying expanses, were likewise disconcerting In the mid Victorian period biology: reduced humankind even further into nothingness

Disputes about evolutionary science, like the disputes about the Oxford movement are a reminder that beneath the placidly prosperous surface of the midVictorian age there were serious conflicts and anxieties

Final phase = time of serenity and security Matthew Arnold (1860) there were anomalies in the seeming smooth and after 1870 flaws became evident.

Germany and united states = new and serious competition not only in industry but also in agriculture.
In (1873-1874 )such sever economic depressions occurred

In 1867 under Disraeli guidens a second reform bill had been passed that extended the right to vote to section of the working classes. In much of the literature of this final phase of Victorianism we can sense and over all change of attitudes .

Back in England Victorian standards were breaking down on several front. Much of the writing of the decade illustrates a breakdown of a different sort Melancholy not gaiety.

The connections between literature in the Romantic and Victorian ages are close. Victorian poets as different as Browning and Swinburne show the strong influence of Shelley. Tennyson Keats Arnold Wordsworth

Evangelica = Evangelicals became a powerful and active minority in the early part of 19century. In 1837 a new Sunday observance bill was introduce in to parliament. It did not quite pass = sober Sunday The middle-class nuritan code was lamely derived from the Old Testament Victorian England was the land of freedom = John -Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty(1859)

Woman question sexual inequality in politics, economic life , education , and social intercourse. Advocating women's did not get the vote until 1918 Married Women's Property Acts (1870-1908)

Educational opportunities for women. In 1837 none of England's three universities was open to women. Establishment of the first women college in London in 1848

Bad working conditions and under employment drove thousands of women into prostitution

Which became increasingly professionalized

MAHBUOBEH NEMATI 880151013

DR.MORIDI DEC 2012