the details and relevant materials would be attached in the files, there are 4 parts totally, each part has different words counting requirement and different number of questions, please answer each q

Introduction and context: “The Victorian Era”

Key literary and cultural figures

Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, J.S. Mill, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Elizabeth Gaskell, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy (among others).

Morality

• They placed high value on honor, duty, moral seriousness, and sexual propriety

• Characterized by rigid social doctrines and repression

• However, literature and cultural debates through the media (newspapers) developed discourses about sexuality and morality throughout the era.

• They did not, contrary to belief, have a single mindset rooted in social values (society as a whole was said to value the above list, but individuals challenged these norms much as they do now)

Identity

• People were identified by their race, class, and gender, and these qualities prescribed and individual with his/her social role. 

• However, this does not mean that people followed these roles or subscribed to them as rigidly as society would suggest. 

Victorian Politics and Socioeconomic structure

• Characterized by their stiff collars, long novels, gritty poverty-induced squalor, and by the “rise of the middle class.” 

• Known for their political stability due to their growing and solid global presence (that covered ¼ of the earth’s surface by 1897)—“the sun never sets on the British empire.”

• Consumerism was very important to the Victorians—began to buy more things to either show or pretend to be of a certain class.

• Rising middle class and widening gap between upper and lower classes (Disraeli called this the “Two Nations”).

  • Growing urbanization and social mobility (both upward and downward)

    • 70% of the population at mid-century was considered poor

    • This included growing industrialization, particularly in northern cities like Manchester

Victorian Literature and Writing

The Victorian age saw the rise of the press, the novel (even more so than during the Romantic period), and the use of writing (both fiction and nonfiction) as a mechanism for social reform and progress.  Additionally, Victorian writing was predominantly founded on realism, or the idea, as George Eliot puts it,  that "art is the nearest thing to life." Many novelists, poets, and writers were interested, at this time, in painting or portraying the life of the people as it is really was. Therefore, much Victorian fiction centered around everyday experiences, moral progress, and the relationship between the struggles of an individual with the larger social community.

Examples of Victorian realists works and writers are

• • • • • • • Gaskell's North and South 

            • George Eliot's Middlemarch

            • Thomas Hardy's "A Son's Veto"

            • Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry

            • Tennyson's poetry

Novels matured into agents for social and moral reform, often depicting the world as it should be or as it is pointing to the ways in which major social problems affect different groups of people (women, the poor, political figures).  

Other types of writing emerge as agents for social change as well—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are writing political philosophy and journalism becomes more prevalent. Writing really comes into its own as a cultural method to shape, reflect, and comment on social issues. 

Key cultural debates often represented and discussed in writing:

• The woman question,

• marriage,

• class relations,

• race relations,

• colonization,

• sexuality,

• religion.

Despite their rigid reputation, The Victorians were very open and brazen about debating and challenging societal norms.

A popular sub-genre of the Victorian novel was the Sensation novel which was based on scandalous activity and subject matter, such as bigamy, murder, madness, and crime. This genre worked to expose the hidden corruptions of the respectable middle and upper class.

Sensation fiction had a mass readership and was considered to be part of popular or mass culture and beneath realist works which (supposedly) had more literary value. It is also the precursor to the detective story. It finds its root in gothic fiction, except it places the scandalous action back inside England domestic life (as opposed to in the foreign medieval past).

In the latter half of the 19th C, mystery novels, detective fiction, and horror writing soared in popularity, partly on the strength of an expanding audience of lower-income readers, rising literacy rates, and cheaper book production. 

Key Figures: Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Bram Stoker. 

Reading like a Victorian

The Victorians read novels in a few different forms, but the most popular were: the “triple decker” or three volume novel or the monthly and weekly serial.

The Serial form is a specific literary form (continuing story over an extended time with enforced interruptions), that, because of this, often engaged directly with other cultural values, debates, and moments. These stories were published alongside other stories, advertisements, and visual contexts--most often illustrations. Thus, for the victorians, a novel or poem was not always a self-contained written form, but rather part of a reading process that was embedded in a specific material framework.

For more information on Serial fiction see: http://victorianserialnovels.org/how-to-use/