In the year 1819, May 24th a girl was born in Britain. The little girl was named Alexandrina Victoria, but people called her Victoria. Victoria was the daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, who was the fourth son of the reigning King of the United Kingdom, King George III. Victorias mother was Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. After the death of little Victorias father and grandfather in 1820 she was raised by her mother. On June 20th 1837 Victoria inherited the throne and became the queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. When Victoria became a queen, a new era begun and it was of course named after the new queen, just as many other eras in ...view middle of the document...
He died in 1970, of a stroke at the age of fifty-eight.
Oliver Twist
Dickens wrote the story about Oliver Twist in the years 1837-1839, so it was one of the first books written in the Victorian age. It is a children's story, a detective story and a novel of social protest. The story is about a little boy called Oliver, who is an orphan born in a workhouse in England in the 1830s. He is born in to the low class life, where he has to work really hard with the other children. They are abused and starving and the people that are in charge of the workhouses are really cruel. Everyone only thinks about themselves, noone really cares about the children. Oliver has to be independent, and with alot of luck and efforts, that little, innocent and polite boy manages to rise from the poor to the rich. With this book, Dickens showed people how different the social classes really were, and how hard it is living the low class life, always being poor but still working all day in a dirty, badly payed workplace such as a factory. How you can not easily go from that to being one of the rich, well dressed and well educated people. In most cases it is not the peoples choise, they just have to stay in the class they are born in.
Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) and Emily Brontë (1818-1848)
Charlotte and Emily Brontë were born in Haworth, a small village on the Yorkshire moors. Their parents rased them there, along with their three sisters and one brother, untill their mother died when the sisters were only three and five years old. All the five sisters were then sent to an orphanage. The life at the oprhanage was hard so after a short while the father brought all the sisters back home when two of them got really sick. Charlotte and Emily started early to read books and write miniature books in their spare time. They read for example Shakespeares work and the Bible. They both got some education and later they opened a school, but that did not work and they had to close it because there were no enrolments. They wrote alot, and in 1846 they published their selection of poems with their sister Anne. Since this time women were not respected as writers they called them selves the male names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Charlotte's most famous novel is Jane Eyre, and Emily's was Wuthering Heights. In 1848 Emily died of tuberculosis and Anne died a while later. After that Charlotte travelled around England and published three novels. Then she got married, but died just a few months after the wedding, because of complications associated with pregnancy.
Jane Eyre
Charlotte's novels had all the same main theme, the need for women to be independent. During this time women were not supposed to search for independence, they were just supposed to be submissive to their husbands and take care of the household duties. The novel Jane Eyre was published in 1847. The story begun when Jane was an orphan that lived with her mean aunt and cousins. The aunt sent her to a Boarding scool,...
