Term Papers on Victorian England

Term Paper Title	Victorian England
# of Words	1057
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.23

Victorian England

The Victorian era, from the coronation of Queen Victoria in
1837 until her death in 1901, was an era of several
unsettling social developments that forced writers more
than ever before to take positions on the immediate issues
animating the rest of society. Thus, although romantic forms
of expression in poetry and prose continued to dominate
English literature throughout much of the century, the
attention of many writers was directed, sometimes
passionately, to such issues as the growth of English
democracy, the education of the masses, the progress of
industrial enterprise and the consequent rise of a
materialistic philosophy, and the plight of the newly
industrialized worker. In addition, the unsettling of religious
belief by new advances in science, particularly the theory of
evolution and the historical study of the Bible, drew other
writers away from the immemorial subjects of literature into
considerations of problems of faith and truth. Nonfiction
The historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his History
of England (5 volumes, 1848-1861) and even more in his
Critical and Historical Essays (1843), expressed the
complacency of the English middle classes over their new
prosperity and growing political power. The clarity and
balance of Macaulay's style, which reflects his practical
familiarity with parliamentary debate, stands in contrast to
the sensitivity and beauty of the prose of John Henry
Newman. Newman's main effort, unlike Macaulay's, was
to draw people away from the materialism and skepticism
of the age back to a purified Christian faith. His most
famous work, Apologia pro vita sua (Apology for His Life,
1864), describes with psychological subtlety and charm the
basis of his religious opinions and the reasons for his
change from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic church.
Similarly alienated by the materialism and commercialism of
the period, Thomas Carlyle, another of the great
Victorians, advanced a heroic philosophy of work,
courage, and the cultivation of the godlike in human beings,
by means of which life might recover its true worth and
nobility. This view, borrowed in part from German idealist
philosophy, Carlyle expressed in a vehement, idiosyncratic
style in such works as Sartor resartus (The Tailor
Retailored, 1833-1834) and On Heroes, Hero-Worship,
and the Heroic in History (1841). Other answers to social
problems were presented by two fine Victorian prose
writers of a different stamp. The social criticism of the art
critic John Ruskin looked to the curing of the ills of
industrial society and capitalism as the only path to beauty
and vitality in the national life. The escape from social
problems into aesthetic hedonism was the contribution of
the Oxford scholar Walter Pater. Poetry The three notable
poets of the Victorian age became similarly absorbed in
social issues. Beginning as a poet of pure romantic
escapism, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, soon moved on to
problems of religious faith, social change, and political
power, as in “Locksley Hall,” the elegy In Memoriam
(1850), and The Idylls of the King (1859). All the
characteristic moods of his poetry, from brooding splendor
to lyrical sweetness, are expressed with smooth technical
mastery. His style, as well as his peculiarly English
conservatism, stands in some contrast to the intellectuality
and bracing harshness of the poetry of Robert Browning.
Browning's most important short poems are collected in
Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1841-1846) and Men and
Women (1855). Matthew Arnold, the third of these
mid-Victorian poets, stands apart from them as a more
subtle and balanced thinker his literary criticism (Essays in
Criticism, 1865, 1888) is the most remarkable written in
Victorian times. His poetry...

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