FROM THE VICTORIANS TO THE MODERNS 1837 – 1910

THE HANOVERIANS: George I, George II, George III, George IV, William IV,
Victoria. (last descendant of the Hanoverian dynasty)

THE VICTORIAN AGE

When Victoria ascended the throne, at the death of her uncle William IV , she was only eighteen
and she reigned for sixty-four years. She became the symbol of a whole era which was called the
Victorian Age.

She married her cousin Albert who was made Prince Consort, he influenced the Queen and he was
the virtual ruler of the country.

Victoria’s reign can be divided into three periods:

1- EARLY VICTORIANISM (1837-50) influenced by the ideals of the American and French
revolution.
2- MID-VICTORIANISM (1850-70) this period was more prestigious for its industrial and naval
power, and for its financial stability.
3- LATE VICTORIANISM (1870-1901) in this period Britain’s supremacy declined from an
economic and social point of view.

When Victoria ascended the throne she found a country in difficult circumstances, and the
consequence was the birth of the CHARTIST MOVEMENT which in 1839 presented Parliament
a petition called the PEOPLE’S CHARTER asking for: UNIVERSAL MALE SUFFRAGE, VOTE BY
BALLOT, ANNUAL GENERAL ELECTIONS, PAYMENT OF MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT.

The TRADE UNION CONGRESS , in 1875, gave legality to the right to strike.

Tories, were now called Consevatives and the Whings Liberals, the two parties had different
views of current problems and the age was marked by a number of social reforms such as:

THE MINES ACT which prohibited the work of women and children in mines;

THE TEN HOURS ACT which limited working hours to ten a day for men and women in texile
factories;

THE EDUCATION ACT which re-organized elementary education;

THE PUBLIC HEALTH ACT which improved health conditions.

The Victorians tended to ignore the problems which still afflected England, there was, in fact, a
part of society where misery was still widespread. Thousands of children grew up in squalor, at
a very early age they were sent to mills or mines, where they worked for hours without a
break, with no schooling or time to play.

Under the influence of Queen Victoria, the age turned excessively puritanical, sex became a
taboo subject, rules and restrictions involved men and women. Appareance begin very
important, middle-class people’s clothes tended to be very formal even in privacy of family life.

THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE

Prosperity and progress on the one hand ( the invention of telephone, telegraph, photography,
and so on), and poverty, ugliness, and injustice on the other, moralism and philanthropy is
usually referred to as the Victorian Compromise. During this period, Parliament passed so
many Acts regulating work, sanitation and the exploitation of women and children.

Victorian justice was quite repressive, Robert Peel in 1829 created the corps of policemen
called “bobbies”were not enough to stop criminality.

The Victorian family was based on marriage and the center of family was the father, while the
mother was to be submissive. Victorian families were usually very large and the Queen
hereself was a prolific mother with her nine children.

Middle-class women in general were confined within the family walls or devoted to a few
“respectable”jobs like teacher or social activities. Married women had no rights before the
law, her husband controlled her children, her property and even her person. The middle-class
usually sent their children to public or private school, where teachers were often incompetent
and corporal punishment still regularly applied to maintain discipline, as we can read in
Dickens.

LITERARY PRODUCTION

PROSE

Prose is the branch of Victorian literature which best mirrors the spirit of the age. In a
compromise between a sentimental approach and a realistic attitude, the writers exalted but
also attacked their own times.

The flourishing of fiction in the Victorian Age was due to urbanization and better means of
communication and the invention of new printing machinery, so prose fiction became the
most appropriate vehicle to communicate and support the ideas of the age.

Victorian novelists are usually divided into “EARLY VICTORIANS” and “LATER VICTORIANS”.
Among the writers of Early Victorians CHARLES DICKENS with the Humanitarian novels focused
on social problems and denonced the evils and abuses caused by industrialization.
Adventure were the ingredients of ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON’s novels.

Among the writers of LATER VICTORIASN FICTION GEORGE ELIOT in a new sort of “realism”
reject any sentimental or romantic attitude.

CHARLES DICKENS 1812-1870

D. was born near Portsmouth in 1812 and when he was a young boy his father was arrested
and confined in preason because he was in debt, so Charles was obliged to leave school and he
went to work in a blacking factory where he suffered cold and hunger. These painful
experiences are recorded in DAVID COPPERFIELD his best-known sentimental novel .

He wrote a lot of social or humanitarian novel where he used fiction and humor to denonce
the vices and evils of industrial period, such as the brutality of certain schools, the criminal
world, the squalor of London slums , the exploitation of children. These themes are present in
OLIVER TWIST, NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, HARD TIMES. He is considered the most representative of
the Victorian Novel for the realistic representations of sexuality and depravation, he was
meticulous about details, especially when he described London slums. His characters can be
divided into good and evil, but Dickens was not concerned with the inner life of his characters,
he was an observer of the external qualities of people.

In Dickens’works is possible to point out some negative and positive aspects:

- His plot are often too full of unlikely events.

- His main characters are often superficially portrayed (all good or all bad).
- His sentimentalism and pathos are often excessive.
- His comic scenes are often exaggerated and grotesque.
- His tragic scenes are often too melodramatic.
- His characters covers a wide range of people with their foibles and eccentricities.
- His style is fluent , affective and full of descriptive detail.

Oliver Twist
Oliver is an orphan who lives in a workhouse where he is brutalized by Mr. Bumble, so
Oliver escapes to the streets of London where he falls into the hand of a gang of
pickpockets. After various adventures, involving a lot of other characters, the gang is
punished and Oliver is adopted by Mr. Brownlow. Finally Oliver starts receiving that
education which the workhouse had never provided for him.
The setting of the novel and the fact that Oliver is an orphan born in a workhouse, allows
Dickens to criticise Victorian policy toward the poor. Indeed, much of the first part of Oliver
Twist criticises the charity organisations run by church and government that were
 established with the Poor Law, which stipulated that the poor could only receive assistance
if they moved into workhouse.
As we have seen, workhouse were very harsh places: children were separated from their
families and put into forced lobour, food was rationed and clothing was inadequate.
Workhouse operated on the principle that poverty was the consequence of laziness , but as
Dickens describes in his novel, the officials who worked in the workhouse were often
greedy and arrogant , so the poor earned very little from their labours.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 1850-1894

He was born in 1850 in Edinburgh, he had short life because he suffered of polio, since his
poor health he moved from place to place in search of milder climates. So he went to
Tahiti, Australia and Samoan islands where he spent his last five years of his life.
He is considered the master of adventure fiction and his masterpiece is The Stange Case of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 1886, a psycological study of the struggle between good and evil
within a human soul.
Doctor Jekyll’s theory is that man has two personalities and to confirm his theory he makes
use of drugs. So one dose changes him into Hyde, a brutal and repulsive person and
another dose let him to return in his previous condition of Dr Jekyll. But one day, suddenly
Jekyll changed himself into Hyde without the use of the drug. So Dr Jekyll realized that he
lost any control over Hyde and poisoned himself.
Stevenson was inspired by a nightmare in which he saw a person drinking a drug and turn
into a different person.
In the novel there are a lot of mataphor of the human soul and the co-existence of good
and evil in man is emphasized through many symbolical ways:

- The house: the house is itself half Jekyll and half Hyde , while the front of Jekyll’s house is
typically Victorian, the back is a sinister building without windows.

- The door: Jekyll’s house has two doors, a front door opened on a respectable square, and a
back door with no bell, full of craks and degraded by tramps. The back door looks like a
kind of opening on the hell.

- The weather: the fog, the cloudy sky, the night convey a sens of real and symbolical
darkness.

- Stevenson was always obsessed by the fear of losing his personality, probably because of
the amount of drugs he had to take to cure his illness. This obsession is represented by the
theme of the “ double”.
The theme of the double dominates the story, influenced by his Calvinist culture, in
particular by the belief that we all have in us the potential for evil, Stevenson considered
evil to be a real precence in human nature.

BRITISH DRAMA

In the first half of the Victorian Age, British Drama was non-existent, the cause was to be
found in the great flourishing of fiction.
The Victorian audience, usually demanded three types of entertainement : farce, spectacle
and melodrama because they could easily identify with the hero. To satisfy the audience,
the manager replaced the simpler staging with more spectacular and more realistic scenic
effects using theatrical machinery. So the stage was more and more crowed with chairs
and tables and stage lighting gave the illusion of natural light. A partial innovation was the
adoption of the front-curtain to avoid showing the way the scenes were being changed.
The consequences of this realistic staging was that the audience was attracted by the
scenic effects and no longer concentrated on the works.
The pioneers of modern realistic drama were Sir Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur
Jones, later Oscar Wilde and G.B. Shaw.

OSCAR WILDE 1854-1900

He was born in Dublin, Ireland, but when he was young he settled in London where in
order to shock the bourgeoisie and draw attention to himself, he begane to dress in a
eccentric way: knee-breeches, black silk stockings, a velvet coat, a strange tie and flowers
in the button-hole. He could also occasionally be seen walking up and down Piccadilly with
a sunflower in his hands.
In costant need of money to support his expencive life accepted an invitation to lecture in
the United States, then he became a book-reviwer for the Pall Mall Gazette and after editor
of the magazine The Woman’s World, but he never stopped writing works . His literary
prestige increased thanks to the success of his so-called “society play”.
But, in March 1895, at the peak of his career, he sued the Marquis of Queensberry, who
had accused him of a homosexual relationship with his son Lord Alfred Douglas.
Unfortunately the accusation were proven and Wilde was arrested and sentenced to two
years’ hard labour for “gross indecency”. Public opinion turned against him, his plays and
books were withdrawn. His wife divorced him and gained the custody of their children,
who changed their name. He was declared insolvent and his goods were sold including
over two thousand books and the manuscripts of his works. His ruins was complete.
While he was in prison, first at Wandsworth and finally at Reading Gaule he wrote De
Profundis a long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas in which he remembered their love story.
In prison he suffered every sort of humiliation, when finally released, he was a broken man
and he adopted the name of Sebastian Melmoth. He spent some time in Naples and
 Swizerland, writing against the brutality of prison life ( The Ballad of Reading Gaol). Then he
settled in Paris where , forgotten by everyone, he died on November 30, 1900, from an
attack of meningitis.
Britain decided to remember him by a memorial in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, on
February 14, 1995, exactly a hundred years after the first London staging of his best-known
play, THE IMPOETANCE OF BEING EARNEST.
A brilliant and unconventional play where sentimentalism and melodrama were replaced
by frivolous and absurd situations. The language is sparking and rich in witticisms,
paradoxes and nonsensical sallies, the upper-class English people are made fun.
The importance of being Earnest works on different levels: it is a farce which plays on
mistaken identities and misunderstanding, and ridicules the conventions of Victorian
melodramma It i salso a parody of romantic love. The characters of the play tipically speak
in paradoxes, they contradict themselves, but these contradictions reveal a deeper kind of
truth about them, which Wilde uses to criticise the world of false appearances they live in.
The play can be read as a social satire on the value placed on appearances, whch mocks the
morals of the upper classes and the hypocrisy of Victorian “earnestness”.

The name of Wilde is also closely connected with Aesteticism and even more with
Decadentism the precept of Art for Art’s sake was for him a moral as an aesthetic
imperative.
He was writer, poet, novelist, playright and essayst, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1891)
provoked a violent reaction but it brought him wealth and fame. The “Prefase” emboding
his view of art.
PLOT: Dorian Gray has his portrait pained by Basil Hallward. The cynic Lord Henry Watton is
his best friend and under his influence, Dorian lives his life in pleasure and sensation. The
portrait , which is endowed with supernatural qualities, has become the mirror of Dorian’s
inner life, so the more he degenerates, the more horrible his portrait becomes. Years pass
and Dorian’s life becomes more and more dissolute and the portrait becomes more and
more revolting. At the end Dorian decided to destroy it , inhabitants of the house hear a
terrible cry and when they enter the room they find Dorian lying on the floor with a knife in
his chest. He has become a horrible ald man with all the signs of his sins, while the picture
represents Dorian in his youthful beauty.
The main theme of the novel is profetic of the author’s future ruins. But there are also
other secondary themes, such as dandysm, the cult of the senses, hedonism and
narcissism.

This story is profoundly allegorical; it is a 19th century version of the legend of Faust, the story of a
men who sells his soul to the devil so that all his desires might be satisfied. In the novel this soul is
the picture, which records the signs of time, the corruption, the horror and the sins concealed
under the mask of Dorian’s timeless beauty. The picture represents the dark side of Dorian’s
personality, his double, which he tries to forget by locking it in a room. The moral of this novel is
that every excess must be punished and there is no escape from reality. When Dorian destroys the
picture, he cannot avoid the punishment for all his sins, that is, death. The horrible corrupted
picture could be seen as a symbol of the immorality and bad conscience of the Victorian middle
class, while Dorian and his pure, innocent appearance are symbols of bourgeois hypocrisy. Finally,
the picture, restored to its original beauty, illustrates Wilde’s theory of art: art survives people, art
is eternal.