Victorian era: Religion

Victorian era: Religion

When Queen Victoria ascended the British throne in 1837, it marked the beginning of a promising new age The Victorian era. This era was known as a period in which astonishing innovations and changes were made. During this period the British society started to discuss issues such as democracy, feminism, unionization of workers and socialism, but it did not represent a great change in terms of religion. The Victorian Age was beyond doubt a religious age. It is believed that because it was many years under the impact of the excesses of the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror and the wars of Napoleon, the skepticism and rationalism of the enlightenment had given way to a renewal of Christian faith.

At those times the Bible was taken as the absolute  truth, and it was the foundation of moral behaviour. During this period, textbooks and games were based on religion and morality. It was believed that if religion was accepted by all, the morality would become the end to crime and poverty. As many Victorians believed that the Bible was the best, indeed in many cases the only guide to a moral life, it was frequently and widely read by people of every social class. What is more, there were lots of religious stories.  Chained bibles were to be found on railway stations, and sermons were regularly printed and sometimes they became best-sellers.

A great number of people used to go to the Church  at least once and probably twice, every Sunday. Churches were crowded, and although some people complained that industrialization and urbanization were alienating the masses from religion, there was scant evidence for that in church attendance figures. When the first national census revealed in 1851 that no fewer than 5 million people had not attended church the previous Sunday there was much shaking of heads among the pious, but of course this did not mean they failed to attend every Sunday, nor that they had ceased to believe in God. Church and chapel attendance did not fall between 1851 and 1881, and in absolute terms actually grew up to around 1906, though it fell relative to the population. Nevertheless, religion was to be found everywhere.

By mid-century, however, religious fervour of this kind had declined sharply, and the dangers to Christian faith seemed to have become more acute than ever when Charles Darwin  published The Origin of Species in 1859. It opened with the boldest possible statement that species had not been made in their final form by God.

To sum up, during the Victorian era the British and Irish society were having a really bad time, so as they needed to believe that everything was going to be better, they started to go the Church because it was probably there where they found a quiet place to spend their time.

Frankenstein

   Frankenstein

Dr. Frankenstein finds himself unable to “mother” the being he creates. Why does Shelley characterize Victor in this way? What does this choice say about the role of women during Shelley’s era? Discuss the significance of parent-child relationships and birth references throughout the novel.

When I first read the novel Frankenstein, it did not shock me, but by the time I could relate it with the Industrial Revolution I thought that it is a really great novel. Throughout her novel Mary Shelley emphasized many drawbacks of this famous revolution that I had never noticed, such as the insensitive way in which women were forced by the society, let’s say, to engender children in order to obtain cheap workforce. The general view has always been that this revolution was really benifecial, but after reading this book, in my view, it was full of downsides, and I would like to describe some of them.

During The Industrial Revolution factories spread rapidly, so the owners of mills, mines and other forms of industry needed large numbers of workers, and children were the ideal employees since they were not big enough or educated enough to argue, to complain or to demand high wages.  It may sound strange, but parents were willing to have children in order to let them work in factories because that way they would have higher incomes. Apparently they never thought about the fact that their children would suffer a lot if they grew up without them, and this was probably what happened with Victor while he was creating his monster. He just prioritized his personal goal, and he did not think about the fact that the being, he was creating, would have feelings, so it would feel abandoned and rejected by society.

More children were necessary, so there was a high birth rate, and this rapid increase in birth rates clearly had an impact upon the physical strength of the mothers. What was more, women had to work right up to and straight after the day of the child’s birth for financial reasons, leaving the care of the newborn child to older relatives, so at those times women did not have neither the time nor the physical capacity to raise their children.  This  is clearly represented in the novel by Justine, a young girl adopted into the Frankenstein household while Victor was growing up, and she was in  charge of bringing him up.

As we can see women were ‘creating’ instead of having babies because they were not looking after their children. They were just giving a helping hand to the owners of the factories. This issue is closely related to the monster that Victor Frankenstein created, and then he found himself unable to ‘mother’ it, since he did not have the capacity to raise that ‘thing’ that he had invented with a specific purpose. All that glitters is not gold, the Industrial Revolution provoked good and bad changes. It generated a lot of new jobs, but it also created many monsters, such as those mothers and those children who were brought up without their caring mothers.

It is important to emphasize the fact that throughout the novel there is clear evidence that Victor Frankenstein keeps his creation in secret, yet the ugly creation  tries to integrate himself into human social patterns. But everyone who saw him dropped out him, and it was his feeling of abandonment which compels him to seek revenge against his creator. That feeling of anger was probably the same that children during the Industrial Revolution felt when they noticed that their mothers were working and they  were always with strangers.

To sum up, I would like to reflect on this: both Victor and those mothers engender people in order to obtain something back. To Victor it was the knowledge that he could create a person, and to the mothers it was the money. But  this matter does not really change their lives in a positive way since they might had felt a deep guilt when they noticed that neither Frankenstein nor those children  had a family that raised them, and included them. That way their creations would never be happy because their ‘parents’ just think about themselves.

Created with Padlet

The French Revolution

The French Revolution

France was having a really bad time during the 18th century,  the French government was deeply in debt and it wanted to restore its financial status through an unpopular taxation scheme, which enlarged  the  division between the nobility, the clergy and the bourgeoisie. In addition, the weather was not good, so farmers and peasants had smaller incomes. For these reasons France's population was forced to organize a revolution, in order to demand a change.  

Being part of the clergy or  the nobility meant that they had almost authority over the peasants. The population was divided into three estates. The first and second estates were made up of the clergy and the nobility while the third estate was made up by the bourgeoisie (wage earners and the peasantry).   The first and second estates were exempt from most taxes while the peasants had to pay taxes to their lord, to the king and to the church. That is why one of the major causes of the French Revolution was the fact that the peasants were forced to maintain the Feudal Lords and the clergy.

France was getting poorer.  It had spent a lot of money on expensive wars, and it continued spending too much money on luxuries. The weather was terrible, there were heavy rains, hard winters,  hot summers, and what was more, France suffered  three very bad  harvests, so as they could not plant seeds, peasants and farmers had smaller incomes. Many French farmers became unemployed, the population was starving, and France was getting into a financial crisis.

As a result of this crisis, the representatives of the third estate declared themselves a  national assembly representing the 96% of the population, feeling themselves as the true parliament. These members met at the Royal Tennis Court until the king agreed to meet their demands, and thus became part of the  Assembly.

In 1774 Louis XVI came to the throne . He was an absolute monarch, so he had complete power. Louis believed that his power had been given to him by God. Louis was dominated by his wife, Marie-Antoinette, whose brother was the Austrian Emperor. She was criticized by many for the way she interfered with Louis’s attempts to govern the country. On 5 – 6 October, 1789, the Paris mob came to Louis’ palace at Versailles and attacked. They captured Louis and his family, and imprisoned him in Paris. Louis could have ordered his guards to fire on the mob, but refused to do so. Louis claimed that he played the role of an English style ‘constitutional monarch’. The National Assembly decided to keep Louis as their constitutional monarch (a monarch who has to obey the rules of a constitution). On September 3rd 1791, the constitution was proclaimed and Louis swore an oath of loyalty to it. On 30th September 1791, the Assembly declared its work finished. It seemed the revolution was over, but in 1793, Louis was executed.

  The period following Louis’s execution became known as “The Terror” in France. Thousands of people suspected of anti- revolutionary activities or of helping France’s enemies were sent to the guillotine. Many areas of France were rebelling against the new radical Jacobin government. The Jacobins ordered 300 people to be executed by cannon fire as the guillotine was too slow. Many people were towed into the middle of the river and suck. By mid 1794, the Terror had died out. Many people looked for someone to blame for the Reign of Terror. The leading Jacobin, Robespierre found himself at the centre of the blame, was arrested and looked up. In July 1794, Robespierre found himself facing the guillotine.

To sum up, we can say that The French Revolution was a consequence of poverty. At those times, there were too many inequalities between the clergy, the nobility  and the bourgeoisie in France, so its poor population decided to take the power, and they started to rule themselves. As time passed by, they forgot the popular interests, and they began to govern, in order to achieve their personal  interests.

Britain under rule of a mentally diseased King? Movie: The Madness of King George (1994)

Do we all know what a trope is? One may or may not have a basic description of it. In practice, it seems that the term it is only reserved for linguists. One thing about not knowing this technical word is that we can get really confused about its deeper meaning. Let us take the word madness, for instance. This one, of all, it is certainly a dangerous word. At least it is from the perspective of literary tropes and translation. Madness covers a wide range of meanings but when it comes to be related to history it could be troublesome. All in all, madness was confusing enough that even today is a hard topic to discuss. In the words to come we will see that avoiding a more technical or specific word for madness was in purpose (perhaps it was fictionalized).

One image is worth a thousand words… this may be true and so does music. The first thing one recognises through the first black screen is the florid rococo type of music. The famous musician George Fenton performs Georg Friedrich Händel baroque music to bring the epoch come to live. Along with this, the outfits are opulent and the whole set in brilliant.

Another advantage the movie had is that the writer, Alan Bennett studied History at Oxford University. He specialised in medieval history teaching and he is (he continues to be) also a researcher. As it is presented here, from Bennett’s point of view, the King begins a sort of a strange journey from sanity to dementia towards sanity. Of all the crazy things the King has done, shouting obscenities and behaving erratically became the norm. But, again, it has been a journey that came, with some affectation, to a happy ending. The renewed and cured King was ruling once again.

Due to the fact that insanity cannot be cured even today, this is whether a facade or at least it is charged with enough affectation to make it rarely believable. Lately, the illness was  supposed to be “porphyria”, that, of all the illnesses that one can come up with is the most suitable, two hundred and fifty years later. It seems that it is not with a sense of irony. Of course, it serves as well to cover the political and disastrous personal life that King had. In a way, and presented like this, it is essentially comical or at least a satire on the whole.

With all these information now presented, it is undeniable that it is also a historical satire. by madness the historians only refer to the first entry on the dictionary while many believe the king was insane which was really impossible. It was stated that madness cannot be cured and this idea is supported by the Web Medical Mental Health (webmd.com/mental-health). It is true that today one may find a suitable drug to lessen the symptoms but not in those times. The whole idea of using the word “madness” was politically “correct” in order not to destroy the weak reputation surrounding George. Avoiding technical words is a treat  that has been used seen the beginning of time by politicians, liars and of course… kings. Finally, Britain was not under the rule of a mentally diseased King.

George III (image)

George III