Victorian Age (12)

• The life of young Victoria
Was born on 24 May 1819 in the middle of a succession crisis. George III’s six daughters and seven sons. By 1817, they had only managed to produce one legitimate heir. Princess Charlotte. But her baby boy was born dead and within hours, she had fallen into a fatal fever and she too died. Give her the mother’s name Alexandrina, but she quickly became known by her middle name, Victoria.
• The first half of Queen Victoria’s reign
She came to the throne in 1837 and died in 1901.

It was a period of unprecedented material progress, imperial expansion, political developments and social reforms (Ten Hours Act of 1847, which limited working hours to ten a day for all labourers.
During her reign, the two main political parties were the Liberals and the Conservatives.
• The building of the railways
The first steam locomotives helped make Britain the most powerful nation in the world.
• Life in the Victorian town
Britain had become a nation of town dwellers. Extraordinary industrial development. The mortality rate was high and terrible working conditions in polluted atmospheres had a disastrous effect, especially on children’s health. Medicine also underwent a radical change: professional organisations were founded to regulate and control medical education and research, and modern hospitals were built.
• The Victorian compromise
The Victorian age was a complex and contradictory era: it was an age of progress, stability and great social reforms; it was also characterized by poverty, injustice and social unrest. The Victorians were great moralizer.
One of the most important notions throughout the 19th century was the need to work hard. The idea of being respectable distinguished the middle from the lower class. Respectability was a mixture of both morality and hypocrisy, severity and conformity to social standards. Philanthropy was a widespread phenomenon; it addressed itself to every kind of poverty, to “stray children, fallen women and drunken men”. Middle class ideals dominated Victorian family life. The family was a patriarchal unit where the husband represented authority and the key role of women concerned the education of children and the managing of the house. Sexuality was generally repressed in its public and private forms, and being prudish in its most extreme manifestations led to the denunciation of nudity in art and the rejection of words with a sexual connotation from everyday vocabulary.
Moralist a strong moral idea.
• The Victorian novel
The novel became the most popular form of literature and the main form of entertainment, since novels were read aloud within the family. The novelists felt they had a moral and social responsibility to fulfil. Some women used a male pseudonym in order to see their work in print. The first part of Victorian age was linked to social and humanitarian novels, whose main representative was Charles Dickens, and to psychological novels, with the works of Emily and Charlotte Bronte.
Two authors: Dickens (spokesman) his eyes:  exploitation of children
 Industrialization (Coketown)
 Utilitarian philosophy fact (p 309)
Theme in common: ° education
° the Bronte sisters: Emily wrote “Withering the gest”
Charlotte wrote “Jane Eyre” emancipated her
through the job
• Charles Dickens and children
Was born in Portsmouth, on southern coast of childhood. His father was imprisoned for debt, and his wife and children, with the exception of Charles, who was put to work in a factory. In 1833, his first story appeared, and in 1836, still a newspaper reporter, he adopted the pen name “Boz”, publishing Sketches by “Boz” a collection of articles describing London’s people and scenes, written for the periodical “Monthly Magazine”. Dickens started a full-time career as a novelist. Oliver Twist was begun in 1837 and continued in monthly parts until April 1839. In 1844 December of the previous year A Christmas Carol, the first of Dickens’s enormously successful Christmas books, was published. The protagonists of his autobiographical novels, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Little Dorrit, became symbols of an exploited childhood confronted with the sad realities of slums and factories. He died in London in 1870 and his buried in Westminster Abbey.
• Charlotte Bronte’s life
Charlotte Bronte spent most of her life in isolation in a remote part of Yorkshire, in Northern England. She did not receive a formal education, she was mainly self-educated. Like many female writers of the period, she decided to use a pen-name to publish her novel Jane Eyre in 1847. It was immediately successful and was followed by other two novels, Shirley and Villette.
JANE EYRE (1847) An Education Novel: Charlotte Bronte’s novel “Jane Eyre” is a perfect example of an education novel. During this journey, Jane undergoes the trial of education according to Victorian standards, where she is, finally, fully educated.
• Victorian poetry before period by Dickens and Bronte
1st period  spokesman of V. age (Dickens, Bronte sisters)
2nd period  V. poetry: two poet important: Tennyson and Browning who used the “dramatic monologue” as literary gare (?).
3rd period Stevenson and Oscar Wilde.
The Dramatic monologue: the reader is presented with the words of one speaker the protagonist who spent about dramatic sorrow full events.
There is another groups of poets who were artist, poet, painters called “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” whose (?) to produce works similar to. The Italian artist before Raffaello: Dante, Gabriel Rossetti, Charles Swinburne and Oscar Wilde.

- ULISSES, Tennyson
Tennyson’s Ulysses is a complex figure. He is the fierce Homeric narrator who has fought at irony (?) he is a restless spirit always open to knowledge and experience but be also the fascinating Ulysses of Inferno XXVI whose searching because a forbidden.
Future Pascoli/ D’Annunzio.
Ulysses is taken again bay Joyce and he becomes an anti-hero Leopold Bloom.