The Victorian Age

• 1837-1901

• Industrial Revolution

• Age of empire

• Technological progress (railways, telegraph, photography)

• Telegraph -> a device to transmit messages

• Scientific discoveries (Darwin / theory of evolution, astronomy, geology)

• sense of a new era - historical consciousness

• Action instead of introspection

  -> sense of progress and sense of loss

• Victorian values: earnestness (Ernsthaftigkeit), moral responsibility, domestic propriety (häusliches Eigentum)

The Victorian Age can be divided in three periods

• early Victorian period (1830-1848): “The Age of Reforms” + “Time of troubles”

• The mid-Victorian period (1848-1870): “Age of Improvement”

• The late Victorian period (1870-1901): Decay of Victorian values

1832 the first great reform act

• male became the right to vote (who owns property that is worth more than 10 pound annual rent)

• The electoral system in the United Kingdom wasn’t representative

• Many “rotten boroughs” with very few voters had significant political influence, while cities like a Manchester and Birmingham where more people lived, had no representation at all

1867 second reform act

1884 third reform act

1918 right to vote for women

• changed the poverty relief system in England

• was a district in central London

• Overcrowded

• It's residents lived in slums

• Synonymous of poverty and crime

• it had six main aims

• Division of the United Kingdom into equal electoral districts

believes that poetry:

• should address social problems

• Has an ethnical, moral and religious function

• Deploys sentimental strategies and devices to this purpose

• Writes as poet-prophet

• international, famous author of the Victorian Age

• Was neglected in the 20th century because of modernist bias against sentimental aesthetics

• sentimental protest poem

• Central motif “crying”:

  • crying as “powerful imaginative site”

  • Different kinds of crying

  • Different functions of crying

• Central motif “the wheels”:

  • as image of the oppressive system

  • In relationship to religious rhetoric and biblical language

  • Psychological dimension of the motif

• drastic comparisons (children and animals / children and old men)

• Pathos and pathetic diction

• Sound quality of the poem

• Metaphor of the family:

  • in the first lines: oh my brothers…, against their mothers…, children weeping…

    • how does the meaning of this metaphor change throughout the poem?

• agriculture, trade and industry flourished

  -> economic prosperity

• Conditions of the working class gradually improved

• Scientific discoveries

• Consolidation of the British empire

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• The railway: new transportation system

• Crystal Palace as an example of modern functional architecture

• Exhibits demonstrate demonstrate the triumph of Victorian technology

• Charles Darwins theory of evolution + natural selection undermined gods status