Term
What were some of the developments during the nineteenth century that
completely transformed English society? |
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Definition
| rise in london’s population. the shift from a way of life based on the ownership of land to a modern urban economy based on trade and manufacturing. fast railways and iron ships, looms, printing presses, and farmer’s combines, telegraph, intercontinental cable, photography, anesthetics, and universal compulsory education |
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Term
| In the late nineteenth century, how much of the territory on the surface of the earth and what percentage of the world’s population were under British rule? |
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Definition
| more than a quarter of the territory of the world and one in four people was a subject of the Queen. |
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Term
| What two major historical events during the early 1830s? |
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Definition
1830 the Liverpool Manchester railway opened
1832 passed reform bill |
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Term
| What were the major provisions of the Reform Bill of 1832 |
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Definition
| Extended the right to vote to all males owning property worth 10 pounds or more in annual rent. Abolition of the rotten boroughs and the redistribution of parliamentary representation. |
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Term
| What were the Corn Laws and why was their repeal significant? |
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Definition
| Abolition of the high tariffs on imported grains. The repeal opened a system of free trade whereby goods could be imported with the payment of only minimal tariff duties. |
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Term
| In what ways did Queen Victorian and her husband epitomize the culture, values, and concerns of their age? |
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Definition
| The queen and her husband, Prince Albert, were models of middle-class domesticity and devotion to duty. |
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Term
| What was the Great Exhibition, where was it held, and why was it significant? |
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Definition
display the exhibits of modern industry and science
held in Hyde Park in a gigantic greenhouse
The building, as well as the exhibits, symbolized the triumphant feats of Victorian technology. |
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Term
| What were Britain’s three major exports during the second half of the nineteenth century? |
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Definition
| People, money, & technology |
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Term
| Name and describe the three major divisions of the Church of England. |
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Definition
1. Evangelical/ Low Church
- Emphasized spiritual transformation of the individual by
conversion and a strictly moral Christian life.
- Dedication to good causes (emancipation of slaves)
- Advocates of a strict Puritan code of morality
- Righteously censorious of worldliness in others
- Much of the their power depended on the fact that their view of life and religion was virtually identical with that of a much larger external group: the Nonconformists, or Dissenters (Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, other Protestant denominations)
2. Broad Church
- resisted the doctrinal and ecclesiastical controversies that
separated the H & L divisions
- open to modern advances in thought
- emphasized the broadly inclusive nature of the Church
3. High Church
- like Low Church, also associated with a group external to the Church of England: “Catholic” side of the church
- emphasized the importance of tradition, ritual, and authority
- in 1830s, a HC movement took shape, aka
1. “the Oxford movement” (originated at Oxford University) or
2. “Tractarianism” (its leaders developed their arguments in a series
of pamphlets or tracts)
- led by John Henry Newman
- argued that the Church could maintain its power and
authority only by resisting liberal tendencies and holding to
its original traditions |
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Term
| Who was Jeremy Bentham? With what school of thought was he associated? What were the characteristics and importance of that doctrine? |
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Definition
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was an English philosopher and legal and social reformer who influenced rationalist challenges to religious beliefs during the Victorian period.
School of Thought: Utilitarianism (aka Benthanism or Philosophical Radicalism)
He believed that all human beings seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Thus, he thought that the criterion by which we judge a morally correct action is the extent to which it provides the greatest pleasure to the greatest number. Using this idea to measure religion, Benthamites concluded that religion was an outmoded superstition and didn’t meet the rational test of value. |
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Term
| What was the “Higher Criticism” and why did it matter |
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Definition
Developed especially in Germany, it was an investigation by scientists to the study of the Bible. Intead of treating the Bible as a sacredly infallible document, scientifically minded scholars examined it as a mere text of history and presented evidence about its composition that believers found disconcerting.
The impact of these, as well as other (Darwin), scientific discoveries were damaging to established faiths. They challenged religious beliefs and made people question their faith, feel isolated, and anxiety about the Bible’s significance. |
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Term
| Give four examples of resistance to British imperial rule |
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Definition
1. Indian Mutiny (1857)
2. Jamaican Rebellion (1865)
3. Masscare of General Gordon in Sudan (1885), where he had
been sent to evacuate the British in the face of a religiously
inspired revolt.
4. Anglo-Boer War: end of century; long, bloody, unpopular
struggle to annex two independent republics in the south of
Africa controlled by Dutch settlers (“Boers”).
5. Emergence of Bismark’s Germany after the defeat of France in 1871: threat to naval and military position & preeminence in trade & industry.
6. United States: recovered after Civil War, competition in industry & agriculture.
7. Growth of labor as a political and economic force: (1867) got the right to vote and developed trade unions |
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Term
| How do Prince Albert and his son, Edward, Prince of Wales, respectively epitomize mid and late-Victorian values? |
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Definition
Prince Albert: Mid-Victorian values: earnest-minded intellectual who had devoted his life to hard work and administrative responsibilities.
Edward: Late-Victorian values: colorful embodiment of changing values: pleasure-seeking, easygoing, scandals noted in newspaper: father of 5 was having affairs with ballet dancers. |
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Term
| Name and describe three laws which changed the position of women in Victorian society. |
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Definition
1. Married Women’s Property Acts (1870-1908): gave married women the right to own and handle their own property.
2. Custody Act of 1839: gave a mother the right to petition for court for access to her minor children and custody of her children under 7.
3. Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857: established a divorce court and provided a deserted wife the right to apply for a protection order that would allow her rights to her property.
4. Factory Acts (1802-78): gradually regulated the conditions of labor in mines and factories, eventually reducing the 16-hour day and banning women from mine work all together. |
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Term
| What kinds of work were available, and unavailable, to Victorian women of different social classes? |
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Definition
Poor: factory operatives, housemaids, seamstresses, field laborers, prostitution
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 (but a governess could expect no security of employment, only minimal wages, and an ambiguous status, somewhere between servant and family member, that isolated her within a household. |
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Term
| Where does the term “the Angel in the house” come from, and what did it mean? |
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Definition
| The popular Victorian image of the ideal wife/woman came to be "the Angel in the House"; Protected and enshrined within the home, her role was to create a place of peace where man could take refuge from the diffuculties of modern life. She was expected to be devoted and submissive to her husband. The Angel was passive and powerless, meek, charming, graceful, sympathetic, self-sacrificing, pious, and above all--pure. The phrase "Angel in the House" (1854) comes from the title of an immensely popular poem by Coventry Patmore, in which he holds his angel-wife up as a model for all women. |
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Term
| What technological changes occurred in printing, how did these affect periodicals, and why were periodicals so important during the nineteenth century? |
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Definition
Because of technological changes in printing---presses powered by steam, paper made from wood pulp rather than rags, and typesetting machines---publishers could bring out more printed material more cheaply than ever before.
The most significant development in publishing from the point of view of literary culture was the growth of the periodical. In the first 30 years of the Victorian period, 170 new periodicals were started in London alone. There were magazines for every taste and subject. The chief reviews and monthly magazines had a great deal of power and influence; they defined issues in public affairs, and they made and broke literary reputations. They also published the major writers of the period and the poetry of Tennyson and the Brownings.
The circumstances of periodical publiation also exerted a shaping force on all literature. Novels and long works of nonfiction prose were published in serial form, which created a distinctive sense of a community of readers. It also provided the vehicle and marketplace for nonfictional prose. |
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Term
| What is the central focus of most Victorian novels |
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Definition
| Most Victorian novels focus on a protagonist whose effort to define his or 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. This tension makes the novel the natural form to use in portraying woman’s struggle for self-realization in the context of the constraints imposed on her. The heroine is often the representative protagonist whose search for self-fulfillment emblematizes the human condition. |
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Term
| What career advice did Charlotte Bronte receive from Robert Southey, and what was her response to it? |
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Definition
| When Charlotte Bronte screwed up her courage to write to the poet laureate, Robert Southey, to ask his advice about a career as a writer, he warned her, “ Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.” Bronte put this letter in an envelope with the inscription “Sothey’s advice to be kept forever. My 21st birthday.” Bronte’s ability ultimately to depart from Southey’s advice derived in part from how open the novel was to women writers |
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Term
| How do Victorian poets differ from their Romantic predecessors in their attitude to imagination? |
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Definition
| All of the Victorian poets show strong influence of the Romantics, but they cannot sustain the confidence that the Romantics felt in the power of the imagination. The Victorians often rewrite Romantic poems with a sense of belatedness and distance. When, in his poem “Resignation,” Arnold addresses his sister upon revisiting a landscape, much as Wordsworth had addressed his sister in “Tintern Abbey,” he tells her that the rocks and sky “seem to bear rather than rejoice.” (more melancholoy). Tennyson frequently represents his muse as an isolated woman, cut off from the world and doomed to death (distant). The speakers of Browning’s poems who embrace the visions that their imaginations present are madmen. (crazy, insane) When Hardy writes “The Darkling Thrush,” Keats’s nightingale has become “an aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small.” |
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Term
| What three developments in Victorian poetry were fundamental to the representation of psychology by nineteenth-century poets? |
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Definition
1. Experimentation with narrative and perspective
2. The dramatic monologue
3. The use of Visual Detail and Sound |
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Term
| Why is nonfictional prose an important genre during the Victorian period? |
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Definition
| Writers of nonfictional prose (“men of letters”), unlike novelists and poets, aimed specifically to instruct readers. The term indicates the centrality of argument and persuasion to Victorian intellectual life. It reflects a vigorous sense of shared intellectual life and the public urgency of social and moral issues. On a wide range of controversial topics (religious, political, aesthetic), writers seek to convince their readers to share their convictions and values. Carlyle made them seem like secular priests. Also, Carlyle argues that the modern man of letters differs from his earlier counterpart in that he writes for money. The combination of a new market position for nonfictional writing and the exalted sense of the function of the writer produce a quintessential Victorian form. Despite the diversity of styles and subjects, Victorian prose writers were engaged in shaping belief in a bewilderingly complex and changing world. They claimed a place for literature in a scientific and materialistic culture, gave meaning that people once found in religion. |
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Term
| Why, despite the fact that Victorian drama is not highly regarded, was the theatre important in nineteenth-century culture and society? |
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Definition
Lots of theatres were built & many people attended. “Only when we realize that Victorian theatre was to England as tv is to us today will we be able to comprehend both its wide appeal and its limited artistic achievement.” The popularity of theatrical entertainment made theater a powerful influence on other genres:
Dickens’ novels composed scenes with theatrical technique
Thackeray represented himself as the puppet master of his characters & employs stock gestures and expressions of melodramatic acting in his illustrations for the novels.
Although people failed as playwrites, they were often successful in incorporating theatrical activities into |
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Term
| What was Carlyle’s attitude to religion and why was it important to his influence upon the early Victorian period? |
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Definition
| The “Clothes Philosophy” which was that naked people seek clothes for protection and you need to change clothes when they get old. No need to return to traditional Christian beliefs, you can just make a new coat. Gods die with the men that make them. His writings proposed a revolution in society and thought. |
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Term
| What are the characteristic features of Carlyle’s prose style and how are these related to the content of his writing? |
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Definition
| Vivid imagery of fire and barnyard and zoo, mixture of biblical rhythms and explosive talk, and inverted and unorthodox syntax. |
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Term
| In what country did Browning spend almost all her married life? |
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Definition
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Term
| What were three of the social topics that Browning wrote about in her poetry? |
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Definition
| American abolitionalism, unifying Italy, social issues for women |
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Term
| Who were the “Apostles” and why were they important for Tennyson? |
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Definition
| group of gifted undergraduates at Cambridge that encouraged him to devote his life to poetry |
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Term
| Whose death overwhelmed Tennyson, and what poem did it inspire? |
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Definition
| Arthur Henry Hallam and the poem is titled “In Memoriam” |
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Term
| How much could Tennyson earn from his poetry in a single year? |
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Definition
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Term
| What are the subject and main theme of the Idylls of the King (Tennyson) |
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Definition
| a vision of civilization’s rise and fall. Themes: social community, heroism and courtly love. Cycles of historical change. |
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Term
| What form of Christianity did Elizabeth Gaskell practice? |
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Definition
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Term
| What part of England did Gaskell live in and write about? |
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Definition
| Outskirts of London, Manchester and Knutsford |
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Term
| In what venues did Gaskell publish most of her fiction? |
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Definition
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Term
| With which poetic form is Robert Browning particularly associated? |
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Definition
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Term
| What were the results of Browning’s attempt to write for the London theatre? |
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Definition
| He failed but writing dialogue for the actors help him with dramatic monologues. |
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Term
| In what ways was Browning influenced by Shelley? |
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Definition
| He became an atheist and a liberal |
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Term
| How was Browning different from many other poets of his time |
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Definition
| He wrote with a more colloquial, discordant style. |
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Term
| In what two areas was Thomas Arnold, Matthew’s father, a leader? |
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Definition
| He was a clergyman and leader of the liberal or broad church. He was also the headmaster at Rugby school. |
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Term
| What was Arnold’s long term professional position and how was it useful for his writing? |
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Definition
| inspector of schools. He went to the homes of the Protestant middle class and wrote and criticized the dullness of middle class life. He was also able to travel across Europe and study the differences in English education. This helped him find the distinctive qualities of English writers. |
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Term
| 4. What did Arnold mean by “culture” and why did he think it was so important for Victorian society? |
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Definition
an open-minded intelligence, a refusal to take things on authority.
People should view life in all its aspects, including the social, political, and religious. This is the cure for the ills of a sick society |
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Term
| With which group of artists was Rossetti associated? How did she differ from them? |
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Definition
| pre-raphaelite. She is different because of a stern religious vision and a consciousness of gender makes her criticize how the pre-raphealites represented women |
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Term
| Which three women did Wilde say he would have married? |
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Definition
| Queen Victoria, the actress Sarah Berhardt, and Lillie Langtry (the mistress of Victoria’s son Edward) |
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Term
| Why was Wilde imprisoned for two years? |
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Definition
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