Society Struggle Victorian Era 3 Pages In the Victorian era, women were expected to live by certain rules and virtues and had a pretty rigid role in society. They were to bear children, do housework and to be selfless, submissive and pure. They were considered to be the weaker sex and Thomas Carlyle, born in Ecclefechan, Dumfries and Galloway, was a Scottish essayist whose work was very significant in the Victorian era. Carlyle was brought up in a strictly Calvinist family, following a version of Protestant Christianity David Russell on The Victorian Essay With the advent of the Victorian age, polite maxims of eighteenth-century essays in the Spectator were replaced by a new generation of writers who thought deeply—and playfully—about social relationships, Estimated Reading Time: 9 mins
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Make Your Own List. With the advent of the Victorian age, polite maxims of eighteenth-century essays in the Victorian essays were replaced by a new generation of victorian essays who thought deeply—and playfully—about social relationships, moral responsibility, education and culture. Here, Oxford literary critic David Russell explores the distinct qualities that define the Victorian essay and recommends five of its greatest practitioners.
Interview by Stephanie Kelley, victorian essays. Your recent book is titled Tact: Aesthetic Liberalism and the Victorian essays Form in Nineteenth-century Britain.
But how did it emerge originally? I was reading a lot of essays, particularly from the Victorian essays period. Charles Lamb, for instance, is always telling stories about how people handle one another.
Contemporaries noticed the newness of this victorian essays of handling others. The writer Sydney Smith wondered in a popular lecture why people now use metaphors of touch to describe their interactions, victorian essays.
We also see the essay performing a certain sensibility responding to social conditions and pressures associated with the beginnings of modernity in the nineteenth century. People victorian essays living more closely than ever before, with people they know less and victorian essays about. It becomes a much more open question. Through their tactful mode, these essayists come up with a creative rather than controlling, victorian essays, playful rather than violent ways of handling not only other people, but also the world and its objects.
What distinguishes the Victorian essay from its Romantic counterpart, or even from its earliest practitioners like Montaigne?
It both adapts and turns away from eighteenth-century essays—say, victorian essays, the polite maxims and wit of The Spectatorwhich would come up with situations and rules by which to follow to solve particular social predicaments.
Lamb often directly riffs off these scenarios, either to confound them or come up with victorian essays authoritative, more creative and playful responses to the same essential questions. As the genealogy of the tactful essay goes through the nineteenth century, the social conditions seem less immediately present.
Certain aspects remain pressing, such as the question of education, victorian essays, and how we influence one another in ways that involve progress or growth. Why did you pick Charles Lamb, victorian essays, victorian essays is often seen as a minor, victorian essays, eccentric figure in the Victorian establishment?
Lamb is a figure who through the nineteenth century and early twentieth century victorian essays so sentimentalized. I thought something very important here is being defended against if sentimentality is being thrown over him in buckets.
And they were reacting to the High Victorian sentimentalizing of him. Lamb offers the essay form as a sociable, playful alternative to a systemizing insistence on transparency, information, and regulation as means of organizing how we live together. Not knowing might open possibilities of creativity and a space between people.
Attempting to get as much information as you can about others is limiting. It makes us overlook how interesting, strange and excessive other people are.
He was writing while holding down a really demanding job as a civil servant in the East India Company. He was a deeply sociable and kind person who faced a lot of horror in his past. The famous story about Lamb an origin of his saint-like reputation is that he came home one day to find his sister had murdered their mother in a fit of psychosis. Rather than send his sister to a grim institution, he took on her full-time care, victorian essays.
In spite of all this, Lamb managed to celebrate his own daily life and write about his environment so compellingly.
What makes them timeless? Like Victorian essays, Lamb really valued the way the vestiges and scars of the past endure in the social scene around him. It was one of his sources of tenderness for others. His elegiac eye is valuable to us now, in a time when it seems there is less and less concern for the traces of the past in our present, victorian essays, and what they might mean to us.
Essays can convey and model that delight in fresh and inventive ways, victorian essays. Next, we have Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings. How is Matthew Arnold indebted to Romantic essayists like Lamb? Leavis, particularly in the twentieth century. Arnold thinks that the creative freedom of ordinary ideas might serve as a basis for reorganising our own society, victorian essays.
Get the weekly Five Books newsletter. Arnold was a school inspector, victorian essays. He scribbled essays victorian essays his breaks during visits to poor and provincial classrooms. He praises the way recent events in French history have broken up and redistributed concentrations of wealth.
Arnold thought the richness of our aesthetic experience should be the very foundation of whether we can imagine a collective life worth living, victorian essays.
We could go back slightly further: Lamb is opposed to a model of human interaction that is based purely on the transfer of information.
With recent debates about social media, particularly Facebook, Lamb may seem to be wiser than we thought! Arnold applies a tactful essayism to education. He makes a powerful case for thinking about education as the basis of feeling creatively alive in our own existence, victorian essays.
The fact that this is occurring in the essay victorian essays is probably interesting to think about as well—we see that the essay is neither purely creative nor philosophical. It seems to be a mixture of elements, at the heart of which is aesthetic experience.
Given that, is it important to think about the categorization of the essay form? I see the essay in this period as offering particular resources for performing new ideas about social victorian essays. My line of approach to the essay is not the only one, but it emphasizes the way the essay is less invested in system and final knowledge.
It provides a home for forms of creativity. The essay victorian essays should be relatively uncategorizable, or keep us on our toes. The big elephant in the room is the Victorian novel. One way to distinguish the essay from the novel is its brief suggestiveness, as opposed to seeking to immerse you in a whole world.
The essay is not invested as the novel is in narrative, and conclusions from which a final judgment or valuation can be made of everyone who was in that novel from the retrospective the bad guys are punished, and the good guys get married, and so on. But to get those you have to read against the grain of the some influential ways of understanding the novel, which are about creating solid, all-too-plausible, bourgeois liberal subjects.
One good example of that might be found in your third choice, George Eliot. Should we care about her essays as much as we do Middlemarch? Her essays are fascinating. What struck me when writing about them was how un -tactful they are. Though she did return to the essay form at the end of her life, most of her essays are written in the s before she turned to fiction. Her essays often attempt to tear down various obstructions to what we might think of as a more tactfully created novel.
The essay becomes a weapon, a tool for accountability. Her targets are the cultural resources of her time, victorian essays, and how they let people down. How does being a standalone victorian essays affect her essays? George Eliot is victorian essays of the great intellectuals of British history. It took a great deal of intellectual and moral courage to move to London when she did, and try and make her way in the world as a single woman in the field of journalism—which, of course, she was never credited for directly.
Partly because of conventions of the time, but mainly because she was a woman, victorian essays. Nevertheless, she had a great talent for finding those resources in the world which could lead to an interesting life, victorian essays.
One of those resources became victorian essays partner, victorian essays, George Henry Lewes—leading to one of the great collaborative love-affairs of the century, victorian essays. At this time she is so attuned to the ways her world offers creative resources for her life, or fails to victorian essays this—her essays tend to express outrage at inadequate forms passed on through culture.
She thought art and literature should help us to live. Yes, victorian essays, but this reaction produces the famous sympathy of her novels. In my book, I write about what happens in the transitions from her Westminster Review essays to her first full novel, Adam Bede, victorian essays. The themes of her essays are worked out in victorian essays positive way in her novels.
Sometimes, I think of George Eliot as a nineteenth-century version of Marilynne Robinson, victorian essays. How formidable, victorian essays, uncompromising and invested in sympathy and forms of kindness those two are. It gets at an important distinction, victorian essays, which is that tactful sensibility is not invested in making everyone like one another.
Can you give us a brief account of its contents, victorian essays, and a sense of why it was so controversial when it first appeared?
The Renaissancepublished invictorian essays a series of essay-portraits of Renaissance artists, mainly in France and Italy. The exception is that it ends with a portrait of a great eighteenth-century critic named Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Through these portraits, victorian essays, Pater offers us a whole sensibility—a way of appreciating victorian essays world. Many of his readers were young and looking for the resources by which to have an interesting life, not unlike Eliot was when she was younger.
They saw Pater was a writer who could really set them thinking about how to live a vivid life. The enthusiasm of undergraduates in Oxford at the time was part of the scandal: Pater was, victorian essays, like Socrates, victorian essays, accused of corrupting the young.
Whatever the case, it cost Pater the chances of any promotion within the University. Does that have anything to do with the homosexual undertones of the book, victorian essays, or is it more the sensual and erotic charge of its argument more generally?
That was the other aspect of the scandal that surrounded him that cost him success in the normative world, victorian essays. But most of all, one of the messages of the book is about rejecting shame—of bodily or sensuous or aesthetic pleasure in the physical and material world.
It divides people. But Pater has an incredibly alive, victorian essays, exciting, and stimulating prose style that somehow transmits the excitement, the refinement and sheer imagination of his critical mind to the page, victorian essays.
Can you say a bit about why he ranges so far back in history, and so far afield into Europe? His first readers found it very strange that he would begin an account of the history of the Renaissance in medieval France and end it in the eighteenth century, but what he does is provide an account of a rich sensibility that could happen at any moment at any time.
His enthusiastic readers got the message that it was addressed to them.
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20/7/ · Text preview of this essay: This page of the essay has words. Download the full version above. The Victorian epoch was characterised by rapid transformation and developments in nearly every sphere, from advances in medical, scientific and technological knowledge to changes in population growth and blogger.comted Reading Time: 9 mins Essay On Victorian Era Words4 Pages Victorian Era (), the reign of Queen Victoria. The Victorian age was flourished with various social and religious movements and sometimes been called as "Second English Renaissance" 3 essay samples found History: the Victorian Era The Victorian era takes place during the reign of Queen Victoria. Looking up to her majesty and her morals, the British population at the time was greatly concerned with the expectancy to adhere to her personality traits
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