The Age of Tennyson

Victorian Age
1832-1887

From the Romantic Age

William Cobbett - editor of Political Register staunch critic of metropolitan culture - the
machine radically altered the relationship
between land and labour - accuses the English
monarchs for having destroyed the country
Mary Wollstonecraft - Vindication of the Rights of
Woman - feminist tract - reason and education as
the greatest hopes for womens emancipation argues against class oppression, gender
discrimination

General historical background

Ascension of Queen Victoria - 1837
Jubilee year - 1887
The age of industrialization, empire and reform
Progress of democracy and science
Reform Bill of 1832 - destroyed the political supremacy of the landed aristocracy - but
labouring class unenfranchised - agitation for electoral reform - Chartism (working classes
demanding parliamentary and social reform - concentrated in factory towns like
Manchester - peaked during 1838-48)
Industrial depression - hungry forties - anxious and critical time
Corn Laws of 1815 (agricultural protection at the expense of the consumer) repealed 1846 - improvement in industrial conditions
Reform Bills of 1867 & 1884-85
Transformation from oligarchy to crowned republic
Breaking down of feudal distinctions - spread of popular education - a growing reading
public
Unparalleled increase of scientific knowledge - revolutionised all current ideas about
nature, man and society - e.g.: Darwin

General background
London - population problems, slums, pollution, poverty, exploitation
Sanitation and hygiene drives in London (also, discourse on infection, racial
contamination - in the context of increased contact with other races during colonial
expansion)
Moral debates - sexual codes, marriage, religious beliefs, family life
Debates on the meaning of progress
Debates about faith - Crisis within the Church of England - conversion of Cardinal
John Henry Newman to Catholicism
Whigs and Tories - Liberals and Conservatives
the Act to abolish slavery, Act prohibiting child labour, Factory Act - 1833 (insistence
on Government inspection)
Night shifts, Working women in factory settings - changes in the structure of the
family - Trade unionism
Expansion of empire - massive revamping suggested - Afghan campaigns, 1857
mutiny in India - governance shifted to the British Crown from the Company - Queen
Victoria as the Empress of India in 1877

No great war, no fear of catastrophe

from outside political consistency
marked by interest in religious questions
and deeply influenced by seriousness of
thought and self-discipline of character,
an outcome of the Puritan ethos
stability and order in daily lives

Amultiple
Victorian
strands ofTemper
ideology and thinking
Conservatives vs. Liberals - social hierarchy,
classical taste in art vs. utilitarianism and collective
action
Divide between believers and agnostics
Social hypocrisy about sexuality - Victorian
prudishness
Fascination for technology and scientific
developments (age of first computer - Charles
Babbage / Ada Lovelace (Byrons daughter) - first
computer programmer)
Ideas of moral function of art vs. drive towards pure
aestheticism

Reflections in literary writings

Prominence of the spirit of enquiry and criticism, scepticism and

religious uncertainty, spiritual struggle and unrest, analytical and critical
habit of mind
Condition of England debates - morality, poverty, education,
industrialisation - contexts of social problem novel
a marked development of Realism
Practical application of science - breaking down barriers - facilitating
travel, easy transmission of thought
From provincialism to democracy
Counter movement against the domination of science
Significance of romantic revival - imaginative return to the past dissatisfaction with the ugliness of materialistic civilisation,
determination to escape from the narrow limitations of the realistic
theory of art
Romantic spirit combined with social reform, its protest against
materialism

Victorian Poetry
Alfred Tennyson
Robert Browning
Matthew Arnold
Arthur Hugh Clough
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Christina Rossetti
William Morris
Algernon Charles Swinburne

Tennyson
Influenced by Romanticism - extremely erudite - wide breadth of
classical learning
Poet laureate in 1850 - raised to Lord Tennyson in 1884
decidedly the greatest of our living poets: Wordsworth
Most representative of the age - was to Victorian England what Spenser
had been to Elizabethan England
the poetic exponent of the cautious spirit of Victorian liberalism - poets
eye + scientists eye
Preferred tradition to new belief systems - Persistent belief in evolution steadied and encouraged him
In Memoriam - elegy on the death of Arthur Hallam - meditative poem Victorian crisis of faith
The Princess, Maud, Idylls of the King, The May Queen, Enoch Garden,
Dora
Three historical plays - Queen Mary, Harold, Becket

Robert Browning
Unconventional, bold and rugged style
dramatic genius - centred in the moral
and spiritual conflicts
dramatic monologues
Gods in his heaven - alls right with the
world - robustly optimistic faith

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

More famous than Browning then emotional, personal - highly popular

Aurora Leigh, Sonnets from the Portuguese
romantic poems - continued influence of the
outgoing age

Matthew Arnold
true voice of the sensitive Victorian intellectual preference for solitary meditation
classicist - impersonal or objective poetry
Sohrab and Rustun, Empedocles on Etna - academic,
imitative, unreal
best works - when he ignored theory and engaged in
the poetry of self expression
personal poetry - melancholy of an era of transition Wandering between two worlds, one dead, // the
other powerless to be born (Stanzas from the Grande
Chartreuse) - heavy burden of doubt

Arthur Hugh Clough

Arnolds Thyrsis - a monody on Cloughs death

Arnold and Clough - spiritual kinsmen

The Pre-Raphaelites
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood - 1848 - group of
poets influenced by the visual arts - paintings of the
contemporary
Founders - William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Admirers of Raphael - high point of Renaissance art invoked medieval images and aesthetics - symbolism
from theology and religion - tragic love and mortality
hard realism + heavy symbolism - commentary on
contemporary society + higher state of being
Criticisms - concerned too much with the body voluptuous bodies

The Pre-Raphaelites
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood - 1848 - group of
poets influenced by the visual arts - paintings of the
contemporary
Founders - William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Admirers of Raphael - high point of Renaissance art invoked medieval images and aesthetics - symbolism
from theology and religion - tragic love and mortality
hard realism + heavy symbolism - commentary on
contemporary society + higher state of being
Criticisms - concerned too much with the body voluptuous bodies

Prose - other
contemporaries
profound influence of physical science - History of Civilization in
England by Henry Buckle
history of the people (not just kings and wars) - John Richard
Greens Short History of the English People
Connecting link between history and aesthetic criticism - in Walter
Paters The Renaissance and Greek Studies
Growth of literary criticism and the art of general essay
Hudsons view on Swinburnes literary criticism
Popularisation of knowledge - production of large body of literature
- scientific subjects made interesting to the general reader
Theology into general literature - Lectures and essays of John
Henry Newman

Some general features of

Victorian prose
Didactic essays and social
commentaries - on politics, society,
environment
Historical tracts were common
Polemical writings on social issues e.g.: problems of the working class
Critical thinking and writing on art
and architecture

Romantic period - rise of the personal

essay
Victorian period - towards social criticism

Novel in 19th century

Expansion of readership - audience for longer prose narratives age of increasing literacy - demand from the middle classes
Utopian fiction, school tales, mystery and sensation novels,
historical novels, industrial novels, social problem novels,
adventure tales, oriental tales, moral stories - ranged from
realism to fantasy
novels of sea and of military life, of high life, middle-class life,
low life, criminal life, political life, artistic life, clerical life - Irish
life, Scottish life - life of different English countries
penny novels, serial publication
circulating libraries
publishing novel - lucrative business
Evolved as the most popular form

Some catalysts
Science
Democracy
Religious and moral unrest
Many-sided interests and conflicting
elements

major novelists

Charles Dickens
William Thackeray
George Eliot (Mary Ann /Marian Evans)

Other contemporaries
Frederick Marryat, Edward Lytton
Benjamin Disraeli
George Borrow, Charles Lever, Charles Reade
Anthony Trollope
Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Anne Bronte
Charles Kingsley, Henry Kingsley
Wilkie Collins
Doddridge Blackmore, Sir Walter Besant
George Meredith
Robert Louis Stevenson

Late Victorian Period

Later decades of the 19th century
and early 20th century
Occupying difficult spots between
Victorianism and modernity
Retained realist mode - social satire
Also, adventure/fantasy and
mystery formats

George Gissing - polemical essays on

censorship - suffering in urban England
- slum fiction - class tensions - sense of
hopelessness and despair (The Nether
World - 1889, New Grub Street - 1891) a tedious read today
George Moore - controversial - novels
of deep sensuality - married women
attracted to other men - a radical
departure from the prudery of the
Victorian Age (A Modern Lover - 1883,
Esther Waters - 1885)

Robert Louis Stevenson - Treasure Island,

Kidnapped (1886)- most famous Scottish writer
since Walter Scott - entertaining travelogues serialised in childrens magazine - polemical
pieces deriding English colonialism - The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde (1886)
Sharp departure from the regular multi-volume
Victorian tales - linear and straightforward few subplots
Rider Haggard - King Solomons Mines (1885) adventure for children - inspired them to think
of a career in the colonies

Thomas Hardy - The Return of the Native

(1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess
(1891), Jude the Obscure (1895) - gloomy,
tragic novels - social and human callousness to
the fate and sufferings of others
Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) - first
appeared anonymously (attributed to George
Eliot - annoyed Hardy!) - his first major success
several short stories, poetry, two critical
pamphlets
class questions, concern about the fate of
women in the 19th century, marriage as a
business transaction, expansion of capitalism objectification of women

Joseph Conrad - Polish immigrant to

England - learnt English through
newspapers and works of Carlyle Heart of Darkness (1899) (postcolonial
studies), Nostromo, Lord Jim
(Chinua Achebe dismissed Heart of
Darkness as bloody racist)
John Galsworthy - The Forsyte Saga Periodwise modern BUT Victorian
themes and attitudes

Arnold Bennett - a regionalist like Hardy

Samuel Butler - Erewhon, or Over the Range
(resembles Gullivers Travels)- defence of faith influenced by Darwin but unwilling to let go of
the Christian doctrine - tracts on biological
theories and journalism
Oscar Wilde - plays - imprisoned for
homosexuality - exploration of narcissism corruption of English bourgeois society, inability
of art to capture the core of wickedness - The
Picture of Dorian Gray
Bram Stoker - Dracula (1897) - science, history,
myth-legends, eroticism - ranks along
Frankenstein

Poetry
Francis Thompson - marked by faith
and self doubt - The Hound of
Heaven
A E Housman - A Shropshire Lad
(1896) - 63 poems - a volume that
has never been out of print unusual for a poetry collection
(Terence, this is stupid stuff)

Drama
Oscar Wilde - Lady Windermeres Fan
(1892) and The Importance of Being
Ernest (1895) - scathing attack on the
polished hypocrisy of the Victorian Age duplicitous people -critique of marriage people marrying for money - recall the
Restoration Dramatists