THE VICTORIAN AGE
TESTI PROF. MARGHERITA UCCELLINI
GRAFICA PROF. TERESA MARTELLINI
The long period known as the Victorian Age is named after Queen
Victoria, who reigned from 1839 to 1901 and was related to many royal
families of Europe, so that she was called “the grandmother of Europe”.
Because of the length of this age, the changing attitudes also affected
literature which, by voicing the conflicts and the ferments of the period,
became a compromise between old and new models.
There is hardly any other English literary period so complex and difficult
to define as the Victorian one. Upset, as it was, by contradictions and
revolutionary ideas, it became the ideal ground for the development of
different literary movements, or rather literary attitudes.
For convenience sake, Victorian literature is sometimes divided into two
stages, which are usually applied to prose in particular:
EARLY VICTORIANS: (1832 – 1870), grouping those writers who
mostly identified themselves with their age;
LATER VICTORIANS: (1870 – 1901), in whose works the sense of
dissatisfaction and rebellion prevailed.
THE INDUSTRIAL
DEVELOPMENT
The Victorian Era was a period of great industrial
development, of extraordinary financial expansion, and of
the creation of the immense British empire. By the 1850s
England was referred to as “the workshop of the world”,
and her grandeur in the fields of scientific, technical and
industrial development was exhibited for all to see at the
Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in 1851. As time
progressed, England’s prosperity continued to increase.
Also science and chemistry made progress in this century:
in 1856 the chemist William Perkin discovered how to
produce colour in factories, especially mauve, which
became very fashionable in Victorian Britain and which
is very near to the colour used in this work.
THE EXPANSION
OF THE EMPIRE
By the end of the 19th century Britain had so
many colonies that they were called collectively
“an empire where the sun never sets”. Although
Britain had lost her American colonies in the
American War of Independence, the country
continued to gain others and to strengthen her
hold on those still in her possession. As a
consequence of this a new idea developed
concerning England’s role in these areas. It was
defined as “the white man’s burden”, a concept
put forward by Rudyard Kipling.
THE WHITE MAN’S
BURDEN
THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN
BY RUDYARD KIPLING
Take up the White Man’s burden,
Send forth the best ye breed,
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captive’s need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wildYour new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
Britain’s role in the colonies was not seen so much as that of the
exploiter –exploitation being a question that Victorian society was
becoming very sensitive to in view of the social problems at home–
but rather that of server. England was prompted by a sense of duty
to “serve” the colonies and to benefit them of all western progress
as well as to prepare them for democratic life. Kipling was the
spokesman of this theory: according to him, who had a mystic view
of imperialism, the colonies were a burden, albeit a profitable one.
He saw the Anglo-Saxons as the elected race whose job it was to
civilize the underdeveloped populations (the white man’s burden)
whether they liked it or not. Behind all the events quoted above
there was the enterprising Victorian middle class with its
neopuritan ethic and the lower classes which were more and more
exploited and poorer.
THE LITERARY
DEVELOPMENT
LATE ROMANTICISM: which was a continuation of the
previous Romantic movement and still looked to the Middle
Ages as a source of inspiration;
REALISM: which stated that art has to reproduce outer
reality faithfully, without idealizing it (as the Romantics
had done);
NATURALISM: which shared the same “realistic”
conception of art, but advocated total objectivity and a
scientific approach to literature;
AESTHETICISM: which, in rejecting the view of the
artist as a moral spokesman and avoiding the issues of the
time, proposed a doctrine of “art for art’s sake”;
DECADENTISM: which held that art is superior to
nature and that the finest beauty was that of dying an
decaying things.