For
much of this century
the term Victorian, which literally describes things and events in the reign of
Queen Victoria(1837-1901), conveyed connotations of "prudish," "repressed,"
and "old fashioned." Although such associations have some basis in
fact, they do not adequately indicate the nature of this complex, paradoxical
age that was a second English Renaissance. Like Elizabethan England, Victorian
England saw great expansion of wealth, power, and culture. (What Victorian
literary form do you think parallels Elizabethan drama in terms of both
popularity and literary achievement?)
In
science and technology the Victorians invented the modern idea of invention --
the notion that one can create solutions to problems, that man can create new
means of bettering himself and his environment.
In
religion, the Victorians experienced a great age of doubt, the first that called
into question institutional Christianity on such a large scale. In literature
and the other arts, the Victorians attempted to combine Romantic emphases upon
self, emotion, and imagination with Neoclassical ones upon the public role of
art and a corollary responsibility of the artist.
In
ideology, politics, and society, the Victorians created astonishing innovation
and change: democracy,feminism, unionization of workers, socialism, Marxism, and
other modern movements took form. In fact, this age of Darwin, Marx, and Freud
appears to be not only the first that experienced modern problems but also the
first that attempted modern solutions. Victorian, in other words, can be taken
to mean parent of the modern -- and like most powerful parents, it provoked a
powerful reaction against itself.
The
Victorian age was not one, not single, simple, or unified, only in part because
Victoria's reign lasted so long that it comprised several periods. Above all, it
was an age of paradox and power. The Catholicism of the Oxford movement, the
Evangelical movement, the spread of the Broad Church, and the rise of
Utilitarianism, socialism, Darwinism, and scientific Agnosticism, were all in
their own ways characteristically Victorian; as were the prophetic writings of
Carlyle and Ruskin, the criticism of Arnold, and the empirical prose of Darwin
and Huxley; as were the fantasy of George McDonald and the Realism of George
Elitot and George Bernard Shaw.
More
than anything else what makes Victorians Victorian is their sense of social
responsibility, a basic attitude that obviously differentiates them from their
immediate predecessors, the Romantics. Tennyson might go to Spain to help the
insurgents, as Byron had gone to Greece and Wordsworth to France; but Tennyson
also urged the necessity of educating "the poor man before making him our
master."