The Victorian Era

“The Age of Reading”

Even idleness is eager now,-eager for amusement; prone to excursion-trains, art-museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels.—George Eliot

Literary Culture

• Typical middle-class families read together in the evenings– wives or daughters read aloud to the rest of the

household

• Magazines containing serialized novels and poems

• General literacy meant there was an enormous amount of printed material produced during the period– 97 percent of both sexes able to read by 1900

Visual Aid

Illustrations• helped unpracticed readers to follow the story.

– 1875 wood engravings gave way to photogravure– 1880s photographs to replace hand-drawn works

• Colored illustrations– hand-tinted at first,

• often by poor women and children working at home• chromolithography soon made colored reproductions of artwork

possible.

• British publishing – gradually transformed itself into a modern industry

• worldwide distribution and influence. – Copies of The Times circulated in uncharted Africa – illustrations torn from magazines adorned bushmen's huts

Reader’s Taste

• Readers' tastes varied according to:– Class– income– education.

• Upper-class– The well-educated but unintellectual – small portion of the Victorian reading public.

• Working-class– literacy rates

• far below the general standard– increased as

» working hours diminished» housing improved» public libraries spread.

A Cheap Fix: Working-class tastes…The appetite for cheap literature steadily grew• religious tracts• self-help manuals• reprints of classics• newspapers• sensational entertainment:

– "penny dreadfuls”• Varney the Vampire

– “shilling shockers" • serials, • bawdy ballads• police reports of lurid crimes

The Middle Class

• largest audience for new prose and poetry

• produced the authors to meet an increasing demand for books:– Edify– Instruct– entertain

The Victorian Novel

• Major authors:– Dickens– Brontes– George Eliot– Thomas Hardy

• Considered a “woman’s genre”– Female protagonists– Large female audience

• Most novels serialized

Serialization

• 1860s most novels were serialized in weekly or monthly magazines

• allowed for an author to alter the shape of his narrative based on public response to earlier installments.

• Later changed to Three volume works• publishers and libraries required authors to

produce "three deckers”,• " long novels packaged in three separate

volumes that tripled rental fees

The Golden Age• English novel

– Most popular form– new books, especially fiction, were still a luxury– Publishers inflated prices

• readers would rent novels and narrative poems• commercial circulating libraries• larger and steadier income than individual sales

• Also popular:– Poetry– serious nonfiction – “Improving” works on:

• Religion• Science• Philosophy• economics.

Victorian Poetry

• A reaction to, as well as a subdued continuation of Romanticism

• Passion is more tempered, more “grown-up”

• Perfection of the dramatic persona, in which the author speaks to the reader in another’s voice– Sought to represent psychology in new ways.

Victorian Drama

• More prominent in the “late” (1871-1901) period

• European drama is very heavy and serious– Chekhov– Ibsen

• English drama is lighter – Gilbert & Sullivan– Oscar Wilde

Social Issues

• The abuses of the past came under closer scrutiny– literature becomes the vehicle that helps to

reform social inequalities.

• period was a time of sustained peace– domestic issues could be addressed.

Literary Responsibility

Close relationship authors shared with their public had its drawbacks:

• writers had to censor their content• meet the prim standards of "circulating library

morality." • Any hint of impropriety was aggressively ferreted

out by publishers and libraries. – Even revered poets such as Tennyson and Barrett

Browning found themselves edited by squeamish publishers.