UVU Victorian Literature (Fall 2018) Dashboard
Description
This group is a collaborative effort of the members of Utah Valley University's "Victorian Literature" class. It will include a timeline, map, and blog posts related to our course materials. For our timeline, we will place a selection of key political, social, and historical events in conversation with our course texts. Timeline events will be chosen for their relevance to the content and context of our readings. These events will be complemented by a brief blog post/annotation exploring the relationship between literary and cultural history. Our map will help us visualize the spatial relation between our timeline events and course texts.
Galleries, Timelines, and Maps
Individual Entries
In the 19th century, child labor was not a new invention. Poor families have always influenced children to enter the workforce as soon as they were able bring in income. Additionally, children often made practical and cheap employees for big businesses. By the mid-1800s, it was the norm for children to work a dozen hours a day doing hard labor, often in coal mines. Around the same time, the working conditions had become so bad that legislature and literature used their influence to improve working circumstances for child workers.
In the year 1842, author and poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, observed and read reports regarding the dire conditions and exploitation of children in the coal mines of Britain. A year later, she published her poem The Cry of the Children. Her poem advocates for the children workers by appealing to the public. Published widely, starting in the capital of Scotland, Browning’s poem was a powerful protest against the terrible state...
moreLady Victoria Colliery is one of the surviving examples of a coal mine from the Victorian Era. The mine is adjacent to the city Edinburgh, Scottland where Elizabeth Barrett Browning first published her poem The Cry of the Children in a popular, local magazine. The poem was written condemning child labor and the conditions of children in the workforce at the time.
Clerkenwell is located in North Central London, between King’s Cross and London. It includes the sub-district of Finsbury. It is an older parish that has existed since Medieval times and continues to the present. Its name comes from the clerk’s well in Farrington. In the seventeenth century, it developed into a more fashionable part of town with expensive residences. At the time of Oliver Twist, it had made a turn for the worst as a strong criminal element encroached into the neighborhood.
Some of the more famous houses of disreputable souls during the Victorian Era included a notorious brothel in which Sugden's Topographical Dictionary described as "the most disreputable street in London, a haunt of thieves and loose women”. It was most definitely a place where crime abounded and it had the highest murder rate in London in the 19th century.
At the time of...
moreAccording to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “freak of nature” became a part of general vocabulary in 1847. The popularity of this term demonstrates the general public’s obsession in 1840’s Britain with the bizarre and abnormal. In this same year, Charlotte Bronte published her classic novel Jane Eyre. The connection between the appearance of the term “freak of nature” and Jane Eyre is interesting when considering the role of Bertha Mason in the context of the novel and the time period in which it was written. Bertha Mason is described as a lunatic in the novel and while there is a difference between lunacy and physical deformities or peculiarities, the manner in which Bertha Mason is presented in the novel clearly portrays her as a “freak of nature”. For example, once Mr. Rochester’s secret is revealed he theatrically proclaims, “I invite you all to come up to the house and visit Mrs. Poole’s patient, and my wife!” (292). Upon taking his audience...
moreA governess is a women employed in a private household to educate pupils (usually girls) in a range of “accomplishments” ranging from reading to drawing. Governesses became increasing popular through the Victorian era for both the Upper and Middle-classes. Women who became governesses were generally “ladies” of an upper or middle-class upbringing themselves that had fallen on hard times and required to work for their living. Generally, governesses would live in the household and receive a salary along with their room and board. Because of their class, governesses commonly found themselves outsiders within the household. The governess’s role as caregiver of the family children and (usually) higher social background made it difficult for a governess to find their position within the social hierarchy of the household. They could not socialize with their employers and often they were ostracized by the other servants of the household for their required deference. This meant that life as...
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