Victorian age, L'era vittoriana, le città, gli autori e le loro opere. Dickens e Carroll, Appunti di Lingua Inglese

Scarica Victorian age, L'era vittoriana, le città, gli autori e le loro opere. Dickens e Carroll e più Appunti in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! QUEEN VICTORIA • Queen Victoria came to the throne when she was just 18 in 1837 and died 1901. Victoria’s reign was the longest in history of England. She married Prince Albert and together they had 9 children. • During Victoria reign there were a lot Social reforms, one of them limited working hours to ten a day for all labourers. • In 19 the century Britain had became nation where the city were overcrowded. This fact is mainly due industrial development and caused a lots of problems. • Victorian cities were famous, in fact , for their squalor, crime and disease like cholera epidemic and tuberculosis. The majority poor people lived in slum districts (bassifondi). • The mortality rate was high and terrible working conditions in pollutes atmospheres had a disastrous effect, especially on children’s health. • During the Victorian age people start to search a solution to problems and were introduced such as modern hospitals, water, gas and lighting, places of entertainment like parks and stadium. In order to resolve law and order problems. • London Underground was built and railways started to changes London. • In 1851 there was the Great Exhibition in which Britain showed all its material goods. During this period Britain was the industrial and economical leader in the world and this was symbolize by the Great Exhibition. THE WORKHOUSES • Workhouses because they were born for help poor people that want to improve their conditions of life but in real people who lived in the workhouses were forced to work, families were separated and food and clothing were not much. • So workhouses didn’t improve the conditions of life of these poor people and because they abused of people and caused more misery. THE LATER YEARS OF QUEEN VICTORIA’S REIGN • Prince Albert died in 1861 and Queen Victoria withdrew herself from the society. Britain fought with other states to divide Africa and at the end obtained South Africa. • Queen Victoria became the Empress of India and so she had an Empire in which the sun never set but this reign was difficult to control. • One of the most important movement of the period is that of suffragette it was a female movement for woman’s rights. THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE • The Victorian age was a contradictory era: in fact it was an age of progress and social reforms, but also of poverty and social unrest. • The Victorians were great moralists: they promoted a code of values that reflect the world as they wanted it to be, not as it really was, based on personal duty, hard work, respectability and charity, which was a mixture of morality and hypocrisy: in fact it implied to have good manners, to attend regularly the church and to be charitable. Dear to upper and middle classes ( who had political and economic power) which had to be respected by the whole society. • Also the family was structured as a middle class family: it has a patriarchal structure where the husband represented the authority and the women had to educate the children and to manage the house. • Also sexuality was a taboo: it was repressed in public and private forms: a female had to be chaste if she didn’t want to be punished by the society and nudity and words with a sexual connotation were rejected. School • Children in Victorian age were educated in many different ways, depending according their sex and their parents’ financial situation, social class. • The girls and the boys from rich family were taught by a governess at the firs, but then they received different kind of education. The boys went to boarding schools, and the girls stayed at home, instructed who to be a good wife. • They method was learn by heart and they wrote lists for pupils to copy. • The punishment were different the boys were hit on their bottom and the girls were hit on their legs and hands. • Poor children worked in factory, sixteen hours per days, work with textile machine, and like chimney sweeps, they risk dying or having cancer. They stayed in terrible working conditions, they cannot read and write. THE VICTORIAN NOVEL • During Victoria’s reign the middle class started to read a lot of books and for this reason writers started to write more. • The novelist of the first part of Victorian period criticized the evil society of the period, a society in which people lived in a terrible conditions of life and children were exploited in workhouses. The setting of the novel was to show people what were the effects of the Industrial revolution. Life in LONDON London is the most important setting of the story (it was described in a realistic way) which is told in three different levels: 1. is the world of the workhouses and the people who are insensible towards the poor; 2. is the criminal world described through pickpockets and murderers 3. is the world of the middle-class who believed in moral values and principles of human being School • Children in Victorian age were educated in many different ways, depending according their sex and their parents’ financial situation, social class. • The girls and the boys from rich family were taught by a governess at the first, but then they received different kind of education. The boys went to boarding schools, and the girls stayed at home, instructed who to be a good wife. • They method was learn by heart and they wrote lists for pupils to copy. • The punishment was a regular practice in Victorian schools were different the boys were hit on their bottom and the girls were hit on their legs and hands. • Poor children worked in factory, sixteen hours per days, work with textile machine, and like chimney sweeps, they risk dying or having cancer. They stayed in terrible working conditions, they cannot read and write. CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870)