Victorian Age - Tennyson

• Progress
• Victorian Age
• 1837-1901
• Industrialization
– Rise of middle class
• Colonization (empire building)
– “The sun never sets on the British empire”
– The white man’s burden
• Scientific advancement
– Darwin’s theory of evolution
– Literature
• Romanticism
– Wordsworth – poet laureate
– Byron, Shelley, and Keats – dead
• Naturalism
– Realistic, “scientific” observation of life
– Pathetic fallacy
• Aestheticism
– Art for art’s sake
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Values of the Victorian Age
– “Charge of the Light Brigade”
– “Ulysses”
• Artist’s place in society
– “The Lady of Shalott”
– “Ulysses”P. 828
• Dramatic monologue – blank verse
• Ulysses = Odysseus
– Trojan war (10 years)
– Odyssey (10 years)
• Calypso
• Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis, Laestrygons
• Lotus Eaters
• Penelope and Telemachus