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key concepts
➤
Politically, it is in the Victorian Age that the British Empire
reaches its greatest extension, from Canada to Australia, from
the West Indies to India, from Egypt to South Africa. It is
an efficient well-connected administrative and commercial
structure, which took its officials and agents from the best
British schools and universities.
➤
The myth of progress is central to the Victorian Age. Science
and the philosophy of Positivism are its theoretical bases:
both concepts argue that reality may be rationally understood,
analysed and controlled by man.
➤
The triumph of industry and technology is the practical side of
the new religion of progress. Especially in the second part of
the Victorian Age, however, there is a widespread reaction to
the consequences of the Industrial Revolution.
➤
The Victorian period may be divided into two phases: the early
Victorian and the late Victorian. The first phase corresponds
to a general acceptance of the age’s ethical and social standards:
the so-called Victorian compromise.
➤
The second phase corresponds to a general anti-Victorian
reaction, visible in two very different literary schools: Realism,
or Naturalism, on the one hand; and Aestheticism, or
Decadentism, on the other.
➤
A fundamental part in the anti-Victorian reaction is played by
the emancipation of women. This takes various forms: social,
cultural and literary. In the Victorian Age the role of women
greatly changed, both as writers and as subjects of male writers’
poetry and novels.
➤
For the emerging American novel two topics are of major
importance: the myth of the Frontier, with its ideas of freedom
and unlimited possibilities; and the haunting sense of evil and
sin within man and society, typical of the Puritan mind.
1870
1910
1890
1859-69
excavation
of the Suez
Canal
1861-65
American
Civil War
1865
abolition
of slavery
in the USA
1884
Third
Reform Bill
1900
Labour Party
founded
1867
Second
Reform
Bill
1887
Victoria’s
Golden Jubilee
1860-65
Abraham Lincoln
President
Queen Victoria
Empress of India
1876
1899-1902
Boer War
Trade Union Act
1875
1897
Victoria’s
Diamond Jubilee
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