The Victorian Age

By Giulia Carattoli

The Victorian Age

Literature and Charls Dickens

The Victorian compromise

The Anglo-Boer wars

Foreign and domestic policy

Technological progress

The Irish Potato famine

Chartism

Workhouses

Reforms

Queen Victoria

Index

(1837-1901)

The Victorian age has been one of the most significant reign in English history. Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837 when she was just eighteen years old and she reigned for almost sixty-four years.She married Prince Albert with whom she had nine children. He was a clever man and since he helped her and gave her advice, she gave him the title of Prince Consort.

Queen Victoria

1830s

Workhouses

The 1830s had seen the beginning of an "age of reform".Some of the most important ones are:

• the First Reform Act (1832);
• the Factory Act (1833);
• the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834)

Age of reform

The Great Exhibition

Chartism

In 1851 a Great Exhibition, organized by Prince Albert, showed the world Britain's industrial and economic power. It was housed at the Crystal Palace, a huge structure of glass and steel designed by Sir Joseph Paxton. Also, the building of the London Underground began in 1860.

In 1838 a group of working-class radicals drew up a People's Charter demanding universal manhood suffrage, a secret ballot and other reforms of the electoral system.It became legal only in 1867 with the Second Reform Act

Progresses

When Prince Albert died in 1861, Queen Victoria withdrew from society.There was a regrouping of the parties, which were:

• the Liberal Party;
• the Conservative Party.

Domestic Policy

In the mid-19th century, England was involved in the two Opium Wars against China, which saw England as a winner. When Russia became too powerful against the Turkish Empire, the Crimean War was fought.

Foreign Policy

In South Africa, by the 1870s, the British controlled two colonies. The Dutch settlers, the Boers, had the two republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Britain took over the first one and the Boers rebelled and war broke out. The Boer Wars ended in 1902 with a British Victory.

The Anglo-Boer Wars

a complex age

The Victorian age was marked with complexity. It was a time of great contradictions.In this period progress, reforms and political stability coexisted with poverty and injustice.

The Victorian compromise

Respectability

The Victorian Age came to an end with the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. She was a symbol of decorum, stability and continuity. The Queen was buried beside her beloved husband at Windsor Castle

The end of an era

One of the greatest success of Victorian Age was "Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Managment" (1861)It was the perfect manual for the Victorian women considered "angels of the house" for taking care of the household and of the family. Even though British society was against every change in the role of women, in the second half of the 19th century the first battles for women were fought.

The role of women

startinng to rise...

The women’s suffrage movement was the struggle for the right of women to vote and run for office and is part of the overall women’s rights movement. In the mid-19th century, women in several countries formed organizations to fight for suffrage. In 1888, the first international women’s rights organization formed, the International Council of Women (ICW). Because the ICW was reluctant to focus on suffrage, in 1904 the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) was formed by British women’s rights activist Millicent Fawcett, American activist Carrie Chapman Catt, and other leading women’s rights activists.

The Suffragette Movement

Millicent Garrett Fawcett

During the Victorian Age for the first time there was a communion of interests between writers and their readers.A great ammount of literature was first published in the instalments of periodicals. The responsability of the novelists was to reflect the social changes of the time. Most of the novelists of the time were women, forced to use a pseudonym to publish their work, like George Elliot.

Literature in the Victorian Age

We can divide it into three groups

The Late-Victorian Age

It was nearer to "naturalism", a scientific look at human behavior, which the narrator was not able to comment.The main authors are Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy.

The Mid-Victorian novel

It had Romantic and Gothic tradition, with also a psychological vein.The main authors were the Bronte Sisters and Stevenson

The Victorian novel

The Early-Victorian novel

It dealt with humaritarian themes and expressed the ideas of the age.The main author is Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was a timeless comic genius and social novelist.He was born in 1812 in Portsmouth. His childhood has not been easy: his father and most of his family were imprisoned because of debts. Charles was forced to work in a blacking factory. He suffered from loneliness and hardship, but he used his sad experiences as a material for his works.

Charles Dickens

He begun his carrer as a journalist.He published a series of sketches using the pseudonym "Boz", Sketches by Boz. They were followed by Pickwick Papers, his first novel. Little Dory, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield are his most important novels and they talked about the expoitation of children and the cruely of the workhouses. Bleak House, Hard Times and Great Expectations, instead, focused on educations and harships of the workhouses

Major Works

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Main features

Style

Didactic aim

Characters

Plot

The story follows the story of a children named Oliver Twist, a poor orphan, as he is followed by a number of unfortunate events. All of them are the result of his poverty.He is raised in numerous workhouses, where he is a victim of torture, hardship and starvation. This novel was written after the adoption of the Poor Law of 1834.

Oliver Twist

The main aims of the novel are:

Themes

• to attack the cruelty of institutions and of individuals;
• talk about crime;
• put childhood as a main theme;
• talk about poverty.

It is shown on three different levels:

London life

• the parochial world of the workhouse;
• the criminal world;
• the world of the middle class.

Click here...!

"Please sir, I want some more..."

...and a parody!!

Child labour was a phenomenon that existed in pre-industrial and industrial societies. Children were forced to hardwork in mines,factory and street or chimney sweepers. Both Charles Dickens and Giovanni Verga wrote about the miserable living conditions of the children of the poor.

Child Labour

Plot

The novel is set in a fictional town called "Coketown" where Thomas Gradgrind makes his children, Louisa and Tom, reject any form of imagination and enjoyment (Utilitarianism).Since the father does not believe in true feelings, he makes his daughter marry Josiah Bounderby, a factory owner. Louisa runs back to her family and Mr Gradgring, realizing his mistakes, protects his daugter from her husband. Tom, in the meanwhile, steals money from the Bounderby's bank; Stephen, an innocent employee is accused of the theft. At the end of the story, Tom escapes justice, Mr Gradgrind is a changed man, Bounderby dies and Louisa is finally happy with her friends and family.

Hard Times

Themes

Caricatures

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Main features

Utilitarianism

Structure

Coketown

Thank you!

He was a man full of energy, so that he travelled to America for a lecture tour against slavery. He wrote for the theatre and he perfomed in front of Queen Victoria in the Great exhibition. Charles had ten children with his wife. He died in 1870 and he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Other informations

Respectability

A mixture of morality and hypocrisy

People in this age gave more importance to self-care, personal hygene and education, but in the same time they wanted to hide poverty and social unrest. Man had the duty to respect and protect women, seen as weaker but mentally superior.

• There was a strong concern of "female chastity.

Single mothers were considered "fallen women"

Workhouses

Life in the workhouses was very miserable, characterized by hard work and a strict diet.The poor had to wear an uniform and their families were split. The idea behind the workhouses was that awareness of such a hard life would inspire the poor to try to raise their life condition.

Unlike all the other novels by Dickens, Hard Times is not set in London. Coketown is a fictional industial city in mid-19th century in England. The air is very polluted because of all the smoke from the machines. The mill owners are proud of the pollution while the workers are depressed.

Coketown

Hard Times is divided into three sections or books, and each book is divided into separate chapters:

Structure

• Book the First, Sowing ;
• Book the Second, Reaping;
• Book the Third, Garnering.

Dickens uses a particular technique to hint at the main featres of the characters' personality. Most of the names are made up of different words:

Caricatures

• Mr Gradgrind, "grade" and "grind"
• Mr Bounderby, "bounder"
• Mr 'M Choakumchild, "choke" and "child"

Utilitarianism

It was a movement which had a big influence on 19th century thinking. According on Jeremy Bentham's principals, an action is useful if it tends to promote happiness for the greatest number of people, and wrong if it produces the reverse. It was entirely based on reason and common sense, thanks to which we can decide if an action is morally useful. Following the Utilitarianism, every problem can be overcome through reason.

Hard Times is Dickens' more polemical novel. It denounces industrialization, criticies materialism and Bentham's Utilitarism and promoted education. The novel suggest that 19th century was turning humans into machines by repressing the development of their emotions and crativity

Themes