'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' - regional writers 1 - context
- Created by: Alasdair
- Created on: 06-06-18 12:34
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- 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' - regional writers 1 - context
- Capital punishment in Victorian Britain
- In the 1870s, when the novel is set, there were five capital crimes:
- Murder
- Treason
- Arson in a royal dockyard
- Espionage
- Piracy with violence
- At end of the novel, Tess is convicted of murder of Alec D'Urberville and hanged at Wintoncester (Winchester) prison
- Public hanging was abolished in Britain in 1868
- When he was eighteen, Thomas Hardy witnessed the public hanging of Elizabeth Martha Brown, a working class woman who had murdered her violent husband, in 1856
- In the 1870s, when the novel is set, there were five capital crimes:
- The mechanisation of agriculture
- For millennia, humans used hand tools to farm, such as the flail or the scythe
- In Britain, the mechanisation of farming started in the 1790s, with the invention of the threshing machine
- By the late 1800s, threshing machines were powered by steam, like the one in Chapter 47 of 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles'
- Hardy often describes the machines using diabolical imagery, suggesting that use of machinery is having a negative impact on the nature of agricultural work
- Victorian morality
- Queen Victoria ruled Britain and the Empire from 1837 to 1901, offering a 'perfect' role model for women and motherhood
- The 'sexual norm' for a Victorian woman was to be a virgin until marriage
- Angel is appalled by Tess's revelation, despite not being chaste himself
- Victorian society was underpinned by Christian values
- The established Church was widely followed; as the novel shows, there were also newer evangelical churches
- Hardy's subtitle for the novel, 'A Pure Woman', was a challenge to conventional (and, as he saw it, hypocritical) conceptions of a Victorian woman
- The influence of Darwinism
- Charles Darwin published 'The Origin of Species' in 1859
- It challenged widely accepted ideas about creation and man's place in the universe
- Thomas Hardy, a keen amateur scientist, read Darwin's work, and his novels reflect the fin de siecle trend towards pessimism and religious scepticism
- 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' could be said to illustrate a ruthless, post-Darwinian society, in which characters who cannot adapt to social change do not survive
- Hardy's descriptions of hardship of Flintcomb-Ash, where labourers choose to work when better jobs are unavailable, depict a life of struggle
- Charles Darwin published 'The Origin of Species' in 1859
- Emigration to Brazil, 1870-1900
- In latter part of C19th, Britain underwent a demographic crisis as population increased rapidly
- Brazil, which had been an independent nation since 1825, abolished slavery in 1850
- This created an economic crisis and a demand for agricultural workers
- Immigration gradually intensified: about 71,000 Europeans emigrated to Brazil each year between 1877 and 1903
- Angel Clare goes to Brazil to seek his fortune as part of this migration pattern after his separation from Tess - his venture fails
- Capital punishment in Victorian Britain
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