HISTORICAL CONTEXT: THE VICTORIAN PERIOD-.

 

How was the society of this period?

Queen Victoria had the longest reign in British history, and the cultural, political, economic, industrial and scientific changes that occurred during her reign were remarkable. When Victoria ascended to the throne, Britain was primarily agrarian and rural (though it was even then the most industrialised country in the world); upon her death, the country was highly industrialised and connected by an expansive railway network.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, Britain had a very rigid social structure consisting of four distinct classes: the Church and aristocracy, the middle class, and the working class. The top class, known as the aristocracy, included the Church and nobility and had great power and wealth. This class consisted of about two percent of the population, who were born into nobility and who owned the majority of the land. It included the royal family, lords spiritual and temporal, the clergy, great officers of state, and those above the degree of baronet. These people were privileged and avoided taxes. The middle class or bourgeoisie was made up of factory owners, bankers, shopkeepers, merchants, lawyers, engineers, businessmen, traders, and other professionals. These people could be sometimes extremely rich, but in normal circumstances they were not privileged, and they especially resented this. There was a very large gap between the middle class and the lower class. The British lower class was divided into two sections: "the working class" (labourers), and "the poor" (those who were not working, or not working regularly, and were receiving public charity). The lower class contained men, women, and children performing many types of labour, including factory work, seam stressing, chimney sweeping, mining, and other jobs. Both the poorer class and the middle class had to endure a large burden of tax. This third class consisted of about eighty-five percent of the population.

Home and family became the first institutions of the Victorian Europe, in which the head of the family exerted a determinant role. The family was the refuge for all who had to survive in a bourgeois society.

But, in spite of the politic system was more and more democratic, the bourgeois family was the opposite. It was a paternal dictatorship in which the father had all the power. The wife had to take care of the house’ administration; she had to be like a slave, and the husband was the intelligent. This subjection of the woman explains the emergence of the first outbreaks of feminism since the end of the 19^th century.

But the woman’ situation was even worse at the working sector. A lot of these women had to practise prostitution to survive in the city.

So, at this period, we have a great technical and economical advance and a big development of the city, at the same time that there was producing also a big development of society’s problems like this, the prostitution, and a further social division. Capitalists, for example, employed industrial workers, who were one component of the working classes (each class included a wide range of occupations of varying status and income; there was a large gap, for example, between skilled and unskilled labour), but beneath the industrial workers was a submerged "under class" sometimes referred to as the "sunken people," which lived in poverty. The under class were more susceptible to exploitation and were therefore exploited.

These kinds of problems were an inspiration for many poets of the time that had consciousness of the society that was being created.

 

How was the literature in the Europe of that time?

The 19th century saw the novel become the leading form of literature in English. The works by pre-Victorian writers such as Jane Austen and Walter Scott had perfected both closely-observed social satire and adventure stories. Popular works opened a market for the novel amongst a reading public. The 19th century is often regarded as a high point in British literature as well as in other countries such as France, the United States of America and Russia. Books, and novels in particular, became ubiquitous, and the "Victorian novelist" created legacy works with continuing appeal.

The important writing of the Victorian period is to a large extent the product of a double awareness. This was a literature addressed with great immediacy to the needs of the age, to the particular temper of mind which had grown up within a society seeking adjustment to the conditions of modern life.

Most Victorian writers still thought of themselves as men of letters in the full meaning of the term. Victorian literature was predominantly a literature of ideas, and of ideas, furthermore, brought into direct relation with the daily concerns of the reading public.

 

Women in the literature-.

The position of women at this time was a very difficult position, overcoat if they wanted to write.

A rapt and dreaming damozel in heaven, a young girl crying silently, a suffering Madonna, a sleeping prostitute — such are the images of passivity and subservience that often characterize the female in Victorian literature. In addition to projecting all their desires onto a female object, male speakers in Victorian poetry sometimes use their narrative voice to suppress the female point of view and enforce codes of patriarchal domination. There are typically three ways in which male speakers (or female speakers in the case of Aurora Leigh) objectify women. Sometimes speakers literally ventriloquize the female subject by putting words in her mouth. In other, more subtle instances of females being objectified, speakers endow women with a quality, assign a value to them, or impose their views on them. In Victorian poetry there is a noticeable pattern of women being reduced to a fixed meaning as opposed to being treated as complex human beings.