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.