Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" (1867):
An Introduction
Introduction: Victorian England
The Social Hierarchy
The Victorian Era (1837-1901) saw unprecedented changes in British society: the
rise of the middle classes, rapid industrialization, and the development of an
empire on which the “sun never sets.” Dramatic
political changes included the Reform
Bill of 1832, which transformed the governmental structure of England. This
Bill completely overhauled the ways in which areas of England were represented
in Parliament: it allocated more seats to the increasingly populous urban areas
in the North. It also enfranchised (gave the vote to) men who occupied a home
with an annual value of at least £10 (10 pounds). Structuring the franchise
this way satisfied prosperous middle-class men who sought representation in
government. But it also drove a political wedge between the middle classes and
the working classes: the Bill specifically excluded all men who did not own
property worth more than £10 annually. Essentially, the Bill excluded everyone
below the upper level of middle class: all of the working classes, the poor, and
all women of any income level were specifically denied the vote. The Bill
defined the right to representation and participation in government as the
possession of a considerable, regular income. Members of the working classes,
who typically survived just barely above subsistence level and who often had no
access to education
beyond primary school, had no voice in government, and would not be granted even
a limited franchise until 1867.
During the 1830's and 1840's, the poor found it increasingly difficult to obtain the relief necessary simply to forestall starvation. The New Poor Law of 1834 replaced the existing (but overburdened and increasingly ineffective) parish-based poor relief system with a centrally planned and organized bureaucracy. This system often forced the poor to choose between begging and living in the workhouse, an institution which separated wives from husbands and parents from children. Since entering the workhouse meant an end to a private life and nearly all possibility of employment, many chose instead to become homeless and roam the country in search of a livelihood or at least a meal. And once the poor left their hometowns, the New Poor Law denied them the right to obtain relief in other localities. Work shortages left the poor no choice but to leave economically depressed areas; however, once they did, they were no longer eligible for benefits. Thus, the New Poor Law came into existence to replace an antiquated and increasingly overwhelmed parish-based system: its very existence signaled the government's commitment to protecting those made most vulnerable by modern industrial capitalism. However, because it was under funded by Parliament, poorly administered, and fundamentally dehumanizing and inflexible, it was widely disliked and arguably generated more problems than it ever resolved (Thompson 13-50). In part as a result of the 1832 and 1834 Bills, Victorian Britain included a wide variety of politically radical working-class unions and organizations working for political and economic reforms, including universal suffrage.
Restrictive legislation was increasingly applied to women in this era. During the nineteenth century, women did not have the same legal rights to inheritance, property ownership, or education as men. By 1833, “marriage virtually turned legal control of a woman’s property permanently over to her husband” (Davidoff and Hall 276). Except under extraordinary circumstances, women did not retain control of their property after marriage until the passing of the Married Women's Property Act of 1882.
Women were legally prohibited from taking an active role in commerce, government, and the church. Whereas men were increasingly encouraged to understand themselves in terms of the job they held in the business world, women were progressively written out of the public sphere. Middle-class and upper-class women were defined by default: the premium placed by mainstream Victorian writers on domesticity defined femaleness in part as the complete abstention from the marketplace. Woman’s sphere was the private world of the home: she was the guardian of the moral development of her children and the primary manager of household resources. Her role was to raise obedient Christian children and to fulfill the needs of her husband by overseeing the disciplined and organized running of his house: she was encouraged to understand herself only as a reflection of her husband. As Davidoff and Hall argue, “At a time when the concept of occupation was becoming the core element in masculine identity, any position for women other than in relation to men was anomalous” (272). Working-class and poor women, of course, were often forced to work both outside and inside the home. But few middle-class women in this period held any positions other than those of governess or schoolmistress. And even these occupations were typically understood as transitional periods -- temporary stops -- on the road towards matrimony. Nineteenth-century Britain offered only one option for intelligent and ambitious women: marriage. Women who transgressed the bounds of socially acceptable behavior by seeking other options tended to be depicted as aberrant, dangerous, and unnatural. The nineteenth century thus saw the progressive disempowerment and disenfranchisement of women: women in the seventeenth and eighteenth century had arguably more political freedom because their rights had not been fully codified in restrictive legislation. By paying close attention to the ways in which the poems and essays that we will read explore male and female subjectivity and experience, we will gain a better understanding of the complexities of nineteenth-century gender construction and its central place in Victorian culture.
To summarize a complex set of issues, then, for most Britons, the nineteenth
century was a time of change and turmoil in which the foundations of the social
order – class and gender relations – underwent dramatic
transformations. The texts we will read reflect and define many of the
primary anxieties associated with these issues as they explore the increasingly
problematic position of poetry and "The Author" in the modern world.
How do these works define "The Author": how is this figure gendered?
classed? How do these authors imagine their reading public? What kinds of
authority do they claim to wield with their writing? "Progress", Science, and Industrialization Although we are trained to read advances in science
and industry
as, by definition, “progress,” and therefore “good,” nineteenth-century
Britons were far more ambivalent. We will explore the ways in which these texts
reflect and comment on the changes and discoveries that seemed to define modern
life. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which these novels connect
these developments to everyday life. What effects do these texts think advances
in science and rapid industrialization will have on the fabric of British
society and the ways in which its citizens live and interact with one another?
And in a mechanically driven world, what kind of authority, if any, does the
"Artist" hold?
The Empire
Matthew Arnold
Arnold's "Dover
Beach" ( like Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard", Laetitia Elizabeth Landon's "Felicia Hemans", and
Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess") is a dramatic
monologue, in which the unnamed speaker addresses an implied but silent
listener. In Arnold's poem, the speaker (not to be identified as Arnold himself,
but rather as a fictional character) looks over the shore at Dover and reflects on the scene
before him. As you read the poem, consider how it offers implied commentary on the
Poet, Poetry, English Literature, and the Classical world.
Links
Read a biography
of Arnold and browse a selection of brief essays on his work at the Victorian
Web. Visit the Victorian Web for more information on Victorian social
history and political
history. Visit the Spartacus
Online Encyclopedia of British History to learn more about19th-century
Britain. Read Anthony Hecht's "The
Dover Bitch" (1968), in which Arnold's silent auditor at last gets to
speak.
Davidoff, Leonora and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of
the English Middle Class, 1780-1850. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
Thompson, F. M. L. The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of
Victorian Britain, 1830-1900.Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.
--Dr. Karen Droisen, July 2001.
As industrialization gradually transformed England from a nation primarily
dependent on agriculture to one dependent on industry, the population became
increasingly concentrated in urban areas – and not just in London.
In 1831, the urban population outside
London was roughly 1 million. By 1901, it was 9 million. London itself
underwent a similar growth spurt: by the end of the century, its share of the
nation’s total population had grown from 11.5 % in 1831 to an astonishing 17.8
% in 1901. In 1801, no town aside from London had more than 100,000 inhabitants.
But by 1831, there were seven cities with more than 100,000, and by 1901, there
were nearly 40. In this context, Victorian poets could not employ the pastoral
tradition with ease. The English countryside, long a source of emotive power and
nationalist feeling in British literature and art, became, as the century
unfolded, far less familiar to the reading public increasingly living in cities.
For British authors, then, the employment of pastoral conventions and themes
became increasingly complex. What did it mean to be a British author if Britain
was increasingly defined and understood as an urban, industrial nation, not as
an ageless countryside of green fields and lakes?
Over the course of the nineteenth century, England’s economy became
increasingly international as it aggressively expanded its Empire.
Its holdings in the East, especially India,
were an important source of capital and of opportunities for Britons
dissatisfied with life at home. We will explore the ways in which these texts
represent the relationship between British society at home and the source of
much of its prosperity, the lands it controlled in the East. What does it mean
to be British if the United Kingdom includes not just England, but also Ireland,
Scotland, Wales, India, Australia, parts of Africa, the East and West Indies,
China, and, until 1783 (when Jane Austen was six years old), the American
colonies? What did it mean to be British if economic prosperity at home
increasingly depended on the exploitation of countries abroad, accomplished
quite often through slavery, slave trading, piracy, brutal military oppression,
and the destruction of indigenous cultures? How could authors write
"British Literature" that somehow made sense of these questions?
Matthew Arnold (1822-99) dedicated his life -- as a scholar, professor of English, poet, and
essayist -- to developing and instituting the English canon as we now know it.
He sought to define, in transhistorical and absolute terms, "great
literature." Against a background of growing civil unrest, including the
great revolutions on the Continent of 1848 and the rise of the powerful labor
movement, Chartism, at home, Arnold sought to define "great
literature," once and for all. As the literary marketplace swelled with
publications by, for, and about a wide range of groups -- women, the working
classes, the rising middle classes -- Arnold sought to establish an ivory tower
of literature to which none but a handful of English authors would be admitted.
The study of literature, according to Arnold and his acolytes, was a holy
pursuit of the "truth" contained within a select group of
publications. His literary criticism is thus also social criticism. To claim
that an elite group of university scholars defines "British
Literature" is to claim as universal the particular interests of the ruling
classes. By reading Arnold's efforts to divorce the study of literature form
contemporary events as a response to the class tensions in Britain and on the
Continent, we can begin to understand the means by which it encodes political
commentary in literary criticism.
Read a bio-bibliography
of Matthew Arnold at the University of Toronto.