South Pasadena High School
The English Seminar--AP



Grace Horowitz Schwartz 
Department Of English, Hunter College
 1991 Bureau Development, Inc.

Queen Victoria's England



Every writer is marked by the age in which he lives and writes. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) passed the whole of his short life in the reign of Queen Victoria. In his own unique way, he was as much affected by this fact as was Alfred Lord Tennyson, who is usually thought of as the supremely representative poet of Victoria's world, or Rudyard Kipling, who is known as the spokesman for Victoria's worldwide Empire, so farflung that the sun never set on it.
When Victoria became queen in 1837, the royal family was neither popular nor respected. George III, her grandfather, had suffered recurrent spells of insanity during his lengthy reign (1760-1820) and at last, in 1811, he became hopelessly incompetent; the Prince of Wales, the oldest of his ten sons, became Prince Regent. When his father died, he came to the throne as King George IV.
The new king had a history that did not inspire loyal affection. He was married to a Mrs. Fitzherbert in 1785, but the marriage, though blessed with many children, was not recognized officially because the lady was a Roman Catholic instead of a member of the Church of England. George's endless extravagances landed him in hopeless debt. In 1795, he deserted Mrs. Fitzherbert to marry Princess Caroline of Brunswick on condition that his debts should be paid off.
 He made no pretense of caring for the Princess; he first neglected, and then abandoned her. A furor was created when, in 1820, Caroline indicated that she expected to be crowned Queen alongside her husband. George tried to divorce her on the charge that she had committed adultery; the obvious opportunism of his behavior made him thoroughly unpopular. The scandalous situation was climaxed by a scene at the coronation when the Queen tried to enter Westminster Abbey for the ceremony and had the doors shut in her face.
George died without legitimate heirs in 1830. His brother, the Duke of Clarence, succeeded him as William IV. William's outstanding characteristic was his boorishness. His uncouth behavior during his short reign did nothing to win back the respect lost by his father and his brother. It was not expected that young Victoria, who became Queen in 1837, would be able to retrieve the love of the English people which her grandfather and uncles had managed to alienate. In fact, many thinking people assumed that the time of the monarchy was running out. It was expected that Britain would get rid of her royal family, by revolution or by other means, and at last become a republic. It was a strange beginning for what ironically turned out to be the longest reign in English history, more than sixty-three years.
Victoria's father was the Duke of Kent, fourth son of George III. He was the oldest surviving son after King William IV, so that it was understood that his little daughter would eventually become Queen. The Duke died while she was a baby. Her German mother supervised her education with great strictness. This consisted of constant drilling in manners and duties, rather than intellectual training. Thus, though Victoria had considerable intelligence, she did not have the asset of a thorough education. This was to lead, later in life, to a narrow outlook, a serious lack of mental flexibility; even today, we think of this cast of mind as "Victorian."
But in 1837, no misgivings about the Queen's limitations troubled England. The people only knew that after a succession of elderly, unappealing kings, they now had a queen who was eighteen years of age, attractive, vivacious, and conscientious. A great wave of affection rose from her subjects, and with this there was mingled a protective instinct. The Queen was hardly more than a child. She had been chaperoned and protected; diligently, those in charge of her had shielded her innocence from contact with anything distressing or improper. Now her subjects began to shield her too. Statesmen, artists, and writers shared an impulse to avoid those subjects that might be unsuitable for the sheltered young queen.
Thus, the accident that the English crown was inherited by a girl colored the culture of an entire age. The effect was striking - and not entirely desirable. What may be proper intellectual nourishment for a strictly raised eighteen-year-old girl is not necessarily appropriate for all the people in a country. Also, the result was the encouragement of respectability, not the rebirth of virtue. These are quite different things. If, inspired by the Queen, the British people had shown an impulse toward higher standards of conduct, the result would surely have been impressive. But as a whole they did not do this. Rather, they showed a greater interest in appearing respectable. The opinion of one's neighbors became all-important. As a result, hypocrisy became the most important virtue. The standard of conduct in Victoria's time was extremely strict and the penalty for breaking the moral code was to be cast out from society - but this meant in practice only that one was expected to avoid getting caught.
Thus, the Victorian era fostered a highly repressive atmosphere. What one could or could not do was carefully prescribed by society. And with this went an insincerity which came to be accepted as entirely natural, especially by the middle class.
Victoria's later history did nothing to alter this. Married to her German cousin Albert, whom she adored, she became the mother of nine children. In 1861, Albert died suddenly, leaving the Queen an inconsolable widow. For the remaining forty years of her life, she wore mourning for him. Naturally, the domestic virtues were those most prized by the Queen. As she got older she became even surer that her own limited ideas were the only correct ones. As an example, for many years she refused to receive at court any woman who had been widowed and had later remarried. She expected all women to abide by her idea of how a widow should behave. She demanded that all women who hoped to take part in the life of the royal court live according to standards that were in excess of what any western religion required.
To summarize, the atmosphere of Victorian England was stuffy and hypocritical. It insisted on conformity. As a result, it produced a large number of people obedient to its standards-but it also produced a crop of colorful eccentrics and rebels. Oscar Wilde was one of these.
Science And Religion:
In 1859, Charles Darwin published his book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, which presented the theory of evolution and touched off a violent controversy which has not subsided completely even today. However, we must not make the mistake of assuming that Darwin was the first person ever to have such ideas. Even in ancient Greece, certain philosophers had suggested that the forms of living things tended to change and develop as time passed. In the early nineteenth century, a French scientist, Baron Cuvier, observed in fossils simple forms of life which had once existed on the earth but were no longer to be found. Sir Charles Lyell explained the enormous extent of geological time in Principles of Geology (1833).
Darwin incorporated a lot of earlier material with his own observations to produce his theory. To put it simply, Darwin observed that most species of plants and animals produced far more young than ever grew into maturity. In the case of some of the simpler organisms, only a minute percentage of those produced could survive. He pointed out that if all the oysters produced in one year were to reach maturity and reproduce, great mountains of oysters would tower up out of the oceans.
What was it that determined which organisms out of the multitudes would be the survivors? Darwin answered that the huge numbers of organisms produced by a given species had a great variety of hereditary characteristics. Those who happened to have characteristics that helped them catch their food and avoid their enemies were the ones that lived. The others died, victims of their enemies, starvation, or other kinds of destruction. Among characteristics that might be helpful to survival were speed, strength, and protective coloration that helped the organism to blend with its surroundings and avoid being seen.
Darwin reasoned further that those creatures that survived were the ones that reproduced themselves; they passed their characteristics on to at least some of their offspring, who then could also survive and reproduce. Those creatures who did not last till maturity died out before they could reproduce themselves. In this way, those characteristics useful in the environment were perpetuated. Thus, the various species developed and changed their characteristics.
Darwin was convinced that this process had been in effect countless millions of years; he believed it had begun with a primitive unicellular sea creature that had been the first life on the earth. As a result of the constant operation of this process, different kinds of life had developed. Some kinds had died out and could now be seen only as fossils. Others became more and more differentiated and complex, until the various forms of plant and animal life known in the modern world came into being.
Naturally, not many people actually read through Darwin's complex and technical explanations. But his ideas became known through newspapers, magazines and sermons. For the implications were clear. If life really had begun in a very simple form and slowly developed over vast stretches of time, then the account of creation in the Bible was seemingly contradicted-for this was different from a world made with all its varied creatures within seven days by the hand of God. A famous Biblical scholar, Bishop Ussher, had, after careful study, dated the year of creation as 4004 B.C. He was even able to supply the very day and hour of the event. Now the concept of geological time made this absurd.
Thus it seemed to many that the very foundations of religious faith were being attacked. Yet, eventually, the various sects were able to assimilate Darwin's ideas. Almost all religious groups have faced the contradictions between science and traditional interpretation of the Bible. Evolution is today taught in many religious seminaries. Darwin himself is buried in Westminister Abbey.
Yet Darwin's thought did give a terrible shock to the time. Before him, most people lived in a cozy, understandable world. Man was the center of this world-of course, for was he not made in God's image? All of creation had been for the purpose of providing a home for him. The universe, the Earth, other living creatures, only mattered because they were necessary to man.
But with the new science, how cold and terrifying the universe became! How frightening it was to think of the earth as an insignificant speck in time and space, where a series of evolutionary accidents had produced the human race.
And worst of all were the methods by which evolution took place. The main instrument of it seemed to be death! Huge quantities of living creatures were produced, apparently with no other function but to die. They were linked with one another in a relationship of repeated cruelty and suffering. A creature might be a destroyer of many species, only to fall a victim at last to others more quick or powerful than itself.
How different is this world governed by waste, accident, and cruelty from that secure one where the benevolent Creator observed each sparrow's fall! Many men who could face the idea that the account of creation in the Bible might not be strictly accurate were stricken to the heart by the senselessness and horror of this picture. Alfred Lord Tennyson, a very typical Victorian writer, speaks of Nature, "red in tooth and claw." "How careful of the type she seems,/ How careless of the single life." Nothing could better sum up the despair of the thoughtful man than these excerpets from Tennyson's In Memoriam.
To summarize, the conflict between science and religion in the Victorian period produced an atmosphere of despair. Thoughtful men found the new world of science, so huge and indifferent to man, a bleak place to live. Some, like Tennyson, faced the problem and struggled to find some basis for faith and hope.
But others, equally aware of the new atmosphere, fought it by ignoring it. They also were troubled by the lonely new world in which they had to live. But they protected themselves by trying to escape. They tried to find a scale of values which would not be affected by these developments. Such men, no longer able to have confidence in the moral world, turned to the world of beauty. The worship of beauty became an end in itself. Beauty was safe, unaffected by outside events. In beauty one could place one's faith and hope; it was changeless. Among those who turned to the worship of beauty were the poet Algernon Swinburne, the critic Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde.
The Industrial Revolution:
Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, the face of England was drastically changed by a huge series of events, which we usually call "The Industrial Revolution." In the early eighteenth century, all Englishmen made their living from the land.
The term "Industrial Revolution" refers to the period in English history, approximately 1750-1850, in which major social and economic changes took place. With the invention of the spinning frame and power loom, England moved from an agricultural and commercial society to a modern industrial society. England became a world textile center. By the mid-1840s over half a million people were employed, 340,000 of them tending power-driven machines in factories.
Economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo rejected contemporary doctrines. They developed the thesis that division of labor and free trade would necessarily benefit the bulk of the populace. But these new doctrines inherited the squalor of the past centuries and developed some new difficulties.
In 1764 a machine for spinning thread (known as the "spinning jenny") was invented. A series of other inventions followed rapidly, including the steam locomotive in 1825. It became possible to produce cotton, wool, and iron at far lower cost than ever before. This was done by building power-driven machines and assembling them in factories, where large numbers of workers came together to operate them. Most often, these factories were built in the north of England, near the coal mines which provided the fuel that would make steam to drive the machines. It was because of this that the industrial cities of England were built mainly in the north.
England's cities grew monstrously in the years between 1800 and 1830. Thousands who could no longer live from the land came to the cities, where they had a better chance of survival. An entirely new class of people developed-people who were, dependent on factory employment rather than on the whims of nature. As thousands poured into the urban settlements, tremendous new difficulties had to be overcome.
Not enough wealth had yet been produced to adequately provide for the newcomers. No housing had been planned to accommodate the hordes of workers. At first, they lived in abandoned houses in old sections of the cities. Eventually inexpensive housing was put up, built by the barest minimum of speculative capital. Among other things, sanitary conditions were woefully substandard (in relation to our present-day standards) and this led to a severe epidemic of cholera during the 1830s.
The multitudes had come from abject poverty to conditions barely better. It was a brand-new mode of living, but the system was yet too young to alleviate the horrors. English cities were hideous in a way that we of the twentieth century can scarcely imagine. In huddled groups of tumble-down houses, mobs of people lived, sometimes several families in one room. Filth and horrible smells were everywhere. People were dressed in rags. Children were undernourished and deformed. In the mines, five-year-olds pulled carts of coal for twelve to fourteen hours a day and never saw the sunlight-or the inside of a school.
Some writers tried to make the people of England conscious of the horrors all around them. For example, Elizabeth Barrett wrote "The Cry of the Children," which described the conditions of child labor. But for others, the ugliness of industrial England made physical beauty seem more important than ever before. In reaction to what they saw, they regarded beauty as a supreme good. Oscar Wilde is one example of this. His writings show no trace of what we call "social consciousness." He never indicates any concern for the evils of his time. Slums, child labor, disease, and poverty might not have existed for all the notice Wilde takes of them. Reading his plays, one gets the impression that England is made up entirely of Lords, Ladies, and a few others who do not have titles but are at least independently wealthy.
Nevertheless, in spite of the narrow focus and limited sympathy displayed in his work, one gets a strong impression that Wilde turns to elegance and beauty to some extent because the whole of reality is unacceptable to him. He escapes ugliness and doubt, and while he does so, he enables his audience to escape with him.

 



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