Analysis of the Term Victorian Through Literature

Analysis of the bound nice Through literary worksThe era of Queen Victorias reign witnessed the passing of milestones in social, economic, and personal approach. It was the senesce of industrialisation, a time of travel, a battle lay down for the conflict amid science and religion. withal further to these swell markers by which legion(predicate) of us recognise the nineteenth carbon, and indeed because of them, Victorias reign inspired re trance inside the single(a) a critique of what it meant to be a merciful dry land. The literary creative persons gave saucily work to the questions on the lips of the edict somewhat them questions that were no chronic so easily answered by Christianity.This sermon will look how the shape strait-laced does or doesnt fit into the mount of use from which it supposedly arises. I will look at trends such as the growth of literary criticism, pioneering scientific lay hold of (onies, the exploration into psychic phenowork for ceon, the increasing independence of women, the purpose of the orbit, every last(predicate)(prenominal) of which contri exactlye to what we survive and get word as nice, and affirm in just ab turn up demeanor wrought the lock of authors such as Eliot, Conan Doyle, and H.G Wells. Using kind-heartedsy close textual analysis I desire to identify the spirit of the e maturerness behind the belles-lettres of the time and whether or non such go bad transcends the limits of the endpoint Victorian.Mevery prominent literary minds of the time such as Arn non shape upnarian, Dickens, and Ruskin helped find the era in their critical attitudes towards it. (Davis 2002, p.10). reproval appears to informalityrain be find a form of exploration in an attempt to bylaw what concerned and worried the artist into something that questioned and reassured. Arnold, in his dissertations in Criticism (Arnold 1865, p.V) explains how he perceives the difference surrounded by forma l and artistic thought The trueness is I take hold never been able to ht it off happily with the logicians, and it would be mere affectation in me to give my egotism the airs of doing so. They imagine uprightness something to be sampled, I something to be chance onn they something to be manufactured, I as something to be found.It is this emergence awargonness of difference that was to become a specify feature of Victorian literature. Differences appeargond in the very perception of things, which led to nipings of isolation, despair, alienation solely prominent themes in nineteenth century work. In Arnolds A spend Night (http//whitewolf. currentcastle.edu.au/ damage/authors/A/ArnoldMatthew/verse/EmpedoclesonEtna/summernight.html) we come over the poetic mind attempt to beat meaning on a moonlit street w here(predicate) the windows, worry hostile faces, ar si impart and white, unopening downAnd the calm moonlight jawms to say Hast thou then bland the old unquiet mee t That neither deadens into rest Nor ever feels the fiery glow That whirls the spirit effort itself past, 30 But fluctuates to and fro never by manic dis prescribe quite possessd And never quite benumbd by the adult males post? And I, I accredit non if to pray Still to be what I am, or yield, and be give cargon all the other men I see.Arnold recognises that the monastic fix around him is unfulfilled, that men are giving their lives to some unmeaning taskwork and he questions whether he should be questioning at all. He is aware of a gap surrounded by the reality of on the job(p) manner and disembodied spirit after(prenominal)-school(prenominal) of work a difference that he strives to find explanation for. Arnold appears to be at sea amidst the streets of his own mind afraid of not world able to define who he is, what he is. These feelings in part express what it meant to be a Victorian struggling to distinguish thoughts and feelings which appear to no monthlong fit into hunting lodge.The Victorian era contained much of what had past and much of what was heretofore to come it bungholenot be seen as an isolated time, nor as an isolated enclosure. It contained aspects of the Romantic period for instance in Arnolds poem, The Buried Life, we see vestiges of Wordsworths legacy of Ode to Immortality. In both poems on that point is a sense of something lost an old passion or intelligence that has gone with the passing of time tho Arnold, un kindred Wordsworth, finds it more than than punishing to come to terms with this A longing to inquire / Into the mystery of this heart that beats / So wild, so deep in us, to know / Whence our thoughts come and where they go. (http//www.web-books.com/Classics/Poe travail/Anthology/Arnold_M/Buried.htm). The language is more passionately dis confinement than the resolute tone of Wordsworths long-winded acceptation We will grieve not, rather find/Strength in what remains behind. (Wordsworth 1928 , p.136). The styles are plainly connected, exactly the trouble with defining the era using literary lyric is that it is havely neither a quirky extension of the Romantics vision, nor is it a straight out front path to the modernists. The 1870s sawing machine the suppuration of authors such as Anthony Trollope who brought out his later invigorateds, yet only twenty years later in 1896 these publications are sitting beside the intimately antithetical form and subject matter of work such as H.G. Wellls The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau, with literary experiments with the modern such as Richard Jefferies The Story of My Heart (a spiritual autobiography) -occurring mingled with in 1883.A growing concern in nineteenth century smell was the potential outlet of the Romantic link betwixt gentle temper and the natural world, and the gap which sudden industrial progress highlighted among spirit and mechanisation. As technology developed so did the notion of artifi ciality. It is worth noting J.S. mill about dissertation on Nature (Mill 1874, p.65) where he says that it is mans nature to be artificial, to remedy nature by artificial pruning and intervention. provided to this, a contemporary of Mills Richard Jennings in like manner drew a line between the province of homo nature and the external world. (Lightman 1997, p.80). In the countryside more efficient methods of farming were employed (see the contrast between Henchards methods and Farfraes ciphering and bill in Hardys Mayor of Casterbridge, (Hardy 1886, p.122)), and crude machines introduced which no longer required the labour force to run them, advance raft to migrate to towns and cities.The urban reality was harsh in 1851 roughly four billion plenty were employed in swap and manufacture and mining, leaving only one and a half million in agriculture. (Davis 2002, p.13). City life, as portrayed by Dickens, was a cruel, unhealthy and un all toldsome existence for many. funct ional conditions in cities were often cramped, insanitary and poorly ventilated, and backing conditions could be change surface worse. Mrs. Gaskell, life story in Manchester, witnessed the frightful pressures that these conditions forced upon family life, and in due north and southwest depicts the difficulties of urban living, offering that salvation for the works classes lay with themselves and their employers, working together. However, metropolis life was not all desolate based in cities, the development of the detective romance brought the city back to gracious scale (Lehan, p.84). Detectives pieced together and reconstructed past events by dint of clues for marchwork, the murder of Bartholomew Sholto in The Sign of Four by Conan DoyleAs far as we can learn, no actual traces of emphasis were found upon Mr Sholtos person, further a valuable collection of Indian gems which the deceased gentleman had inherited from his pose had been carried off. The discovery w as first make by Mr Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson () Mr. Athelney Jones, the well-known member of the detective police force, happened to be at the Norwood police spot () Mr Jones well-known technical knowledge and his powers of minute observation have enabled him to prove conclusively that the miscreants could not have entered by the door or by the window but must(prenominal) have made their way crossways the roof of the building, and so through a trapdoor into a elbow room which communicated with that in which the body was found. (p.66)The city provided an exciting backdrop to crime scenes its labyrinthine streets similar to the mapping of the pathways of the human mind so that the both became inextricably linked. As Joseph McLaughlin says in Writing the Urban Jungle, the urban hobo camp is a space that calls off a pleasurable acquiescence to something great, more powerful, and, indeed, sublime () also an fantastic domain that calls forth fantastic action exploring, conqu ering, enlightening, purifying, taming, high hating. (McLaughlin 2000, p.3).Further to what McLaughlin conjure ups, the Victorians perception of time and space in the city and the countryside was changing radically from the knightly perceptions that all the same existed in the Romantic period. People saw the finished products in both manufacturing and farming no longer involving the long, drawn-out pith to an end, instead the end result was being achieved faster and with more control. hither developed the root of modern industry which continues today in intensive farming and factory lines. Yet here to a fault the contractnings of waste and excess. Richard Jefferies, a nineteenth century natural scientist and mystic, known for his dissertations on nature, remarks on the abundance of food in the natural world in his dissertation Meadow ThoughtsThe surface of the priming coat offers to us far more than we can consume the grains, the seeds, the fruits, the animals, the aboundin g products are beyond the power of all the human race to devour. They can, too, be multiplied a thousandfold. there is no natural deprivation. Whenever at that place is wish among us it is from artificial causes, which perception should remove. (Jefferies 1994, p.26).Unfortunately there was plenty for those who could founder it but not comme il faut to spare for the poorer lower classes. (Ritvo 1997, p.194). Trends of over production and wastage which became a worry in Victorian times are reflected in the literary concerns of Jefferies childrens story, Bevis, where rallying crys, despite their abundance, are in danger of nice an insufficient medium of boldness and not filling the metaphysical space on the page. In describing a sunrise and the thoughts and feelings associated with watching it, Jefferies struggles to aver the beauty before himThe sun had not yet stood out from the orient, but his precedent light shone through the translucent blue. Yet it was not blue, nor i s there any word, nor is a word possible to convey the feeling. (Jefferies 1881, p.391)We see too in James Thomsons City of Dreadful Night (Thomson 1892, p.2) the desperateness of laborious to articulate thoughts and feelingsBecause a frigidness rage seizes one at whiles To show the bitter old and wrinkle truth Stripped defenseless of all vesture that beguiles, False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth Because it gives some sense of power and passion In helpless impotence to try to fashion Our woe in living voice communication howeer harsh.In both passages there is a sense of try to convey so much more than the words will allow. And that is the essence of the problem of defining the era with a word which the era itself selected Victorian resembling the authors of its time struggles to convey the enormity and the condensed nature of its changing environment. Victorian literature is thus perhaps best studied between the lines of its texts rather than for what it offers at face value. Thomsons words to try to fashion our woe in living words although appearing dismal could actually withhold a more positive content it deals with the notion of perseverance that by creating words, however difficult, the author is refusing to give in to despair by trying to interpret it into creative energy.There is a sense of crisis in the work of Thomson, just as there is to be found in Jefferies futuristic After London where the lonely(prenominal) explorer Felix discovers the land after humanity has overreached itself to sociological disaster and has lost the harmonious dealinghip between mankind and nature. London becomes no more than a crystallised ruin in a ground oozing with poison unctuous and slimy, like a thick oil. (Jefferies 1885, p.205). Through work like this we see that Victorian was an era of first step where visions of the future curtly became tangible concerns and possible realities, and where contemporary conceptions of language and life might no longer hold up to the pressures of the time. In H.G. Wells the Time Machine, the time traveller discovers a land in the year 802,701The air was free from gnats, the earth from weeds or kingdom Fungi everywhere were fruits and sweet and elegant flowers brilliant butterflies flew hither and thither. The ideal of preventative medicine was attained. diseases had been stamped out. I saw no recount of any contagious diseases during all my stay. And i shall have to tell you later that even the processes of putrefaction and decay had been profoundly affected by these changes. (Wells 1995, p.28)In this description of a futuristic age the Victorian conception still retains the idea of a paradise a place full of butterflies and flowers. This Christian concept is a literary hangover from Miltons Paradise Lost, and remains an important theme for the moderns such as D.H. Lawrence.The Victorian age suffered from a dualistic split between a bright future on the one hand promi sed by leaps in technology, education and economical success and an increasingly alienated, conf employ society on the other. There were those carry throughrs like Huxley who believed that by human intervention deep down a political and economic framework humans could bourgeon out of their condition seeing no limit to the extent to which intelligence and will () may vary the conditions of existence (Huxley, 1893, Evolution and Ethics, The Romanes Lecture (http//aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE9/E-E.html), and there were those like Hardy whose characters were bound to fail because they were not emotionally fitted into the cosmos out of which they evolved .It was the nineteenth century spiritual crisis which precipitated the literary shifting into the new genre of the realist novel. By the mid-nineteenth century, society had begun to grow away from the idea of atonement for sin within an omnipotent religion, where judgement would come solely in heaven, and towards the more humanis tic idea of God as in-dwelling, so that salvation could be achieved on earthWe have now come to regard the world not as a machine, but as an organism, a system in which, while the separate contribute to the ontogeny of the whole, the whole also reacts upon the development of the parts and whose primary purpose is its own perfection, something that is contained within and not outside itself, an familiar end while in their turn the myriad parts of this general organism are also lesser organisms, ends in and for themselves, pursuing each its lonely ideal of individualist completeness. (Gore (ed) 1890, p.211)A spiritual lack created a need to define, instal and categorise a world that suddenly appeared chaotic. When Darwin published On the business line of Species in 1859 he raised issues of public concern as to the truth of the bible and the essence of Christianity. However, its content and its methodology were seriously criticised (Appleman 2001, p.200). It was a difficult work to accept as it cause the public to rethink and define their history that they were a product of evolution and not a abbreviate made being came as a shock.The future of thought and literature was suddenly changed as bulk tried to sew together the threads of the past. Natural Science became a national obsession exotic flora and fauna from across the world were brought into London daily, to be displayed in the British Museum or Kew Gardens (Lightman, 1997 p.1). In literature, we see the author begin to play the part of evolutionist Eliots Middlemarch although concerned with the evolving character of Dorothea Brooke detects the threads of sub-plots and the successes and failures of other characters which form a pattern of development. As Gillian Beer saysThere is not one primitive tissue, just as there is not one reveal to all mythologies () emphasis upon plurality, rather than upon singleness, is crucial to the developing argument of Middlemarch. (Beer 2000, p.143). deceased i s the tradition of the valiant hero sandwich or heroine singularly conquering their environment (a trend set by classics such as Homers The Odyssey (1967)) and in its place a landscape upon which the author grafts and nurtures developing shoots of life. It is this sort of growth that is in danger of stay unseen to the contemporary historian or critic as it can become shrouded by generalising concepts which are so often prescribed to the term Victorian concepts such as repression, old-fashioned and prudish. (http//www.victorianweb.org/vn/victor4.html).These sort of terms restrict the individuals perception of the era when it was a time when growth was boost rather than restricted. Authors used the simile of pruning and nurturing plant life to symbolise the development of the self for example in North and South Gaskell discusses the problem of the working individual who struggles to reach his or her potential when the manufacturers are unsparingly cutting away all off-shoots in t he direction of literature or high kind cultivation, in hopes of throwing the whole effectiveness and vigour of the plant into commerce. (Gaskell 1865, p.69).For Gaskell, it is through the routine interaction between heap that such difficulties are accustomed the chance to be overcome. And this was the essence of the realist novel set amidst a world which had witnessed such alteration to transform the lostness felt by society into a seeing of the teentsyr things in life which could withhold qualities of greater spiritual value. As Philip Davis says, the realist novel was the holding ground, the meeting point, for the overlapping of leafy vegetable life. (Davis 2002, p.144). And it was within this common life that a more calm acceptance of the new state could be achieved. Gillian Beer proposes that through her novels agreement Eliot creates order and understanding of the evolving process of novel-writing. In Middlemarch, the naming of Casaubons books Waiting for Death, Tw o Temptations, troika Love Problems draws attention to the books organisation by emphasising categorisationBut the process of reading leads into divergence and variability. tied(p) while we are law-abiding how closely human beings conform in the taxonomy of events we learn how differently they feel and think. For Dorothea and Casaubon waiting for death government agency something very different from what it means for Mary Garth and Featherstone. The similitudes are different. The distances between people are different. Lydgate, here at one with the project of the book, longed to demonstrate the more intimate relations of living structure (115225). In this double emphasis on conformity and variability George Eliot intensifies sometime(a) literary organisations by means of recent scientific theory. In Darwinian theory, variability is the creative principle, but the type shed light ons it possible for us to track common ancestry and common kinship. (Beer 2000, pp.143-4)Writing i tself was becoming an just about divine archetype, an inner order of a chaotic external world. The idea that humans had evolved from primates meant that the boundaries between what was one thing and what was another(prenominal) were no longer so clearly defined. There developed a fear of the animate and a fear of the inanimate, and efforts were sought to understand them. As Harriet Ritvo says in The Platypus and the MermaidDepending on the beholder, an anomaly might be viewed as embodying a contest to the established order, whether social, natural, or divine the containment of that challenge the incomprehensibility of the creation by human intelligence or simply the endless and diverting variety of the world. And beholders who agree on the content of the representation could still disagree strongly about its clean valence whether it was obedient or bad, entrancing or disgusting. (Ritvo 1997, p.148).In a world where categorisation was important but not so easily achievable, the novel too became neither one thing nor another realism became a melting pot for ideas, a sort of hybrid of styles. In Eliots The Lifted Veil realism is used as a fomite for the exploration of her ideas into psychology and psychic phenomena. Latimers clairvoyance forces him to endure a fearful insight into the minds of the people around him I began to be aware of a phase in my supernormal sensibility, to which, from the languid and slight nature of my intercourse with others since my illness, I had not been alive before. This was the obtrusion on my mind of the intellectual process going forward in first one person, and then another, with whom I happened to be in contact the vagrant, frivolous ideas and emotions of some uninteresting acquaintanceMrs Filmore, for examplewould force themselves on my consciousness like an importunate, ill-played musical instrument, or the loud activity of an gaol insect.But this superadded consciousness, wearying and annoying enough when it urged o n me the trivial inhabit of indifferent people, became an intense distract and grief when it seemed to be opening to me the souls of those who were in a close relation to me when the rational talk, the graceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and the affectionate kit and boodle, which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, dim capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a tempestuousness heap.(Eliot 1859, pp.13-14)Latimer is no longer caught up in the web of peoples characters. Eliot plays with the idea that his consciousness has the ability to transcend the sublunar the rational talk, the kindly deeds in order to gain insight into an alternative and not so rosy vision of the mechanism of the human mind where tho ughts are make-shift and chaotic. The nineteenth century saw the acceptance of the concept of otherworldly phenomena into the working classes. Robert Owen, a social reformer, who influenced the British Labor movement (Oppenheim 1985, p.40) get alongd many working class Owenites to follow him into the spiritualist fold, where they enthusiastically continued their ongoing search for the new moral world.Interests such as spiritualty and psychology which had previously been more underground pursuits, were brought out into the open. The concept of telepathy, a term coined by Frederic Myers in 1882 (Luckhurst 2002, p.1) even helped to theorize the uneasy cross-cultural encounters at the colonial frontier. (Luckhurst 2002, p.3) These developments suggest that the Victorians felt imbued with the power of their age they felt confident of their ability to communicate on different planes of consciousness. So it could be argued that Victorian was not simply a time devoted to the discovery of the self and the working of the inner mind, but a time that also focused on the projection of ideas and thoughts outside of the self ideas which themselves stand outside of the class Victorian.In 1869 the Spiritualist Newspaper began selling first as a fortnightly, then as a weekly publication. (Oppenheim 1985, p.45). This draws the discussion to the point of representation the social nature of Victorians seems to suggest that they enjoyed the focus being on themselves. Self-obsession is an aspect of the time which the term Victorian profitablely represents by particularisedally referring to the rule of the Queen the term draws attention to the importance of the individual. The era saw the development of many different styles of fashion and the use of photography. As part of the Freudian influence great importance was rigid on puerility and it was during the nineteenth century that the first laws concerning child welfare were passed. (Mavor quoted from Brown (ed) 2001, p.i) T he focus on the central, the ego, was paramount. As Mavor says,it was as if the camera had to be invented in order to document what would soon be lost, childhood itself and childhood had to be invented in order for the camera to document childhood (a fantasy of innocence) as real. (Brown (ed) 2001, p.27).Perhaps because of societys sense of change there seems to have been a necessity to record and keep track of the world around. uncovering took place on a much grander scale in the exploration of the world. The British imperium was global, yet as Patrick Brantlinger suggests in curb of Darkness, (Brantlinger 1988, p.4) imperialism was not generally reflected in the literature of the time. What we do see evidence of however is the mapping of new worlds and territories (Richard Jefferies Bevis).The development of the adventure story suggests that Victorians desired to explore what lay outside of what they knew and in this respect the term Victorian which people can think of as rep resenting a society closed within in itself is misleading. The rise of imperialism began to shape the ideological dimensions of subjects studied in school (Bristow 1991, p.20) and so through literature the Victorian child was offered an exciting world of sophisticated representation and ideas with the knowledge that the world was theirs to explore. Does the term then encourage us to think of the society as a class of people set apart from the rest of the world?In The Island of Dr. Moreau it is not just the future of science that is explored but the concept of a new territory and its force outs on the mind. For example, when the protagonist first sees the beast-servant on batting order the ship he is at once frightenedI did not know then that a ruby luminosity, at least, is not special in human eyes. The figure, with its eyes of kick upstairs, struck down through all my adult thoughts and feelings, and for a secondment the bury horrors of childhood came back to my mind. Then the effect passed as it had come. An uncouth black figure of a man, a figure of no particular import, hung over the taffrail, against the starlight. (Wells 1997, p.31).The circumstances of being at sea is disorientating and causes the imagination to play tricks so that the man is first one thing a figure with its eyes of fire and then suddenly becomes an uncouth black figure of a man. The effect is that the protagonist suddenly regresses to the forgotten horrors of childhood. This sudden fluctuation is important as it represents the fluidity of the era and how change and discovery on a global scale, although empowering, also caused instability within the individual. Therefore, when considering the age in the context of its name we can understand that the term was perhaps created out of both the desire to represent transaction but also out of a need to belong.This desire to belong which manifested itself during an age ruled by one woman placed great importance on the role of the fe male in society. It was a time when women began to travel and write without the necessity of using a pseudonym (see Cheryl McEwan on Kingsley in atomic number 74 Africa, (2000, p.73)). In books such as Hardys Tess of the DUrbervilles the idea of the fallen woman is tested when Tesss crucial lack of vox populi in herself causes her never to discover the paradise with Clare that might have been.The nineteenth century began to be more explicit concerning issues of gender for example, the affinity between Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick (see McClintock 1995, pp.132-138) where Cullwick is photographed cross-dressed as a farm worker. A Victorian man however appears to have had more stigma attached to him and in this context the term is commonly associated with valiancy and English valour (Ridley/Dawson 1994, p.110). There is less flexibility surrounding the notion of Victorian men -as if the term somehow threatened their masculinity. However, this did not seem to affect the male auth ors of the time. Lewis Carroll captured the public imagination through Alices Adventures in Wonderland, which although following the story of a little girl, depicts many male characters. (see Carroll 2000).In conclusion, the term Victorian although useful to refer to a specific time period in history, does however encourage us to make sweeping generalisations without investigating how various(a) the era was. In terms of the subject matter of Victorian literature there is no clear cut distinction between early, middle and late Victorian for example, Bulwer-Lytton attempts at the beginning of the century what Richard Jefferies does at the end the difference is in style and form. Within that time frame there was condensed an incredible assortment of styles, tastes and attitudes, yet the term suffers from being associated with prejudices and assumptions about Victorians. However, it is worth manner in mind that prejudices were indeed a part of Victorian society. When the Victorian s explored the rest of the world they made generalisations and assumptions based on what they found (eg The Island of Dr. Moreau) where experience and the nature of what is discovered defines behaviour.As a critic in 1858 wrote we are living in an age of change (quoted from Houghton 1957, p.1) therefore when considering the Victorian age we should remember that values and trends were evolving it was not a static time governed by repression or old fashioned values. From the research carried out for this dissertation it appears that through the gaining of knowledge, Victorians also realised how little they knew and how much more there was to discover. As Arnold says in A Summer Night How fair a lot to fill / Is left to each man still.(http//whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/A/ArnoldMatthew/verse/EmpedoclesonEtna/summernight.html). In this context the term Victorian can be dualistically representative discoveries of the time, although revolutionary, were often rudimentary in nature, and it was humbling for the individual to consider how much further knowledge and discovery had yet to go.On the other hand, the term suffers too from being inadequate a single word is too smaller term for the vast riches and diversity of discovery, and it could be argued that the era is better realised if seen as a second revolution. Like the Victorian authors themselves we are left with no suitable words to convey the entireness of an era as can Lawton says in his introduction to The Time Machine (1995, p.xxvi) the term Victorian is used too loosely to pass over a sequence of eras, the different reign of a woman who lent her name to objects as diverse as a railway terminus and a plum.When studying Victorian Literature it is worth bearing in mind the fluidity of the time and the changeability which arose out of living on the cusp between the passing away of old values and the unknown territory of the new. realness recognised the gaps which were forming in society such as the distancing of the self from religion and offered to paper the cracks through its vision of bringing people together on a mundane level. Its territory stretched to include the darkest recesses of the mind to the smallest of everyday events, celebrating the grey area between extremes as we now know as Victorian.BibliographyArnold, M., Reprint of 1865 ed. dissertations in Criticism With the addition of Two dissertations not hitherto reprinted. London Routledge.Appleman, P, 2001, Darwin. London NortonBeer, G., 2000, Darwins Plots. Cambridge Cambridge University PressBrantlinger, P, 1988, Rule of DarknessBritish Literature and Imperialism. Ithaca, NY Cornell University PressBristow, J., 1991, Empire BoysAdventures in a Mans World. London Harper Collins. Brown, M., 2001, (ed) Picturing Children. Aldershot AshgateBulwer-Lytton, E., 1853, A gothic Story.Analysis of the Term Victorian Through LiteratureAnalysis of the Term Victorian Through LiteratureThe era of Queen Victorias reign witnessed the passing of milestones in social, economic, and personal progress. It was the age of industrialisation, a time of travel, a battleground for the conflict between science and religion. Yet further to these great markers by which many of us recognise the nineteenth century, and indeed because of them, Victorias reign inspired change within the individual a revaluation of what it meant to be a human being. The literary artists gave new form to the questions on the lips of the society around them questions that were no longer so easily answered by Christianity.This dissertation will explore how the term Victorian does or doesnt fit into the context from which it supposedly arises. I will look at trends such as the development of literary criticism, pioneering scientific discoveries, the exploration into psychic phenomenon, the increasing independence of women, the mapping of the world, all of which contribute to what we know and understand as Victorian, and have in some way shaped the work of authors such as Eliot, Conan Doyle, and H.G Wells. Using some close textual analysis I hope to identify the nature of the inspiration behind the literature of the time and whether or not such work transcends the limits of the term Victorian.Many great literary minds of the time such as Arnold, Dickens, and Ruskin helped define the era in their critical attitudes towards it. (Davis 2002, p.10). Criticism appears to have become a form of exploration in an attempt to turn what concerned and worried the artist into something that questioned and reassured. Arnold, in his dissertations in Criticism (Arnold 1865, p.V) explains how he perceives the difference between logical and artistic thought The truth is I have never been able to ht it off happily with the logicians, and it would be mere affectation in me to give myself the airs of doing so. They imagine truth something to be proved, I something to be seen they something to be manufactured, I as something to be found.It is this growing awareness of difference that was to become a defining feature of Victorian literature. Differences appeared in the very perception of things, which led to feelings of isolation, despair, alienation all prominent themes in nineteenth century work. In Arnolds A Summer Night (http//whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/A/ArnoldMatthew/verse/EmpedoclesonEtna/summernight.html) we see the poetic mind struggling to find meaning on a moonlit street where the windows, like hostile faces, are unsounded and white, unopening downAnd the calm moonlight seems to say Hast thou then still the old unquiet breast That neither deadens into rest Nor ever feels the fiery glow That whirls the spirit front itself away, 30 But fluctuates to and fro Never by passion quite possessd And never quite benumbd by the worlds sway? And I, I know not if to pray Still to be what I am, or yield, and be Like all the other men I see.Arnold recognises that the society around him is unf ulfilled, that men are giving their lives to some unmeaning taskwork and he questions whether he should be questioning at all. He is aware of a gap between the reality of working life and life outside of work a difference that he strives to find explanation for. Arnold appears to be lost amidst the streets of his own mind afraid of not being able to define who he is, what he is. These feelings in part express what it meant to be a Victorian struggling to place thoughts and feelings which appear to no longer fit into society.The Victorian era contained much of what had past and much of what was still to come it cannot be seen as an isolated time, nor as an isolated term. It contained aspects of the Romantic period for instance in Arnolds poem, The Buried Life, we see vestiges of Wordsworths legacy of Ode to Immortality. In both poems there is a sense of something lost an old passion or instinct that has gone with the passing of time yet Arnold, unlike Wordsworth, finds it more difficult to come to terms with this A longing to inquire / Into the mystery of this heart that beats / So wild, so deep in us, to know / Whence our thoughts come and where they go. (http//www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Anthology/Arnold_M/Buried.htm). The language is more passionately discontent than the resolute tone of Wordsworths visionary acceptance We will grieve not, rather find/Strength in what remains behind. (Wordsworth 1928, p.136). The styles are obviously connected, but the trouble with defining the era using literary terminology is that it is clearly neither a quirky extension of the Romantics vision, nor is it a straightforward path to the modernists. The 1870s saw the maturation of authors such as Anthony Trollope who brought out his later novels, yet only twenty years later in 1896 these publications are sitting beside the considerably different form and subject matter of work such as H.G. Wellls The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau, with literary experim ents with the modern such as Richard Jefferies The Story of My Heart (a spiritual autobiography) -occurring between in 1883.A growing concern in nineteenth century life was the potential loss of the Romantic link between human nature and the natural world, and the gap which sudden industrial progress highlighted between nature and mechanisation. As technology developed so did the notion of artificiality. It is worth noting J.S.Mills dissertation on Nature (Mill 1874, p.65) where he says that it is mans nature to be artificial, to remedy nature by artificial pruning and intervention. Further to this, a contemporary of Mills Richard Jennings also drew a line between the province of human nature and the external world. (Lightman 1997, p.80). In the countryside more efficient methods of farming were employed (see the contrast between Henchards methods and Farfraes ciphering and mensuration in Hardys Mayor of Casterbridge, (Hardy 1886, p.122)), and new machines introduced which no lon ger required the labour force to run them, encouraging people to migrate to towns and cities.The urban reality was harsh in 1851 roughly four million people were employed in trade and manufacture and mining, leaving only one and a half million in agriculture. (Davis 2002, p.13). City life, as portrayed by Dickens, was a cruel, unhealthy and unwholesome existence for many. Working conditions in cities were often cramped, unhygienic and poorly ventilated, and living conditions could be even worse. Mrs. Gaskell, living in Manchester, witnessed the appalling pressures that these conditions forced upon family life, and in North and South depicts the difficulties of urban living, offering that salvation for the working classes lay with themselves and their employers, working together. However, city life was not all desolate based in cities, the development of the detective novel brought the city back to human scale (Lehan, p.84). Detectives pieced together and reconstructed past events through clues for example, the murder of Bartholomew Sholto in The Sign of Four by Conan DoyleAs far as we can learn, no actual traces of violence were found upon Mr Sholtos person, but a valuable collection of Indian gems which the deceased gentleman had inherited from his father had been carried off. The discovery was first made by Mr Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson () Mr. Athelney Jones, the well-known member of the detective police force, happened to be at the Norwood police station () Mr Jones well-known technical knowledge and his powers of minute observation have enabled him to prove conclusively that the miscreants could not have entered by the door or by the window but must have made their way across the roof of the building, and so through a trapdoor into a room which communicated with that in which the body was found. (p.66)The city provided an exciting backdrop to crime scenes its labyrinthine streets similar to the mapping of the pathways of the human mind so that the t wo became inextricably linked. As Joseph McLaughlin says in Writing the Urban Jungle, the urban jungle is a space that calls forth a pleasurable acquiescence to something greater, more powerful, and, indeed, sublime () also an imaginative domain that calls forth heroic action exploring, conquering, enlightening, purifying, taming, besting. (McLaughlin 2000, p.3).Further to what McLaughlin suggests, the Victorians perception of time and space in the city and the countryside was changing radically from the medieval perceptions that still existed in the Romantic period. People saw the finished products in both manufacturing and farming no longer involving the long, drawn-out means to an end, instead the end result was being achieved faster and with more control. Here developed the root of modern industry which continues today in intensive farming and factory lines. Yet here too the beginnings of waste and excess. Richard Jefferies, a nineteenth century naturalist and mystic, known for his dissertations on nature, remarks on the abundance of food in the natural world in his dissertation Meadow ThoughtsThe surface of the earth offers to us far more than we can consume the grains, the seeds, the fruits, the animals, the abounding products are beyond the power of all the human race to devour. They can, too, be multiplied a thousandfold. There is no natural lack. Whenever there is lack among us it is from artificial causes, which intelligence should remove. (Jefferies 1994, p.26).Unfortunately there was plenty for those who could afford it but not enough to spare for the poorer lower classes. (Ritvo 1997, p.194). Trends of over production and wastage which became a worry in Victorian times are reflected in the literary concerns of Jefferies childrens story, Bevis, where words, despite their abundance, are in danger of becoming an insufficient medium of expression and not filling the metaphysical space on the page. In describing a sunrise and the thoughts and feelings associated with watching it, Jefferies struggles to articulate the beauty before himThe sun had not yet stood out from the orient, but his precedent light shone through the translucent blue. Yet it was not blue, nor is there any word, nor is a word possible to convey the feeling. (Jefferies 1881, p.391)We see too in James Thomsons City of Dreadful Night (Thomson 1892, p.2) the desperateness of trying to articulate thoughts and feelingsBecause a cold rage seizes one at whiles To show the bitter old and wrinkled truth Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles, False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth Because it gives some sense of power and passion In helpless impotence to try to fashion Our woe in living words howeer uncouth.In both passages there is a sense of trying to convey so much more than the words will allow. And that is the essence of the problem of defining the era with a word which the era itself selected Victorian like the authors of its time struggle s to convey the enormity and the condensed nature of its changing environment. Victorian literature is thus perhaps best studied between the lines of its texts rather than for what it offers at face value. Thomsons words to try to fashion our woe in living words although appearing dismal could actually withhold a more positive message it deals with the notion of perseverance that by creating words, however difficult, the author is refusing to give in to despair by trying to transform it into creative energy.There is a sense of crisis in the work of Thomson, just as there is to be found in Jefferies futuristic After London where the lone explorer Felix discovers the land after humanity has overreached itself to sociological disaster and has lost the harmonious relationship between mankind and nature. London becomes no more than a crystallised ruin in a ground oozing with poison unctuous and slimy, like a thick oil. (Jefferies 1885, p.205). Through work like this we see that Victori an was an era of possibility where visions of the future suddenly became tangible concerns and possible realities, and where contemporary conceptions of language and life might no longer hold up to the pressures of the time. In H.G. Wells the Time Machine, the time traveller discovers a land in the year 802,701The air was free from gnats, the earth from weeds or fungi everywhere were fruits and sweet and delightful flowers brilliant butterflies flew hither and thither. The ideal of preventative medicine was attained. diseases had been stamped out. I saw no evidence of any contagious diseases during all my stay. And i shall have to tell you later that even the processes of putrefaction and decay had been profoundly affected by these changes. (Wells 1995, p.28)In this description of a futuristic age the Victorian imagination still retains the idea of a paradise a place full of butterflies and flowers. This Christian concept is a literary hangover from Miltons Paradise Lost, and rema ins an important theme for the moderns such as D.H. Lawrence.The Victorian age suffered from a dualistic split between a bright future on the one hand promised by leaps in technology, education and economical success and an increasingly alienated, confused society on the other. There were those writers like Huxley who believed that by human intervention within a political and economic framework humans could evolve out of their condition seeing no limit to the extent to which intelligence and will () may modify the conditions of existence (Huxley, 1893, Evolution and Ethics, The Romanes Lecture (http//aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE9/E-E.html), and there were those like Hardy whose characters were destined to fail because they were not emotionally fitted into the cosmos out of which they evolved .It was the nineteenth century spiritual crisis which precipitated the literary shift into the new genre of the realist novel. By the mid-nineteenth century, society had begun to grow away fro m the idea of atonement for sin within an omnipotent religion, where judgement would come solely in heaven, and towards the more humanistic idea of God as in-dwelling, so that salvation could be achieved on earthWe have now come to regard the world not as a machine, but as an organism, a system in which, while the parts contribute to the growth of the whole, the whole also reacts upon the development of the parts and whose primary purpose is its own perfection, something that is contained within and not outside itself, an internal end while in their turn the myriad parts of this universal organism are also lesser organisms, ends in and for themselves, pursuing each its lonely ideal of individual completeness. (Gore (ed) 1890, p.211)A spiritual lack created a need to define, order and categorise a world that suddenly appeared chaotic. When Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 he raised issues of public concern as to the truth of the bible and the essence of Christianity. However, its content and its methodology were seriously criticised (Appleman 2001, p.200). It was a difficult work to accept as it caused the public to rethink and redefine their history that they were a product of evolution and not a tailor made being came as a shock.The future of thought and literature was suddenly changed as people tried to sew together the threads of the past. Natural Science became a national obsession exotic flora and fauna from across the world were brought into London daily, to be displayed in the British Museum or Kew Gardens (Lightman, 1997 p.1). In literature, we see the author begin to play the part of evolutionist Eliots Middlemarch although concerned with the evolving character of Dorothea Brooke follows the threads of sub-plots and the successes and failures of other characters which form a pattern of development. As Gillian Beer saysThere is not one primitive tissue, just as there is not one key to all mythologies () emphasis upon plurality, rathe r than upon singleness, is crucial to the developing argument of Middlemarch. (Beer 2000, p.143).Gone is the tradition of the valiant hero or heroine singularly conquering their environment (a trend set by classics such as Homers The Odyssey (1967)) and in its place a landscape upon which the author grafts and nurtures developing shoots of life. It is this sort of growth that is in danger of remaining unseen to the contemporary historian or critic as it can become shrouded by generalising concepts which are so often prescribed to the term Victorian concepts such as repression, old-fashioned and prudish. (http//www.victorianweb.org/vn/victor4.html).These sort of terms restrict the individuals perception of the era when it was a time when growth was encouraged rather than restricted. Authors used the metaphor of pruning and nurturing plant life to symbolise the development of the self for example in North and South Gaskell discusses the problem of the working individual who struggle s to reach his or her potential when the manufacturers are unsparingly cutting away all off-shoots in the direction of literature or high mental cultivation, in hopes of throwing the whole strength and vigour of the plant into commerce. (Gaskell 1865, p.69).For Gaskell, it is through the everyday interaction between people that such difficulties are given the chance to be overcome. And this was the essence of the realist novel set amidst a world which had witnessed such alteration to transform the lostness felt by society into a seeing of the smaller things in life which could withhold qualities of greater spiritual value. As Philip Davis says, the realist novel was the holding ground, the meeting point, for the overlapping of common life. (Davis 2002, p.144). And it was within this common life that a more calm acceptance of the new state could be achieved. Gillian Beer suggests that through her novels organisation Eliot creates order and understanding of the evolving process of n ovel-writing. In Middlemarch, the naming of Casaubons books Waiting for Death, Two Temptations, Three Love Problems draws attention to the books organisation by emphasising categorisationBut the process of reading leads into divergence and variability. Even while we are observing how closely human beings conform in the taxonomy of events we learn how differently they feel and think. For Dorothea and Casaubon waiting for death means something very different from what it means for Mary Garth and Featherstone. The relations are different. The distances between people are different. Lydgate, here at one with the project of the book, longed to demonstrate the more intimate relations of living structure (115225). In this double emphasis on conformity and variability George Eliot intensifies older literary organisations by means of recent scientific theory. In Darwinian theory, variability is the creative principle, but the type makes it possible for us to track common ancestry and common kinship. (Beer 2000, pp.143-4)Writing itself was becoming an almost divine representation, an inner order of a chaotic external world. The idea that humans had evolved from primates meant that the boundaries between what was one thing and what was another were no longer so clearly defined. There developed a fear of the animate and a fear of the inanimate, and efforts were sought to understand them. As Harriet Ritvo says in The Platypus and the MermaidDepending on the beholder, an anomaly might be viewed as embodying a challenge to the established order, whether social, natural, or divine the containment of that challenge the incomprehensibility of the creation by human intelligence or simply the endless and diverting variety of the world. And beholders who agreed on the content of the representation could still disagree strongly about its moral valence whether it was good or bad, entrancing or disgusting. (Ritvo 1997, p.148).In a world where categorisation was important but not so easily achievable, the novel too became neither one thing nor another realism became a melting pot for ideas, a sort of hybrid of styles. In Eliots The Lifted Veil realism is used as a vehicle for the exploration of her ideas into psychology and psychic phenomena. Latimers clairvoyance forces him to endure a painful insight into the minds of the people around him I began to be aware of a phase in my abnormal sensibility, to which, from the languid and slight nature of my intercourse with others since my illness, I had not been alive before. This was the obtrusion on my mind of the mental process going forward in first one person, and then another, with whom I happened to be in contact the vagrant, frivolous ideas and emotions of some uninteresting acquaintanceMrs Filmore, for examplewould force themselves on my consciousness like an importunate, ill-played musical instrument, or the loud activity of an imprisoned insect.But this superadded consciousness, wearying and annoying enoug h when it urged on me the trivial experience of indifferent people, became an intense pain and grief when it seemed to be opening to me the souls of those who were in a close relation to me when the rational talk, the graceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a fermenting heap.(Eliot 1859, pp.13-14)Latimer is no longer caught up in the web of peoples characters. Eliot plays with the idea that his consciousness has the ability to transcend the mundane the rational talk, the kindly deeds in order to gain insight into an alternative and not so rosy vision of the mechanics of the human mind where thoughts are make-shift and chaotic. The nineteenth century saw the acceptance of the concept of otherworldly phenomena into the working classes. Robert Owen, a social reformer, who influenced the British Labor movement (Oppenheim 1985, p.40) encouraged many working class Owenites to follow him into the spiritualist fold, where they enthusiastically continued their ongoing search for the new moral world.Interests such as spiritualism and psychology which had previously been more underground pursuits, were brought out into the open. The concept of telepathy, a term coined by Frederic Myers in 1882 (Luckhurst 2002, p.1) even helped to theorize the uneasy cross-cultural encounters at the colonial frontier. (Luckhurst 2002, p.3) These developments suggest that the Victorians felt imbued with the power of their age they felt confident of their ability to communicate on different planes of consciousness. So it could be argued that Victorian was not simply a time devoted to the discovery of the self a nd the workings of the inner mind, but a time that also focused on the projection of ideas and thoughts outside of the self ideas which themselves stand outside of the category Victorian.In 1869 the Spiritualist Newspaper began selling first as a fortnightly, then as a weekly publication. (Oppenheim 1985, p.45). This draws the discussion to the point of representation the social nature of Victorians seems to suggest that they enjoyed the focus being on themselves. Self-obsession is an aspect of the time which the term Victorian usefully represents by specifically referring to the rule of the Queen the term draws attention to the importance of the individual. The era saw the development of many different styles of fashion and the use of photography. As part of the Freudian influence great importance was placed on childhood and it was during the nineteenth century that the first laws concerning child welfare were passed. (Mavor quoted from Brown (ed) 2001, p.i) The focus on the centr al, the ego, was paramount. As Mavor says,it was as if the camera had to be invented in order to document what would soon be lost, childhood itself and childhood had to be invented in order for the camera to document childhood (a fantasy of innocence) as real. (Brown (ed) 2001, p.27).Perhaps because of societys awareness of change there seems to have been a necessity to record and keep track of the world around. Discovery took place on a much grander scale in the exploration of the world. The British Empire was global, yet as Patrick Brantlinger suggests in Rule of Darkness, (Brantlinger 1988, p.4) imperialism was not generally reflected in the literature of the time. What we do see evidence of however is the mapping of new worlds and territories (Richard Jefferies Bevis).The development of the adventure story suggests that Victorians desired to explore what lay outside of what they knew and in this respect the term Victorian which people can think of as representing a society clos ed within in itself is misleading. The rise of imperialism began to shape the ideological dimensions of subjects studied in school (Bristow 1991, p.20) and so through literature the Victorian child was offered an exciting world of sophisticated representation and ideas with the knowledge that the world was theirs to explore. Does the term then encourage us to think of the society as a class of people set apart from the rest of the world?In The Island of Dr. Moreau it is not just the future of science that is explored but the concept of a new territory and its effects on the mind. For example, when the protagonist first sees the beast-servant on board the ship he is immediately frightenedI did not know then that a reddish luminosity, at least, is not uncommon in human eyes. The figure, with its eyes of fire, struck down through all my adult thoughts and feelings, and for a moment the forgotten horrors of childhood came back to my mind. Then the effect passed as it had come. An uncou th black figure of a man, a figure of no particular import, hung over the taffrail, against the starlight. (Wells 1997, p.31).The circumstances of being at sea is disorientating and causes the imagination to play tricks so that the man is first one thing a figure with its eyes of fire and then suddenly becomes an uncouth black figure of a man. The effect is that the protagonist suddenly regresses to the forgotten horrors of childhood. This sudden fluctuation is important as it represents the fluidity of the era and how change and discovery on a global scale, although empowering, also caused instability within the individual. Therefore, when considering the age in the context of its name we can understand that the term was perhaps created out of both the desire to represent achievement but also out of a need to belong.This desire to belong which manifested itself during an age ruled by one woman placed great importance on the role of the female in society. It was a time when women b egan to travel and write without the necessity of using a pseudonym (see Cheryl McEwan on Kingsley in West Africa, (2000, p.73)). In books such as Hardys Tess of the DUrbervilles the idea of the fallen woman is tested when Tesss crucial lack of belief in herself causes her never to discover the paradise with Clare that might have been.The nineteenth century began to be more explicit concerning issues of gender for example, the relationship between Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick (see McClintock 1995, pp.132-138) where Cullwick is photographed cross-dressed as a farm worker. A Victorian man however appears to have had more stigma attached to him and in this context the term is commonly associated with heroism and English valour (Ridley/Dawson 1994, p.110). There is less flexibility surrounding the notion of Victorian men -as if the term somehow threatened their masculinity. However, this did not seem to affect the male authors of the time. Lewis Carroll captured the public imaginati on through Alices Adventures in Wonderland, which although following the story of a little girl, depicts many male characters. (see Carroll 2000).In conclusion, the term Victorian although useful to refer to a specific time period in history, does however encourage us to make sweeping generalisations without investigating how diverse the era was. In terms of the subject matter of Victorian Literature there is no clear cut distinction between early, middle and late Victorian for example, Bulwer-Lytton attempts at the beginning of the century what Richard Jefferies does at the end the difference is in style and form. Within that time frame there was condensed an incredible diversity of styles, tastes and attitudes, yet the term suffers from being associated with prejudices and assumptions about Victorians. However, it is worth bearing in mind that prejudices were indeed a part of Victorian society. When the Victorians explored the rest of the world they made generalisations and assu mptions based on what they found (eg The Island of Dr. Moreau) where experience and the nature of what is discovered defines behaviour.As a critic in 1858 wrote we are living in an age of transition (quoted from Houghton 1957, p.1) therefore when considering the Victorian age we should remember that values and trends were evolving it was not a static time governed by repression or old fashioned values. From the research carried out for this dissertation it appears that through the gaining of knowledge, Victorians also realised how little they knew and how much more there was to discover. As Arnold says in A Summer Night How fair a lot to fill / Is left to each man still.(http//whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/A/ArnoldMatthew/verse/EmpedoclesonEtna/summernight.html). In this context the term Victorian can be dualistically representative discoveries of the time, although revolutionary, were often rudimentary in nature, and it was humbling for the individual to consider how much further knowledge and discovery had yet to go.On the other hand, the term suffers too from being inadequate a single word is too smaller term for the vast wealth and diversity of discovery, and it could be argued that the era is better realised if seen as a second revolution. Like the Victorian authors themselves we are left with no suitable words to convey the entirety of an era as John Lawton says in his introduction to The Time Machine (1995, p.xxvi) the term Victorian is used too loosely to encompass a sequence of eras, the diverse reign of a woman who lent her name to objects as diverse as a railway terminus and a plum.When studying Victorian Literature it is worth bearing in mind the fluidity of the time and the changeability which arose out of living on the cusp between the passing away of old values and the unknown territory of the new. Realism recognised the gaps which were forming in society such as the distancing of the self from religion and offered to paper the cracks through its vision of bringing people together on a mundane level. Its territory stretched to include the darkest recesses of the mind to the smallest of everyday events, celebrating the grey area between extremes as we now know as Victorian.BibliographyArnold, M., Reprint of 1865 ed. dissertations in Criticism With the addition of Two dissertations not hitherto reprinted. London Routledge.Appleman, P, 2001, Darwin. London NortonBeer, G., 2000, Darwins Plots. Cambridge Cambridge University PressBrantlinger, P, 1988, Rule of DarknessBritish Literature and Imperialism. Ithaca, NY Cornell University PressBristow, J., 1991, Empire BoysAdventures in a Mans World. London Harper Collins. Brown, M., 2001, (ed) Picturing Children. Aldershot AshgateBulwer-Lytton, E., 1853, A Strange Story.