Victorian literature

The term Victorian literature refers to novels and poetry published during the sixty-three-year-long reign of Queen Victoria. The works generally reflect the widespread changes in society at that time, realistically describing both the technological and social transformations. Victorian authors wrote poems and novels that commented on, and criticized, the way the Industrial Revolution and strict class divisions affected people, especially the lower classes.

Overview

The period during which Queen Victoria ruled the British Empire was long and laden with changes. Stretching from 1837 to 1901, Victoria's reign encompassed the Industrial Revolution, which transformed England from an agricultural to a manufacturing economy. The physical and social consequences of unregulated factories, large populations, and close city dwelling created the need for organized reform programs to improve work safety and the living conditions of the working people. The middle class thrived, and men strove to climb the social ladder while women began to question their lack of opportunities. Later in the nineteenth century, the working classes organized to gain political power and some control of their work environments. These vast changes fed the imaginations of poets and emerging novelists, supporting themes such as individuals' identities in relation to societal and moral issues, including child labor and the treatment of women.

Realities of the Industrial Revolution

When farm workers, craftsmen, and artisans headed to the cities to find employment in the new factories, they found the work hard and the wages low. Women took jobs in mills and workshops, and even young children worked to help support the family. Still, most working families were forced to live in teeming, dirty slums and had little to eat. Authors such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy described the realities of displacement, factory work, and slum conditions, and their widely available fiction helped the middle class understand the dreadful working and living conditions of the poor. The popularity of serials in periodicals or cheap bound copies made high-quality reading material available to the lower classes for the first time. What people learned from Victorian literature prompted calls for reform, and new organizations, many led by women, began to address the problems.

Dickens, perhaps the most popular author of the time, based several of his works, including Hard Times and David Copperfield, on the real experiences of workers. In fact, Dickens took some scenes in David Copperfield directly from his own bewildering childhood after he was left on his own when his father was sent to debtors' prison. In the novel, Copperfield is forced to take a factory job pasting labels on bottles, working long hours for little pay in a rat-infested factory, just as Dickens had. Similarly, his novel Oliver Twist describes the plight of children sent to the workhouse. Although sometimes melodramatic, stories like these had a profound effect on public opinion.

Women's Issues

With the expansion of manufacturing, middle-class men accumulated wealth and strove to move into the upper class. They assumed the values and trappings of upper-class life—obedient children, cleanliness, and honesty. A strictly upheld moral code also defined the Victorian middle classes, sometimes to the detriment of family relationships. These traits became fodder for novelists, who created comic characters, satires, and tragedies that mirrored real people and events. For example, in her semi-autobiographical novel The Mill on the Floss,George Eliot shows the real harm caused when a young woman's community believes that she broke a narrow social standard. Eliot describes the heartbreaking rejection of a woman by her brother after she takes an unchaperoned boat ride with a young man although both are innocent of wrongdoing. A similar event in Eliot's experience haunted her all her life. Ostracized by friends and family, unwelcome in respectable homes, particularly her overly proper brother's home, Eliot used her novel to reveal the hurt the family's conventional values caused, even as she made fun of them. The fact that she took a male pen name also reflects the lack of opportunity for women, who were rarely published.

Moral Lessons in Poetry

Victorians expected poetry to improve their minds and deliver a moral lesson. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, retold Arthurian legends in his "idylls," such as "Morte d'Arthur," and in his epic In Memoriam, he discussed evolution and religion, the unconscious, art, man versus society, and man versus nature. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in her novel-length poem Aurora Leigh, addressed issues Victorian women faced. The main character, Aurora, is a bright, curious girl who, like Barrett, had to educate herself and reject a marriage proposal to break into the literary community of London. A second character, Marian, is a lower-class girl who escapes her abusive father only to fall into the hands of an unscrupulous woman who sells her into prostitution. Marian's plight was considered shocking and immoral, but the poet showed why Marian deserved help and compassion, not the rejection and moral judgment such women received in Victorian society.

Additional themes in Victorian literature were the controversy over scientific discoveries and their effects on the future. Authors such as H.G. Wells created characters and situations that explored the possibilities of what science could do—or what might happen if something went terribly wrong. Wells had studied biology, including Darwin's theories. His science fiction novels, such as The Time Machine and War of the Worlds depicted a frightening future that included alien invasions, robots, and unheard of weapons that could destroy the world, most of which came true in the twentieth century. Darwin's nonfiction work, The Origin of Species, challenged religious beliefs, especially regarding creation, and by the end of the century, Victorian values and behavior had become the target of satirical plays by writers such as Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.

Bibliography

"Alfred, Lord Tennyson." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2014. Web. 13 Aug. 2014.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/alfred-tennyson

Davies, James A. John Forster: A Literary Life. Totowa: Leicester University Press, 1983. Print.

http://books.google.com/books?id=T-FLlXaZ2-4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=john+forster&hl=en&sa=X&ei=RZTrU5nmLJOZyATl84CYBQ&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=john%20forster&f=false

"Elizabeth Barrett Browning." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2014.Web. 13 Aug. 2014.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/elizabeth-barrett-browning

"H.G. Wells." The Literature Network. Jalic Inc., 2014. Web. 13 Aug. 2014.

http://www.online-literature.com/wellshg/

Hughes, Kathryn. "Rereading: George Eliot's Mill on the Floss." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media Limited, 26 March 2010. Web. 13 Aug. 2014.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/mar/27/eliot-mill-floss-biography-tulliver

Landow, George P. "The Blacking Factory and Dickens's Imaginative World." The Victorian Web. The Victorian Web, 14 October 2002. Web. 13 Aug. 2014.

"The Victorian Age: Topics." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. W.W. Norton and Company, 2014. Web. 13 Aug. 2014.

http://wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/victorian/welcome.htm

"Victorian Literature." The Literature Network. Jalic Inc., 2014. Web. 13 Aug. 2014.

http://www.online-literature.com/periods/victorian.php