Victorian Background

Victorian Background |
| The Romantic Period: began in 1798It ended in one of the following years:1832--Reform Bill is passed *
1837--Victoria becomes Queen
1850 -- Death of William WordsworthThe Victorian period: ended 1901 |

                         
                                                By-
                                                Priyakshee Choudhury
                                               

INTRODUCTION
The Victorian era is generally agreed to stretch through the reign of Queen Victoria from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. Victoria's reign lasted for 63 years and 216 days; the longest in British history up to the present day. It was a tremendously exciting period when many artistic styles, literary schools, as well as, social, political and religious movements flourished. It was a time of prosperity, broad imperial expansion, and great political reform. It is also the beginning of modern times.
For much of this century the term Victorian, which literally describes things and events (roughly) in the reign of Queen Victoria, conveyed connotations of "prudish," "repressed," and "old fashioned." Although such associations have some basis in fact, they do not adequately indicate the nature of this complex, paradoxical age that saw great expansion of wealth, power, and culture.
The Victorian age was not one, not single, simple, or unified, only in part because Victoria's reign lasted so long that it comprised several periods. Above all, it was an age of paradox and power. The Catholicism of the Oxford Movement, the Evangelical movement, the spread of the Broad Church, and the rise of Utilitarianism, socialism, Darwinism, and scientific Agnosticism, were all in their own ways characteristically Victorian; as were the prophetic writings of Carlyle and Ruskin, the criticism of Arnold, and the empirical prose of Darwin and Huxley; as were the fantasy of George MacDonald and the realism of George Eliot and...