THE VICTORIAN PERIOD

O.K. Mantz

Trapped in a liminal space between Romantic ambitions and a sense of distance and resignation, the Victorian Age witnessed a descent of that initial vigour. Although many of the desires remain the same, the Victorian Age faced a break from the past, straining towards modernity, and thus anticipating those emotions of hope, longing, and beauty with less ardour, realising a bleak movement forward. The 19th century also witnessed the rise of the industrial revolution, where modern life became less agricultural and began to move away from the natural world, impacting not only the poets’ cognitive processes, but also their ways of life.

Matthew Arnold, an inspector of schools by vocation, wrote poems and prose primarily in his spare time, continuously circling back to the question of how to live a prosperous life in a modern industrial society (Norton 415). Arnold’s poems are typically set within a beautiful, often natural setting where the speaker realises either what they themselves have lost or what others around them no longer possess. This longing for something lost is made especially clear in his 1852 poem “The Buried Life,” where the speaker seeks for “knowledge of our buried life,” reflecting on both the people around him as well as himself (line 48). Here, Arnold presents the permeating Romantic views such as a “thirst to spend [the] fire and restless force in tracking out [the] true, original course” (lines 49-50). He then acknowledges that people “try in vain to speak and act [the] hidden self,” but elucidates the inability to be truly authentic, for the individual does not know their true self (line 64). By delving into a rather hopeless interpretation, Arnold displays a Victorian perspective of diminishing hope for something greater and better, trapped in a liminal space instead. However, the speaker finally beholds his beloved, who with “tones of a loved voice caressed,” which forces his eye to “sink inward” to reflect upon himself (line 83 and 86). Here, the Victorian idea of relationship, solitude, and isolation are displayed in a shifting, industrial world.

This self-reflection on something lost becomes extremely evident in “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” in which the speaker, after travelling across a rugged landscape, encounters the monastery of the Carthusian monks and begins a journey of introspection. He first describes their setting and deep faith of fasting and prayer, but then remarks that he himself has lost faith, having been raised by the “master of the mind” (line 73). Beginning with the plural form “we” in the first nine stanzas, the reader is invited to accompany the speaker on their way to the monastery; a sudden shift to the first-person pronoun, however, isolates the speaker and marks a transition towards introspection that the reader is invited not to share the experience with, but to observe from a distance. On the one hand, the speaker mourns the loss of faith and tradition, describing how human tears and sadness has not become less through reason and that the outcry, rather than the silence of men, has not brought about pure happiness. However, Arnold moves towards a realisation that those who remain in faith and tradition can neither “grow in other ground” nor “flower in foreign air” and will remain isolated from the rest of society (lines 207-208). He acknowledges the power of reason to propel humanity forward towards that “perfect joy” of future generations.

With an arguably less noble aim, but with a far more celebrated persona, Alfred, Lord Tennyson was one of the most popular and beloved of Victorian poets, possessing “the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet” according to W.H. Auden (Norton 143). Although his image and skill was often questioned, his poetry remains an integral aspect and representation of Victorian values. Tennyson’s perspective on the Greek King of Ithaca in his poem “Ulysses” explicates the liminal space between the strength of the past and the uncertainty of the future. Weaving Homer’s vision of Odysseus into his character, Tennyson adumbrates a man searching for adventure and dangers so that he may triumph as a hero or perish as a legend. Speaking to his subjects after returning home, Ulysses declares “how dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use” (line 22-23). Yet, Tennyson’s Ulysses is different in name from Homer’s Odysseus, and the poem does not carry the feeling of a heroic epic. Rather, the dramatic monologue is suffused with Dante’s rendition of Ulysses in the eighth circle of Hell. Ulysses’ return home to Ithaca, “so praised by Homer as the fulfilment of his quest, is now completely eliminated by Dante” for Ulysses is “literally enveloped in the flame of his unquenchable desire” (Chapman 5). Both the Romantic idea of looking forward to something supernatural and phenomenal as well as the disappointment of unrealising that expression becomes manifest in “Ulysses.” Through Ulysses—the disappointed hero who struggles between his legendary past and the bleeker future—Tennyson elucidates that “though much is taken, much abides;” and although they are no longer “that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven,” the Victorians must usher in a new generation of thought and feeling (lines 65-66). While the Romantics were ambitious, the Victorians were “made weak by time and fate,” while yet remaining “strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” (lines 69-70).

Finding strength in the liminal Victorian Age where tradition was lost and the future seemed foreboding and dark is not a simple task. As the British Empire witnessed the progression from a rural, predominantly agricultural society to an industrial one, the literature discussed concerns over modernity and the loss of feeling and sensitivity. For, while the Romantics had “their source in a great movement of feeling,” the Victorian period marked “a great movement of mind” (Norton 454). And yet, however much opposing, these two eras “assert literature to contain the materials which suffice for thus making us know ourselves and the world” (Norton 484). The Victorian Age stressed deep introspection, as well as blending the faculties of emotion and reason to delve into authenticity of the self and the world around oneself—ideas that seem all but lost in the modern world.

WORKS CITED

Chapman, David. Not the Same Old Story: Dante’s Re-Telling of The Odyssey. Samford University, 2019.

Greenblatt, Stephen, editor. The Norton Anthology of English Literature (The Victorian Age), 10th ed., D, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, New York, 2018.