13. Victorian literature, Shelley, Wilde

13. VICTORIAN LITERATURE
SHELLEY, WILDE

VICTORIAN TIMES

• Main values: money, materiality, to get married and do nothing, have children, not going to school, staying at home (women), class stratification, industrialization, urbanization, gentrification (gentry = middle class)

• Lowe class people – workhouses, child labour, poor life conditions, fallen women, criminality

• Territorial expansion, improvement

• Caring and baring of children, women – trophies, hour glass, perception of beauty, sex objects only, domestic violence

• Child labour, chimney sweeps, in mines, no education – education acts – until age od 8, then 12 or 13

• Harsh underground, the surface is clean

• Sexuality is an absolute taboo

• Urbanisation, dirty streets and violence, alcoholism, poverty, prostitution, child labour

• Start of the police institution

• Art for art’s sake: art was a source of beauty, morality, aesthetic movement, art is only to be beautiful, doesn’t have to have a meaning, but even when I will look at something it can give me something

X concept od leisure time, inventions

• Charles Dickens – Oliver Twist

  • Wrote about social environment

  • Was very famous

• Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species

  • Scientific research

  • Evolution theory

OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900)

• Not fitting in – was Irish

• Passionate about languages and literature

• Epigrams, poems, drama (mainly), short stories

• Genius, witty, funny

• Good education (Oxford), classical art

• Upper class – he was making fun about the class he came from – hypocrisy

• Homosexuality – he was gay, but had a wife and two kids – looks – decadence, stories about unfulfilled love

  • Immoral = affairs with young boys

  • Hypocrisy: gay community, hidden places, where it was allowed to be gay – but no one talked about it

  • He came out as gay → prison → devastation → died while being sick and completely alone

• He was a kind man in real life, he was used by his lover Bertie x he was really critical in his books

• He was popular during his life

TEHEMS – hypocrisy, pretending everything is fine, believing in the God, saying one thing but doing the other

- religion was important – Victorian values, Victorian family, man provides for the family, strict upbringing

- aging – scared of getting old

- beauty – it is not beautiful, it is not longer useful, beauty od people, handsomeness

• Work:

  • Epigram = a short saying or poem that expresses an idea in a clever, funny way

    • "I can resist everything except temptation".

  • Play: “The importance of being earnest” – wise, Jak je důležité míti Filipa

  • Story: "The Nightingale and the Rose"

  • Novel: “The Pictures of Dorian Gray” – only novel

  • Poem: “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”

  • Comedy: “A Woman of No Importance”, “An Ideal Husband”

  • Fairy tales: tragic end, not for children – “The happy prince and other tales”

  • Tragedy: “Salome”

  • Political essays

  • One of the main topics: young and beauty

• ”The Picture of Dorian Gray“:

  • Published before Wilde reached his fame