Middle and late Victorian periods (1851-1901)

Middle and late Victorian periods (1851-l901)

The early Victorian period usually finishes with the Great Exhibition in 1851.

The following period saw the massive expansion of Britain's Empire all over the world. The British Empire towards the end of the century covered a quarter of the earth's surface, including Canada, Australia and New Zealand, strategic outposts in Asia and in the Mediterranean, islands in the Caribbean and large parts of Africa.

In 1876 Queen Victoria was declared Empress of India, while in South Africa the British were at war with Dutch settlers known as Boers.

Two Boer Wars were fought between the British Empire and the two independent Boer republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic.

The war most commonly referred to as the 'Boer War' is the Second Boer War (1899-l902), which involved large numbers of troops from many British possessions and which ended with the conversion of the Boer republics into British colonies. These colonies later formed part of the Union of South Africa.

Social reforms

Slowly the situation of the workers improved.

The late Victorian period was strongly influenced by two important political ures, William Gladstone (originally a Tory leader, eventually a Liberal one) and Benjamin Disraeli

(Tory). Both of them advocated a policy of gradual incorporation of the working classes through reforms:

In 1870 the Education Act provided a system of primary schools

In 1871 the Trade Union Act made unions legal

In 1884 the Fabian Society, which represented British Socialism, was founded.

The society laid many of the foundations of the Labour Party, founded at the start of the 20th century.

Age of EARNESTNESS and RESPECTABILITY

Victorian Age was a period of earnestness. Samuel Butler's novel The Way of All Flesh attacks

Victorian-era hypocrisy.

It was  published after Butler's death in 1903. Middle class women were expected to conform to a submissive and pious domestic role. Family was strictly patriarchal: the husband represented the authority and sexuality was generally repressed and that led to extreme manifestations of prudery.

The age turned excessively puritanical. All the words with vaguely sexual or 'indelicate' connotation were driven out of every day language, or replaced by euphemisms. Manners and speech were to be retrained and sober, so that 'respectability' became the key word of Victorianism.

Age of ANXIETY

The mid-Victorian period was an age of progress and growing material prosperity, however, it also became known as the Age of Anxiety. This was because with the publication of Darwin's The Origins of Species (1859) traditional Christian belief found itself in open conflict with modern science.

Darwin demonstrated that chance and necessity were the determining factors in the survival and

evolution of a species. This marked the beginning of a crisis in values which continued into the 20° century.

Darwin's ideas found political application in the theories of racial superiority which became a vital part of the ideology of imperialism. It partly accorded to Victorian ideas of social progress and improvement, yet at the same time seemed to justify social and economic disparity between rich and poor.

Late Victorian novelists

Victorian novels can more or less divided into two groups: before and after Darwin.

The novels after Darwin are representative of a growing crisis in the moral and religious values which formed the base of Victorian ideas about society.

Two outstanding anti-Victorian novelists were Samuel Butler (1835-l902) and Thomas Hardy (1840-l928), while Rudyard Kipling (1865-l936) was the great apologist of the British Empire. He is best known for  The Jungle Book (1894), a collection of stories, and Kim (1901), a tale of adventure.

Henry James (1843-l916) was probably the novelist who contributed most to the formal development of the novel. One of his major themes is the impact of old European culture on American culture. His masterwork is The Portrait of a Lady.

Moreover, many entertaining novels of different kinds were written in these years by

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-l894) and  Anthony Trollope (1815-l882).

THOMAS HARDY

A deep pessimism permeates all his work.

All his novels are set in Wessex, a fictional English county modeled after the real Dorset county, where he was born and brought up.

They deal with moral questions, played out through the lives of people living in the countryside, and point to the darker truths behind pastoral visions.

His best known works are:

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

The Return of the Native

Far from the Madding Crowd

The Mayor of Casterbridge

Jude the Obscure

JUDE THE OBSCURE (1895)

When it was first published in 1895, its critical reception was so negative that Hardy resolved never to write another novel.

Jude the Obscure attacked the institutions Britain held the most dear: higher education, social class, and marriage. It called, through its narrative, for a new openness in marriage laws and commonly held beliefs about marriage and divorce. It introduced one of the first feminist characters in English fiction: the intellectual, free-spirited Sue Bridehead.

The novel has an elaborately structured plot, in which subtle details and accidents lead to the characters' ruin.

Summary

Jude Fawley dreams of studying at the university in Christminster, but his background as an orphan raised by his working-class aunt leads him instead into a career as a stonemason. He is inspired by the ambitions of the town schoolmaster, Richard Phillotson, who left for Christminster when Jude was a child. However, Jude falls in love with a young woman named Arabella, is tricked into marrying her, and cannot leave his home village. When their marriage goes sour and Arabella moves to Australia, Jude resolves to go to Christminster at last. However, he finds that his attempts to enroll at the university are met with little enthusiasm.

Jude meets his cousin Sue Bridehead

Jude the Obscure - Chapter 1

`Yea, many there be that have run out of their wits for women, and become servants for their sakes. Many also have perished, have erred, and sinned, for women. O ye men, how can it be but women should be strong, seeing they do thus?' - Esdras.

The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the departing teacher's effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in moving house.

The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and everything would be smooth again.

The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary lodgings just at first.

A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: `Aunt have got a great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you've found a place to settle in, sir.'

`A proper good notion,' said the blacksmith.

It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy's aunt - an old maiden resident - and ask her if she would house the piano till Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy and the schoolmaster were left standing alone.

`Sorry I am going, Jude?' asked the latter kindly.

Tears rose into the boy's eyes, for he was not among the regular day scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster's life, but one who had attended the night school only during the present teacher's term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid.

The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that he was sorry.

`So am I,' said Mr. Phillotson.

`Why do you go, sir?' asked the boy.

`Ah - that would be a long story. You wouldn't understand my reasons, Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.'

`I think I should now, sir.'

`Well - don't speak of this everywhere. You know what a university is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should have elsewhere.'

The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley's fuel-house was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for removing it; and the schoolmaster gave a final glance round.

The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine o'clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other impedimenta, and bade his friends good-bye.

`I shan't forget you, Jude,' he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. `Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt me out for old acquaintance' sake.'

The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a quiver in his lip now and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the framework, his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child's who has felt the pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. There was a lining of green moss near the top, and nearer still the hart's-tongue fern.

He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a morning like this, and would never draw there any more. `I've seen him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home! But he was too clever to bide here any longer - a small sleepy place like this!'

A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning was a little foggy, and the boy's breathing unfurled itself as a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were interrupted by a sudden outcry:

`Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!'

It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well stood - nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet of Marygreen.

It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of an undulating ud adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, hump- backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny castiron crosses warranted to last five years.