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Unit 19: The Victorian Age (Social, Economic, Political, Cultural Conditions and Women Novelists)

But from another point of view, the Victorian Age in English literature was a continuation of the Notes
Romantic Age, because the Romantic Age came to a sudden and unnatural and mainly on account
of the premature deaths of Byron, Shelley and Keats. If they had lived longer, the Age of Romanticism
would have extended further. But after their death the coherent inspiration of romanticism
disintegrated into separate lines of development, just as in the seventeenth century the single
inspiration of the Renaissance broke into different schools. The result was that the spirit of
Romanticism continued to influence the innermost consciousness of Victorian Age. Its influence is
clearly visible on Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Dickens, Thackeray, Ruskin, Meredith, Swinburne,
Rossetti and others. Even its adversaries, and those who would escape its spell, were impregnated
with it. While denouncing it, Carlyle does so in a style which is intensely charged with emotional
fire and visionary colouring. In fact after 1870 we find that the romantic inspiration was again in
the ascendent in the shape of the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements.
There was also another reason of the continuation of Romanticism in the Victorian Age. There is
no doubt that the Reform Act set at rest the political disturbances by satisfying the impatient
demand of the middle classes, and seemed to inaugurate an age of stability. After the crisis which
followed the struggle against the French Revolution and Napoleon, England set about organizing
herself with a view to internal prosperity and progress. Moreover, with the advent to power of a
middle class largely imbued with the spirit of Puritanism, and the accession of a queen to the
throne, an era of self-restraint and discipline started. The English society accepted as its standard a
stricter conventional morality which was voiced by writers like Carlyle. But no sooner had the
political disturbances subsided and a certain measure of stability and balance had been achieved
then there was fresh and serious outbreak in the economic world. The result was that the Victorian
period, quiet as it was, began to throb with the feverish tremors of anxiety and trouble, and the
whole order of the nation was threatened with an upheaval. From 1840 to 1850 in particular,
England seemed to be on the verge of a social revolution, and its disturbed spirit was reflected,
especially in the novel with a purpose. This special form of Romanticism which was fed by the
emotional unrest in the social sphere, therefore, derived a renewed vitality from these sources.
The combined effect of all these causes was the survival and prolongation of Romanticism in the
Victorian Age which was otherwise opposed to it.
Moreover, Romanticism not only continued during the Victorian Age, but it appeared in new
forms. The very exercise of reason and the pursuit of scientific studies which promoted the spirit
of classicism stirred up a desire for compensation and led to a reassertion of the imagination and
the heart. The representatives of the growing civilization of the day—economists, masters of
industry, businessmen—were considered as the enemies of nobility and beauty and the artisans of
hopeless and joyless materialism. This fear obsessed the minds of those writers of the Victorian
Age, to whom feelings and imagination were essentials of life itself. Thus the rationalistic age was
rudely shaken by impassioned protestations of writers like Newman, Carlyle and Ruskin who
were in conflict with the spirit of their time.
The Victorian Age, therefore, exhibits a very interesting and complex mixture of two opposing
elements—Classicism and Romanticism. Basically it was inclined towards classicism on account
of its rational approach to the problems of life, a search for balance and stability, and a deeply
moral attitude; but on account of its close proximity to the Romantic Revival which had not
completely exhausted itself, but had come to a sudden end on account of the premature deaths of
Byron, Shelley and Keats, the social and economic unrest, the disillusionment caused by
industrialization and material prosperity, the spirit of Romanticism also survived and produced
counter currents.

Task Write a short note on Victorian period.

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