Final Exam: Literature and Culture of 19th Century BritainJeff Tibbetts
The Social Context of Victorian Literature
As I looked through the introduction to our anthology, “The Victorian Age”, I was struck by how the social environment of the Victorians influenced their writing. In particular, the passage headed “The Age of Energy and Invention” noted some of the technological advances that informed both George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. Both of these novels are heavily invested in the concept of advancing technology. With regards to Middlemarch, even though the time period is some forty years before the actual Victorian Age, new breakthroughs in medical science and engineering were priming even these country villagers with a rational and modern perspective, and the railroads threatened their simple lives. In Lady Audley’s Secret, the use of rapid transportation and a quick, reliable post system allowed Robert Audley to carry out his investigation in a new and thoroughly modern way.
Further on in the introduction we run into a section headed “The Woman Question”, which seems to have been quite a hot-button issue for the Victorians. Much of what we’ve read this semester deals either directly or indirectly with this subject. Some of it, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem “Jenny”, reveals a view of a woman on a pedestal. Other works, like Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem “Lady of Shallot” give us a somewhat more conservative or Romantic retrospective look at women. The novels Middlemarch andLady Audley’s Secret also come to mind when thinking about women.
The final section of the introduction titled “The Role of Art in Society” deals with the changing form of the artist both in literature and the fine arts. This, of course, brings up the Decadent movement, including Arthur Symons’s essay titled “The Decadent Movement in Literature” as well as Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. These are in contrast to the more conservative views of art as espoused by such critics as Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin.
This introduction acts both as a primer and as a summary of the Victorian age. I’ll go through each section and compare what the introduction says about Victorian England with what one can find in the poetry and literature of the age.
The first section of the introduction that I thought was well-represented in our readings was the section on technology. There were several phrases that I believe speak directly to our texts. The Victorian obsession with the rail system is summed up well here: “The ‘newness’ of Victorian society—its speed, progress, and triumphant ingenuity—was epitomized by the coming of the railway” (Anthology 1012). In Middlemarch, this was an important element towards the end of the novel, as the coming of the rail system promised to both advance and destroy the town, depending on one’s viewpoint. In the confrontation with the mob of farmers out to harass the men taking measurements for the coming railroads, Fred says: “Somebody told you the railroad was a bad thing. That was a lie. It may do a bit of harm here and there […]. But the railway’s a good thing” (Eliot 445). This is the question that many Victorians were facing. Is the sum-total of benefit/damage positive or negative? A bit later, in Lady Audleys Secret, the railway is depicted more positively, if somewhat pragmatically. The anthology mentions that “the journey from London to Edinburgh that had taken two weeks in 1800 now took less than a day” (Anthology 1012), and Robert often takes quick trips all over England. The ease with which he does this is characterized by the fact that what would have been quite a committed trip before was now simply routine, he simply “packed his portmanteau; jumped into a cab; and reached the railway station within an hour of his receipt of Alicia’s letter, which had come by the afternoon post” (Braddon 233). The rapidity of transportation and the mail system was changing the way that British people were living, “linking once remote parts of the country into a single economy and culture” (Anthology 1012). When Lady Audley felt the need, she could easily send her maid on an errand: “I want you to go to London by the first train to-morrow morning to execute a little commission for me. You may take a day’s holiday afterwards, as I know you have friends in town” (Braddon 95-6), and the fact that her servant even had friends in London, some distance away when forty years earlier she may never have left the town where she worked.
The railroads were seen by some as an example of the problems caused by all of England’s industrialization. The modern rail system “irrevocably altered the face of the landscape” (Anthology 1012), and many people didn’t appreciate this destruction of a beautiful landscape. To go back to Middlemarch, there’s a lot of meaning that one can extract from the conflict between Fred and the angry mob. One of the prevailing thoughts about the “railroad people” was that they were up to no good. “The least they pretended to do was that they were going to cut Lowick Parish into sixes and sevens” (Eliot 442). Dividing up this area that was quite closely knitted together would be a serious change, and the influx of modernity to this country town was not looked at as such a good thing by a lot of the villagers. It wasn’t something that could be helped, though, and people like Fred saw this, and also how it would be futile to try and stop it. He tells the mob: “Now, my lads, you can’t hinder the railroad: it will be made whether you like it or not. And if you go fighting against it, you’ll get yourselves into trouble” (Eliot 445). This was true of any person in Middlemarch, or any other person in England. Change was coming, and there was little one could do about it.
The next section of the introduction that I found interesting was the way in which views of women were changing. Several of the books and poems that we read showed this—some as a longing for the tradition of the past and some as a progressive view of the future role of women. The anthology tells us that “throughout much of Victoria’s reign, women had few opportunities for higher education or satisfying employment” (Anthology 1020). This restriction is felt in Middlemarch. Even though the story is set several decades before the Victorian age, the state of women as dependent on men was much the same. A woman’s future depended in large part on a good marriage, and a bad marriage was seen as an especially horrible fate for a woman: “Oh, if she took the wrong man! […] Marriage is always bad then” (Eliot 437). Women were also expected to be “domestic and pure, selflessly motivated by the desire to serve others rather than fulfill her own needs” (Anthology 1020). This traditional view of women can be seen in the way that Lydgate thought about the benefits of marriage: “Lydgate felt sure that if ever he married, his wife would have that feminine radiance, that distinctive womanhood which must be classed with flowers and music, that sort of happy beauty which by its very nature was virtuous, being moulded only for pure and delicate joys” (Eliot 154). This elevation of women onto pedestals did much to hold them back, even while appearing to be kind to them. We also see this in Lady Audley’s Secret, when Robert (a self-confessed misogynist) observes this about women: “Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea. The most feminine and most domestic of all occupations imparts a magic harmony to her every movement, a witchery to her every glance” (Braddon 242). In that novel, Lady Audley rejects her station as based on her marriage, and she builds a new life. This is a crime against the very social order of the Victorians: “A bold woman, […] a wicked woman, who did not care what misery she might inflict upon the honest heart of the man she betrayed” (Braddon 284). While this was all happening, another sort of woman was coming into the light of society: the prostitute.
The anthology tells us that “low wages and unemployment drove tens of thousands of girls into prostitution” (Anthology 1021). This is one of the negative effects of an industrial revolution. This growing group of prostitutes filled some peoples’ imaginations with an interesting conflict. In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem “Jenny”, the persona’s curious mix of admiration and pity and revulsion of the prostitute is a fitting summary of how society looked at them: he goes from “Lazy laughing languid Jenny, / Fond of a kiss and fond of a guinea,” to “Poor handful of bright spring-water / Flung in the whirlpool’s shrieking face; / Poor shameful Jenny, full of grace” (lines 1,2, 16-18). His opinion of her is conflicted, at the very least.
Women in Victorian society were also beset by the new “science” of “the medical establishment [that] backed the conventional view that women were physically and intellectually inferior, a ‘weaker sex’ that would buckle under the weight of strong passion, serious thought, or vigorous exercise” (Anthology 1020). One reading of Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shallot” is that she died because she tried to leave her womanly work and see the world. This could be supported by this passage: “There she weaves by night and day / A magic web with colors gay. / She has heard a whisper say, / A curse on her if she stay / To look down to Camelot. / She knows not what the curse may be, / And so she weaveth steadily,” (lines 37-43). She doesn’t seem to understand why she just weaves all day, but she knows that something bad will happen if she stops.
The last section of the introduction that I think was pertinent to our reading was the section about the prevailing views about art. The things that we read in class go from the very traditional or retrospective, such as Tennyson’s poems “Ulysses”, “Tithonus”, and even his Idylls of the King, to the Decadent work of Wilde or Pater. Though the introduction doesn’t talk too much about the Decadent movement, it’s easy to read between the lines of something like: “Because Victorian times seemed so thoroughly to break from the past, ‘modern’ became a common but often prejudicial word” (Anthology 1029) and see how the work of Decadent artists were a reaction to the changing times. Their reaction against the work that was thought of as “classic” was a defining characteristic: “[The Decadent movement,] the most representative literature of the day—the writing which appeals to, which has done so much to form, the younger generation—is certainly not classic, nor has it any relation with that old antithesis of the Classic, the Romantic” (Symons). Another aspect of this reaction was against the rigidity of the society. “In an era of practicality, art declared its freedom by positing its sheer uselessness” (Anthology 1031), and people like Oscar Wilde picked up on this with gusto. Wilde delivered this in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray: “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely” (Wilde 42).
The other side of the artistic issue promotesan obsession with, and a return to, the past of both Britain and Roman and Greek cultures. The anthology says that: “Many writers […] preferred to indulge […] in what Tennyson called the ‘passion of the past’” (Anthology 1029). This is obviously a motivation behind much of Tennyson’s work, as well as Matthew Arnold’s critical essays. In his essay “Culture and Anarchy”, Arnold talks at length about how British society needs more of the Hellenic spirit: “Greek art, again, Greek beauty, have their root in the same impulse to see things as they really are, inasmuch as Greek art and beauty rest on fidelity to nature,—the best nature,—and on a delicate discrimination of what this best nature is” (Arnold in Anthology 1590). This celebration of the classic cultures was something that came through in many of our readings. Many of the poems were set either in Greek or Roman myths, and many others were set in the Renaissance or Medieval time periods (such as Browning’s dramatic monologues and Tennyson’s Idylls). This could be because “many authors saw in earlier times a more ethically and aesthetically coherent world” (Anthology 1029). This is fairly overt in the case of John Ruskin’s essay, “The Stones of Venice”, where he asserts “that Gothic architecture has external forms and internal elements. Its elements are certain mental tendencies of the builders, legibly expressed in it; as fancifulness, love of variety, love of richness, and such others” (Ruskin in Anthology 1476). He applies a certain morality to architecture, and the implication is that modern architecture lacks a positive moral message. Ruskin and others saw certain ideals in the cultures of the past that were seemingly falling away from British society.
Reading the introduction again is a great way to put some of our readings into perspective. The zeitgeist of the era exerted a powerful influence over the writers of the day, and comparing the historical account of the times to the literature reveals a clear congruence of many of the ideas or concepts. Everything that we have read for this class takes on a deeper meaning when taken into context of the society that produced the writers. This is even evident in many of the works that aren’t set in Victorian times, but before it.
Works cited outside of the anthology
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley’s Secret. Natalie Houston, Ed. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2003.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Gregory Maertz, Ed. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2004.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Norman Page, Ed. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2002.
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