Poetry 111 Course No:3214 Third Year section A

1. Poetry 111Course No:3214Third Year section A فادية مغربل ريم العبد العال بسمة داود هدى الجهني

2. Victorian Age 1830-1901

3. The Victorian AGE of the United Kingdomwas the period of Queen Victoria's reign from June 1837 to January 1901. • Rise of an industrialized society. • Urbanizedmiddle class. • Modern urban economy. • Challenges to religious faith, in part based on the advances of scientific knowledge. • Changes in the role of women.

4. Phases of Victorian Age :

5. THE EARLY VICTORIAN (1830-48) : A TIME OF TROUBLES • The early 1830s was historical events occurred of momentous consequence in England. In 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened ,become the first steam-powered ,public railway line in the word. • By 1900 England had 15,195 lines of track and an underground railway system beneath London . • Condition in the new industrial and coal-mining areas were terrible . Workers and their families in the slums of such cities as Manchester lived in horribly crowded, unsanitary housing and the conditions under which men ,women and children toiled mines and factories were unimaginably brutal

6. One of the most striking was put forward by the chartist ,a large organization of workers. In 1883 organization drew up a people’s charter advocating the extension of the right to vote, the use of secret balloting , and other legislative reforms . • For ten years the chartist leaders' engaged in agitation to have their program adopted by parliament. Their fiery speeches, delivered at conventions designed to collect signatures for petitions to parliament, created fears of revolution

7. Time of the Troubles left its mark on some early Victorian literature reaction is most sad necessity ,”Carlyle writes in his Past and Present , governors who wait for that to instruct them are surely getting into the fatalest Courses .” Memories of the French Reign of Terror lasted longer than memories Of British victories over Napoleon at Trafalgar and Waterloo memories freshened by later outbreaks of civil strife .

8. The mid- Victorian period (1848–70) • It was a time of prosperity, optimism, and stability. • The achievements of modern industry and science were celebrated at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park (1851). • Enormous investments of people, money, and technology created the British Empire.  Many English people saw the expansion of empire as a moral responsibility, and missionary societies flourished. 

9. There was increasing debate about religious belief.  The Church of England had evolved into three major divisions, with conflicting beliefs about religious practice. • Rationalist challenges to religion from philosophy (especially Utilitarianism) and science (especially biology and geology). • Both the infallibility of the Bible and the stature of the human species in the universe were increasingly called into question.

10. The later period (1870–1901) • This final phases of the century was a time of serenity and security, the age of house parties and long weekends in the country. • London the center of civilization, the queen city of the world. Reflects: commodities, inventions, products that were changing the texture of modern life. Also to a culture change.

11. The final decades of the century saw the spread British imperialism: • The sudden emergency Germany after the defeat of France in 1871 . • The recovery of the united states after the civil war. • In the mid Victorian balance of power was the growth of labor as political & economic force.

12. The ROLE OF WOMAN • The extreme inequities between men and women stimulated a debate about women’s roles known as “The Woman Question.”  • Women were denied the right to vote or hold political office throughout the period. • By the end of Victoria’s reign, women could take degrees at twelve universities. 

13. Hundreds of thousands of working-class women labored at factory jobs under appalling conditions, and many were driven into prostitution.  • John Stuart Mill argued that the “nature of women” was an artificial thing, most male authors preferred to claim that women had a special nature fitting them for domestic duties.  

14. Literacy& Victorian literature • Literacy increased significantly in the period, and publishers could bring out more material more cheaply than ever before.  The most significant development in publishing was the growth of the periodical • Writing in the shadow of Romanticism, the Victorians developed a poetry of mood and character.  • Writing in the shadow of Romanticism, the Victorians developed a poetry of mood and character. 

15. Poetry in a sense settled down from the upheavals of the romantic era and much of the work of the time is seen as a bridge between this earlier era and the modernist poetry of the next century. Alfred Lord Tennyson held the poet laureateship for over forty years and his verse became rather stale by the end but his early work is rightly praised. • The most famous collection of Victorian comic verse is the Bab Ballads. • Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote poems which sit somewhere in between the exultation of nature of the romantic Poetry and the Georgian Poetry

16. of the themes of later poets while Hopkins drew for inspiration on verse forms from Old English poetry such as Beowulf. • The reclaiming of the past was a major part of Victorian literature with an interest in both classical literature but also the medieval literature of England. • The Victorians loved the heroic, chivalrous stories of knights of old and they hoped to regain some of that noble, courtly behaviour and impress it upon the people both at home and in the wider empire. The best example of this is Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King which blended the stories of King Arthur, particularly those by Thomas Malory, with contemporary concerns and ideas.

17. The Victorian era was a period of dramatic change that brought England to its highest point of development as a world power. • The early Victorian period (1830–48) saw the opening of Britain’s first railway and its first Reform Parliament, but it was also a time of economic distress. • Although the mid-Victorian period (1848–70) was not free of harassing problems, it was a time of prosperity, optimism, and stability.

18. In the later period (1870–1901) the costs of Empire became increasingly apparent, and England was confronted with growing threats to its military and economic preeminence. • The extreme inequities between men and women stimulated a debate about women’s roles known as “The Woman Question.” • The most significant development in publishing was the growth of the periodical.