esame di Letteratura Inglese II, prof Reggiani, poesie commentate

ENRY AYHEW

A B : who passionately analyzes the economic exploitation of workers by wealthy capitalists.

NNIE ESANT

She wrote several articles about the match factory Bryant and May, culprit of mistreating his workers and of

playing them low wages. Her articles led to a public boycott and a strike of fourteen hundred match workers.

‘The white slavery of London match workers’.

A N C : She wrote a series of letter about the working conditions in the factory. When her

DA IELD HEW

identity was discovered, an uproar ensued and she was fired. She became active in politics and continued to

write for political causes. A letter about conditions in a factory in Crewe states strongly the case for

improving wages for the tailoresses who "ceaselessly work" six days of the week.

T “W Q ”: T V D G

HE OMAN UESTION HE ICTORIAN EBATE ABOUT ENDER

Many of the historical changes that characterized the Victorian period motivated discussion and argument

about the nature and role of woman — what the Victorians called "The Woman Question." The extension of

the franchise by the Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867 stimulated discussion of women's political rights.

Although women in England did not get the vote until 1918, petitions to Parliament advocating women's

suffrage were introduced as early as the 1840s. Equally important was the agitation to allow married women

to own and handle their own property, which culminated in the passing of the Married Women's Property

Acts (1870–1908).

The Industrial Revolution resulted in changes for women as well. The explosive growth of the textile

industries brought hundreds of thousands of lower­class women into factory jobs with grueling working

conditions. The new kinds of labor and poverty that arose with the Industrial Revolution presented a

challenge to traditional ideas of woman's place. Middle­class voices also challenged conventional ideas about

women.

Happily married herself until the death of prince Albert in 1861, Victoria was nevertheless aware of some

of the sacrifices marriage imposed on women.

The required “submission” of which the queen wrote was justified in many quarters on the grounds of the

supposed intellectual inferiority of women; as popularly accepted lore expressed it: “average weight of man’s

brain is 3.5 lbs, woman’s 2,11 lbs. In the minds of many, then, the possessors of the “shallower brain”

naturally deserved a dependent role. In this climate it would follow that a woman who tried to cultivate her

intellect beyond drawing­room accomplishments was violating the order of Natural and religious tradition.

Woman was to be valued, instead, for other qualities considered especially characteristics of her sex:

tenderness of understanding, unworldliness and innocence, domestic affection, and, in various degrees,

submissiveness.

Many of the queen’s female subjects shared her assumptions that woman’s role was to be accepted as

divinely willed. Women’s works were documented in “domestic conduct literature”.

George Eliot argued against the figure of the “angel of the house”: the pedestal on which women were

placed was one of the principal obstacles to their achieving any alteration in status. That woman’s position in

marriage and in society was taken as natural, also stood in the way of change.

Earlier in the century, some women were dissatisfied and unfulfilled. It is commonly said that boredom

was a particular problem for Victorian women. In the mid­Victorian period, one­quarter of England’s women

had jobs, most of them onerous and low­paying, at the same time other women earned their livings by

working as prostitutes. To be bored was the privilege of wives and daughters in upper and middle­class

homes, establishments in which feminine idleness was treasured as a status­symbol. If family finances failed

and they were called on “to do” something, women from these classes faced considerable difficulties: their

severely limited choice of respectable paid occupations meant that many sought employment as governesses.

S.S. E : wrote books on women’s education and domestic roles. She had a belief that feminine

LLIS

education should cultivate what she called “the heart” rather than the intellectual faculties. In her letter she

emphasises all the ‘privileges’ English woman have, and not the disadvantages.

C P : “The Angel in the house”, written to celebrate her wife. It was criticized by

OVENTRY ATMORE

Virginia Woolf for the sentimentality of its ideal of woman and for the oppressive effect of this ideal on

women’s minds. Since Woolf’s critic “the angel in the house” has often been used to encapsulate a

patronizing Victorian attitude toward women.

J. R : his essay ‘Queen’s Gardens’ was very popular during his time and had assertions about the

USKIN

distinct differences between men and women, and their respective roles in the two separate spheres of public

and private life.

H M : suffered a painfully unhappy childhood and adolescence both because of recurring

ARRIET ARTINEAU

illnesses and because of the strict, narrow lifestyle of her middle­class family.

She became a well­known writer of her time.

A : The Great social Evil: In 1858 a letter appeared in the London Times above the signature

NONYMOUS

‘One More Unfortunate’. This individual, who claimed to be a prostitute, described her respectable

upbringing and her experience as a governess, lamented her disgrace, and called on men to be more

compassionate in their reform efforts. Responding in part to this, another letter, also apparently from a

prostitute and titled ‘the great social evil’.

D. M. M : In A Woman's Thoughts About Women, the novelist Dinah Maria Mulock compares the

ULOCK

prospects of Tom, Dick, and Harry, who leave school and plunge into life, with those of "the girls," who

"likewise finish their education, come home, and stay at home." They have, she laments, "literally nothing to

do."

F N : Likewise in Cassandra, Florence Nightingale, who later became famous for

LORENCE IGHTINGALE

organizing a contingent of nurses to take care of sick and wounded soldiers during the Crimean War, writes

passionately of the costs for women of having no outlet for their heroic aspirations. At the age of 32 she was

still living at home, unmarried. Some members of her well­to­do family, strongly opposed her nursing

ambitions and pressured her to remain at home. So bored with family and social life that she thought of

suicide, she began writing Cassandra, her “family manuscript” which records her frustrations before she

escaped into a professional world where there was “something to do”.

M C : a feminist writer who claims that inside the institution of marriage is one of the worst

ONA AIRD

obstacle to change for women.

W B : celebrated the improvements that he had witnessed during his lifetime. From the

ALTER ESANT

ignorant ladies of 1837 to the New Women of 1897.

E N I

MPIRE AND ATIONAL DENTITY

Great Britain during Victoria's reign was not just a powerful island nation. It was the center of a global

empire that fostered British contact with a wide variety of other cultures, though the exchange was usually an

uneven one. By the end of the nineteenth century, nearly one­quarter of the earth's land surface was part of

the British Empire, and more than 400 million people were governed from Great Britain, however nominally.

An incomplete list of British colonies and quasi­colonies in 1901 would include Australia, British Guiana

(now Guyana), Brunei, Canada, Cyprus, Egypt, Gambia, the Gold Coast (Ghana), Hong Kong, British India

(now Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka), Ireland, Kenya, Malawi, the Malay States

(Malaysia), Malta, Mauritius, New Zealand, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Somaliland (Somalia), South

Africa, the Sudan, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and Trinidad and Tobago. Queen Victoria's far­flung empire was a

truly heterogenous entity, governed by heterogenous practices. It included Crown Colonies like Jamaica,

ruled from Britain, and protectorates like Uganda, which had relinquished only partial sovereignty to Britain.

Ireland was a sort of internal colony whose demands for home rule were alternately entertained and

discounted. India had started the century under the control of the East India Company, but was directly ruled

from Britain after the 1857 Indian Mutiny (the first Indian war of independence), and Victoria was crowned

Empress of India in 1877. Colonies like Canada and Australia with substantial European populations had

become virtually self­governing by the end of the century and were increasingly considered near­equal

partners in the imperial project. By contrast, colonies and protectorates with large indigenous populations

like Sierra Leone, or with large transplanted populations of ex­slaves and non­European laborers like

Trinidad, would not gain autonomy until the twentieth century.

[Click on image to enlarge] As Joseph Chamberlain notes in The True Conception of Empire, the

catastrophic loss of the American colonies had given rise to a certain disenchantment with empire­building.

But despite a relative lack of interest in the British imperial project during the early nineteenth century, the

Empire continued to grow, acquiring a number of new territories as well as greatly expanding its colonies in

Canada and Australia and steadily pushing its way across the Indian subcontinent. A far more rapid

expansion took place between 1870 and 1900, three decades that witnessed a new attitude towards and

practice of empire­building known as the new imperialism and which would continue until World War I.

During this period Britain was involved in fierce competition for new territories with its European rivals,

particularly in Africa. It was becoming increasingly invested, imaginatively and ideologically, in the idea of

empire. It found itself more and more dependent on a global economy and committed to finding (and forcing)

new trading partners, including what we might call virtual colonies, nations that were not officially part of

the Empire but were economically in thrall to powerful Great Britain. All of these motives helped fuel the

new imperialism. British expansion was not allowed to progress unchallenged — the Empire went to war

with the Ashanti, the Zulus, and the Boers, to name a few, and critics like J. J. Thomas and John Atkinson

Hobson (NAEL 8, 2.1632­34) denounced imperialism as a corrupt and debasing enterprise — but it

progressed at an astonishing pace nonetheless.

[Click on image to enlarge] The distinction between imperialism and colonialism is difficult to pin down,

because the two activities can seem indistinguishable at times. Roughly speaking, imperialism involves the

claiming and exploiting of territories outside of ones own n