Victorian Age (1837-1901) PDF

The Victorian Age (1837-1901): Historical and social context The Victorian Age was an age of important social and political reforms, of technological and scientific progress, and Britain became the most powerful country in the world thanks to its colonial expansion. Queen Victoria was loved especia...

The Victorian Age (1837-1901): Historical and social context The Victorian Age was an age of important social and political reforms, of technological and scientific progress, and Britain became the most powerful country in the world thanks to its colonial expansion. Queen Victoria was loved especially by the middle classes for her way of life and moral code. The Queen always reigned constitutionally, respecting Parliament and acting as a mediator above party politics (the two main political parties: the Liberals and the Conservatives, who alternated in government). This allowed: material progress, imperial expansion, social reforms. King William IV (1830-37) had no surviving legitimate children at the time of his death, so he was succeded by his niece Victoria (who was 18 years old) in 1837. She was the daughter of Prince Edward, fourth son of King George III (1760-1820), and of Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg. Queen Victoria then married her cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840. They had nine children. She died at 81 in 1901, succeded by her son Edward VII, the first King from the House of Saxe-Coburg Gotha (future House of Windsor). The British Empire During the reign of Queen Victoria, Great Britain ruled over a wide and powerful empire, that brought the British in contact with different cultures. Britain’s imperial activity started with Queen Elizabeth I (1558- 1603), in the second half of the 16th century. After the 1857 Indian Mutiny (a rebellion in India against the rule of the British East India Company) India came under direct rule by Britain and Queen Victoria was crowned Empress of India in 1876. India was important especially for the control on the country’s resources: tea, spices, cotton, silk. The British occupied new territories, such as Australia (originally a prison colony), New Zealand, Hong Kong, and expanded their possession in Africa (control on Cape of Good Hope), Egypt (Suez Canal) Afghanistan and South East Asia (Malaysia and Burma). THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN: The Victorian believed that the ‘races’ of the world were divided by physical and intellectual differences; some were destined to be led by others; it was an obligation imposed by God on the British to impose their superior way of life, their institutions, law and politics on native peoples. (This was called “the white man’s burden”, after a poem by Rudyard Kipling). Reforms After the pressure for democratic reforms during the years of the French Revolution, Britain turned politically conservative. The First Reform Bill (1832) insisted on property ownership, excluding the working classes completely. Birth of the Chartist movement (1838): working class people asked for a charter (a list of rights) of social reforms, such as the extension of the right to vote to all male adults. The Chartists were strongly opposed: the movement’s leaders were arrested, some protesters were killed, so the Chartist Movement dissolved. However, between 1860 and 1914 most of the Chartists’ demands became law. In particular, in 1918 the right to vote was extended to all men from 21 and women from 30 years of age, and in 1928 also to all women from 21 years of age! THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE The Victorian Age was an age of contrasts and social imbalance (progress and reforms vs poverty and social injustice). Victorian society was based on a set of moral values that could only be fulfilled by the middle and upper classes: hard work, respectability, good manners and education, patriarchal family, female chastity, repression of sexuality. Philantropy (charitable activity) was carried out by a lot of respectable women. These values derived from the Puritan tradition. All those who didn’t conform to these values were considered evil and immoral. So, the Victorian compromise is a mixture of hypocrisy and morality, the attempt to hide the unpleasant aspects of progress and the materialistic philosophy of life under a veil of respectability and optimism. Poverty: Poverty was considered a moral problem, like a crime, to be managed through repressive measures or to keep hidden. In industrial cities, poor were forced into overcrowded slums while the property-owning class (5% or less of the population) occupied up to the 50% of the available land. Poor Laws (1834) took away children from their families to “solve” the problem of starvation and they were sent to work in parish-run workhouses where they received in return just enough food to survive. So, the Victorian Age was an age of great contrasts: poverty and squalor on one hand, progress and reform on the other. A contrast also visible in the grandeur of some public buildings compared to the numerous slums present in towns. Victorian London: Victorians often revived previous styles. Classical forms were preferred for civic and public buildings, like government offices, town halls; Gothic ones for ecclesiastical and domestic works. After 1855 the Gothic revival prevailed over the classical faction. The Victorian family: The ideal Victorian family was patriarchal: Victorian private lives were dominated by an authoritarian father. Women were subject to male authority: the wife’s duties were to educate the children, to manage the house and make it a comfortable place for her husband. ‘Victorian’, synonymous with ‘prude’, stood for extreme repression; nudity was denounced in art and even furniture legs had to be concealed under heavy cloth not to be ‘suggestive’. The royal family was a powerful model for this. In fact Queen Victoria showed both her authority as a queen and her female humility in the presence of her husband. However, many women took on new challenges: some women were great travellers, Marianne North travelled in many distant countries and she painted a lot of unknown species of animals and plants. Florence Nightingale can be considered the founder of modern nursing: she led a team of nurses in the war of Crimea, and then founded the first training school for nurses in London. VICTORIAN LITERATURE: The Novel Here are some of the most famous incipits in Victorian literature: “Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse.” (Oliver Twist) “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” (Jane Eyre) “They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks.” (Wide Sargasso Sea) “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do.” (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) “Mr Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow lovable.” (The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) “The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.” (The Picture of Dorian Gray) CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870) Charles Dickens’ life as a child was not a stable one. He was born in Portsmouth, on the south coast of England, in 1812. He was the second of eight children. His father John, a clerk in the Naval Pay Office, moved his family from place to place trying to improve the family’s financial position, which instead steadily worsened. In 1817, however, the family moved to Chatham, in Kent, and the five years spent there proved the happiest of Dickens’ life. The countryside, the busy River Medway, the cathedral town of Rochester seem to have become a sort of idyllic interlude throughout the rest of Dickens’ life – he would frequently escape to Kent in later life when the pressure seemed too much to bear, and the characters in his novels often go there. In 1822 his father, now in serious financial difficulties, moved to London, where the family lived in poor conditions in Camden Town. To help his family, when he was twelve Charles was forced to leave school and sent to work in a blacking factory near the site of the present Charing Cross Station. The experience proved traumatic. The strong industrial smell, the rats, the rough people he had to work with, were a painful contrast to the pastoral idyll of the Kent he had known. Shortly after, his father was sent to the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, and Charles’ misery was complete: the family was broken up and he was sent to live alone in very poor lodgings. His visits after work to his father and family, together with what he daily saw of life in London’s poor quarters, gave him an early experience of the misery of 19th-century society. Prison, the poor quarters of London, life in the city streets and the other boys working at the factory remained in his mind and profoundly influenced his novels. Moreover, these impressions of massive social and human dereliction were linked in Dickens’ mind to his own feelings of having been abandoned by his family. This feeling formed the basis for characters such as Oliver Twist, the young David Copperfield, Pip in Great Expectations: all of them suffer unjustly for having been cast away. At the age of fourteen Dickens went to work as a clerk in a legal office. There he soon developed a contempt for lawyers and the law as an institution – another major theme in his novels. He also began to work as a free-lance reporter and journalist, which enabled him to meet a wide range of people and to empathise with the feelings and reactions of his readers. In 1836 he adopted the pen name of ‘Boz’ and wrote Sketches by Boz, short articles describing London people and scenes published in instalments, which were immensely popular. This success led to The Pickwick Papers, his first novel, relating the adventures of a group of eccentric people travelling on the English roads – where the comic and picaresque elements are mixed. It was published in monthly instalments between 1836 and 1837, and made Dickens famous in Britain and in the United States among all social classes: the young Queen Victoria read both Pickwick and Oliver Twist, staying up until midnight to discuss them. These were crucial years for Dickens: in 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of the editor of one of the newspapers he worked for – they would raise a large family of seven sons and two daughters. How were Dickens’ middle years the most productive in his career? Dickens possessed an incredible physical energy. The result was an amazing literary output, all written in conjunction with travelling abroad, journalistic work, public speaking, philanthropic work, amateur theatre. The range of his material is vast, and covers the whole of his life and experience. Between 1837 and 1850 he published most of the novels he is now famous for. Nicholas Nickleby (monthly, 1838-39) is an attack on the scandal of the private schools to which unscrupulous parents often consigned unwanted children. The Old Curiosity Shop (weekly, 1840-41) is typical for its great sentimental scenes, culminating in the death of one of Dickens’ best-loved characters, Little Nell, the sensation of the age. Martin Chuzzlewit (monthly, 1843-44) contains satirical portraits of the American people and manners, material from his first visit to the USA. Dombey and Son (monthly,1846-48), an attack on Victorian society’s love of money and lack of disinterested affections, was the first of his novels to have been planned in advance, and not just carried on from one instalment to the next. This procedure would characterize all his subsequent work. At this stage in his career, Dickens also turned to semi-autobiographical themes, as in David Copperfield (monthly, 1849- 50), often considered his masterpiece: it is one of the greatest portraits in English literature of the loves, pains and wonders of childhood – it is, essentially, a Bildungsroman, or novel about growing up. Dickens confessed: ‘Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.’ What were Dickens’ late novels like? Dickens’ novels of the 1850s form a much more serious group exploring darker themes of social injustice, the iniquities of the legal system, and the destruction of human hope by impersonal social and industrial forces. Bleak House (monthly, 1852-53) deals with the scandalous bureaucratic system of the Court of Chancery in London, showing how the delays and complications of the law can destroy the lives of ordinary people. Hard Times (weekly, 1854) discusses the dehumanizing effects of life in the factories of the industrial north of England. Little Dorrit (monthly, 1855-57) is Dickens’ analysis of the iniquities of the law of debt – something which he painfully remembered from his childhood experience. His next novel, Great Expectations (weekly, 1860-61), by some considered his greatest, also deals with the law, namely with the iniquities of the penal system. It is also again on the theme of ‘growing up’. Did Dickens also write about other countries and peoples? Yes, he did. He was a great traveller, both curious about other peoples and places and eager to promote his work abroad. He made two triumphal reading tours of the United States, in 1842 and 1867. His American impressions (often quite critical of the country) are described in a travelogue, American Notes for General Circulation. There Dickens includes a powerful condemnation of slavery, which he had attacked as early as The Pickwick Papers, linking the emancipation of the poor in England with the abolition of slavery abroad. For one year (1844-45) Dickens also lived in Italy, a country he much liked – as shown in his Pictures from Italy (1846). He declared his support for Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, helping raise funds for their campaigns, and stated that ‘a united Italy would be of vast importance to the peace of the world’ and that ‘I feel for Italy almost as if I were an Italian born.’ What were Dickens’ last years like? In his last years Dickens wrote less for a number of reasons. In the first place, it would have been hard for any writer to keep writing at such a pace. Secondly, in 1858 he separated from his wife and his life and work changed, becoming more complicated. He became involved with an actress, Ellen Ternan, and the collapse of his marriage brought about a huge scandal: there was a feeling that the nation had been betrayed by its best-loved family novelist. To pay for his two families now, Dickens embarked on a long series of public readings (mostly from his own novels but also from Shakespeare’s plays): they paid very well but were so exhausting that his doctor finally ordered him to stop. In the 1860s he only published Our Mutual Friend (monthly, 1864-65) and the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (monthly, 1870, only 6 of the 12 instalments completed). After decades of overwork his health was precarious and he died suddenly, of a stroke, in June 1870. What typically Victorian social issues are present in Dickens’ works? Dickens was deeply conscious of social injustice, political incompetence, the poverty and suffering of the masses, and the class conflicts of Victorian England. Child exploitation, legal injustice, the fate of orphans, the misery of the poor, the fall into prostitution of many poor women were major themes in his novels. He dealt with these issues in his novels, which show an increasingly critical attitude towards contemporary society. An example is Oliver Twist (1837-38), which recounts the sufferings of an orphan brought up in a workhouse who runs away to London and joins a gang of thieves made up of children. In Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) Dickens attacks cruelty in boarding schools – the Victorian equivalent of today’s bullying. In Hard Times (1854) he deals with the sufferings of the factory system and the harm done by the Utilitarian philosophy. His writings inspired others, in particular journalists and political figures, to address the social problems he described so vividly. The prison scenes in The Pickwick Papers are claimed to have been influential in having the Fleet Prison shut down. And Karl Marx asserted that Dickens made clear to the world ‘more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together.’ What are the settings of Dickens’ novels? Dickens’ novels present a variety of settings: the countryside and Merry Old England of The Pickwick Papers; the provincial towns which figure in most of his stories; the industrial settlements of the North in Hard Times. However, Dickens’ most typical setting is London: the vast, crowded city where different classes and social groups live alongside each other and yet do not communicate. He knew the city from first-hand experience – his night walks through London were celebrated – and he was the first writer to see the modern city as a microcosm of all human life and (especially) misery. As a writer, Dickens was also instrumental in creating a peculiar kind of setting: the image of the Victorian Christmas that survives to this day on Christmas cards and advertising all over the world. He wrote a series of ‘Christmas Books’, of which A Christmas Carol (1843) and The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) are the most famous. In them, a mixture of the supernatural and the sentimental is combined with a powerful moral lesson. Why are Dickens’ characters so unforgettable? Dickens created a fictitious world that for millions of readers has become real. His characters are mainly from the lower and middle classes, and their physical features, clothes, gestures and accents are perfectly captured by Dickens. Upper class and aristocratic characters, on the other hand, are not portrayed so well and tend to fall into stereotypes. Another fault sometimes found with his characters is that they are too easily divided – particularly in his early novels – into good and bad, to the point of becoming almost purely symbolic. For better or for worse, however, they remain unforgettable, often because they are associated with a repeated set of gestures and phrases. For example, Mr Grandgrind in Hard Times, who believes in nothing but facts, is always identified with the squareness of his ideas and even his physical attributes (shoulders, head). The main strength of Dickens’ style is his humour, through which he makes the strong points of his novels unforgettable, and also manages to hide – or make more acceptable – his weaknesses: melodramatic or openly didactic passages. He is also very good at mixing social criticism with lively portraits of universal characters – combining the pathetic with the comic. His ability to create dialogue is unmatched by any other English novelist. Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) Born in 1816 in Yorkshire. Her father was Patrick Brontë, an Anglican clergyman, Irish-born. After being offered a rectorship, he moved with his wife, Maria Branwell Brontë, and their six small children to Haworth amid the Yorkshire Moors in 1820. Soon after, Mrs. Brontë and the two eldest children (Maria and Elizabeth) died, leaving the father to care for the three girls (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne) and a boy, Branwell. Their upbringing was aided by an aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, who left her native Cornwall and took up residence with the family at Haworth. In 1824 Charlotte and Emily, together with their elder sisters before their deaths, attended Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, in Lancashire. The fees were low, the food unattractive, and the discipline harsh. Charlotte condemned the school later in Jane Eyre, under the disguise of Lowood Institution, and its principal, the Reverend William Carus Wilson as Mister Brocklehurst in the novel. Charlotte wished to improve her family’s position, so she found a job as a teacher. She also worked as a governess (mostly to pay his brother’s debts). She was sent to Brussels where she received a strict literary training and fell in love with her teacher, Constantin Héger, but had to repress her feelings. After completing her education she came back to England. She wrote poetry with her sisters and in 1837 she dared to send her lines to a poet, Robert Suthey, who dismissed her by saying that a woman should not waste he time with literature. But she went on writing. They managed to publish a volume of Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (their male pseudonyms) which only sold two copies. She declined many proposals of marriage and attempted to start a school but no pupils were attracted to distant Haworth. Branwell died in September 1848, Emily in December, and Anne in May 1849. She married her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, in 1854. He did not share his wife’s intellectual life, but she was happy to be loved and to take up her duties as his wife. Her pregnancy, was accompanied by exhausting sickness, and she died in 1855 of pneumonia. Works: 1. Her first novel: The Professor Told in the first person by an English tutor in Brussels, it is based on Charlotte’s experiences there, with a reversal of sexes and roles. It was rejected by editors and published posthumously in 1859. 2. Jane Eyre: an Autobiography (1847) A masterpiece of the Victorian Age, published under her male pseudonym, Currer Bell. The reception was positive, although some critics labelled it “antichristian” because of its emphasis on love and desire and its defiance of societal codes. However, the author’s literary talent was praised. 3. Shirley (1850) It can be defined as a social novel, because its events unfold against the backdrop of the industrial depression of 1812 and the protests of textile workers. Shirley is a tenacious woman brought up almost as if she were a boy. Caroline, in contrast, is an orphaned girl who is rejected by the man she loves because she is poor. 4. Villette (1853) Largely based on her experience in Brussels, it is her only novel without an happy ending. The protagonist is Lucy Snowe, a poor girl who tells the story of how she left England to become a teacher in Belgium. Jane Eyre: themes Jane is an unconventional heroine, an independent and self-reliant woman who overcomes both adversity and societal norms. Charlotte Brontë’s works often deal with women’s condition and the obstacles they have to face in life. Her heroines show courage, dignity, hard work and sensitivity. The relationships between men and women are mostly dominated and limited by the power of money and social differences. Love is described as a deep human need that often clashes with social restrictions and rules. The novel also blended genres: It is a Bildungsroman, since it narrates Jane’s struggle for happiness, from childhood to maturity. Jane’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs to the mode of Moral Realism. The novel is predominantly realistic, since she portays the social and economic conditions of her time, focusing especially on the role of power and money. The gloomy settings, the misterious and disturbing situations, the incontrollable passions of some characters, the fiery death of Bertha are part of the Gothic tradition. Jane Eyre’s appeal was partly due to the fact that it was written in the first person and often addressed the reader, creating great immediacy. Charlotte Brontë’s style is always refined: sentences are elaborate and complex, the way each character speaks reveals the type of man/woman he/she is through careful lexical choices. Jane Eyre inspired various film, TV, stage adaptations, and also rewritings. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a novel by the Dominican-British author Jean Rhys, serves as a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Jane Eyre, describing the background to Mr. Rochester's marriage from the point of view of his wife Antoinette Cosway, Rhys's version of Brontë's "madwoman in the attic". Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys - What is Sargasso? It is seaweed. The reason behind this title is highly symbolic: as for the seaweed, which catches people in water, the characters of this novel are caught up in controversial themes like race, ethnicity, sex, gender roles and postcolonialism. - PLOT: the novel is set in Dominica, Jamaica and England during the 1830s and tells the story of Bertha Mason, here called Antoinette Cosway, the mad wife of Mr. Rochester. From Jane Eyre we know very little of Bertha, Jean Rhys was fascinated by this character and decided to give her a new life, to build a new story around her. Jane Eyre provided the initial inspiration for a novel which became independent of its own model. There is no Jane in Rhys’ novel, but there is the final fire set by Antoinette, the difference is that this time the tragic event feels like a liberation for her. - 3 parts: 1. Told in Antoinette’s words 2. Narrated by Mr.Rochester 3. Again Antoinette is given the opportunity to speak (she is imprisoned in the attic of Thornfield Hall) - In WSS we can understand much more about her because she has been given the chance to express herself, her suffering, her sense of alienation living with a man who never understood her and never even tried to do so. - Original aspects: 1. Intertextuality 2. Alternation of voices THE FIGURE OF THE CHILD IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE During the Victorian Age, several authors explored the figure of the child, reflecting societal values and issues. Key authors include: - Charles Dickens: His novels, such as Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations, depict the harsh realities faced by orphaned and impoverished children, emphasizing themes of social injustice and moral growth.  - Lewis Carroll: In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Carroll presents a more whimsical yet complex view of childhood, exploring identity and societal expectations through the character of Alice. - Charlotte Brontë: In Jane Eyre, Brontë portrays the struggles of a young girl navigating a harsh world, highlighting themes of resilience and moral integrity. - George Eliot: In The Mill on the Floss, Eliot examines childhood through the lens of family dynamics and social constraints, focusing on the emotional lives of her child characters. These authors collectively contributed to a nuanced understanding of childhood during this era, addressing both innocence and the vulnerabilities faced by children in a rapidly industrializing society. Carroll's portrayal of Alice vs. Dickens' depiction of Oliver: Carroll presents Alice as a curious, imaginative child navigating a whimsical, nonsensical world. Her adventures are characterized by playful absurdity and a quest for identity, allowing her to challenge societal norms and expectations. Alice's experiences emphasize self-discovery and empowerment, as she often asserts her will against the illogical adults around her. In contrast, Dickens portrays Oliver as a victim of societal neglect and exploitation within a grim reality. Oliver's journey highlights the harsh conditions faced by impoverished children in Victorian England, emphasizing themes of suffering and moral integrity amidst adversity. His experiences serve as a critique of social injustices, particularly the failures of the Poor Law and the workhouse system. Empowerment vs. Victimhood: Alice’s Agency: Alice often exercises agency in her interactions, questioning authority and navigating challenges with determination. This portrayal reflects Victorian ideals of individualism and personal growth. Oliver’s Powerlessness: Oliver is mostly powerless against the societal structures that oppress him. His story focuses on the systemic issues that trap children in cycles of poverty and abuse, highlighting their lack of agency within society. Alice and Oliver encapsulate two distinct aspects of Victorian childhood: Alice represents the imaginative exploration of identity within a privileged context, while Oliver embodies the harsh realities faced by impoverished children. Together, they illustrate the diverse experiences of childhood during this era, highlighting issues of social class, identity, and moral complexity within Victorian literature. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) What was Wilde’s Irish background? Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 in Dublin into an eminent family. He was the son of Sir William Wilde, an important surgeon in the city, and of a woman devoted to poetry and the arts: she ran a literary salon and wrote poetry under the pseudonym ‘Speranza’. Wilde was educated at Portora Royal School – an exclusive school – and then went to Trinity College, Dublin, before winning a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford. At Oxford he was immediately attracted to the Aesthetic Movement whose philosophy was set out in Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance – Wilde’s favourite book throughout his life, of which he said: ‘It is the flower of decadence’. The other major influence on him was the art historian and writer John Ruskin, one of his teachers at the university, with his influential studies on Italian medieval art. Both influences combined in confirming Wilde’s faith in the cult of beauty and refinement, which he put not only into his writings but also into his life. At Oxford he quickly won a reputation for his brilliant conversation and as a dandy and a collector of beautiful things – such as exquisite porcelain. The notion that ordinary objects (chairs, tables, lamps, etc.) should be aesthetically pleasing (central to The Picture of Dorian Gray) was fundamental to later developments such as Art Nouveau (in Italian, Stile Liberty) and Art Déco in the next century. How did Wilde become the spokesperson of the Aesthetic Movement? After graduating, Wilde moved to London. The years 1878-81 established his reputation as the most refined and provocative of the ‘aesthetic young men’. He assumed extravagant habits, such as carrying flowers when out walking. He dressed in bright colours, in contrast with the severe black suits of the middle class of his time: wearing a green carnation in his buttonhole and velvet knee breeches became typical of his youthful extravagance. Because of his flamboyant personality he became the leader of the Aesthetic Movement (‘Professor of Aesthetics’, as he was called) and as such was invited to the United States for a triumphal series of lectures in 1881. There too his habits were widely imitated and set a fashion: during his American tour, the students at Yale walked into the hall where Wilde was due to lecture carrying flowers in their hands. His legendary wit and his Oxford connections also introduced him to the upper class, whose superficial lifestyle he would so accurately reproduce in his comedies. How did Wilde make his name as a writer? On his return to England, in 1883, he married Constance Lloyd, who bore him two children. Between 1885 and 1891 he wrote a series of fables which he collected in two volumes: The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891). He also wrote short stories: the most famous is The Portrait of Mr W.H., on the mysterious person to whom Shakespeare’s sonnets are dedicated. Wilde’s first literary success, however, came in 1891 with a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was both an exploration of extreme decadence and a mystery story. It is the story of a young man who leads an increasingly dissolute and immoral life dedicated to pleasure until disgust with his own sins brings about his death. It is important to note that literary success for Wilde came only after he had become a celebrity, a social success. In this sense, he is the forerunner of the hedonistic life-style of the 1960s and 1970s, especially as represented by Andy Warhol and Pop Art. How did Wilde come to dominate the English and American stage? From 1890 to 1895 Wilde embarked on a highly successful career as a writer of light comedies – at one point, three of his plays were running at the same time in London and New York. In rapid succession he produced Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and the greatest of them all, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), still regarded as the perfect comedy of its type. It was as if Wilde had been preparing all his life to put his knowledge of the British upper class – its language, mannerisms, vanity, hypocrisy, lack of real values – into his plays. Ironically, their extraordinary success was sanctioned by the same people he exposed in them: as Jonathan Swift once remarked, satire is a mirror in which people recognise everyone except themselves. What traumatic event eventually brought Wilde to ruin? Wilde’s social and literary success came to an abrupt end in 1895, when he was arrested and sentenced to two years of hard labour at Reading Jail because of his homosexual relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of the Marquess of Queensbury. Douglas’ father, after a long private campaign against Wilde, had eventuallyprovoked him until Wilde reacted by taking him to court for slander. Wilde lost in court and the revelations about his relation with Douglas were enough to have him imprisoned – homosexuality was then a serious criminal offence. London society abandoned Wilde the moment he was found guilty. The revulsion against him was violent, both in Britain and the United States. Even his family members became social outcasts: his wife Constance and their children had to leave England and change their family name. Wilde’s period in prison, however, gave him the inspiration for two of his greatest works, which inevitably reflect a new, more sombre view of life: The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), on the way prison changes a man for worse, and De Profundis, a long autobiographical letter reflecting on his change of fortunes (partly published posthumously in 1905). What were Wilde’s last years like? When Wilde left prison in 1897 he was an aged and broken man, though he was only forty-three. He went to France under the assumed name of Sebastian Melmoth. The choice of the name was typical of Wilde’s by now bitter irony: St Sebastian was martyred by being shot by arrows (arrows were printed on Wilde’s prison uniform); and Melmoth, a perpetual exile, was the hero of a famous Gothic novel, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820, by Charles Maturin, an Irish writer who was Wilde’s great- uncle). In Paris, Wilde lived a miserable existence as a bankrupt and social exile, supported by money from his friends. He died alone in a small hotel in 1900, and is now buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery where his tomb is one of the most visited. ROBERTLOUISSTEVENSON (1850-1894) Born in Edinburgh, he had a difficult childhood due to poor health. At the age of 21, he decided to dedicate himself entirely to writing. This choice worsened the conflict with his parents, together with his rejection of his Calvinist upbringing and his taking to a Bohemian lifestyle. In 1876 in Paris, he met and befriended the American Frances (“Fanny”) Vandegrift Osbourne. She was ten years older than him and had a husband and two kids (Isobel and Loyd). Later, she divorced. They met again in California in 1879 and married a year later. The family moved to Great Britain, where Fanny helped to patch things up between Robert and his father. Meanwhile he had become a successful writer thanks to Treasure Island (1883) and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). He travelled a lot together with his wife. In 1890 they bought a plantation in western Samoa and moved there permanently. His last work In the South Seas (1896) was published after his death in 1894 due to a stroke. Stevenson was loved by the Samoans. When he died, they carried his body on their shoulders to nearby Mount Vaea, where they buried him on a spot overlooking the sea. Fanny returned to California and when she died in 1914, her daughter Isobel took her ashes to Samoa where they were buried next to her husband. In The Strange Case, Stevenson saw the dual personality of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as a conflict between the good and evil sides of personality. This is evidently an expression of the feeling of suppression that Stevenson felt in the Victorian Society: There was such a pressing requirement to behave in a certain way, which denied aknowledgement of the baser instincts. Dr Jekyll was the personification of this frustration in Stevenson and other Victorian men. Dr Jekyll is compelled to turn into Mr Hyde so that he can do things that polite society would have normally found scandalous. The strict morality of the period obliges him to completely deny his instinctual side, whose hidden presence therefore grows more oppressive. When he is able to become Mr Hyde, Jekyll feels somehow liberated, as though his civilised morally upright persona were actually a burden or prison. Victorian Social Codes in Jekyll and Hyde: The story is set in London, although the grim atmosphere closely resembles that of Edinburgh. Conscious of the duality in human nature, the physician Dr Jekyll discovers a drug that can divide these sides, isolating but also liberating his evil instincts in a separate physical form and personality that he calls Mr Hyde. This personality, which Jekyll assumes from time to time, is pure evil and at one point he murders an old man. Gradually, Hyde begins to take over Jekyll’s life and the drug loses its power to restore the doctor’s civilised character. Jekyll realises that the only solution is to kill Hyde, which means killing himself in the process. Jekyll writes out a full account of the events and locks himself in his laboratory with the intent to keep Hyde imprisoned and, as Poole (Jekyll's butler) and Utterson smash down the door to the laboratory, commits suicide by poison. The main theme is the duplicity of human nature: The double, or “dopplegänger” (lit. “double goer”), is an ancient figure which belongs to German folklore. It then became a common theme in some famous stories by E.A.Poe. The dark side of Dr Jekyll embodies the repressed instincts and emotions of his divided soul. Influenced by his Calvinist upbringing, Stevenson considered evil to be a real presence in human nature. The tragic ending may thus represent the disastrous consequences of a split personality and suggest that men should find a balance between their good and evil sides. It is dangerous to try to completely suppress certain elements of human nature, which must find a socially acceptable form if they are not to become dangerous and destructive. Style: Different Perspectives The novel has a third person narrator but 4 different points of view: 1. Mr Utterson: a lawyer who investigates a series of strange occurrences between his old friend Dr. Henry Jekyll and a murderous criminal named Edward Hyde. 2. Mr Enfield: Utterson's cousin. 3. Dr Lanyon: a longtime friend of Jekyll. 4. Dr Jekyll himself. The accounts of the first 3 are gathered together in the first part of the book almost as if they were witnesses at a trial. Each is, however, only a partial and external version of the events. In these accounts Jekyll appears as a respectable doctor. It is not until the last part of the story that Jekyll himself becomes the narrator in a final confession before he kills Hyde and himself. VICTORIAN LITERATURE: Poetry WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892) Born on Long Island, NY. With little formal education, at 11 he started work as an office boy, then worked as a schoolteacher, writer and editor for several magazines. After entering politics as a Democrat and travelling to New Orleans, he returned to New York where he produced the first edition of Leaves of Grass, financed with his own money. During the American Civil War, Whitman moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked for the government and volunteered at hospitals. He was deeply shocked by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He retired in 1873 to New Jersey, where he continued to write poetry and essays. Whitman died in 1892 at the age of 72. Works: - Drum Taps (1865) - A Sequel, incuding his famous elegy on Abraham Lincoln, «When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed» - Memoranda during the War (1875), a prose work. - In 1855 he published his first edition of Leaves of Grass, a poetry collection which grew throughout Whitman’s life, appearing in nine editions, and later came to incorporate most of his poetic output. The idea of Leaves of Grass as an ever-expanding work in progress is intimately connected to Whitman’s vision of himself as the voice and chronicler of the American Experience. The first edition was a small book of twelve poems, and the last was a compilation of over 400. Leaves of Grass was praised by Trascendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson as «the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed». American poetry During the Victorian period in Britain poetic innovation fell into decline. The novel was increasingly becoming the preferred and most effective means of addressing the new reality. Across the Atlantic, by contrast, poetry was once again being reinvented. American poetry strongly deviated from British poetry, first of all being a celebration of individualism. Its two most significant voices, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, are in many ways diametrically opposite to each other. Whitman’s poetry, among the most innovative of the century, was conceived as one unending journey down the open road of America. This road would bring together the many different voices of the country in an open, all-inclusive and democratic way. However, Whitman’s poetry was largely ignored by readers, partly on account of its rough manners and sexual outspokeness. In Britain, his reputation began to grow thanks to the praise of A.C. Swinburne, who compared him to Blake, and to William Rossetti who published a shortened, expurgated edition of Leaves of Grass (1868). Language Whitman’s poems are not only interesting for their political and social ideals. Equally important is their linguistic experimentation. Whitman felt the need to recognise and develop an American voice that would be free from European influence: The expanding states of America were rapidly inventing new words and trying new linguistic combinations. Here was a linguistic gold mine ready to be used by poets. Whitman’s idea of the American language was of a flexible, mobile and perpetually mutating entity, whose changes mirrored the accelerated development of the country. With the arrival of successive waves of immigrants, a cultural melting pot also became a linguistic melting pot. Whitman also frees poetry from metric regularity: - using long lines and free verse - adopting a syllabic technique that enables him to generate complex rhythmic patterns while giving the illusion of informal though definitely uncommon speech. THE THEME OF THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN LITERATURE The founding element of the traditional American culture, the Frontier is both physical and symbolic: it is an ideal limit beyond which wilderness resides, as opposed to that “here” represented by Euro-American civilization. The Frontier took on different aspects depending on the interpretations, especially during the 20th century. It acquired historical dignity thanks to the scholar F.J. Turner and remained for decades in the imagination of many American historians as the potential for expansion and resources that gave birth to an American identity, but also as a set of obstacles whose progressive overcoming contributed to the creation of the American nation. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) She was born in Amherst, a small rural town that counted only 2500 inhabitants in 1830. There, a well enstablished university, Amherst College, had been founded by Emily’s grandfather, Samuel F. Dickinson. She came from a conspicuous family. Although her education stopped at 17 years of age after only one year of college in South Hadley, she kept reading (Emerson, the Bronte sisters, Elizabeth Browning, George Eliot, but also Shakespeare, the metaphysical poets and, of course, the Bible), exposed to the cultural environment of her home. Starting from the age of 20, she used to write letters to her few friends, sending them some of her poems > no difference for her between verse and prose in written communication, both are a means of transmitting her thoughts and emotions. Poetry not as an object by itself but as a tool for communication. Near the age of 30, she experienced an evolution as an artist and she published anonimously two of her poems, I tasted a liquor never brewed and Safe in their Alabaster Chambers, on a local newspaper. She never married, secluding herself in her father’s house and creating a relationship with the world through the written word. Between 30 and 50 years of age, she was in a complex psychological state: dealing with people became more and more strenuous for her and, when she could, she avoided it. (“Could it please your convenience to come so far as Amherst I should be very glad, but I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or town” June 1869). She began to talk to visitors from the other side of a door rather than speaking to them face to face. She was rarely seen, and when she was, she was usually clothed in white. In 1874 her father died and in 1875 her mother was struck by a paralysis. Emily and her sister Lavinia had to take care of her until 1882 when she died as well. 1884: she started suffering from Bright’s disease (inflammation of the kidneys) and died in 1886. She was 55. She made her sister promise she would burn her poems, but Lavinia broke her promise after she discovered the collection of nearly 1,800 poems. Emily Dickinson's first volume was published four years after her death. Her main correspondences: Thomas W. Higginson, Susan Gilbert Austin (brother), Charles Wadsworth, Otis P. Lord, Samuel Bowles Helen H. Jackson. Themes: Universal themes - Nature: one of her greatest passions was botany. She sees the things of nature as simple, common but remarkable (“the simple News that Nature Told / With Tender Majesty”), and so is her poetry. Animals, especially birds, are ever-present. - Death: she is upset by physical death as an inevitable entity. She wonders about the afterlife. (Victorian morbid fascination with death). Creepy animals: flies, spiders, mice, snakes, bats. - Life and immortality: she contemplates the afterlife with melancholy and trepidation. Is life’s suffering worth God’s promises? - Love: the object of love is never mentioned. Sometimes this endless love seems to be mutual, but not destined to be fullfilled, not in this world. She describes a love for the absent one (dreaming, remembering, waiting). Style and Language: - Brevity: she often sees the poem as an aphorism and writes short poems, following Poe’s idea that the composition has to be short in order to be read in one sitting and to be more incisive on the reader’s mind. - Impersonal speaker (“I”) who expresses thought and feelings to a listener (“you”). - No titles. - Quatrains and rhymes. - Rhythm reflects the one of verbal communication: it varies from broken and interrupted, to sprung or rushed. - Unusual punctuation (e.g. frequent use of dashes). - Describes abstract concepts with concrete images. - Her poetry is authentic and sincere, but indirect (“Tell all the truth, but tell it slant”) - Romantic feelings but anti-romantic language: quotations, technical expressions, scientific terms, toponyms, details and precise objects > influenced by the literature of the 17th century, she also anticipates 20th century poetry, jumping from a lexical sphere to another.