The Industrial Revolution

• Factory systems emerged

• The shift in the English economy moved away from agriculture and toward the production of manufactured goods

• 1833-Britain abolished slavery/Factory Act-regulated child labor in factories

• 1834-Poor Law-Amendment applied a system of workhouses for poor people

• 1871-Trade Union Act-made it legal for laborers to organize to protect their rights

Religious Movement in Victorian England

• Evangelical Movement: emphasized a Protestant faith in personal salvation through Christ. This movement swept through England. Led to the creation of the Salvation Army and YMCA.

• Oxford Movement (Tractarians): sought to bring the official English Anglican Church closer in rituals and beliefs to Roman Catholicism

Literature

• Victorian writers dealt with the contrast between the prosperity of the middle and upper classes and the wretched condition of the poor.

• In the late 1800s, they also analyzed the loss of faith in traditional values.

• Late Romantic literature includes some of the greatest and most popular novels ever written.

Realism

• The attempt to produce in art and literature an accurate portrayal of reality

• Realistic, detailed descriptions of everyday life, and of its darker aspects, appealed to many readers disillusioned by the “progress” going on around them.

• Themes in Realist writing included families, religion, and social reform

Naturalism

• Based on the philosophical theory that actions and events are the results not of human intentions, but of largely uncontrollable external forces

• Authors chose subjects and themes common to the lower and middle classes

• Attentive to details, striving for accuracy and authenticity in their descriptions

Edwardian period 

King Edward VII, after whom the Edwardian period is named.

The Edwardian era or Edwardian period in the United Kingdom is the period covering the reign of KingHYPERLINK "http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_VII_of_the_United_Kingdom" Edward VII, 1901 to 1914.

The death of Queen Victoria in January 1901 and the succession of her son, Edward, marked the start of a new century and the end of the Victorian era. While Victoria had shunned society, Edward was the leader of a fashionable elite which set a style influenced by the art and fashions of continental Europe—perhaps because of the King's fondness for travel. The era was marked by significant shifts in politics as sections of society which had been largely excluded from wielding power in the past, such as common labourers and women, became increasingly politicised.

The Edwardian period is frequently extended beyond Edward's death in 1910 to include the years up to the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912, the start of World War I in 1914, the end of hostilities with Germany on November 11, 1918, or the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919. By the end of the war, the Edwardian way of life, with its inherent imbalance of wealth and power, had become increasingly anachronistic in the eyes of a population who had suffered in the face of war and who were exposed to elements of new mass media which decried the injustice of class division.

Class and society

Socially, the Edwardian era was a period during which the British class system was very rigid. It is seen as the last period of the English country house. Economic and social changes created an environment in which there was more social mobility. Such changes included rising interest in socialism, attention to the plight of the poor and the status of women, including the issue of women's suffrage, together with increased economic opportunities as a result of rapid industrialisation. These changes were to be hastened in the aftermath of the First World War

Literature

Despite its short pre-eminence, the period is characterized by its own unique architectural style, fashion, and way of life.

Authors like James Barrie, Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, Ford Maddox Ford, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred Noyes, Arthur Symons, P.G. Wodehouse and H.G. Wells displayed a strong reaction against the propriety and conservatism of the Victorian Age. Their work often exhibits distrust of authority in religion, politics, and art and expresses strong doubts about the soundness of conventional values. It was during this period in which a significant distinction between highbrow literature and popular fiction was emerging. The rest of 2010 shall be devoted to reading from the aforementioned authors, but not exclusively:

William Yeats 1865-1939

• born Irish

• very interested in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism, Irish mythology, and astrology

• Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature

• Look for his theory “Spiral history” 1913

Joseph Conrad 1857-1924

• Polish by birth, orphaned at 11

• - joined a British merchant ship in 1878 after failed suicide attempt

• 1886 gains British citizenship

• 1889 pilots a ship down the Congo in Africa

• 1890 begins career as a writer

“Heart of Darkness”, “Lord Jim”, “The Secret Agent”

Rudyard Kipling 1865-1936

• Born in British India

• Port, short story author, novelist

• 1907 the Nobel Prize for Literature

• Poster-boy for British Imperialism (see The White Man Burden)

• Popular writer during his time, but fell out of favour in past decades due to post-colonial criticism

The modern Period

Women’s rights

-1882 – Married Women’s Property Act allows married women to own property in their own right

-1878- Women allowed to attend university -1918- Women gain right to vote

Karl Marx 1818-1883

Karl Marx: German political theorist who, along with Friedrich Engels, wrote “The Capital”

Sigmund Freud 1856-1939 Austrian Psychologist

- the subconscious mind, repression, dream interpretation

- saw sexual desire as the driving motivator of people

- Id, Ego, Super Ego, Oedipus Complex

Naturalism was a literary movement or tendency from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character.

• First coined\employed by French novelist Emile Zola

• Deals with those raw and unpleasant experiences which reduce poor or middle class characters to “degrading” behavior in their struggle to survive

• Life is usually the dull round of daily existence.

• But characters are usually associated with the heroic or adventurous acts of violence and passion leading to desperate moments and violent death. The suggestion is that life on its lowest levels is not so simple as it seems to be. (Stephen Crane, Jack London, Thomas Hardy)

World War 1 1914-1918

• Causes include imperialistic foreign policy, fighting extends to colonies

• The end of Victorian Era in England. Shock, disillusionment, bitterness, Rejection of old societal values.