VICTORIAN AGE
(Between 1830- 1890s )
• The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen
Victoria's reign from 1837 until she died in 1901.
• In 1857 a great revolt started in India and the company failed
miserably, therefore Queen Victoria become the Empress of
India in 1877 after failure of East India Company in Sepoy
Mutiny.
• It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined culture,
great advancements in technology, and national self-
confidence for Britain.
• Scientific temperament was also going up in this period. Ex:
1.Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution
2. The first photograph taken, by Louis Daguerre in France
and William Henry Fox-Talbot in 1838.
3. A Scottish blacksmith Kirkpatrick Macmillan invented the
first pedal bicycle. His machine was propelled by pedals,
cranks and drive rods in 1849.
4. Alexander Bell, a Scotsman living in America, invented
the telephone on 7 March 1876.
5. The electric light bulb invented by Swan and Edison for
home use.
6. First ever gas engine for railway came up in this period.
• During the Victorian age Britain was the world's most
powerful Nation. By the end of Victoria’s rain, the British
Empire extended over about one-fifth of the Earth’s surface.
• Like Elizabeth England, Victorian England shows great
expansion of wealth power, and culture.
• The amount of development happen during Victorian period
in in England had surpassed the development of past 300
year.
• When Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution came, Atheism
become new phenomena in England .
Evil Effect on society
• Although it was a peaceful and prosperous time, there were still issues within
the social structure. The social classes of this era included the Upper class,
Middle class, and lower class. Those who were fortunate enough to be in the
Upper class did not usually perform manual labor. Instead, they were
landowners and hired lower class workers to work for them, or made
investments to create a profit. This class was divided into three subcategories:
Royal, those who came from a royal family, Middle Upper, important officers
and lords, and Lower Upper, wealthy men and business owners (Victorian
England Social Hierarchy).
• The large scale of new industries such as railroads, banks, and government
meant that more labour was needed to make sure the cities were able to
function.
• The Working class consisted of unskilled laborers who worked in brutal and
unsanitary conditions , They did not have access to clean water and food,
education for their children, or proper clothing. Children took on hard-working
jobs as coal miners, chimney sweepers, farm workers and domestic servants.
• Though in 1833 abolition of slavery and in 1833 Factory(against child labor in
factories ) act passed as a law but it has no or less impact in real life of the workers.
• In the blink of 1840s the situation of poor section of the people were soo degrading
that this time of the period is called the Hungry Forties .
Literature Age of Victorian/Victoria Age : -
❖ Unlike Romantic Age where people think that the inferior writers only wrote Novel
and they concentrate in Poetry but in Victorian age Novel become the predominant
aspect of Literature. So the Victorian age is known for its talented Novelist .
❖ There are some important influencers of Victorian Era. They are
a. Industrial Revolution
b. Medieval literature
c. Darwin theory of Evolution
d. The political as well as expansion of British Empire and many other.
Poetry
While the novel was the dominant form of literature during the
Victorian era, poets continued to experiment with style and
methods of story-telling in their poems. Examples of this
experimentation include long narrative poems (epic poems) and the
dramatic monologue as seen primarily .
Most Imp Poets and their poems
The most prolific and well-regarded poets of the age included Alfred, Lord
Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Gerard
Manley Hopkins, and Oscar Wilde.
1. Alfred Lord Tennyson: Alfred Tennyson was born in the depths of Lincolnshire,
the 4th son of the 12 children of the rector of Somersby, George Clayton
Tennyson.
*In 1827, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he found the teaching
dull, but made strong friendships, notably with Arthur Hallam.
* He started his writtyong career with “Two Brother” in 1827.
*He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one
of the most popular British poets. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's
Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his first pieces, "Timbuktu".
*He left Cambridge after the death of his father, and published two collections of
poems in the early 1830s, which included ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘Mariana in the
South’ and ‘The Lotos-Eaters’. Ulysses
* In October 1833, the sudden death of Hallam plunged him into a period of deep
depression and mourning. Over the next 17 years he continually worked on and
revised a poetic tribute to his friend, which he published as In Memoriam
A.H.H(Arthur Henry Hellam). in 1850. The poem became one of the best known
and best loved of the period, with Queen Victoria saying that next to the Bible, it was
her greatest comfort following the death of Prince Albert.
2. Robert Browning,: (1812-1889) He was a Scottish botanist and palaeobotanist(: a
branch of botany dealing with fossil plants) who made important contributions to
botany largely through his pioneering use of the microscope. He was responsible
for discovery of the nucleus of the cell in plant.
*His dramatic monologues and the psycho-historical epic The Ring and the
Book (1868-1869), a novel in verse, have established him as a major figure in the
history of English poetry.
* My Last Duchess was his an example of the dramatic monologue. It first appeared in
1842 in Browning's Dramatic Lyrics.
Novel
The realistic novel was quite different than what has been seen with
earlier literature. The most popular form of literature had always
been poetry. The realistic novel changed that. This form of literature
used journalistic techniques in order to make the literature
something closer to real life with facts and general stereotypes of
human nature.
The novels were about the common man, which also happened to be
the struggles of the lower class. These struggles usually included a
lower class citizen trying to gain upward mobility. Thus, a subgenre
called Social Realism was born.
1. Charles Dickens: Charles John Huffam Dicken (7 February 1812 – 9 June
1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-
known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of
the Victorian era.
Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school at the age of 12 to work in a factory when his
father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. After three years he was returned to
school, before he began his literary career as a journalist.
Works: Mainly Humanitarian
a. Dickens's literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of The Pickwick
Papers.
b. Tale of Two Cities 1859
c. Great Expectations 1861
d. David Copperfield 1849
e. Hard times 1854
f. A Christmas carol (prose) 1843
g. A Bleak house 1853
h. Oliver Twist (2nd novel) 1837-39
2. William Makepeace Thackeray: William Makepeace Thackeray (18 July
1811 – 24 December 1863) was a British novelist, author and illustrator. He is known
for his satirical works on upper class society . Thackeray, an only child, was born
in Calcutta, British India, where his father, Richmond Thackeray (1 September 1781 –
13 September 1815), was secretary to the Board of Revenue in the East India
Company.
**Vanity Fair (1847- 48): A Novel without a Hero is his most successful novel.
a. The Yellowplush Papers (1837)
b. Catherine (1839-1840)
c. A Shabby Genteel Story (1840)
d. The Paris Sketchbook (1840)
e. Second Funeral of Napoleon (1841)
f. The Irish Sketchbook (1843)
g. The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844)
h. Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846)
i. Mrs. Perkin’s Ball (1846) under the name M.A. Titmarsh
j. Stray Papers: Being Stories, Reviews, Verses, and Sketches (1821-1847)
k. The Book of Snobs (1848)
3. George Eliot : Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880;
alternatively Mary Anne or Marian, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an
English novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of
the Victorian era.
*Although female authors were published under their own names during her lifetime,
she wanted to escape the stereotype of women's writing being limited to lighthearted
romances. She also wanted to have her fiction judged separately from her already
extensive and widely known work as a translator, editor, and critic. Another factor in
her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public
scrutiny, thus avoiding the scandal that would have arisen because of her
relationship with the married George Henry Lewes.
** She is known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed
depiction of the countryside
• She wrote seven novels: They are…..
❖ Adam Bede (1859),
❖ The Mill on the Floss (1860),
❖ Silas Marner (1861),
❖ Romola (1862–63),
❖ Felix Holt, the Radical (1866),
❖ Middlemarch (1871–72) and
❖ Daniel Deronda (1876)
4. The Bronte Sisters: The Brontë were a nineteenth-century literary family, born in
the village of Thornton and later associated with the village of Haworth in the West
Riding of Yorkshire, England. The sisters, Charlotte (1816–1855), Emily (1818–
1848), and Anne (1820–1849), are well known as poets and novelists.
Like many contemporary female writers, they originally published their poems and
novels under male pseudonyms: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.
Wuthering Heights in 1847
Emily Bronte –
Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre in 1847
Emily Bronte – The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in 1848
