![[Click on image to enlarge]](../../images/victoria2.jpg)
Key terms: Victorianism, faith and doubt, self-scrutiny, imperialism, propriety, Evangelicalism, Utilitarianism, social Darwinism, "higher criticism,"improvement, natural selection.
IThe word "Victorian" and the concept of Victorianism conjure up a rich and contradictory complex of images for us: a time of strict rules, formal manners, rigidly defined roles, sexual prudery, propriety, respectability, earnestness, duty, pious conventionality, overdecoration, elaborate houses and furniture, and people who were, as the period introduction in the Longman Anthology notes, "as well-upholstered as their furniture." This was the age of muttonchop whiskers and crocheted stockings to cover the piano "limbs" (we're too polite to say "legs" in public, gasp!). It was also the period of Jack the Ripper, of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde, of the penny-dreadful novel and Sherlock Holmes, of great men keeping mistresses in bordellos, of women going off to missionary society meetings to improve the lives of the ignorant while child chimneysweeps suffocated in their chimneys.
The Victorian era, spanning from 1832–1901, was a period of dramatic change the world over, and especially in England, with the rapid extension of colonialism through large portions of Africa, Asia, and the West Indies, making England a preeminent center of world power and relocating the perceived center of Western Civilization from Paris to London. The rapid growth of London, with a population of 6.5 million by the time of Victoria's death, evidenced a marked change due to industrialization away from a way of life based on the ownership of land to a modern urban economy based on trade and manufacturing. Dramatic changes in manufacturing, rapid growth of the British economy, and seemingly continual expansion of England's colonized territories resulted in mixed sentiments, with some writers such as Thomas Babbington Macauley applauding change and the superior civilization of England and other writers such as Mathew Arnold and Thomas Carlyle expressing more trepidation and concern about this era of change. It was true that the "sun never set on the British Empire," but the cost of obtaining and maintaining that empire on human lives and on ethical practices was high indeed.
The Victorian early period (1832–48) can be described as a time of dramatic change with the improvement of the railroads and the country's first Reform Parliament, but it was also a time of economic distress. Even with the Reform Bill of 1832, extending voting privileges to the lower middle classes and redistributing parliamentary representation to break up the conservative landowner's monopoly of power, England's economic troubles could not be entirely solved. By the end of this Time of Troubles, the Chartists, among others, succeeded in introducing important economic reforms, such as the repeal of the Corn Laws and the introduction of a system of Free Trade. It's estimated that in the early 1840s, the life of a working man in one of the factory cities (Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, etc.) was about 20 years because of the poor conditions. A great part of the population of Britain still did not have the vote, and the working poor became even poorer as workhouses, poorhouses, and orphanages became cheap sources of disposable labor. "To go on the parish" as a destitute person was a virtual death sentence in many parts of England--constables would try to drive the poor into another village so that their own village wouldn't have to support the poor people. The modern concept of "dumping" the poor practiced in the 21st century by many hospitals and social organizations has its origins here. As a result, the period that saw such remarkable prosperity for some also saw the formation of an underclass of the poor, reflected in works like Dickens' Oliver Twist or Hard Times. (Not even the Second Reform Bill of 1867 or the Education Act of 1870 truly remedied this disparity.)
The historian Asa Briggs refers to the following period of the Victorian era as "The Age of Improvement." Although the mid- Victorian period (1848–70) was not free of the previous period's problems, it was a time of overall prosperity and general social satisfaction with further growth of the empire improving trade and economic conditions. This was also a period in which industry, technology, and science were celebrated with renewed vigor. The development of railroads made it possible to journey from London to Glasgow in a day, to have the morning's newspapers in Scotland by midnight. Macadam's paving system and a well-developed stagecoach system made travel across the length and breadth of Britain easily possible--and reformist efforts to make it illegal to travel or work on the Sabbath were shot down by the efforts of writers like Dickens, who pointed out that such Evangelical attempts to legislate morality were in fact further ways of discriminating against the poor.
By this point, however, the Church of England had evolved into three major divisions, with conflicting beliefs about religious practice, and faith and doubt became the central religious question of the age. The "High Church" wanted to return to ceremony and trappings in the Church of England; the "Low Church" Methodists and Evangelicals located in the cities preached Biblical inerrancy, and sought to promote enthusiasm in religious works. Meanwhile the Broad Church, the mainstream Church of England, tried to soldier on in the face of the greatest challenges to established faith the world had ever seen. Empiricism and the work of Hume led to rationalist challenges to religion, including Utilitarianism, developed by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, which argued that the greatest good is that which gives the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people (no matter what the consequences to the minority). Science in the work of the geologist Lyell and the writers Thomas Henry Huxley and Charles Darwin, laid open the historical workings of Nature over eons, making it less possible to believe in the neoclassical concept of a Divine Architect in the face of mutability, natural selection, geology, competition, and the unquestionable evidence of the evolution of species. (Remember that many of these discoveries were made by clergymen; the term "scientist" did not occur until 1840!) "Higher Criticism" had a similar effect in its perception of the Bible as a historical text subject to human interpolation and error, and George Eliot's translation of Strauss' Life of Jesus and Bishop Colenso's work on the Pentateuch lay bare the undeniable evidence for errancy in scriptural transmission, to the dismay of many complacent readers.
The later period (1870–1901) was a time of changing attitudes about colonialism, industrialization, and scientific advancement. Rebellions and war in the colonial territories made the public increasingly more aware of the costs of empire. Various events challenged the sense of England's endless prosperity as a world power, such as the emergence of Bismarck's Germany and its threats to English naval and military positions and the expansion of the American grain industry, driving down the price of English grain. Socialist movements grew out of this discontentment, as well as a melancholy spirit in the writing of the end of the century. Even as John Stuart Mill and other Evangelicals encouraged the beginnings of suffrage for women, through the reform of marital laws and child custody, the Queen was opposing it as disgusting and suggesting that its supporters should be whipped. Oscar Wilde's making a pun of "earnest," a typical and sincerely used mid-Victorian word, is typical of a dying Victorianism. At the same time, the new technologies of photography and sound recording mean that for the first time, we can see and hear what our forebears sounded like--perhaps one of the reasons why we have a better sense of the Victorian period than of many of its predecessors.
Three genres dominate the Victorian period, as the conditions of publishing, including the prominence of the periodical press, dramatically shaped the form of literature. Serialization of novels, for example, allowed for an author to alter the shape of his narrative based on public response to earlier installments. In the later years of the era, authors started to position themselves in opposition to this broad reading public and serialization gave way to three-volume editions. The Victorian novel was primarily concerned with representing a social reality and the way a protagonist sought and defined a place within this reality and fiction came to be the dominant genre. The increased popularity of periodicals also allowed the nonfiction essay to become a widespread and popular literary genre. Works such as Darwin's On the Origin of Species and Ruskin's Stones of Venice sold as well as Dickens did. Victorian narrative poetry dominated the era, with Victorian poets seeking to represent psychology in new ways through the use of self-scrutiny and the dramatic monologue. As one wit put it, the speakers in Victorian poetry are not so much heard as overheard. Tennyson in In Memoriam expressed a typical Victorian ambivalence about revealing so much private feeling: "I sometimes hold it half a sin / To put in words the grief I feel."
Tennyson (1809-1892) is one of the most important and representative voices of this changing age of Faith and Doubt. As Poet Laureate of the kingdom from 1850 to his death, he gave voice to the sentiments of his time in carefully-crafted narrative poetry. Tennyson had joined a Cambridge undergraduate group called "The Apostles," who fancied themselves literary critics and philosophers, and the friendships he made in this group greatly influenced his life. Arthur Hallam's was the most important of these friendships. Hallam, another precociously brilliant Victorian young man like Robert Browning, John Stuart Mill, and Matthew Arnold, was uniformly recognized by his contemporaries (including William Gladstone, his best friend at Eton) as having unusual promise. He and Tennyson knew each other only four years, but their intense friendship had major influence on the poet. On a visit to Somersby, Hallam met and later became engaged to Emily Tennyson, and the two friends looked forward to a life-long companionship. Hallam's death from illness in 1833 (he was only 22) shocked Tennyson profoundly, and his grief lead to most of his best poetry, including In Memoriam , "The Passing of Arthur", "Ulysses," and "Tithonus." Most of these are dramatic monologues--a form very popular in the Victorian period because it allowed the poet to use a persona speaking with the pronoun I to scrutinize human actions and motives. The form establishes a connection to the reader much more so than the novel does. The dramatic monologue addresses the reader directly, drawing the audience into the emotions while allowing the poet to maintain a distance from the emotions. in Tennyson, the dramatic monologue most often uses a character from an earlier literary work, such as classical legend or the Arthurian tradition, to be the poet's mouthpiece. Tennyson was one of the first, but not the only, nineteenth century British writer to move from Romantic orientalism into British medievalism--both Sir Walter Scott and the Pre-Raphaelite poets (most especially Morris and Rossetti) created their own romanticized view of the Middle Ages to fit into the Victorian world view.
In In Memoriam the poet wrestles with the questions that wracked his age--why do the good die young? in what can one have faith? how does one reconcile faith in a traditional deity with the new discoveries of science and evolution? The poem thus becomes a new iteration of Milton's task--to justify the ways of God to man in an elegy--and Tennyson's poem shows the struggle of the psyche to achieve that task. The poem's four sections--neatly punctuated by the three Christmas sections--take the grieving narrator through all the stages of grief, anger, doubt, and new resolution. The poem begins (p. 601) in bleak mourning--"on the bald street breaks the blank day" and the poet/speaker uses his craft as a mask and defense to hide his grieving--"In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er, / Like coarsest clothes against the cold." The mourning poet states that "Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all" (603), but yet the grief undercuts his faith. By the second year after Hallam's death, he is calling on a God he doesn't trust to answer (sections 53 and 54, page 605: "Be near me when my light is low...Be near me when my faith is dry, / And men the flies of latter spring, / That lay their eggs, and sting and sing/ And weave their petty cells and die.") By the end of section 54, the poet/speaker's despair is laid bare: "but what am I? / An infant crying in the night: / An infant crying for the light: / And with no language but a cry." (p. 605).
The poet/speaker is confounded by the new discoveries of science, seeing himself as one "Who trusted God was love indeed / And love Creation's final law-- / Tho' Nature, read in tooth and claw / With ravine, shriek'd against his creed" (606). It takes him two more years to be able to "Ring out the old, ring in the new" (610) and see Hallam as a pre-cursor, as a 'type' or fore-runner, of a new stage in the evolution of Man, as a better and nobler model to emulate. Playing upon two competing means of the term type, Tennyson parallels and contrasts the biological and the religious. Although he admits that man as a type (species) may well disappear like the dinosaur, a fossil in the iron hills, he finds in Hallam a type (prefiguration) of both the reappearance of Christ and of the higher form (species, type) of humanity--a reassurance that time, evolution, and human life have meaning. In the last two poems of the work (Nos. 130, 131) the poet/speaker celebrates a love that is "vaster passion now" "With faith that comes of self-control." His scrutiny of his beliefs has led him back to a faith based on "truths that never can be proved:"--a rejection of empiricism. Yet he chooses to believe, and so finds closure. It's a good exercise to contrast the ideas about faith here with Browning's The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church and Arnold's Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse, both of which wrestle with the same questions but reject the conclusion Tennyson makes.
In poetic terms one of the things to note here is the In Memoriam stanza, four lines of octosyllabic verse (usually, but not always, iambic) rhyming abba. Tennyson's gift for versification makes this flexible and at times even muscular, even though the limited number of rhymes in English is a challenge for a poet seeking variety of rhythmic and sound effects.
