What do you know about the Victorian Age? Explain in your own words.
Ans.The reign of Queen Victoria which extended from 1837 to 1901 is referred to as the Victorian Age. This covered the better part of the nineteenth century. It is difficult to characterise any age in one or two sentences because each epoch is a complex of various historical, political, economic, social and cultural factors. However, it would not : far from the truth to term the Victorian Age as a period of peace and prosperity. Seventeenth century England was rife with Civil War and revolutions and the eighteenth century witnessed recurrent wars against France. However, during the nineteenth century the only wars were the Crimean War (1853-54) against imperial Russia and the Boer War (1899- 1902) in South Africa which only served to enhance Britain's power and prestige which reached its zenith in the mid-nineteenth century. It was a period of imperial expansion. It was also a period of economic prosperity marked by a strong ethic of self-help. Hard vork was regarded as the key to success. There was an intense feeling of 1:ational unity and optimism. The familiar image of Queen Victoria with her husband Prince Albert and their children only served to emphasise the importance of the family as a key social unit. The Victorian age was also rather moralistic and the Quecn's soberly clad figure only stressed the propriety and decorum that marked nineteenth century English society. Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859) by expounding the theory of evolution, shook the foundations of religious faith. The Victorian age is often referred to 'an age of giants'. The writers of the period were confident and extremely prolific. The Elizabethan age can be seen as the age of drama, the Romantic age as the age of poetry, while the Victorian age can boast of the best English novels ever written. The novels of Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, George Eliot, G.M. Thackeray, George Meredith and Thomas Hardy are widely read even today. The poetry of the age is a continuation of the Romantic tradition on one level, while on another, it is also an expression of the spirit of its age. In general terms, one might well say that while Romantic Poetry emerged as a product of the poet's individual mind and experiences, Victorian poetry seems to evolve out of a more general spirit of the age. For example, Romantic poetry comes straight from the heart, while Victorian poetry give the impression that a poet is always aware of his/ her own exalted status and this dictates the tone and the manner in which s/he addresses the reader.
This does not mean that the Victorians did not express their emotions. It was an age of prosperity, but also an age of gloomy forebodings; it was an age of imperial expansion, but also an age of colonial uprisings; above all, it was an age of peace, but there was an undercurrent of 'sick hurry and divided aims'.
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