Economy and society
The Victorian age took its
name from Queen Victoria, whose reign (1837 -
1901) was the longest in the history of England. It was a period of
economical and territorial expansion. The modern urban economy of manufacturing
industry and international trade took over from the old agricultural economy.
"Free trade" became the dominant economic ethos without changes in the
political and social structure. Britain
was the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. This was the result
of material exploitation of its growing number of colonies. With the revival of
revolutionary activity in continental Europe,
the unsettled masses of the urban poor were perceived as a potential danger to
the existing order of things and gradually over the century steps were taken to
incorporate portions of the working classes into society through a series of
reforms and progressive policies.
The pressure for reform
After the French Revolution, Britain had
turned politically conservative. Industrial regions of
the country were not
so well represented, votes had to be declared publicly, was often subject to
bribery or intimidation.
These factors gave rise to the working class Chartist movement. The Chartists'
demands contained six points: votes for all males; annually elected
parliaments; payment of Members of Parliament; secret voting; abolition of the
property qualification for candidates seeking election; the establishment of
electoral districts equal in population. The People's Charter was rejected
three times over a period of 10 years. The third petition was rejected in 1848,
the year that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote
their Communist Manifesto denouncing the alienation of labour under capitalist
organisation, and revolution was erupting again across Europe.
In Britain
however, there was no such risk of a mass uprising. The Chartists were poorly
organised and split by internal differences. All their demands, except that for
an annually elected parliament became law between 1860 and 1914. A series of reform
bills in the second half of the century gradually extended the vote to members
of the working classes until the first demand of the Chartists, that of giving
all men the right to vote, was granted in 1918. Women,
however, had to wait until 1928 before they too were all able to vote.
Technological innovation
The mid 19th century was also
a time of great technological innovation: the invention of steam-powered
machinery, the development of railways, became faster and more efficient,
leading to the rapid expansion of urban centres. The Great Exhibition (1851)
held in Crystal Palace
(London), became a symbol for Britain's
dominant position as an industrial and imperial trading power. Communications
were also greatly improved thanks to a more efficient mail service and the
invention of the telephone. Printing became cheaper, which led to a
proliferation of literary production of all types. The age was characterised by
a general feeling of optimism.
The cost of living
At the beginning of the
Industrial Revolution, Britain's
home economy mostly revolved around agriculture and the textile industry.
Mechanisation meant increased competition. The prices of finished products
fell, although profits stayed high thanks to increased sales. But high
production costs decreased the manufacturers' profit margin. The only solution
was to cut production costs, which was most easily done by the direct cutting
of wages. The cost of living, however, was kept artificially high by the Corn
Laws which maintained the price of corn in Britain at an unrealistically high
level. As a result there was widespread starvation. It was the combination of
these factors that sent masses of people to the cities to look for work in
factories.
Poverty and the Poor Laws
The price of corn was kept
artificially high by the Corn Laws, paupers risked
starvation and could not feed their children. In order to solve this problem,
the children were declared destitute and, forced to separate from their
families, were sent to work in parish-run workhouses, in return for which they
received barely enough food to survive. It was only towards the end of the 19th
century that poverty was to be widely recognised as a social problem.
The Victorian compromise
The urban workers continued
to live in conditions of abject poverty while being systematically exploited by
their rich employers. To confront the appalling conditions of the urban
environment, the government promoted a campaign to clean up towns devastated by
epidemics, and built modern-hospitals. The police helped to safeguard the law
but at the same time had the function of controlling the masses of the urban
poor, since the law was invariably on the side of property owners. In the minds
of many wealthy Victorians, the poor were not victims of circumstance but a
dirty, dangerous and
immoral species. However, the Victorian ideal represented by such values as
church, family, the home and the sanctity of childhood applied only to those
happy few who could afford them. Middle-class women were expected to conform to
a submissive and pious domestic role - the so-called angel in the home. By
stepping outside of this role, a respectable woman could ruin her reputation.
Similarly, the idea of childhood as a paradisal
golden age, proated by the children's literature of the time, masked the
fact that the children of the poor were forced into labour at an extremely
early age and often separated from their families.
Darwin
In the first part of Darwin's
theory was not new: this was the idea that all forms of life on the et had
gradually derived over hundreds of millions of years from a common ancestry,
and were not, as religion had always taught, preconceived, fixed species
designed by some divine being. The second part of Darwin's theory concerned the struggle for
existence and the survival of the fittest. Before Darwin, biology and natural history had been
the last refuge for the belief in a creation ordered by divine providence. It
was Darwin who showed that all existing species had undergone considerable
mutation, and that their adaptive characteristics had evolved through an
extremely long process of
natural selection. In a
given environment, members of the same species compete for survival, and
it is those best
adapted to the environment who will survive. The characteristics which help
them to survive are biologically selected and copied so that they are inherited
by their descendants, who by this measure become even better
adapted.
Uses and abuses of Darwin
In Darwin's mind, his theory applied strictly to
the domain of biology and natural history, but unfortunately like many other
scientific ideas, it was soon being abused for social and political ends.
Social Darwinism was likewise used to support the theory that the underclasses were less evolved, genetically degenerate and
thus had a natural vocation to vice and crime. Simplified, popularised versions
of Darwin,
along with anti-Semitism and nationalism, undoubtedly played a part in shaping
the mind of the young Adolf Hitler.
THOMAS HARDY
Hardy has been
from time to time defined as a regionalist, a pessimist, as well as a realist,
a romantic and a naturalist. Romanticism: the
total immersion in nature and his belief that only in rustic life men can
express their passions to the full, make Hardy a romantic. But, while for the
Romantics Nature usually meant joy and consolation, for Hardy it came to mean
something else, that is an hostile power, indifferent to men's destiny. Love,
which is the basis of all his novels,
and which is another romantic content, quite often ends in disillusion and
failure, destroyed by institutions like marriage or by society and by Fate. Pessimism: the influence of the latter scientific
discoveries and the reading of philosophers such as Darwin led him to work out a pessimistic
theory, according to which man is an insignificant insect in an indifferent
universe. Man is therefore the victim of an obscure fate; this led Hardy to
work out the idea of a kind of predestination. The Wessex, which is the land of much
of his novels is presented as a world in decline, in fact mechanization is destroyng isolation and rhythmos
of country life. Tess is
mainly a rich portrait of country dile disruped
by the economic and social changes brought by the industrial revolution. The
downfall of country life is not only a historical consequence of
industrialisation, but embodies a deeper vision of the negative forces shaping
human life and destiny. Tess's fall is simbolically linked with disappearence
of the idealized country life. Tess is the victim
male-dominated society with unjust moral code. Tess
is the victim both of Alec and of Angel, in fact Alec blakmails
and seduces her without thought of marrying her. On the other hand Angel, whom Tess truly loves, abandons her, overcome by traditional
values and ordinary prejudices. A web of symbols envelopes
the whole novel (she is often described in terms of ts, ed to a small
defenceless bird to suggest her grace and the association with a serpent simbolizes her
corruption by Alec). The recurrence of white and red in the novel emphasizes Tess's innocence and passion, besides red is the colour,
together with black, of the mechanical world. But Tess
is also the victim of fate and a disordered world. Tess
is as relic from the past who is unable to find her own place in the evolution
of modern civilization. She is split between two contrasting worlds: the old
aristocratic order and the new bourgeoisie; the agricoltural
world and the new world of money and commerce. The final words 'justice
was done' ironically epitomize the fatalistic concept present in all the book. Plot it tells the story of
a young girl of a poor Wessex
family, who finds out of being th
descendant of a famous ancient family, the D'Ubervilles.
Then Tess goes for help to a rich supposed relative,
Alec, who seduces and gets her pregnant. Some years later, while working as a
milkmaid, Tess falls in love with Angel and accepts
his proposal of marriage. After their marriage on the wedding night, she
confesses her past experience to him. Angel, shocket
and disillusioned, abandons her and goes to Brazil. Alone and poor, she becomes
a field worker, always hoping for his returne. But
one day she meets Alec and becomes his mistress. When Angel returns she murders
Alec, later she is finally arrested ( while simbolically sleeping on the stone of sacrifice at Stonehenge).
