Discussion Topic
Victorian Age's Influence on English Literature
Summary:
The Victorian Age, spanning from 1830 to 1900, profoundly influenced English literature by addressing social issues, morality, and the impact of industrialization. Early Victorian literature focused on social reform, with works like "The Cry of the Children" and Oliver Twist highlighting child labor and poverty. Mid-Victorian works celebrated national pride and moral themes, as seen in Tennyson's poetry. Later, literature critiqued Victorian values through satire and realism, with authors like Wilde and Shaw. The era saw the novel's rise as a dominant literary form, influenced by industrialization and Darwin's ideas, and remains significant for its imaginative and moral depth.
What are the salient features of Victorian Age English literature?
Specifically, the Victorian period began when Queen Victoria became queen of England in 1837 and ended with her death in 1901. However, the period from 1830 to 1900 is generally considered the Victorian Era. During this time period of course, characteristics of the culture were presented in the literature of the era.
English power was expanding into Africa and Asia. A growing English middle class, wanting to gain access into the noble class, produced some appearances of a stuffy, proper culture. Manufacturing was growing and living conditions for the poor were often deplorable. Cultural struggles grew over science vs religion, the role of women and proper behavior, especially with regard to sexuality. All of these elements showed up in the popular forms of literature.
Novels were extremely popular at the time and often had themes of social advancement, usually linked to financial gain or proper behavior. Charles Dickens and Charlotte...
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Bronte are two popular authors of this theme. Idealized behavior written in literature helped to create what it meant to be a "proper Englishman". Didactic poetry grew in popularity as did nonfiction material. Towards the end of the Victorian period, themes ofsatire and rebellion against all the proper behavior stereotypes began to show up in literature.
What role did the Victorian Age play in the history of English literature?
Because of the intense industrialization in Britain during the Victorian Era, the manufacture of books got much cheaper -- enabling the mass market and the prominence of the new form of the Novel, as #2 suggested. What's curious is that books became so cheap that even children's literature became a commodity!
Books specifically for children were unheard of -- until writers like Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) with her stories glorifying the English countryside with beautiful watercolor illustrations were able to be mass-produced.
The Victorian period in literature was increasingly affected by the ideas of Darwin, a thinker whose ideas continue to provoke real thought and have a major influence in the present day (unlike, say, Marx and Freud). Many Victorians found Darwin's ideas unpleasant and unappealing. In the sense that the Victorian writers were the first to have to wrestle with the implications of Darwinism, they are writers whose works remain quite vital today.
What is the main aspect of Victorian literature?
To select one aspect of Victorian literature and explain why it is the most significant is obviously a huge undertaking, and an answer which is only a couple of hundred words long must be very general and summary.
Nonetheless, I think that the aspect of Victorian literature which strikes the modern reader most forcibly is what I shall call its "largeness". This applies in the most elementary way: Victorian writers such as Trollope, Dickens, Hardy, Carlyle and Ruskin produced immense oeuvres, filling many feet of shelf-space with uniform calf-bound volumes. Tennyson, Browning and Arnold wrote similarly long poems.
On a somewhat deeper level, though, Victorian writers tackled large themes. The length of their books paralleled the grandeur of their concerns: liberty, justice, the death of God, the responsibilities of empire, the meaning of virtue. Writers with no training in philosophy were happy to try their hand at the big philosophical questions. Writers like George Eliot (who was very widely read in philosophy and theology) constructed whole new philosophies of religion.
Many of the Victorians were tremendously confident, certain that they were at the apex of the greatest empire in history. Their confidence was vast confidence. Many were racked with doubts because religion seemed to be collapsing. Their doubts were enormous doubts. Whatever else the Victorians were, they were always larger than life.