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THE VICTORIAN AGE CULTURE AND SOCIETY - Coggle Diagram
THE VICTORIAN AGE
CULTURE AND SOCIETY
URBAN SOCIETY AND WOMEN
in
cities
: gas lighting, rubbish collection, public buildings (town halls, railway station, libraries, museums, music halls, boarding schools, hospitals, police stations, prisons)
retail consumer boom (new shops, public houses, theatres)
women involved in public life (leaders in campaigns against prostitution) and had access to colleges
women's taboos: control over property, divorce, sex and childbirth
the
Married Women's Property Act
gave married women the right to own and manage their own property (indipendently from their husbands)
SOCIAL DARWINISM
developed in 1870s
the philosopher
Herbert Spencer
applied Darwin's theories to human society: races, nations and social classes were subjected to the principle of the "
survival of the fittest
", poor did not deserve compassion
eugenics
: middle class (the fittest) was exhortet to reproduce more
LATE THINKERS
Karl Marx
in
Das Kapital
: research about English industrialisation
John Ruskin
: studies on Gothic architecture, criticism of inhumanity of industrialisation, nostalgia for the past
William Morris
(inspired by Ruskin and Thomas Malory's
Le Morte d'Arthur
): set up a firm to produce craft-made furniture, wallpaper and decorative objects (reaction to utilitarian mass-produced goods)
SPREAD OF SOCIALIST IDEAS
rise of political left after the foundation of
Fabian Society
(1884), a middle-class socialist group (
Sidney
and
Beatrice Webb
,
George Bernard Shaw
)
aimed to transform Britain into a socialist State (not through revolution, but reforms)
foundation of
Independent Labour Party
, a non-Marxist socialist party (attracted both male and female intellectuals)
agreed with Ruskin's criticism of the greed, competition, ugliness of industrial society
PATRIOTISM
frequent expressions of civic pride and national fervour
influenced by racial superiority
"races" were divided by fundamental physical and intellectual differences
obligation imposed by God on the British to spread their superior way of life to native people ("
Jingoism
")
THE VICTORIAN NOVEL
middle-class members were avid consumers of literature (borrowing book from circulating libraries, readign periodicals)
publishing
: essays, verse and novel appeared in
instalments
in periodicals (costant contact with the public: the wirter should maintain the interest and alter the story in progress)
novel
most popular form of literature and entertainment (science made it analytical, democracy made it humanitarian, moral unrest made it inquisitive and critical)
in the novel: social outcast ad a more virtuos hero, thematic unity (by
Jane Austen
), social responsability (show social changes, critical about workers condition, but less than European writers such as
Balzac
,
Flaubert
,
Turgenev
,
Dostoyevsky
),
didacticism
(literature as a mean to correct vices)
omniscient narrator
: comment on the plot, barrier between "right" and "wrong" (retribuition and punishment came in the final chapter)
setting: the city (symbol of industrialisation, anonymous lives, lost identities); realistic characters to identify with
2 types of novel
the
humanitarian novel
(or the
novel of purpose
): deals with realistic, fantastic or moral nature, according to the predominant issue
the
novel of manners
(19th models): deals with social and economic problems (ex.
William M. Thackeray
)