Victorian
Christoffer Gammad
Dr. Frank Fennel
4/25/2013
Out with the Old in with the New
The Victorian Age transformed the minds of the people of Europe. It challenged the ideas and views they came to understand, it created uproars of movements and different bodies of thinking. The growth of an age can be seen through the people who’ve lived through it and how their lives have changed. England quickly became a developing world power with these movements. During the span of this semester, we have studied and learned how this change came to be. We studied the literature of the period, the catalysts to forward and rational thinking, where people and writers alike sympathized with one another. Victorian literature is characterized by a strong sense of morality, frequently supporting the oppressed, whether it is women, children, or the poor. Ideas of economics, politics, science, philosophy, and the arts, all shaken, not stirred, within this ravaging time of upheaval. Charles Darwin ranted about his theory of evolution; Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote about nature contrasting with the supernatural, even an influential woman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, exposed us to the wrongdoings of child labor. These individuals criticized the world they lived in, pondered the questions of morality and justice, and sought to change the ideas that their world believed to be right and just. The literature we have studied in this course became very influential to the times, and it even reflects back to us as readers. When we read Victorian literature, we put it into context we can only imagine, the social injustices, the abuse of power and the severe economic inequalities of the Victorian period.
The Victorian period boasted many different types of genres, each contributing to the major changes that are happening in Victorian England. We focus on a major novel that characterizes a society based upon the people who inhabit it; we focus on George Elliot’s Middlemarch and its importance to the
Dr. Frank Fennel
4/25/2013
Out with the Old in with the New
The Victorian Age transformed the minds of the people of Europe. It challenged the ideas and views they came to understand, it created uproars of movements and different bodies of thinking. The growth of an age can be seen through the people who’ve lived through it and how their lives have changed. England quickly became a developing world power with these movements. During the span of this semester, we have studied and learned how this change came to be. We studied the literature of the period, the catalysts to forward and rational thinking, where people and writers alike sympathized with one another. Victorian literature is characterized by a strong sense of morality, frequently supporting the oppressed, whether it is women, children, or the poor. Ideas of economics, politics, science, philosophy, and the arts, all shaken, not stirred, within this ravaging time of upheaval. Charles Darwin ranted about his theory of evolution; Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote about nature contrasting with the supernatural, even an influential woman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, exposed us to the wrongdoings of child labor. These individuals criticized the world they lived in, pondered the questions of morality and justice, and sought to change the ideas that their world believed to be right and just. The literature we have studied in this course became very influential to the times, and it even reflects back to us as readers. When we read Victorian literature, we put it into context we can only imagine, the social injustices, the abuse of power and the severe economic inequalities of the Victorian period.
The Victorian period boasted many different types of genres, each contributing to the major changes that are happening in Victorian England. We focus on a major novel that characterizes a society based upon the people who inhabit it; we focus on George Elliot’s Middlemarch and its importance to the