The Victorian Age: The period of Queen Victoria's reign as monarch of England; during that period, England had become the chief industrial and political superpower of the world, and the writers of that period were responding to the many social changes (and challenges) brought about by this great "Age of Progress".
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| 1098472909 | Industrialization | Shift of the economy from an agricultural one to an industrial one. Ex. The factory of the "Ironmaster" in Dickens's Bleak House | 0 | |
| 1098472910 | The Rise of the Middle Class | Movement of working-class people into the middle class as a result of industrialization; the emergence of the middle class as the most socially prominent and influential of all the classes Ex. The "Ironmaster" from Dickens's Bleak House | 1 | |
| 1098472911 | "The Age of Progress" | Great advancement in technology and of the standard of living for many of those living during the VA Ex. The (initial) view of the Time Traveler in Wells's The Time Machine | 2 | |
| 1098472912 | The Condition of the Working Class | Movement of may working-class people away from farm work and into factory work, resulting in these people having to move to squalid, crowded factory towns (like Manchester) Ex. The brick makers in Dickens's Bleak House | 3 | |
| 1098472913 | Domestic Ideology | Belief that there should be a strict segregation of women and men into separate gender spheres: a private domestic sphere for women and a public sphere for men; most fundamental ideology of the VA Ex. Esther and Alan Woodcourt in Dickens's Bleak House | 4 | |
| 1098472914 | Separate Spheres | Separate spheres for domestic ideology: Men- public sphere; education, work, business Women- private sphere; home, motherhood, housekeeping Ex. Esther's domestic world vs the Court of Chancery in Dickens's Bleak House | 5 | |
| 1098472915 | Domestic Angels | Women who strictly adhere to domestic ideology by being loving wives, attentive mothers, and competent housekeepers, who are sexually pure, submissive to men, and satisfied with operating exclusively within the private sphere Ex. Esther in Dickens's Bleak House | 6 | |
| 1098472916 | Fallenness (Fallen Women) | The socially ostracized state of women who had pre-marital sex or who committed adultery Ex. Lady Deadlock in Dickens's Bleak House | 7 | |
| 1098472917 | Imperialism | The acquisition of colonies justified by a belief in European racial and social superiority over colonized natives; especially by the British during the 19th and early 20th centuries Ex. Thomson's "Rule Britannia!" and Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" | 8 | |
| 1098501220 | Imperial Romance | -Fictional narratives written in Britain between 1880 and 1920 -European protagonist journeying into a remote corner of European dominion, where -British explorers encounter an exotic civilization, with strange and bizarre customs that are the antithesis of the European way of life; -Imperial Romances created binaries between the scientific, rational European protagonist and the irrational, superstitious natives and between the "good" tribe who welcomed European rule and the "bad" tribe who opposed it, and they often -presented the threat of miscegenation in the form of a native female lover/companion (for the protagonist), who had to be abandoned. Ex. Wells's The Time Machine | 9 | |
| 1098501221 | Darwinism | The theory of biological evolution of species through natural selection, based in large part upon the theories of Charles Darwin. Ex. Wells's The Time Machine | 10 | |
| 1098501222 | Social Darwinism | -The application of Darwin's theory of biological evolution to the process of social evolution, -society should not help people who could not support themselves—because society, like nature, should be based on "survival of the fittest" (Herbert Spencer's phrase -society might instead be devolving—evolving into a less advanced state—because modern life was making people "too soft." Wells's The Time Machine | 11 | |
| 1098501223 | Serial Publication | Publishing a novel in weekly or monthly installments, pioneered by Charles Dickens Ex. Dickens's Bleak House | 12 |
