1. The Victorian Era
1830s-1900

2. Historical context

3. Queen victoria

4. “high values on such qualities as honor, duty, moral seriousness and sexual propriety”

5. “A Growing power” Population growth Imperial expansion
1801: 11 million
Late 1800s: 37 million
Imperial expansion

6. Irish Potato FAmine

7. Mills and Poverty Shift from agrarian to industrial economy
The middle class
Child labor
Worker strikes and reform

8. Gender and Domesticity
House = sacred space
Gender roles viewed as “innate” and “natural”
“One of the key signs of a man’s professional success was his wife’s ‘idleness’ within the home”
“Angel in the house” vs. “Fallen woman”
Victorian gentleman
“New Woman”

9. Faith and Doubt Evolution and fossil record “Agnostic” coined in 1869
Changing social order

10. Entertainment Increased income and leisure time
Circuses, sporting events, public gardens, theaters, wax museums, etc.
New technology: photograph, cinema

11. Victorian literature

12. The Novel Long novels (often in installments) with many characters
Realism
The “social problem novel”
“We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness.” –George Eliot
Romantic elements still present in Victorian works

13. aestheticism Attack on realism “Art for art’s sake” –Walter Pater
“Art never declares anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being a creation of its own time, it is usually in direct opposition to it.” –Oscar Wilde