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Victorian Values: Religion, Sex, Race and Deviance in Nineteenth Century Britian

Course organiser: Thomas Dixon
Level: 2

According to both popular stereotypes and to many historical accounts, those whose efforts developed and sustained Victorian Britain as the first modern superpower were deeply flawed individuals, whose attitudes were characterised by hypocrisy, prudish morality, sexism, racism, imperialistic arrogance and selfish individualism. From Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) to Mrs Thatcher's call for a return to "Victorian values" in the 1980s, up to AN Wilsons recent The Victorians (2002) different people have made different polemical uses of their own particular vision of the victorians, eminent or otherwise, including Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale, Josephine Bulter, Charles Darwin, Charles Bradlaugh, Annie Besant and Oscar Wilde. Sources will include pieces of journalism and popular culture as well as extracts from novels and works of philosophy, science, medicine and religion. The course will explore the religious, cultural and intellectual life of the period through these sources, and will be organised around four main themes: faith, doubt and morality; women and men; empire and race; normality and deviance.