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as moral
earnestness,
astounding
material progress and confidence . In truth, the Victorian age was an area
of extraordinary complexity and variety of view point, as its writers
demonstrate.
The Victorian age is remarkable for its scientific progress. In many
ways, it was an age of progress and inventions -of railway building, teamships, reforms, marking the transition between the end of the Industrial
Revolution and the beginning of the Victorian period science and
technology convert and develop-but it was also a time of doubt. There was
too much poverty, too much injustice and too little certainty about faith or
morals -thus it became also an age of reformers and theorists.
It was an age both exhilarated and bewildered by a growing wealth
and power, the peace of industrial and social change. The lower middle
classes and most part of the common people gain access to culture.
Therefore, universal elementary education was instituted in 1870. The
search for balance is at once the most general and the most typical feature
of the Victorian age. Other features seem to be the serial novel and the
creation of the modern newspaper as a means of information and popular
education as well as the key-words of the period, progress and freedom.
By Progress they meant the expansion of human power in the material,
the intellectual and spiritual field. As the Great Exhibition of 1851
proudly demonstrated, this was the age both of applied art and of the
application of new technologies to new aspects of design and production.
The years 1830-1880 were years of British self-confidence and
semiisolatinism in terms of European affairs, but the illusion of peace in the
1850s was broken by the disasters of the Indian Mutiny and by the
incompetent bungling of the Crimean War.
Paul Brand in "English and American Literature"2 considers that
"there are three main problems which faced the Victorians: the rise of
democracy, the position of the poor and the emancipation of women".
the rise of democracy, in the position of the poor and the emancipation of
women.
The Reform Bill of 1832 had given the vote to the middle classes;
the second Reform Bill of 1867 extended the vote to the working classes.
Negro slavery in the colonies was abolished in 1833 and by the end of
Victoria's reign the white colonies were largely self-governing. Slow
improvement was also made in the condition of the poor .The Factory Act
of 1833 forbade child-labour below a certain age in most industries. But
the New Poor Law of 1834, which transferred the care of the poor from
the parish to the state, destroyed family life by sending the poor to the
workhouse. The Victorian era was an important time for the development
of science. Charles Darwin's work "On the Origin of Species", affected
society and thought in the Victorian era. The theory of evolution contained
within the work shook many of the ideas the Victorians had about
themselves and their place in the world and although it took a long time to
be widely accepted it would change , dramatically, thought and literature.
The theory of evolution which was later worked out by philosophers
and scientists like Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley, come to
exercise a tremendous influence on Victorian thought. As Paul Brand
explains in "English and American Literature" 7, "this influence was
twofold: it strengthened the optimistic belief in Progress, which was so
characteristic of the Victorians, but it also perplexed the minds of those
who, believed in a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis". Though a
series effort was made to reconcile the discoveries of geology and biology
with the old religious beliefs, many Christians failed to see that there
cannot really be any disagreement between the religious and moral truths of
the Bible on the one hand, and the findings of science on the other.
This apparent conflict between science and faith cast a dark
shadow over the Victorian scene and the struggles and doubts are reflected
VICTORIAN LITERATURE
different atmosphere
and
literature
developed various
specialist
POETRY