The Victorian Era 18371901: City, Country, and Empire

1
The Victorian Era (1837-1901) City, Country,
and Empire
2
Cities

• In the 18th century the pivotal city of Western
  Civilization had been Paris by the second half
  of the 19th century this center of influence had
  shifted to London, a city that expanded from
  about two million inhabitants when Victoria came
  to the throne in 1837 to six and one-half million
  at the time of her death in 1901 (979).

3
London

• Victorian cities are, the cities of the railway
  and trainway age, of the age of steam and of gas,
  of a society sometimes restless, sometimes
  complacent, moving, often fumblingly and
  falteringly, towards grater democracy. The
  building of the cities was a characteristic
  Victorian achievement, impressive in scale but
  limited in vision, creating new opportunities but
  also providing massive new problems (Briggs 16).

4
Consider the image of London with which Dickens
opens A Christmas Carol,

• The city clocks had only just gone three, but it
  was quite dark already-it had not been light all
  day-and candles were flaring in the windows of
  the neighboring offices, like ruddy smears upon
  the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in
  at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense
  without, that, although the court was of the
  narrowest, the houses were mere phantoms. To see
  the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring
  everything, one might have thought that Nature
  lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale
  (33).

5
What can be gained from a contemporary study of
representations of Victorian cities?

• We can and should criticize the appalling living
  conditions in Victorian cities, the absence of
  amenities, the brutal degradation of natural
  environment and the inability to plan and often
  even conceive of the city as a whole. At the
  same time we realize also that in a very
  different twentieth-century society we are often
  just as hard pressed as the Victorians to make
  cities attractive and inspiring (Briggs 18-19).

6
The Country

• The now hallowed visual cliché-the patchwork of
  meadow and pasture, hedgerows and copses,
  immaculate villages nestling among small tilled
  fields-is in fact quite recent only after the
  pre-Raphaelites did the recognizably English
  landscape become a medieval vision, all fertile,
  secure, small scale (Lowenthal 138).

7
While Charles Dickens, like William Blake before
him, wrote fiction that encoded critical attacks
on social problems that especially plagued
Victorian city life, they drew on pastoral
imagery.

• When Scrooge wakes up a reformed man, the city of
  London looks much different than it did in the
  opening Running to the window, he opened it,
  and put out his head. No fog, no mist clear,
  bright, jovial, stirring, cold cold, piping for
  the blood to dance to golden sunlight heavenly
  sky sweet fresh air merry bells. Oh, glorious!
  Glorious! (132).

8
Dickens/Blake method of looking to a English
pastoral past as means to resist the rapid
catapult into modernity was further developed and
employed by a group of London artists, called
pre-Raphaelites, who greatly influenced poems
like Goblin Market.
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Pre-Raphaelites

• Pre-Raphaelites a group of 19th century London
  artists, who united to resist mechanistic
  artistic conventions and to create, or re-create,
  art forms in use before the period of Raphael
  (1483-1520) in contrast to the what they
  perceived to be the corrupting and academic
  technique of Raphael, they wanted to return to
  the abundant detail, intense colors, and complex
  compositions of medieval Italian and Flemish art.

10
While Rossetti was influenced by the
Pre-Raphaelites, and even related to some of
them, her style leans toward arts and crafts.

• Arts and crafts movement DEF

11
Rossettis colleague and a leading figure in the
British arts and crafts movement, William Morris,
practiced this emphasis on a return to or
retrieve and employ pre-industrial techniques and
esthetics.
12
William Morris

• In 1861 Morris and several friends founded a
  company to design and produce furniture,
  wallpaper, textiles, stained glass, tapestries,
  and carpets, objects still prized today as
  masterpieces of decorative artThe minor arts, he
  believed, were in a state of complete
  degradation through his firm he wanted to
  restore beauty of design and individual
  craftsmanship (1482).

13
We can see this emphasis expressed in Goblin
Market

• Early in the morning/When the first cock crowed
  his warning,/Neat like bees, as sweet and
  busy,/Laura rose with Lizzy/Fetched in honey,
  milked the cows,/Aired and set to rights the
  house,/Kneaded cakes of whitest wheat,/Cakes for
  dainty mouths to eat,/Next churned butter,
  whipped up cream,/Fed their poultry, sat and
  sewed/Talked as modest maidens should/Lizzie
  with an open heart,/Laura in an absent dream,/One
  content, one sick in art/One warbling for the
  mere bright days delight/One longing for the
  night (199-214).

14
And similar to all the other authors weve read,
the rural setting of Goblin Market, is a means of
analyzing the urban spaces.

• They drew the gurgling water from its deep
• Lizzie plucked the purple and rich golden flags,
• Then turning homewards said The sunset flushes
• Those furthest lofty crags
• Come Laura, not another maiden lags,
• No willful squirrel wags,
• The beasts and birds are fast asleep.
• But Laura loitered still among the rushes
• And said the bank was steep. (219-27).

15
How to make the move to empire? We can see this
emphasis expressed in Goblin Market

• Early in the morning/When the first cock crowed
  his warning,/Neat like bees, as sweet and
  busy,/Laura rose with Lizzy/Fetched in honey,
  milked the cows,/Aired and set to rights the
  house,/Kneaded cakes of whitest wheat,/Cakes for
  dainty mouths to eat,/Next churned butter,
  whipped up cream,/Fed their poultry, sat and
  sewed/Talked as modest maidens should/Lizzie
  with an open heart,/Laura in an absent dream,/One
  content, one sick in art/One warbling for the
  mere bright days delight/One longing for the
  night (199-214).

16
Empire

• After England had become the worlds workshop,
  London became, from 1870 on, the worlds banker.
  England gained particular profit from the
  development of its own colonies, which, by 1890,
  comprised more than a quarter of all the
  territory on the surface of the earth one in
  four people was a subject of Queen Victoria. By
  the end of the century England was the worlds
  foremost imperial power (980).

17
How do Goblin Market and A Christmas Carol write
about the British Empire?

• Throughout its global empire England built
  railways, strung telephone wires, established
  compulsory, English education, sought markets
  for its manufactured goods, sought raw materials,
  and according to Queen Victoria, protected the
  poor natives and advanced civilization.

18
Consider the following description of the bounty
of the Ghost of Christmas Present

• Heaped upon the floor, to form a kind of throne,
  were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great
  joints of meat, suckling-pigs, long wreaths of
  sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of
  oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked
  apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense
  twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch that
  made the chamber dim with their delicious steam
  (80).

19
In contrast to bounty unquestioned bounty in A
Christmas Carol Laura in Rossettis Goblin Market
warns her sister

• Look at our apples/Russet and dun,/Bob at our
  cherries,/Bite at our peaches,/Citrons and
  dates/Grapes for the asking,/Pears red with
  basking/Out in the sun,/Plums on their
  twigs/Pluck them and suck them/Pomegranates,
  figs. (352-62).

20
Why think about cities, countries, and Empire?

• Speaking of the perception of English empire,
  Benedict Anderson says The warp of this
  thinking was a totalizing classificatory grid,
  which could be applied with endless flexibility
  to anything under the states real or
  contemplated control peoples, regions,
  religions, languages, products, monuments, and so
  forth. The effect of the grid was always to be
  able to say of anything that it was this, not
  that it belonged here, not there. It was bounded
  and therefore-in principle-countable (184).