The document discusses several key themes and tensions of the Victorian era in England. It describes the period as one of both scientific progress and spiritual uncertainty. Traditional beliefs were questioned as philosophical and ideological divisions emerged. Literature of the time, such as works by Carlyle, Dickens, and Arnold, reflected these tensions. Meanwhile, Christianity and moral teachings still held influence, though some saw hypocrisy in the social system. Debates also occurred around issues like women's rights, individualism, and the role of family and society.

2.  An age…
 of conflicting explanations and theories
 of scientific and economic confidence
But also
 of social and spiritual pessimism
 of awareness of the inevitability of progress
 of deep disquiet as to the nature of the present
 Traditional solutions and universal truths or
panaceas were considered not enough and this
resulted into philosophical and ideological
tensions.

3.  These tensions are evident in the literature
of the period:
 Carlyle’s diatribes in 1830s
 Dickens’s social novels in 1840s
 Arnold’s speculations of the 1870s
 Troubled early poetry of Tennyson
 Like many other previous eras, it was an age
of paradox, but this paradox struck the
Victorian people more profoundly than their
ancestors.

4.  There remained a high degree of Christian committment.
 Religion was still a powerful force in Victorian life and
literature.
 Mid-Victorian society was held together by Christian moral
teaching and constricted by the triumph of puritan sexual
mores.
 Particular stress on the virtues of monogamy and family
life, but also aware of the moral anomalies of the social
system.
 Many people saw the family as an agent of oppression
 Although the period saw the stirrings of the women’s
movement, peopel also revered the matronly model provided
by Queen Victoria and accepted the stereotype of virtuous
womanhood propagated by many novelists and poets.

5.  The domestic political scene saw the sacredness of the
principles of liberty of conscience and the freedom of
the individual enshrined in law and in the writings of
Macaulay and Mill.
 But these principles benefited middle-class men and
were of little relevance to the many women who were
still denied proper education and property rights and
to all the women who were excluded from the
franchise.

6.  The question for observers like Carlyle was whether
this was to be a century of…
 Invention or creativity
 Matter or spirit
 Mechanical or dynamic thinking
 This was the challenge to literature too!

7.  There is no composite Victorian, no one definitive
picture of Victorian England.
 All its complexities, contradictions, overlaps and
influences can be better understood with the many
debates, quarrels, disputes and questions amongst “the
Victorians”.
 Their differences and disagreements help to form the
picture of all that is involved in the great Victorian
crisis of belief.

8.  Much literature in this period extends itself onto
different areas of discourse and concern like:
 Social, economic, political, epistemological, moral,
religious, cosmological etc.
 The status of historical understanding is under
question in literature.
 Carlyle warns how the Victorians’ consciousness of their
own historical position (their fear of social and
historical determinism) was as great a threat as
determinism itself.
 But literature often gets its writers to dephts below
that consciousness
 And history alone can not tell the inner story of the
age in all its meaning.

9.  The term “Victorian”:
 It’s not really a Victorian word
 Many of the leading Victorian writers were of course,
in some sense, anti-Victorian
 Deeply critical of the so-called Victorian attitudes of their own age
 Ex: Mathew Arnold: against the complacent materialism
 Ex: Dickens: exposing religious hypocrisy
 Ex: Ruskin: on the unfeelingness and uncreativeness of his times
 But the adverse reaction against the Victorians begins after
Queen Victoria’s death and it goes on to include within the
term figures such as Arnold, Dickens and Ruskin themselves.

10.  Individualism:
 It is a central concept to Victorian society and culture
 Testified in Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859)and
Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859): they either deal with the
individual or were used to justify the ideology of the
individual.
 Origin of the Species: evolution and rational selection,
not about Victorian individualism as such but adapted
to political and socioeconomic spheres; by Herbert
Spenser: “social Darwinism”=> survival of mankind; also
enshrined in the law

11.  On Liberty: emphasis on the needs and desires of
individuals => his right to be “heard” in society
 “the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately
exercised by soceity over the individual”
 “sovereign”, “freedom of opinion” and “to unite”
 Only “to prevent harm to others”
 Utilitarianism: promote the greatest happiness to the greatest
number

12.  Victorians were preoccupied with how to reconcile the
ethos of individualism with the individual’s
requirement to participate in a better society for all.
 Also opposition to individualism:
 Robert Owen (1830s-1840s): a society based on a “social
system”; cooperation, “community”, early use of
“socialism”; unified working class and trade unions.
 A more socialist critique of individualism took hold in
the 1880s.

13.  In literature:
 Victorian novels focussed on individuals themselves.
 Titles with individual names: Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), Eliot’s Felix Holt
(1866), Oliver Twist (1837), David Copperfield (1850), Jane Eyre (1847),
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Tess of the D’Ubervilles (1891),
Dracula (1897), etc.
 Even in novels with more abstract titles, individualism is represented
 A. Throllope: “Every man to himself is the centre of the whole
world, the axle on which it all turns. All knowledge is but his own
perception of the things around him”.
 Individuals placed in clonflict with his/her society: fight against
social environment.
 Individuals become individuals in the course of the stories.

14.  Family:
 Promoted at the public level by Queen Victoria
 Also publicised by the increasingly efficient methods of
communication: Newspapers, journals, pamphlets,
reviews, images, cartoons, cooking manuals, etc.
 Novels and theatre
 Family patterns, family consciousness vs. reality

15.  Family legislation:
 Infant Custody Bill (1839): divorced women could have access
to their children
 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act (1857)
 Married Woman’s Property Acts (1870-1872)
 Microcosm of society, guaranteed reproduction of
capitalism: patriarch, angel in the house and obedient
children
 The Victorian house

16.  In literature:
 Ideal households, cosy homes: Christmas Carol (1843),
Oliver Twist (1837),
 Less respectale or dysfunctional lower-class families.
Bad mothers, absent father. etc: Barnaby Rudge (1841),
Great Expectations (1861), Bleak House (1853)