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.