PEOPLE’S DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF ALGERIA

ENSC “ASSIA DJEBBAR”

Literature as a Mirror of the Era

DONE BY:
 LATRECHE Anfel
 TERRAI Ilhem
(Group 3)

SUPERVISOR:
HAMADOU Yasmin
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Outline:

I. Introduction:

 Literature during the Victorian Era

 Overview

 Characteristics of Victorian literature

The Victorian Compromise

Realism

Moral purpose

The reclaiming of the past

II. Body:

 Literary Portrayal of the era:

 How the novel served as a mirror of the era (major novelists,

famous works, and themes explored)

 How poetry mirrored the Victorian Age (major poets, famous

works, and themes explored)

III. Conclusion
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i. Literature during the Victorian Age:

1. An Overview:

Over the six decades of Queen Victoria’s reign, some 60,000 works of prose fiction were

published in Great Britain alone. This unprecedented growth was due in part to in part to the

spread of education, the emergence of the middle classes, and the proliferation of more

affordable reading materials. As an increasing proportion of the population became literate, so

too did the demand for new types of literature increase –a demand that was met by more than

7,000 authors.

Queen Victoria came to the throne during the world’s first Industrial Revolution, a time

characterized by rapid change and development. Key advances in communication methods and

the growth of the railway network led to a boom in print production and distribution.

As reading became less of a privilege of the wealthy and more of a pastime of the common

British citizens, publications such as periodicals flourished. These magazines provided monthly

installments of news articles, satire essays, poetry and fiction. Theses serial publications enabled

many authors to easily share their works with the public and helped launch the careers of

prominent Victorian writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, and the

Browning’s (Norton). Because literature was an accessible and pervasive part of Victorian

society, studying it is crucial in understanding the attitudes and concerns of the people who lived

during the era. Most of the writing during this time was a reaction to the rapidly changing

notions of science, morality, and society.

2. Characteristics of Victorian Literature:

1. 1. Victorian Compromise: The Victorian period was a time of great contradiction, often referred to as

Victorian compromise; Victorians took a compromising position between dualistic ideologies. An effort
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was made to restore the old and the new to bring about a compromise between morality and depravity,

faith and doubt, progress and tradition as well as romanticism and realism. 2. Realism: during this era,

Literature shifted its interest from romanticism to realism, which strives to represent life without

idealization; faithful representation of reality. 3. Moral Purpose: Victorian Literature was marked by a

deep moral purpose; Literature both in prose and poetry departed from the purely artistic standard of

art’s sake and became replete with morale values to uplift and instruct the common masses. 4. The

reclaiming of the past: this was a major part of Victorian Literature that was found in both classical

literature and the medieval literature of England.

ii. Literary Portrayal of the Era:

The literature of this era was unique as it dealt with a variety of topics. It reflected upon the use of

romanticism, crime, poverty power, politics, gender, sexuality, and so on.

1) The Novel:

"A novel is not simply a vehicle for private expression, But that it also exists for social examination."
Margret Atwood
The authors of this era all seem to reflect on life experiences to convey their thoughts about

Victorian society and even their own class standing.

One of the most famous authors of the time is Charles Dickens. His books contained the harsh

reality of the world; they showed the truth of what was going on in London at the time of the early 19th

century. Many issues that occurred during the Victorian era inspired Dickens writings greatly. In his

famous works, "Oliver Twist", "Great Expectations", "Nicholas Nickleby", Charles portrays the

sordid lives of criminals, exposes the cruel treatment of many orphans and how they were used in the

worst ways, and discusses how people were defined by how much wealth they had and what status they

were. Dickens emphasized various themes in his stories. He reflected upon the superficial attitudes of

Victorian Society, focused on the real meaning of poverty, discussed the idea of crime and the

difference between being born a criminal and an influenced one, so, while crime was high during the
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Victorian era, much of it had to do with people being forced into it because of their social standing. In

addition, Charles often considered the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. During this

period, the lower classes experienced squalid working and living conditions. Dickens himself

experienced this hardship as a child when he was forced to work in a shoe factory after his father was

sent to debtor's prison. This influenced his depiction of the Marshall Sea prison in Little Dorrit. Prisons,

orphanages, or slums may seem grim settings for a story, but they allowed Dickens to shed light on how

his society's most invisible people lived.

George Eliot is also regarded as one of the Victorian Era's most prominent novelists. In her

masterpiece "Adam Bede" (1859), she states, "let us have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to

the faithful representing of commonplace things". Through this quotation, George explicitly expresses her

realist orientation, similar to that of Dickens. Using literature, she tried to accurately mirror the world and

portray realistic scenes with complex, life-like characters.

For instance, in another of her famous works -called "Middlemarch" (1871-72), Eliot denounces

the harshness of oppressive social expectations through discussing the ways people, especially women;

conduct themselves and how the community judges them. On the other hand, she shows that any

resistance is inherently limited, as ways of living for women at the time did not exist.

2) Poetry:

Following Romanticism, Victorian poets continued many of the previous era's main themes, such

as religious skepticism, but they also raised other distinct themes related to the issues that emerged

during the Victorian Era. Realism was one of the features that characterized the Victorian poetry; it had

less idealized view of nature as compared to the Romantic poetry. Poets like Lord Alfred Tennyson and

Robert Browning were the first to depart from the tradition of 'art for art's sake' and were very conscious

to show moral purpose to uplift and to instruct.

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Victorian poets portrayed the misery that Industrial Revolution had brought about in the society.

Under the new order of economy, the world became more complex and stranger, which made humans

more individualized than ever before, but also made them fail to find their position in society. People

felt less satisfaction and freedom, but more isolation. True that on the surface, Victorians seemed to

enjoy the wealth and prosperity, but the feelings of uncertainty, cynicism, and self-doubt also prevailed.

The poets of this age reflected these problems in their poems and wrote on isolation, despair, doubt, and

general pessimism that surrounded the era; besides, they raised voice for indiscrimination against the

common masses. To demonstrate, Tennyson’s poem, ‘Locksley Hall’ (1842) is about the restless “young

England”. Mathew Arnold explored the “strange disease of modern life” and the loneliness of modern-

age men in his poem ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’ (1853). In ‘The City of Dreadful Night’, Arthur Hugh Clough

deals with the note of Insomnia and Pessimism. In addition, the Victorian era was the first grate age of

doubt; leading 19th century intellectuals battled the church and struggled to absorb radical scientific

discoveries that upended everything the Bible had told them about the world. The leading Poets of this

age reacted to this religious skepticism through their works. To illustrate, Robert Browning attempted to

criticize religion in his poems like ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’. He also questioned the demands of the church that

go against human nature. Similarly, When Tennyson wrote ‘In Memoriam’ (1850), he raised many

questions on life and death. Arnold’s poem ‘Dover Beach’ (1867), also addresses the eroding religious

faith of the time.

iii. Conclusion:

The Victorian Era was, indeed, a time of great economic, political, and social changes. The writers

of the time often reflected these substantial changes in their literature focusing of the interest of society.

Themes like science vs. religion, progress, social class and women question had been a center of

discussion in much, if not all, of their works.

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SOURCES:

1. https://prezi.com/moitcgsqb-h6/themes-of-charles-dickens-

novels/?fbclid=IwAR2Xrp8O9Joh-

vRUtYr2_jYlakX1JilX8FP_9Pj36Roc1TStO3gS7kqRsRc&fallb

ack=1

2. https://career101.in/characteristics-of-victorian-poetry/4885/

3. Wikipedia

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLke4z4ArMI

5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffv3GzOU5D

6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBCnhoFbLtA

7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6vjjQKWoIA