Victorian Age: Contradictions, Novels, and Social Injustice
Corresponds to Queen Victoria’s age (1837-1901).
There was economic development: growth of industry and manufacturing. Consequently there was a migration to the cities.
Believed that: The poor were poor because they were lazy people, and the rich were rich because they were hard working or talented.
The Victorian Compromise
The Victorian age was a contradictory era because on the one hand was an age of progress and on the other it was characterized by poverty and injustice. The Victorians were great moralists and promoted a code of values that reflected the world as they wanted it to be, based on hard working, respectability, and charity. These values were refined by the upper and the middle classes, but they were of equal application to all society.
Middle class ideas dominated Victorian family life. The family was patriarchal, where the husband represented the authority and the women only had to educate the children and take care of the house. The society promoted female chastity and sexuality was generally repressed in every form.
The Victorian Novel
In this period there was a relationship between writers and readers.
Large poems were written in this time because people of Victorian age liked to read and spent a lot of time for this. There were circulating libraries: middle class could read and could take books in this.
There was also the publisher of many periodicals, megasine by episode, which allowed to maintain contact with the public. The novel became the main form of entertainment (were read with the family and couldn’t talk about sex or to be horror). They had a lot of expectations.
Themes: abandon the children and live in the cities. The themes were mirrors of society of time, the reality. They reflected the social changes, like the industrial revolution, the fight for democracy and the growth of towns. The writers knew the evils of their society and denounced it. The objective was to make people aware of social injustice.
At the time it was not easy to publish, and some women used a male pseudonym.
Main Features
– omniscient narrator
– The setting was the city, which was the symbol of industrial civilization and also the expression of anonymous lives
– The plot was long (often complicated by subplots (piu trame))
– The writers concentrated on the creation of characters and their inner life
– Retribution for good and punishment for evil were to be found in the final. Also the adventures and incidents had to be explained and justified
Charles Dickens
was born in south England in 1812. His father was imprisoned for debt and he had to go to work at the factory. At twenty years old he began to work as a reporter for a newspaper. After his first story he was immediately followed by the Pickwick Papers, which were in episodes.
After this success Dickens started a full-time career as a novelist, writing very fast and increasing complexity.
Their most important characters, like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Little Dorrit became symbols of an exploitation of childhood.
He was the first author that talked about social issues, his genre is the social novel.
Oliver Twist
Childhood in the Victorian Age was generally a cruel experience. A lot of children from the working class died early or were obliged to work in factories and mines. Others became criminals. Some government acts tried to improve children’s working conditions by limiting the work’s hours. Dickens was obsessed with children, whom he presented as either innocent or corrupted by adults. At the beginning, they live
through a negative situation but later rise to happy endings.
The most important setting is London, especially in the workhouses that were managed by the church. The poor lived in dirty, in a permanent state of fear. The conditions prevalent in the workhouses were appalling and the people had a hard regulation: they were forced to work, families were separated and rations of food and clothing were small.
The Education
In early Victorian England the children received a different education according to their social class. The boys and the girls from rich families receive a full education. This education was different because girls received an education to be mothers, good housewives and to take care of children, family and house (private teacher). The boys were sent to schools and they learned to become businessmen. They studied math, biology, Latin,..
For the poor classes children worked 16 hours a day and didn’t have time to go to school, but there were the ragged schools where they learned the basic education.
At the time the discipline was very hard and the children were punished even for small mistakes. They were afraid of teachers, who were authoritative, unemotional, rigid, insensitive people. The goal of this education was to repress the child, who can not express himself. They are called “boys and girls” or numbers: the teachers didn’t care about their name or information about them. Children are dispossessed of their personality and identity.
Utilitarianism was a theory: they learn in the school only what is utilitarian for real life: math, statistics.
Excluding aspects that we consider important, the aspect of the personality.
Students became numbers and they were forced to conform.
That is functional: the economy needed to educate people, good workers, people that were skilled for their job.
They didn’t care about interior life, they were to be functional for economy.