Introduction. “Victorians Like US”: The Victorian Age Revisited

Elisabete Mendes Silva,Maria Granic

doi:10.5334/as.67

Abstract

“Victorians Like Us” was a project carried out by the English Culture Research Group of The University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies. The four conferences organised between 2012 and 2018 and held at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities in Lisbon gave visibility to the project. They all promoted discussion on a wide variety of topics pertaining to ideological, social, and cultural settings and encompassing all facets of the Victorian era. The topics fostered a critical and creative dialogue on Victorianism and our current age. This introduction first sets the context for the present issue of Anglo-Saxonica, which comprises expanded versions of papers delivered at the Victorians Like Us III conference, and then briefly describes their main topics and goals.

Highlights

As Berlin stated: True knowledge is knowledge of why things are as they are, not merely what they are; and the more we delve into this, the more we realise that the questions asked by the Homeric Greeks are different from the questions asked by the Romans, that the questions asked by the Romans differ from those asked in the Christian Middle Ages or in the seventeenth-century scientific culture or Vico’s own eighteenth-century days
Our immersion in the Victorian era represents an attempt to examine it through the critical lens of our cultural perceptions, to ask questions in the search for more than mere facts
Debates about faith, where agnosticism contended with the desire to believe, quarrels about politics with the rise of the working-class politics, the defence of marriage and family as highly praised institutions and the need to uphold moral guidance in the so-called rotten souls, permeated Victorian society

Summary

Introduction

The idea that to understand our present we need to scrutinise our past is commonly asserted.1. Several reference works about the Victorian Age define it as a period of great economic expansion and prosperity, a period of transition from a static feudal system to a dynamic industrial society, marking the birth of modern Britain3.

Results

Conclusion