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The Victorian Age section of Norton Topics Online sheds light on the debates over British imperialism, the role of women, and the conditions of industrial workers which provoked conflict and change in mid- and late-nineteenth-century Britain; a fourth topic cluster is devoted to the relationship between poetry and painting which inspired and preoccupied writers and artists in this period.

Suggested uses of Norton Topics Online: The Victorian Age with The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Seventh Edition (anthology page references for the new Seventh Edition are included below):

Industrialism: Progress or Decline?

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Cry of the Children NAEL7.2.1174 • Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present NAEL7.2.1110 • John Ruskin, Stones of Venice NAEL7.2.1432 • Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy NAEL7.2.1528 • William Blake, The Chimney Sweeper NAEL7.2.46 • William Wordsworth, Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways NAEL7.2.299

Industrialism: Progress or Decline? is a vital companion to the section of the same title in the Norton Anthology. The portrayals of laboring life gathered here provide valuable contexts and contrasts to the analyses of industrial labor by Carlyle, Ruskin and Arnold, and are necessary background to works by writers from Wordsworth to Dickens which seek to capture the spirit of the industrial age.

The Woman Question: The Victorian Debate About Gender

• John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women NAEL7.2.1155 • Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh NAEL7.2.1180 • Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Princess NAEL7.2.1225 • George Eliot, Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft NAEL7.2.1456 • Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man [Natural Selection and Sexual Selection] NAEL7.2.1686 • Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren's Profession NAEL7.2.1810 • George Meredith, Modern Love NAEL7.2.1570 • Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman NAEL7.2.166 • Anna Laetitia Barbauld, The Rights of Women NAEL7.2.27

The Woman Question supplements and develops the section of the same title in the Norton Anthology. This topic cluster is an essential companion to texts debating women's roles and rights by John Stuart Mill, George Eliot and, from the previous era, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Mary Wollstonecraft. The selections gathered here will be equally valuable as aids in interpreting representations of womanhood in works such as Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Tennyson's Princess, and Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession. This site will shed light on why Darwin's theories of natural selection disrupted Victorian ideas of natural femininity, and clarify the context out of which George Meredith's disenchanted sonnet sequence Modern Love emerged. Students will also be encouraged to consider how the woman question and the related marriage question lent themselves to novelization in the Victorian era.

The Painterly Image in Poetry

• Alfred, Lord Tennyson NAEL7.2.1198 • Robert Browning, The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church NAEL7.2.1359   Andrea del Sarto NAEL7.2.1385   Fra Lippo Lippi NAEL7.2.1373 • Dante Gabriel Rossetti NAEL7.2.1573 • Christina Rossetti, In An Artist's Studio NAEL7.2.1586 • John Ruskin, Modern Painters NAEL7.2.1428 • Walter Pater, The Renaissance NAEL7.2.1638   Appreciations NAEL7.2.1645 • Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray NAEL7.2.1760 • Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson at 34 NAEL7.2.1076 • W. H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts NAEL7.2.2266

The Painterly Image in Poetry focuses on the visual imagination of the Victorians, providing resources for the analysis of visual illustration in the works of poets like Tennyson and Robert Browning, and the aesthetic theories of Ruskin and Pater. The texts gathered here, supplemented by a rich array of pre-Raphaelite paintings, provide an introduction to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's career in both media, and vital background to Christina Rossetti's sonnet In An Artist's Studio. Arthur Henry Hallam's appreciation of Tennyson's "picturesque" style illuminates how poems like Mariana achieve their effects through the accumulation of visual detail, and can also be read alongside Carlyle's study of Tennyson's character.

Victorian Imperialism

• The Rise and Fall of Empire   • Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Charge of the Light Brigade" NAEL7.2.1280 • Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man NAEL7.2.1686 • Rudyard Kipling, "The Man Who Would Be King" NAEL7.2.1865   "Danny Deever" NAEL7.2.1888   "The Widow at Windsor" NAEL7.2.1889   "The Ladies" NAEL7.2.1890   "Recessional" NAEL7.2.1892   "The Hyenas" NAEL7.2.1893 • Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness NAEL7.2.1957 • E. M. Forster, A Passage to India NAEL7.2.2133 • George Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant" NAEL7.2.2457 • Nadine Gordimer, "The Moment before the Gun Went Off" NAEL7.2.2573 • Derek Walcott, "A Far Cry from Africa" NAEL7.2.2266   "Nights in the Gardens of Port of Spain" NAEL7.2.2581   "The Glory Trumpeter" NAEL7.2.2582   "The Schooner Flight" NAEL7.2.2583   "Midsummer" NAEL7.2.2584   Omeros NAEL7.2.2585 • Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart NAEL7.2.2617 • V. S. Naipaul, "One Out of Many" NAEL7.2.2722 • Anita Desai, "Scholar and Gypsy" NAEL7.2.2768 • J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians NAEL7.2.2829 • Salman Rushdie, "The Prophet's Hair" NAEL7.2.2843

In conjunction with "The Rise and Fall of Empire," "Victorian Imperialism" provides an introduction to the debates surrounding imperial expansion in the nineteenth century. The selections included will help contextualize nineteenth-century representations of race, nation, colonization, and imperial warfare written by Kipling, Tennyson, Darwin, and Conrad during the decades of the British Empire's greatest strength, and early twentieth-century authors like Forster and Orwell who chronicled the waning days of the Empire. "Victorian Imperialism" also provides essential background reading for students studying the postcolonial writings of Achebe, Coetzee, Desai, Gordimer, Naipaul, Rushdie, and Walcott.