VICTORIAN AGE (1830-1901)

“The Victorian Age (1830-1901). Introduction”

INTRODUCTION1
1897 Mark Twain, Diamond Jubilee celebrations (60th anniversary Queen Victoria’s reign):
“British history is two thousand years old, 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."
The most marked and dramatic change was in England, highest point of development as a world power.
The pivotal city hitherto had been Paris, by the second half of the 19th c. it became London which
expanded from about 2 million inhabitants to 6.5 million during the reign of Queen Victoria.

The way of life changed from land ownership to a modern urban economy based on trade and
manufacturing, industrialization, steam power (railway), inventions (telegraph, photography),
universal compulsory ed.
England was the first country to become industrialized: social and economic problems, enormous
increase in wealth, capture markets all over the globe; England became the world's workshop and
London became, from 1870 on, the world's banker. With its own colonies, England was the world's
foremost imperial power.
The reactions of Victorian writers were diverse, from those who praised England as a world power, to
those who lamented the loss of traditional customs. The melancholy poetry of Mathew Arnold often
strikes this note:

For what wears out the life of mortal men?

‘Tis that from change to change their being rolls;
‘Tis that repeated shocks, again, again,
Exhaust the energy of stronger souls

Benjamin Disraeli

Benjamin Disraeli

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Three deckers
QUEEN VICTORIA AND THE VICTORIAN TEMPER 2

The character of the queen permeated the time: earnestness, moral responsibility, domestic propriety.
She was the black-garbed Widow of Windsor in the forty years after her husband's death in 1861.

Victoria came to the throne in a decade that seems to mark a different historical consciousness among
Britain's writers. There was a feeling of transition. Carlyle: “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe” (to
abandon the introspection of the Romantics and to turn to the higher moral purpose). Writers as early
as the 1850s and 1860s defined their age as Victorian. 20th century writers wanted to separate
themselves from the Victorians predecessors as prudish and old fashioned, they mocked them.
Virginia Woolf was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, an eminent Victorian. Woolf recorded in her
diary what she could never have become a writer if he had not died when he did. Growing up under
such towering shadows, she and her generation mocked their predecessors to make them less
intimidating. The Georgian’s reaction against immediate predecessors was responsible in part for the
low estimation of Victorian literature; its aftereffects can also be felt when the term Victorian is
employed in an exclusively pejorative sense, as prudish or old-fashioned. But because it is a period of
almost 70 years, we can hardly expect generalizations to be uniformly applicable. It is, therefore,
helpful to subdivide the age into three phases:

- Early Victorian (1830-1848)

- Mid-Victorian (1848-1870)
- Late Victorian (1870-1901)

EARLY VISTORIAN (1830-1848): A TIME OF TROUBLES3

In 1830 the first steam-powered railway opened, the first in the world. By 1900 England had 15,195
lines of track and an underground railway system beneath London. The train transformed England's
landscape, supported the growth of its commerce, and shrank the distances between its cities.
The opening of England's first railway coincided with the opening of the country's Reform Parliament.
England was still governed by an archaic electoral system whereby some of the new industrial cities
were unrepresented in Parliament. Manufacturing interests, who refused to tolerate their exclusion
from the political process any longer, led working men in agitating for reform. Parliament passed a
Reform Bill in 1832 that extended the right to vote to all males owning property worth £10 or more in
annual rent. The working classes did not obtain the vote until 1867. Even more important was the
redistribution of parliamentary representation because it broke up the monopoly of power that the
conservative landowners had so long enjoyed.

2 Págs. 5-7º
3 Le he cambiado un poco el título, originalmente es: The Early Period: Time of Troubles, pero he pensado que,
siguiendo el esquema justo encima, sería más lógico seguir con las mismas frases para ir desarrollándolos. Págs. 7-10
 VICTORIAN AGE (1830-1901)
The Time of Troubles: economic and social difficulties attendant on industrialization in the 1830s and
1840s (unemployment, desperate poverty, and rioting). Conditions under which men, women, and
children toiled in mines and factories were unimaginably brutal. in the slums of the cities, families
lived in horribly crowded, unsanitary housing.

In 1845 serious crop failures in England and the outbreak of potato blight in Ireland, the population
suffered severely from the exorbitant price of bread or from scarcity of food. Abolition of Corn Laws
in 1846. Although free trade did not eradicate the slums of Manchester, it helped relieve the major
crisis. The next two decades were relatively calm and prosperous.
This Time of Troubles left its mark on some early Victorian literature. "Condition of England" novels
of the 1840s and early 1850s. as a response to the industrial and political scene. Disraeli, Sybil with
the subtitle of The Two Nations, a phrase that pointed out the line dividing the Britain of the rich from
the other nation, the Britain of the poor.

“Condition of England”

Parece que hay una errata en los años, pero creo que la respuesta es “Condition of England”

North and South Elizabeth Gaskell

THE MID-VICTORIAN PERIOD (1848-70): ECONOMIC PROSPERITY, THE GROWTH
OF EMPIRE, AND RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY4
In the decades following the Time of Troubles some Victorian writers, such as Charles Dickens,
continued to make critical attacks on the shortcomings of the Victorian social scene.
Overall, this second phase of the Victorian period was a time of prosperity. The monarchy was doing
good. Agriculture flourished together with trade and industry. The condition of the working classes
was being gradually improved: Factory Acts in Parliament, which restricted child labor and limited
hours of employment,
In 1851 Prince Albert opened the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, in the Crystal Palace.

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England's technological progress, together with its prosperity, led to an enormous expansion of its
influence around the globe. Its annual export of goods nearly trebled in value between 1850 and 1870;
the export of people (emigration) and capital increased (British capitalists’ investments). This
investment, of people, money, and technology, created the British Empire. Missionary societies
flourished, there was an increasing debate about religious belief. By the mid-Victorian/period the
Church of England had evolved into three major divisions: Evangelical, or Low Church; Broad Church
(Tractarianism); and High Church (liberal).
Some rationalist challenges to religious belief that developed before the Victorian period maintained
their influence. The most significant was Utilitarianism, also known as Benthamism or Philosophical
Radicalism: all human beings seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. An action is morally
correct in terms of the number of people it gives pleasure to. Measuring religion by this moral
arithmetic, Benthamites concluded that it was an outmoded superstition. Utilitarianism aroused
considerable opposition from intellectuals such as Dickens because it left no room for feelings.

In mid-Victorian England, however, the challenge to religious belief gradually shifted from the
Utilitarians to some of the leaders of science. The scientific attitude of mind was applied toward a
study of the Bible. This kind of investigation was known as the "Higher Criticism." They examined
the Bible, instead as a sacredly document, as a mere text of history. The Origin of Species by Darwin:
theory of natural selection conflicted with the concept of creation derived from the Bible, Darwin’s
theories made the Victorians feel “infinitely isolated”. “By the 1860s the great iron structures of their
philosophies, religions, and social stratifications were already beginning to look dangerously
corroded”. Charles Kingsley wrote “The young men and women of our day are fast parting from
their parents and each other; the more thoughtful are wandering either to wards Rome, towards
materialism, or towards an unchristian and unphilosophic spiritualism.”

Respuesta: SUBLIME

Respuesta: Darwinism
THE LATE PERIOD (1870-1901): DECAY OF VICTORIAN VALUES5

An extension of the golden glow mid-Victorianism. It was a time of serenity and security, the age of
house parties and long weekends in the country. London considered the center of civilization.
Continuing technological change and a culture of consumerism.

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The wealth of England's empire economy. The final decades of the century saw the apex of British
imperialism, yet the cost of the empire became increasingly apparent in rebellions, massacres, and
wars. In addition, the "Irish Question" became especially divisive in the 1880s. Serious competition
and threats from other world powers such as Germany and the USA.

Another change was the growth of labor as a political and economic force, development of trade
unions, socialism, Marxism.

In much of the literature of this phase we can sense an overall change of attitudes. Some writers
expressed the change by simply attacking the major mid-Victorian idols, such as Darwin, Tennyson,
and Prime Minister Gladstone. They also satirized the family and sanctimonious lifestyle of the
Victorian era. They concluded that the answers to our problems are not to be found, and that our role
is to enjoy the fleeting moments of beauty.

THE NINETIES6

The changes in attitude of the 1870s increased in the final decade of the century. Changing values with
the example of the crown prince. A pleasure-seeking easy-going person, Edward was the antithesis of
his father, Prince Albert, an earnest-minded intellectual who had devoted his life to hard work and to
administrative responsibilities. Edward openly maintained scandalous relations.

In the writing there is a feeling of melancholy, cultivated a deliberately fin de siècle pose. A studied
languor, a weary sophistication, a search for new ways of titillating jaded palates. The Yellow Book
was a periodical represented the Aestheticism of the nineties. David Copperfield by Dickens 1850, the
hero affirms: "I have always been thoroughly in earnest." In 1895 Oscar Wilde's comedy The
Importance of Being Earnest turns the typical mid-Victorian word earnest into a pun.

THE ROLE OF WOMEN7

Political and legal reforms in the course of the Victorian period had given citizens many rights. England
was considered the freest country in the world. Nevertheless, women did not share in these freedoms.
They could not vote or hold political office. Women did not get the vote until 1918. Married women
could not handle their own property, divorce was not equal for men and women, educational and
employment opportunities for women were limited. Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman (1792), challenges long-established assumptions about women's role in society.
Legislative measures over the course of the nineteenth century gradually brought about changes: The
Custody Act of 1839, The Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, the Married Women's
Property Acts (1870 -1908).
Feminists worked to pressuring Parliament for legal reform and to enlarge female educational
opportunities. In 1837 none of England's three universities was open to women. By the end of Victoria's
reign, women could take degrees at twelve universities. There was also agitation for improved
employment opportunities for women. Writers as Charlotte Bronte complained that middle-class
women were taught trivial accomplishment. But lower-class women had a very hard life, the largest

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 VICTORIAN AGE (1830-1901)
proportion of working women laboured as servants. The explosive growth of mechanized industries,
especially in the textile trade, created new and gruelling forms of paid employment, women worked at
factory jobs under appalling conditions, they went also into the mines. Bad working conditions drove
thousands of women into prostitution.

“Surplus" or "Redundant" women of the middle classes— that is, women who remained unmarried
because of the imbalance in numbers between the sexes. The only occupation at which an unmarried
middle-class woman could earn a living and maintain some claim to gentility was that of a governess,
Jane Eyre. Popular genre through which to explore women’s roles in society.

In The Subjection of Women, John Stuart Mill argues that “what is now called the nature of women is
eminently an artificial thing-the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation
in other” In Tennyson’s The Princess the king voices a more traditional view of male and female roles,
a view that has come to be known as the doctrine of “separate spheres” This concept of womanhood
stressed woman’s purity and selflessness. Their role was to create a place of peace where man could
take refuge from the difficulties of modern life.
By the 1890s the "New Woman," an emerging form of emancipated womanhood, was endlessly
debated in a wave of fiction and magazine articles. Ultimately, as Victorian texts illustrate, the basic
problem was not only political, economic, and educational. It was how women were regarded, and
regarded themselves, as members of a society.

LITERACY, PUBLICATION, AND READING8

Literacy increased significantly during the Victorian period. By the end of the century, basic literacy
was almost universal, the product in part of compulsory national education, required by 1880 to the
age of ten.

There was also an explosion of things to read (technological changes). +imp: growth of the periodical,
extended to literature: SERIAL form. Serial publication encouraged a certain kind of plotting and
pacing and allowed writers to take account of their readers' reactions. It also created a distinctive sense
of a community of readers, a sense encouraged by the practice of reading aloud in family gatherings.

But at the end of the period there was a sense that mass publication included less serious literature.
SHORT FICTION AND THE NOVEL9
The novel was the dominant form in Victorian literature. Initially published in serial form, novels
subsequently appeared in three-volume editions. They reveal the author's vision of the social world.
Realism or realisms, each novelist present a specific vision. The most depicted situation was social
relationships in the middle-class society, a strong sense of stratification, but there are chances for class
mobility (Jane Eyre). Most Victorian novels focus on a protagonist whose effort to define his/her place
in society is the main concern of the plot. The novel thus constructs a tension between surrounding
social conditions and the aspiration of the hero or heroine (love, social position, or a life adequate to
his or her imagination). The novel is the best way to portray the woman’s struggle for self-realization.

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 VICTORIAN AGE (1830-1901)
From the beginning of the 19th century, women writers were major authors. Victorian novel was
extraordinarily various in styles and genres.

About short fiction, Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol offers a good case in point. Stevenson’s The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”

Respuesta: Serial Publication

POETRY10

Although today we generally consider the novel as not only the most distinctive but also the most
important literary form of the Victorian era, nineteenth-century, readers would have disagreed. Poets
sought new ways of telling stories in verse. All the Victorian poets show the strong influence of the
Romantics. The Victorians often rewrite Romantic poems with a sense of distance, attenuated
Romanticism.
The great achievement of Victorian poetry: creating a lyric poem in the voice of a speaker ironically
distinct from the poet. Romantic poetry is eclectic, but Victorian poetry shares some characteristics:
- It tends to be pictorial, using detail to construct visual images.
- It uses sound in a distinctive way, poets use sound to convey meaning,
- They represent psychology in a different way.

Arthur Henry Hallam defines this kind of poetry as “picturesque” as combining visual impressions
in such a way that create a picture that carries the dominant emotion of the poem. Contemporary artists
frequently illustrated Victorian poems, and poems themselves often present paintings. Victorian poetry
also uses sound in a distinctive way; beautiful cadences, alliteration and vowel sounds, or a roughness
adopted in part in reaction against Tennyson.
Victorian poets seek to represent psychology in a different way, their most distinctive achievement is
a poetry of mood and character.
In the 2nd half, identity as bohemian rebels. Women poets poetry less complicated because they find
difficulties in another field, their sex expectations.

PROSE11
Nonfictional prose is clumsy and not quiet exact, it has its uses not only to distinguish these prose
writers from the novelists but also to indicate the centrality argument and persuasion to Victorian
intellectual life. Periodical press. Basis for modern literary criticism.

The modern man of letters, Carlyle argues, differs from his earlier counterpart in that he writes for
money12.

DRAMA AND THEATER13

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12 No lo veo muy importante, la verdad.
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Here we must distinguish between playwriting on the one hand and theatrical activity on the other.
Theatre was to Victorian England what television is to us today14.

INDUSTRIALISM, PROGRESS OR DECLINE?15

Victorians debated whether the machine age was a blessing or a curse, whether the economic system
was making humanity happier or more miserable. Did the Industrial Revolution represent progress,
and how, in fact, was progress to be defined?
By the beginning of the Victorian period, the Industrial Revolution had already created profound
economic and social changes. The terrible suffering of the workers moved writers and legislators to
urgently focus attention to the condition of the working class. The terrible living and working
conditions of industrial laborers led a number of writers to see the Industrial Revolution as an appalling
retrogression. Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin both lamented the changed conditions of labor, the
loss of craftsmanship and individual creativity, and the disappearance of what Karl Marx called the
“feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations” between employer and employee that they believed had existed
in earlier economies. They critized industrial manufacture not only for the misery of the conditions it
created but also for its regimentation of minds and hearts, as well as bodies and resources.
It is instructive to compare the selection in this section with Carlyle’s chapter “Captains of Industry”
from Past and Present; Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem about child labor, “The Cry of Children”;
Ruskin’s argument about manufacture in The Stone of Venice and William Morris’s explanation in
“How I Became a Socialist”.

Respuesta: Industrial Revolution

Thomas Hardy

The Great Exhibition in London

14 No muy interesante para cara al examen.

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 VICTORIAN AGE (1830-1901)
16
“THE WOMAN QUESTION; THE VICTORIAN DEBATE ABOUT
GENDER”17

The greatest social difficulty in England probably was the relationship between men and women (upon
on trial the institution of marriage, family and the traditional roles of women as wives, mothers and
sisters. The Victorian period was not only the institution of marriage but the family itself and, the
traditional roles of women as wives, mothers and daughters.

The “Woman Questions”, as it was called, engaged many Victorians, both male and female. The
Woman Question encompassed not one question but many. The mixed opinions of Queen Victoria
illustrate some of its different aspects. Believing in education for her sex, she gave support and
encouragement to the foundation of a college for women in 1847. On the other hand, she opposed to
the concept of votes for women, which she described in a letter as “this mad folly.” Equally thought-
provoking are her comments on women and marriage.
Many of the queen's female subjects shared her assumptions that woman's role was to be accepted as divinely
willed:

- as illustrated in the selections from Sarah Ellis's popular work of 1839, The Women of England, a
manual of inspirational advice now usually classified with more practical books
- Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) as "domestic conduct literature." The required
"submission" of which the queen wrote was justified in many quarters on the grounds of the supposed
intellectual inferiority of women.
- As popularly accepted lore expressed it: "Average Weight of Man's Brain 3'/2 lbs; Woman's 2 lbs, 11
ozs." In the minds of many, then, the possessors of the "shallower brain" (to borrow a phrase from the
speaker of Tennyson's "Locksley Hall," 1842), naturally deserved a dependent role.
- In reminding wives of their range of duties, another nineteenth-century conduct book available in many
editions, The Female Instructor, recommended that a wife always wear her wedding ring so that
whenever she felt "ruffled," she might "cast [her] eyes upon it, and call to mind who gave it to [her]."

In this climate it would follow that a woman who tried to cultivate her intellect beyond drawing-room
accomplishments was violating the order of Nature and of religious tradition.

Woman was to be valued instead, for other qualities considered especially characteristic of her sex:
- tenderness of understanding,
- unworldliness and innocence,
- domestic affection and in various degrees, submissiveness.
- “Angel in the House” as Coventry Patmore described her in the title of his popular poem.
- John Ruskin’s essay “Of Queens’ Gardens” that men and women “are nothing alike, and the
happiness and perfection of both depends on each asking and receiving from the other what
the other can only give” the powers of "a true wife," he felt, made the home "a sacred place."

16 Copiado del libro por su gran importancia para la pregunta del essay que casi seguro es sobre Jane Eyre en relación
con The Women Question
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 VICTORIAN AGE (1830-1901)
- A number of feminists as well as more traditional thinkers held this ideal view of woman's
character,

But George Eliot argues in her essay on Mary Wollstonecraft, that the exalted pedestal on which
women were placed was one of the principal obstacles to their achieving any alteration status. That
woman's position in society and in marriage was taken as a natural, and thus inevitable, state also stood
in the way of change.

Echoing the arguments of Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill, the feminist writer Mona Caird
contended in 1888 that the institution of marriage was socially constructed and had a specific history,
far from being a relationship ordained by God, marriage was an association that could and ought to be
reinvented to promote freedom and equality for both partners.

It is commonly said that boredom was a particular problem for Victorian women. In the mid-Victorian
period, one-quarter of England’s female population had jobs, most of them onerous and low paying.
At the same time other women earned their livings by working as prostitutes, “Great Social Evil” as
the Victorians regarded it.
To be bored was the privilege of wives and daughters in upper-middles-class homes. If family finances
failed, some women faced considerable difficulties: many sought employments as governesses.
Frequently taken up as a topic in novels of the period, the complex and compromised social position
of the governess is, a notable feature of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Brontë character, however,
does not limit her criticism to her own impoverished plight when she expresses her frustration with the
social attitudes that governed the behaviour of women of her class more broadly.
Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel;
they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their
brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation,
precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged
fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings
and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is
thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn
more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

George Meredith, in his Essay on Comedy (1873), develops the same argument; the test of a
civilization, he writes, is whether men "consent to talk on equal terms with their women, and to listen
to them."

Yet at least two reviewers of Jane Eyre, both women, regarded such proposals as tantamount to
sedition. Margaret Oliphant called the novel "A wild declaration of the 'Rights of Women' in a new
aspect," and Elizabeth Rigby attacked its "pervading tone of ungodly discontent."
In some household such discontent, whether godly or ungodly, led to a daughter’s open rebellion, very
remarkable was the case of Florence Nightingale, who found family life in the 1850s intolerably
pointless and, despite parental opposition, cut loose from home to carve out a career for herself in
nursing and in hospital administration.
 VICTORIAN AGE (1830-1901)
This era also witnessed the arrival of the much-debated phenomenon of the “New Woman”,
frequently satirized as simply a bicycle-riding, cigarette-smoking, mannish creature, this confident and
assertive figure burst onto the scene in the 1890s, often becoming the focus of attention in articles,
stories and plays, and the author of literary works herself.

Women of course had begun to be published before Victoria's reign, and many women became
successful novelists. And yet embarking on such a career was never an easy choice. The selections
from Harriet Martineau's autobiography included here suggest some of the obstacles, internal and
external, against which the aspiring woman writer struggled. Inevitably, some female writers were
hacks, and they provide George Eliot with easy targets for ridicule in her essay "Silly Novels by Lady
Novelists" (1856). Nonetheless, women emerge as major novelists during the period, as illustrated in
the careers of the Bronte sisters and Eliot herself.
To be sure, not all her female characters are frustrated and discontented; as a realist Eliot recognized
that many upper- and middle-class women apparently found their leisurely lives fully enjoyable. In
Middlemarch (1871—72), for example, Celia Brooke Chetham rejoices in her comfortable life as wife
and mother on a country estate. Yet to her sister Dorothea (whom Celia regards with affectionate
indulgence as an eccentric misfit), the traditional womanly lot in life is as painfully frustrating as
Florence Nightingale had found it. It was on behalf of such women as Dorothea that John Stuart Mill
developed his argument in The Subjection of Women (1869). Also revealing in this context are some
of the extracts from Tennyson's 1847 poem The Princess ("The woman's cause is man's") and from
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1857), a novel in verse that portrays the life of a woman
poet (book 1 describes how the typical girl's education constricts a woman's mind, and book 2 features
Aurora's defence of her vocation as a poet).

Aunt wants to educate Aurora to become an accomplished woman.- Angel in the house
Jane: Governess - not reputable profession

18
EMPIRE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY19

CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870)

Charles Dickens was Victorian England's most beloved and distinctive novelist.

18 No lo resumo porque sinceramente, no sirve para los essays y no tiene nada de provechoso para las preguntas cortas
de la primera parte del examen.
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 VICTORIAN AGE (1830-1901)
Born in Southern England. 7 siblings. Debts. He began to work at 11. Father arrested; all the family
went to live in prison but him. He felt abandoned, feeling basis of Oliver Twist, David Copperfield
and Pip.
When his father left prison (legacy) sent Charles to school. 15 clerks at a law office. After that,
freelance reporter. Fiction under the pseudonym of Boz. Pickwick Papers, in serial instalments, gave
him fame.

Respuesta: Dickens
Married. 10 children, domestic chaos frustrated him. He had lost his first and perfect love because of
her family. His beloved sister-in-law died in his arms, devastated.
Through the 1840s and 1850s Dickens continued to write novels. He founded and edited the weekly
magazine Household Words (incorporated in All the Year Round, fiction, politics and sc). He began a
series of Christmas books. Separated. Affair. Illness, Great expectations and died suddenly.

Pickwick Papers

Oliver Twist

David Copperfield - Great Expectations

Pickwick Paper

Serial Publication
 VICTORIAN AGE (1830-1901)

William Thackery

Serial Publication

EMILY BRONTË20

Emily passed most of her life in Yorkshire moors. She was the fifth. Her father was a clergyman. At
the age of six, she was sent away to a school for the daughters of poor clergy with her three elder
sisters, within a year, the two oldest girls had died because of the school’s harsh and unhealthy
conditions, which Charlotte Brontë was later to portray in Jane Eyre. Mr Brontë brought his two
remaining daughters at home, where together with their brother and younger sister, he educated them
himself.

The Brontë family shared a rich literary life. Mr. Brontë discussed poetry, history, and politics with
his children, and the children themselves created extraordinary fantasy together.
Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë adopted pseudonyms of Currer Bell, Ellis Bell and Acton Bell,
when they decided to publish.
Her concern with a visionary world links her to the Romantic poets, particularly to Byron and Percy
Bysshe Shelley; but her hymnlike stanzas have a haunting quality that distinguishes her individual
voice.

ELIZABETH GASKELL21

Her first novel, Mary Barton, presents a sympathetic picture of the hardships and the grievances of
the working class. Another early novel, Ruth, portrays the seduction and rehabilitation of an
unmarried mother.
The first published anonymously but quickly was recognized as the writer. She knew Charlotte
Brontë with whom she became friends. Brontë’s father, when she died, asked her to write about her
daughter. Gaskell wrote Life of Charlotte Brontë, which is a masterpiece of English biography and
one of their finest portrayals of character. Her focus in the Life on the relationship between Brontë’s
identity as a writer and her role as daughter, sister and wife reflects the balance. Gaskell herself
sought between the stories she wove and the people she cared for. Referred to by Dickens as “my

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21 Págs. 245-246
 VICTORIAN AGE (1830-1901)
dear Scheherazade” Gaskell wrote not just to entertain but also to critique society and to promote
social reform.

“GEORGE ELIOT”22 Marian Evans

In most of her novels, she evokes a preindustrial rural scene or the small-town life of the English
Midlands, which she views with a combination of nostalgia and candid awareness of its limitations.

Her real name was Marian Evans, it was influenced by Sir Walter Scott. She broke with Christian
religion, but she agreed to observe the formality of attending church with him and he agreed, tactitly,
at least, that while, there she could think what she liked.
Preoccupation about theological issues led to her first book, a translation in 1846 of The Life if Jesus
by D.F. Strauss. German.
When she move to London with her impressive intellectual credential led her to appointment as an
assistant editor of Westminster Review, edited by John Stuart Mill.
Eliot’s fiction owes much to Austen’s with its concern with provincial society, its satire human
motives, its focus on courtship. But Eliot brings to these subjects a philosophical and psychological
depth very different in character from that of the novel of manners. Eliot’s fiction typically combines
expansive philosophic meditation with an acute dissection of her character’s motivates and feelings.
She is, perhaps, the greatest English realist.
The Woman Question, as her essay “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft” suggests, held
particular interest for her. She typically chooses for her heroine a young woman, with a powerful
imagination and a yearning to be more than her society allows her to be. Eliot seems sympathetic to a
feminist point of view, yet her stress on the values of loyalty to one’s past. To duty, despite personal
desire, suggests that her attitude toward the Woman Question is complex. 23

George Eliot wrote, “My function is that of the aesthetic not the doctrinal teacher”

Respuesta: George Eliot

Respuesta: George Eliot

22 Págs. 399-401
23 Y tanto, cuando se fue a vivir con su primer amor sin que este se pudiera divorciar.
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Respuestas: B. B. B

Respuesta: Thornfield Hall

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Respuesta: Bertha Mason

Respuesta: Currer Bell

Respuesta: Bildungsroman/ Künstlerroman / coming of age novel / life of an artist since childhood

Bildungsroman / Künstleroman / coming of age novel / life of an artist since childhood

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24Indoor spaces where Jane feels most oppressed: Gateshead (its red room) and Lowood.
At Thornfield, she is happy and fulfilled, but she cannot help feeling constrained (Bertha’s room as a
symbol of patriarchal oppression).
More positive indoor settings and their symbolism: Moor House (healing and female solidarity),
Morton School (Jane’s fulfilment and independence), Ferndean (happiness with Rochester, at last).
Outdoor settings signifying a certain degree of freedom for Jane:
the playground at Lowood, the grounds around Thornfield, the moorland where
she experiences communion with Nature (her “mother”). Jane’s traversing the moorland
is also a symbolic wandering in the desert.
In Jane Eyre, the heroine moves from one setting to the next, in a kind of pilgrimage of self-fulfilment.
In Tennyson’s “Mariana”, on the other hand, the female protagonist is closely associated with an only
setting and presented as
the victim of paralysing grief.

Rochester: obligado a casarse - forma de opresión - clase social alta - Atrapados en sus
propias vidas. El es un gentleman -
Jane: suffering in Gateshead and Lowood-middle class family - loneliness - trapped in her
own world - oppression - family oppression
Jane feels trapped and tries to find solution
Rochester: feels trapped and flees, locks wife in the "attic"

https://prezi.com/r31jlpiw67gd/jane-eyre-a-romantic-novel/ Me ha parecido super interesante para

poder focalizar la información tan basta que tengo para poder hacer un desarrollo.

24
Notas de compañeras que muy amablemente han compartido, después de quedar por horas para estudiar juntas en
mayo, muchísimas gracias.
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Memory
Feelings

Reconciliation with nature

Inner self

Emotions
Social migrations to the city.... fleeing the countryside -

Healing power against the misery of the city

Nostalgic feelings
Harmony with nature as a response to the Industrial Revolution

Bleak house

Middlemarch - George Eliot

Bleak house -Dickens

Vanity Fair - Thackeray

le dan mas realismo y refuerzan la historia

engagges the reader - autobiographical account in first person- bond between the
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narrator and the reader-necesidad de compartir sus emociones y experiencias con el lector-create a
sense

of empathy in the reader-el lector como confidente

Aurora: not such a direct relation with the reader

Retrospective narration

RAM: