The British Empire

During the reign of Queen Victoria, Great Britain ruled over a wide and powerful empire.
An area of 4 million people more than 400 (fourandred) million squares miles. After the 1857 (aitin fifty seven)
Indian Mutiny India came under direct rule by Britain;Queen Victoria was crowned.Empress of India in
1877(eitin seventin seven).The British also occupied:Australia and New Zealand;parts of China – including
Hong Kong in 1841(eitin fourti uan);Burma in 1886( eitin eitin six);Egypt in 1882 (eitin eitin two);Sudan in
1884 (eitin eitin four);South Africa in 1902 (naitin e two), after the Boer War.
The Victorians believed that:
The ‘races’ of the world were divided by physical and intellectual differences;some were destined to be led by
others; it was an obligation imposed by God on the British to impose their superior way of life, their
institutions,law and politics on native peoples.
Rudyard Kipling: The White Man’s Burden
A poem written in 1899(eitin naitin nain) to give advice to the United States on the occasion of the annexation
of the Philippines.It contains the author’s famous phrase, ‘the white man’s burden’.The bard of the English
Empire and came to symbolise the belief in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Charles Darwin and evolution: 1859 (eitin fifti nain)Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species.
His theory of natural selection discarded the version of creation given by the Bible, it seemed to show that the
strongest survived and the weakest deserved to be defeated. Stress on the godless element of chance involved in
evolutionary variation.
Theory of evolution 1871(eitin seventin uan): The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex
all living creatures have taken their forms through a slow process of change and adaptation in a struggle for
survival;favourable physical conditions determine the survival of a species;
unfavourable ones determine its extinction;man evolved, like any other animal, from less highly organised
forms, namely from a monkey.
The Victorians and crime: There were occasional panics linked to particular appalling offences.The
Victorians believed crime could be beaten:create Prison acts (1865 and 1877). Creation of new police forces..
Impact on small theft on the streets→ Street robbery, called garrotting’. →There were occasional panics linked to
particular appalling offences→The murders of Jack the Ripper (1888)..The case of Jack The Ripper was the most
famous case of sexual violence.Parliament responded to the problem with legislation which provided flogging
as well as imprisonment for offenders.Violence, especially violence with a sexual connotation, sold
newspapers.The press created sensations out of minor incidents.Domestic violence rarely came before the
courts: tolerated because committed in the private sphere. Publicising of such behaviour bad reputation to the
family
The criminals :At the beginning of the century are considered criminal offenders individuals belonging the
working class.By the middle of the century ‘criminal classes was social groups stuck at the bottom of society.
Towards the end of the century the criminal was an individual suffering from some form of behavioural
abnormality that had been either inherited or encouraged by dissolute parents.
Aestheticism
Developed in France with Théophile Gautier (1811–72).It reflected: the sense of frustration and uncertainty of
the artist;his reaction against the materialism and the restrictive moral code of the bourgeoisie; his need to
re-define the role of art; the French artists withdrew from the political and social scene; escaped’ into aesthetic
isolation.The bohemian’s protest against the monotony and vulgarity of bourgeois life led to an unconventional
existence, the pursue of sensations and excesses, and the cult of art and beauty.
Aesthetic Movement in England.
Walter Pater (1839-94) is regarded as the theorist of the Aesthetic Movement in England. His Studies in the
History of the Renaissance (1873) and his masterpiece Marius the Epicurean (1885) were immediately
successful, especially with the young, because of their subversive and potentially 'demoralising' message. He
rejected religious faith and said that art was the only means to stop time, the only certainty. He thought life
should be lived in the spirit of art, namely 'as a work of art', filling each passing moment with intense
experience, feeling all kinds of sensations. The task of the artist was to feel sensations, to be attentive to the
'attractive', the 'gracious'.The main implication of this new aesthetic position was that art had no reference to
life, and therefore it had nothing to do with morality and did not need to be didactic. Pater's works had a deep
influence on the poets and writers of the 1890s(eitin naitin), especially Oscar Wilde who was an exemplary
Aesthete.
The dandy:Belonged to the upper classes🡪 opposite to the bohemian.Elegance as a reason of life and ‘life as a
work of art’.Interested in beauty and literary works 🡪 opposite to the didacticism of the Victorian writers of the
first half of the age.
Oscar Wilde's life
Oscar Wilde (1854-19o0) was born in Dublin in 1854 (eitin fifti four). After attending Trinity College in
Dublin, he was sent to Oxford, where he gained a first class degree in classics and distinguished himself for his
eccentricity. He became a disciple of Walter Pater, accepting the theory of 'Art for Art's Sake'. After
graduating, he left Oxford and settled in London, where he soon became a fashionable dandy for his
extraordinary wit and his extravagant way of dressing. In 1881 (eitin eitin uan), Wilde edited, at his own
expense, Poems, and was engaged for a tour in the United States. On his arrival in New York, he told reporters
that Aestheticism was a search for the beautiful, a science through which men looked for the relationship
existing between painting, sculpture and poetry, which were simply different forms of the same truth. The tour
was a remarkable personal success for Wilde. On his return to Europe in 1883 (eitin eitin trhe), he married
Constance Lloyd, who bore him two children, but he soon became tired of his marriage. In the late 1880s (eitin
eitin), Wilde's literary talent was revealed by a series of short stories, The Canterville Ghost, Lord Arthur
Savile's Crime, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, written for his children, and the novel The Picture of
Dorian Gray (1891). After his first and only novel, he developed an interest in drama. In the 1890s (eitin
naintin), he produced a series of plays which were successful on the London stage, such as his masterpiece The
Importance of Being Earnest (1895, OText Bank 79-80) and the tragedy in French Salomé (1893). However,
both the novel and the tragedy damaged the writer's reputation: the former was considered immoral, and the
latter was prevented from appearing on the London stage due to its presumed obscenity.
In 1891 (eitin naitin uan), Wilde met the handsome young nobleman Lord Alfred Douglas, with whom he had
a homosexual affair. The boy's father forced a public trial and Wilde was convicted of homosexual practices
and subsequently sentenced to two years of hard labour. While in prison, he wrote De Profundis, a long letter
to explain his life and to condemn Lord Alfred Douglas for abandoning him; this work was published
posthumously in 1905 (naitin e five). After Wilde was released from prison, he lived in France under a
pseudonym, as an outcast in poverty. He died of meningitis in Paris in 1900 (naitin andred).
The Picture of Dorian Gray
1890 (eitin naintin) 🡪 first appeared in a magazine. 1891 (eitin naitin uan)🡪 revised and extended.
It reflects Oscar Wilde’s personality. It was considered immoral by the Victorian public.
The story Dorian Gray
The novel is set in London at the end of the 19th (naintin) century. The protagonist is Dorian Gray, a young
man. Dorian's beauty fascinates a painter, Basil Hallward, who decides to paint his portrait. The portrait
satisfies the young man's desires, including that of eternal youth; the signs of age, experience and vice appear
on the portrait. Dorian lives only for pleasure, making use of everybody and even letting people die because of
his insensitivity. When the painter sees the corrupted image of the portrait, Dorian kills him. Later, Dorian
wants to free himself of the portrait, witness to his spiritual corruption, and stabs it, but in doing so he
mysteriously kills himself. In the very moment of his death, the picture returns to its original purity, and
Dorian's face becomes 'withered, wrinkled, and loathsome'.
The moral of the novel is Every excess must be punished and reality cannot be escaped.
When Dorian destroys the picture, he cannot avoid the punishment for all his sins 🡪 death. The horrible,
corrupting picture could be seen as a symbol of the immorality and bad conscience of the Victorian middle
class.The picture, restored to its original beauty,
illustrates Wilde’s theories of art: art survives people, art is eternal.
In The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) captured the
mood of change of the last decades of the 19h century and expressed the moral division between good and
evil. This is a classic psychological novel, in which hypocrisy is embodied by the double. The double, or
doppelgänger, is an alter ego, which appears as a distinct and separate being perceived by the physical
senses but existing in a dependent relation to the original. The alter ego was not subordinate'; in fact, the
double often comes to dominate the subject. Stevenson created a symbiotic relationship between Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde, the former locked in symbolic conflict with the sinister power he had released from within
his own being.
The story The plot of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is quite simple: the protagonist is a man divided against himself into two
distinct characters. The first is a respectable being, Jekyll, and the second an evil genius, Hyde. These two beings are in a
perpetual struggle, and it is the same act of secret chemistry that releases Hyde and restores Jekyll.Once Hyde is
released from hiding, he achieves domination over the Jekyll aspect, so that the individual has only two choices:
the man may choose a life of crime and depravity, or Jekyll must eliminate Hyde in the only way left- by killing
himself. Hence Jekyll's suicide is the final and only choice.Stevenson therefore implies that man's salvation is based on
the annihilation of one part of his nature if he lives in a civilised society. hyde is physically repugnant violent and
dishonest, a true criminal
Robert Louis Stevenson's life
Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850 (eitin fifti). Because of his poor health, he spent most of
his childhood in bed, terrified of the dark and tutored at home under the influence of his family's Calvinism. In
his adolescence he travelled a lot in search of a friendlier climate; he lived in the south of England, Germany,
France and Italy. He took up engineering at university, following in his father's footsteps, but he was not
enthusiastic about it. He was in conflict with his social environment, the respectable Victorian world; he grew
his hair long, his manners were eccentric and he became one of the first examples of a 'bohemian in Britain,
openly rejecting his family's religious principles and their love for respectability. After giving up engineering, he
graduated in law in 1875 (eitin seventin five) and decided to devote himself to writing. He married an
American woman, and since his health was deteriorating, they moved to Australia and Tahiti. He died of a
brain haemorrhage in 1894/eitin naitin four). Stevenson became popular as a novelist in the 1880s, when he
published Treasure Island (1883), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Kidnapped (1886) and
The Master of Ballantrae (1889). His short stories, pervaded by a sense of suspense and supernatural, were
collected as New Arabian Nights (1882).
DR jekyll He was a great and well-built man, about fifty years old, smooth-faced, with a shadow of
cleverness, skill and kindness. His eyes were easily readable, that is, his eyes were very expressive.

Edward Hyde is a very short young man of stature and repulsive appearance. To the sight it seems a pale
dwarf that does not have its own physiognomy to it gives a' impression of latent deformities out of the
ordinary and whoever meets: it is similar to a monstrous Juggernaut, according to Enfield.