If the Enlightenment had stressed the need to subordinate the emotions to the intellect, Romanticism took the opposite line and stressed instead the emotions as the fundamental source of truth, authenticity and their expression in art. As the middle class grew in numbers and confidence in the decades following the ending of the Napoleonic Wars and the rapid growth of prosperity with Britain's booming industry and trade, so the bourgeois virtues of regularity, hard work, seriousness, sobriety, modesty, piety and civic engagement began to prosper too. Novelists sought to encompass the often bewildering changes brought about by industrialization, and to urge upon their readers ways of dealing with them. In architecture, Classical ideals of proportion dominated, derived from the Roman writer Vitruvius; in sculpture, the ideal form was considered to be embodied in Classical works such as the Apollo Belvedere (5). Ironically it was to be through popular art and music, through posters and advertisements, and through film scores, that modernism found its way most forcefully into the wider public and gained a measure of acceptance usually denied it in the concert hall and the art gallery. Email. Yet the religious seriousness behind the painting was obvious. So too was the revival of interest in the Middle Ages, seen not as a dark period of credulity and superstition, but as an era of great deeds and deep emotions, far away from the prosaic and mechanical world of early industrial society. In the history of the United Kingdom, the Victorian era was the period of Queen Victoria's reign, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. Victorian art is well known for its distinctive style. Prezi’s Big Ideas 2021: Expert advice for the new year Above all, it was an age of paradox and power. During this time, the main subjects of paintings were nobility, military and historical scenes. He was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa by London University in 2013. The critic W. R. Greg thought that novels were becoming addictive, numbing the brain with their endless supply of descriptive prose. Romanticism depicted the wildness of nature as something not to be tamed and ordered, but to be admired as sublime and picturesque, more powerful than the ephemeral creations of humanity, as in Turner'sSnowstorm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps (10) - note the Classical theme. But the secret of its success lay in the first instance in its appeal to contemporary readers. Victorian Britain, like the periods before it, was interested in literature (see Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and William Makepeace Thackeray), theatre and the arts (see Aesthetic movement and Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood), and music, drama, and opera were widely attended. The idea of the tortured genius was central to the Romantic ideal of art. The generation that grew up during the industrial age started believing in accuracy and attention to detail. The Victorian era, as it is generally referred to, starts from 1830's and lasts till almost the end of nineteenth century. At the centre of all this work was the home, its delights, its sanctity, its loss, its recovery; familiar territory to the bourgeois reader. In my next lecture, on 13th December, I'll turn to the subject of 'death and the Victorians' and look at some of the social and physical realities underpinning what often seems to us in the twenty-first century the morbid and faintly ridiculous fascination that the subject had for contemporaries. Seen on stage, the stories they featured were often presented with songs and musical interludes, merging into the music hall, which emerged as a form of popular entertainment in the 1850s. The United Kingdom physically extended its borders, at one point claiming nearly a quarter of the world through colonization and becoming a top political power. But the culturalavant-garde, as it came to be known, had little or no resonance in the world of middle-class cultural consumers. George Eliot's Felix Holt, the Radical, for example, published in 1866 during the debates about the extension of voting rights that was passed by Parliament the following year, portrayed the events surrounding the passage of the First Reform Act in 1832 and made a strong plea for the education of the masses. ©Professor Richard J Evans, Gresham College 2010, Gresham College receives no government funding. Such innovations linked Britain and Europe to what were widely regarded as 'primitive' cultures as European empires cemented their hold on their African and Asian colonies. When the young Spanish artist Pablo Picasso first saw African art in a Paris exhibition in 1907, he began to experiment with incorporating its forms into his own musical compositions. The series has sold more than 250,000 copies in English and has been translated into twelve foreign languages. (39) What was a serious subject for the Victorians, imbued with religious and moral significance, had become a subject for witticisms at the end of the century. This stems from the image of Queen Victoria—and her husband, Prince Albert. Popular novels were themselves sometimes used as the basis for melodramas such as Spring-Heeled Jack, (27) which depicted a villainous figure able to jump over rooftops as he evaded his pursuers. Usually featuring a villain, a damsel in distress, a brave but guileless young hero, an aged parent and a comic character, they combined the themes of love and crime, and often invited audience participation, especially by hissing the villain whenever he appeared. Religion and Science While the early editions were heavily criticized for what one reviewer called their assumption that families would be too 'squeamish' to read Shakespeare aloud in the original, as early as 1820 the Edinburgh Review was declaring that 'it is better every way that what cannot be spoken, and ought not to have been written, should now cease to be printed'. Driven on by the Evangelical revival of the early 19th century, societies and voluntary associations sprang up all over Britain, and in many of them, middle-class women played leading roles. Folk art traditions began to be lost as people migrated to the towns and found other sources of entertainment such as the music hall. Just like any other homemade art form, it quickly grew commercialized, and mail-order shops sprang up that promised to take a loved one’s hair and return it some weeks later as a beautiful piece of wearable art. Like the television soap-operas of the present day, it allowed consumers to inhabit a world parallel to their own, where moral and social dramas were played out in ways that were recognizably similar to their own lives, but more eventful and exciting, and which sometimes prompted the desire to subscribe to the reforming spirit of the age. Prose fiction addressed overwhelmingly the present. The characteristic Romantic figure was not an artist, writer or composer bound in a web of patronage and convention, but a lone figure such as the German painter (9) Caspar David Friedrich'sWanderer above a Sea of Fog (1818), confronting a sublime Romantic landscape after conquering its peaks, contemplating an unknown and uncertain future. Of course, the realist novel was far more than any of this: it enabled the writer to explore in unprecedented depth and with subtlety and sensitivity the complexities of human feeling at a time when old certainties were dissolving; thus it transcended its immediate subject and remained alive and relevant long after the problems it addressed on the surface had passed into history. Arnold saw this study as a kind of moral and mental discipline that would equip boys with the sound principles needed for adult life. (13) The topic might have been shocking, but the message was thoroughly conventional. The term Victorian has acquired a range of connotations, including that of a particularly strict set of moral standards, often hypocritically applied. Death indeed formed a central concern of the Victorians, and how to deal with it was a central question they faced. At the same time, however, Romanticism was also a revolt against the social hierarchies and rigidities of the eighteenth century. 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