This document provides an overview of key characteristics of the Victorian age in England from 1837-1901 through a series of short sections. It discusses how novels were commonly serialized in magazines or as installments to increase profits, how industrialization heavily influenced literature of the time, and how social class was an important factor in Victorian society. Other topics covered include tensions between science and religion, a focus on progress, and a prevalent nostalgia for the past. The document serves to introduce some of the major themes and contexts found in Victorian literature.

1. • Name: Trivedi Disha Hiteshbhai
• Roll no:36
• Paper no: 6
• Topic: Characteristic of Victorian age
• Year: 2015-2017
• Submitted to: Smt. S. B. Gardi
Department of English M.K.Bhavnagar University
• EMAIL: trivedisha22236@gmail.com

2. Characteristic of the age
1. Serialization
2. Industrialization
3. Class
4. Science v/s religion
5. Progress
6. The woman questions
7. Nostalgia
8. Utilitarianism

3. • Difference between class
• The Victorians were super status conscious.
Between the working class and
the upper crust, there was the
catchall "middle class." And with
the middle class growing in the
nineteenth century, there were
suddenly more class gradations to
keep track of.
• How much money do you make per year?
• Do you have your very own carriage?
• What does your family do for a living?

4. Serialization in Victorian age
• It can be daunting to pick up a Victorian novel. The
Penguin edition of Middlemarch weighs in at 880
pages, and it's not an exception. But that's not
always how you would have originally encountered
them. Many novels were published in parts—in the
super trendy three-volume form, or by a monthly
dose, or even in a weekly magazine. Why? Mostly it
came down to cold hard cash.

5. Industrialization
• "industrialization" might sound
more like economic development
than literary history.
• But Victorians were seeing major
changes—from manufacturing
booms to the first railways to
widespread urbanization. And it's
hard to escape this stuff if you
read many 19th-century novels
or poems.
• In fact, a whole genre developed
around it: the industrial or social
novel (sometimes it's called "the
condition of England" novel).

6. Science v/s religion
• Victorian theories about nature often
work their way into the lit when things
take a turn for the bleak—from
Tennyson's famous description of
nature as "red in tooth and claw," to
George Gissing's depressing novels
about being poor in London.
• Things are pretty wretched
in Gissing's New Grub Street: it's like
taking Darwin's theories and applying
them to the London literary scene. All
the characters seem to be in a real
struggle for survival. They're trying to
make it as writers, but only the strong
(or just lucky) survive. It doesn't seem
to matter how hard people try, or how
much faith they have—sometimes the
world (i.e., nature) is against them.

7. progress
• Victorians loved them some
progress, whether it was
one person bootstrapping
their way up into the middle
class, or the entire nation
growing bigger and
stronger. And the British
didn't stop at their borders,
either. This was the age of
imperialism, and the British
colonies stretched as far
away as India and Jamaica.
But things were always
liable to fall apart.
•

8. nostalgia
• The Victorians had a bad case of
nostalgia. They could get wistful and
sad about just about anything that was
over.
• Victorian literature is riddled with
nostalgia: from historical novels about
Robin Hood (Sir Walter Scott's
Ivanhoe), to epic poems about the
golden days of Camelot (Alfred, Lord
Tennyson's Idylls of the King).
• This nostalgia probably had more to do
with the present than with the past.
• Many Victorian writers and thinkers—
especially Thomas Carlyle—were
convinced that the nineteenth century
was facing a crisis.
• For example, see everything Carlyle
ever wrote.