Why is the Victorian Age seen as so romantic by many?
It was a wonderful time for the rich and the privileged. A time of expansion of the empire and prosperity for capitalist opportunists to make their name- a new Elizabethan Age! These were the people who largely controlled the narratives of that time. The voices of the miserable and poor who lived in grinding poverty were incapable of expression, lacking the vehicle of literacy. Look closely at Victorian photographs of the time showing street-scenes in working class areas. The blurs on the emulsion are all that is left to record the daily hardships and suffering of the poor. Their lives were too transient and fleeting to register on the film of that time. Dickens and Zola wrote touchingly and sometimes mawkishly about their squalor and the injustices inflicted upon them. Even then, both authors were attacked by critics because the lives of the ‘underclass’ were seen as unfit subject for any literary genre. The accepted novels of the time emphasised romantic and coquettish dalliances bet
