How many times did William Gladstone serve as British Prime Minister?
Four times.
Which four reforms did Gladstone introduce?
He liberalised recruitment, extended voting rights, established national education, and legalised trade unions.
How did Disraeli gain working-class Tory support?
Through patriotic campaigns and parliamentary reforms extending voting rights.
What was the shared aim of Gladstone’s and Disraeli’s gradual reforms?
To incorporate the working classes and prevent insurrection.
In which year was the Independent Labour Party formed?
1893.
When did suffrage groups unite after pressure for female equality grew?
1897.
Who led the more radical Women’s Social and Political Union?
Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst.
Which lands did white settlers and European immigrants colonise while moving west in nineteenth-century America?
Native American lands.
Why were railroads crucial to nineteenth-century US economic development?
They transported crops, livestock, and wood to commercial centres and ports.
What was the stated economic purpose of productive technologies such as the combine harvester and assembly line?
To increase productivity and profits while reducing costs.
When did abolitionism grow in the northern United States?
From the 1830s to the 1860s.
Which formerly enslaved person supported northern abolitionism?
Frederick Douglass.
When was Abraham Lincoln elected president?
In 1861.
What happened after Lincoln’s election in 1861?
Seven southern states seceded, and four more followed.
When did the American Civil War begin and end?
It lasted from 1861 to 1865.
Who won the American Civil War?
The Union defeated the Confederacy.
What was the Union’s initial aim in the Civil War?
To preserve the United States as a nation.
What domestic ideal did Victorian society impose on women?
Women were idealised as “an angel in the house.”
What literary influences did the Brontë sisters use to explore passion and violence?
Gothic influences and Romantic intensity.
How does Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton portray women labelled as fallen?
Sympathetically, while condemning their ostracism and affirming moral rehabilitation.
What was George Eliot’s real name?
Mary Ann Evans.
What crisis do late Victorian novels reflect in Victorian society?
A crisis in its underlying moral and religious values.
What kind of world does Thomas Hardy present in his novels?
A pessimistic, tragic world where outsiders conflict with narrow-minded social values.
What do Lewis Carroll’s Alice novels parody?
The logic and justice of nineteenth-century conventions.
What aspect of humanity does Stevenson explore in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?
Humanity’s hidden primordial side and its potentially destructive nature.
What does Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray expose about Victorian society?
Victorian hypocrisy and the deception of appearance versus reality.
What national aim shaped nineteenth-century American writers’ literary voice?
To express national identity and the society’s idea of liberty through a distinctively American voice and consciousness.
What does the allegorical romance in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter explore?
The transformation of the Puritan spirit in America.
What did Transcendentalism affirm about human nature and freedom?
Human goodness and freedom.
What ideal of fraternity did Melville express?
A fraternity founded on truth and trust among brothers and sisters.
Where did Victorian novels generally place references to Britain’s colonies?
At the margins.
Which colonial settings appear at the margins of Great Expectations and Jane Eyre?
An Australian prison colony in Great Expectations and Bertha Mason’s West Indian origins in Jane Eyre.
How did boys’ adventure novels typically portray imperialism?
As an adventure in which heroic colonisers supposedly helped native people.
How did Kipling portray Western colonial rule spiritually and economically?
As both a white man’s spiritual mission and an economic project.
What did Kipling’s portrayal reveal about imperialism?
Its obsessions, contradictions, and paradoxes.
Where was Rudyard Kipling born?
India.
Which party did William Gladstone join after Tory leadership?
The Liberal Party.
In which years was Benjamin Disraeli British Prime Minister?
1868 and 1874–80.
What did the Elementary Education Act of 1870 grant children?
The right to basic education.
Which philosopher and rights activist unsuccessfully sought votes for women during the 1867 electoral reform?
John Stuart Mill.
In which years was John Stuart Mill alive?
1806–73.
What was the Fabian Society?
A large society of socialist intellectuals.
Which political party was the Fabian Society closely bound to?
The Labour Party.
What did the Fabian Society help progressive Liberal politicians move towards?
Broadly socialist principles.
Which technologies characterized the Civil War as an early industrial war?
Railroads, the telegraph, and mass-manufactured weaponry.
What happens to Jane and Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre?
Jane marries, while Bertha Mason dies in a fire.
What social conflict does Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights explore?
Desires and passions that cannot be integrated into society’s dominant order.
Which George Eliot novel marks the height of her psychological insight?
Middlemarch.
What literary movement does George Eliot’s psychological insight in Middlemarch anticipate?
Virginia Woolf’s Modernism.
How is Tess punished in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles?
For her passionate nature and by law.
What followed the scandal caused by Jude the Obscure’s publication?
Hardy stopped writing novels.
What did Sherlock Holmes become in Conan Doyle’s fiction?
A complex, sometimes contradictory prototype of the modern mastermind.
How did Edgar Allan Poe connect modern beauty with human experience?
He linked modern beauty with loss and death.
Which European writers did Edgar Allan Poe influence?
Writers from Baudelaire to Oscar Wilde.
Which three major works by Herman Melville are named in the statement?
Moby-Dick, Bartleby the Scrivener, and Billy Budd.
What literary style characterized Henry James’s view of privileged outsiders?
He focused on privileged outsiders confined by bourgeois society.
How did Baden-Powell use Kipling’s Jungle Book (1894–95)?
In developing the Scout movement.
How did the Victorian period contribute to modern society?
It helped pave the way for modern society through transition and innovation.
Which historical period does postmodern fiction often revisit?
The Victorian period.
Answer 30 questions on Victorian Society and Literature.
1. Which combination of measures formed part of Gladstone’s reform programme?
2. How did Disraeli build working-class support for the Conservatives?
Go over the full study guide for Victorian Society and Literature.
Read the study guide →Upload your class notes and Revizly writes your flashcards in about a minute.
Flashcard maker