Littérature de Grande-Bretagne

Littérature de Grande-Bretagne

The Victorian Age

• The period of Queen Victoria’s reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901.
• There was a change from the rationalist character of the Georgian period and a greater emphasis on romanticism and mysticism.
• The Victorian age is generally associated with an extreme conservatism as regards social interaction and sexuality.
• They were typically described as living boring lives and as being very repressed in regard to sexuality, family values, humor etc.
• They were generally intolerant of social deviants (criminals, homosexuals etc.), and it was a society in which the middle class dominated.
• They were generally industrious, hard working.

Alice in Wonderland: sense of morality, childhood

• The Rise of Britain

• In 1887 Mark Twain was visiting London during the Diamond Jubilee celebrations honoring the sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria’s coming to the throne.
• “British history is two thousand years old,” he said, “and yet in a good many ways the world has moved farther ahead since the Queen was born than it moved in all the rest of the two thousand put together.”
• This was indeed a period of great expansion in British history as England was brought to its highest point as world power.

• London As a Center of Influence

• Because of the industrial revolution, London had grown rapidly
• Developments such as power, iron ships, printing presses, farmers ‘combines, telegraph, intercontinental cable, photography, anesthetics, and universal compulsory education pointed to the rapid change in English society.
• Because England was one of the first countries to become industrialized, it could take advantage of its position to make a place for itself in the world.

• Dynamic Change

• This rapid change had effects on Victorian Life. One historian describes it as follows: “The period is one of strenuous activity and dynamic change, of ferment of ideas and recurrent social unrest, of great inventiveness and expansion.”
• Consider that such rapid change had a profound impact on the people of the time. Although many Victorians were pleased with the worldwide success of England, they also suffered from a sense of loss, and felt a sense of displacement in a world made strange by new technologies and structures.
• Victorians are often described as experiencing a mix of anxiety and satisfaction. The period is full of contradictions.

• The Three Victorians Periods

• The Victorian age is generally divided into three periods:
• The Early Period: (1832-1848)
• The Middle Period: (1848-70)
• The Late Victorian Period: (1870-1901)

• The Time of Troubles

• This period was often called “The Time of Troubles” because it corresponds to the passing of a Reform Bill in 1832 which satisfied the demands of the middle classes.
• For example, only men who owned property worth more than ten pounds in annual rent could vote
• The voting population didn't include the working classes until 1867

• The Industrial Revolution

• The Industrial Revolution was the period in which machines and factories were increasingly being used for production.
• This involved a shift from an agrarian society to an industrial society, and many people moved to the cities for work.
• Class conflicts and the prosperity of the middle class evident in early Victorian society came from the time of the Industrial revolution. (a period that spans 1750-1850)

• Karl Marx and Frederich Engels

• The industrial revolution, with its massive factories and systems of mass production also gave rise to theories about class.
• Engels had observed the poverty and difficult working conditions in textile factories in Manchester, and he published Condition of the Working Classes in England (1844) in which he criticizes capitalism
• Karl Marx and Frederich Engel published The Communist Manifesto in 1848, partially in reaction to industrialization and its results

• Religious Controversy in Mid-Victorian times

• A major concern in Mid-Victorian times was the conflict between religion and science.
• Recent discoveries by geologists about the age of the earth. Robert Lyell's Principles of Geology along with the Robert Chambers book Vestiges of Creation (1843-46) brought Victorians to challenge their idea of the origins of the human race.

• Women in the Victorian Age

• Women in the Victorian age did not have the right to vote, (You could be queen (Queen Victoria, who was an anti-feminist) but you could not vote or hold property
• *Women did not earn the right to vote until 1918 in Great Britain (France = 1944)
• Women could not pursue a person in law and married women could not own or inherit property until the Married Women’s Property Acts were passed (1870-1908)
• Victorian, middle-class women were supposed to be virtuous, cultivated, modest and could only have sex with one man: their husband
• The perfect woman was a good wife, mother and homemaker. We often hear the expression the “Angel in the House” (from a poem by Coventry Patmore in which he idealizes his wife)
• The man was the head of the household and made all decisions
• Current social theories of the time contributed to this idea: For example, Darwinism, and the “survival of the fittest” along with the idea that biology determines our competencies, make women appear biologically unfit to assume the same tasks as men.
• Women from middle-class families could seek respectable work as a school teacher or governess
• Otherwise there were few opportunities for a woman to earn her own living
• However there were more and more women participating in industry because of the Industrial Revolution
• Feminist notions began to be communicated in circles of middle-class women
• The women’s suffrage movement made progress during this time in British history

• The Subjection of Women-John Stuart Mill

• In 1869 John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women, an essay that challenged the current status of women in society
• He argued for reforms in the privileges of men, suggesting the same privileges be accorded to women
• Mill was convinced that humanity would be more sophisticated and advanced if every member of society was given access to education (thus including women)
• He felt all people should be able to vote and be autonomous in society, both morally and intellectually
• Mill’s position as member of parliament helped him fight for women’s suffrage

• Women’s Educations

• Women’s education was one of the subjects Mill also concentrated on.
• There were no women’s colleges (university level education) until 1848 when the first women’s college in London was established
• Women were limited to studying at special Academies that taught them how to be cultivated wives and mothers
• By the end of Victoria’s reign, women could take degrees at twelve universities or university colleges and could study, although not earn a degree, at Oxford and Cambridge

• Childhood in Victorian Times

• Another important change in Victorian times was W.E Foster’s Education Act of 1870. This law allowed for the creation of a compulsory educational system open to all.
• It was a key element in introducing working class children to education
• Being a child in Victorian times was a violent experience for working class children who were submitted to various forms of hardship and cruelty
• Many children were forced to work in factories (Work in mills, mines and in agriculture.)

• Middle Class Children

• Some children came from middle-class homes and were subjected to the hardships of lower-class children.
• Some critics say that the Victorian Age “invented” the idea of childhood as we understand it today.
• The idealization of childhood: Represent humanity in Its most natural and innocent state.
• For ex: Dickens was very interested in working class childhood.

• Family

• The notion of family values is also attributed to the Victorian Times
• Even Queen Victoria promoted a family ideal with her marriage to Albert in 1840
• The new means of communication allowed for images of Queen Victoria and her family to be widely visible
• The ideal family unit became a middle-class image with women playing a domestic role as “angels in the house”

• Victorian Theatre

• Victorian theatre is view as a television for the Victorians.
• Victorians would often go to the theatre, sometimes to high quality theatre, and sometimes also burlesques, extravaganzas, scenic and modified versions of Shakespeare’s plays, melodramas, pantomimes, and musicals.
• Many writers also wrote plays, but there were different ranges in the quality of their writings

• Victorian Values and self-censorship

•  Victorian values were particularly strict, as mentioned above, and writers had to adjust to the limitations imposed by predominant values
• There was a tension between these values and the freedom given by writing that affected much of the writing of the time
•  There was also social pressure on writers who had a strong social role as “seers” who had a responsibility to propose forms of instruction in their writing, yet there was little consensus as to the exact nature of this instruction

• Children’s Literature in Victorian Times: “The Golden Age”

•  The Victorian age from the 1860s (mid-late Victorian period) onwards is generally considered to be the first ‘Golden Age’ of children’s literature  

• Victorian Writers and the novel

• Charles Dickens
• William Thackeray Vanity Fair
• George Eliot The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Middlemarch (1872)
• Thomas Hardy Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895)
• The Brontë Sisters (Anne, Emily and Charlotte Brontë): Charlotte: Jane Eyre (1847) Emily:  Wuthering Heights (1847) Anne: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

• The Fairy Tale

• The fairy tale was central to Victorian literature for children and variations of this genre were collected, edited, adapted, re-written, and created.
• Fairy tales, folklore, fables, nursery rhymes and legends were all popular with children throughout the nineteenth century.

• Novelists Turning to Children’s literature

• John Ruskin: The King of the Golden River (1841, 1850)
• William Makepeace Thackeray: The Rose and the Ring (1855)
• Christina Rossetti: Goblin Market (1862)
• Charles Kingsley: The Water Babies (1863)
• Charles Dickens: The Magic Fishbone (1868)
• Mary de Morgan: On a Pincushion and Other Tales (1877)
• George Macdonald: published many works
• Oscar Wilde: The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)

• Victorian children’s literature and social values

• Overall, Victorian literature for children showed a preoccupation with future of Great Britain and Its children.
• There was a strong reappearance of the fairies in Victorian literature.
• These fairies appeared during a time when British society, and the place of children, were changing at a rapid rate.
• Fairies were a means to protest the conditions in England.
• The Victorians used and amplified this social dimension.
• Many Victorian fairy tales were contradictory, but they allowed writers to ask new questions about social views, religion, authority, sexual identity, and the role of art (particularly art for children)
• For late Victorian writers for children fairy tales allowed them to create other, more utopian, worlds.
• This allowed them to critique reality while celebrating utopian visions.
• The literature was often aimed at both child and adult readers+

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• Catherine Sinclair

• Catherine Sinclair exemplifie political engagement. 
• Catherine Sinclair (1800-1864) was born and educated in Edinburgh, Scotland.
• She worked as a secretary for her father, Sir John Sinclair, a rich philanthropist and politician for many years
• She began her career as a writer in writing a traditional, moralistic novel for children: Charlie Seymour; or the The Good Aunt and the Bad Aunt (1832)
• She also published two novels for adults.
• Her major work was Holiday House (1839) which was intended for children.

Holiday House (1839)

• It tells the story of two careless, wild children who make mistakes and aren’t punished.

• After their mother’s death, they were abandoned by their father and now live with their Uncle David and Grandma Harriet Graham, who are raising them.

• Uncle David’s story is meant to show a different way of educating children, that is using the imagination to gain access to moral decision-making.
• It also makes a statement about Christian goodness.
• As Jack Zipes says: “Almost all the fairy tales of the 1840s and 1850s use allegorical forms to make a statement about Christian goodness in contrast to the greed and materialism that are apparently the most dangerous vices in English society.”
• An allegory is: “A specific form of extended metaphor, in which the characters and actions of a text have further meanings outside the text. The story can therefore be read on two levels:  that of the text, of the surface story, and that of the further significance which may be political, religious, social etc.
• It is a very didactic, yet literary, form of communication about ideas. Sinclair experiments with the allegorical fairy tale  
• Yet it is a new form of didactic literature that uses pleasure to teach and allows children to experience transgression in fiction as a form of pleasure.
• Because of this, Catherine Sinclair’s Holiday House (1839) is often seen as a turning point in children’s fiction, a sort of “bridge between earlier didactic literature and the more liberated, later work of Lewis Carroll and others”
• Uncle David gives them a story because the children kinda see him as a role model. If they see a troublemaker like they are, giving them a lesson, they may listen to it more. The story is his particular way of teaching: while Crabtree whips the children, he entertains them with a fairy tale and give them a lesson at the time. One of the morale of the tale is that one mustn't be idle, because at the end Master no-book become depressed with doing nothing, quote "no sweetmeats were worth the trouble of eating, nothing was pleasant to play at and in the end he wished it were possible to sleep all day, as well as all night.

• John Ruskin

• He was an only child
• He was the son of John James and Margaret Ruskin, a financially comfortable middle-class family
• He was educated at home and traveled extensively with his family. This exposed him to many cultures, art and architecture.
• He published Modern Painters a work in which he defended the work of British painter J. M.W. Turner. Needed to be “true to nature”
• He became one of the best-known arts and social critics of Victorian times
• He supported the work of experimental painters and architects of this period
• Many critics have commented on the quality of his writing about painting
• Ruskin’s preoccupation with nature and art also led to preoccupation with the negative aspects of industrialization and the transformation of English Society.
• Ruskin was known for being a committed socialist, although his socialism was described as being “eccentric”
• He was opposed to the egotism, materialism and greed of British society in his time. His Political Economy of Art (1857) expressed these ideas.
• He introduced unusual Christian socialist ideas in courses at the Working Men’s College in London and also at the University of Oxford
• He was opposed to strict moralism in fairy tales and said that the Grimm tales possessed “true historical value”
• He felt a moral education was best accomplished by appealing to the imagination.

John Ruskin The King of the Golden River

MOODLE

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• Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

• He was very familiar with the fairy tale tradition.
• He had read The Arabian Nights, The Tale
• MOODLE
• Dickens used fairy-tale motifs and themes in his Christmas Books (1843-48)

Charles Dickens The Magic Fishbone

• The Magic Fishbone is a fairy tale by Alice Rainbird
• Alicia is a 7 years old girl who is the eldest of 19 children
• She is the daughter of a king and a queen, and she takes care of 17 of the children who all take care of the baby
• One day her father, the king, buys some salmon from Mr. Pickle

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• Lewis Carroll

• Real name: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
• He was a mathematician tutor
• His book “Alice” is very famous
• His name was a game → Charles Lutwidge = Carolus Ludovicus (in latin) = Carroll Lewis (in English)
• He became one of the masters of Victorian photography

Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

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