Who Were the Victorians?

Queen Victoria 1837-1901

__The images of strife and isolation of the "ignorant armies clashing" on a "darkling plane"__ is surprisingly different than _the insistence of a shared experience through word placement and rhyme scheme_ in terms of _reasoning____. By this, I mean _the reasoning is__ is __of a total lack of connection marked by warfare and not seeing each other__ in __the darkling plain___ while there is a striking difference in _the word placement and rhyme scheme___ in terms of __making a shared experence central and able to assert itself__. Noticing this pattern of ___looking at the immediate feelings versus the reflection___ suggests that ____" we/ Find also in the sound a thought"__ is also a part of this collation because it _____ suggests a return to connection through an ancient experience__.

cnnxn to oustide world: "on the french coast" "Come to the window" "Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean"

repetitions: "Begin, and cease, and then again begin"

does not follow regular rhyme/scansion "Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight" BUT uses basically iambic and moves towards some rhyme scheme

placement: "we"

"Of human misery;we/

Find also in the sound a thought,"

http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/snod/vicagetimeline.html

• What does X mean?

• What is the significance of X?

• What conditions, influences or events caused X to be as it is? How or why did it become what it is?

• What is the process that led to X? What were the steps in the process? How did that process take place?

• How could X have happened differently, and what might be the effects of changes to the process? What is the significance of this process?

• Who is the audience for X? What is that audience’s expectations, and how are those expectations

addressed?

• How does X work in the text? Does it convey meanings other than its literal definition? Does it mean different things to different audiences? How would the text change if “X” were replaced with a synonym?

• What caused x to happen as it did? Where did it happen, who was involved and what was the outcome? What might have caused it to happen differently? What controversies surround the event?

• What is the effect of X? How does it achieve that effect? What details contribute to the overall effect? Might it have different effects on different audiences? What choices did the author/artist make in order to achieve that effect?

• What are the various opinions about X?

• What disagreements might circulate around X?

• What are the common assumptions about X?

Is there any overlap between positions about X? What are the reasons for each opinion?

Age of Novels: Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Anthony Trollope....

Poetry: Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold

Essays: Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin

Science: Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer

Victorian Realism: A Defining Characteristic

Who Were the Victorians?

Defining Characteristics

• Progress
• Industrialism/Science
• Religion
• Colonialism
• Economics
• Class/Gender Upheaval
• Morality
• Communal Values

Terry Eagleton How to Read a Poem

For Further Reading....

"For all the great poetry and art produced by the romantic generations, many nineteenth-century readers and writers believed their approach tended towards egotism and excessive subjectivity. Nonetheless, at the same time that Thomas Carlyle proclaimed that his contemporaries should close their Byron and open their Goethe (which many of his readers reconfigured as "close Byron and read Carlyle"), they had passed a great divide — one of the central ones in Western intellectual and social history — and could not return to the elegant wit and scathing satire of the Augustans. As E. D. H. Johnson pointed out more than half a century ago in The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry (1952), the Victorian project involved finding literary and artistic means of bridging a series of what they understood to be binary oppositions: self and society, personal and political, subjective and objective. Above all, as Carlyle managed to do in Sartor Resartus, Tennyson in In Memoriam, and Dickens in Great Expectations, they had to find public uses for very private experiences without either becoming egotistical or makes themselves vulnerable. Thus, the necessity of developing the dramatic monologue and new forms of both autobiography and autobiographical fictions. In other words, the Victorians had to find a way to create a synthesis of what Abrams calls pragmatic and expressive forms of art. Characteristically Victorian literature therefore attempts bravely, and often successfully, to combine the individuality, originality, intensity, and above all sincerity of Wordsworth and Keats with publicly accessibility and social relevance of Pope and Johnson." George P Landow The Victorian Web (www.victorianweb.org)

“THIS Rector of Broxton is little better than a pagan!” I hear one of my readers exclaim. “How much more edifying it would have been if you had made him give Arthur some truly spiritual advice! You might have put into his mouth the most beautiful things—quite as good as reading a sermon.”

Certainly I could, if I held it the highest vocation of the novelist to represent things as they never have been and never will be. Then, of course, I might refashion life and character entirely after my own liking; I might select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman and put my own admirable opinions into his mouth on all occasions. But it happens, on the contrary, that my strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective, the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness–box, narrating my experience on oath.

George Eliot Adam Bede

http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/introduction-to-victorian-literature-overview-of-themes-style-and-authors.html

Browse:

http://www.victorianweb.org/

Wandering between two worlds, one dead

The other powerless to be born,

With nowhere yet to rest my head

Like these, on earth I wait forlorn

Matthew Arnold "Stanzas from Grand Charteuse"

'How Do You Like London?' Mr Podsnap now inquired from his station of host, as if he were administering something in the nature of a powder or potion to the deaf child; 'London, Londres, London?'

The foreign gentleman admired it.

'You find it Very Large?' said Mr Podsnap, spaciously.

The foreign gentleman found it very large.

'And Very Rich?'

The foreign gentleman found it, without doubt, enormement riche.

'Enormously Rich, We say,' returned Mr Podsnap, in a condescending manner. 'Our English adverbs do Not terminate in Mong, and We Pronounce the "ch" as if there were a "t" before it. We say Ritch.'

...'Our Language,' said Mr Podsnap, with a gracious consciousness of being always right, 'is Difficult. Ours is a Copious Language, and Trying to Strangers. I will not Pursue my Question.'

...

'It merely referred,' Mr Podsnap explained, with a sense of meritorious proprietorship, 'to Our Constitution, Sir. We Englishmen are Very Proud of our Constitution, Sir. It Was Bestowed Upon Us By Providence. No Other Country is so Favoured as This Country.'

'And ozer countries?--' the foreign gentleman was beginning, when Mr Podsnap put him right again.

'We do not say Ozer; we say Other: the letters are "T" and "H;" You say Tay and Aish, You Know; (still with clemency). The sound is "th"--"th!"'

'And OTHER countries,' said the foreign gentleman. 'They do how?

'They do, Sir,' returned Mr Podsnap, gravely shaking his head; 'they do--I am sorry to be obliged to say it--AS they do.'

'It was a little particular of Providence,' said the foreign gentleman, laughing; 'for the frontier is not large.'

'Undoubtedly,' assented Mr Podsnap; 'But So it is. It was the Charter of the Land. This Island was Blest, Sir, to the Direct Exclusion of such Other Countries as--as there may happen to be. And if we were all Englishmen present, I would say,' added Mr Podsnap, looking round upon his compatriots, and sounding solemnly with his theme, 'that there is in the Englishman a combination of qualities, a modesty, an independence, a responsibility, a repose, combined with an absence of everything calculated to call a blush into the cheek of a young person, which one would seek in vain among the Nations of the Earth.'

Having delivered this little summary, Mr Podsnap's face flushed, as he thought of the remote possibility of its being at all qualified by any prejudiced citizen of any other country; and, with his favourite right-arm flourish, he put the rest of Europe and the whole of Asia, Africa, and America nowhere.

Charles Dickens Our Mutual Friend