Lectures in Victorian Literature of Ideas, Fiction, Poetry and Drama - INTRODUCTION

1.The Victorian Literature Bibliography

There are four literary genres important for the students understanding of Victorian
literature: fiction and the essay (as species of fictional and thematic literature in prose),
poetry and drama. Victorian novels being long-winded and not entirely to the taste of
twenty-first century people, the idea informing the bibliographical selection is to defeat
current readers potential impatience by selecting essential fragments for the lecturing and
practical seminar work. Victorian poetry (which is termed post-Romantic) being baffling
by comparison with the revolutionary effusions of Romanticism, firstly, and, secondly,
with the revolutionary criture of the Modernists ( i.e., the twentieth-century writers of
the first decades), and both Victorian drama and Victorian poetry being vehicles of ideas
it is important to understand the ideas and intentions of the essays (as thematic
literature: literature of ideas) and to work critically with it, in order to become familiar in
depth with the Victorian age contexts. The historical (narrative) and sociological
(analytical) contexts will be explained in the introductory lecture, following the first
volume of Contributions of the British Nineteenth Century the Victorian Age to the
History of Literature and Ideas (by Ioana Zirra) and the fictional, poetic or dramatic
genres and species will be approached comparatively and historically in the light of the
second volume of the same work, whose subtitle is Literary Analysis from the Victorian
Age. Students, should, consequently, connect historical, sociological, generally cultural
contexts with the literary genres, species or texts proving subtlety, knowledge and a
rigorous analytical spirit in coping with the seminar assignments and the final
examination.
The point of the analyses, then, is for them to be understood by students through
close reading. This involves moving beyond mere paraphrasing, by summaries of ideas in
the texts (remember the caveat voiced against The Heresy of Paraphrase by Cleanth
Brooks in The Well Wrought Urn !), to interpretations of the discourse informing
Victorian texts. Though these interpretations shall be in the spirit of the schools of
twentieth century concepts of literary criticism and theory studied in the second semester
of the first academic year, special emphasis shall be laid on understanding the Victorian
background which informs the attitudes of the contemporary addressers, addressees,
codes and messages.
Bibliography
Fiction
1.Charles Dickens: Great Expectations and excerpts from Bleak House and Our Mutual
Friend (for which see the lecture) (any of the latter two novels can optionally be read in
full and there will be a bonus of one to the mark)
2,3The Bront Sisters: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre
4 George Eliot: Silas Marner or Middlemarch
5Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Native
6Lewis Carroll: Alices Adventures in Wonderland or Samuel Butler: Erewhon or Oscar
Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray or Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde or Bram Stoker: Dracula

Plays one choice from the first entry; the second entry is obligatory:
1Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest/Salom
2George Bernard Shaw: Major Barbara
Poetry
1Alfred Tennyson: The Lady of Shalott, Ulysses, excerpts from The Princess (The
Prologue), from In Memoriam, from Locksley Hall
2Robert Browning: Fra Lippo Lippi, Caliban upon Setebos, The Last Ride
Together / By the Fireside
3Matthew Arnold: To Marguerite: Continued, The Buried Life, Dover Beach,
Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse/ The Scholar Gipsy
4Arthur Hugh Clough: The Latest Decalogue
5Algernon Charles Swinburne: Hymn to Proserpine
6Gerard Manley Hopkins: Binsey Poplars, Pied Beauty, The Windhover, No
Worst, There Is None
Essay Excerpts:
1Thomas Carlyle: the excerpts discussed in the lectures from Signs of the Times,
Sartor Resartus, On Heroes Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, Past and Pressent
(see the first module of the course outline)
2John Stuart Mill: Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties, the excerpts discussed in the
lectures from Bentham, Coleridge and On Liberty (chapters II and III)
3John Ruskin: excerpts from Modern Painters (Pre-Raphaelite School); from The Stones
of Venice: The Nature of Gothic https://archive.org/details/natureofgothicch00rusk
4John Henry Newman: the excerpts from The Idea of a University and The Tamworth
Reading Room discussed in the lectures
5Matthew Arnold: excerpts from Essays in Criticism the First and Second Series,
Culture and Anarchy (Sweetness and Light; Hebraism and Hellenism;Barbarians,
Philistines, Populace) and Discourses in America discussed in the lectures
6Oscar Wilde: excerpts from The Soul of Man under Socialism
7Thomas Henry Huxley: excerpts from Science and Christianity (Agnosticism)
NB
In choosing their final bibliographical list, students shall make sure of the following:
- that the two compulsory plays (only one of the three listed, a comedy and a symbolistic
drama by Wilde, being compulsory) and that six Victorian novels have been read IN
ENGLISH (something to be demonstrated by the new words taken down in the portfolio);
- that a minimum of two poems of the ones listed with a slash (for each poet with more
than one poem indications) have been thoroughly understood, in their letter and in the
spirit by resorting to the guide-lines in the Victorianism lectures and to critical
concepts for close text analysis and to hermeneutical interpretative canons, as learned in
the first academic year, the second semester in the Concepts of Literary Criticism
courses.

Avoid internet quick or zero learning recipes from sparknotes and summaries of literary
texts and, especially, plagiarism of other peoples English texts: formulate thoughts of
your own in academically correct and ambitiously beautiful texts to obtain high marks!
Imitate the Victorians high cultural standards! Read for pleasure, with due refinement,
and by using your imagination fully!
2. Indications about the calculation of the final mark
Students shall present to the seminar instructors, and as a pre-requisite for taking the
final exam, PORTFOLIOS complete with explanations (in both English and Romanian)
of the new words encountered while reading Victoriana; reading notes for individual
texts; at least three pages of hand-written quotations relevant to one of the following
themes:
-the relationship of the younger to the older generations
-Victorian male heroes and madmen
-Victorian women
-Victorian lovers
-Victorian children
-Victorian excerpts on art
The portofolio marks shall count as 10% of the final mark. The seminar mark shall count
as 30% of the final mark, providing the exam score obtained is one for a passing mark
(minimum 5). The final exam will be written and its mark will be an average of all the
marks obtained. The final exam shall include a quiz with tasks/questions/sentences from
the courses as taught in this years format adapted to multiple choice or fill in the
blanks clozes or find the mistake types of exercises.

SUMMARY OF THE TAUGHT MATTER:

The Victorian Age, named after the long reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) is the age
of the British Empire, a significant national age for Britain, which had become The
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in 1801. Geopolitically speaking,
the British Empire came to be in control of 1/3 of the world during the 19th century with
possessions on all the continents (Australia and New Zealand, several Islands in the
Pacific West Indies, India , which began as a colony of the merchants from the East India
Company (also being referred to as the Subcontinent, it was turned into a Crown
possession in 1877, when Queen Victoria became Empress of India); Canada, forty times
the sizes of Britain in North America; in Africa, Egypt and Nigeria to the North and
South Africa at the southern tip of the continent, completely British and defeated after the
Boer Wars of the centurys last decades.
Four keywords can be used to begin the economic, political and sociological description
of Britain in the nineteenth century: wealth, capitalism, democracy and socialism, which
together with industrialization spelled MODERNIZATION.
Wealth was produced thanks to the scientific and technological advances, which enabled
Victorian man to control nature and increase the living standard of the rich, in accordance
with the ideas of the classical economist Adam Smiths The Wealth of Nations.
Capitalism, the economy based on capital, rested on the accumulation of wealth as a sure
path to progress. It was made possible by the massive scientific and technological
advances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Zirra, vol. I, 9,10) that led to the
creation of a huge, all-powerful market.
The main issues of nineteenth century politics were to strengthen the free market (and the
British Empire possessions essentially contributed to this), to enfranchise the men of
property and turn them into mature, responsible citizens with equal rights and powers
moreover, by granting them the power to consume an increasing variety of goods.
Victorian middle-class democracy was modern because, by comparison to Athenian
democracy, it was aimed at creating a perfect middle-class establishment whose strength
would be increased by numbers. The first electoral reform, the Reform Bill1 of 1832
enfranchised male owners of property whose annual income was at least 10 pounds, the
next one, of 1867, doubled the number of middle-class voters and the third, in 1884,
secured the universal male enfranchisement.
Though modern democracy incorporated some of the revolutionary principles for which
people had died in America and France in 1777 and 1789, respectively, in Britain2, it was
1

Because a law is just a Bill while it is discussed in the British parliament and before
it receives the Royal assent to become a statute, the name the Reform Bill as
retained by history indicates the serious debates preceding its adoption. This
revolutionary measure turned the democratic masquerade practices and traditional
political favoritism towards the modern, genuine political representation of wide
masses of middle-class people. This meant the abolition of the so-called rotten
boroughs, for example fake constituencies that sent to parliament representatives
of places on the map with no real population to represent.
2
England is an incorrect way of referring to Britain, in the nineteenth century, just
as today: the countrys name is the UK, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland, in the nineteenth century, and of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in the
twentieth century. The citizens are formally the British/the British people, and
informally, the Brits. The contrast between British and English comes from that
between politics and linguistics/literary culture, British being politically correct,

actually carried out in peaceful confrontation, and in fact in cooperation, by the two
political parties of the nineteenth century: the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party.
(The following paragraphs reformulate the material available in Zirra, vol. 1,1012)Between the two of them, they carried out the reforms which brought about the
modernization of Britain: the electoral and free-market reforms, firstly, and then
generally social, religious , urban and cultural reforms, for example the reforms in
education.
Reforms:
In 1846, a law that put an end to the British monopoly on the corn market was the repeal
of the Corn Laws and by 1860, a full-fledged free market had become operative in
Britain. Other reforms that modernized British society and made it resemble nowadays
society were the Catholic Emancipation (which became effective after 1830), which gave
the Catholics equal opportunities, civil rights and access to the middle-class professions
(of lawyers, doctors, professors), the 1870 Education Act, which generalized literacy by
making primary education compulsory and setting up English State Schools all over the
Empire, the 1871 Repeal of the Test Acts. The last of these reforms gave free access to
prestigious universities ( Cambridge and Oxford) to non-Anglicans and opened their way
to elite careers in the establishment.
Cultural campaigns:
The cultural campaigns conducted in the Victorian age, which we can read about at large
in the essays and fictional literature preserved in anthologies, indicate that culture was
regarded as one of the important levers for social emancipation and control. This leads to
the paradox that the Victorian first mass age had a high-culture. It can be stated without
exaggerating that the Victorian society was held together by quality press circulated in
broadsheets: one magazine which carried parliamentary reports, essays, poems and
fiction, for example, was read by one hundred thousand people, and one issue, by the
family and servants of the person who bought it and by friends, neighbours and relatives.
Indeed, apart from the gentry, after the Education Act, even the servants in the genteel
households had access to the literature read at home. In the Victorian genteel households
literature was originally read on Sundays, after Church, as another instrument for the
generally moral education and entertainment.
In general, it is fair to say that the British Liberals were keener on home reforms, as they
were partisans of the little England policy. At their head was William Ewart Gladstone,
four times Prime Minister (between 1868-74, 1880-85, 1885-6 and 1892-3). One famous
example of the Liberal foreign policy was the campaign for putting an end to the Union
between Ireland and Great Britain through the Irish Home Rule bills unsuccessfully
passed (debated) in 1886 and 1893, owing to the alliance between William Ewart
Gladstone, nicknamed The Old Man, and the Irish uncrowned king, Charles Stuart
Parnell. The Conservative Party was imperially minded, the partisan of the Bigger
England policy, of wars and the investment policies implicit in them. The head of the
Conservative Party was Benjamin Disraeli, in office as Prime Minister for one year in
1868 and between 1874-1880. He was also Queen Victorias friend, an elegant dandy and
a writer. In his 1845 novel Sybil, or the two Nations (available on the portal of the Project
because it naturally includes the inhabitants of the kingdoms of Wales and Scotland
and Ireland. People study English in Britain and abroad, in (high)school or when they
are at university.

Gutenberg on the net, in electronic form for anyone who may wish to read it), he
introduced the idea that the rich and the poor were two separate British nations.
This point is proved by the last keyword announced at the beginning of the
lecture: socialism. Throughout the nineteenth century, the lower classes were almost
completely neglected by the leaders of the Victorian establishment and the noninterventionist state3. Among the few reforms which regarded the poor in Early
Victorianism was the1834 Poor Law Amendment, which created the workhouses, which
resembled prisons more than asylums and in which were gathered (confined) the begging,
underfed and overworked poor from the streets. The Factory Acts passed between 1833
and 1878, though, eliminated child labour and gross overworking. Moreover, there was
no chance for substantially extending any modernization reforms to the people who were
not represented in parliament as proved by the Chartist Movement. Between 1836 and
1854, several petitions or Charts drafted in perfect ignorance of the legal forms with
which Parliament operated. Although they were endorsed by millions of signatures of
people who gathered in long street-demonstrations (the 1840 Chart, for example was
signed by over three million three hundred people), they were not taken into
consideration by parliament because of their formal aspect and the civil rights claimed in
them were not granted. The first general strike took place in Britain in 1842 and Trade
Unionism became a steady movement between the 1860s and 1870s. No wonder, then,
that the end of the nineteenth century saw the rise of two brands of socialism: radical or
utopian socialism (which envisaged the complete abolition of property as a source of
justice for a perfect modern age and as the only way for regenerating a society that
reduced its people to mere mechanisms at the mercy of entrepreneurs) and Fabian (or
moderate) socialism. The rise of socialism proved the limitations and actual injustice of
modern, capitalistic and very partial democracy. It demonstrated that the material criteria
for the general, average greatest happiness of the greatest numbers (as advocated by
Jeremy Bentham at the end of the eighteenth century needed to be completed with virtues
that the mercantile, capitalist world-order could not rise to. The failure of communism to
right the wrongs of capitalism one century after the Victorian age, however, demonstrates
the shortcomings of any modern utopia, be it capitalist or socialist. This is why the slowpace, rational reformism which the Fabian socialists advocated and tried to implement in
Britain seems to have more chances of success in principle because, though being
moderate , pragmatic and corporatist in spirit, it does not destroy existing structures of
social, economic and political life but tries to correct evils gradually while retaining the
overall frames.
See the chapter Profile of the Age in I. Zirra, Contributions of the British Nineteenth
Century the Victorian Age to the History of Literature and Ideas, vol.1 , and THE
REFORMULATIONS BELOW

The non-interventionist state was a state committed to the principle of laissez-faire

which bequeathed the political prerogative of the state to the entrepreneurial class
(the capitalists) and allowed the invisible hand of the market, i.e., free competition, to
rule undisturbed.

Labels for the Victorian age :

-the age of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), who became Empress of India in 1876 after
previously changing the name of the Hanoverian British dynasty to that of the House of
Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, when she married Prince Albert of the latter house) in
Romanian, epoca victorian (small case)
the age of the British Empire (a geopolitical label) - the British monarch controlled one
third of the world in the British colonies which extended in Asia to Afghanistan and
Tibet, covering the whole of India ( thirty-four times the size of England), extending to
New Zealand and Australia (where Magwitch in Great Expectations or Hetty Sorrell
in Adam Bede by George Eliot and many a real Victorian villain got transported in a
kind of surrogate of a criminals execution). The British Empire also extended to
Canada, 40 times the size of England. In Africa, the British Empire occupied Nigeria
and Egypt to the North, after the Purchase in 1875 of the Suez Canal, and went as far
down as the tip of the continent where it conquered South Africa after the Boer War, in
the 1890s. (see G. M. Trevelyan. Illustrated History of England, 1962, translated into
Romanian in 1975 ; Book 6, 3rd Chapter).The union of Ireland with Great Britain ( to
create The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801) sanctioned and brought
to its climax the centuries-old domination of Ireland by the rich, powerful neighbour.
-the country of the industrial revolution (an economic, social label). It is interesting to see
what caused the industrial revolution and what its historical consequence were. In the
span of a single century the history of science unites in Britain the names of James Watt,
Michael Faraday, William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, George Boole, James Clerk Maxwell.
The technological advances include the invention of the telegraph, the intercontinental
cable, the generalisation of steam power (with the large scale implementation of the
steam hammer, the steam turbine, the steam loom and the steam plough) or the universal
milling machine; the communication industry was revolutionized by the invention and
the world-wide spreading of the telegraph, the intercontinental cable or photography and
by the rotary printing press; land transportation developed tremendously with the
building in Britain of the first successful railroad system in the world followed by the
construction of the first underground railway system, the Metropolitan, in 1860; the
electric lamp increased the urbanization standards, too; the commodity industry was
changed by the introduction of the vacuum cleaners, and the war industry thrived after
the invention of the automatic guns, the shell gun and the Winchester gun (cf. 1991
Information Please Almanac, Houghton Mifflin, Boston).
an age of material progress, leisure and ambitious education for the middle classes (see
The Prologue to The Princess by Lord Alfred Tennyson ) this label is the consequence of
the former one)
-an age of considerable environmental change: the change of the countryside and the city alike.
Quite often, a plain would be spectacularly transformed into a canyon by the sprouting railways
which cut through meadows in depth or cut tunnels through the mountains: all these site changes
amounted to a special kind of environmental events thought worthy of being celebrated in work
songs about the navies (or railway workers) and their prowess in taming nature (as the theme
park folklore demonstrates today, in the most recent and fashionable kind of museographical
exhibition in Britain, aimed at recreating the commoners everyday life in the regional British

near past). Urbanization became overriding, with the displacement of the rural population in the
mass. In literature, this was reflected by the nostalgic rememberance of the rural past in quite a
number of success, or simply representative, Victorian novels, such as the majority of George
Eliots novels or the rural gentry and family chronicles that spawned into a picturesque Victorian
genre.
the first mass age in history, the precursor, of the 20th century mass society (a sociological and
cultural label)
an age of liberal reforms meant to strengthen the economically liberal state (a label that
demonstrates the connection between economy and politics) Liberal politics is middle class
politics with little regard for the lower classes (from a populist or social-democratic

viewpoint this could be seen as a cruel state: it did not bother to manage the interests of
other than the capitalistic entrepreneurs and did not interfere with the market. The label
for the Victorian or liberal state was a non-interventionist state, dominated by mercantile
free market a regulations. It was based on the political doctrine of laissez-faire that
gave free reign to the private capitalistic enterprise without regard to the public welfare.
Thus, the liberal legislation was double-edged: protectionist, for the capitalistic,
entrepreneurial class and impoverishing when not simply indifferent or even oppressive
towards the working class
- laws which enfranchised the man of property, called Reform Bills, since they completely
changed the voting qualifications at the beginning from nominal to real property qualifications by
eliminating the old rotten boroughs and the appointment of constituencies by royal charter. The
Reform Bill of 1832 enfranchised all the male owners of property worth at least 10 pounds in
annual rent; the Reform Bill of 1867 doubled the number of voters; and the 1884 Bill brought
about the universal male enfranchisement. The parliamentary battle was fought throughout the
19th century between the representatives of the two political parties, the Liberals and the
Conservatives, with William Ewart Gladstone, nicknamed The Old Man, at the head of the
Liberal Party and four times at the head of the executive as the British Prime Minister, between
1868-74, 1880-85, 1885-6 and 1892-3; the other mandates were held for the Conservatives by Sir
Robert Peel, first, then by Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victorias friend and British Prime Minister
between 1874-1880. The two parties are also distinguished by their foreign policy, in so far as the
Tories advocated a big England, imperial policy, while the Liberals were the little England
party.
- property-strenghthening and free-trade measures required by a successful political machine
meant to sustain the kind of progress associated with the British power in control of a newly
industrial economy and a modern empire. Thus, in 1846, the old Corn laws were repealed, which
had offered protectionist tariffs for British agriculture. This was the pre-requisite for effectively
securing free trade, by 1860.
- the 1830 Catholic Emancipation meant the modernization of the British polity now capable
of making allowance for other than its own Reformed, Anglican political formations . A similar
modernization embraced the British polity services and institutions, thanks to the measures
passed by Gladstones administration during the 1868-1874 mandate. (See the relevant chapter in
G. M. Trevelyans Illustrated History of England for a pertinent discussion of the Liberal
modernization of the British institutions, including the religious and military ones).

- reforms in education, reformism meant that essential education was generalised, so that the
1870 Education Act opened the way to generalised literacy in Britain. By 1871, the abolition
of the university tests virtually transformed the leading universities of Oxford and Cambridge
into lay, metropolitan, universalist universities.
- public administration and municipal management reforms, which created town councils instead
of rotten boroughs and heightened the quality of urban life As a result, what we know today as
roughly modern city life became a reality translated into higher living standards and the increased
number of commodities. The Victorian periodical, serialised pamphlets, the formal discourses, not
to mention the fiction and satirical documents of the age retain numerous traces of the eventful
addition to cities of public baths and laundries, museums, libraries (public reading rooms), parks,
public gardens and later trams, gas and electricity facilities or water networks.

an age of social unrest in the mass section of the society the poverty problem which

represented the reverse of the great imperial and colonial coin, included in the Victorian
age the passing of a number of poor laws, such as the 1834 Poor Law Amendment which
created the workhouses or prisons in disguise for containing what was considered to be,
at the time, the social scum of the street villains. The poor street population literally
haunted the Dickensian imaginary in so many of his youthful novels. The Chartist
Movement of 18361854 proved that beyond the middle-class modern paradise there
reigned supreme social chaos. For almost the entire first half of the age, the Victorian
masses demonstrated in the streets and sent petitions of rights (charts) signed by everincreasing numbers of people to the leaders of the nation but they were never listened to
(the 1840 Chart, for example, was signed by over three million three hundred people who
requested for the lower classes precisely what came to be granted to the middle classes in
the course of the century). This prolonged street demonstration reminds one of the long
demonstration for democracy in Bucharest, in the Piata Universitatii Square at the
beginning of the 1990s); under Chartist inspiration, there were organised strikes, such as
the first general strike of 1842 but all these got practically nowhere and had to continue
their fight by the better organised trade-unionist movement of the 1860s and 1870s
(after the repeal of the Combination Acts, which had forbidden gatherings of riotous
people, in the wake of the French Revolution between 1799, i.e., and 1824). This
proved that there exisited virtually two nations in Britain, as Benjamin Disraeli put it,
the rich and the poor. The rich passed and enacted quite a big number of consistent laws
for the poor, but it appears that the former were too busily engrossed in their business to
devote enough attention or resources to rescuing the poor. The Factory Acts of the period
18331878, however, eliminated child labour and gross overworking in factories. Some
support was granted also by the governments Public Health Acts of 1871 1875 which
granted some measure of medical assistance to the poor as well. Still, for all the echoes of
the social unrest and unhealthy living conditions of the poor in the printed Victorian
media, including the literature of the age, the 1880s saw the rise of more radical social
movements, such as the wide-spread socialism of the Fabian brand or the utopian
socialism of the intellectuals and of Marxian communism, some time after the
publication of the Communist Party Manifesto by Karl Marx, in 1859. By 1903, the

Socialist Labour Party had also been formed as a potential opposition force on the
political stage.