THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE (p. 299)

exercise 1

The term ‘Victorian Compromise’ came to be coined and applied to this particular age because the Victorians, under the strict reign of Queen Victoria, had to compromise many essential features of individuality and modes of expression.

exercise 3

exercise 4

(1) stability

(2) moralist

(3) duty

(4) respectable

(5) ownership

(6) comfortable

(7) charitable

(8) drunk

(9) patriarchal

(10) prudery

exercise 5

1. The Victorians were great moralist: they faced a large number of problems on such a scale, that they felt obliged to support certain values which offered solutions or escapes. Thus they promoted a code of values that reflected the world as they wanted it to be, not as it really was, based on duty, hard work, respectability an charity.

2. These values were refined by the upper and middle classes, who had political and economic power, but they were of equal application to all strata of society.

3. One of the most important notion throughout the 19^th century was the need to work hard.

Respectability was a mixture of both morality and hypocrisy, severity and conformity to social standards.

The family was a patriarch until where the husband represented authority and the key role of women concerned the education of children and the managing of house.

Sexuality was generally repressed in its public and private forms, and being prudery in its most extreme manifestations led to the denunciation of nudity in art and the rejection of words with a sexual connotation from everybody vocabulary.