Victorianism

After being reading different sources I have decided to base me mainly on one: on the Norton Anthology English Literature, due to it’s easy to understand and very clear, but I don’t forget the others (see references).

“In 1897 Mark Twain was visiting London during the Diamond Jubilee celebrations honoring the sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria's coming to the throne. "British history is two thousand years old," Twain observed, "and yet in a good many ways the world has moved farther ahead since the Queen was born than it moved in all the rest of the two thousand put together." Twain's comment captures the sense of dizzying change that characterized the Victorian period. Perhaps most important was the shift from a way of life based on ownership of land to a modern urban economy based on trade and manufacturing. By the beginning of the Victorian period, the Industrial Revolution, as this shift was called, had created profound economic and social changes, including a mass migration of workers to industrial towns, where they lived in new urban slums. But the changes arising out of the Industrial Revolution were just one subset of the radical changes taking place in mid- and late-nineteenth-century Britain — among others were the democratization resulting from extension of the franchise; challenges to religious faith, in part based on the advances of scientific knowledge, particularly of evolution; and changes in the role of women.”

“All of these issues, and the controversies attending them, informed Victorian literature. In part because of the expansion of newspapers and the periodical press, debate about political and social issues played an important role in the experience of the reading public. The Victorian novel, with its emphasis on the realistic portrayal of social life, represented many Victorian issues in the stories of its characters. Moreover, debates about political representation involved in expansion both of the franchise and of the rights of women affected literary representation, as writers gave voice to those who had been voiceless.”

 We can emphasize in four topics that concerned the Victorians: “evolution, industrialism, what the Victorians called "The Woman Question", and Great Britain's identity as an imperial power”. It’s to say, “the debate about the benefits and evils of the Industrial Revolution, the debate about the nature and role of women, and the myriad issues that arose as British forces worked to expand their global influence”. “The debates on both industrialization and women's roles in society reflected profound social change: the formation of a new class of workers — men, women, and children — who had migrated to cities, particularly in the industrial North, in huge numbers, to take jobs in factories, and the growing demand for expanded liberties for women. The changes were related; the hardships that the Industrial Revolution and all its attendant social developments created put women into roles that challenged traditional ideas about women's nature. Moreover, the rate of change the Victorians experienced, caused to a large degree by advances in manufacturing, created new opportunities and challenges for women. They became writers, teachers, and social reformers, and they claimed an expanded set of rights”.

“In the debates about industrialism and about the Woman Question, voices came into print that had not been heard before. Not only did women writers play a major role in shaping the terms of the debate about the Woman Question, but also women from the working classes found opportunities to describe the conditions of their lives. Similarly, factory workers described their working and living conditions, in reports to parliamentary commissions, in the encyclopedic set of interviews journalist Henry Mayhew later collected as London Labor and the London Poor, and in letters to the editor that workers themselves wrote. The world of print became more inclusive and democratic. At the same time, novelists and even poets sought ways of representing these new voices. The novelist Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her first novel, Mary Barton, in order to give voice to Manchester's poor, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning tried to find ways in poetry of giving voice to the poor and oppressed.”

Summarizing, one sentence to describe easily Victorians would be: they thought “the Romantic aspirations no held only the key to the mystery of poetry. Men a woman leading flawed, passionate lives; artists, scholars, adventures, musicians, lovers – these are the characters who come to haunt his moral imagination and his curiously intricate thought process” (extracted from: “Luis Cernuda and the modern English poets”, Chapter 2: Cernuda and Browning by Brian Hughes.). Victorians were who begins to worry about real and diary life.

References:

-         http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/victorian/welcome.htm - The Norton Anthology of English Literatura.

-         http://www.victorianweb.org/ - An essential source referring to Victorian Era.

-         “Luis Cernuda and the modern English poets”, Chapter 2: Cernuda and Browning, Brian Hughes, Univ. de Alicante.

-         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorianism -  The Wikipedia (Victorian Era in general).

-         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_literature - The Wikipedia (Victorian Era in concrete literature):