The Victorians and their World

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 6
• Convenor: Dr Victoria Mills
• Assessment: a 1500-word essay (30%) and 3500-word essay (70%)

To a great extent we live in the world that the Victorians made. But what was that world really like, and how can we understand both the things that are familiar about it and what is different and strange?

In this module we examine key themes crucial to our understanding of the Victorian period (poverty, gender, class, imperialism) and introduce you to a wide range of Victorian texts and images. Ranging from the novel through journalism, domestic instruction books, travel writing, poetry and painting, we will show the Victorians in surprising ways, and shed new light on our received ideas of this fascinating period.

Indicative syllabus

• Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)
• George Gissing, The Nether World (1889)
• A selection of New Woman short stories
• Richard Redgrave, 'The Outcast' (1851)
• G.F. Watts, 'Found Drowned' (c. 1848-1850)
• Frederick Walker, 'The Lost Path' (1863)
• William Holman Hunt, 'The Awakening Conscience' (1853)

By the end of this module, you will:

• have a deeper understanding of the Victorian period through an examination of a wide range of cultural production (novels, paintings, photographs, journalism)
• understand how the Victorians dealt with key issues such as poverty and the changing role of women and how this developed across the nineteenth century
• recognise and understand key critical and interdisciplinary approaches to studying the Victorian period
• have detailed knowledge of a series of key debates and their critical contexts, and be able to identify connections between them.