The Victorian Age

Over the course of Queen Victoria's reign, London's population grew from about 2 million to

6 million. [Between 1837 (when Queen Victoria ascended the throne) and 1901 (when she died) the population of London grew from about 2 million to well over 6 million—an unparalleled population boom.]

In 1867, Queen Victoria was named

Empress of India.

Which Victorian playwright was particularly associated with "the problem play"?

George Bernard Shaw

What European city was the center of culture immediately prior to the Victorian period?

Paris

Which of the following is true?

Queen Victoria did not support voting rights for women.

What was the subtitle of Benjamin Disraeli's 1845 novel, Sybil?

The Two Nations [points to a common focus for many Victorian authors: the sharp divide between the haves and the have-nots in industrial England]

Which of the follow authors was avowedly enthusiastic about England's fast-pace economic and political growth?

Thomas Babington Macaulay [Many other Victorian authors were much more skeptical, however.]

The prose of Henry James tends to present which of the following?

Victorian affluence and elegance

Which of the following is true?

Victorian novels often focused on social relations.

Which author argued that nonfiction prose was "the special and opportune art of the modern world"?

Walter Pater

Victorian poets were often uneasy with the general public expectation that poetry be

didactic.

Queen Victoria is generally associated with

domestic propriety. [In many ways the Victorian age reflects values that Queen Victoria herself embodied: moral responsibility and domestic propriety.]

The Victorian period is often divided into which of the following?

early, mid, and late periods. [early (1830-1848); mid (1848-1870); and late (1870-1901). We often also recognize the final decade of the nineteenth century (the 1890s) as a transitional period between the Victorian era and Modernism.]

What does fin de siècle mean?

end of the century

The 1832 Reform Law

extended voting rights. [The 1832 Reform Bill extended voting rights and redistributed parliamentary representation. While this was an important first step in democratizing political power, voting rights were still limited to men who owned property. The 1832 Reform Bill marked, for many Victorians, the beginning of a new age of political power unlike any they had ever experienced.]

The Chartists

fought for working-class rights. [A group called the Chartists organized themselves to fight for workers' rights; workers (including women and children) otherwise enjoyed no protection from industrial abuses. The Chartist organization fell apart by 1848 but their efforts set the stage for real and meaningful reform in the future.]

Higher Criticism approached the Bible in terms of

history. [New discoveries in the sciences during the mid-Victorian period led to a new mode of reading the Bible: Higher Criticism approached the Bible not as a divine and infallible text but rather as a historically produced set of documents that reflected the prejudices and limitations of their human writers.]

Which of the following had a major effect on Victorian narrative fiction?

serial publication. [The practical reality of publishing in serial form had a direct impact on Victorian narrative style, including how plots were paced, organized, and developed. The experience of reading fiction in serial form was probably similar to the modern experience of watching a television program that unfolds in a series of hour or half-hour installments: the plot is paced so that readers/viewers are left "hanging" at precisely the rights points.]

The Crystal Palace was the centerpiece of what event?

the Great Exhibition [Mid-Victorian England was proud of its progress in science and technology, as is evidenced by the Crystal Palace, centerpiece of the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Crystal Palace was designed using modern architectural principles and materials, and its role in the Great Exhibition was to showcase the "progress" made possible by science and industry.]

Queen Victoria was the first British monarch

to be photographed.