UPDATED 3

The Victorian Period
1. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…” – Charles Dickens, from A Tale of Two Cities
2. 1833-1901
3. Two works published in Victoria’s reign proved as powerful as any of the machinery assembled for The Great Exposition. In 1848, as England watched while revolutions convulsed Europe, Karl Marx published The Communist manifesto. This pamphlet warned that there was “a spectre haunting Europe”. That “spectre” was communism, with its prophecy of political revolution. The other book, the work of a gentleman scientist who had seen evidence for biological evolution during his long sea voyage on HMS. Beagle, was On the Origin of Species. Supporters and attackers alike knew that after Charles Darwin’s work, our sense of ourselves and our place in the world would never be the same.
4. Key Historical Theme: Imperial Britain
5. – Under Victoria, Britain’s empire expanded, and Britain celebrated progress, prosperity, and peace.
- Darker stories linked to Britain’s empire included the Irish Potato Famine, widespread poverty at home, and the rise of Germany as a competing imperial power.
6. * An Elegy with Up-to-Dates Themes: Tennyson’s In Memoriam, A.H.H., his elegy for his friend Arthur Hallam, speaks to the problem of belief and doubt that was central to the age. In this poem, Tennyson’s struggles to come to terms with Hallam’s death at the age of twenty-two, asking whether a benevolent God or an indifferent nature directs the universe. About ten years before Darwin, he writes of “nature red in tooth and claw”. One of the most impressive aspects of this elegy is its engagement with the latest scientific discoveries. Be the end of the poem, however, Tennyson has regained his belief and declares his faith in a divine plan for the universe.
• The Sonnet: In Sonnet 43, Elizabeth Barrett Browning states her belief in the power of love, more positively than Matthew Arnold. She adds a distinctively Victorian note of piety, reverence, and religious belief to her love poem.