THE VICTORIAN AGE: A GOLDEN AGE OR AN AGE OF MISERY ?

1. THE VICTORIAN AGE: A GOLDEN AGE OR AN AGE OF MISERY? THE VICTORIAN TOWNS

2. POSITIVE ASPECTS OF THE VICTORIAN AGE: • Industrial revolution: the industrial revolution started with the introduction of capitalism. • Technological advances: introduction of steam hammers, locomotives… • Economical progress: Britain was the first economical power in the world till 1901, as the Usa became the leader, but it remained the first in manifacturing.

3. Drawing of a crushing mill

4. Representation of a cotton factory

5. Crystal Palace • Crystal Palace was a construction of iron and glass. It contained a great exhibition of technological advances (steam hammers, locomotive….). This exhibition had a political purpose: it was useful to show the supremacy of Britain in the world - economy.

6. 1820 Writers spoke about the “machine age” with a positive tone • BUT ON THE OTHER HANDit implied a high social and environmental cost.

7. The heroes of the age • Scientists, in particular engineers, were described like heroes by many writers like Samuel Sniles. • From this point of view, technological progress and mechanical inventions were the result of inspired, intuitive leaps made by heroic figures.

8. The cartoons The first cartoon appeared in 1850. Cartoons were used to emphasise the importance of industry during the Victorian Age.

9. Negative aspects of the Victorian Age: • Pollution in the towns due to factory activity: in fact life in the countryside was much healthier. • Hygienic conditions (cities were too densely populated, most people lived in miserable conditions; most houses shared water supplies) • Epidemics (cholera,thyphoid), with a consistant increase of death in the cities.

10. In 1851 half of Britain’s population lived in towns, which offered a better chance of work and higher wages than the countryside…

11. But life expectation in the towns was of only 26 years: • Large towns were unhealthy. New epidemics were stalking the cities. • Such a high mortality, hadn’t been seen sincethe Black Death

13. The crisis of epidemics came to a peak in the “Great Stink”.

14. The “Great Stink” • This expression is used to describe the terrible smell in London, coming from the Thames. • The “Miasmas”, exhalations from decaying matter, poisoned the air.

15. Poor families, with 4-5 children, lived in houses with 2-3 rooms and without a lavatory. The houses of the rich had water in the kitchen, gas lighting, flushing toilets and were decorated. The houses

17. The clubs • The clubs had their origin in the coffee houses, but they contributed to increase the difference between social classes. In fact only people belonging to high classes could be members of a club.

18. Municipal corporations: • In the early 19th century many towns were governed by municipal corporations, usually of self-electing members. Parliament reformed municipal administration in 1835, but even if corporations were elected, voters were self-interested owners of small property. Many towns voted for cheap governments, with a policy of low spending on drains or water supplies.

19. Answer to the webquest: The Victorian Age wasanageof misery, because the process of industrialization had a high social cost

20. Why begin with Hardy?It is generally taken for granted that works of literary art are conditioned by economic and political forces active in the society in which those works spring and to which they are directed, forces which bear on in the solitary artist as he struggles to compose.And I supposed that the art-work should have an effect in moulding the political actions and sentiments of those who respond to it. These are not, I think, notions that originated with Karl Marx, though Marx valuably systematized them and gave them a polemical edge. At all events, they are now assumptions basic to any responsible literary history. In the first half of the 20th c. the most far-reaching influence, for good and ill, has been not Yeats, Still less Eliot or Pound, not Lawrence, but Hardy. Pound , to be sure, unlike the others named, has declared himself among the beneficiaries of Hardy. Hardy indeed had the effect on locking any poet whom he influences into the world of historical contingency, a world of specific places at specific times. Vernon Watkins realized this when he asserted that he and Dylan Thomas were both religious poets, who “could never write a poem dominated by time, as Hardy could.”

21. Hardy seems to have mistrusted the claims of poetry to transcend the linear unrolling of recorded time. This sets him irreconcilably at odds with for instance Yeats who exerts himself repeatedly to transcend historical time by seeing it as cyclical, so as to leap above it into the realm that is visionary, mythological and, in some sense eternal. We ought to have delight in both Hardy and Yeats, if only because so much of the finest Yeats is concerned with the effort of transcendence rather than the achievement of it. But for any poet who finds himself in the position of choosing between these two masters, the choice can not be fudged ; there is no room for compromise. And so there is an emblematic significance to Philip Larkin’s conversion from Yeats to Hardy in 1946. Equally, there is perhaps tragic significance to the fact that Hardy is said to have been Thomas Dylan’s favourite poet, whereas Yeats was his chosen master.

22. But none of Hardy’s admirers have yet found how to make Hardy the poet weigh equally with Eliot and Pound and Yeats, not just as poets but as intellectuals as well. In general we can say that Hardy is not generally thought of as an intellectual force. Hardy, Herbert Spencer and Robert Huxley are old hat and Hardy who found his ideas in the same climate of opinion, is therefore out of date. But quite apart of the question whether a man’s images can be divorced from his ideas quite so cleanly, the second half of the 20th c. is surely much less confident than the first half was , of having outgrown Thomas Hardy. The scientific humanism to which Hardy gave allegiance survives as a working ethic. The Second World War, which so discredited the reactionary or religious alternatives that had been promoted by the poets and the literary intellectuals shook also the confidence of scientific humanism, but so radically.

23. Hardy was a socialist and a scientific humanist also. And to just that degree the ideas of Hardy are far more forces to be reckoned with than the ideas of T.S. Eliot. Unlike Pound, Yetas or Lawrence or Eliot (who had anti democratic opinions, Hardy was a social democrat who would always call for “the freedom of inquiry”—a principle which his authors regarded without enthusiasm, if not with animosity, much as some of them profitted by it. In that way scientific humanism is the ethics behind not just socialist positions in politics, but equally behind all which may call themselves liberal.It could be argued that Hardy is the one poetic imagination of the first magnitude in the 20th c. who writes out of, and embodies in his poems, political and social attitudes which a social democrat recognizes as “liberal”. Hardy’s response for example to the 1st. WW seems to have been liberal in a sense which does little credit to his shrewdness. Skeptical as he was in general, he appears to have believed that European man, enlightened as he had been bey scientific liberalism, had progressed beyond the point at which he would any longer have recourse to war.

24. His less liberal contemporary Rudyard Kipling knew better as he observed the arms race gather momentum and the balance of power tilt. But Hardy appears to have been quite innocent.Hardy rallied from the shock of the war, and tried to make a sense of it retrospectively, in a document called “Apology” (dated Feb. 1922 ) with which he prefaced his post-war collection, Late Lyrics and Earlier. In the article he criticized the war and likened human beings to animals ; if they continue to fight they will perish the human race on earth.Hardy is quite clear about what should motivate our actions in life– it is “loving kindness, operating through scientific knowledge.” This is what is meant by “scientific humanism.”

25. Why Hardy thought the position worth restating, and the plea worth making, appears near the end of the essay, speaking of poetry, pure literature, religion,” he declares:At the end of the essay Hardy says: …these, I say, the visible signs of mental and emotional life, must like all other things, keep moving, becoming; even though at present, when belief in witches of Endor is displacing the Darwinian theory and “the truth that shall make you free,” men’s minds appear … to be moving backwards rather than on. A forlorn hope, a mere dream, that of an alliance between religion, which must be retained unless the world is to perish, and complete rationality, which must come, unless also the world is to perish, by means of the interfusing effect of poetry –“the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; the impassioned expression of science,” as it was defined by the English poet who was quite orthodox in his ideas.

26. This of course reminds of Wordsworth and Mathew Arnold who believed in the power of poetry to fill the vacuum in of the soul when the power of religion fades down in an age like that of the Victorian Age. Hardy’s strategy was, we now realize, to buttress (strongly support) his case for scientific humanism as the only respectable working ethic for the poet, by enlisting an authority much more compelling than his own could be, bedeviled (confused) as his was by willful misrepresentations of his own position as perversely “unorthodox.”