Salient features of Victorian age and its poets too

Prepared by- Urvi Dave

Course- M.A.

Sem- 2

Paper no.- 6

Paper name- Victorian Age

Enrollment num.- 14101009

Batch- 2014-16

Email id- dave.urvi71@gmail.com

Guidance- Heenaba Zala

Submitted to- Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Question- Discuss the salient features of the Victorian age and about its poets too.

Introduction- The Victorian age is believed to be from 1850-1900 when Victoria became Queen in 1837, English literature seemed to have entered upon a period of lean years, in marked contrast with the poetic fruitfulness of the romantic age. Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron and Scott had passed away. Keats and Shelley were dead but already there had appeared three disciples of those poets who were destined to be far more widely read than were their masters. Tennyson had been publishing poetry since 1827, his first poems appearing in almost simultaneously with the last works of Byron, Shelley and Keats; but it was not until 1842, with the publication of his collected poems, two volumes, that England recognized in him one of her great literary leaders. Elizabeth Barrett Browning had been writing since 1820. Browning had published his Pauline in 1833. But in 1846, when Bells and Pomegranates were published, people began reading his works and started appreciating him. A group of pose writers had emerged in like Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle and Ruskin. In this age, the long struggle of the Anglo- Saxons for personal liberty was settled and democracy was established. The house of Commons becomes the ruling power in England; and a series of new reform bills rapidly extend the suffrage, until the whole body of English people choose for themselves the men who shall represent them. Because it is an age of democracy, it is an age of popular education, of religious tolerance, of growing brotherhood and of profound social unrest. The slaves had been freed in 1833; but in the middle of the century, England awoke to the fact that slaves are not necessarily Negroes, stolen in Africa to be sold like cattle in the market place, but that multitudes of men, women and little children in the mines and factories were victims of a more terrible industrial slavery. Because it is an age of democracy and education, it is an age of democracy, comparative peace. England begins to think less of the pomp and false glitter of fighting, and more of its moral units, as the nation realises that it is the common people who bear the burden and the sorrow and the poverty of war, while the privileged classes reap most of the financial and political rewards. With the growth of trade and of friendly foreign relations, it becomes evident that the social equality for which England was contending at home belongs to the whole race of men; that brotherhood is universal, not insular; that a question of justice is never settled by fighting; and that war is generally unmitigated horror and barbarism. The Victorian age is especially marked because of its rapid progress.

Salient Features- The Victorian age is especially marked because of its rapid progress in all the arts and sciences and in mechanical inventions like spinning looms to steamboats and from matches to electric lights. All these material things as well as the growth of education have their influence upon the life of a people, and it is inevitable that they should react upon its prose and poetry; though as yet we are too much absorbed in our sciences and mechanics to determine accurately their influence upon literature. When these new things shall by long use have become familiar as country roads, or have been replaced by newer and better things, then they also will have their associations and memories, and a poem on the rail roads maybe as suggestive as Wordsworth’s sonnet on Westminster Bridge. This age can be called as the Age of Compromise(compromise between science and religion; between democracy and autocracy).

Industries had been started emerging in the cities which led to migration. Due to migration, people left villages and agriculture was affected severely.

In other words, we can say, there was death of agriculture. When everyone went to city, it became overpopulated. As people were working in industries, they got money and food but getting shelter was their main problem. There was lack of space and for that, people started quarrelling with each other. Intoxication had started, prostitution started taking place and evil things started happening. There was dark and gloomy atmosphere everywhere. Majority of people were poor. The dominant people were money minded and so humans were used as machines. Workhouses were getting full as people were in search of job to earn money.

 Workhouses looked like prisons. They were very much dirty and stinky. The condition of people were not good. They were given a fixed amount of meal. Women were kept away from men and their husbands too. Children too were kept away from adults. The people in the workhouses had to work for twelve hours whether it be a child or an adult. They had the permission to bath once in a week. Ill people were kept in sick wards. A number orphanages and prostitutes increased as woman many a times didn't get work anywhere. She had to involve in prostitution and then chances of getting pregnant increased.

If this happened, the lady had to deliver the child and then left that child to orphanages. There was severe socio-economic depression people were threatened by the name of God. People had to work in harsh conditions as there was not enough electricity. Each job was hard and everyone had to suffer a lot.

Achievements- The Oxford Movement

This movement took place in the nineteenth century. It was an outcome of a long controversy and ideological conflicts amongst different Christian sects and Churches and therefore it may be called a religious movement. Its name was Oxford movement as it was centered at the University of Oxford that sought a renewal of Catholic or Roman Catholic, thought and practice within the Church of England in opposition to the Protestant tendencies of the church. This movement is also called Tractarian Movement as it was carried throughout the tracts and pamphlets. The origin of the Oxford movement can be traced to the opposition of the scientific discoveries against age old religious beliefs and faiths. The aim of the movement was to rehabilitate the dignity of the church, to defend the church against the interference of the state, to fight against rationalism. This age is remarkable for the growth of democracy following the Reform Bill of 1832; for the spread of education among all classes; for the rapid development of the arts and sciences; for important mechanical inventions; and for the enormous extensions of the bounds of human knowledge by the discoveries of science.

Poets

1)          

  Arthur Hugh Clough (01 Jan 1819-13 Nov 1861) was an English poet, an educationist and the devoted assistant to ground breaking nurse Florence Nightingale. Matthew Arnold, four years his junior, arrived the term after Clough had graduated. Clough and Arnold enjoyed an intense friendship in Oxford. Ambarvalia (1849) published jointly with his friend Thomas Burbidge, contains shorter poems of various dates from circa 1840 onwards. A few lyric and elegiac pieces, later in date than the Ambarvalia, complete Clough’s poetic output. His long poems have a certain narrative and psychological penetration and some of his lyrics have strength of melody to match their depth of thought. He has been regarded as one of the most forward-looking English poets of the nineteenth century. He often went against the popular religious and social ideals of his day, and his verse is said to have the melancholy and the perplexity of an age of transition, although Through a Glass Darkly suggests that he did not lack certain religious beliefs of his own. His work is interesting to students of meter, owing to the experiments which he made in the Bothic, and elsewhere, with English hexameters. Clough is best known for his short poems Say Not the Struggle Naught Avaleith, a rousing call to tired soldiers to keep up the good fight, Through a Glass Darkly, an exploration of religious doubt, and The Latest Decalogue, a satirical take on the Ten Commandants.

2)           

Robert Browning (07 May 1812-12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. It was an obscure early poem Pauline that brought him to the attention of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, followed by Paracelsus praised by William Wordsworth and Dickens. By the time of his wife’s death (Elizabeth Barrett Browning) in 1861, his stock was beginning to rise, with a major collection Men and Women, followed by the long- blank verse poem The ring and the Book. He is better known today for his shorter poems such as The Pied Piper of Hamelin and How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix. By Twelve, Browning had written a book of poetry which he later destroyed when no publisher could be found. He was a great admirer of the Romantic poets, especially Shelley. In March 1833, Pauline, a fragment of a confession was published anonymously by Saunders and Otley at the expense of the author. It is a long poem composed in homage to Shelley and somewhat in his style. In 1834, began writing Paracelsus, which was published in 1835. The subject of The Sixteenth Century Savant and Alchemist was probably suggested to him by the Lomte Amedee de Ripart Mondar, to whom it was dedicated. It is a mono drama without action, dealing with the problems confronting an intellectual trying to find his role in society. In 1838, he visited Italy, looking for background for Sordello, a long poem in heroic couplets, presented as the imaginary biography of the Mantuan bard spoken of by Dante in the Divine comedy. Canto 6 of Purgatory. This was published in 1840 and met with widespread division, gaining him the reputation of Wanton carelessness and obscurity. The Ring and the Book was the poet’s most ambitious project and arguably his greatest work; it has been praised as a Tour de Force of dramatic poetry, published separately in four volumes from November 1868 throughout February 1869, the poem was a success both commercially and critically and finally brought Browning the renown he had sought for nearly forty years.

3)           

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (06 March 1806-29 June 1861) was one of the most prominent English poets of the Victorian era. Her poetry was widely popular in both Britain and the United States during her lifetime. Her first adult collection, The Seraphin and Other Poems was published in 1838. She wrote prolifically between 1841-1844 producing poetry. Elizabeth’s volume Poems (1844) brought her great success. During this time, she met and corresponded with the writer Robert Browning, who admired her work. She is remembered for poems like How Do I Love Thee (Sonnet 43, 1845) and Aurora Leigh (1856). She wrote her own Homeric Epic The Battle of Marathon: A Poem. Her first collection of poems, An Essay on Mind, with other poems, was published in 1826 and reflected her passion for Byron and Greek politics.

4)          

  Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822-15 April 1888) was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. Arnold published his second volume of poems in 1852, Empedocles on Etna, and other poems. In 1853, he published poems: A New Edition, a selection from two earlier volumes famously excluding Empedocles on Etna, but adding new poems, Sohrab and Rustum and The Scholar Gipsy. In 1854, Poems: Second Series appeared; also a selection, it is included the new poem, Balder Dead. Arnold is sometimes called the Third great Victorian poet, along with Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning. Arnold was keenly aware of his place in poetry. In 1869, he wrote a letter to his mother:

“My poems represent, on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of what that movement of mind is, and interested in the literary productions which reflect it. It might be fairly urged that I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning; yet because I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn as they have had theirs”.

Harold Bloom echoes Arnold’s self-characterization in his introduction to the Modern Critical Views volume on Arnold:

“Arnold got into his poetry what Tennyson and Browning scarcely needed, the main march of mind of his time”.

Of his poetry, Bloom says:

“Whatever his achievement as a critic of Literature, society or religion, his work as a poet may not merit the reputation it has continued to hold in the twentieth century. Arnold is at his best, a very good but highly derivative poet… As with Tennyson, Hopkins and Rossetti, Arnold’s dominant precursor was Keats, but this is an unhappy puzzle, since Arnold (unlike the others) professed not to admire Keats greatly, while writing his own elegiac poem in a diction, meter, imagistic procedure, that are embarrassingly close to Keats”.

In 1867, Dover Beach depicted a nightmarish world from which the old religious verities have receded. In his poetry, he derived not only the subject matter of his narrative poems from various traditional or literary sources but even much of the romantic melancholy of his earlier poems Senancour’s Obermann.

5)            Dante Gabriel Rossetti (12 May 1828- 09 April 1882) was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood in 1848, with William Holman Hunt and john Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists an writers influenced by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne- Jones. His early poetry was influenced by John Keats. His later poetry was characterized by the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, especially in his sonnet sequence The House of Life. He frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures, spanning from The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Astarte Syriaca (1877), while also creating art to illustrate poems such as Goblin Market by the celebrated poet Christina Rossetti, his sister. He worked on English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova.

6)          

  William Morris (24 March 1834- 03 October 1896) was an English textile designer, poet, novelist, translator and social activist. He achieved success with the publication of his epic poems and novels namely The Earthly Paradise (1868-70). His first poems were published when he was 24 years old. His first volume, The Defence of Guenevere and other poems (1858) was the first book of Pre- Raphaelite poetry to be published. The Haystack in the Floods, one of the poems in those collections is probably now one of his better known poems. One early minor poem was Masters in his Hall (1860), a Christmas Carol written to an old French tune. Another Christmas theme poem is The Snow in the Street adapted from The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon in The Earthly Paradise.

7)        

    Algernon Charles Swinburne was one of the most accomplished lyric poets of this age and was a prominent symbol of rebellion against the conservative values of his time. Later works are By the North Sea, Evening on the Broads, A Nympholept, The Lake of Gaube, and Neap Tide. Other works are Poems and Ballads, Moxon (1866), Songs before Sunrise, Song of Two Nations.