The Victorian Age (1830-1901)

Samborne House, London.

The Victorian Age

Queen Victoria

❑ Victoria became queen at the

age of 18; she was graceful
and self-assured.

❑ Her reign was the longest in

British history.

Franz Xavier Winterhalter, The young Queen Victoria, 1842

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The Victorian Age

Queen Victoria
❑ In 1840 she married a German
prince, Albert of Saxe-Coburg.

❑ They had nine children and

their modest family life
provided a model of
respectability.

❑ During this time Britain

changed dramatically.
Franz Xavier Winterhalter, The young Queen Victoria, 1842

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The Victorian Age

The growth of the British Empire

British Empire throughout the World, 19th century, Private Collection.

• England grew to become the greatest nation on earth →

“The sun never sets on England”.
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The Victorian Age

The growth of the British Empire

British Empire throughout the World, 19th century, Private Collection.

• Because of England’s success, the British felt it was their duty to

bring English values, laws, customs, and religion to the
“savage” races around the world.
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The Victorian Age

The woman’s question

• Women’s suffrage did not happen until 1918.

Suffragettes The Rights of Women or Take Your Choice (1869)

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The Victorian Age

Positive aspects of the age

Industrial revolution: factory
system emerged; for the first time
in Britain’s history there were more
people who lived in cities than in
the countryside.

Technological advances:
introduction of steam hammers
Workers in a Tobacco Factory and locomotives; building of a
network of railways.

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The Victorian Age

Positive aspects of the age

Economical progress: Britain

became the greatest economical
power in the world; in 1901 the
Usa became the leader, but
Britain remained the first in
manufacturing.

Workers in a Tobacco Factory

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The Victorian Age

Negative aspects of the age

Pollution in towns due to factory activity.

Homeless Boys (1880) London in 1872

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The Victorian Age

Negative aspects of the age

Lack of hygienic conditions: houses were overcrowded, most people
lived in miserable conditions; poor houses shared water supplies.

Homeless Boys (1880) London in 1872

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The Victorian Age

The Victorian compromise

• The Victorians were great

moralisers → they
supported: personal duty,
hard work, decorum,
respectability, chastity.

W. H. Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1853-4,

London, Tate Britain.

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The Victorian Age

The Victorian compromise

• ‘Victorian’, synonym for prude,
stood for extreme repression;
even furniture legs had to be
concealed under heavy cloth
not to be “suggestive”.

• New ideas were discussed &

debated by a large part of
society. W. H. Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1853-4,
London, Tate Britain.

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The Victorian Age

The Victorian compromise

• The middle-class was obsessed
with gentility, respectability,
decorum.

• Respectability → distinguished
the middle from the lower class.

John Lamb, Victorian family portrait, 1879.

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The Victorian Age

The Victorian compromise

Decorum meant:

a. Victorian private lives were

dominated by an authoritarian
father.
b. Women were subject to male
authority; they were expected to
marry and make home a “refuge”
for their husbands.
John Lamb, Victorian family portrait, 1879.

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 Victorian Thinkers
a. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)-philosopher who created two
ideas
• Utilitarianism: the object of moral action was to bring about the
greatest good for the greatest amount of people
• Liberalism: governments had the right to restrict the actions of
individuals only when those actions harmed others, and that
society should use its collective resources to provide for the basic
welfare of others. Also encouraged equal rights for women.

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b. Charles Lyell (1797-1875):
Showed that geological features on Earth had developed
continuously and slowly over immense periods of time

c. Charles Darwin (1809-1882): Introduced the

survival of the fittest theory and the theory of natural selection.

Lyell Darwin
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The Victorian Age

d. Karl Marx and his studies

about the harm caused by
industrialism in man’s life.

Karl Marx
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The Victorian Age

i. Friedrich Nietzsche -
nihilism
j. Sigmund Freud-
psychoanalytic theory

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The Victorian Age

11. Key Philosophies

• Realism
• The Realist movement in fiction emerged in the
1870s, lasting through the turn of the century.
• Realism refers not only to fiction that is realistic,
but to fiction that
(1) Shows a concern with social convention, (e.g.
how to behave in various social situations),
especially the social behaviors of the middle
class
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The Victorian Age

Realism
Shows an appreciation for industrial, commercial
and technological progress
(from which the middle and upper middle
classes, primarily, benefited).

(3) Uses contemporaneous, middle class subjects

and subject matter -- their newfound wealth
allowed the middle class to become the reading
market.

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The Victorian Age

Realism
Has a didactic purpose: writing in order to hold a
mirror up to middle class society, to show them
their flaws and “instruct” them on improvement.

(5) Is socially determinist: (based on notions of

Darwin, biological determinism and adaptation)
the individual is ‘determined,’ or influenced by
pressures and forces beyond his or her control.
Such pressures include race, class, politics and
gender.
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The Victorian Age

Naturalism
• An offshoot movement of realism, occurring in the
late 1880s and 1890s
• It takes the realist idea of social determinism to its
furthest extreme: the individual has no free will,
and is entirely determined by external forces
beyond his or her control.

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The Victorian Age

Naturalism
• This is what British naturalist Thomas Hardy called
the concept of “the imminent will.”
• Naturalism turned to lower class subject matter,
and social problems such as prostitution, alcohol
and drug abuse, domestic abuse.

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The Victorian Age

Marxism
• The economic and political theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels that hold that human actions and institutions are
economically determined and that class struggle is needed to
create historical change and that capitalism will ultimately be
superseded by communism.
• Materialism
• Class struggle
• Ideology- set of ideas and beliefs

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The Victorian Age

Psychoanalytic Theory
• A philosophical set of human nature
• Psychoanalysis is both an approach to therapy and a
theory of personality
• Emphasizes unconscious motivation –
• the main cause of behavior lie in unconscious mind

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The Victorian Age

Psychoanalytic Theory
LEVEL OF MENTAL LIFE
1. UNCONSCIOUS
• Contains all the feeling, urges or instinct that are beyond our awareness but it
affect our expression, feeling, action
• (E.g. Slip of tongue, dreams, wishes)

2. PRECONSCIOUS
• Facts stored in a part of the brain, which are not conscious but are available for
possible use in the future
• (E.g. A person will never think of her home address at that moment but when
her friend ask for it, she can easily recall it)

• 3. CONSCIOUS
• Only level of mental life that are directly available to us
• The awareness of our own mental process (Thoughts/feeling)
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The Victorian Age

Decadence
• The Decadent movement was a late 19th
century artistic and literary movement of Western Europe.
• Focus on ‘art for art’s sake
• Decadent writers used elaborate, stylized language to discuss taboo
and often unsavory topics, such as death, depression, and deviant
sexualities.
• The word decadence, which at first meant simply "decline" in an
abstract sense, is now most often used to refer to a perceived
decay in standards, morals, dignity, religious faith, or skill at
governing among the members of the elite of a very large social
structure, such as an empire or nation state.

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The Victorian Age

Aestheticism
• Aestheticism, late 19th-century European arts
movement which centred on the doctrine that art
exists for the sake of its beauty alone, and that it
need serve no political, didactic, or other purpose.

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The Victorian Age

Characteristics of Poetry
• Poetry reflected the society of Victorian era. Mostly, writers were social reformers.
• Victorian poets were heirs to the Romantics, and many of the generalizations about

Romantic poetry still apply

• Distrust of organized religion, skepticism, interest in the occult and the mysterious

• The Victorian period heralded a new wave of poetry that was influenced by its Romantic
predecessors yet distinctly different

• Victorian poets were more likely to have a scientific conviction of God's absence

• Victorian Poets have followed traditional style

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The Victorian Age

Thank You!

Ms. Zenab Jehangir