Victorian Era Schools In Hard Times, And Jane Eyer

The world today consists of children roaming the streets, technology taking over the world, and being able to work wherever you'd like but, could you imagine a life without all these things? Believe it or not there was a time in life where these things were very uncommon to see. This would be known as the victorian era. This time period was between 1837 and 1901. Daily life was very different from now. Health, social classes, and fashion are just three examples of how daily life was different in the victorian era.

If we look back on the 19th century, we see masterpieces like Jane Eyre that dared to shatter the standard of the quintessential Victorian woman, obedient and tucked away at home. In an article by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Charlotte Brontë, the author of Jane Eyre, was described as dissatisfied by a culture that

Women in the Victorian era were supposed to be passive, pure, and idle; were not to be well educated; and were expected to marry.  Throughout Brontë's novel, Jane Eyre learns the realities of these social expectations and directly and indirectly speaks against them.

This project is about the social and moral view of Victorian society through the author of many acclaimed novels Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Social view is basically relating to society or its organization and moral is concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior. Dickens was not only the first great urban novelist in England, but also one of the most important social commentators who used fiction effectively to criticize economic, social, and moral abuses in the Victorian era. Dickens showed compassion and empathy towards the unguarded and disadvantaged segments of English society, and contributed to several important social reforms. Dickens’s deep

The Victorian Era was known for its propriety, and for its social standards that could be as strict as the caste system in India. Citizens in England of low social regard faced many prejudices and limitations that could be almost insurmountable to overcome. Much like the caste system, people considered to be the dregs of society were often alienated and had little room for opportunity. In Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre, the main character, Jane, suffers social prejudice because she is a simple governess, revealing much about the social stigmas about the working class during the Victorian Era. Jane’s social status limits her not only from being with the one she loves, but also hinders her endeavor to achieve true autonomy.

The Victorian Era encompassed a time of great discrepancy between the sexes, especially for women. The polarization of gender roles reflected on a basis of gender sexuality where men and women were granted certain advantages and disadvantages. Women were expected to realize a specific position in society based on morals of submission, passivity, and a complete lack of selfishness and independence. Constrictive notions such as these prevent individual expression and expansion. Therefore, while struggling to fill the pre-conceived expectancies of society, one forces true desires and happiness to pass as a scant priority. Charlotte Brontë's Victorian novel, Jane Eyre, explores the significance of individual fulfillment in an oppressive

Like the many of us today that are obsessed with reputation and appearance, the Victorians were just as bad, most of their life was centred around what other people think of them. What is the right way to dress and talk? Victorians showed how important reputation and appearance is to them in their everyday life from the way they dress to the literature they wrote and read. This is shown very clearly in two texts that I shall be analysing and comparing. They are; Jane Eyre written by Charlotte Bronte and the A Doll’s House written by Henrik Ibsen.

Written by Dickens in 1815, Hard Times attempts to convince readers by illustrating the fact that life during the Industrial Revolution was anything but pleasant for human beings. Centred around Mr. Gradgrind and his moderately sized family, Dickens succeeds at giving the reader a up close and personal view of what it meant to be a father, mother, man, woman, and child during the industrial revolution. Dickens also provides the reader with three central themes: the mechanization of human beings, the conflict of fact versus fantasy, and the significance of the female figure. Dickens set out with a goal in writing this novel to expose the truth on how grim the Industrial Revolution really was for the human race. I therefore think that, through examining various examples sprawled throughout the text in connection to the three themes, there should definitely be enough evidence to conclude that Dickens interpretations of the Industrial Revolution were believably similar and, in a sense, true to what people were faced with during the 18th

Prior to 1900 secondary education was virtually non-existent, the consensus view at that time was that secondary education was only for boys of the middle and upper classes. The few schools available were fee paying and therefore only an option to those who could afford them. This fuelled the gap in social status and in the opinion of Marxists kept the lower classes in their place so as not to disrupt the economic and social balance. In the 1860’s there were no grammar schools for girls, however due to a slight change in the views of society by 1900 eighty girls’ schools had been created (Stephens, 1998). The 1870’s saw the development of some of ‘higher grade’ schools, these had a scientific and technical bias and grants were provided for those whose pupils were successful in the

“In September of 1824, [Charlotte and Emily] were sent to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, a school for the daughters of impoverished clergy… The harsh conditions of the school were later reflected in Charlotte Brontë's novel, Jane Eyre.”(Lewis)

The Victorian era has an influential impact on individuals as they overcame many of society’s beliefs during this period. In Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, societal pressure during the Victorian era led to a discovery of the human condition. This is demonstrated through: love, gender roles, and social class.

The whole theory of modern education is completely unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper class and probably lead to acts of violence,” (pg. 333, The Complete Plays, Poems,

The idea of governess extended until the nineteenth century. The Victorian women, especially the Bronte sisters, Charlotte and Anne, experienced the occupation of a governess. Their impressions were negative because of the poor condition, bad treatment, and low wage of a governess during the Victorian era. According to Gilbert, Anne endured in the governess’s job for six years while Charlotte shortened it to two years. Charlotte wrote in a letter to her sister Emily, “I can now see more clearly than I have ever done before that a private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living and rational being, except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfill”(qtd. in Heyck, 203). Charlotte transfers her negative views of the governess’s status in English society through her literary work Jane Eyre. She portrays the poor conditions and bad treatments of the private school that Jane attends. In Lowood School, Jane spends eight years before she accepts an offer of becoming a governess and starting her financial dependence. Mr. Brocklehurst who is the headmaster of Lowood School keeps the girls hungry and cold. Also, he treats the girls very badly by punishing them. One of the problems that children from working and middle class face in schools, rather than the social distinction, is the physical punishment. In “Aspects of Neglect: The Strange Case of Victorian Popular Education,” Harold Silver investigates about the “corporal punishment” that is used in

Charles Dickens (the author of Great Expectations) and Charlotte Brontë (the author of Jane Eyre) both grew up during the early 1800s. Growing up during the same time period, each author incorporated elements of the Victorian Society into these novels. Both novels depict the protagonist’s search for the meaning of life and the nature of the world within the context of a defined social order. In essence, the two novels encompass the all-around self-development of the main characters, by employing similar techniques. Each spurs the protagonist on their journey by introducing some form of loss or discontent which then results in the main character departing

(An Analysis of the critique of Victorian schools in the poems Hard Time and Jane Eyre by Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte )