La vita in epoca vittoriana, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica La vita in epoca vittoriana e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! ’ When she came to the throne she was just 18 years old and ruled for 64 years. Her own sense of duty made her the ideal head master of a constitutional monarchy. She married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, had nine children and gave him the title of Prince Consort. ➢ Great Reform Act: transferred voting privileges to the large industrial towns ➢ Factory Act: prevented children aged 9 to 13 from being employed more than forty-eight hours a week; no one between 13 and 18 could work more than 72 hours a week ➢ Poor Law Amendment Act: reformed the old Poor Laws (from Elizabeth I) Life in the workhouses was appaling on account of their system of regimentation, hard work and a monotonous diet. The poor had to wear uniforms and their families were split and this was due to an optimistic faith in progress and to the Puritan virtues of hard work, the idea that was behind was that the poor would feel inspired and tried to improve. This houses were run by Church. In 1838 a group of working-class radicals drew up a People’s Charter demanding universal manhood suffrage, a secret ballot and other reforms of the electoral system. Bad weather and an unknown plant disease from America caused the destruction of potato crops in 1845. Ireland experienced a terrible famine, a lot of people died or emigrated. This crises forced the Prime Minister to abolish Corn Laws. England experienced a second wave of industrialisation which brought economic, cultural and architectural change. In 1851 a Great Exhibition showed the world Britain’s industrial and economic power, it was housed at the Crystal Palace by Sir Joseph Paxton and erected in Hyde Park. In 1860 started the building of the London Underground. England was involved in the two Opium Wars against China, which was tryna stop the opium trade. England gained access to five ports and the control over Hong Kong. In 1857 widespread rebellion against British rule and, consequently, the Indian administration was given fewer responsibilities. Supported liberal causes (Italian independence from the Austrians). Fought the Crimean War. At the death of Prince Albert, the Queen withdrew from society and spent ten years away. In Parlament there were the Liberal Party (Whigs, Radicals and businessmen), led by Gladstone and the Conservative Party (Tories), led by Disraeli. Disraeli allowed local public authorities to clear the slums and provided housing for the poor; then provided sanitation and running water; limited the working hours per week. Encouraged also the purchase of more shares in the Suez Canal Company to protect Britain’s route to the East. Gladstone was Prime Minister four times. Thanking him was introduced ‘board schools’ in the poorest areas of the towns. Vote was extended to all male householders, miners, mill-workers and farm labourers. The Irish Parliamentary Party, led by Parnell, demanded self-governmentmfor Ireland but that was granted only after World War I. In South Africa the British controlled two colonies, Cape Colony and Natal, while the Dutch settlers, the Boers, had the two republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. When Britain took over Transvaal, the Boers rebelled and war broke out with the britain’s victory. Queen Victoria had also the title of Empress of India. India was economically important and strategically necessary to British control of Asia. The Queen died in 1901 and for almost a century she had embodied decorum, stability and continuity and she was buried beside her beloved husband in the Frogmore mausoleum at Windsor Castle. It was a time of unprecedented change but also of great contradictions. It was an age in which progress, reforms and political stability coexisted with poverty and injustice. Modernity was praised but there was a revival of Gothic and Classicism in art. Religion played an important role in people’s lives. The Victorians believed in God but also in progress and science. Freedom was linked with religion as regarded freedom of conscience, with optimism over economical and political progress, and with national identity. Increasing emphasis was placed on education, and hygiene was encouraged to improve health care. Self- restraint, good manners and self-help came to be linked with respectability, which was a mixture of morality and hypocrisy. There was a growing emphasis on the duty of men to respect and protect women, seen at the same time as physically weaker but morally superior. Women controlled the family budget and brought up the children. There was an intense concern for female chastity and single women with a child were marginalised as ‘fallen women’. Sexuality was repressed. An action is morally right if it brings up consequences that lead to happiness, it suited the interests of the middle class and contributed to the Victorian conviction that any problem could be overcome through reason Believed progress comes form mental energy, and therefore accorded great importance to education and art. Oliver Twist (1837-1839); A Christmas Carol, the first of Dickens’s successful Christmas books. The protagonists of his novel Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Little Dorrit, became the symbols of an exploited childhood confronted with the bitter realities of slums and factories. Other works include Hard Times, which deal with the conditions of the poor and the working class in general. By the time of his sudden death, Dickens had drawn adoring crowds to his public appearances in England, Scotland and Ireland; he was buried in Westminster Abbey. His aim was to arouse the reader’s interest by exaggereting his characters’ habits as well as the language of the London middle and lower classes, whose social peculiarities, vanity and ambition he ridiculed freely, though without sarcasm. He was always on the side of the poor, the outcast and also the working class. Children are often the most important characters: they become the moral teachers instead of the taught, the examples instead of the imitators. The wealthier classes acquired knowledge about their poorer neighbours. Dickens’s task was to make the ruling classes aware of the social problems without offending his middle-class readers. Dickens employed the most effective language and accomplished the most graphic and powerful descriptions of life and character ever attempted by any novelist. He is considered as the greatest novelist in the English language. “ ” This novel is set in an imaginary industrial town named Coketown. Thomas Gradgrind, an educator who believes in facts and statistics, has founded a school where his theories are taught, and he brings up his two children by repressing thei imagination and feelings. He marries his daughter to Josiah Bounderby, 30 years older than her, but she gives consent as she wants to help her brother with the job in his husband’s bank, but the marriage proves to be unhappy. Tom robs his employer and at first gives suspicion on an honest man, but he is finally discovered and obliged to leave the country. In the end Mr Gradgrind gives up his narrow-minded, materialistic philosophy. The fictional city of Coketown stands for a real industrial mill town in mid-19th-century Victorian England. The machines of factories are like mad elephants, and their smoke looks like serpents. All the buildings are the same. Nothing seems to bother the mill owners. They seems to be proud of the polluted air, to some it symbolise productivity and to others, it’s depression. It’s divided into three sections and each book is divided into separate chapter: ➢ Sowing: shows the seeds planted by the Gradgrind education ➢ Reaping: reveals the harvesting of these seeds ➢ Garnering: linked to a dominant symbol which is no longer the ‘solid’ ground upon which Mr Gradgrind’s system once stood The philosophy of Utilitarianism comes through the actions of Mr Gradgrind and Bounderby: as the former educates the children of his family and his school through facts, the latter treats the workers in his factory as emotionless objects that are easily exploited for his own self-interest. Mr Gradgrind believes that human nature can be governed entirily by reason. Dickens’s primary aim is to illustrate the dangers of the teaching method called ‘object lesson’, originally conceived as a method of education arising from children’s own experiences and suited to their particular stage of development, but distorted in its introduction to English schools. Was born in Edinburgh, because of his poor health he spent most of his childhood in bed, terrified of the dark room he was kept in and tutored at home, under the influence of his family’s Calvinism. He travelled a lot in search of a friendlier climate. He was in conflict with a social environment, the respectable Victorian world. He became one of the first examples of the bohemian in Britain, openly rejecting his family’s religious principles and their love for respectability. He became popular as a novelist in the 1880s when The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was published. “ ” Mr Utterson is a London lawyer and frien to Dr Jekyll. After relating a disturbing tale of a sinister man assaulting a small girl, Utterson begins to question the odd behaviour of his friend. He discovers that hia friend has created a potion able to release his evil side, Mr Hyde. These two beings are in a perpetual struggle; once Hyde is released from hiding, he achieves domination over the Jekyll aspect, so that the individual has only two choices: the man may choose a life of crime or Jekyll must kill Hyde. Jekyll’s suicide is the final and only choice. The story takes place in London in the 1870s. At that time the West End was in contrast with the appalling poverty of the East End slums. This ambivalence is reinforced by the symbolism of Jekyll’s house: the front side, used by the doctor, is fair, part of a square of ‘ancient, handsome house’; the rear side, used by the Hyde, is part of a sinister block of buildings, which ‘showed no windows’. Most scenes of the novel take place at night: there is only the artificial lighting of Jekyll’s house. The most important events are wrapped up in darkness and fog. There are four narrators ➢ Utterson: has the role of detective since he follows clues and draws hypothesis. He has a strange relationship with Enfield ➢ Enfield ➢ Dr Lanyon: a friend and a colleague of Dr Jekyll’s as well as a great advocate of reason, is the first person to see his friend enact his transformation. He prefers to die rather than live in this kind of world ➢ Jekyll: speaks in first person This novel had its origin in a dream: Stevenson wrote down in his diary that he had dreamed of a man in a laboratory who had swallowed a drug and turned into a different being. It was the Gothic aspect of this story that excited him, and he produced a first draft. The Calvinism of his family gave him a sense of man’s divided self and its pessimism moved him to rebel against religion. Stevenson drew inspiration for the description of Hyde from Darwin’s studies. Jekyll is a kind of ‘Victorian Faust’ and his awareness is a sort of pact with an interior evil that controls him in the end. This novel may also be considered a reflection on art itself and Jekill’s discovery may symbolise the artist’s journey into the unexplored regions of the human psyche. 1850-1894