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 MacDonald and the realism of George
Eliot 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." Matthew Arnold
might say at mid-century that the world, which seems To lie before us like
a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither
joy, or love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.
But he refused to reprint his poem "Empedocles
on Etna," in which the Greek philosopher throws
himself into the volcano, because it set
a bad example; and he criticized an Anglican bishop who
pointed out mathematical inconsistencies
in the Bible not on the grounds that he was wrong, but
that for a bishop to point these things
out to the general public was irresponsible.