Week #3 ENG 103 TV Meetings, Spring 2003

Bend CRN # 22011	Meets in BEC 156 [Bend Campus Studio]
Prineville CRN # 22015	Meets in Prineville College Center
Redmond CRN # 22016	Meets in Redmond College Center, Rm 112
Warm Springs CRN # 22018	Meets in Warm Springs College Center

Victorian Age, 1830 – 1901
Queen Victoria (r. 1837-1901)

"British history is 2,000 years old and yet in a good many ways the world has moved farther ahead since the Queen was born than it has moved in the rest of the 2,000 put together."
–Mark Twain, 1897

******************

	Mid-C19: London center of Western civilization
	Population Growth: 2 to 6½ million
	Modern urban trade & mfg. economy
	Inventions (e.g. loom, railways, iron ships, printing, telegraph…)
	England 1st to industrialize
	Merchant fleet, colonization & world markets: "The sun never sets on the British Empire"
	World’s banker-wealth
	Painful transformations: political-social problems

******************

Writers’ Reactions to Rapid Change

"We are living in an age of transition."
--John Stuart Mill, 1831

"The greatest and most highly civilized people that ever the world saw."
--Thomas Babington Macaulay
(1800-1859)

But at what price?

"…repeated shocks, again, again
Exhaust the energy of strongest souls."
--Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

******************

Early Victorian Era:
1830-1848
"Time of Troubles"
England near revolution

"When Byron passed away [1824]…
we turned to the actual and practical career
of life: we awoke from the dreaming,
…and addressed ourselves to the active and daily objects which lay before us."
--Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), England and the English

xxxxx

1. Industrial Revolution (1770-1840): Invention, Urbanization, Capital(ism) & Labor

1830: Steam-powered public Liverpool & Manchester Railway

2. Rise of “Middle” Class, Growth of Literacy

Intro to "Perspectives:
The Industrial Landscape"
pp. 1818-1820

e.g. Thomas Gradgrind is
"a man of facts & calculations," "ready to weight & measure any parcel of human nature"
--character in Hard Times [1854]
novel by Charles Dickens

3. Shadow of French Revolution
(1789 - 1795)

Intro to "Perspectives:
The Rights of Man and
the Revolution Controversy"
p. 1347

1832: Reform Bill extends vote to males with L10 property & transforms class structure

to 1848: Workers’ Chartist Movement demands extended vote, secret ballot+…

"Slowly comes a hungry people,
as a lion, creeping nigher…"
--Tennyson, Locksley Hall (1842)

"Insurrection is a most sad necessity,
& governors who wait for that
to instruct them are surely getting into
the fatalest courses"
--Thomas Carlyle,
Past and Present (1843)

1848: "Corn Laws" repealed

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Novels & Prose
1840s-1860s
critique socio-economic-political conditions

e.g. Sybil: The Two Nations (1845):
England of rich & England of poor
by Benjamin Disraeli [1804-1881]

Charles Dickens [1812-1870]:
excerpt from Hard Times [1854];
and
Henry Mayhew [1812-1887]:
excerpt from London Labour &
the London Poor [1861-1862]
Longman pp. 1827-1830, 1838-1843

Early Victorian Poetry
1830-1848

Romantics’ Shadow: by 1837, most (young) Romantic Era poets dead
only Wordsworth still alive

Victorian era poets can’t sustain Romantic faith in imagination (e.g.
--Tennyson’s doomed, isolated muse;
--Browning’s speakers of imaginative vision = madmen

Poetry of Mood & Character I

Pictoral – painterly, "pictureque":
visual detail & images represent mood/ situation & carry emotion (e.g. Tennyson)

Use of sound – conveys meaning "where words would not" (Hallam on Tennyson)

Tone - ". . . is the sign of the feeling" - whether mellifluous (Tennyson, Swinburne: beautiful cadences, consonant alliteration & vowel sounds)
…or rough (Browning, Hopkins)

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
[1809-1892]:
"Lady of Shallot" [1832, 1842];
and
excerpts from The Princess [1847]
Longman pp. 1908-1911,
1913-1918, 1926-1928

Mon.,4/21 In-Class Listening:
"Lady of Shallot"

xxxxx

Poetry of Mood & Character II
Robert Browning [1812-1889]:
"My Last Duchess" [1842]
and
"The Bishop Orders His Tomb..." [1845]
Longman pp. 1957-1965

Lyric = favorite Romantic Mode:
fairly short poem, single speaker "I" expressing state of mind or process of perception, thought, feeling; as if musing in solitude.

Speaker = created character (not poet) who speaks poem in particularized situation at critical (dramatic) moment

Monologue = lengthy speech by single character (e.g. in a play);
Soliloquy = utters private thoughts

Dramatic Monologue - Browning:
"lyric in expression" but "dramatic in principle"
Poetic speaker - "utterances of… imaginary persons, not mine" - ironically distinct from poet: E.g.
"My Last Duchess": Duke negotiates for 2nd wife; &
"Bishop Orders His Tomb…": Bishop lies dying

- Becomes 20th C. norm -

Go to Week #4 TV Meeting web page for
additional Notes on Week #4 Readings
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng103/week4.htm
xx