Paper 6 Historical summery and characteristics of victorian age

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Name.                 :   Vyas Jeel j.
Roll No                :     15.
Paper No            :    6. Victorian Literature.
Class                    :     M.A. Sem - 2
Topic                   :     Brief history and characteristics of the Age.
Enrolment No   :    2069108420190045
College               :   Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English
Email ID             :    jeelvyas15@gmail.com
Submitted         :    Department  of English M.K.B.University   





Introduction :

                     When Victoria became queen, in 1837, English literature seems to have entered upon a period of lean years, in marked contrast with the poetic fruitfulness of the romantic age. The time period of Victorian Age is 1850 to 1900. The international position of Britain of that time was very strong.   The main reason of this great position is that the defeat of great Napoleon in 1815. The British Empire, while it had suffered a setback half a century earlier with the loss of the American colonies, was expanding throughout the world with great success.
Historical characteristics of the Age :
 
        The Age has its own historical characteristics through which we can easily come to know about the historical background of the Age. To know historical background of age is important because Literature is connected with the people who lives at that time. If we know history of the time we can easily see that why some writer of the time wrote particular things about the people and society.
• Democracy.
• Social Unrest.
• The Ideal of peace.
• Arts and science.

1. Democracy :

            The very first characteristic of the Age is Democracy. We found the Democracy in time of Victoria. Amid the multitude of social and political force of this grate age, for things stand out clearly. The Long struggle of the Anglo-Saxon for personal liberty is definitely settled and Democracy becomes the established order of the day. The last vestige of personal government and Divine right of rules disappears; the House of commons become the ruling power in England; a series of New reform bills rapidly extend the Differences, until the whole body of English people choose for themselves the Man who shall represents them.
2. Social unrest :

Because it is an age of Democracy it is an age of popular education, age of religious tolerance,  Age of growing brotherhood, and Age of profound social unrest. The slaves had been freed in 1833; but in the middle of the century England come to know about the fact that all slaves are not necessarily negroes, stolen in Africa to be sold like cattle in market place, but that multitude of  men, woman, and little children in the mines and factories were victims of more terrible industrial and social slavery. There were some moments which were the reason of social unrest.

     1.  Oxford Movement:

      This was the movement around 19th century, and leaded by John Henry Newman. It was generated by those who was against scientific development and wanted church to rule on people by resettling the glory of religion. The movement was mostly on pamphlets and tracts so it was also known as “The Tractarian Movement”. The centre of the movement was Oxford, so it is known as ‘The Oxford Movement’.

    2.  The Pre- Raphaelite School of Poetry:

      This movement was for establishing the quality of poetry by ‘Pictorial effects’. Raphael was a painter and all the leaders of moment like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt founded a society in 1848, getting inspired by Rapheal.

3. The Ideal of peace:

                         Third characteristics of the Age is ideal of peace. Because it is Age of Democracy and education, it is an age of comparative peace. England begins to think less of pipe and false glitter of fighting and more of it’s moral evils as the nation realizes that it is the common people who bear the burden and the sorrow and the poverty of war while the privileged classes rape most of the financial and political reward. With the growth of trades and of friendly foreign relationship it become evident that that the social equality for which England was contending at home belong to the whole race of man.

4. Art and science :

           Forth characteristic of the Age is art and science. Victorian Age is especially remarkable because of its rapid progress in all the art and science and in mechanical invention. A glance at any record of the industrial achievement of the 19th century will show how vast they are.

 Literary characteristics of the Age :

    Every Age has its own literary characteristic. It is also important  to know about literary characteristics. Because by knowing them we can able to understand the Literature of the Age. There  three main characteristic of the Age.
• An age of prose
• Moral purpose
• Idealism
1. An Age of prose :

             First characteristics of Victorian Age is this age was Age of prose. The novels were looking like the bright stars in the sky of England during the Victorian era. The great novelists like:- Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, William Thackeray, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte and Anne Bronte filled the sky of the Victorian era with their novels. Number of readers has increased a thousand fold with the spread of popular education it is an age of newspaper the magazines and the modern novel. The first two bring the store of the world daily life. The novel in this age fills a place which the drama held in the days of Elizabeth.

2. Moral purpose :
 
   The second marked characteristic of the Age is that Literature both in prose and in poetry seems to depart from purely artistic standard of art for art sake and to be actuated by a definite moral purpose. Even the novel break away from Scott's romantic influence and first studies life as it is, and then point out what life may ought to be. Where we read the fun and sentiment of Dickens the social miniatures of Thackeray or physiological studies of George Eliot we find in almost every case a definite purpose to sweep away error and to reveal the underlying truth of Human life.

3. Idealism :

            Third characteristics of the Age is Idealism. We found Idealism in Victorian age. It is somewhat customary to speak of this age as an age of doubt and pessimism, following the new conception of man and of the universe which was formulated by science under the name of name of evolution.
Apart from this there are some other characteristics which is below.
Search For Balance:-
 During this period the writers tried to balance the romentic as well as the classical influence. This is well obsereved in the works of J.S.Mill during this time. The new religious movement called the oxford movement was started. This movement shows a search for balance.
Humanitarian Approach:-
 In the novels of Charles Dickens, J.S.Mill and certain other novelist. We came accross the humanitarian approach. It is important to note that this age was an age of industrial revolution this industrial revolution creates two classes:-(1). Labourers(2). Capitalists.
Some Victorian novels deals with the class consciousness and also present the problems of poverty during this period.
Realism:-
The literature of the Victorian age was correlated to the social and political life of the age. The Victorian literary artists, living aside a few votaries of art for art’s sake represented by the Pre-Raphaelite school of poets, were inspired by a social zeal to represent the problem of their own age.
         
 Perhaps for this reason the Victorian literature is the literature of ‘realism’ rather than of romance, not the realism of Zola and Ibsen, but a deeper realism which strives to tell the whole truth, showing moral and physical diseases as they are, but holding up health and hope as the moral conditions of humanity. Literature became an instrument of social reform and social propaganda and it was marked with purposeful, propagandistic and didactic aims.
         The Victorian literature is full of realism. We can say that Oliver twist is a realistic character; in Victorian age we found there is child labor in workhouse. So it called realism, and in Frankenstein there is no real character like monster in real life, but we found character like Oliver in real life. So the Victorian literature represents realism. There is no imaginative character in the literature. In Victorian literature we found realistic character rather than romantic character.
Pessimism:-
A note of pessimism, doubt and despair runs through Victorian literature and is noticed especially in the poetry of Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough. Though a note of pessimism runs through the literature of the age, it cannot be dubbed as a literature of bleak pessimism and dark despair. A note of idealism and optimism is also struck by poets like Browning and prose writers like Ruskin. Rabbi Ben Ezra brings out the courageous optimism of the age. Stedman’s Victorian Anthology is, on the whole, a most inspiring book of poetry. Great essayists like Macaulay, Carlyle, Ruskin, and great novelists like Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot inspire us with their faith in humanity and uplift us by their buoyancy and large charity.
                 
The literature of the age is considerably modified by the impact of science. “It is the scientific spirit, and all that the scientific spirit  implied, its certain doubt, its care for minuteness and truth of observation, its growing interest in social processes, and the conditions under which life is lived that is the central fact in Victorian literature.”
           The questioning spirit in lough, the pessimism of James Thomson, the melancholy of Matthew Arnold, the fatalism of Fitzgerald, are all the outcome of the skeptical tendencies evoked by scientific research. Tennyson’s poetry is also considerably influenced by the advancement of science in the age, and the undertones of scientific researchers can be heard in ‘In Memoriam’.
Patriotism :

A note of patriotism runs through Victorian literature. Tennyson, Dickens and Disraeli are inspired by a national pride and a sense of greatness in their country’s superiority over nations.
In one direction the literature of the Victorian age achieved a salient and momentous advance over the lecture of the Romantic Revival. The poets of the Romantic were interested in nature, in the past, and in a lesser degree in art, but they were not intensively interested in men and women.
         
To Wordsworth the dalesmen of the lakes were a part of the scenery they moved in. He treated human being as natural objects and divested them of the complexities and passions of life as it is lived. The Victorian poets and novelists laid emphasis on men and women and imparted to them the same warmth and glow which the Romantic poets had given to nature. “The Victorian age extended to the complexities of human life, the imaginative sensibility which its predecessor had brought to bear on nature and history. The Victorian poets and novelists added humanity to nature and art as the subject matter of literature.”
                    We can say that in the literature the effect of patriotism. The writer focuses on national identity and patriotism in Victorian age.

Conclusion :

To conclude we can say that this are the characteristic of the Age which We can find in the Victorian age  and Literature.