Study Guide to the Victorian Poets

By Intelligent Education

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for the most inventive and highly-regarded poets of the Victorian era, including Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Release date: Sep 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645424796

Intelligent Education

Intelligent Education is a learning company with a mission to publish accessible resources and digital tools to educate the world. Their mission drives every project, from publishing books to designing software and online courses, film projects, mobile apps, VR/AR learning tools and more. IE builds tools to empower people who love to learn. Intelligent Education offers courses in science, mathematics, the arts, humanities, history and language arts taught by leading university professors from Wake Forest University, Indiana University, Texas A&M University, and other great schools. The learning platform features 3D models and 360 media paired with instructional videos for on-screen and Mixed Reality interaction that increases student engagement and improves retention. The IE team is geographically located across the United States and is a division of Academic Influence. Learn more at http://intelligent.education.

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THE VICTORIAN POETS

INTRODUCTION

THE VICTORIAN PERIOD

This period spans the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). The term Victorian is used in its widest sense to designate the body of literature written during these years and to suggest the particular qualities and attitudes of that literature. Modern usage of the term suggests a sense of prudery, false modesty, or empty respectability which it is felt characterized the nineteenth century. This latter pejorative use of Victorian is really based on an exaggerated response to the high standards of decency and the moral earnestness of the period. It is true that Victorian writers were often very cautious with regard to profanity and matters of sex, but to reject them on this score would be totally unfair. Indeed, Victorian literature reflects the tremendous social, political, and religious upheavals of the age, and we today are the heirs to many of their findings. If anything, the Victorian period is one of great change, an age of transition, and the literature of the period reveals to us the great tensions and pressures that existed beneath the surface optimism and serenity, so often referred to as Victorian.

IMPORTANT DATES

Some of the important dates and events of the period can be listed to help in describing the age:

(1) 1832 - The First Reform Bill

(2) 1837 - Victoria becomes Queen of England

(3) 1846 - The Corn Laws repealed

(4) 1851 - Prince Albert presents the Great Exhibition in London.

The erection of the Crystal Palace testifies to the industrial achievement of England.

(5) 1854-1856 - War against Russia in the Crimea

(6) 1859 - Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species published

(7) 1870-71 - Franco-Prussian War

(8) 1901 - Queen Victoria’s death

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CHANGE

England had been ruled by an aristocratic, Anglican group down through the eighteenth century. The Neo-Classical period of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries emphasized elegance, grace, urbanity and wit-all indicative of a literature appealing largely to the aristocracy. However, a Puritan middle class had been emerging since the early seventeenth century and in the Victorian period this class emerges as a powerful political and social force. Romanticism, in part responding to the appeal of the French Revolution (1789), had stressed individualism and had expressed sympathy for the isolated masses striving for political and economic freedom. Victorianism developed this Romantic interest in a social sense, stressing the need for an ordered society wherein the individual might find his rightful place. Unlike Romanticism which so often stressed the value of individual experience in itself, the Victorian writers were concerned with the public character and the public importance of literature. Thus, for example, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poetry provided the age with moral reflections on heroes and thereby offered instruction to his readers.

THE REFORM BILL OF 1832

This bill extended the right to vote to members of the rising industrial middle class. The invention of the steam engine, the spinning jenny, and the power loom in the late eighteenth century contributed to the growth of England as an industrial power.

Victorian liberalism championed the rights of the upper capitalist group of the middle class - the new captains of industry - against the old landed aristocracy. The Reform Bill marked a tremendous shift in political power and gave rise to at least a partially democratic form of government. Thus one of the great changes that sets the Victorian age apart from others was the arrival of big business and the spread of middle class government.

VICTORIAN LIBERALISM

The social philosophy of Victorian liberalism championed the rights of the middle class and greatly helped to secure the reforms instituted in 1832. Today we speak of "liberals as those who believe in the right and duty of government to establish and secure the welfare and happiness of all citizens. However, the liberal philosophy of the nineteenth century was in many ways opposite to our understanding of the term.

The rise of middle class government and of big business are - as indicated above - characteristics which set the nineteenth century apart. Liberalism of the period was indebted to the political and social philosophies found in the eighteenth century writings of the philosophers John Locke in England and Jean Rousseau in France. The Declaration of Independence also influenced Victorian liberalism. In the political sphere, liberalism sought the liberties of all citizens and advocated that government should restrict its functions to the maintenance of public order. In short its attitude as regards government was one of laissez faire, or hand off!

UTILITARIANISM

Connected with Victorian liberalism was the philosophy of Utilitarianism. Its chief exponent was Jeremy Bentham (1772-1832). Utilitarianism expressed the belief that men are motivated by self-interest and that they should seek as much pleasure in life as possible. The utilitarians desired to test all institutions - government, church, and law - to see if they were useful, that is, to see if they contributed to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of men. The Benthamites succeeded in reforming the Civil Service in England, and they further rejected religion as an outdated superstition. Religion, as we shall see, was another great problem in the Victorian period.

VICTORIAN SOCIETY

Industrial revolution and the rise of middle class democracy characterize the society of nineteenth century England. Utilitarianism and liberalism proposed a view of man as an economic creature motivated by self-interest. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), the essayist and historian, coined the phrase cash-nexus (cash link or bond) which summed up the relationship of man to fellow man. A society now ruled largely by wealthy industrialists offered the desire for money as one of the greatest goals in life. Along with a desire for money went a desire for social advancement - Charles Dickens’ (1812-1870) Great Expectations (1860) is a novel whose title and story tell of this desire. It became a duty to become a gentleman. A mood of optimism permeated Victorian England. England was the first nation of the world to become industrialized. During the century the population rose from two million inhabitants when Victoria became Queen to six and one-half million at her death. England remained unchallenged as the leading world power until late in the century when Germany and the United States both emerged to challenge her leadership. Temperance, industry, frugality, self-reliance became the virtues of this middle class society. The pace of growth was rapid and faith was placed in material progress. Perhaps Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), essayist and historian, best expressed the mood of optimism when he referred to the English people as the greatest and most highly civilized people that ever the world saw. Macaulay prophesied of the future in his Southey’s Colloquies (1829):

If we were to prophesy that in the year 1930 a population of fifty millions, better fed, clad, and lodged than the English of our time, will cover these islands. that machines constructed on principles yet undiscovered will be in every house, that there will be no highways but railroads, no travelling but by steam, that our debt, vast as it seems to us, will appear to our great-grandchildren a trifling encumberance, which might easily be paid off in a year or two, many people would think us insane.

Macaulay’s optimism is echoed by Tennyson in his poem Locksley Hall; however, Tennyson did not always write so enthusiastically of industrial progress.

THE REACTION

No age can be characterized safely by neat and pithy generalizations. History is complex and the Victorian period is no exception. While some advocated belief in material progress, there were others who were thoroughly dismayed with the events of the period. Macaulay praised industrial progress, but Tennyson struck a different note in Locksley Hall when he wrote: Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion, creeping nigher, / Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly dying fire. Progress also brought horrible abuses. While the captains of industry grew rich, thousands of laborers starved and suffered awful brutalities. Abject poverty existed alongside great wealth. Records of the period indicate that children of from six to eight years of age worked ten to twelve hours a day. Women worked until the very last stages of pregnancy. Housing for the lower-middle class and for the poor was terrible, and many were forced to live in cellars or to crowd into small rooms. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) was a passionate humanitarian who worked to improve child labor conditions and her political and humanitarian poems reflect this interest. Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist (1838), gave a realistic portrait of workhouse conditions.

TORY PATERNALISM AND SOCIALISM

Political response to the social situation took two forms: Tory Paternalism and Socialism. The laissez faire philosophy encouraged the government to stand by and allow the dreadful conditions mentioned above. Tory Paternalism emphasized that the government had a responsibility to act for the welfare of the people. This was an aristocratic response to problems and also a reaction against liberalism. Government measures such as the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 helped to ease the situation. This measure greatly reduced the tariffs and allowed for free trade and the importation of food. Socialism, though not the dominant voice of the period nor the most effective, was still a strong opposition force. It sought government control of utilities, land, and industry. The Fabian Society became the important Socialist group. The extreme form of Socialism was Communism. The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels appeared in 1847, and Marx’s Capital appeared in 1867, 1885, 1895. A second reform bill was ultimately passed in 1867, and the right to vote was extended to the working classes. Labor thus became a powerful political force.

RELIGION

The emergence of religious doubt is another characteristic of the Victorian period. The Benthamites rejected religion as superstition and were met by the conservative voice of the Oxford Movement, led by John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), one of the great prose writers of the period and author of Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Apology in behalf of his life) and The Idea of a University. Newman, who later became a Roman Catholic, defended the High Church and dogmatic, institutional religion against its enemies. Thomas Carlyle remarked that his was an age at once destitute of faith and terrified at scepticism. Carlyle offered a doctrine of work to his age as a substitute religion and closed his essay Everlasting Yea with the command Produce, Produce!

Traditional religion and belief in a supernatural reality were often supplanted by a religion of humanity. The service of man replaced the service of God. Another substitute religion was that based on the Ideal of Hero Worship - thus the preoccupation in Victorian literature with legendary heroes. In a sense hero-worship was a reaction against the anti-intellectual, materialistic spirit of the age, and it was hoped that the hero would offer spiritual nourishment and an ideal of life.

SCIENCE

Advances in geology and astronomy indicated to man the age and expanse of his universe. Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) was a landmark in biology and proclaimed the theory of evolution, or natural selection. The conflict with the Biblical account of man’s origin became a celebrated controversial issue. In the 1860’s evolution and Biblical Criticism based on the new discoveries of science and using scientific method questioned traditional orthodoxies. The foundations of religious belief were shaken, and Matthew Arnold remarked there was not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve.

LITERATURE

The literature of the Victorian period defies neat and tidy generalizations. Nineteenth century England was marked by considerable diversity, and Victorian literature reflects this diversity. However, it is possible to assess within certain limits and with some caution the temper of the literature. Victorian literature is often remarked for its solemnity, and many Victorian writers did believe that they were prophets offering moral and practical instruction. Matthew Arnold thought of poetry as a new religion and stated that the function of poetry was to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us." Part of this seriousness was a reaction against the verbal beauties of the Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and John Keats (1795-1821), and against the volutionary spirit and the wild and passionate heroes of George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824).

The term Evangelical is often applied to Victorian literature and it is a term that goes back to the eighteenth century Low Church teachings of John Wesley, the English clergyman and founder of Methodism. As applied to literature evangelical characterizes the rigorous code of puritan morality and the enthusiastic interest in reform so predominant in Victorian life. This puritan code was largely a middle class product emphasizing the practical virtues of hard work and worldly success. It required abstention from worldly pleasures and ultimately produced a kind of conformity. Thus one should note Victorian earnestness or seriousness, its emphasis upon puritan morality, and finally its concern for commercial and worldly success. Respectability - agreement with an external code of social behavior - became a leading value of the period.

THE VICTORIAN DILEMMA

The puritan code greatly influenced Victorian literature and accounted for the writer’s painstaking efforts to avoid material that would bring a blush to young ladies’ cheeks. Perhaps more important