The Victorian Age
The Victorian Age (1837-1901)
The Victorian Age
• Progress, Expansion,
mobility
The Victorian Age
• Mattew Arnold “the dialogue of the mind with
itself
The Victorian Age
A Christmas Carol (1843)
Charles Dickens
The Victorian Age
• The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886)
• Robert Louis Stevenson
The Victorian Age
• Dracula (1897)
• Bram Stoker
The Victorian Age
Science, technology and
innovation
The Victorian Age
• Scientific Activity:
• Charles Darwin, On the
Origin of Species (1859)
• Natural selection
• Survival of the fittest
The Victorian Age
• H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895); The
Island of Dr Moreau (1896)
• C. Dickens, Great Expectations (1860-1861)
• Thomas Henry Huxley, On the Physical Basis of
Life (1868). “there is some one kind of matter
which is common to all living beings, and that
their endless diversities are bound together by
a physical, as well as an ideal, unity”
The Victorian Age
• Thomas Henry Huxley, “The Two Cultures
Debate” (1880’s):
• T.H. Huxley, Science and Education (1883)
• M. Arnold, Discourses in America (1885)
The Victorian Age
• Herbert Spenser, The Social Organism (1860)
• Social Darwinism
The Victorian Age
• The Great Exhibition
• (1851)
• Crystal Palace
The Victorian Age
• Railway, telegraph and
telephone
The Victorian Age
Wolfgang Schivelbusch,
The Railway Journey. The
Industrialization of Time
and Space in the 19th
Century
Ejzenstein, “Dickens, Griffith
and the Film today” (1944)
https://www.youtube.com/wa
tch?v=Ts1x6uADFtM
The Victorian Age
• Victorian Imperialism
• Distinction between
Imperialism and
Colonialism
The Victorian Age
• Homi Bhabha, The
Location of Culture
• Frantz Fanon, Black
Skin, White Masks
• Gayatri Spivak, Can
Subaltern Speak?
• Edward Said,
Orientalism;
• Culture and Imperialism
The Victorian Age
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of
Darkness (1902)
• “wanderers on a
prehistoric earth”
The Victorian Age
• Triple-decker volume
The Victorian Age
• Circulating Libraries
The Victorian Age
• Serialization
The Victorian Age
• Dickens’s Pickwick
Papers (1836-7)
The Victorian Age
The Victorian Age
• Charlotte Brontë, William Thackeray, Anthony
Trollope, George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson,
Charles Dickens
• ‘Silver fork novels’ (1820 and 1845) William Hazlitt in
1827
• Newgate novels
The Victorian Age
• Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (1849)
• Elisabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848)
• Hungry Forties (1840’s) –famine (Ireland) misery
(Britain)
• “I bethought me how deep might be the romance in
the lives of some of those who elbowed me daily in
the busy streets of the town in which I resided”
Elisabeth Gaskell preface to Mary Barton
The Victorian Age
•
Romance vs Novel
•
Characters
Romance
•
1- They are very important members of the society
•
2- They do magical/spiritual or heroic tasks that are impossible to normal people.
•
3- They are normally one-dimensional characters that stay the same throughout the story.
Novel
•
1- They are middle class characters
•
2- They do daily chores
•
3- Sometimes they might evolve, grow.
•
•
•
•
•
•
Setting
Romance
1- The setting is often vague, or discarded on the whole.
2- If mentioned, the setting is something magnificent.
3 Castles, Magical and mysterious places
Novel
1- It is a very detailed setting
2- It is normally something humble.
3- It is a real place and if not then it sounds like it is.
The Victorian Age
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Period/Time
Romance
1- There is no or a vague sense of time.
2- Does not necessarily stick to chronological order
Novel .
1- Time Continuum should either be measured by a clock or calendar.
2- It has to be in chronological order.
Plot
Romance
1- The plot in itself was like in a dream, smooth unrelated movements with no climax.
Novel
1- It had a specific plot with a certain climax.
Language
Romance
1- The Romances were aimed at the upper class readers
2- There were standard symbolisms.
Novel
1- Since it was aimed at middle class readers, the language was simple
2- There was no symbolism or metaphors or similes
3- It was denotative rather than connotative
The Victorian Age
•
•
•
•
•
•
Tone
Romance
1- One singular type of tone throughout the romance
2- Uses emotions that are Ideal.
Novel
1- The tone varies depending on the genre of the
Novel
• 2- Remains realistic.
• 3- Uses emotions that are realistic but varies
depending on situations and different characters
The Victorian Age
•
•
•
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957)
" The romancer does not attempt to create “real people” so much as stylized figures which
expand into psychological archetypes. It is in the romance that we find Jung’s libido, anima,
and shadow reflected in the hero, heroine, and villain respectively. That is why romance so
often radiates a glow of subjective intensity that the novel lacks, and why a suggestion of
allegory is constantly creeping in around its fringes. Certain elements of character are
released in the romance which make it naturally a more revolutionary form than the novel.
The novelist deals with personality, with characters wearing their personae or social masks.
He needs the framework of a stable society, and many of our best novelists have been
conventional to the verge of fussiness. The romancer deals with individuality, with characters
in vacuo idealized by revery, and, however conservative he may be, something nihilistic and
untamable is likely to keep breaking out of his pages. (AC, 304–5)
The Victorian Age
• Archetypal literary criticism: myths and archetypes
(from the Greek archē, or beginning, and typos, or
imprint)
• Social anthropology (with Frazer and his The Golden
Bough) and psychoanalysis.
• Carl Gustav Jung: myths are the “culturally
elaborated representations of the contents of the
deepest recess of the human psyche: the world of
the archetypes”.
The Victorian Age
• JUNG listed four main forms of archetypes:
•
•
•
•
The Shadow
The Anima
The Animus
The Self
The Victorian Age
• “usually prefers his material in a plastic, or
roughly contemporary state, and feels
cramped by a fixed historical pattern” (AC,
306).
• “most” ‘historical novels’ are romances” (AC,
307).
The Victorian Age