Paper 3 Context and General Knowledge Flashcards
How does Max Noradu define the fin de siècle?
“Practical emancipation from traditional discipline”
What did J.S. Mill say about the rapid change in the Victorian period?
“the times are pregnant with change”
How many prostitutes were estimated to live in London in 1870 by William Acton?
219,000, “or one in twelve”
What is a ‘cottage industry’?
A small manufacturing business that often operates in the home of the craftsperson
How does James Eli Adams define the ‘dandy’?
“The dandy incarnates a sardonic, detached elegance loosely derived from the model of Byron by way of “Beau” Brummel”
Who wrote ‘Sartor Resartus’?
Thomas Carlyle
Which virtues did ‘Sartor Resartus’ champion?
Those considered distinctly ‘Victorian’: duty, faith, self-denial, earnestness, “the gospel of work”
Which two strands of thought served to attack aristocracy during the Victorian period?
Benthamism (utilitarianism), Evangelicalism
Which two social developments did Evangelicals spearhead?
Abolition of slave trade (under William Wilberforce), laws governing factory conditions
How did principles of piety and self-discipline become vehicles for social change/criticism in Britain?
Aristocratic profligacy showed unfitness to rule, underlying principle that Britain would best be governed by those who could govern themselves
List of factors which sought to change/develop Victorian society + outlook.
- Industrialisation
- ‘Corn Laws’ and emergence of middle class
- Dandyism, antipathy to Dandyism
- Utilitarianism and Evangelicalism
- Rise of industrial capitalism
- Cult of domesticity + separate spheres
- Renewed class division
Robert Southey’s rebuke at Charlotte Brontë’s writerly aspirations
“Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.”
John Ruskin’s idealistic sketch of the domestic sphere in ‘Sesame and Lilies’
“The place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division”
What are James Eli Adams’s views toward ‘sympathy’ in Victorian literature?
‘Sympathy encouraged belief in the fundamental harmony of rich and poor, typically grounded in the Wordsworthian faith that “we have all of us one human heart.”
James Eli Adams on views towards poor Victorian women
“Poor women were always more readily exposed to sexual suspicion, for they lacked the shelter - both literal and figurative - that domesticity provided the affluent.”
