The Victorian Age (1837-1901)

(1819-1901)
Photograph 1882
 The Victorian Rich 19th
Century

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 Victorian Rich Homes
19th Century

Victorian Home Library

The Victorian Poor
19th Century
Victorian Poor Homes
19th Century
 Part 2: Home & Abroad in the Victorian Age Introduction (R & V, pp.337-347)

Aims:
 Develop close reading: introduction to genres prevalent in
the Victorian period (VP)
 Compare and contrast home and abroad in these writings
 Readers &reading in the VP
 Introduction to Part 2

 Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (WH) (1847)

 Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (SF) (1890)

 Robert Louis Stevenson (famous Scottish emigrant writer)

‘The Beach of Falesa’ (BF) (1892-93)
 Set Books
 WH: is set on the Yorkshire Moors (histories of 2
houses, Thrushcross Grange & Wuthering Heights)
 SF: most crimes take place inside homes
 BF: British trader living abroad (RLS settled in
Samoa)
 All works were written for a domestic readership, but
engaging with the world outside Britain
 Home & Abroad

 What was ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ to the Victorians?

 Who were the Victorian readers & what were the reading
practices?
 Reading was the most popular domestic pastime then, and it
contained news from the wider world
 In an age of empire and literacy, home and abroad were not
always easily separated.
At home with the Victorians

 ‘A safe, comfortable, and righteous home became the

most important and desirable expression of British
Victorian morality and middle-class respectability’.
 For the Victorians, home was to be a refuge from the
riguour, uncertainty, anxiety and potential violence of
the outside world.
 John Ruskin (1819-1900) Social commentator (Sesame and Lilies
1865)
 The role of women was to be homemakers and helpmates to their
husbands in a loving domestic environment. Home had to be a ‘place
of peace, the shelter not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt
and division.’
 Women had to devote themselves to the domestic sphere, and make it
their sacred duty: their social role was inseparable from their sex.
 He equated a well-managed comfortable house with moral correctness
an orderly home was the best expression of a virtuous society and, by
extension, country.
 Other Victorian Thinkers

 Coventry Patmore, a poet, crystallized Victorian ideas about

domesticity in his poem The Angel in the House (1863): pure,
chaste, devoted to her husband and sympathetic.
 Isabella Beeton’s Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household
Management (1861) one of the century’s most influential
books (it sold over 2 million copies in the first decade) warned
against ‘badly cooked dinners and untidy ways’
 Victorian Home

 But such an understanding of home was contested: the literature of the

age questioned as well as reflected these Victorian domestic values.
Home was not an absolutely secure environment.
 Despite the strong sense of social and sexual propriety, and heavy
penalties against unacceptable behavior, new realities of urban life,
especially in London, meant violence, prostitution, drug addiction,
crime, etc. (Home as the scene of murder in SF).
 The Victorians and Abroad: The Industrial Revolution & Empire

 Idealization of the perfect home took place at a time of Industrial

change.
 Middle-class prosperity and comfort was the result of an expanding
and profitable overseas trading empire, with India at its centre.
 The poorest communities in London’s East End (dock workers,
labourers) were the most dependent on imperial commerce.
 Importance of Empire
 The empire was visible everywhere in 19 th century: imperial
goods and products in middle-class and working-class
homes; in high politics and popular culture, in Parliament, in
fiction and on the streets, in economic policy and popular
imagination.
 From empire came tea, sugar, spices, cotton, opium, wool,
gold, rubber, and other commodities, on a daily basis.
 Empire in Victorian Age

 Queen Victoria was publicly proclaimed ‘Empress of India,’ a title she

held until her death in 1901, she took Hindi and Urdu lessons, relied
increasingly on her Indian clerk, but never visited India. Her domestic
life was idealized and imitated by her subjects (family taking tea
together), and circulated in the popular press.
 Emigrants

 The Victorian period:

Imperial expansion abroad
Social upheaval at home
 Millions left Britain to trade, fight in wars, administer or settle in
empire.
 Many emigrated for economic necessity (with Industrialization
forcing down the cost of labour).
 Many emigrants intended to return but never did.
 Immigrants

 Freed African slaves, Indian traders and students,

Chinese dock workers appeared in the streets of
London
 Appeared in literature (eg., in Doyle’s).
 Reading about abroad at home

 The Victorian age saw a great rise in reading

 Britain became a literate society, reading in different locations,
inside and outside home.
 Following the Education Act (1870), all could read with some
proficiency newspapers, magazines, fiction, essays, memoirs
 They correspond with family and friends abroad.
 National Identity

 Newspapers were hugely influential in forming British public

opinion about empire.
 Reading became a culturally unifying activity, cementing national
identity across entrenched class divisions.
 The White Man’s Burden

 India was often romanticized for readers at home

 ‘The empire was a mirror in which the British saw
themselves the way they wanted to be seen:
 ‘powerful, resourceful, enterprising, hard-working,
virtuous, Christian, bringers of progress,
civilization and emancipation.’
 Importance of Empire

 Britons were fully aware by the 1880s of the possibility of

fabulous wealth and social advancement that empire offered.
 The vision of the British mission abroad was at odds with
reality, but the myth of Britain’s imperial destiny was
pervasive.
 The Importance of Reading

 But some of the certainties about home and abroad

changed during the Victorian period.
 Reading, the most important cultural activity for
the Victorians, shaped views about home and
abroad in this period.
 Readers’ Responses

 What a literary text means is to a considerable extent a product of its

readers’ responses to it. It is not just authors who create meanings.
Readers bring their own experiences, values and expectations.
 Values and assumptions change, so do responses. Responses to WH
differed from the early reception to later periods: interpreted differently
over time.
Thank
you
very
much