? Industrialism?Progress or Decline? ? The Woman Question ? The Painterly Image in Poetry ? Victorian Imperialism
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THE VICTORIAN AGE
TEXTS CONTEXTS 1830 Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical 1832 Sir Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology 1833 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus 1836 Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers 1837 Carlyle, The French Revolution 1842 Tennyson, Poems. Robert Browning, Dramatic Lyrics 1843 John Ruskin, Modern Painters (vol. 1) 1846 George Eliot, The Life of Jesus (translation) 1847 Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights 1848 Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair 1850 Tennyson, In Memoriam. William Wordsworth, The Prelude (posthumous publication) 1851 Ruskin, Stones of Venice 1853 Matthew Arnold, Poems 1854 Dickens, Hard Times 1855 Robert Browning, Men and Women 1857 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh 1859 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty. Tennyson, Idylls of the King (books 1?4) 1860 Dickens, Great Expectations. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss 1862 Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market 1864 R. Browning, Dramatis Personae 1830 Opening of Liverpool and Manchester Railway 1832 First Reform Bill 1833 Factory Act. Abolition of Slavery Act. Beginning of Oxford Movement 1836 First train in London 1837 Victoria becomes queen 1838 'People's Charter' issued by Chartist Movement 1840 Queen marries Prince Albert 1842 Chartist Riots. Copyright Act. Mudie's Circulating Library 1845-4 6 Potato famine in Ireland. Mass emigration to North America 1846 Repeal of Corn Laws. Robert Browning marries Elizabeth Barrett 1847 Ten Hours Factory Act 1848 Revolution on the Continent. Second Republic established in France. Founding of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 1850 Tennyson succeeds Wordsworth as Poet Laureate 1851 Great Exhibition of science and industry at the Crystal Palace 1854 Crimean War. Florence Nightingale organizes nurses to care for sick and wounded 1857 Indian Mutiny. Matrimonial Causes Act 1860 Italian unification 1861 Death of Prince Albert 1861-6 5 American Civil War
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TEXTS CONTEXTS 1865 Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland 1866 Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and Ballads 1867 Karl Marx, Das Kapital 1869 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy. Mill, The Subjection of Women 1871 Darwin, Descent of Man 1872 Eliot, Middlemarch 1873 Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance 1885 W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, The Mikado 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 1888 Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills 1889 William Butler Yeats, Crossways 1891 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey. Arthur Conan Doyle, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes 1893 Shaw, Mrs. Warren's Profession 1895 Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest. Hardy, Jude the Obscure 1896 A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad 1898 Hardy, Wessex Poems 1900 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim 1865 Jamaica Rebellion 1867 Second Reform Bill 1868 Opening of Suez Canal 1870 Married Women's Property Act. Victory in Franco-Prussian War makes Germany a world power. Elementary Education Act 1871 Newnham College (first women's Oxbridge college) founded at Cambridge 1877 Queen Victoria made empress of India. Gerard Manley Hopkins joins Jesuit order 1878 Electric street lighting in London 1882 Married Women's Property Act 1885 Massacre of General Gordon and his forces and fall of Khartoum 1890 First subway line in London 1891 Free elementary education 1893 Independent Labour Party 1895 Oscar Wilde arrested and imprisoned for homosexuality 1898 Discovery of radium 1899 Irish Literary Theater founded in Dublin 1899-190 2 Anglo-Boer War 1901 Death of Queen Victoria; succession of Edward VII
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THOMAS CARLYLE 1795-1881
W. B. Yeats once asked William Morris which writers had inspired the socialist movement of the 1880s, and Morris replied: 'Oh, Buskin and Carlyle, but somebody should have been beside Carlyle and punched his head every five minutes.' Morris's mixed feelings of admiration and exasperation are typical of the response Thomas Carlyle evokes in many readers. Anyone approaching his prose for the first time should expect to be sometimes bewddered. Like Bernard Shaw, Carlyle discovered, early in life, that exaggeration can be a highly effective way of gaining the attention of an audience. But it can also be a way of distracting an audience unfamiliar with the idiosyncrasies of his rhetoric and unprepared for the distinctive enjoyments his writings can provide. One of the idiosyncrasies of his prose is that it is meant to be read aloud. 'His paragraphs,' as Balph Waldo Emerson observes, 'are all a sort of splendid conversation.' As a talker Carlyle was as famous in his day as Samuel Johnson in his. Charles Darwin testified that he was 'the best worth listening to of any man I know.' No Boswell has adequately recorded this talk, but no Boswell was needed, for Carlyle's prose adopts the rhythm, idiosyncrasy, and spontaneity of the spoken voice. It is a noisy and emphatic voice, startling on a first reading.
Carlyle was forty-one years old when Victoria became queen of England. He had been born in the same year as John Keats, yet he is rarely grouped with his contemporaries among the Bomantic writers. Instead his name is linked with younger men such as Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, and John Buskin, the early generation of Victorian writers, for whom he became (according to Elizabeth Barrett Browning) 'the great teacher of the age.' The classification is fitting, for it was Carlyle's role to foresee the problems that were to preoccupy the Victorians and early to report on his experiences in confronting these problems. After 1837 his loud voice began to attract an audience; and he soon became one of the most influential figures of the age, affecting the attitudes of scientists* statesmen, and especially of writers. His wife once complained that Emerson had no ideas (except mad ones) that he had not derived from Carlyle. ' 'But pray, Mrs. Carlyle,' replied a friend, 'who has?' '
Carlyle was born in Ecclefechan, a village in Scotland, the eldest child of a large family. His mother, at the time of her marriage, was illiterate. His father, James Carlyle, a stonemason and later a farmer, was proudly characterized by his son as a peasant. The key to the character of James Carlyle was the Scottish Calvinism that he instilled into the members of his household. Frugality, hard work, a tender but undemonstrative family loyalty, and a peculiar blend of self-denial and self- righteousness were characteristic features of Carlyle's childhood home.
With his father's aid the young Carlyle was educated at Annan Academy and at Edinburgh University, the subject of his special interest being mathematics; he left without taking a degree. It was his parents' hope that their son would become a clergyman, but in this respect Thomas made a severe break with his ancestry. He was a prodigious reader; and his exposure to such skeptical writers as David Hume, Voltaire, and Edward Gibbon had undermined his faith. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776?88), he told Emerson, was 'the splendid bridge from the old world to the new.' By the time he was twenty-three Carlyle had crossed the bridge and had abandoned his Christian faith and his proposed career as a clergyman. During the period in which he was thinking through his religious position, he supported himself by teaching school in Scotland and, later, by tutoring private pupils; but from 1824 to the end of his life he relied exclusively on his writings for his livelihood. His early writings consisted of translations, biographies, and critical studies of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and other German authors, to whose view of life he was deeply attracted. The German Bomantics (loosely grouped by Carlyle under the label 'Mys
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