The most important characteristics of British home politics and affairs: the modern urban economy of manufacturing industry

and international trade took over the old agricultural economy. The industrial development which came with railroads, steamboats, better means of transport and communication, new machines for manufacturing turned the North of England into the most advanced region of the country. The laissez-faire theory according to which the government did not interfere with economic decisions and the expansion of textile industries and rail transport made available new capitals, ready for investments. Although Britain had become the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world there was still a considerable poverty problem. Poverty was generally considered a crime, to be managed through repressive measures, rather than solved through adequate redistribution of resources. In fact, among the most unjust pieces of legislation passed in Victorian Britain were the Poor Laws. So as to solve the problem of starvation among poor people, children were declared destitute and forced to separate from their families and sent to work in parish-run workhouses, in return for which they received barely enough food to survive.

Symbolic significance of the Great Exhibition: It was opened in London in 1851 by the queen herself. It was the first world fair held in Crystal Palace (London), and was seen as the triumph of British progress and prosperity, displaying 200,000 objects from all over the world.

Britains Empire all over the world. This expansion was partly due to the need to protect trade routes to and from Britains main imperial property, i.e. India. Trade with India included tea, spices, silk and cotton and it was vital to the British economy that routes across A period of rapid expansion, land and sea be secured. It both economically and was partly for this reason that Britain annexed a territorially. number of territories including South Africa, Egypt and Burma, Malaysia and Afghanistan. Towards the end of Victorians reign, the British believed that, in the racial hierarchy of mankind, they stood supreme: their way of life, their institutions, law, politics. Patriotism was deeply influenced by ideas Queen Victoria ascended to the throne at the age of of racial superiority: the 18 in 1837. She was to reign sixty-four years and races of the world were became the symbol of a whole era, which was later divided by fundamental called the Victorian age. physical and intellectual differences, that some were destined in which In 1836 the working-class Chartist Movement drew up a Peoples Charterto be led by others. they asked for: votes for all males, annually elected parliaments, payment of MPs so that working-class men could also become MPs, secret voting, abolition of the property for candidates seeking election, the establishment of electoral districts equal in population.

Social problems such as long working hours, childrens and women s labour, bad housing of the working class gradually started to be faced along with the issue of suffrage.

The most important political and social reforms which were passes by parliament in the second half of the 19th century regarded the vote: in the 1867 the Second Reform Act gave the vote to urban working-class men and in 1884 male agricultural labourers were also given the vote. There were reforms to improve working class conditions for the poor and the 1870 Education Act provided for mass education.1

Philanthropy was a Victorian phenomenon with a range and diversity of interests: it addressed itself to every kind of poverty, to stray children, fallen women and drunken men and absorbed the energies of thousands of Victorians, above all women. Many activists believed they could save the dissolute, raise up fallen women and instill selfhelp.

The concept of fallen women was a fate imposed upon thousands of women by a society with an intense concern for female chastity. Single women with a child suffered the worst of societys punishments: they were ostracized and marginalized. Sexuality was generally repressed in its public and private forms, and moralizing prudery in its most extreme manifestations led to the denunciation of nudity in art, the veiling of sculptured genitals and the rejection of words with sexual connotation from everyday vocabulary. The word Victorian has come to be used, (like Puritan) to describe a set of moral and sexual values. These values were of equal application to all strata of society, though they were particularly concerned with the upper or middle class.

The Victorian idea of a womans role in society can be summarized by the phrase An angel in the home, as womens rights were extremely restricted. They could not go to university, nor could they inherit property if there was a male heir in their family. They were educated just to become attractive wives. Nevertheless, a lot of outstanding Victorian artists were women: Charlotte and Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell.

The Victorians were great moralisers. The values they promoted reflected not the world as they saw it, the harsh social reality around them, but the world as they would have liked it to be.

Bourgeois ideals also dominated Victorian family life. The family was a patriarchal unit where the position of the husband was dominant. The man was the breadwinner as well as the source of discipline according to a role coming by divine providence.
Probably the most advocated notion was the need to work hard. In an age which believed in progress, most of people thought that the material progress was the result of hard work . As a consequence, the Victorians insisted on a sense of duty rather than on personal qualities. Sunday schools and later the compulsory elementary schools placed great emphasis on punctuality and application. Diligence, good time-keeping and good behavior were rewarded.

The idea of respectability distinguished the middle from the lower class. Respectability was a mixture of both morality and hypocrisy, severity and conformity to social standards. It implied the possession of god manners, the ownership of a comfortable house with servants and a carriage, regular attendance at church, and charitable activity.

Victorian values

The phrase Victorian compromise highlights the paradoxical conditions of life in Victorian England where progress and poverty coexisted: the contradictions which lay in every field of human knowledge and human experience, the unwillingness of recognizing them. Why? In order to assert a psychological assurance of the English people. But everyone knew what was wrong, but they pretended not to see it. For instance, poverty was ignored in order to admire the increasing wealth of the country. Colonial power and economic progress made for the optimistic outlook of many Victorians. It was an age riddled with contradictions and doubts, notably about religion and about the relationship between science and belief. It is also for this hypocritical attitude that the adjective Victorian is often used with a negative 2 connotation.

The main early Victorian novelists: Charles Dickens and William M. Thackeray

The most significant women novelists.

The number of women writers increased considerably in the 19th century and some of the most significant Victorian novelists were women. The most famous ones are Charlotte and Emily Bront together with George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, not forgetting Jane Austen who was an inspiration to female novelists of all successive epochs. A common thread which connects these novelists is that they explore a world in which female identities and social roles are defined and governed by patriarchal values which wish to restrict the minds and bodies of women. Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre is a novel of formation, Bildungsroman, influenced by the Gothic tradition in which the central character, Jane, grows up to become the good wife of Rochester, while the mad woman in the attic, Bertha Mason, dies in a fire. This is a world in which bodily passions are present either in repressed or sublimated form. In Emily Bronts Wuthering Heights the violence of passion is much more open. There is no place in civilized society for the destructive passions which unite Cathy and Heathcliff and both die as outsiders. George Eliot in her Middlemarch is more interested in the intellectual possibilities open to women in the 19th century. The novel begins with a marriage and recounts the gradual disillusionment felt by the heroine Dorothea Brooke regarding her relationship with her husband who is unable to consider her as an intelligent being. Elizabeth Gaskells novels such as Ruth and Mary Barton deal with fallen women prostitutes, unmarried mothers, abandoned mistresses as well as the lives of the working classes.

Among the main late Victorian novelists: Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was greatly influenced by Darwins theories which also gave rise to a conflict between science and faith. In 1859 the publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin came to shock the world as it assumed that man was born out of biological evolution instead of Gods hand. The novels published after Darwin became representative of a growing crises in the moral and religious values which formed the base of Victorian ideas about society. Moreover, the late Victorians were pessimistic about the future and sharply critical of the utilitarian and moralist convections which characterized the period in which they lived. 3

Dickens, the first truly urban novelist, sets most of his works in London, a city full of life and energy of which he also sees and realistically portrays the squalor and deprivation that many of its inhabitants were obliged to endure. Dickens celebrates the energy of London, but he also fiercely criticizes some aspects of the so-called Victorian compromise, such as the greed and hypocrisy of the rich and their absolute indifference to the problems of the poor. Thackeray attacks the shallowness of the Victorian world, all based on the cult of money and appearance.

A reaction to the Victorian materialistic and utilitarian approach.

The most important characteristics Some authors of the second half of the 19th century maintained that art was to be selfWildes masterpiece, The Picture of sufficient and need serve no moral or Dorian Gray has remained in English political purpose. literature as the most significant example Oscar Wilde in England established himself of English Aestheticism and the Preface to as a spokesman of the school of Art for the novel has always been regarded as the Arts Sake, a movement whose supporters manifesto of this literary movement. considered art to be an autonomous realm. In Wildes view, this school also included French poets, such as Baudelaire In the Preface to The Picture of Dorian and Rimbaud, the Pre-Raphaelites and Gray, Oscar Wilde says that all art is the Romantic poet, John Keats. quite useless. Oscar Wilde, as an Aestheticism maintained that the artist aesthete, believed that art and in particular in The Importance of Being In Oscar Wildes theatre had no moral or the creator of beautiful things had to didactic purpose. In this senseare generated that Earnest, comic effects we could say by different types of humour. into a work of art and that transform life art has no realplay isArt for on a number of the The whole use. based Wilde and for misunderstandings deriving completely free from any art was to be Aestheticists in general, created identity, a typical comic device which from disguised or mistaken and existed moral judgement there is no such thing as in its own realm whose only days of Plautus and which Shakespeare has been around since the morality was a moral or an immoral book, an ethical beauty. The artist, said Wilde, is of Errors and As You Like It. used in plays like The Comedy the creator sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable of beautiful things whose aim is to reveal art Linguistic puns and paradoxes are another source mannerism of style. of humour. The and misunderstandings of not only was art of Being Earnest are conceal the artist. Thus The Importance useless, it was also useless to look for meaning word Ernest which is both generated by the paradoxical pun on the in art, as theofartistsWorthing uses to deceive others and also - when the name Jack intentions were of no account. If art had a -purpose it was to sincere. spelt earnest a word meaning produce pleasure. Wildes plays are full of paradoxical statements. An example is when Gwendolyn says Once a man begins to neglect his domestic duty he becomes painfully effeminate. Another source of comedy in Wildes plays is absurdity, both linguistic and structural. Wilde

Pre-Raphaelitism is an artistic movement established in England in the mid-19th century, its first concerns of painting were later extended to literature. The artists known as PreRaphaelites proposed new models both in painting and in literature, turning towards a genuine representation of nature and the human spirit. In 1848 the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood was formed by a group of poets including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. In literature, the principal subjects were ethic and religious matters, useful to criticize contemporary injustices, or to evoke the genuine, natural life of the past, disgusted as they were by materialism and social abuses of their time.

novels to resolve the plot, pushing these to absurd extremes, while characters often say absurd things. Gwendolyn, a few seconds after meeting Cecily, says to her I am very fond of you Cecily. I have liked you ever since I met you as though she has known her for years.

The typical comic situations of Oscar Wildes theatre and his use of comic devices.

The famous play The Importance of Being Earnest

In the play The Importance of Being Earnest Wilde implicitly criticizes two aspects of Victorian society which are intrinsically linked: the first is the conservatism of Victorian moral values from whose censure he has to conceal his homosexuality, the second is hypocrisy, the double standard which permitted immoral behavior to go on behind the scenes as long as it maintained an impeccably respectable public face. The play foregrounds both these aspects through the main character Jack Worthings double life as Ernest, a word which ironically means honest.