Novelists sought to encompass the often bewildering changes brought about by industrialization, and to urge upon their readers ways of dealing with them. The Victorian era is named in honor of Queen Victoria, who took the throne in 1837 and oversaw nearly 63 years of expansion of the British Empire. However much men like Ruskin or Wordsworth might complain of the vulgarity of working-class tourists, the emerging working classes of the industrial age also read with increasing enthusiasm, helped by the spread of public libraries and the growing ability of publishers and printers to produce cheap books and pamphlets. Driven on by the Evangelical revival of the early 19th century, societies and voluntary associations sprang up all over Britain, and in many of them, middle-class women played leading roles. Artists and composers looked to it because they felt that the western traditions sustained by the Academies had reached their limits. Impressionism found relatively few English imitators - Wilson Steer, whose painting of the beach at Walberswick is probably his best known, was one of only a handful - (36) but that in a sense did not matter; what mattered is that the work of the French Impressionists was soon available in England, helping to undermine conventions of representation and heralding the end of the Classical model of culture that had underpinned so much of the artistic production of the nineteenth century. As the middle class grew in numbers and confidence in the decades following the ending of the Napoleonic Wars and the rapid growth of prosperity with Britain's booming industry and trade, so the bourgeois virtues of regularity, hard work, seriousness, sobriety, modesty, piety and civic engagement began to prosper too. In architecture, Classical ideals of proportion dominated, derived from the Roman writer Vitruvius; in sculpture, the ideal form was considered to be embodied in Classical works such as the Apollo Belvedere (5). (34). George Eliot's Felix Holt, the Radical, for example, published in 1866 during the debates about the extension of voting rights that was passed by Parliament the following year, portrayed the events surrounding the passage of the First Reform Act in 1832 and made a strong plea for the education of the masses. Similarly, Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring, which caused a riot at its first performance in Paris in 1913, gained much of its disruptive power through its conscious musical and visual attempt to convey an imagined world of pagan rituals as described by the primitivist painter Nicholas Roerich, who designed the sets and costumes. The early paintings were dominated by the theories of the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, Joshua Reynolds. They also felt that the role of the artist was to tell moral stories but were more fascinated by the recent scientific developments which apparently looked like a disapproving biblical sequence of events. In 2012 Sir Richard was appointed Knight Bachelor in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, for services to scholarship. But of course these principles had to be derived as well from the teachings of Christianity; and Victorian Classicism differed in this respect perhaps more than any other from the Classicism of the Enlightenment, which in works such as Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, influenced by the religious scepticism of French thinkers like Voltaire,had treated Christianity as an emotional, irrational and ultimately destructive historical force that perhaps more than any other had led to the downfall of Classical civilization and the coming of the dark ages of credulity and superstition. Modernist art and culture, emerging around of the turn of the century, was in some ways the ultimate expression of the Victorian idea of progress, transforming it into the belief that only the new was valuable. Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was short-lived, but the ideas were extremely influential. What counted, however, was not the genesis and original publication date of Bowdler's editions, but the fact that the Shakespeare at least went through 50 further editions all the way up to 1896, and this is why Bowdler, and Bowdlerization, a term invented in 1836, are thought of in general terms as "Victorian". He has also appeared widely television and radio outside the UK, most notably on North German Radio/Television, West German Radio/Television and Radio Multikulti Berlin. Literary rates improved with the spread of education; if 67 per cent of men and 51 per cent of women could sign their name rather than put a cross or a mark in 1840, the figures had reached 81 per cent and 73 per cent in 1871, during which period the population of the UK had risen by some 40 per cent. The seriousness of Victorian art was shared by the moral purposefulness of Victorian literature. However, he resigned from the post of professor in 1837 and met John Ruskin in 1840. All of this sounded perfectly innocuous, and indeed conjures up images of sandle-wearing, homespun-clad, middle-class intellectuals searching for an alternative lifestyle that would get away from industrially produced goods and an urban way of life and recapture the natural, simple skills and styles of traditional folk art: the Arts and Crafts movement begun in the 1880s by William Morris, under the influence of John Ruskin, tried indeed to do just that (30). Millais, indeed, ended his career with a knighthood, while Hunt was made a member of the Order of Merit. The phrase “art for art’s sake” may sound simple—but these four words ushered in a brand-new art movement in Victorian era London. Byron and Shelley were rebels against conventional morality, just as Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites used working-class girls and even prostitutes as models. Victorian Literature, Art and Culture Option 1 year full time or 2 years part time; Year of entry 2021; Campus Egham; The course. The Pickwick Papers for example appeared in twenty monthly parts in 1836-7, with 40,000 subscribers paying in monthly instalments; magazines sprang up to satisfy this demand, such as the Cornhill, which was launched in 1860 in an edition of 120,000 with the first instalment of a new novel by Trollope and contributions by Thackeray and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (24). In my next lecture, on 13th December, I'll turn to the subject of 'death and the Victorians' and look at some of the social and physical realities underpinning what often seems to us in the twenty-first century the morbid and faintly ridiculous fascination that the subject had for contemporaries. Popular cultural activities could also include wood-carving and embroidery, and in many respects merged into work as people made and decorated objects that would be useful as well as pleasing to look at. Yet Romanticism also contained within itself the seeds of a very different kind of aesthetic moral code. This lecture examines the characteristics of Victorian culture and the reasons for its decline. What really made the difference however was the advent of technological innovations that made it far easier than before to spread culture across the European continent and even across the globe: the steamship and the railway, making travel faster and easier; the phonograph, the photograph, the motion picture, even, more prosaically, the development of photo-engraving, enabling the cheap reproduction of works of art. Life was not a task to him, but a sinecure: he fingered the guineas in his pocket, and ate his dinners, and slept the sleep of the irresponsible.' Victorian Era Art and Artists, Victorian pictures, Culture and Social History of the Victorian Era 1837-1901, Queen Victoria history, Victorian society - What made Victorians Victorian, The Victorian age was not one, not single, simple, or unified; Victoria's reign lasted so long that it comprised several periods. The spread of mechanism and the severe economic depression made British cities unfavorable to live. Along with popular high-class social events, there were paintings of the countryside of England as well. The increased literacy rate from schooling, cheaper production, and broader Find out how you can help, The Victorians: Culture and Experience in Britain, Europe and the World 1815-1914, The Great Plagues: Epidemics in History from the Middle Ages to the Present Day, The Rise and Fall of European Empires from the 16th to the 20th Century, The Victorians: Culture and Experience in Britain, Europe and the World, 1815-1914, Mathematical Journeys into Fictional Worlds, Far From Hollywood: New Kinds of Classic Film, What Clinicians Can Learn From Forensic Scientists. But by the 1830s, industrialization, freeing the economy from direct dependence on the natural world of agriculture; the rapid growth of cities, bringing millions into a new, harsh and unforgiving urban world; the emergence of new social classes and new social antagonisms; and the arrival on the moral and political agenda of questions such as poverty, death and disease, exploitation, inequality, and social evils of many kinds, called forth the realist novel as a means of portraying the collectivity of society, with its teeming mass of characters and its shifting relations between them. Has women’s place in society changed from Elizabethan and Victorian Eras.         Time and Space Romanticism depicted the wildness of nature as something not to be tamed and ordered, but to be admired as sublime and picturesque, more powerful than the ephemeral creations of humanity, as in Turner'sSnowstorm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps (10) - note the Classical theme. Cartoonists such as Gillray and the Cruikshanks, whose grotesque satirical images such as this one, from 1812, The Prince of Whales or the Fisherman at Anchor, (18) shows the future George IV swimming in a sea of politics while spouting the 'liquor of oblivion' over the Whigs and the 'dew of favour' over the Tory fishermen who have hooked him, while the prince's mistress Lady Hertford looks longingly at him, her horned husband behind her. Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare. He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1993, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society since 1978 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 2001. Thus Holman Hunt, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood in 1848, chose as his subjects not only poems based on medieval legends, like The Lady of Shalott, (12) but also religious and moral topics, as in The Awakening Conscience, showing a mistress or kept woman beginning to repent of her sinful way of life. Death indeed formed a central concern of the Victorians, and how to deal with it was a central question they faced. It ranks alongside Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) as a representation of how fin-de-siècle literature explored the darkest recesses of Victorian society and the often disturbing private … Of course this had to some extent always been the case: Josef Haydn had been lionized in London in the late eighteenth century, while earlier on, Georg Friedrich Handel had made his home there; painters such as Canaletto, Rubens, Rembrandt and the Renaissance masters had been collected all over Europe, and indeed the Royal Academy had been founded in part from a belief on the part of Sir Joshua Reynolds and others that English art was being neglected in the country of its origin; famous works of fiction fromDon Quixote to Robinson Crusoe had been translated into many languages including English. So far I've been talking about Victorian culture as if it was purely British, but in fact as communications developed, in the myriad ways I talked about in my first lecture, so culture became international. They were, in fact, among the first characteristic literary products of the dominant cultural movement of the first half of the nineteenth century, Romanticism, and Romanticism was itself not least a reaction against the rationalist and materialist spirit of the Enlightenment. On sale for a penny, these lurid and sensational works earned the strong disapproval of the moral arbiters of the day. Derogatory references to clergymen are expunged, parts of the body are not referred to, the word "body" itself is generally replaced with the word "person", and immoral characters such as the prostitute Doll Tearsheet (2) in Henry IV Part II, a popular subject for illustrators like Thomas Rowlandson, disappear entirely. The emergence of Romanticism reflected widespread European revulsion against the excesses of the Revolution and Terror in France, a revulsion shared in full measure in Britain, and widely ascribed to the hegemony of abstract and rigid conceptions of how human happiness was to be achieved. Romantic groups such as the Pre-Raphaelites sought to return to a world not just before the Enlightenment but also, as their name deliberately proclaimed, the Renaissance, or at least its later phases. To these influences were added those I described at the end of my previous lecture, as new concepts of time and space and technological innovations such as motion pictures began to undermine conventional ideas of representation as well, and the machine began to replace nature as the object of interest for futurist artists such as the self-styled Vorticist Wyndham Lewis (37). 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