Victorian Literature(1837-1901)

Henry Antonio Velandia GarcíaStudents

Why this period was named as The Victorian Age?

The name given to the period is borrowed from the royal matriarch of England, Queen Victoria, who sat on throne from 1837 to 1901.

She became a national icon who was identified with

strict standards of personal morality.

Title

Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of

India

Born24 May 1819

Buckingham Palace, London

Dead 22 January 1901

Coronation 28 June 1837

Full name Alexandrina Victoria

Signature

Reign of Queen Victoria (20 June 1837 until her death)

Victoria married her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, in 1840. Their nine children married into royal and noble

families across the continent

Facts:

In the Victorian Period:

Poetry was still the most visible of literary forms.

While essayists and novelists were confronting social issues, poets for their part remained ambivalent at best.

At some point in the Victorian era, the novel replaced the poem as the most fashionable vehicle for the transmission of literature.

Serial publications in magazines and journals became more and more popular.

Dickens made full use of the serial format.

Major Writers of the Victorian Period

• Carroll, Lewis (1832-1898)left

• Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)right

• Doyle, Arthur Conan (1859-1930)left

• Wilde, Oscar (1854-1900) right

Charles Dickens

Born7 February 1812

Landport, Hampshire, England, United Kingdom

Dead 9 June 1870 (aged 58)Higham, Kent, England,

United Kingdom

Occupation Writer and social critic

Full name Charles John Huffam Dickens

Signature

Some personal facts:

• Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison.

• Despite his lack of formal education, he edited: a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles

• During his lifetime campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.

• He was the first great popular novelist in England.

Famous for:

Part of his appeal certainly owed to the fact

that his literary style, while always entertaining,

put the ills of society under the microscope for everyone to see due to the Realism (movement against the romanticism

and the idealism; focused on the reality).

Charles Dickens´s Quotes

There are books of which the backs and covers are

by far the best parts.

Oliver twist

The original title was Oliver Twist, or, The Parish Boy´s Progress.

Is the second novel of English author Charles Dickens, and was first published as a serial 1837–39 in Bentley´s Miscellany magazine.

The story about the orphan Oliver Twist, who starts his life in a workhouse was used by Dickens to criticize public policy toward the poor in 1830s England.

Main Characters

Oliver Twist: The novel’s protagonist. Oliver is between nine and twelve years old when the main action of the novel occurs.

Fagin: A conniving career criminal. Fagin takes in homeless children and trains them to pick pockets for him. He is also a buyer of other people’s stolen goods. 

Nancy: A young prostitute and one of Fagin’s former child pickpockets. Nancy is also Bill Sikes’s lover. 

Bill Sikes: A brutal professional burglar brought up in Fagin’s gang.

Agnes Fleming: Oliver’s mother. After falling in love with and becoming pregnant by Mr. Leeford, she chooses to die anonymously in a workhouse rather than stain her family’s reputation.

Importance of the Oliver Twist novel:

Oliver Twist was the first novel in English language that had a child as protagonist.

Dickens makes considerable use of symbolism. The many symbols Oliver faces are primarily good versus evil, with evil continually trying to corrupt and exploit good, but good winning out in the end.

Oliver Twist plunges the reader into an uncomfortably unromantic world where people are starving to death, children are killed off by their keepers, the innocent suffer, and the cruel and exploitative prosper.

Conclusions:

1. Nearly every institution of society was shaken by rapid and unpredictable change.

2. Improvements to steam engine technology led to increased factory production.

3. For the majority of writers and thinkers the inequality present in Victorian society was a kind of illness that would sooner or later come to a tipping point.

References

http://www.online-literature.com/periods/victorian.php(The Literature Network) https://www.classicsnetwork.com/essays/the-significance-of-

compassion-in-oliver/367 (Classics Network)