1. Romantic Heritage Historical Perspectives on Steampunk Character Watchlist

2. Early Victorian Period  1837: Queen Victoria Assumes the Throne  18 years old  Houses of Parliament Built  Dickens  ‘37-38 Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist  ‘38 Nicholas Nickleby  1840: Victoria Marries First Cousin Prince Albert

3. 1830s: The Death of Romaticism The 1830s are a period of transition Wordsworth still alive (d. 1850), but is not regarded as before. Coleridge earns money giving talks on metaphysics until his death in 1834 (Remember for Anubis Gates) Several of the great romantic poets have died: Keats (1821) Byron (1824) Blake (1827) We find that “Mortality had imposed a barrier between the romantic era and the Victorian” (Altick 6). Thomas Carlyle keeps a bit of the romantic spirit alive (although considered a chiefly Victorian writer for most of the century) Early transcendentalism. Rooted in German philosophy.

4. Key Figures and Their Decline in Favor Lord Byron Heroic Figure “She Walks in Beauty” Romance, Sexual Uninhibited Confessional Style Revolutionary Shelley Radical Political Views Atheism Blake Dissenter!

5. Rationalism Altick notes, “In the early Victorian period, rationalism would acquire new authority” (8). – Jeremy Bentham Utilitarian Legal Theorist/Punishment – The Panopticon – Hard Labor – Solitary Confinement – John Stuart Mill Utilitarian Differs from Bentham, “On Liberty”

6. Regency and Industrialism The Regency – Baudy Glamour – Dandyism – Return to the splendor and excess of the previous century “Silver Fork Novels” – Centered on the flash and fashion of characters, not the characters of the characters. Industrialism – England’s impoverished in the light of these excesses. – Akin to the Gilded Age, in a way.

7. The Two Nations Disraeli’s Sybil – England is “Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers of different zones or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws” (Altick 11). Source material for The Difference Engine

8. The Great Exhibition of the Works of All Nations 1851 World’s Fair The Crystal Palace First Prefab Building Invention Free Trade This is the Height of the Victorian Era