Study guide: Victorian Society and Literature

📋 Course Outline

1. Gladstone, Disraeli and Social Reform
2. New Ideas and Women’s Suffrage
3. American Expansion and Industrialisation
4. Slavery and the American Civil War
5. Women Novelists and Social Constraints
6. Late Victorian British Novelists
7. American Literary Voices
8. Colonial Fiction and Imperialism
9. Victorian Legacy in Later Fiction

📖 1. Gladstone, Disraeli and Social Reform

★ Must-know

• William Gladstone served as British Prime Minister four times: 1868–74, 1880–85, February–July 1886, and 1892–94.

• Gladstone’s reforms included: liberalising recruitment in the military and civil service, extending voting rights to some working-class people, establishing national education, legalising trade unions

• Disraeli helped create the modern Conservative Party and gained working-class Tory support through patriotic campaigns and parliamentary reforms extending voting rights.

• Gladstone and Disraeli supported gradual reform to incorporate the working classes, prevent continental-style insurrection, and supply industry with workers as manufacturing and services became more complex.

• The Independent Labour Party was formed in 1893, elementary education became free in 1891, and the school-leaving age rose to twelve in 1899.

Further detail

• Gladstone moved from Tory leadership to the Liberal Party, advocated free trade, and narrowly failed to secure self-government for Ireland.

• Benjamin Disraeli was a popular Tory statesman and novelist, unusually Jewish for the political elite of his time, and served as Prime Minister in 1868 and 1874–80.

• The Elementary Education Act of 1870 gave all children the right to basic education, though parents sometimes had to pay, and the Trade Union Act of 1871 made unions legal.

• Modern movements that took shape included:

  • modern democracy
  • feminism
  • worker unionisation
  • socialism
  • Marxism

💡 Memory Hook

Gladstone’s Liberal reforms and Disraeli’s Tory patriotism both sought working-class support

📖 2. New Ideas and Women’s Suffrage

★ Must-know

• Pressure for female equality grew after 1867 and culminated in suffrage groups uniting in 1897, followed by the more radical Women’s Social and Political Union led by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst.

Further detail

• John Stuart Mill, a philosopher and rights activist, unsuccessfully sought votes for women during the 1867 electoral reform.

• Fabian Society, a large society of socialist intellectuals closely bound to the Labour Party, helped progressive Liberal politicians move towards broadly socialist principles.

💡 Memory Hook

Mill’s failed vote campaign → growing pressure → suffrage groups

📖 3. American Expansion and Industrialisation

📝 Essential Points

• During the nineteenth century, white American settlers and successive waves of European immigrants moved west, colonising Native American lands as cities and railroads were built.

• Railroads were crucial to nineteenth-century US economic development because they transported agricultural crops, livestock, and wood to commercial centres and ports.

• Productive innovations included:

  • the combine harvester
  • refrigeration
  • the factory assembly line

💡 Memory Hook

Westward settlement → railroads and technology → greater productivity and profits

📖 4. Slavery and the American Civil War

★ Must-know

• From the 1830s to the 1860s, abolitionism grew in the northern United States, supported by formerly enslaved people such as Frederick Douglass and white activists including William Lloyd Garrison, founder of The Liberator, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

• In 1861, Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president, after which seven southern states seceded to form the Confederate States of America and four more followed.

• The American Civil War lasted from 1861 to 1865 and ended in victory for the Union over the Confederacy.

• The Union initially aimed to preserve the United States as a nation rather than abolish slavery; abolition became a war aim later because of military necessity, growing northern anti-slavery sentiment, and African Americans’ self-emancipation by fleeing enslavement.

Further detail

• The American Civil War was among the most violent conflicts in modern history and among the first industrial wars, using railroads, the telegraph, and mass-manufactured weaponry.

💡 Memory Hook

Lincoln’s election → secession → war → Union victory

📖 5. Women Novelists and Social Constraints

★ Must-know

• Victorian society idealised women as “an angel in the house”; women could not attend university or inherit property when a male child was in the family, and middle-class girls were typically taught accomplishments such as piano, drawing, and embroidery to prepare them as wives.

• Charlotte and Emily Brontë used Gothic influences and Romantic intensity to explore passion and violence beyond the order and restraint associated with Jane Austen.

• Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1853) portrays women labelled as fallen, including prostitutes and unmarried mothers, sympathetically and condemns their ostracism after employers seduce and abandon them, while affirming the possibility of moral rehabilitation.

• George Eliot, whose real name was Mary Ann Evans, addressed social problems including unmarried motherhood and marital infidelity and depicted rural life with accuracy and detail.

Further detail

• In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Jane eventually marries, while Bertha Mason dies in a fire.

• Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has a more mythical tone than Jane Eyre and explores desires and passions that cannot be integrated into society’s dominant order.

• George Eliot’s psychological insight reaches its height in Middlemarch and anticipates Virginia Woolf’s Modernism.

💡 Memory Hook

The ideal “angel in the house” versus women’s restricted rights and writers’ challenging voices

📖 6. Late Victorian British Novelists

★ Must-know

• Late Victorian novels reflect a crisis in the moral and religious values underlying Victorian society.

• Thomas Hardy presents a pessimistic, tragic world in which outsiders conflict with narrow-minded social values and undisciplined human nature is treated as a crime deserving punishment.

• Lewis Carroll’s Alice novels explore language’s paradoxes and limits and parody the logic and justice of nineteenth-century conventions, anticipating modern experimental fiction.

• Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde explores humanity’s hidden primordial side and its potentially destructive nature.

• Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray explores good and evil within humanity and exposes Victorian hypocrisy and the deception of appearance versus reality.

Further detail

• In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Tess is seduced and abandoned by Angel Clare, kills him, and is punished for her passionate nature and by law.

• In Jude the Obscure, Jude is punished for his ambition and for living outside social conventions; the novel’s publication scandalised readers, after which Hardy stopped writing novels.

• Arthur Conan Doyle combined a doctor’s methodical outlook with spiritualism, and Sherlock Holmes became a complex, sometimes contradictory prototype of the modern mastermind.

💡 Memory Hook

Respectable appearances conceal conflict, divided selves, or social hypocrisy

📖 7. American Literary Voices

★ Must-know

• A central concern of nineteenth-century American writers was creating a distinctively American voice and consciousness to express national identity and the society’s idea of liberty.

• Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter uses an allegorical romance rooted in Puritan culture to explore the transformation of the Puritan spirit in America.

• Transcendentalism, associated with Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, rejected much of the Puritan outlook, affirmed human goodness and freedom, supported women’s emancipation, and experimented with ideal communities.

• Melville developed a humorous and ironic view of life and expressed an ideal of fraternity founded on truth and trust among brothers and sisters rather than a society organised around fathers and sons.

Further detail

• Edgar Allan Poe explored the decay of European values in the American context and linked modern beauty with loss and death, influencing European writers from Baudelaire to Oscar Wilde.

• Melville’s major works include:

  • the prose epic Moby-Dick
  • the story Bartleby the Scrivener
  • the story Billy Budd

• Henry James focused on privileged outsiders confined by bourgeois society and compared American and European ideas of culture and society.

💡 Memory Hook

American writers seek a distinct identity while negotiating European inheritance

📖 8. Colonial Fiction and Imperialism

★ Must-know

• Victorian novels generally mentioned Britain’s colonies only at the margins, as in the Australian prison colony in Great Expectations and Bertha Mason’s West Indian origins in Jane Eyre.

• Popular boys’ adventure novels typically presented imperialism as a simple adventure in which heroic colonisers supposedly helped native people.

• Rudyard Kipling, born in India, portrayed Western colonial rule as a spiritual mission of the white man as well as an economic project, revealing imperialism’s obsessions, contradictions, and paradoxes.

Further detail

• Kipling’s Jungle Book (1894–95) was used by Baden-Powell in developing the Scout movement.

💡 Memory Hook

Adventure fiction casts colonisers as heroes; Kipling exposes imperialism’s contradictions

📖 9. Victorian Legacy in Later Fiction

📝 Essential Points

• The Victorian period was a time of transition and innovation that helped pave the way for modern society, and postmodern fiction often revisits it.