english 6175 - victorian literature @ east carolina u.

Mini-lecture 24: "The Victorian Legacy"

Mini-lecture 24: "The Victorian Legacy"

Scope: This course has moved chronologically through the reign of Queen Victoria. pausing frequently to study such themes as ideas about men and women, servants, leisure, music, art, and architecture. In this final lecture, I will offer a quick overview of the whole period: single out some of its most striking, contradictory, and paradoxical elements, and end with a few general conclusions about the nature of historical study in general and the study of Victorian Britain in particular.

Britain gradually became more of a democracy as it extended the franchise to previously excluded groups by a succession of acts of Parliament. In doing so. it retained its monarchy. whose reputation Queen Victoria herself did much to restore. More striking. Britain managed to forestall revolutionary upheavals, which were common throughout the rest of the developing world. Women were still excluded from the political nation at the century’s end, but the working class’s own party. Labour, had laid the foundations of its massive role in twentieth-century Britain. The empire grew throughout the Victorian era, especially in the 1880s and 1890s. It was widely admired from abroad and gave Britain the appearance of ever-greater power but actually disguised several crucial weaknesses. The worst of these weaknesses, never adequately corrected, was the fact that industry and commerce were low-status occupations compared to the leisured life of the aristocracy. Britain. accordingly, lost its industrial lead to Germany and America and failed to keep pace with accelerating technical changes. As Victoria’s reign ended, Britain faced an unstable world and the prospect of decline.

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Outline

I. Britain gradually moved toward political democracy.

A. Impediments to voting and sitting in Parliament were removed piecemeal.

1. The three Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, and 1884 expanded the franchise.

2. The secret ballot (1872) and the Corrupt Practices Act (1883) diminished opportunities for bribery and intimidation.

3. The political rights gained by Catholics after 1829 and Jews after1858 ended the principle of religious exclusion.

4. After 1888, atheists were also included.

5. Thus, the special privileges attaching to members of the Church of England were gradually dismantled.

B. Democracy faced serious critics, who claimed that popularly elected politicians must pander to their constituencies and are often mediocrities and demagogues.

1. In practice, political life was not debased.

2. Parliament continued to be an arena in which exceptional politicians were far more common than mediocrities.

3. Politicians of lower social origins, now able to sit in Parliament, proved to have minds every bit as brilliant as those of their aristocratic colleagues.

C. Britain, unlike most of the European nations, did not undergo a nineteenth-century revolution or civil war.

D. Queen Victoria restored the monarchy’s reputation and assured it a continued role in the constitution in an age when many European monarchies were coming to an end.

E. By 1901, the Labour Party was joining the political nation, but in a nonrevolutionary way.

1. It, too, was, in many respects, conservative: Labour MPs respected the monarchy as much as anyone else and continued to do so through the twentieth century.

2. Throughout the twentieth century. the Labour Party was ambivalent about its own commitment to socialism; the Trades Union Congress and many Labour MPs had less interest in overthrowing capitalism than in getting a better deal out of it.

F. Politics remained a prestigious and honorable career.

II. The British Empire grew throughout the Victorian era.

A. It was the model for other ambitious nations’ empires.

B. It was comparatively well governed.

1. Despite some brutal military actions, the British colonial administration, once having established power, was relatively fair minded and humane.

2. Victorian British idealism was more than just a cover for comniercial rapacity.

3. The British ended slavery and provided education, sanitation. medicine, and other public health benefits for their colonies.

4. The Indian Congress Party itself depended on Victorian values.

C. The British Empire disguised Britain’s gradual loss of economic leadership.

III. Victorian Britain never overcame crucial weaknesses.

A. It did not sufficiently honor tile businessmen on whose work British greatness was founded.

1. High status required family pedigree and leisure.

2. Social snobbery was persistent and disabling, a recurrent theme in Victorian literature throughout the period.

B. Most people in Britain were poor.

1. Living standards rose very slowly, but from an extremely low starting point.

2. For most people throughout the Victorian period, life was a matter of chronic anxiety.

3. There was no “rags to riches” mythology -- no idealism about class mobility: the poor had no idea that they might aspire to a better life.

4. Trade unions were designed to make the best of the economic status quo by fighting for their working-class members’ pensions. job security, and job safety.

5. Trade unions also impaired British competitiveness by designing rigid demarcation rules and fostering an environment of mutual distrust between workers and management.

C. Britain was unable to use its influence to create international stability: late Victorian rivalry with Gennany was an early portent of the First World War.

IV. History in general, and Victorian history in particular, presents great opportunities and challenges.

A. History requires an imaginative engagement with people whose ideas are distinct from our own.

B. History ought not to be a mere recital of facts.

C. Victorian Britain did, in fact, produce many superb and imaginative historians, such as Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Macaulay.

D. The abundance of materials from the Victorian era is an asset to historians but can also be a problem.

E. Victorian vestiges, literary and material, give everyone the opportunity to delve more deeply into this subject.

Essential Reading:
Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria and Eminent Viciorians.
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, the Heroic, and Hero-worship.

Supplementary Reading:
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Henry James, The Princess Casamassima.

Questions to ConsIder:
1. Could Britain have acted more wisely to protect its best interests in the nineteenth century?
2. Which of Britain’s many achievements in the Victorian era was the most remarkable?

Mini-lecture 23: "Victorian Britain and the American Civil War"

Mini-lecture 23: "Victorian Britain and the American Civil War"

Scope: British attitudes toward America varied in the Victorian era depending on the class, interests, and beliefs of the observer. British supporters of democracy were generally pro-American, whereas defenders of hierarchy tended to be anti-American. The Anierican Civil War created difficulties for British politicians. Economic and diplomatic interests both suggested the benefits of an alliance with the Confederacy, but religious and humanitarian sentiment supported the Union. Britain’s equivocal policy toward America caused a diplomatic crisis. but the rift healed soon after the war, while cultural links continued to strengthen. At the same time, a steady stream of Britons emigrated to the United States, as farmers, industrial workers. entrepreneurs. and even utopian colonizers.

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Outline

I. British attitudes toward America depended on the individual’s beliefs.

A. America represented an inspiring future to believers in democracy.

B. It represented a dismaying future to supporters of hierarchy, Mrs. Trollope, for example, was appalled by Cincinnati egalitarianism.

C. America and Britain shared literary tastes.

1. First Walter Scott, then Charles Dickens, reigned supreme in both countries.

2. American writers, including Longfellow, Emerson. and Washington Irving, became famous in Britain first.

3. The Smithsonian Institution was funded by, and named after, a British scientist, James Smithson (1765—1829).

II. The American Civil War posed a dilemma to British politicians.

A. Cotton from the slave south fed the industrial factories of Lancashire and Yorkshire. The trade had boomed ever since the invention of the cotton gin.

B. Political reasons existed to justify supporting the Confederacy.

1. From a geopolitical view, two small Americas were better than one big one.

2. Victorians sympathized with “independence” movements in Italy, Hungary, Poland, and potentially the Confederacy, too.

C. Political, religious, and humane reasons existed to justify supporting the Union.

1. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beeclier-Stowe were popular in Britain.

2. Britain had abolished slavery in its own plantation colonies in 1833.

3. John Bright helped persuade northern mill workers to support the Union.

4. Karl Marx praised British workers’ pro-Union sentiment.

D. A series of diplomatic incidents during the American Civil War affected Anglo—American relations, including the “Trent” incident.

1. Confederate diplomats James Mason and John Slidell were sailing to Britain under the protection of the British flag to argue the case for official British recognition of the Confederate States of America.

2. They were captured by the U.S. Navy, but Abraham Lincoln ordered their release to Britain after Lord Palmerston sent him a letter threatening war.

E. The Union sent talented diplomats of its own to prevent an Anglo-Confederate alliance.

1. Charles Francis Adams was ambassador.

2. His son and private secretary Henry was also a secret journalist.

3. Their skillful negotiations in Whitehall helped prevent British recognition of the Confederacy.

F. Lincoln’s leadership was widely admired in Britaim Queen Victoria mourned his death.

G. The Alabama and other gunboats built in Britain aided the Confederacy and continued to cause ill feelings after the war.

1. As a neutral country in the American Civil War, Britain had no right to supply warships to either side.

2. The Alabama, built in Britain and armed in the Azores, was used by the Confederates to sink many Union ships.

3. This violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the neutrality rules.

4. The postwar “Alabama claims” (1872) settled the issue.

III. Emigration from Britain to Anierica accelerated after the Civil War,

A. A steady stream of British emigrants moved to America.

1. British farniers were subsidized by American railroad companies, which gave them land and supplies to establish farms on the Great Plains.

2. Industrial workers and miners brought expertise to America.

B. A few of them played an important role in American history.

1. Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), steel manufacturer, became one of the richest men in the world.

2. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and played a central role in the education of the deaf.

IV. In the later nineteenth century, the idea of Anglo-Saxon supremacy and the common missionary impulse drew the two nations together.

A. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson both admired British institutions and the British Empire.

B. Winston Churchill was the most famous child of an Anglo-American dynastic marriage.

Essential Reading:
David Frost and Michael Shea, The Rich Tide: Men, Women, Ideas, and Their Transatlantic Impact.
H.C. Allen. The Anglo-American Relationship Since 1763.

Supplementary Reading:
Kevin Phillips. The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph 0f Anglo-America.
F. Leventhal and R. Quinault, Anglo-American Attitudes: From Revolution to Partnership.

Questions to Consider:
1. How did American and British histories interact in the Victorian era?
2. Would Britain have benefited from supporting the Confederate States of America?

Mini-lecture 21: "Later Victorian Literature"

Mini-lecture 21: "Later Victorian Literature"

Scope: The late Victorian years witnessed an immense concentration of literary talent and a series of controversies and about the nature and morality of literature. Authors and critics debated bitterly whether sexuality and the inner workings of unhappy marriages should be depicted in literature and on the stage. Hendrik Ibsen and Thomas Hardy each found savage detractors and eager champions. The aesthetic movement of the 1890s sidestepped the dispute by denying that art had anything to do with morality at all. However, its most well known British exponent. Oscar Wilde, found that lack of discretion about his own homosexuality could bring severe punishment. The British Empire found a brilliant literary champion in Rudyard Kipling in the 1880s and 1890s, but the nation as a whole got a second-rate mediocrity, Alfred Austin, as poet-laureate. Ironically. the most durable literary figure of the late Victorian era, Sherlock Holmes, was created simply for passing entertainment and to raise some ready money for a struggling doctor, Arthur Conan Doyle.

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Outline

I. Influential writers believed that more elements of human life should be portrayed in fiction and drama.

A. Hendrik Ibsen’s plays stirred controversy.

1. Conventional critics condemned these works, for example, A Doll's House (1879) and Ghosts (1891).

2. Early feminists and such critics as George Bernard Shaw defended Ibsen’s plays.

B. Thomas Hardy sympathized with “fallen” women.

1. His novels evoked a rural England in the midst of radical social change.

2. Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1896) endured savage criticism on the grounds that they were immoral and excessively frank about sex.

3. In spite of their critics, the novels enjoyed enormous popularity.

4. In later life. Hardy turned exclusively to writing poetry.

II. The aesthetic niovement denied that art and literature had a moral purpose at all—it spoke on behalf of “art for art’s sake.”

A. Walter Pater in England and Theophile Gautier in France influenced the movement.

B.Oscar Wilde defied or contradicted all the conventions.

1. Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 and studied classics at Oxford University.

2. His exotic dress, quick wit, and dandyism made him a celebrity.

3. He appears in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Patience (1881) as the character Bunthorne.

4. His novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and his essay “The Decay of Lying” contradicted familiar verities.

5. His plays. above all The Importance o~Being Earnest, demonstrated his mastery of the stage.

6. He brought disaster on himself by suing the Marquis of Queensberry, with whose son he was having a homosexual affair.

7. Wilde sued the marquis for libeling him as a “posing sodomite," but lost.

8. Wilde refused to go voluntarily into exile to avoid prosecution for “Acts of Gross indecency between Males.”

9. He was convicted and sent to prison for two years.

10. After prison, he spent the rest of his life in exile in France and died prematurely in 1900.

III. Literary and political interests often overlapped.

A. Rudyard Kipling championed the imperial mission.

1. Kipling, born in India in 1865, was sent to England for his schooling, which lie hated.

2. At the age of sixteen, he returned to India, where he went to work for an English-language newspaper.

3. He urged British and American Anglo-Saxons to take up the “white man’s burden” of colonialism: he believed that Britain had a Godgiven duty to bring civilization and Christianity to colonial subjects.

4. Recessional (1897) warned that only trust in God could preserve the British Empire from ultimate failure.

5. Kipling was the first British writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he did in 1907, when he was only forty-one.

B. The poet-laureate controversy of 1892—1895 came to a farcical conclusion.

1. Tennyson’s death in 1892 led to a prolonged debate over possible candidates.

2. Most of the best poets were unsuitable because of their sexual or political orientation.

3. Alginon Swinburne and Oscar Wilde were homosexuals.

4. Kipling was too young.

5. William Morris was an outspoken socialist.

6. Coventry Patmore, Francis Thompson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins were Roman Catholics.

7. Lord Salisbury appointed Alfred Austin.

8. Austin churned out patriotic verses by the yard.

IV. Growth in the ranks of the reading public created more niches for authors.

A. Arthur Conan Doyle, a Scottish doctor living in London, created the Sherlock Holmes phenomenon.

B. The character of Holmes was inspired by Dr. Joseph Bell, one of Doyle’s professors at medical school.

C. Holmes represented the triumph of scientific method and close observation over ad hoc police methods.

D. For example, Holmes is a great advocate of fingerprinting, which was being introduced at the time.

E. Conan Doyle tired of Holmes, but the character’s popularity and financial incentives —- an American magazine offered Doyle £5,000 per story — brought him back from the dead.

F. Doyle himself was consulted in criminal controversies, and he championed prisoners he felt had been wrongly convicted.

Essential Reading:
Karl Beckson. London in the 1890s: A Cultural History.
Julian Symons. Conan Done: Portrait of an Artist.

Supplementary Reading:
G.K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature.
Margaret Drabble, ed., The Genius of Thomas Hardy.

Questions to Consider:
1. What were the arguments for censorship of sexual and marriage-related issues in literature?
2. How, and with what consequences. do politics and literature interact?

Mini-lecture 22: "Victoria After Albert-1861-1901"

Mini-lecture 22: "Victoria After Albert: 1861—1901"

Scope: Queen Victoria never fully recovered from the shock of Prince Albert’s death, after which she always wore mourning. Throughout the 1860s. she refused to do her public duties, always complaining of illness and depression. until the popularity of the monarchy itself began to decline. Recovering some composure in the 1870s. Victoria found solace in the help of a loyal Scottish servant. John Brown, and in the flattering attentions of her favorite prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli. After Brown’s death in 1883. another devastating blow, she was served by “the Munshi.” a young Indian Moslem who was widely disliked and resented by other members of her court but retained her devotion. By then. Victoria’s nine children and their families were connected to every royal court in Europe. Her Golden and Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1887 and 1897 occasioned great public celebrations and a festive, imperial mood in London. Victoria herself survived the worst shocks of the Boer War, dying in 1901 at the age of eighty-one.

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Outline

I. After the death of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria became reclusive.

A. She refused to attend official functions and dressed in black mourning for the rest of her life.

B. She complained of being too miserable or too ill to appear in public.

1. She fully expected to die very soon, though she was only forty-two.

2. She bullied her doctor, William Jenner, to confirm her belief that she was failing.

C. Her popularity declined as she became reclusive: Charles Dilke criticized her in Parliament and was cheered.

II. In later life. Victoria relied heavily on a small group of friends and helpers.

A. Among her prime ministers, she loved Disraeli but disliked Gladstone. 1, Disraeli flattered her, was obsequious. and enjoyed her company.

1. He appointed her empress of India in 1876 (her European relatives were emperors of Austria, Germany. and Russia).

2. He trusted her instinct for public opinion.

3. Gladstone was respectful but did not pretend to take her advice in policy issues.

B. John Brown, Victoria’s Scottish servant, became her favorite companion.

1. He was her riding companion at Balmoral and saved her from a riding accident.

2. Victoria’s doctor brought Brown to Windsor after Prince Albert’s deatll in the hope of persuading her to resume riding, which she did.

3. Brown became high-handed among servants and even members of the royal family, confident of the queen’s unswerving loyalty.

4. He was rumored (then and since) to be her lover or even her secret husband.

5. He seized a young man who fired a pistol at the queen in 1872, further winning tier favor.

6. Brown’s death in 1883 horrified the queen.

C. Abdul Karim, “the Munshi,” replaced John Brown in Victoria’s affections. He became her servant in her old age.

1. The Munshi was a widely hated figure at court, where he was suspected of passing on state secrets to an Islamic fundamentalist group in India.

2. Courtiers also suspected him of biasing the queen in favor of the Muslim side in Indian affairs.

3. Victoria flew into a great rage when her household rebelled against them, largely because of their racial prejudice.

4. After Victoria’s death, the Munshi was pensioned off and retired to India.

D. Victoria disliked any member of the household leaving it -- many of her servants continued into old age in her service.

E. Her private secretary, Henry Ponsonby, recounted her imperiousness and her dislike of contradiction.

III. Victoria’s family connections linked up the monarchies of all Europe.

A. Her nine children all married and all had children of their own.

1. Her thirty-eight grandchildren included the monarchs of much of Europe.

2. Her eighth child, Prince Leopold, suffered from hemophilia and died prematurely.

3. She now has hundreds of living descendants.

B. Relations with her eldest son and heir, Edward (nicknamed Bertie), remained strained.

1. Victoria blamed Edward for Albert’s death.

2. Edward never lived up to Victoria’s moral expectations; he was a philanderer and gambler.

3. Victoria accused him of setting a bad example for the lower classes.

C. Victoria had ambivalent feelings about Germany.

1. She was half-German and had married a German; her favorite daughter had married the kaiser.

2. She hated Bismark, who was chiefly responsible for achieving German unity in 1870, because she saw the resulting growth in German power as a threat to Britain’s supremacy in the world.

IV. Victoria’s visibility and popularity revived late in life.

A. The Golden Jubilee of 1887 marked her fiftieth year as queen: she attended a service at Westminster Abbey but refused to wear robes of state.

B. The Diamond Jubilee of 1897 is seen by many historians as the high watermark of the British Empire.

V. Victoria never grasped the extent or severity of British poverty.

A. E. F. Benson, a popular writer and son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, said that Victoria was unaware of the sufferings of the poverty stricken and viewed protesters and social activists as mere troublemakers.

B. As Benson put it, Victoria knew of only three social classes: the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the middle class, “which she could see was becoming the governing power.”

C. She visited Scottish crofters when she was staying at Balmoral, but those crofters were relatively privileged and ill no way representative of the working class as a whole.

D. She never visited industrial cities or urban “rookeries.”

VI. Victoria died in January 1901, aged eighty-one, at Osborne, her residence on the isle of Wight, in the arms of her grandson, the kaiser of Germany.

A. Only subjects over age sixty-five could remember anyone else being monarch.

B. She was buried beside Prince Albert, after forty years as a widow, at their mausoleum in Frogmore.

C. Her son (Bertie) became King Edward VII at the age of sixty.

VII. Victoria had always feared that she might go mad, as her grandfather George III had, but in fact, despite periodic rages, she had remained psychologically very stable.

Essential Reading:
Christopher Hibbert, Queen Victoria: A Personal History.
Lytton Strachey. Queen Victoria.

Supplementary Reading:
Christopher Hibbert, ed., Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals: A Selection.

Questions to Consider:
1. Did Britain get any real benefit from the preservation of its monarchy?
2. How did personal and political issues overlap in Victoria’s later reign?

Mini-lecture 17: "The Crimean War"

Mini-lecture 17: "The Crimean War: 1854-1856"

Scope: In 1854. Britain went to war against a European power for the first time since Waterloo(1815). In alliance with France and Turkey, it fought against Russia on the coast of Black Sea, afraid that Russia might profit from the declining strength of the Turks and threaten Britain’s Indian empire. The British campaign was mishandled by an army riddled with inefficiency, nepotism, and corruption, but ultimately prevailed. because the enemy was even more poorly organized. The Charge of the Light Brigade, one of the most famous incidents of this war and the one that occasioned Lord Tennyson’s poem. demonstrated many of the faults of the British army in concentrated form. Two new developments made the war memorable: the nursing achievements of Florence Nightingale, whose hospital work at Scutari showed that recovery rates aniong wounded soldiers could be much higher than they had been traditionally, and the investigative reporting of the Times correspondent William Howard Russell. His stories, arriving in Britain almost instantly because of the new telegraph, aroused public opinion, led to political investigations, and contributed to the resignation of Prime Minister Lord Aberdeen.

Click here for a printable, PDF version of the following outline.

Outline

I. Fear of Russian power was a steady undercurrent of nineteenth-century British politics.

A. Liberals thought of the Czars as the epitome of cruel. arbitrary. and backward rule.

B. Conservatives feared Russian designs on the Eastern Mediterranean aiid the British Empire in India.

C. Both anticipated that the declining Turkish Empire would be displaced by Russia.

D. Russia occupied the area west of the Black Sea that is today Rumania. triggering war with Turkey, which also claimed the area.

E. After a long period of diplomatic maneuvering. Britain and France declared war against Russia ill alliance with Turkey in March 1854.

II. The British army was mismanaged.

A. Officers gained their positions through social and political influence, not military skill.

1. Commissions could be bought and sold, and regimental commanders were entitled to dress their soldiers in uniforms of their own design.

2. High—level commands usually canie through Seniority, and all the British commanders in the Crimean War were over age sixty-live.

B. Rankers were drawn from the poor and unemployed and were forced to submit to severe discipline.

C. The army was not suitably equipped for the climatic extremes of the Crimea.

1. The first campaign, at Varna on the western shore of the Black Sea, took place in blistering heat. Outbreaks of cholera and dysentery soon weakened the army.

2. Later, in the Crimea. after the Russians had retreated, the army suffered from the same deadly winter that had defeated Napoleon in 1812.

3. Supplies arrived too slowly and were often inappropriate to conditions.

D. The Anglo-French forces (about 25,000 from each country) won a series of victories at Alma, Balaclava, and lnkerman in the fall of 1854, then besieged the fortress of Sevastapol.

1. They could have seized Sevastapol at once, but because of a lack of information, they delayed.

2. This delay afforded the Russians the opportunity to fortify Sebastapol. resulting in a year-long siege.

E. The Charge of the Light Brigade was launched in error during the Battle of Balaclava.

1. From a hilltop. Lord Raglan watched captured British guns being removed and sent a message to Lord Cardigan to retake them.

2. From his position in the valley, Lord Cardigan could not see these guns.

3. Rather than question orders, he attacked the entrenched batteries lie could see, which fired on his men throughout their charge.

4. They overran the battery but were unable to hold it.

5. The event occasioned the work of poet-laureate Tennyson.

F. Queen Victoria followed the course of the war closely.

1. She created a decoration, the Victoria Cross, for officers and ranks alike.

2. She followed the news of the campaigns closely.

3. She resented the fact that the war was acconipanied by an outbreak of anti-foreign feeling that was turned against Prince Albert.

4. She invited Lord Cardigan to describe the Charge of the Light Brigade to her in person.

III. William Howard Russell’s journalism criticized the British army’s conduct.

A. Telegraph lines to London meant that news arrived in Britain the same day rather than weeks later, as it had in previous wars: press dispatches regularly arrived more quickly than commanders’ reports got to the cabinet.

B. William Howard Russell, a journalist for the London Times, wrote in a style that stripped the romance from war, describing the suffering of the soldiers.

C. Russell established the press as a potentially powerful political force.

1. The stories prompted a radical MP, John Roebuck, to demand a committee of inquiry into the government’s conduct of the war.

2. The vote in favor of this committee was so strong that the prime minister, Lord Aberdeen, resigned.

3. Lord Palmerston replaced him and began to rectify the chaos.

4. The commission’s report concluded that the antiquated system, rather than individual mendacity, had caused the early disasters.

D. Roger Fenton, a pioneering photographer, made 360 photographs in the Crimea; the Crimean War was the first war in history of which we have photographs.

E. It substantiated a small anti-war movement in Parliament; Cobden and Bright, former leaders of the Anti-Corn-Law League, led it.

IV. Florence Nightingale (nicknamed by soldiers “the Lady with the Lamp”) improved medical care for the wounded soldiers.

A. She had sought a nursing career at a time when such work was considered inappropriate for genteel women.

1. She rejected suitors.

2. She studied nursing in Germany.

B. News of the war led her to lobby Sidney Herbert, a politically wellplaced friend, to let her lead a nurses’ expedition.

C. She took thirty-eight volunteer nurses and a shipload of equipment to Scutari (near Istanibul, several hundred miles from the actual battles).

D. Nightingale dramatically improved conditions at Scutari.

1. Nightingale feuded with Sir John Hall.

2. She cleaned filthy wards and provided beds, linen, and regular laundry. (Five times as many soldiers died of disease as of battle wounds.)

3. Publicity for her work brought voluntary and official help and money from England.

4. Queen Victoria publicly honored her when she returned at war’s end.

E. Nightingale became an effective behind-the-scenes lobbyist for hospital building and sanitation.

1. Her pose as an invalid was belied by her prolific writings.

2. At a tinie when women had no public political role, Nightingale was not allowed to give testimony to parliamentary commissions.
Instead, Sidney Herbert and other male political friends worked at her bidding.

3. She established St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, opposite Parliament. Britain’s first school of nursing.

4. Her work dignified nursing as a job for ladies.

V. The Crimean War ended in 1856 with the Peace of Paris.

A. The treaty compelled the new Russian czar, Alexander II, to relinquish Russia’s territorial claims in the eastern Danube area and to demolish its Black Sea naval bases.

B. In Britain, the war led to a round of rationalization, civil service reform, and the abolition of purchase for army commissions (1871).

Essential Reading:
Winifred Baunigart, The Crimean War, 1853— 1856.
Cecil Woodharn-Smith, The Reason Why.

Supplementary Reading:
Trevor Royle, Crimea: The Great Crimean War.
Hugh Small. Florence Nightingale: Avenging Angel.

Questions to Consider:
1. Why did Britain fight on behalf of the Turkish Empire?
2. What role did British public opinion play in the Crimean War?

Mini-lecture 18: "The British in Africa-1840-1880"

Mini-lecture 18: "The British in Africa: 1840—1880"

Scope: The African coastline had been explored by the time of Victoria’s reign.
but much of the interior was unknown to Europeans. British explorers crisscrossed Africa and traced the course of the major rivers in the midVictorian period. Among their motives were a desire for scientific and geographical knowledge and eagerness to spread the Christian gospel. suppress the Arab slave trade, and develop economic opportunities. Among the most famous explorers were Richard Burton, James Speke. David Livingstone. and Henry Stanley. In their conflicts with the Arabs and Africans. the British were usually successful because of their technological superiority. but many paid with their lives in the unhealthy climate. The British pLiblic followed their exploits enthusiastically and supported colonization schenies. Disraeli’s Conservatives in the 1870s expanded the British Empire in Africa; Gladstone’s Liberals were less enthusiastic.

Click here for a printable, PDF version of the following outline.

Outline

I. The British search for the source of the Nile was funded by the Royal Geographical Society (founded in 1830).

A. The expedition of Richard Burton and John Henning Speke located Lake Victoria in 1858.

1. Burton was among the most intellectually adventurous men of the age. a brilliant linguist (he reputedly mastered twenty-six languages), and a prolific writer. He was the first Englishman to visit Mecca (in disguise). He was a great collector of pornography, the first translator of the Arabian Nights. and a good amateur antliropo log ist.

2. Speke was a big game hunter, poor at languages. and less naturally curious about different cultures than Burton. He was a teetotaler. who resented Burton’s predilection for alcohol, experimentation with local drugs. and womanizing. (Burton resented Speke’s desire to stop to hunt big game along the way.)

3. Burton and Speke were very heavily laden and found their native bearers unreliable. They lost supplies and many of their bearers on the journey.

4. When Burton was too sick with malaria to travel. Speke discovered a lake, which he named Victoria, that he claimed was the. source of the Nile.

5. Speke was not able to prove his claim at the time. although it was later found to be true: sickness prevented him from seeking the river’s outlet from the lake.

B. The differences in Burton’s and Speke’s personalities caused severe tensions in their relationship.

1. Speke returned to Britain, leaving Burton behind in Africa after their expedition in 1858.

2. Burton asked Speke not to publicize his discovery of Lake Victoria until all doubts could be dispelled.

3. Speke, however, went to the Royal Geographical Society with their findings.

4. Burton felt betrayed. and the two men became enemies.

5. Burton disputed the significance of Speke’s discovery of Lake Victoria.

6. Burton wrote that Speke was not a qualified scientist and that although Speke had received all the glory, it was he. Burton, who had done the expedition’s important work.

7. In 1864. the Royal Geographical Society arranged for the two men to debate the issue.

8. Speke died in a shooting accident the day before he and Burton were scheduled to confront each other in the debate.

C. Speke and James Grant. on a second expedition (1859) that involved even more colorful adventures, confirmed that the river Nile originated in Lake Victoria.

II. David Livingstone blended idealistic mission work with exploration and became a national hero.

A. He trained as a doctor and intended to be a medical missionary in China, but warfare prevented him from entering the country.

B. His lack of success in converting Africans drew him, instead, to exploration.

1. He was the first European to cross the Kalahari Desert (1849).

2. He explored and charted the Zambesi River (1853—1855) and discovered what he named the Victoria Falls.

3. He took pride in traveling light and withstanding fearsome hardships.

4. Africans and Europeans alike were impressed by his charisma.

C. He carried on the search for the Nile’s source after Burton, Speke. and Grant.

1. The Royal Geographical Society funded his 1866 expedition.

2. Livingstone detested Burton for his “bestial immorality.”

3. He was also contemptuous of Grant, Speke, and other explorers.

4. He lost contact with the outside world on his 1866 expedition and it was rumored that he had died.

5. After four years of no news from Livingstone, James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald asked one of his journalists, Henry Stanley, to go and search for Livingstone.

D. Henry Stanley was a Welsh immigrant to the United States, who had fought on both sides in the American Civil War.

1. With the backing of the New York Herald, he undertook one of the most imperious of all expeditions into “darkest Africa,”

2. In 1871, Stanley “found” Livingstone at Ujiji and gave the immortal greeting “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

3. With Stanley’s help, Livingstone pursued an alternative theory -— that the Lualaba River was the Nile -— but Livingstone died in 1873.

4. Livingstone’s faithful African servant, Susi, brought his body back to the coast.

E. Henry Stanley resolved any remaining uncertainties between 1874 and 1877 -- he proved that the Lualaba was the Congo.

F. African adventurers’ tales continued to delight the British public.

1. Mary Kingsley showed the same daring as her male counterparts.

2. African adventure fiction, such as Rider-Haggard’s King Solomon's Mines, was popular.

III. British empire-builders wanted to dominate not merely the African coast, as in earlier generations, but all potentially useful interior parts of the continent.

A. The completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 created a new route to India, of great strategic significance.

B. The Ashanti War of 1874 demonstrated Britain’s determination to annihilate indigenous rivals.

1. Rival empires confronted each other, but Britain enjoyed overwhelming technological superiority.

2. The natives’ numerical superiority, greater immunity to disease, and knowledge of the terrain were still no match for British firepower.

IV. Britain extended its reach into the interior of southeni Africa.

A. Boer dissatisfaction at British governance (the Boers resented the British authorities’ request to free their slaves) had provoked the “Great Trek” of the 1830s and the foundation of the Boer Republics, Orange Free State, and Transvaal.

B. The discovery of diamonds led the British to annex Transvaal in 1877.

C. The Boers at first tolerated this, because they benefited from British efforts to neutralize Zulu power.

1. A British army suffered an unexpected defeat (at Isandhlwana) at the hands of the Zulu in 1879.

2. British military pride was salvaged at Rorke’s Drift (the subject of the classic British movie Zulu) and Ulundi.

D. With the Zulus defeated, the Boers became eager to throw off the British, whose protection they no longer needed.

1. The Boers had been led to expect that Gladstone would revoke DisraelFs annexation ofTransvaal. He did not.

2. Paul Kruger's coup against Britain succeeded at Majuba Hill (l88l).

3. Prime Minister Gladstone then reversed himself, rather than launch a big campaign, and Transvaal regained its independence.

4. The British claimed sovereignty over Transvaal, which would become politically volatile in the next twenty years with the discovery of massive gold reserves iii the Johannesburg area.

5. These tensions prefigured the Boer War (1899-1902).

Essential Reading:
Roy Lewis and Yvonne Foy, The British in Africa.
Roger Beck, The History of South Africa.

Supplementary Reading:
James Morris, Heaven's Command: An imperial Progress.
Donald Morris. The Washing 0f the Spears: A History of the Rise of the Zulu Nation.

Questions to Consider:
1. What motives led to British exploitation of Africa?
2. Why did the explorers’ and soldiers’ activities generate enthusiasm in Britain itself?

Mini-lecture 19: "Medicine and Public Health"

Mini-lecture 19: "Medicine and Public Health"

Scope: Medicine became a profession in the Victorian era, an era in which death at any age was common. In the 1830s. a three-tier medical system existed, divided among classically trained physicians at the top and. beneath them, surgeons and apothecaries, who took care of practical aspects of medical care and learned through apprenticeships. To learn their trade, doctors needed to dissect corpses. Their official source was the gallows, but grave robbers provided the necessary additional bodies. despite bitter popular opposition to the practice. Medical advances in the Victorian era included the application of anesthetics and antiseptics by Lister and others and the unification of the medical profession by legislation of 1858. More important in reducing the death rate, however, were the elementary steps taken in public health and sanitation. John Snow performed the classic public health experiment in 1854 by removing the handle of a pump that he had identified as the focus of a cholera outbreaks cities began to keep health statistics and find ways to provide fresh water supplies. Meanwhile, women struggled for admission to the profession, though niale doctors discouraged them for fear that practicing as doctors would upset their delicate reproductive systems.

Click here for a printable, PDF version of the following outline.

Outline

I. Sickness and death were constant companions in Victorian Britain.

A. Death came at any age, often suddenly.

B. Dying was a public event, and deathbed scenes were solemn social occasions.

II. In the early nineteenth century. medical men were divided into three categories, each with its own role and social rank.

A. Physicians were the most eminent.

1. They were graduates of Oxford or Cambridge.

2. They studied largely in the classics and mathematics.

3. They were licensed by the Royal College of Physicians.

B. Surgeons were of intermediate rank.

1. They had the status of skilled technicians.

2. They needed to be physically robust and not squeamish.

3. They were licensed by the Royal College of Surgeons.

C. Apothecaries were the lowliest medical men.

1. Provincial surgeons were often apothecaries, also.

2. Many medicines were poisons, including mercury.

3. It was widely believed that all ailments were related to bad blood. thus many medicines claimed to cure all ailments.

D. Numerous unlicensed healers also plied their trade.

III. Parliament reformed Britain’s medical system and created a situation of greater legal uniformity.

A. By act of Parliament in 1858, all doctors were included on a centralized list of practitioners. the Medical Register.

1. The Colleges, which had lobbied against the act, were retained but lost most of their earlier power

2. Inclusion on, or exclusion from, the Medical Register now marked a sharp professional divide.

B. The Anatomy Act of 1832 helped curb the problem of body snatching.

1. "Resurrection men” had earlier provided anatomy schools with the necessary bodies, because the gallows alone were insufficient.

2. Fear of postmortem dissection compounded poor people’s dread of the workhouse.

3. The fear of dissection was partly attributable to the fact that many people believed in resurrection of the earthly body -— an intact earthly body —- at the "Second Coming.”

C. The economic and social status of doctors continued to vary.

1. A minority became rich—the Harley Street consultants.

2. For most, practicing medicine remained a marginal business.

3. Doctors began to appear as heroic figures in literature —- a phenomenon previously unknown.

IV. Medicine and science combined to create genuine improvements in the midand late nineteenth century, though they disagreed over the best methods.

A. One group of doctors emphasized surgical improvements.

1. Joseph Lister helped spread the use of antiseptics to prevent infection of wounds.

2. Anesthetics, along with antiseptics, made surgery far more endurable and reduced shock. (James Simpson pioneered the use of chloroform.)

B. A second group believed that sanitation was more important than surgery in saving lives. The great London sanitary reformers, including Edwin Chadwick, John Simon. Edwin Lankester, and Florence Nightingale, led them.

C. Cholera epidemics after 1831 added urgency to the sanitationists’ work.

1. Doctors John Snow and William Budd had identified living organisms in water as the cause of the outbreaks.

2. Snow identified a pump as a cholera source in an 1854 epideniic and removed the pump handle —- an emblematic moment in the history of public health.

D. The logic of preventive public health spread gradually and always in the face of popular opposition. Small pox vaccinations were made compulsory in 1853.

V. Victorian doctors theorized about the nature of sex.

A. They warned young men that masturbation would lead to blindness and dementia.

B. They helped popularize the view that women were naturally frail and at the mercy of their reproductive systems.

1. They treated menstruation and pregnancy as forms of sickness.

2. Many male doctors campaigned passionately against women being permitted to become doctors.

3. Nevertheless, hardy pioneering women doctors did appear, beginning in the late 1870s.

Essential Reading:
Roy Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death, and Doctors in Britain, 1650—1900.
H.J. Morris, Cholera: 1832.

Supplementary Reading:
Anne Hardy. Health and Medicine in Britain Since 1860.
Mary P. English, Victorian Values: The Life and Times of Dr. Edwin Lankesier.

Questions to Consider:
1. What was the connection between medicine and social status in Victorian Britain?
2. Why was health so precarious in nineteenth-century Britain?

Mini-lecture 20: "Education"

Mini-lecture 20: "Education"

Scope: At the beginning of the Victorian era, more than half the British population could not read or write. By the end of it, nearly everyone had sonic elementary literacy. The spread of the vote (in the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884) underlined the need for an educated electorate. Parliament legislated to promote elementary schooling for all in 1871 and made it compulsory in 1880. Until then, a wide variety of educational practices had prevailed in a highly decentralized environment, from the simple rural danie school at one extreme, to the famous”public” (i.e.. private) schools, Eton and Harrow, at the other. Corporal punishment was integral to education at all levels and some of the public schools followed what now look like sadomasochistic practices. The high-minded reform of the public schools was led by Dr. Thomas Arnold at Rugby and fondly commemorated by his pupil Thomas Hughes in Torn Brown ‘s Schooldaj’s (1857). By the late Victorian era, sports, especially cricket, were emphasized more highly than the academic curriculum was. By 1900, most of the elite schools regarded their principal role not as an intellectual one but as the producers of Christian gentlemen. University education broadened in the Victorian era from the training of clergymen to a cautious embrace of the new sciences and humanities. The first colleges for women appeared at Oxford and Cambridge, but the students were subjected to strict chaperonage.

Click here for a printable, PDF version of the following outline.

Outline

I. Education was highly localized and varied in quality depending on location.

A. Dame schools gave rural children the elements ofan education.

1. Learning was almost entirely by memorization and recitation.

2. Masters and mistresses enforced discipline with a cane.

B. The Education Act of 1870 introduced universal education for children up to the age of thirteen.

1. Recent wars in America and Germany appeared to give the advantage to the more educated population.

2. Extension of the franchise (1867) made the need for wider education urgent.

3. The government hoped to economize and maintain local initiatives but found religious obstacles difficult to circumvent.

4. Further legislation of 1880 made attendance compulsory and cost-free.

C. The Secondary Education Act of 1902 created universal secondary schooling.

II. The famous British public schools were transformed in the Victorian era.

A. They were not public in the American sense, but private boarding schools.

1. Eton and Harrow were the most distinguished.

2. Keate and other headmasters practiced brutal flogging, but punishment was theatrical and ritualized.

3. Other public schools were scandalously brutal and negligent.

B. These schools experienced an era of reform following Thomas Arnold’s transformation of Rugby from 1827.

1. Arnold wanted to help boys conquer the evil in their nature and become Christian gentlemen.

2. Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) is a thinly fictionalized account of Arnold’s Rugby.

C. The cult of sports, especially rugby and cricket, was emphasized more strongly than the academic curriculum.

III. Britain gradually recognized the need for an improved higher educational system.

A. The Anglican monopoly of Oxford and Cambridge students ended in the 1850s.

B. Non-Anglican fellows (teachers) were also permitted after 1871.

C. Outstanding teachers, such as Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College. Oxford, began to seek out brilliant but poor students.

D. New universities began to teach science, which Oxford and Cambridge had neglected.

IV. A few Victorian women also began to seek educational opportunities.

A. London University admitted women in 1848.

B. The first women’s colleges at Oxford and Cambridge were founded in 1868 (Oxford) and 1869 (Cambridge). Women were excluded from degrees until 1920.

V. Education at home remained a popular alternative to schooling.

A. John Stuart Mill (1806—1873) was educated at home by his father, James Mill, beginning at the age of three.

1. Mill’s father was incredibly attentive to his son’s progress and held him to the highest standards.

2. Mill undertook very difficult work from the earliest age and claimed anyone else could do it, too.

3. As an eight-year-old, lie was also required to tutor his younger brothers and sisters in Latin.

4. He believed that the education lie had experienced could have been enjoyed, with profit, by any child.

B. Bertrand Russell (1872—1970) was educated first by his brother, then by tutors, and finally, at Cambridge University.

Essential Reading:
John Chandos. Boys Together: English Public Schools, 1800—1864.
G.F. Lamb. The English at School.

Supplementary Reading:
John Stuart Mill. Autobiography.
Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, Volume I.

Questions to Consider:
1. Why did the Victorians acquiesce to so much physical punishment of children?
2. What was the motive behind Victorian educational reforms and improvements?

Mini-lecture 15: "Progress and Optimism"

Mini-lecture 15: "Progress and Optimism"

Scope: In dramatic contrast to the poverty and misery of working-class England stood the mid-Victorian faith in science, technology, and progress. The Great Exhibition of 1851 symbolized this faith. Joseph Paxton’s daring design of the prefabricated iron and glass building in the center of Hyde Park set the tone, which was elevated even more by the royal opening ceremonies and the thousands of technically advanced exhibits. The exhibition’s six million visitors, including many from the lower classes, were well behaved; they silenced conservative mutterings that the event would be the focus of Chartist or revolutionary unrest. By the 1850s, at least some Victorians of all classes had been bitten by the self-improvement bug: their aspirations were embodied in Samuel Smiles’s influential book Self-Help, which outsold even Dickens. William Lovett, former Chartist leader, spent the later years of his life not in political agitation but in promoting education, sobriety, and thrift in working men. At the same time, Titus Salt, an enlightened Yorkshire entrepreneur, opened his model industrial community. Saltaire, offering a salubrious, alcohol-free setting: the newest in design and mechanization; and model houses for his workers.

Click here for a printable, PDF version of the following outline.

Outline

I. The Great Exhibition of Science and Industry (1851) was designed as a showpiece of British industrial progress.

A. A committee established by Prince Albert in 1849 reviewed 245 possible designs for the building and rejected all of them.

B. Joseph Paxton, Chatsworth estate manager, then sketched a magnified greenhouse design that the committee accepted.

1. Brunel’s design for the Paddington Station glass arches, 1849, had shown that big structures in these materials were viable.

2. The exhibition space enclosed a million square feet and was nearly
2,000 feet long.

C. Prefabrication, simple design concepts, and plate glass enabled the exhibition building, known as “The Crystal Palace,” to be erected in only six months by a crew of 2,600 men, enclosing several fully grown trees.

1. The abundance of interior light, made possible by improvements in glass technology, was revolutionary.

2. There were 14,000 exhibits. half of them British.

3. These included engineering innovations, such as steam locomotives and designs for new bridges: photographic equipment: early experiments in electricity; and arts and domestic inventions, both serious and whimsical (such as a collapsible piano).

D. Thousands of sparrows were attracted to the warm interior and threatened to spatter the exhibits.

E. The exhibition exceeded its promoters’ hopes, ultimately bringing six million visitors, including working people, who paid only one shilling on special days.

1. Tory fears that the exhibition would be the focus of antigovernment unrest were quieted.

2. The exhibition embodied the gospel of peace and the gospel of work, two pillars of mid-Victorian respectability.

F. The building was later dismantled and shipped in sections to Sydenham in south London, where it stood until destroyed by fire in 1936.

G. Profits (nearly 200,000 pounds) from the exhibition and sale of the Ciystal Palace were used to build the museum and university section of Kensington. Other cities emulated London’s Great Exhibition. including Chicago in 1893.

II. Mid-Victorian writers and manufacturers anticipated a steadily improving future and espoused theories of progress.

A. Samuel Smiles eulogized the hard-working, self-helping man.

1. First as a lecturer to working men in Leeds, then as an author, Smiles celebrated the achievements of Wedgewood, Stephenson, and other inventors.

2. In Self-Help (1858), he argued for the supremacy of hard work and thrift

3. An immense bestseller, Self-Help was more popular than the great Victorian novels.

4. Unlike Horatio Alger or Charles Dickens in their stories, Smiles offered no astonishing coincidences to bring wealth and fortune.

5. The book even sold well in translation around the world, and the Khedive of Egypt had inscriptions from it, in Arabic, around the walls of his Cairo palace.

B. Titus Salt (1803—1876) created a practical community.

1. His development of alpaca worsted in 1834, an inexpensive silklike fabric, gave him a secure place in the textile business.

2. Saltaire. founded in 1850 away from the unhealthy Bradford climate, aimed to give a healthy, godly, alcohol-free life to its workers.

3. It was the world’s first fully integrated cotton mill, concentrating all aspects of the work in one place.

4. Like Smiles, Salt believed in hard work, sobriety, punctuality, and thrift and continued to work long hours, even when he became rich.

5. As Mayor of Bradford, Salt created a drainage scheme to discourage cholera in 1848 and helped destitute families emigrate to America.

6. He won a seat in Parliament in 1859 but decided that life away from the factory didn’t suit him and resigned the seat two years later.

7. He believed in a harmony of interests between workers and owners and was sharply opposed to trade unions.

C. William Lovett (1800-1877) abandoned Chartism in favor of promoting working men’s education and self-improvement.

1. A flaming radical in early life, he led the London Working Men’s Association and was imprisoned for his Chartist activities in 1840.

2. His humane educational ideas were far ahead of their times.

3. He hated complexity, “the gothic,” and what he saw as ttìe church’s role in advancing superstition and obfuscation.

4. Unlike his contemporary, Karl Marx, however, Lovett did not believe in class conflict.

D. Numerous other Victorian writers expressed utopian hopes for the progress of science and technology.

1. Winwood Reade’s The Martydom of Man (1872) foresaw the scientific conquest of suffering in terms of the religious millennium.

2. George Henry Lewes believed science was replacing philosophy.

Essential Reading:
Gordon Marsden, Victorian Values.
J.B. Priestley, Victoria's Heyday.

Supplementary Reading:
Samuel Smiles, Self-Help.
L.T.C. Rolt, Victorian Engineering.

Questions to Consider:
1. How did the project of the Great Exhibition overcome technical and political obstacles?
2. Was the theory of progress compatible with a belief in human inequality?

Imporatant quotes from Mini-lecture 15:

The London Times editorialized that the place would become “a bivouac of old vagabonds,” and they went on to say,

“We can scarcely bring ourselves to believe that the advisers of the Prince care to connect his name with such an outrage to feelings and wishes of the metropolis.”

One Tory Member of Parliament, Colonel Sibthorp, said that the exhibition was going to bring nothing but foreign assassins and venereal disease to London.

“It is the greatest trash, the greatest fraud, and the greatest imposition ever attempted to be palmed upon the people of this country. The object of its promoters is to introduce among us foreign stuff of every description.”

Lord Reedsdale on his visit to the Crystal Palace:

“The Crystal Palace is so graceful, so delicate, so airy, that its translucent beauty remains graven on my memory as something which must defy all rivalry. When I first saw it, glittering in the morning sun, I felt as if Aladdin and the genie who was the slave of the lamp must have been at work on it. No mere human hands with hammers and tools could have wrought such a miracle. The general effective beauty and airy grace together with the delicate framework and the brilliancy of the whole structure was indelible.”

L.T.C. Rolt in his book, Victorian Engineering (1970) observes:

Today, browsing through old engravings and photographs of the exhibition, one is immediately struck by the extreme contrast between the engineering exhibits, which shared with the building that housed them a clean, functional beauty of line and proportion unmarred by an excess, and the galleries devoted to arts and manufactures. For the latter, for the most part, resembled some vast lumber room where a jetsam of miscellaneous objects, some pathetic, some ludicrous, but all representing a prodigal misuse of labor and ingenuity, lie together gathering dust. It is the great paradox of the Victorian Era that the same people who set a steam powered girdle around the earth, should carve for their queen’s palace at Osborne a garden seat out of a block of coal, admire a statue made of zinc, or wear cuffs spun and woven from poodle fur.

Queen Victoria herself writing in her diary:

“Some of the inventions were very ingenious, many of them quite Utopian. It has taught me so much that I never knew before and has brought me in contact with so many clever people I should not otherwise have known and with so many manufacturers whom I would scarcely have met unless traveled all over the country and visited every individual manufactory, which I could never have done.”

Samuel Smiles published Self-Help in 1858. In preface, he said:

“The book aims to re-inculcate those old fashioned, but wholesome lessons which cannot perhaps be too often urged that youth must work in order to enjoy, that nothing creatable can be accomplished without application and diligence. The students must not be daunted by difficulties but conquer them by patience and perseverance and that, above all, he must seek elevation of character without which craft he is worthless and worldly success is naught.”

Here is another quotation from Self-Help:

“Some call for Caesars, others for nationality, and others again for acts of Parliament. Whatever is done for men, and for classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus and necessity of doing for themselves. No law, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober. Such reforms can be enacted only by means of individual action, economy, selfdenial, and by better habits rather than by greater rights."

This did not mean that he was an absolutely unquestioning believer in laissez faire. Here is another beautiful passage from Samuel Smiles:

“When typhus or cholera breaks out, they tell us that nobody is to blame. That terrible nobody, how much he has to answer for. More mischief is done by nobody than by all the world besides. Nobody adulterates our food. Nobody poisons us with bad drink. Nobody leaves towns undrained. Nobody fills jails, penitentianes and convict stations. Nobody has a theory too, a dreadful theory. It is embodied in two words, laissez faire —- let alone. When people are poisoned with Plaster of Paris mixed with flour, let alone is the remedy. When people live in foul dwellings, let alone. Let wretchedness do its work. Do not interfere with death.”

As you entered into Saltairee, Titus Salt's famous utopian workplace, there was an archway, and the inscription on the archway was:

“Abandon Beer All Ye Who Enter.”

Numerous other Victorian writers expressed Utopian hopes for the future. In Winwood Reade’s book, The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Reade is particularly enthused by the way that science and technology advanced society:

“The god of light, the spirit of knowledge and divine intellect, is gradually spreading over the planet and upwards to the skies. Virtue will descend from heaven, surrounded by her angels and reign over the hearts of mean. Earth, which is now a purgatory, will be made a paradise. Hunger and starvation will be unknown, and the best part of human life will no longer be wasted in the tedious process of cultivating the fields. Disease will be extirpated. The courses of decay will be removed. Immortality will be invented, and then, the earth being small, mankind will migrate into space and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet and sun from sun. The earth will become a holy land which will be visited by pilgrims from all corners of the universe. Finally, men will master the forces of nature. They will become themselves the architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds. Man will then be perfect. He then will be a creator.”

George Henry Lewes, a much more level-headed man and a distinguished philosopher in his own right, was also so impressed that science and technology appeared to be moving forward, rather than covering the same ground. He said the problem with philosophy is that any amount of intense logical thought still in the end just leaves you with a set of ideas. Science and technology actually give you something needed for the first time:

“Instead of perpetually finding itself after years of gigantic endeavor returned to the precise point from which it started, science finds itself year by year, almost day by day, advancing step by step, each accumulation of power adding to the momentum of its programs. Onward and forever onward, mightier and forever mightier, rolls this wondrous tide of discovery.”

Mini-lecture 16: "Victorian Literature I"

Mini-lecture 16: "Victorian Literature I"

Scope: Several of the greatest British writers in history lived in the Victorian era and remain popular to the present, including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Charlotte, Emily, and Ann Bronte, and Thomas Carlyle. They lived in an age of growing literacy when greater numbers of people could make writing a livelihood, though it was still precarious for most. Their work gives us a vivid picture of Victorian life, showing us not only what the world looked like but also people’s hopes, dreams, and fears and their ideas about the past and the future. These writers were sometimes melodramatic; at other times, sharply realistic in their description of a world that was changing rapidly around them. Many of them were keen social critics, with Dickens leading the way in condemnation of corruption, hypocrisy, official folly, and the misunderstanding of children. They were moralists, too, generally arguing the superiority of middle-class values as opposed to those of the aristocracy and the working class. Their work was worldly—concerned more with happiness than with Christian doctrine.

Click here for a printable, PDF version of the following outline.

Outline

I. In the Victorian era, writing became a profession—patronage or independent wealth were no long vital.

A. Several thousand people made a living as writers of various kinds (though most were poor and depended on hack work, penny dreadfuls. or basic journalisni to survive).

B. The novelists Charles Dickens (1812-1870). George Eliot (1819-1890), and Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) made the most money, and all three authors were shrewd in business.

C. Serialization and “triple-decker” novels were business propositions.

D. Less successful writers worked very hard for smaller returns.

1. James Payn wrote 160 books, including 46 novels, but never earned as much as an ordinary lawyer.

2. Mrs. Oliphant produced 100 novels, at least 100 other books, and more than 1,000 articles in 50 years but never prospered.

E. Many writers relied on other jobs for income.

1. Trollope was a post office inspector (until he had published nineteen novels).

2. Matthew Arnold and Thomas Macaulay were government officials:
Charles Kingsley and John Henry Newman were churchmen.

F. Fiction gradually became more important and novelists were more venerated than before, partially displacing poets; Dickens and Eliot were lionized as guardians of the middle-class conscience.

G. Authors enjoyed few of the conveniences of their modern counterparts; work had to be handwritten and hand copied.

II. Although they often posed as guardians of moral conventions, some writers’ lives were unconventional.

A. Dickens drew on the events of his own life for his fiction.

1. His childhood included debtor’s prison and factory work.

2. He became a court and parliamentary reporter, then enjoyed instant success with his first novel, Pickwick Papers (1837).

3. One of the most striking features of Dickens’s writing is his power to depict life from a child’s viewpoint.

4. Queen Victoria read and admired most of Dickens’s books during her reign.

5. People unknown to him solicited his advice.

6. Dickens deserted his wife, Catherine, after the birth of their ten children in favor of actress Ellen Ternan.

7. He tried to explain and justify himself to his wide reading public in Household Words, a journal that he edited.

8. He kept Ellen, twenty-seven years his junior, as his secret mistress, never acknowledging her in public.

B. George Eliot lived with George Henry Lewes from 1854-1879, although he was married to another woman; after Lewes’s death, Eliot married the much younger John Walter Cross.

III. Victorian fiction is brilliantly inventive and imaginative.

A. Many novelists aimed for larger-than-life effects.

1. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre both challenges realism and submits to realism.

2. Dickens and Thackeray specialized in caricatured characters, not least by giving them such names as Pecksniff, Pumblechook, Micawber, and “Waterloo” Sedley.

3. These writers had a gift for depicting such faults as complacency and hypocrisy.

B. They portrayed the changes brought about by Britain’s shift from a chiefly agricultural society to a mainly industrial one.

1. Dickens, in Hard Times (1854), drew a vivid picture of the northern industrial towns and the struggle of working people for living wages and self-respect.

2. Mrs. Gaskell also contrasted the genteel country life of Cranford (1851-1853) with the harsh new industrial world of Mary Barton (1848).

C. They, and their poet-contemporaries, sentimentalized home life as a haven from the rushing commercial world.

1. Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House (1854-1861) personified the mood.

2. A domestic Christmas is sentimentalized in the description of Bob Cratchit’s household in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843).

IV. Victorian novels are nearly all preoccupied with social class and marriage.

A. They warn against the assumption that it is always good to marry a wealthy spouse: in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-1872), Fred Vincy is not morally worthy of Mary Garth, despite his greater wealth and social position.

B. Victorian novels appear satisfied with the paradox that marriage creates a happy ending, whereas characters who are already married are often at odds.

1. The Bishop and Mrs. Proudie in Barchester Towers (1857) are always at odds, with Mrs. Proudie nearly always victorious.

2. The fact that David Copperfield’s marriage to Dora Spenlow (in Dickens’s novel David Copperfield) and Dorothea Brooke’s marriage to Mr. Casaubon (in Eliot’s Middleinarch) come before the end shows at once that the marriages are a mistake.

V. Many novelists contributed to the humanitarian protest against social cruelty.

A. Child labor was one of the great reform issues of the era.

1. Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1862--1863) forced the middle-class public to consider the plight of chimney sweeps’ boys.

2. Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837-1839) protests against the workhouse system and the exploitation of children.

B. Disraeli’s Sybil (1845) was subtitled The Two Nations and describes Victorian Britain as a society polarized between rich and poor.

VI. A great deal of Victorian literature was about or for children.

A. Children often appear as morally superior to their elders.

1. Little Nell in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841) is too good to live.

2. The foundling child Eppy, in Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861), transforms the miserly old hand loom weaver.

B. The Alice books of Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodson), published in 1865 and 1871, subverted the Victorian “improving” tone.

C. Victorian children’s literature also saw a trend to anthropomorphize animals, as in the tales of Beatrix Potter, Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books (1894, 1895), and Lewis Carroll’s Alice books.

Essential Reading:
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield.
George Eliot, Middlemarch.

Supplementary Reading:
Herbert H. Tucker. ed.. A Companion to Viciorian Literature and Culture.
Anthony Trollope, The Warden.

Questions to Consider:
1. How was Victorian fiction dependent on commercial and industrial developments of its era?
2. In what ways were the Victorian novelists inconsistent in their moral messages?

Important Quotes from Mini-lecture 16:

Queen Victoria herself, when she was just coming to the throne, was an 18 or 19-year-old girl. She read Oliver Twist and then successor Nicholas Nickleby and thought they were absolutely wonderful. She tried to persuade Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, to read them. He was already in his late 50s and early 60s by then. Melbourne told the queen (as she records in her diary),

“It’s all on workhouses, coffin makers, and pickpockets. I don’t like that low, debasing style.”

Victoria says,

“We defended Oliver very much, but in vain.”

Lord Melbourne then said,

“I don’t like these things in reality and therefore I don’t wish to see them represented.”

Queen Victoria remained loyal to Dickens and read all of his books during the main part of her reign. When he died in 1870, she wrote,

“He had a large, loving mind and the strongest sympathy with the poorer classes. He felt sure that a better feeling and much greater union of the classes would take place in time. I pray earnestly that it may.”

Dickens observes of his character Mr. Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend (1865):

“Mr. Podsnap was well to do, and stood very high in Mr. Podsnap’s opinion. Beginning with a good inheritance, he had married a good inheritance and had thriven exceedingly in the marine insurance way and was quite satisfied, and he felt conscious that he set a brilliant social example in being particularly well satisfied in most things and above other things with himself. Thus, happily acquainted with his own merit and his own importance, Mr. Podsnap settled that whatever he put behind him, he put out of existence. There was a dignified conclusiveness, not to add, a convenience, in this way of getting rid of disagreeables which had done much in establishing Mr. Podsnap in a lofty place in Mr. Podsnap’s estimation.”

Coventry Patmore in The Angel in the House notes:

“There is something about that abode imbued with templelike repose, an air of life’s kind purposes pursued with ordered freedom sweet and fair, a tent pitched in a world not right, it seemed , whose inmates, every one, on tranquil faces bore the light of duties beautifully done.”

One reviewer in Fraser’s magazine wrote:

“The very mention of Dickens’ last number (The last number of these serials,) in any social gathering is sure to be the signal for a chorus of eager admiration. Go where you will, it is the same. There is not a fireside in the kingdom where the cunning fellow has not contrived to secure a corner for himself as one of the dearest and, by this time, one of the oldest friends of the family.”

From Disraeli's Sybil, The Two Nations (two characters are discussing—two upper-class characters):

“Our queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed."

“Which nation?” asked the young stranger, “because she reigns over two." The stranger paused. Agermont was silent but looked inquiringly. “Yes,” resumed the young stranger after a moment’s interval, “two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy who are ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings as if they were dwellers of different zones or inhabitants of different planets. They were formed by different breeding, fed by different food, and are ordered by different manners. They are not governed by the same laws.”

“Who do you speak of?” said Agermont hesitatingly.

“The rich and the poor.”