Essays on Victorian Literature

Victorian age, as the word itself is telling us, is the period of English and world history marked by the reign of Queen Victoria, the most long-lived from all English emperors. The adopted timing of this age coincides with the years of Queen Victoria’s reign, respectively from 1837. until 1901. During her sixty four year long ruling, history remembers this period as the “Victorian age”In this period the habit of reading widely spreads, and in England appears a group of writers who were called ...

“For men, love was important, but for women, it was absolutely necessary.” Great Expectations by Charles Dickens takes place in the Victorian Era, when relationships were formal, classy, and altogether proper. Victorian Era relationships were drastically different from relations in the twenty-first century. In Great Expectations, the main character, Pip, develops many relationships. The most notable person that Pip associates with is the taunting, self-centered Estella. This paper will ...

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens was published in 1860, and is widely regarded as examplary for the Victorian Era, as the novel seems to reflect upon the great social changes which occured during that time in Britain. The Victorian Era saw great transformations for the society, not only in terms of the emergence of the idea of the 'New Woman' and thus for the questioning of the patriarchy, but also regarding the realisation of the slow decline of the British Empire and, caused largely due ...

Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula was published in 1897 and it still stands as his greatest masterpiece. The novel could not find an immediate success but it has inspired several films and other literary pieces of work. Stoker’s intention was to explain the anxieties of his time such as the repercussions and consequences of abandoning traditional beliefs, scientific progress and female sexuality. We must be quite sure that at that time Stoker could not imagine his words associated with sex, but in ...

H. Rider Haggard’s novel King Solomon’s Mines (1855) is a popular novel that sometimes has been read as an adventure story in which a white man, Quatermain, travels into unknown and dangerous territory and fight against dangerous natives. However, Zachary David Cady offers an alternative reading and point of view by claiming that “the novel was intended for an adolescent audience and contain numerous direct representations of Victorian masculinity”. The novel makes it clear from the beginning: ...

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) can be read from a feminist perspective, as Mina Murray-Harker, one of the most complex character in the novel, is a mixture between the Victorian woman ideals. That is why she deserves a profound analysis in order to discuss whether she is or not a depiction of the “New Woman”. “Initially Mina Murray is one of those secondary characters born to serve as man’s helpmate”, but readers will see that this fact changes during the novel’s evolution.“Dracula is ...

Haggard narrates in King Solomon’s Mines the adventure of three men that appear to be three perfect examples of white manliness. However, Allan Quatermain, who is the narrator of the novel, does not act like a hero . Additionally, Haggard also includes the fear of the female Other, which is represented not only by a witch but also by a young beautiful woman. In this novel, men identity and men power are challenged by the depiction of the narrator and especially by the role of women, but they ...

What may have been one of Britain’s greatest times took place during Queen Victoria’s reign lasting from 1837 to her death in 1901. This period, commonly known as The Victorian Era, was one of great change and national confidence for the people of Great Britain. Society observed increasing turns to romanticism and mysticism during this time, and there was a definite resistance to the rationalism and theories of the previous era, The Georgian Period. And as great as it was, The Victorian Period ...

King Solomon’s Mines is a novel by the English Victorian writer Henry Rider Haggard which was published in 1885. The novel, which became a best seller in a short period of time, tells the story of a group of adventurous men leaded by Allan Quatermain on their quest to find Curtis’ brother, who had gone on an expedition in search of King Solomon’s mines. Many themes have been subject of study within King Solomon’s Mines pages, for example, the good versus the evil, the British imperialism, ...

Victorian women were viewed as fragile and more qualified for family obligations as opposed to outside political and business issues. As women tried to push for a more independent lifestyle, those who opposed gender equality often argued that they served better as wives and moms than as co- workers and politicians. Charles Dickens ' portrayal of Mr. Gradgrind as a heartless, oppressive father and husband who rules over Mrs. Gradgrind and forces Louisa into an unhappy marriage sums up the ...

Dracula converts the society’s conventions into grotesque elements. Religion is deformed by Count Dracula and used to transform women into a demonic-being. This status of fear makes ordinary people to defeat the enemy that comes from the outside, giving the fact that the Count is a foreigner. People are anxious because their society values are changing and transforming their ‘angel in the house’ into ‘The new Women’. Dracula makes his feminine subjects be sexually aggressive challenging the ...

In the 19th century, Christianity suffered a decline of faith. Scientific discoveries and the publication of rational studies of the Bible as a historical book and not as God’s word, like The life of Jesus (1808-74) from David Strauss, contributed to the decrease of the Christian belief. Moreover, the publication of theories like On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural selection (1859) from Charles Darwin enforced the idea that God was not the Creator. On the other side, the literature of ...

     Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White shows the relationship between madness and gender in the female characters of Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie. However, although there was a larger number of female patients in the asylum, Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie are unconventional choices for the Victorian ‘madwoman’, as they appear to conform to the Victorian ‘angel of the house’ ideal. Lyn Pykell argues that “the classic nineteenth-century madwoman is the deviant, energetic woman who defies ...

Nowadays the female characters have more important roles in novels than they used to, especially if the novel is all about the male figures. When thinking about a story of strong and determined adventurers, most of the times what comes to mind is the figure of a masculine character, (because women were simply not enough to be like that). When this novel was written, in 1885, women had to stay at home and be the perfect angel in the house: have kids and take care of them as well as of the ...

The majority of the readers of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) focus on the Imperialism and how white men overcome the difficulties and save Kukuanaland from the tyrant King Twala. I agree here that Haggard wants to present how men overcome difficulties in the land where they have never been. It is a masculine novel because men are represented as fighters for the truth who are not afraid to die as long as the justice is ruling the society. On the contrary, women are represented ...