Victorian England Research Articles

Threads of Tradition Social Expectations and Marriage in Emma by Jane Austen and Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

This study explores the theme of marriage and social expectations in two beloved novels: In case of two British novelists Jane Austen's Emma and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The paper is focused on revealing a multi-faceted character of the figure of gender roles, social values and traditions linking the lives of Emma Woodhouse and Tess Durbeyfield by means of a comparative analysis. These tensions between female characters' individual goals and social constraints are exposed by the study and the opinions of Elizabeth V. Spelman, Ann Bo-Hubert, Hazel Carby, Elaine Showalter, Susan Gubar and Sandra M. Gilbert are referred to. Austen dismantled the precedent social norms of the Regency period through the vital tool of satire and wit after this novel is through and through analysed out. The made decision to make the word association “Brain” instead of “love” is a pretty good way to show the society who sees marriage as only a calculated action, not the passionate connection. The multilayered substructures of a theme are formed due to the "crazy woman in the attic" metaphor constructed by Gilbert and Gubar which implies the true self of a woman in society is suppressed due to restricted roles. Unlike Stone's 'Greek Myths,' Hardy in Tess of the D’Urbervilles focusing on a gloomy story that work to demonstrate the harmful consequences of ignoring Victorian society rules. The article analyses the marriage and gender role issues that Hardy has shown in a vivid manner as Eagleton says. The main conflict of the play is about what man want and what society demands, that is: what is true happiness and what is right in social term. Social class differences get intensively scrutinized, as the plot shows how the social systems influence the lives of the characters and build their destinies which deepens the theme analysis further. The study shows that these classic novels have been excellent guides and examples that have helped readers figure out what they would like to do with their lives. Moreover, the readers have been able to see people confront the challenges they encounter from institutions or interpersonal dynamics as well as expectations to balance their culture and social obligations.

Social Issues During the Victorian Era Lead to the Formation of Nice Girl Syndrome in Gaskell’s Ruth

This study aimed to elaborate on the relationship between social issues during the Victorian era and Nice Girl syndrome, as demonstrated in Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth. A qualitative descriptive method was employed to achieve this objective, incorporating Alfred Adler's Individual Personality approach and Beverly Engel's Nice Girl syndrome as the grand theory. Data on female characters' behaviour and thoughts in Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth were collected and analyzed using Adler's and Nice Girl syndrome theories, respectively. Furthermore, the dialogue and monologue of female characters were also considered. The results showed that social issues such as social class, Victorian family, Victorian ideal womanhood, and Victorian religion and morality related to Nice Girl syndrome during the Victorian era influenced and contributed to the formation of Ruth's female characters.

Cows, Communities, and Religious Responses to the 1865–66 British Rinderpest Outbreak*

The devastating outbreak of rinderpest in the British Isles in 1865–66 — the so‐called “cattle plague” — was a significant event in Victorian Britain, one that did much to shape British agriculture, animal disease control, and veterinary medicine. This article argues that the cattle plague also had long‐term significance for the relationship between the Church of England and non‐human animals. During eighteenth‐century rinderpest outbreaks, Anglican clergy had rarely considered the suffering animals. In 1865–66 and afterwards, services in Anglican churches increasingly involved animal themes, issues, and presences. From this time, it became usual for Anglicans to mark moments of severe animal disease with special prayers and services. The crisis also encouraged changes in how Church of England clergy, and ministers in other Christian denominations, spoke about animals in sermons. During the outbreak of rinderpest, there was a sharpened awareness of the extent to which cows and humans had common interests and inhabited a shared community. A heightened appreciation of the bonds and interdependencies between people and farmed animals, the article suggests, had much significance for ecological thinking among nineteenth‐century ministers of religion. The article argues for the distinctive status of cattle in modern Christianity.

“Avenging the Nation”. Freedom of the Press and Constitutional Deliverance in Trollope’s Palliser Novels

Abstract This essay examines the notion of constitutional deliverance within the Victorian settlement. The expression points to the way constitutional arrangements react to threats that may disrupt the politico-legal order. Rooted in constitutional morality, it entails executing justice, restoring order, and protecting individuals’ rights and freedoms. To this end, it analyses Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, and The Prime Minister, i.e. three of the six Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels, and explores whether the freedom of the press executed constitutional deliverance in the Victorian era. The essay will focus on Mr Quintus Slide, the editor of the People’s Banner, whose acts of moralisation seem to fit into the (political and biblical) notion of deliverance. The article argues that Slide used the press not to deliver the Nation, but to avenge his own interests. In so doing, he contradicted the idea of constitutional deliverance as embedded in Parliament, where the anointed Monarch summons His body politic to execute justice and protect it.

EXPLORING THE HISTORICAL LAYERS OF VICTORIAN SOCIETY & FASHION TRENDS: A LITERARY REVIEW

The Victorian era, spanning Queen Victoria's reign from 1837 to 1901, witnessed a complex interplay of societal norms, cultural trends, economic factors, and gender roles that profoundly influenced fashion. This era was characterized by a strict code of morality and respectability, leading to clothing that emphasized modesty and concealment, along with a distinctive class-based approach to attire. The fascination with Orientalism and the Arts and Crafts Movement left a distinct mark on fashion, introducing exotic elements and handmade details. Economic and technological factors, notably the Industrial Revolution, transformed the fabric market and influenced clothing availability and affordability. The proliferation of visual media disseminated fashion trends, while distinct men's and women's fashion reflected the "separate spheres" ideology. This exploration of Victorian fashion is not merely a retrospective analysis but an examination of how clothing serves as a mirror to society. The legacy of this era endures, influencing contemporary fashion and underscoring the enduring relationship between attire and culture. The study of Victorian fashion offers a deeper understanding of how societal values, cultural dynamics, economic forces, and gender constructs intertwine to shape the clothing choices of a bygone era, leaving a rich and resonant tapestry of historical and cultural significance.

Wolf Rock Lighthouse Long-Term Monitoring

Wolf Rock Lighthouse is a Victorian era masonry structure located in an extreme environment facing the fiercest Atlantic storms off the southwest coast of England whose dynamic behaviour has been studied since 2016. Initially, a modal test was used to determine modal parameters; then, in 2017, a monitoring system was installed that has operated intermittently providing response data for a number of characteristic loading events. These events have included wave loads due to storms, a small UK earthquake, helicopters landing on the helideck, and the grounding of a ship on the reef. This is believed to be the most extensive experimental campaign on any structure of this type. This paper briefly describes a unique project involving the characterisation and measurement of dynamic behaviour due to different forms of dynamic loading.

‘The Black Prince of Baker Street’ and the Black Presence in Britain, 1837–1849

  Between 1838 and 1849 a man repeatedly visited London claiming to be ‘Louis Christophe’, seeking access to money deposited in the Bank of England by his ‘brother’ the deceased King of Haiti, Henri Christophe. By following this impostor around London and the wider Atlantic, this article makes an important contribution to understanding of the Black presence in Britain during the early Victorian period. Alongside his interactions with the Black community, it documents how ‘Louis Christophe’ was able to defraud British philanthropists, the forms of racial prejudice he received during the decade, and the legacy of the Haitian Revolution.

Crafting British medicine in the Empire: the establishment of medical schools in India and Canada, 1763-1837.

In the early nineteenth century, medical schools became a growing means of regulating medicine in the British Empire, both in the metropole and in two colonies: India and Canada. By examining the establishment of medical schools in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Quebec City, Montreal and Toronto between the end of the Seven Years' War and the beginning of the Victorian era, this article argues that the rise of the British Empire was a key factor in the gradual replacement of private medical apprenticeships with institutional medical education. Although the imperial state did not implement a uniform medical policy across the British Empire, the medical schools established under its jurisdiction were instrumental in devising a curriculum that emphasised human dissection, bedside training in hospitals and organic chemistry as criteria of medical competence.

“She is the Great Outside”: Ecofeminist Potentiality in H. G. Wells’s The Sea Lady

Abstract H. G. Wells’s serial fable The Sea Lady (1902) offers a satirical commentary on the Victorian Age: It draws a societal allegory that criticises both a cohesive conception of the natural world, and Victorian notions of the domestic realm – in the private and national sense of the term. Yet the story has long been regarded as an oddity in the author’s oeuvre. Wells’s Victorian contemporaries criticised its lack of scientific detail so characteristic of his more successful scientific romances. The reason for this appears to be the story’s eponymous central figure – a mermaid, supposedly rather the stuff of legend, folklore and fairy tales. However, by opening up a utopian realm in which ‘better dreams’ await, the figure of the sea lady destabilises Victorian moral orders as a potential discovery of the future lingers on the horizon of the century’s turn. In this article, I foreground the story’s ecofeminist potential by analysing the intersections between its unconventional form, the ‘untameable female’ protagonist at its centre, and the specific oceanic and littoral environments it presents.

The Transitional Career of Mary Gurney (1836–1917): Work for the Reform of English Middle-Class Female Education at Secondary and Tertiary Levels

ABSTRACT This article presents an understanding of the context, nature and significance of Mary Gurney’s educational career during the years 1863 to 1917. It is assisted in part by the conceptual lenses of feminist thinking and network theory. Despite neglect by past historians, Gurney’s work was seen by contemporaries as equal in significance to that of leading reformers who, like her, sought equality between English middle-class male and female education at secondary and tertiary levels. The article demonstrates her career’s transitional position between that of middle-class female philanthropist and professional female during the British Victorian and Edwardian periods of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It discusses the educational consequences of Gurney’s work before and after her death, including how its effects spread to other geographical and social locations, as part of the process of assessing its value.

Sarah Woodbine: a black nurse in Victorian Britain Sarah Woodbine: a black nurse in Victorian Britain , by David Gleave, Neasa Roughan and John D. Ellis, Historycal Roots, 24 August, 2023, £5.00 (paperback), £1.99 (ebook), ASIN Number BOCGM9CBKK

Sarah Woodbine: a black nurse in Victorian Britain <b>Sarah Woodbine: a black nurse in Victorian Britain</b> , by David Gleave, Neasa Roughan and John D. Ellis, Historycal Roots, 24 August, 2023, £5.00 (paperback), £1.99 (ebook), ASIN Number BOCGM9CBKK

Visibility, Precarity and Public Spaces: Reading Matthew Arnold’s “West London” in an Indian Classroom

This essay is an account of my experience of teaching Matthew Arnold's "West London" in an Indian classroom through the conceptual prism of vulnerability. The essay argues that the configuration of public space in Arnold's poem in terms of differential class relations in Victorian society offers a literary mode of visualizing vulnerablity and prompts an ethical recognition of the humanness of marginalized characters. It further demonstrates how the peadgogic exercise of 'reading' such poetry in the contemporary urban Indian context can alert students to the politics of occupying and negotiating public spaces in terms of (the lack of) class position and privilege across diverse cultural and historical contexts. 

The Early Novels of Ivy Low: Literature, Love, and Lust in 1910s London

ABSTRACT This article examines the early literary career of the writer Ivy Low. Low’s work and literary friendships of this period offer a rich source of insight into the contradictions and challenges of British literary culture in the early 1910s, especially for a young woman of Jewish descent eager to belong to a new generation of writers. The article examines Low’s two early novels Growing Pains (1913) and The Questing Beast (1914). The novels continue existing literary traditions of the Victorian and Edwardian era while at the same time being determinedly modern if not Modernist in outlook. Low’s psychologically honest explorations of women’s sexual feelings and descriptions of women in the workplace supplement the more conventional subjects of marriage, education, religion, and art, as well as a vivid portrait of the process of becoming a published author. Drawing on archival autobiographical writing, the article explores how Low’s initially promising career becomes increasingly problematic as she grows more aware of barriers of class and race which make her an outsider despite her close friendship with the writer Viola Meynell and D. H. Lawrence’s early interest in her.

Ella Erskine, Elkin Mathews, and the “Long Aesthetic Century”

ABSTRACT Scholars have used terms such as the “long nineteenth century” to convey the fact that the characteristics, principles, and artistic debates of the Victorian era did not suddenly vanish in 1900, but continued to inform British literature throughout the Edwardian era and into the start of the First World War. From work written by women, in particular, during the first decade of the twentieth century, it is obvious that one of the most significant developments of late-Victorian literature – i.e. the Aesthetic Movement – continued to enjoy an active life. This chapter uses a 1909 volume of prose poems, Shadow-shapes by Ella Erskine, to make that point, while demonstrating the important role played by Elkin Mathews, her publisher, in keeping Aestheticism before the public.

Postmodernism: A Revolt Against Victorianism in Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Postmodernism embraces ambiguity, and challenges fixed meanings and universal truth. Tess of the d’Urbervilles represents the morality of the time. Tess of the d’Urbervilles can be read as a pointer to this problem. Hardy pleads, like the postmodernists, to employ more than one hermeneutic approach to decipher the meaning and purpose of Victorian morality. Hardy portrays Tess as a postmodern woman who rejects socially constructed values and truth in order to attack Victorian morality. Tess is more postmodern than Victorian in the sense that she opposes Victorian chastity and virginity as meta-narratives. Tess believes what she believes to be right or wrong, disregarding Victorian society and societal norms. Because postmodern theory is applied to the text, the proposed study is qualitative. The novel is the primary source of data collection. Secondary data sources include books and journal articles. Selected passages from the text are interpreted with a view to postmodern theory to address research questions. The research technique is interpretive content analysis.

Racial Ideologies and Imperial Discourses: A New Historicist Reading of Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden”

Set against the backdrop of the 19th-century apex of European colonial expansion and formation of New Imperialism, Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden", composed in 1899, emerges as a cultural artefact reflecting and actively participating in the racial and imperialistic discourses prevalent during this epoch. Generally criticized for perpetuating a one-sided narrative, the poem ignores the violence, exploitation, and cultural disruption wrought by colonial powers and presents an idealized vision of the colonizers' mission without acknowledging the harsh realities faced by the colonized. The present article offers a comprehensive New Historicist examination of Kipling's iconic poem by contextualizing it within the racial and exceptionalist socio-political and pseudoscientific milieu of the late 19th century United Kingdom and the complex web of imperial ideologies prevalent in the Victorian era. By engaging critically with Kipling's poem, this study aims to give insights into the intersections between literature, power, and historical context and offer a nuanced understanding of the legacies of imperialistic ideologies and their implications for our present-day understanding of empire and race.

Middle-class Fathers, Sons, and Mental Illness in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

This article explores the impact of mental illness on the relationship between middle-class fathers and sons in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. Using sources that include autobiographies, oral histories, press reports of violence, and records of appeals against conscription, the article argues that shame was not the dominant reaction. Many mentally ill men lost masculine status and agency within the family, but both fathers and sons were much more likely to respond to illness with loving concern, attempts at negotiation and pacification, than to use their power over vulnerable relatives with attempts to confine and hide them from sight.

Racial Discourses in Aegean Prehistory c. 1900: The Case of the Cupbearer Fresco at Knossos

This article traces characterizations of the Cupbearer fresco, named after the large vessel the figure holds and uncovered at the site of Knossos in 1900, in light of the research agendas about the ‘races’ of the prehistoric Aegean and traditions of racial science current in late Victorian Britain. The head of the Cupbearer was compared to Classical Greek art, modern Cretan populations, and cranial remains from prehistoric contexts. Drawing from academic publications, articles in the press, and reports of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the author situates the discourse surrounding the Cupbearer in the context of scholars seeking the origins of ‘European’ civilization in prehistory, and the creation of racial typologies, especially using cranial measurements and photography. The Cupbearer gained a dual status as a racial portrait comparable to past and present human populations, but also as a work of art that prefigured the later achievements of Classical Greece.

Book Review: The Wonders: Lifting the Curtain on the Freak Show, Circus and Victorian Age by John Woolf

Book Review: <i>The Wonders: Lifting the Curtain on the Freak Show, Circus and Victorian Age</i> by John Woolf

Victorian London, England and Englishness in Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs

Neo-Victorianism is described as a genre in critical and fictional writing which alters our perspective of past and present by bringing two different centuries into focus. From a new genre which is rooted in the past and strongly attached to the present, arise analytical comparisons and alternative-creative works. Victorian England is a vantage point for the Industrial Revolution; when contemporary readers and critics trace effects and results of major social, economic and intellectual changes in the twenty-first century back to their source, Victorian England appears as a model for the industrial shift in Europe. This situation justifies the choice of setting for a great number of Victorian and Neo-Victorian novels: among numerous nineteenth-century settlements, Victorian London becomes prominent. London is a designed spot in time and space which is laden with success in industrial production to become a role model, but at the same time with its characteristics such as the heavy burden of urbanisation, showing itself in over-populated places, filthy and inhumane living and working conditions; it exhibits the downside of the industrialisation period. Social and institutional vices of industrialism are portrayed in historical documents as well as literary works in settlements and places of the nineteenth-century: factories, workhouses, slums, hospitals, asylums, and colonies. Period-specific developments are measured through recorded personal and social stories, coming from every class of society, belonging to every age, gender and ethnicity, in the motherland as well as colonies. Moving from the philosophies influencing mainly the first half of the twentieth century, it is argued that contemporary theories show a growing interest on perception, representation and production of space. This article aims to emphasize the set of relations between the concepts of belonging, identity and otherness in the light of the theories on heterotopias and third spaces in Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, which is a Neo-Victorian rewriting of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.