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In every period of revolt are buried the seeds of convention. So the revolutionary spirit which was active in England in the first years of the nineteenth century was tempered by that natural conservatism of the English which has always led them to prefer slow processes of change and reform to the violence of open revolt. By a slow but steady process the English adjusted themselves in the nineteenth century to the forces of political and social revolution, with the result that the world of George V [1910-1936] differed vastly from that of George III [1760-1820]. Much of the tumult and the shouting of the continental struggles of the early nineteenth century died away with the defeat and exile of Napoleon in 1815. But the leaven of revolution and reform continued to work, and to its close the century was a period of ferment and adjustment. The age of Victoria [1837-1901] was serious age, a complex era that stamped itself on almost every literary form to which it gave expression. To understand Victorian literature, therefore, it is necessary first to know something of the storm and stress of the times. The progress of these social forces covers many decades. It is not possible to point to any exact date and say, "In this year the changes began." Yet if this must be done, the year 1832 may well be chosen. In this year was passed the first of the great political reform bills that mark the advance of democracy in nineteenth-century England. In some respects it is a date almost as important as 1215, the year of Magna Charta. In literature, too, the year is notable. In 1832 died Sir Walter Scott, the most completely typical novelist of the romantic movement; and on the Continent the year marks the passing of the German poet Goethe. In 1832 appeared the first collected poems of Alfred Tennyson, in many ways the most Victorian of Victorian poets, the poet laureate, and the bardic voice of his age. It was not until five years later that Victoria, granddaughter of George III, ascended the throne, succeeding her stuffy uncles George IV [1820- 1830] and William IV [1830-1837], but 1837 is a less significant date than 1832. What date should be chosen for the end of this era of democracy, science, and industrialism? The period might be carried down to the end of Victoria's long reign in 1901. But again, the date of the queen's death is of no particular significance. She had become in her declining years hardly more than a revered symbol of her empire's power, and at least two decades before her death there were evidences in society and in literature of the beginnings of a break with Victorianism. The year 1880 may therefore be selected as marking the distinct waning though not the definite end of those elements in English life and letters which bear the name Victorian. This date marks the end of a half century that is sometimes sneered at by a later generation as too "moral"; but because of its fullness, richness, and complexity, it will take its place as one of the most important periods in English life and letters. Nationalism and Imperialism The expansion of a tiny island kingdom into a world empire had its inception in the growth of English commerce in the reign of Queen Elizabeth [1558-1603] or earlier. The physical expansion, however, occurred largely in the reign of Queen Victoria [1837-1901], when the British flag was carried by diplomacy and military conquest into almost every part of the habitable world. During the nineteenth century England became definitely Great Britain; she swung her trident over the seven seas, seized the channels and the ports necessary to her expansion and gradually extended her rule over a territory five times the size of all Europe. She acquired Egypt and the Sudan, the home of Kipling 's Fuzzy-Wuzzies. Her control of the Suez Canal (1875) gave her command of the eastern part of the Mediterranean just as her fortifications at Gibraltar gave her command of the western part. In the Crimean War of 1854 she blocked Russia's purpose to establish a fleet on the Black Sea, and in India she guarded the northern passes against possible Russian invasion by land. The repression of the bloody Indian mutiny of 1857 was followed by Victoria's assumption of the title first of Sovereign of India and, twenty years later, of Empress of India. In the later partition of Africa, Great Britain gained a dominion at the southern end of that continent. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand provided a new type of colonial connection by becoming the "free nations" of the empire under independent governments. It is doubtful, indeed, whether the British Empire could have expanded so widely under the eighteenth-century theory of colonization. In the reign of George III the political conception that the colony existed solely for the purpose of contributing to the wealth of the mother country was exploded both by the violence of the American Revolution and by the growth of a democratic spirit in England. Colonial policy under Victoria, especially as it was concerned with subjects of English blood, was vastly more liberal and generous. And although certain parts of the British Empire were bought -- to use Kipling's vivid phrases "with the sword and the flame" and "salted down with the bones" of British soldiers, a much vaster area merged happily, peacefully, and democratically into the great empire. It might seem that this rapid growth of kingdom into empire would have resulted in tempering the English spirit of nationalism and bringing the island into a closer and more friendly association with its continental neighbors. Some connection with them was, of course, inevitable. In the problems incident to the partitioning of Africa, the commercial invasion of China and Japan, and the curbing of Russia's ambitions, the British had not only to sit at the council table but also to engage in armed alliances with the continental powers. On the whole, however, the England of Victoria's reign was self-centered and nationalistic. Wealthy and self-satisfied, she could not believe that any country outside the empire was necessary to her happiness and well-being, and her insularity developed into a national smugness and priggishness which aroused the disgust of her own critics and prophets. Part of this insularity was native to her character. Part, however, grew out of her fear of entangling alliances with the nations of the Continent. Democracy was slowly being forced upon her by industrial changes and political reforms. But democracy acquired as the French had acquired it she did not want, and she watched with troubled and suspicious eye the various political disturbances of her nearest neighbor. In The Princess Tennyson represents his typical beef-eating English gentleman as looking across the channel at the "pale shores of France" and praying God's blessing on "the narrow seas that keep her off”; and this sentiment was echoed by most Victorian gentlemen. Finally, the English were so taken up with problems at home that they did not have time to be overmuch concerned with those of other nations. Problems of a growing democratic spirit in politics and problems of social and industrial adjustment needed to be solved and the English girt up their loins manfully and struggled in their own island to bring order out of what seemed to many to be hopeless chaos. Thus it is that Victorian literature is distinctively English. Occasionally it has a continental or outlandish flavor; on the whole, however, it bears conspicuously the stamp of its native origin. The image shows a copy of one page from “Democracy, Science, and Industrialism” from: “The Literature of England, An Anthology and a History”, Volume 2, by George B. Woods, Homer A. Watt and George K. Anderson, Published by Scott, Foresman and Co., New York, 1941, pp. 415-424. “Democracy, Science, and Industrialism” from: “The Literature of England, An Anthology and a History”, Volume 2, by George B. Woods, Homer A. Watt and George K. Anderson, Published by Scott, Foresman and Co., New York, 1941, pp. 415-424.