The Victorian World

The magnitude of social change in the Victorian Era was enormous, and the influence of Victorian people and events is still felt into the twenty-first century. Named for the reign of Queen Victoria, 1837-1901, this period in British history was witness to the industrial revolution; the Darwinian revolution; an upheaval of manners and morals; political and economic turmoil at home; violence abroad in the growing empire; social conflict over class and gender; an outpouring of literature and philosophy; the development of old and new sciences; growth of railways and mass communication; and the proliferation of the decorative arts, popular music, and mass entertainment. It was the age of Charles Darwin, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Isambard Brunel, Charlotte Brontë, Florence Nightingale, William Morris, Thomas Huxley, John Stuart Mill, Robert Owen, Benjamin Disraeli, Lewis Carroll, Elizabeth Gaskell, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Stanley Jevons, Jack the Ripper, John Ruskin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and other luminary figures too numerous to name. Alumni College 2008 will examine the Victorian world from a number of perspectives across the disciplines, including history; economics; science, technology, and society; philosophy; literature; art; and music. Please join us for an in-depth and multi-faceted look at this crucial and momentous period in Britain.

Faculty Lectures

The Victorian Period: Culture and Politics from Household to Global Empire
Raffael Scheck, professor and chair of the Department of History
Why do we speak of a Victorian period? What was distinctive about it? Who was the queen who gave the period her name? Why has Victorian Britain become a paradigm of cultural norms, from good manners to gender roles? What is wrong with the common perception of these norms? This presentation will consider concentric circles from the typical Victorian household to British society and culture, politics, and global empire with a focus on colonialism, foreign policy, democratization, and electoral politics.

The Rise and Decline of the Workshop of the World
Jason Long, assistant professor of economics
In the mid eighteenth century, a small island off the northwest coast of the northwest tip of the Eurasian landmass began its rise to becoming the world’s dominant economic and political power. The British Industrial Revolution marked the onset of modern economic growth and the “great divergence” between rich countries—Europe and the European offshoots—and poor countries—everyone else. Then, after a century of dominance, Victorian Britain lost its position as world economic leader to a more dynamic newcomer: the U.S. The rise and (relative) decline of Britain are two of the most intensely studied, hotly debated topics in economic history. We will examine both classic and current explanations with an eye toward understanding not only the specifics of the British experience but also the complex process of changing world economic leadership.

Charles Darwin, Evolution, and Religion in Nineteenth Century England
Piers Hale (formerly of Colby’s Science, Technology, and Society Program) assistant professor of the history of science, University of Oklahoma
Today in the United States there is significant discussion about the religious implications of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859. However, what is not often focused upon in the present debate is Darwin’s own discussion of the implications of his theory of natural selection for Christian belief. In this lecture and subsequent discussion we will consider Darwin’s own thoughts on the matter as expressed in his autobiography and in his frank correspondence with the Harvard botanist Asa Gray. While Darwin became quietly agnostic, Gray came to see evolution by natural selection as quite compatible with his Christian beliefs, as did the Anglican theologian Charles Kingsley. We will consider the different ways in which Gray and Kingsley, who did much to publicize Darwinism in America and England respectively, held together those still somewhat awkwardly reconciled views of life: evolution and religion.

John Stuart Mill: Struggles in Victorian Gender Roles and Political Economy
Jill Gordon, professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy
John Stuart Mill was an activist for individual liberty, women’s suffrage, women’s property rights, and birth control and a one-term member of Parliament. John Stuart Mill’s life and philosophical work shed light on some of the salient issues and struggles during the Victorian age. We will examine Mill’s life and three of his works—On Liberty, The Subjection of Women, and Principles of Political Economy—in an effort to explore some of the struggles of the period, including the extent (and limits) of individual liberty, the asymmetry between men’s freedom and women’s freedom and the social disutility this asymmetry creates, and the difficulty of promoting the free market and private property while protecting basic human well-being and dignity.

An Evening in the Victorian Parlor: Nineteenth-Century Popular Song in England and America
Elizabeth Erskine Patches, soprano, and Steven Saunders, professor of music
From “Home! Sweet Home!” and “Love’s Old Sweet Song” to the songs of Gilbert and Sullivan, popular songs in nineteenth-century England gave voice to the hopes and ideals of the era. This lecture-recital will transport you back to an age of refined drawing-room soirees and rowdy music-hall comedies. The evening will explore both music and the insights that music provides into contemporaneous culture. We also will trace the influence of British song in America, concluding with a sing-along of works by the most beloved American songwriter of the period, Stephen Collins Foster.

Language and Satire in Carroll’s Alice Books
David Suchoff, professor of English
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1872) are two classics of the Victorian era that live on today. In the Alice books, Carroll writes more than a children’s literature by using humor to point out the conventions restricting women and the working class in his era, comically examining the way language doesn’t entirely control our world. In fact, Lewis Carroll (Arthur Dodgson) was also a philosopher who used the “nonsense” themes in the Alice books to investigate the relation between a moral language and the comedy of puns and laughter that question such control. We will follow Carroll’s exploration of the way language actually worked in his world and ours: the way the pen can “write all manner of things I don’t intend,” as the King tells Alice, and how humor and satire revise our belief in the way words claim to name things. To take the Victorians at their word, we’ll look at how the Alice books anticipate Henri Bergson’s theory of the pun and laughter and at Schopenhauer’s theory of the ludicrous and the absurd.

The World of Victorian Art
Lauren Lessing, Mirken Curator, Colby College Museum of Art
This session will introduce the eclectic array of styles that together are known as Victorian art. After viewing a slide presentation on Victorian art in Britain, attendees will enjoy a guided tour of the Colby College Museum of Art galleries where they will view and explore the wider influence of Victorian taste on the art of the United States in the nineteenth century.