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Having overcome the gloomy age of Romanticism, with its apex of darkness in Lord Byron’s poem ‘Darkness’ (1816), and having survived the aftermath of the graveyard poetry in the lurid Gothic novels, the Victorians hoped to see the advent of a bright era where beacons of light would chase off the last vestiges of Romantic melancholy, the persistently black gall that had left its indelible imprint on a wide range of European works from Horace Walpole to Alfred de Vigny, from Samuel T. Coleridge to Giacomo Leopardi. With Queen Victoria acceding to the throne at the blossoming age of 19 in 1837 and thus severing the bonds with the sombre Regency period and its decadent Georges, the Victorians were willing to comply with Thomas Carlyle’s injunction to shut their dismal Byron in favour of Goethe’s light-bringing Wilhelm Meister (which Carlyle had translated in 1824, in the very year of Byron’s impactful death in Missolonghi).

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Introduction: The Darkest Decades: The Victorians and Their Darknesses

  • 章节

  • 发表日期：

    2026年

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  • Norbert Lennartz,
  • Jacqueline F. Kolditz,
  • Carolin Sternberg

摘要

Having overcome the gloomy age of Romanticism, with its apex of darkness in Lord Byron’s poem ‘Darkness’ (1816), and having survived the aftermath of the graveyard poetry in the lurid Gothic novels, the Victorians hoped to see the advent of a bright era where beacons of light would chase off the last vestiges of Romantic melancholy, the persistently black gall that had left its indelible imprint on a wide range of European works from Horace Walpole to Alfred de Vigny, from Samuel T. Coleridge to Giacomo Leopardi. With Queen Victoria acceding to the throne at the blossoming age of 19 in 1837 and thus severing the bonds with the sombre Regency period and its decadent Georges, the Victorians were willing to comply with Thomas Carlyle’s injunction to shut their dismal Byron in favour of Goethe’s light-bringing Wilhelm Meister (which Carlyle had translated in 1824, in the very year of Byron’s impactful death in Missolonghi).