In order to consider the future of Victorian literary studies within the long nineteenth century, we must go back to that earlier ‘period’ of the nineteenth century, and the French Revolution of 1789. During the Napoleonic wars, two British women poets published extensive poems that addressed the impact of the revolutionary crisis on Britain’s future empire: Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812) and Anne Grant’s reply, Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen (1814).1 Barbauld warned her fellow citizens that Britain’s imperial ambitions and social injustices could lead to her ruin, while Grant assured them that a future global British empire would look back to counter-revolutionary Britain with gratitude: ‘On every faithful soul, and generous breast,/ This glorious era shall be deep imprest,’ Grant wrote.2 Both poets’ keen sense of the significance of their historical moment, evident in their titles and emphasized throughout the poems, are instances of what James Chandler has argued is the distinctively Romantic-era preoccupation with the problem of historical specificity: as the ‘age of the spirit of the age,’ the Romantic period is ‘the period when the normative status of the period becomes a central and self conscious aspect of historical reflection.’3 Informed by Scottish Enlightenment stadial theories of history, Barbauld saw 1811, when the war was going badly for Britain, as a crisis from which the nation may not recover, but instead begin its irreversible decline.
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The self-proclaimed “proudest and most arrogant man in France,” Gustave Courbet created a sensation at the Paris Salon of 1850–51 when he exhibited a group of paintings set in his native Ornans, a village in the Franche-Comté in eastern France. These works, including The Stonebreakers (1849–50; now lost) and A Burial at Ornans (1849–50; Musèe d’Orsay, Paris) challenged convention by rendering scenes from daily life on the large scale previously reserved for history painting and in an emphatically realistic style. Confronted with the unvarnished realism of Courbet’s imagery, critics derided the ugliness of his figures and dismissed them as “peasants in their Sunday best.

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The Orient—including present-day Turkey, Greece, the Middle East, and North Africa—exerted its allure on the Western artist’s imagination centuries prior to the turn of the nineteenth century. Figures in Middle Eastern dress appear in Renaissance and Baroque works by such artists as Bellini, Veronese, and Rembrandt, and the opulent eroticism of harem scenes appealed to the French Rococo aesthetic. Until this point, however, Europeans had minimal contact with the East, usually through trade and intermittent military campaigns. In 1798, a French army led by General Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt and occupied the country until 1801. The European presence in Egypt attracted Western travelers to the Near and Middle East, many of whom captured their impressions in paint or print. In 1809, the French government published the first installment of the twenty-four-volume Description de l’Égypte (1809–22), illustrating the topography, architecture, monuments, natural life, and population of Egypt. The Description de l’Égypte was the most influential of many works that aimed to document the culture of this region, and it had a profound effect on French architecture and decorative arts of the period, as evidenced in the dominance of Egyptian motifs in the Empire style.

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Claude Monet was a key figure in the Impressionist movement that transformed French painting in the second half of the nineteenth century. Throughout his long career, Monet consistently depicted the landscape and leisure activities of Paris and its environs as well as the Normandy coast. He led the way to twentieth-century modernism by developing a unique style that strove to capture on canvas the very act of perceiving nature.

Raised in Normandy, Monet was introduced to plein-air painting by Eugène Boudin (2003.20.2), known for paintings of the resorts that dotted the region’s Channel coast, and subsequently studied informally with the Dutch landscapist Johan Jongkind (1819–1891). When he was twenty-two, Monet joined the Paris studio of the academic history painter Charles Gleyre. His classmates included Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and other future Impressionists. Monet enjoyed limited success in these early years, with a handful of landscapes, seascapes, and portraits accepted for exhibition at the annual Salons of the 1860s. Yet many of the rejection of his more ambitious works, notably the large-scale Women in the Garden (1866; Musée d’Orsay, Paris), inspired Monet to join with Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Renoir, and others in establishing an independent exhibition in 1874. Impression: Sunrise (1873; Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris), one of Monet’s contributions to this exhibition, drew particular scorn for the unfinished appearance of its loose handling and indistinct forms. Yet the artists saw the criticism as a badge of honor, and subsequently called themselves “Impressionists” after the painting’s title, even though the name was first used derisively.

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Movement of the 1870s and 1880s that manifested itself in the fine and decorative arts and architecture in Britain and subsequently in the USA; it had no discernible influence on continental Europe. Reacting to what was seen as evidence of philistinism in art and design, it was characterized by the cult of the beautiful and an emphasis on the sheer pleasure to be derived from it.

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Pre-Raphaelites The first thing likely to strike anyone looking at poems and paintings by Pre-Raphaelite artists is that they have little in common. The label “Pre-Raphaelite” leads a reader or viewer to expect some uniformity arising from a common aesthetic philosophy, technique, or goal, but the Pre-Raphaelites rarely provide such uniformity, despite the heroic efforts of later critics to locate it. Even within the literary and artistic work of a given member, it is easy to find a variety of styles and approaches that prevents easy generalizations.
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