 Earnestness

 Earnest Definition: to be eager or zealous; to be sincere, serious, and determined;

and to be important, not trivial.
 The Victorian period consisted on tremendous economic, social, and political
changes rocked Great Britain.
 These were caused by earnest actions and their consequences required, indeed
demanded, earnest responses.
 The Agricultural Revolution dislocated rural populations, forcing people to
leave the countryside for cities. The majority of citizens that moved to the
cities became workers in the factories created by the Industrial Revolution.
*British nation as a whole benefited from these changes, individuals often
suffered greatly.
 Earnestness in Victorian Literature:
• Victorian style writing usually uses mockery and dramatizing and
sometimes Pythonesque humour (comedy like monty phython) in the
magazine Punch, we think of the Victorians as earnest.
• The Victorian poets were essentially third-generation Romantics, Tennyson being a
disciple of Keats and Browning of Shelley.
♦ Like their mentors, they grappled with religious and social issues, for they
regarded the artist as society's conscience.
• Poets and novelists such as Elizabeth Barrett, Charles Dickens, and
Elizabeth Gaskell showed earnestness in creating literary works which
portrayed the lives of the underprivileged
♦ Writings such as these ultimately contributed to changing public
attitudes and public policy toward practices like child labor and public
executions.
♦ Reforms in hospitals and orphanages, prisons and workhouses, schools
and factories can all be traced to debates initiated or fueled by writers.
♦ The earnestness of all these reformers — artistic, intellectual,
religious, and political — improved the quality of the life in Victorian
Britain.
 Evangelicalism
 Evangelicalism Definition: a term literally meaning "of or pertaining to the
Gospel." Evangelicalism practices zealous preaching and dissemination of the
gospel.
 Evangelicalism stressed the reality of the "inner life," insisted on the total
depravity of humanity (a consequence of the Fall) and on the importance of the
individual's personal relationship with God and Savior.
 They put particular emphasis on faith, denying that either good works or the
sacraments (which they perceived as being merely symbolic) possessed any
salvational efficacy.
 Evangelical Christianity has special importance to Victorian literature because so
many major figures began as Evangelicals and retained many attitudes and ideas,
including notions of biblical symbolism even after they abandoned their
 childhood and young adult beliefs either for another form of Christianity or
unbelief.
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browining, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas
Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 as a child, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was raised in the Evangelical faith and its
doctrines strongly influence her choice of Biblical types and her construction of personal
myth in her verse-novel Aurora Leigh.
 According to Evangelical belief, the fall from paradise of Adam and Eve resulted in the
innate depravity of man. Paradoxically, the fall of man sharpens his awareness of his own
humble nature and brings him to a fuller appreciation of Christ's sacrifice for mankind.
Possessed of the knowledge of his own wickedness, the Evangelical believer lives with
the dual conviction that he is a product of original sin and still a recipient of Christ's
redeeming love.
 In Aurora Leigh, the Biblical type of the fallen man is resurrected from Puritan texts,
which emphasize the historical background of the type, and given Victorian meaning.
 In keeping with standard Victorian literary usage, Barrett Browning's use of Biblical
typology illustrates the spiritual dimension of the seemingly commonplace.
 In her personal myth, nature becomes a metaphor for the fusion of the spiritual and the
earthy elements of existence.
 In Book IX, Aurora Leigh, a thirty-year-old poet who has just been reunited with her
cousin Romney, typifies her rejection of Romney's wedding proposal ten years ago as her
fall from grace. Her "secular scripture," which bursts from her in the sudden emotional
epiphany of which the Evangelicals were so fond, reflects Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
own poetics
 Respectability
 Respectability definition: The quality, state, or characteristic of being respectable.
Honorableness by virtue of being respectable and having a good reputation
 The valuation of moral law and respectability also had a positive influence in the
Victorian period.
 Victorians' devotion to self-control and the development of proper "character"
led them to pursue admirable humanitarian and charitable goals.
 While self-reliance may have been the ultimate goal, many Victorians devoted
themselves to working with the downtrodden (oppressed) of society and
supporting charities
 In literature: After Horatio Alger, Jr. (1832-1899), author of hundreds of novels
and stories for young adults. His books were immensely successful, selling
hundreds of millions of copies. The characteristic of the novels of Horatio Alger,
Jr. which depicted an impoverished youth who achieved success and great wealth
through hard work, honesty, and virtue.
 Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick (1867) championed the theme of poor-boy-
makes-good
 Beginning with Ragged Dick (1868), he wrote more than 100 books that were
almost alike in preaching that through honesty, cheerful perseverance, and
hard work a poor but virtuous lad would have his just reward (though it was
almost always precipitated by good luck). His books sold more than 20
 million copies, despite consistently weak plots and dialogue, and Alger was
one of the most popular and socially influential writers of the late 19th
century.
 Reform
 Reform: To improve by alteration, correction of error, or removal of defects; put
into a better form or condition. To abolish abuse or malpractice in, To put an end
to (a wrong), To cause (a person) to give up harmful or immoral practices,or to
persuade to adopt a better way of life.
 A reform movement is a kind of social movement that aims to make gradual
change, or change in certain aspects of society, rather than rapid or fundamental
changes
 Reformists' ideas are often grounded in liberalism, although they may be rooted in
utopian, socialist or religious concepts.
 Three Reform Acts, of 1832, 1867, and 1884  all extended voting rights to
previously disfranchised citizens.
• The 1867 Reform Act extended the right to vote still further down the class ladder,
adding just short of a million voters — including many workingmen — and doubling
the electorate, to almost two million in England and Wales.
• Created major shock waves in contemporary British culture, some of which appear in
works such as Arnold's Culture and Anarchy and Ruskin's Crown of Wild Olive, as
authors debated whether this shift of power would create democracy that would, in
turn, destroy high culture.
 The Victorian Age
 The Reform Bill of 1832 gave the middle class the political power it needed to
consolidate-and to hold-the economic position it had already achieved.
 Industry and commerce burgeoned.
 While the affluence of the middle class increased, the lower classes, thrown
off their land and into the cities to form the great urban working class, lived
ever more wretchedly.
 The social changes were so swift and brutal that utopianism rapidly gave way
to attempts either to justify the new economic and urban conditions, or to
change them.
 The intellectuals and artists of the age had to deal in some way with the
upheavals in society, the obvious inequities of abundance for a few and
squalor for many, and, emanating from the throne of Queen Victoria
(1837-1901), an emphasis on public rectitude and moral propriety.
 In Victorian Literature
 The Victorian era was the great age of the English novel-realistic, thickly
plotted, crowded with characters, and long.
 It was the ideal form to describe contemporary life and to entertain the middle
class.
 The novels of Charles Dickens, full to overflowing with drama, humor, and an
endless variety of vivid characters and plot complications, nonetheless spare
nothing in their portrayal of what urban life was like for all classes.
  William Makepeace Thackeray is best known for Vanity Fair (1848), which
wickedly satirizes hypocrisy and greed.
 The Pankhurts’:
 A militant campaign to include women in the electorate originated in
Victorian times.
 Emmeline Pankhurst's husband, Richard Pankhurst, was a supporter of the
women's suffrage movement, and had been the author of the Married
Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882.
 In 1889, Pankhurst founded the unsuccessful Women's Franchise League, but
in October 1903 she founded the better-known Women's Social and Political
Union (Suffragettes), an organization famous for its militancy.
 Led by Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, the campaign
culminated in 1918, when the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed an
act (the Representation of the People Act 1918) granting the vote to women
over the age of 30 who were householders, the wives of householders,
occupiers of property with an annual rent of £5, and graduates of British
universities.