VICTORIAN AGE-GENERAL VIEW

"Victorian", is wholly accurate as a label simply for the chronological

period 1837-1901, the reign of Queen Victoria. She was queen for 64
years, longer than any other British king or queen, during a period of great
change. Victoria, who also had the title" Empress of India", was married to
a German prince, Prince Albert who died in 1861 and left behind a
desolate Victoria. Her genuine but obsessive mourning, which would
occupy her for the rest of her life played an important role in the evolution of
what would become the" Victorian" mentality.
The noun "victory" appeared between 1300-1400,it has an old French
origin, comes from Latin "victoria" from "victus".
Victor Olaru in "Victorian Literature"1 appreciates that "in the reaction
of the early 20th century the term "Victorian" meant smug, stuffy, narrow
-minded, prudential, moral and naively optimistic". The later 20 th century
has tended to see Victorianism

as moral

earnestness,

astounding

material progress and confidence . In truth, the Victorian age was an area
of extraordinary complexity and variety of view point, as its writers
demonstrate.
The Victorian age is remarkable for its scientific progress. In many
ways, it was an age of progress and inventions -of railway building, teamships, reforms, marking the transition between the end of the Industrial
Revolution and the beginning of the Victorian period science and
technology convert and develop-but it was also a time of doubt. There was
too much poverty, too much injustice and too little certainty about faith or
morals -thus it became also an age of reformers and theorists.
It was an age both exhilarated and bewildered by a growing wealth
and power, the peace of industrial and social change. The lower middle

classes and most part of the common people gain access to culture.
Therefore, universal elementary education was instituted in 1870. The
search for balance is at once the most general and the most typical feature
of the Victorian age. Other features seem to be the serial novel and the
creation of the modern newspaper as a means of information and popular
education as well as the key-words of the period, progress and freedom.
By Progress they meant the expansion of human power in the material,
the intellectual and spiritual field. As the Great Exhibition of 1851
proudly demonstrated, this was the age both of applied art and of the
application of new technologies to new aspects of design and production.
The years 1830-1880 were years of British self-confidence and
semiisolatinism in terms of European affairs, but the illusion of peace in the
1850s was broken by the disasters of the Indian Mutiny and by the
incompetent bungling of the Crimean War.
Paul Brand in "English and American Literature"2 considers that
"there are three main problems which faced the Victorians: the rise of
democracy, the position of the poor and the emancipation of women".

VICTORIAN VALUES, REFORMS AND THE THEORY OF

EVOLUTION

The central figure of the family was Father, regarded as a Godlike

head, who was to be obeyed out of respect for his superior knowledge
and experience. This idea of respect was widely accepted in Victorian
times. It was the acknowledgement that people in the classes above one
were in some way innately superior and entitled to deference . Close to

the idea of respect was that of authority.

Society was to be organized between groups who gave orders and
those who obeyed: the poor were to obey the rich, the wives their husbands
and the children their parents.
The Victorians also valued respectability. To be respectable you had
to have some financial independence while to be in debt or to take charity
prohibited real respectability.
The obsession with dressing in a way that was tasteful but not gaudy,
to be respectful to your "betters" yet polite to those less fortunate, to speak
without swearing and above all to live in an area or part of a street that
had a good reputation, was important to the Victorians because they
believed that this outward signs of proper behavior reflected inner personal
values.
In the middle of the 18th century the word "respectable" was applied
to persons worthy of respect for moral excellence. Then the meaning
changed somewhat, the word was applied to people of "good or fair social
standing" with the moral qualities appropriate to this .A further shift of
meaning occurred and the word was applied to anyone who was honest
and decent in behavior and clean in habits irrespective of social position.
This last meaning reveals how the idea behind the word had captured all
classes of society.
Walter Allen in "The English Novel"6, thinks that "from one point of
view, the notion of respectability may be regarded as the apotheosis of
wishful thinking, from another as a violent and heroic attempt to correct
vices and weaknesses of the age".
Therefore, the strict morality, the holiness of family- life owed a great
deal to the example of Queen Victoria herself and her indirect influence
over literature, as well as social life was considerable.
Generally speaking, the English Liberals were in favour of reform in

the rise of democracy, in the position of the poor and the emancipation of
women.
The Reform Bill of 1832 had given the vote to the middle classes;
the second Reform Bill of 1867 extended the vote to the working classes.
Negro slavery in the colonies was abolished in 1833 and by the end of
Victoria's reign the white colonies were largely self-governing. Slow
improvement was also made in the condition of the poor .The Factory Act
of 1833 forbade child-labour below a certain age in most industries. But
the New Poor Law of 1834, which transferred the care of the poor from
the parish to the state, destroyed family life by sending the poor to the
workhouse. The Victorian era was an important time for the development
of science. Charles Darwin's work "On the Origin of Species", affected
society and thought in the Victorian era. The theory of evolution contained
within the work shook many of the ideas the Victorians had about
themselves and their place in the world and although it took a long time to
be widely accepted it would change , dramatically, thought and literature.
The theory of evolution which was later worked out by philosophers
and scientists like Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley, come to
exercise a tremendous influence on Victorian thought. As Paul Brand
explains in "English and American Literature" 7, "this influence was
twofold: it strengthened the optimistic belief in Progress, which was so
characteristic of the Victorians, but it also perplexed the minds of those
who, believed in a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis". Though a
series effort was made to reconcile the discoveries of geology and biology
with the old religious beliefs, many Christians failed to see that there
cannot really be any disagreement between the religious and moral truths of
the Bible on the one hand, and the findings of science on the other.
This apparent conflict between science and faith cast a dark
shadow over the Victorian scene and the struggles and doubts are reflected

in the literature of the period.

VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Victoria's long reign saw a growth in literature, especially in fiction,

practiced notably by Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, George Eliot,
Trollope, James and Hardy.
The Victorian age covers 71 years (1830-1901). Historians
distinguish early, middle and late Victorian England, corresponding to
periods of growing pains, of confidence in the 1850s and of loss of
consensus after 1880, a date which offers a convenient division: Charles
Dickens (1812-1870) and Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) belonged to different
ages.
Walter Allen in "The English Novel"3 considers that "the novelists of
the first half of the Victorian age were at one with their public to a quite
remarkable degree; they were conditioned by it, but for the most part
were willingly conditioned by it". They identified themselves with their
age and were its spokesmen.
The novelists of the 2 nd half of the Victorian age , however, were
writing in some sense against their age; they were critical, even hostile to
its dominant assumptions. Their relation to the reading public was nearer to
that of the 20th century novelist than to the early Victorians.
Michael Alexander in "A History of English Literature"4 shows that
"many Victorians allowed their understanding to be led by thinkers, poets
even novelists".
After the middle of the reign, confidence began to fade; its last two
decades, which also saw an overdue revival of drama took on a

different atmosphere

and

literature

developed various

specialist

forms -aestheticism, professional entertainment.

Victorian literature was written in the main for the people and reflected
the pressing social problems and philosophies of a complex era. The
age was prevailingly one of social restraints and taboos, reminiscent in
this respect of the Puritan period. The writers are didactic, moral and
purposeful.
One characteristic of Victorian literature is the high moral purpose
allied to a Romantic technique: language is rich and highly ornamental, a
reflection of the new "Gothic" architecture with its tasteless elaboration of
design.
According to Mathew Arnold in" The English Novel" 5 "the Victorian
period seems to be dominated by novels being considered a deeply
unpoetical age".
The novel remains the dominant literary genre due to the increasing
number of the readers although few Victorian novels are as well made
as "Wuthering Heights" or "Middlemarch" and few Victorian poems are
perfect.

POETRY

Although Victorian verse is broadly post-Romantic, giving new

inflections to the personal, subjective, emotional and idealistic
impulses of the Romantics, it is more various than this suggests.
Expressive and plangent, it is also descriptive, of nature and of
domestic and urban life. Often it half-dramatizes figures from history

,legend and literature. Tennyson, Browning and Arnold suggest an

idiosyncrasy of subject, language and metre equally pronounced in
less serous and less major poets.