Victorian Literature 2 Essay, Research Paper
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Khristy Gibson
Mrs. B. Williams
Advanced English IV
2 February 1997
How Literature was Affected in the Victorian Age
The Year 1837 was really important. It was non merely the twelvemonth that Queen Victoria acceded the throne, but besides the twelvemonth that a new literary age was coined. The Victorian Age, more officially known, was a clip of great prosperity in Great Britain’s literature ( Keach 608 ) . The Victorian Age produced a assortment of alterations. Political and societal reform produced a assortment of reading among all categories ( Stuart 5 ) . The lower-class became more self-aware, the in-between category more powerful and the rich became more vulnerable ( 6 ) . The novels of Charles Dickens, the verse forms of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, the dramatic dramas of Oscar Wilde, the scientific finds of the Darwins, and the spiritual rebellion of Newman all helped to heighten acquisition and literacy in the Victorian society. Of all of the Literary epoch, the Victorian age gave a new significance to the word contention. Writers of that clip challenged the thoughts of faith, offense, gender, jingoism and over all societal contentions ( Brown 16 ) .
Queen Victoria influenced the literary age herself. She loved to read and she was educated in the finest schools in Great Britain ( Fraiser 278 ) . Queen Victoria encouraged reading among all of her people. She gave out free books to kids and she built schools for the lower categories. Besides the Queen invited outstanding Victorian age authors such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Charles Dickens to read in private to her in Buckingham Palace ( Packard 59 ) .
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The Victorian Age was besides an epoch of several unsettling societal developments. This forced authors to take places on immediate issues inspiring the remainder of society ( Brown 23 ) . Hence, romantic signifiers of look in poesy and prose continued to rule English literature throughout much of the century. The attending of many authors was directed to the growing of the English democracy, instruction, materiallism, faith, scientific discipline and the theory of development. In “Opposition of Matter” Thomas Caryle spoke out against philistinism. Historian Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote History of England and Critical Historical Essays. Maculay expressed the complacence of the English in-between category over the new prosperity and turning political power ( 29 ) .
The Oxford Movement caused corruptness during the Victorian age. The Tractarians insisted that the Anglican Church was Catholic, non Protestant and they wanted to set up independency from the lifting in-between category ( Richardson 8 ) . The motion began under the leading of John Keble and Paul Newman. Newman attacked the national renunciation in Tracts for the Times ( 9 ) . The book caused an effusion
in England. Newman was forced to vacate his place as caput of the motion. With his surrender, the Oxford Movement came to an terminal. Following the Oxford Movement, many Orthodox Victorians believed that God had created each species and the universe was created in seven yearss ( Packard 58 ) . As the 19th century proceeded, these traditional imposts were put into inquiry by Erasmus Darwin and his grandson, Charles Darwin. Erasmus Darwin found that the universe was non created in seven yearss in Zoomina, where he discovered that the evolutionary theory
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was unscientific. Charles Darwin wrote Origin of the Species, doing full graduated table contention in Europe ( 59 ) . Darwin said that species survive and evolved by natural choice, or the endurance of the fittest. The public argument over the development marked for Victorians a extremist alteration in rational and spiritual life.
The literature of the first four decennaries of the Victorian period could non assist but reflect the societal and rational contentions of the epoch ( Richardson 9 ) . Writers including Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin attacked the jobs straight, while Charles Dickens, George Eloit and Alfred Lord Tennyson dramatized the struggles and challenges in their plants. The most popular signifier for this type of dramatisation was the novel. Victorian novels represented about every facet of 19th century Victorian life ( Keach 629 ) . Though poesy and prose were surely distinguished, it was the novel that finally proved to be the Victorians particular literary accomplishment ( Keach 682 ) . The Victorian novel’s most noteworthy facet was its diverseness. The Victorian period produced a figure of novelists whose work today would suit between popular fiction and literature. Novelist Wilkie Collins excited his audience with The Woman in White, Elizabeth Gaskell with Wives and Daughters and M.E. Braddon with her much underrated Lady Audley’s Secret ( Richardson 35 ) . All three of these writers wrote for big audiences; increasing literary rates and increasing publication gross revenues ( 36 ) . Motifs of Gothic fiction besides found their manner into the Victorian novel. ( Summers 18 ) The two writers who illustrated this signifier of Gothism were Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights. Wuthering Heights was a consummate combination Gothic motive in which the strange love experiences of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. The book has been considered as on of the finest novels in English history. ( 20 )
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The Victorian involvement in societal life led to a blossoming on the novel of love affair. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote Cranford, bring forthing a charming image of Victorian Village life
and the complex surveies of household … ;
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