Late Victorians

LATE VICTORIANS Historical overview Transformation and the Victorian age (expansion, mobility, progress) The Reform Acts, mass democracy. Legislative initiatives and social reform Challenges to religious authority Science, technology and innovation Technologies of travel, commerce and the British Empire Print technology and the press

Rudyard Kipling’s (1865-1936) “Recessional: A Victorian Ode” (composed to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1897) is often taken to mark the end of the era. Preoccupation with the past informs a wide range of intellectual movements. Emergence of aestheticism: what signified “the Victorian” came to be seen as “the past”. Walter Pater, founding father of aestheticism: “not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end”. Rejection of Victorian culture’s philistine mixture of middle-class moralization and didacticism. Victorian era ended before Victoria died in 1901.

FICTION. NOVEL Divided and anxious country. Many established values and conventions seemed to fall apart. Writers try to engange with these changes; others opt for a variety of forms of scape. Late Victorian social pessimism. Interest in evolution, progress and reform went hand in had with fears about degeneration, regression, decline. George Gissing (1857-1903): New Grub Street (1891). His negative social vision connects with a sense of a culture that has been coarsened by commercialism Fear of brutal, irrational forces below the surface might become evident. Previous fiction fails, whereas more troubling, disruptive ideas take their place. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894): The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)

Wherever we turn in late nineteenth-century literature there is the idea of something dangerous and irrational that will destabilize society. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928): In his novels there is an idea of a natural indiscipline in people, at odds with the requirements of social convention. “The New Woman” Sarah Grand (1854-1943): The Heavenly Twins (1893), The Beth Book (1894) Some figures created by men: Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) Most significant novelist in the last quarter of the nineteenth century Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) The Return of the Native (1878) The Major of Casterbridge (1886) Tess of D’Urbervilles (1891) Jude the Obscure (1895) Far from the Madding Crowd: “Every green was young, every pore was open, and every stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice”. He writes from the margins. Sense of standing outside and questioning established values. Rejection of established patterns of social reconciliation in fiction. Something elemental about people more elemental than their social identity. Characters that are rebel by nature, not by choice. They can achieve dignity through endurance, heroism or strength of character.

In Hardy’s poems there are similar feelings of loss, frustration, confusion, uncertainty and pain. He called himself a “meliorist”. Quite a few of his poems depict the perversity of fate, the disastrous coincidence of events.

“The Ruined Maid” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67g3RRrJZHk

DRAMA Oscar Wilde (1854-1900): Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) A Woman of No Importance (1893) The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) The Importance of Being Earnest: Improbable events. Lacking in substance. Wilde praise for his witty and epigrammatic style and inversion of parodies and satires; but (unlike Swift and Pope) no intention of reforming the world. The style of the play ties in with the play’s central metaphor of pretence. Pretence without substance of depth. Vacuous emptiness of everything (opposed to mid-Victorian solid moral and social convictions).

The theatre: place for the debate about the state of a nation. The late Victorian period is characterized by just this kind of revival of drama. Late-century artists’ engagement with the pressing social, moral and political issues of the day. They strove to challenge their audiences with thorny problems. Realism in the tightly crafted dramas of George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) Born in Dublin. Moved to London when he was twenty. Widower’s House, his first play, was published in 1893. Most notable works: Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893) Arms and the Man (1894) Candida (1897) The Devil’s Discipline (1896) Man and Superman (1903) Major Barbara (1905) Pygmalion (1912) Saint Joan (1923). His career continued well into the 20th century.

Heavily influenced by Henrik Ibsen (by his image of social crusader and political analyst) In his early plays, intent on revealing the flaws, hypocrisies, traps, inner horrors, and ailments of society. Period of fresh expression of liberal values. He created a drama of ideas: characters argue points of view which justify their social positions (Mrs Warren’s Profession, Major Barbara). Attacks the complacencies and conventional moralism of his audience.

Mrs. Warren’s Profession: prohibited on the British stage, no legal performance in England until 1926 (after receiving the Nobel Prize). In the preface he offers an eloquent plea for the recognition of the seriousness and morality of the play. The play was written “to draw attention to the truth that prostitution is caused, not by female depravity and male licentiousness, but simply by underpaying, undervaluing, and overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul together.”

“But it is no defence at all of the vice which she organizes. It is no defence of an immoral life to say that the alternative offered by society collectively to poor women is a miserable life, starved, overworked, fetid, ailing, ugly. Though it is quite natural and RIGHT for Mrs Warren to choose what is, according to her lights, the least immoral alternative, it is none the less infamous of society to offer such alternatives. For the alternatives offered are not morality and immorality, but two sorts of immorality. The man who cannot see that starvation, overwork, dirt, and disease are as anti-social as prostitution—that they are the vices and crimes of a nation, and not merely its misfortunes—is (to put it as politely as possible) a hopelessly Private Person.”