You have already read the introduction to the Victorian period, but a quick review should prove useful in understanding the transitional poets. (For your convenience, I have included the relevant passages from the "Decline" section here.)

The somewhat naive optimism and complacency that many of the Victorians enjoyed at the height of the period could not last. If the middle years of Victoria's reign saw the middle class enjoying an extension of the power once held almost exclusively by the landed aristocracy, what followed was the working class's attempt to follow suit. As Richard D. Altick notes,

The high Victorian era closed some time toward the end of the sixties, certainly no later than the middle seventies. If a single year may be taken to mark off the late Victorian period from the halcyon middle one, it would undoubtedly be 1867, when the Second Reform Bill doubled the electorate by enfranchising town workers. The Victorians were thereby brought face to face with an issue which had been slowly taking shape over several decades but which they had chosen not to think too much about: how to accommodate the nation's political structure and, even more importantly, its culture, to the power now within the grasp of the common man. The preceding decades had seen the middle class achieve its place in English society; now it was the manual workers' turn. Bitterly though many might deplore the advent of democracy, somehow it had to be accepted as an accomplished fact.

The national outlook was further clouded by the agricultural depression which began in 1873 and lasted, though relieved by intermittent spells of comparative prosperity, to the end of the century. A series of crop failures, the influx of cheap machine-harvested grain from the American prairies, and the introduction of refrigerator ships which brought meat from Australia and New Zealand reduced farming to a marginal place in an economy which until the last half-century had been squarely based on the land, and destroyed the balance between agriculture and industry which had made possible the prosperity of the middle years. One momentous result was that the large landowners finally had to surrender most of the political power to which they had clung despite the inroads of industrialism.

The shift in political balance caused by the decline of agriculture and the ascendancy of the workingmen's vote was but one of the many tendencies which complicated and in many ways darkened the later Victorian decades. The economic decline revived labor unrest. Trade unions, strengthened by legislation passed in the seventies, promoted strikes in many industries, and the socialist movement was re-invigorated. . . . (Victorian People and Ideas, New York: Norton, 1973, 14-15, emphasis mine)

With regard to the literature, a similar change is evident. Despite Alfred, Lord Tennyson's religious questionings, we find in the close of "Ulysses" what might be seen as the credo of High Victorian optimism: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." And in Robert Browning, we find the spiritual consolation of Andrea del Sarto's hopeful: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what's a heaven for?" However, there are signs of a shift when we come to Matthew Arnold's social commentary in "The Scholar Gipsy," as he speaks of

. . . this strange disease of modern life,
   With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
     Its heads o'ertaxed, its palsied hearts,

That shift is further evident in the "Transitional Poets," Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, and A. E. Housman. Hopkins is an anomaly both in his style and in his fervent Christianity, but with Hardy and Housman there is a definite pessimism which is in stark contrast to what we have read thus far.

The introductions in your text are the best point of departure: Hopkins (1648), Hardy (1916), and Housman (2041). Pay attention to the following terms or topics associated with each author. We will be discussing these during the course of your reading.

Hopkins: instress, inscape, sprung rhythm
Hardy: irony, fate, sadness
Housman: fatalism, doom, mutability

The following URLs may be of interest:

The Gerard Manley Hopkins Resource Page
Thomas Hardy's World

^© Scott Foll 2000. All rights reserved.