Chapter 5 The Victorian Age Bilde inn Britain

Chapter 5 The Victorian Age Bilde inn

Britain in the Victorian Age • Industrialisation and urbanisation transforms Britain • “The workshop of the world” - new technologies give increased mechanisation • Rising middle classes – through business and the professions – erode the power of landowning aristocracy • Growing urban working class • “The criminal classes”

Victorian society – Jekyll vs. Hyde • Respectability and strict morality • vs. crime, prostitution and degradation • Economic growth and domestic improvements • vs. child labour and the workhouse

Britain and the world • Britain as leading world power • “Pax Britannica” • British Empire encompasses ¼ of the globe • Queen Victoria proclaimed Empress of India in 1876

Victorian Literature • Novels increasingly popular • Melodrama and social criticism (Dickens) • Women novelists (Brontës, Gaskell, G. Eliot…) • Birth of children’s literature (Kipling, Carroll…)

19 th century America Manifest Destiny • the belief that the US would extend from east to west • Homestead Act (1862) offered 162 acres to settler families • Native Americans pushed into reservations Currier & Ives: Crossing the Rockies 1860

19 th century American Civil War • Northern and southern states develop different economic structures • Southern states still reliant on slavery and oppose abolition • Southern states’ withdrawal from the Union causes war

19 th century America Postbellum US • Reconstruction of the South – minus slavery, but with segregation and political exclusion and suppression of blacks • Rapid industrialisation and mass immigration to Northern cities

19 th century American literature • “Transcendentalists” mixed English romanticism with American optimism • Civil War brought a taste for realism in fiction (Twain…) • Emily Dickinson (183086) precursor of modernism with her poems, published posthumously.