High Victorian Culture

by Morse, David

• ISBN13: 9780814755044
• ISBN10: 0814755046
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-04-01
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

In fascinating detail. . . . [Morse] touches on many topics, yet keeps separate Victorians of very different cultural worlds. . . . Mid-Victorian Britain memorably presented. --ChoiceCovering the four decades from the accession to the throne by Queen Victoria in 1837 to her proclamation as Empress of India in 1877, High Victorian Culture is an in-depth study of Victorian literature and culture in its heyday. The age of Dickens, Carlyle, Mill, George Eliot, Tennyson, and Browning, it is a time of growing national self-confidence and of impressive industrial, scientific and literary achievements. It is an age also marked by dislocation and uncertainty, in which certain familiar landmarks of a society crumble and disappear. It is a world haunted, in a way, by its own strategic silences, as a society that is in many ways profoundly undemocratic finds itself driven by democratic rhetoric. It is a culture in which the freedom of speech and openness of discussion it claims to tout so highly can actually masks prospects of revelation deeply disturbing to some its finest cultural practioners. Extending his capacity for meshing the economic, political, religous, and artistic influences on literature to a new era, David Morse offers a new cultural perspective on the first four decades of the Victorian era.

Table of Contents

Author's Note
Introduction	p. 1
England	p. 47
The Menacing World: Dickens, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, and Thackeray	p. 122
Keeping the Faith: Newman, F.D. Maurice, Tennyson and Trollope	p. 218
Victorian Intellectuals and their Dilemmas: Mill, Huxley, George Eliot and Matthew Arnold	p. 299
The Necessity of Art: Browning, Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites	p. 394
Breaking the Silence: Collins, Meredith and Hardy	p. 478
Notes	p. 531
Bibliography	p. 539
Index	p. 548
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