"Teaching Victorian Characters"

[DanPD]

I have to write an academic paper about Teaching Victorian Characters.
I have some ideas in mind but nothing organized.
Could you please give me a suggestion?

[Calidore]

This is a good place to organize them. Put down what you're thinking and you'll get feedback. But nobody else is going to take the first step for your homework.

[cacian]

Hi DanPD what ideas in mind do you have?

[MeLiKeyClaSsIcS]

DanPD,

Being someone who aspires to teach Victorian Literature within the next 3 years, I'm looking forward to reading your ideas. I look forward to the subsequent feedback as well!

[DanPD]

I was thinking about presenting a general view on the Victorian Period at first; then starting to focus on some of the main novelists of the period; at this point I might focus my ideas on these novelists' most famous characters.
My paper should also cover some aspects related to ways in which I would teach my students these characters; like what methods, materials and activities.
How many Victorians should I present? My paper should be around 70-80 pages.

[MeLiKeyClaSsIcS]

Well, you could focus on Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, Thackeray, and Charlotte Bronte. I feel like they were the most popular novelists of the time. Of course, there are the late authors such as Wilde, Stoker, and Gissing whose novels are vital to the late Victorian ideas of Aestheticism, Decadence, and the emergence of the "New Woman".

You could also focus on the idea of marriage during the period and use the novels and respective characters as representations of the changing laws and perspectives on the institution. Characters such as Ada Claire from Bleak House, Gwendolyn Harleth from Daniel Deronda, Lady Glencora and Alice Vavasor from Can You Forgive Her?, Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair, and Jane Eyre from the titular novel. You can also include Mina Harker from Dracula, and Monica Madden and Rhoda Nunn from The Odd Women *. I think this is a great spectrum when thinking about the drastic changes in marriage laws and the effects of these changes on the aforementioned characters. If I were going to teach anything Victorian, I'd probably start with the institution of marriage and it's effects on female--and even male--characters.

If you want to think about activities, you could think about asking the students about their views on current marriage laws in the UK (and even the US) and compare them to the laws during the period. It would give them some nice understanding pertaining to why the previously mentioned characters make the decisions they make when thinking about spousal, financial, and work-related decisions.

*Characters and novels are from C. Dickens, G. Eliot, A. Trollope, W. M. Thackeray, C. Bronte, B. Stoker, and G. Gissing respectively.

[Scheherazade]

How many Victorians should I present? My paper should be around 70-80 pages.If I were writing such a paper, I would start with a general overview of Victorian period and move onto say that the specifics of the period could be observed in certain characters that could be found in the books depicting era. Then, I would list their characteristics, examining and providing as many sound examples as possible from different authors.

As for teaching methods, I would recommend comparisons; providing students with passages, presenting characters from the Victorian era and maybe from more modern ones (probably from the books they have already read) and ask them to compare them, making sure that they are drawing the expected conclusions, making sure that the students are provided enough examples for them to develop their understandings on the topic.

[kiki1982]

Yes, start with an overview of the Victorian age and the Victorians' mindset. A.N. Wilson's The Victorians is good background in this respect.

Teaching stock characters like 'the old spinster', the Byronic hero (you can't teach Victorian without teaching that), the villain (how do I recognise one), the crone, etc. might benefit reading in the future.
You could take the celebrity culture for the Byronic hero: Byron modelled most of his heros on himself, but was himself so famous that a cult kind of developed around him. Hence the popularity of his works. How does celebrity in itself facilitate this?

Issues of morality and marriage (of course) are also important, but it's almost overdone. The money and entrepreneurship, renewal of this age has probably never been outdone. Business is something you could take on board. I seem to believe Dickens has quite a few of these brand new investors/inventors and things. People who try their luck. Morality need not necessarily be about marriage, it can also be about what to do with the poor (the work houses and Oliver Twist, what were they for?), philanthropy and the emergence of Sunday school and school in itself, the first 'social' (company) estates...

In terms of the Brontë sisters, Charlotte is good, but if you want a real text book of morality and the ambiguity of marriage (together with how people shunned anything that wasn't mainstream), you absolutely have to do Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. It a pretty straightforward tale, but it reveals more about the societal mechanisms that existed back then than Charlotte's (only judging by Jane Eyre, though).

Much as I loathe Dickens, he is a good place to introduce, because (to me at least) he writes fluently, doesn't lose himself too much in descriptions of Hardy's liking, and is pretty black-and-white in his characterisation. It's easy to recognise a villain, because he'll be wearing black and have a nasty nose and a long beard. Otherwise he'll act weird. Although his caricatures need some guidance. His image of the work house, for example, is severely flawed. He might have had a nasty time (all due to the indipendent nature of them), but they had been founded for a purpose and were not all that bad.

Trollope is also good for satire, he's definitely very funny, but you need to know a little about the surroundings of it.

The occult was also a great Victorian love affair. It started with ghosts, but with the study of humans it moved towards an exploration of the subconscious and how man was able to commit crime and murder. The great Sherlock Holmes was practically the last stage (and his spin-off Poirot with his 'grey cells'), but The Moonstone as one of the earliest is quite funny in its naivety. Not saying anything, because it's so surprising. :D The kind of recent series Wire in the Blood carries further the idea of understanding the mind of the killer = knowing who's done it and why. Both Sherlock Holmes and Poirot did that (I'm not sure about Miss Marple).

[MeLiKeyClaSsIcS]

Great suggestions kiki1982. I do think that the field of Victorian marriage has been WAY overdone. Every Victorianist I've had for a professor has been hellbent on being the one who refreshes interest in this! I do like reading about it, but I'm way more interested in the politics of the time, hence my love for fiction like Trollope and his Palliser series. I'm very interested in studying the domestic representations of important political reforms in Victorian literature--particularlly in Trollope and Dickens. I laughed out loud when you said that you "loathe Dickens", I adore Dickens! He never really made any great suggestions on reform, but he strikes my Renaissance fancy; he practically disguised his plays as theatrical novels! I hope these posts are helping you out, DanPD!

[kiki1982]

Haha, you see, Dickens bores me to tears. Ironically Trollope called im 'Mr Popular Sentiment' and did a wonderful exposé about him in The Warden. Exactl wat I felt! How alike people can be, even if they were born some 150 years apart :D.

For my part, I think more should be made of the Victorians as undyingly creative in wanting to improve the world (it did not all go as planned, but bless them, did they try). That's an often overlooked part of that morality that is reduced to marriage.

[DanPD]

I'm amazed about the amount of suggestion you gave me.
I would like to thank you for this and I really appreciate the fact that you spent some time writing these ideas.
I have to think about these suggestions and decide what idea should my characters be focused and built on - marriage, education, morality, politics, Aestheticism or Decadence.

[MeLiKeyClaSsIcS]

I was glad to help DanPD! If you have any other questions, feel free to ask!

[DanPD]

I am meeting my paper coordinator on weekend and we're going to shape it.

[kelby_lake]

As for teaching methods, I would give the students a strong sense of what it was like to be a Victorian- what they thought, how they behaved, etc. Some characters' actions may look stupid to modern readers but make perfect sense in context of the Victorian period, so you need to make sure that the students 'get' it. Maybe mix in some non-fiction writing of the time, which could be critics talking about the period, contemporaries talking about it, or even historical documents.