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ROMANTICISM AND VICTORIAN TIMES
The Burning of the Houses of Parliament by J. M. W. Turner, 1834
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” (William Wordsworth)
The American Revolution of 1776, the spirit of “liberty, equality and fraternity” of the French Revolution of 1789 and the Industrial Revolution brought about a time of hope and change. Society was changing, becoming industrial rather than agricultural, cities developed, the middle class became powerful and there were moves towards a more democratic political system (the Reform Act of 1832 and a following act in 1867 allowed all men over 21 to vote, women could only achieve this right in 1928).
Romantic writers breathed and encouraged this revolutionary spirit. However, differently from European Romanticism, in Britain , Romantic literature is mostly poetry. Nevertheless, these British poets wanted a revolution in poetic language too, and they changed the face of English literature for ever.
1- Where did Romantic poets look for the inspiration, in contrast with 18th century poets?
http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/romantic/review/summary.htm
Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798, is classically considered to have marked the beginning of the Romantic movement in British literature. The book was a volume of poetry written by two poets who were friends and lived in the same English district. They were also known by a name associated with this place. Their idea was to write a new kind of poetry, which could be read and understood by everybody.
2- What´s the name of these Romantic poets and the district where they lived? What type of place is this which such an enormous influence had in their poems?
http://www.liu.se/isk/amnen/engelska/kurshemsidor/bcs/movement.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_District
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyrical_Ballads
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth
3- Read the sonnet “The World is Too Much with Us” by William Wordsworth.
What does the author think is wrong with the modern world?
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/%7Ewldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/wordsworth.html
4- William Blake is another Romantic poet who saw the dangers of an industrial society in which individuals were lost.. In his famous poem “London” he calls the systems of society “mind-forged manacles”. For Blake, London is a city in which the mind of everyone is in chains and all individuals are imprisoned.
Listen to the poem at the Norton Audio Reading Archive site and write down the words you hear which could imply this negative view of London.
http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/noa/audio.htm
You can now read the poem at the following site.
http://quotations.about.com/cs/poemlyrics/a/London.htm
5- John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron belong to a second generation of Romantic poets.
Read the information below and decide to whom of these poets it refers.
A- His picture of the romantic hero, an isolated individual who attacks social conventions and challenges the authorities of the age and who searches for, but never finds, peace and happiness, was particularly influential. He died at the age of 36 and he fought on the side of the Greeks in a war of independence against Turkey.
B- He attacks the religion and morals of the age and in an essay he states that we cannot prove that God exists. He was the husband of another important English writer.
C- He was interested in the irrational, mysterious and supernatural world of the distant past. The main themes of his poems are the search for lasting beauty and happiness and for permanent meanings in a changing world. His death of tuberculosis at the age of 25 made him a symbol for the Romantic movement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron
Alfred Tennyson, later Lord Tennyson, succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in 1850. He was the poet of the Victorian age and the last important poet of the century. He was considered a poet of sadness and loss who surrounded his work with the beauty of a twilight or sunset atmosphere.
Read his poem Crossing the Bar to realize that.
http://www.online-literature.com/tennyson/713/
Although the Romantic period is best known for the work of major poets, this period also saw the rapid growth of the novel and it prepared the way for the even larger growth of this genre in the Victorian period.
The Scottish historical novelist Sir Walter Scott was one of the first international, best-selling authors.
He wrote about revolution, history and social change at the beginning of the 19th century, and his popular novels, such as Ivanhoe, Rob Roy or Waverley, created Scotland as a historical setting and gave Great Britain a historical identity.
6- However, this was also the time when women novelists started to make their way through the traditionally male world of literature.
Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot are notable 19th century novelists.
Their most famous novels:
“Mary Barton”, “Middlemarch”, “Jane Eyre”, “Frankenstein”, “Pride and Prejudice” and “Wuthering Heights” are milestones in the history of the English Literature.
Complete this chart with the name of the novelist and the title of her most famous novel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Bront%C3%AB
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eliot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Gaskell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Bront%C3%AB
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Austen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley
7- This is what Cathy, one of the central characters of one of the novels mentioned above, tells her housekeeper about her feelings for Heathcliff compared to her feelings for Edgar Linton whom she marries:
“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I´m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath- a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nellie, I am Heathcliff- he´s always, always in my mind… as my own being”
In which of the novels mentioned can we read such a passionate declaration of love?
Use a dictionary to translate it into Spanish.
8- In the Victorian period some novelists took up publishing their novels in monthly or weekly installments which appeared in magazines that became very popular. Only when they completed their serial were their works issued as complete novels in one to three volumes. These are portraits of either the triviality or the distressing misery of Victorian society. That is the case of William Thackeray´s Vanity Fair and most of the novels of his friend and sometimes rival Charles Dickens.
Dickens wrote thirteen novels specially concerned with the suffering of the poor and the weak, particularly children. He wrote in the preface to Oliver Twist in 1858, "I saw no reason, when I wrote this book, why the very dregs of life, so long as their speech did not offend the ear, should not serve the purpose of a moral, at least as well as its froth and cream".
He described the largest and most spectacular city in the world at that time, Victorian London, with his unique power of observation.
Have a look at an 1859 map of London, click on the location of London Bridge and find out two scenes of Charles Dicken´s novels that took place here. Was there a lot of traffic on the bridge at that time?
http://www.fidnet.com/~dap1955/dickens/dickens_london_map.html#londonbridge
http://www.fidnet.com/~dap1955/dickens/works.html
http://www.fidnet.com/~dap1955/dickens/dictionary1879a-l.html#londonbridge
http://www.fidnet.com/~dap1955/dickens/dickens_london_map.html#top
The tone of Thomas Hardy´s novels was even more tragic. His major works Tess of the D´Urbervilles or Far from the Madding Crowd reflected the conflicts and pessimism of the last years of the nineteenth century,
http://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/entry/Hardy-Th
9- The most outstanding playwright in the final years of the century was Oscar Wilde. He was the eccentric and controversial writer of The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest. This is one of his witty sentences:
"It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true."
-- “The Picture of Dorian Gray”
Read some more quotes by this amazing figure at the following site and choose your favourite:
http://www.cmgww.com/historic/wilde/quotes.htm
10- At the end of the 19th century, detective and adventure stories became popular. Moreover, what is now known as science-fiction was just beginning. The most famous fictional detective was Sherlock Holmes created by Arthur Conan Doyle.
The Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson is also remembered today for his novels of adventure, such as Treasure Island or Kidnapped. Although his best known work is the istory of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde..
Other writers wrote books for young readers: Lewis Carroll published Alice´s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds.
But the most important writer from the end of the century, who also wrote some stories which are still popular with children today, came from the colony of India. He was the poet of Empire and the first English writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.
Who was this writer and what is the title of one of his famous stories about a boy who was brought up in the jungle by animals?
http://www.liu.se/isk/amnen/engelska/kurshemsidor/bcs/page7.html
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