1. Which ruler's reign marks the approximate beginning and end of the Victorian era?

a) King Henry VIII
b) Queen Elizabeth I
c) Queen Victoria
d) King John
e) all of the above, in that order, with Victoria's reign marking the most pivotal period for England's colonial efforts in India, Africa, and the West Indies


2. Which city became the perceived center of Western civilization by the middle of the nineteenth century?

a) Paris
b) Tokyo
c) London
d) Amsterdam
e) New York

3. By 1890, what percentage of the earth's population was subject to Queen Victoria?

a) 1%
b) 10%
c) 15%
d) 25%
e) 95%


4. What did Thomas Carlyle mean by "Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe"?

a) Britain's preeminence as a global power will depend on mastery of foreign languages.
b) Even a foreign author is better than a homegrown scoundrel.
c) Abandon the introspection of the Romantics and turn to the higher moral purpose found in Goethe.
d) In a carefully veiled critique of the monarchy, Byron and Goethe stand in symbolically for Queen Victoria and Charles Darwin respectively.
e) Leave England and emigrate to Germany.


5. To whom did the Reform Bill of 1832 extend the vote on parliamentary representation?

a) the working classes
b) women
c) the lower middle classes
d) slaves
e) conservative landowners


6. Elizabeth Barrett's poem The Cry of the Children is concerned with which major issue attendant on the Time of Troubles during the 1830s and 1840s?

a) women's rights and suffrage
b) child labor
c) Chartism
d) the prudishness and old-fashioned ideals of her fellow Victorians
e) insurrection in the colonies


7. Who were the "Two Nations" referred to in the subtitle of Disraeli's Sybil (1845)?

a) the rich and the poor
b) Anglicans and Methodists
c) England and Ireland
d) Britain and Germany
e) the industrial north and the agrarian south


8. Which of the following novelists best represents the mid-Victorian period's contentment with the burgeoning economic prosperity and decreased restiveness over social and political change?

a) Anthony Trollope
b) Charles Dickens
c) John Ruskin
d) Friedrich Engels
e) Oscar Wilde

9. Which event did not occur as part of the rise of the British Empire under Queen Victoria?

a) Between 1853 and 1880, 2,466,000 emigrants left Britain, many bound for the colonies.
b) In 1876, Queen Victoria was named empress of India.
c) To save costs and maximize profits, the day-to-day government of India was transferred from Parliament to the private East India Company.
d) From 1830 to 1870, the sum total of investments abroad by British capitalists had risen from £300 billion to £800 billion.
e) In 1867 the Canadian provinces were unified into the Dominion of Canada.


10. What does the phrase "White Man's Burden," coined by Kipling, refer to?

a) Britain's manifest destiny to colonize the world
b) the moral responsibility to bring civilization and Christianity to the peoples of the world
c) the British need to improve technology and transportation in other parts of the world
d) the importance of solving economic and social problems in England before tackling the world's problems
e) a Chartist sentiment


11. Which of the following best defines Utilitarianism?

a) a farming technique aimed at maximizing productivity with the fewest tools
b) a moral arithmetic, which states that all humans aim to maximize the greatest pleasure to the greatest number
c) a critical methodology stating that all words have a single meaningful function within a given piece of literature
d) a philosophy dictating that we should only keep what we use on a daily basis.
e) a form of nonconformism


12. Which of the following discoveries, theories, and events contributed to Victorians feeling less like they were a uniquely special, central species in the universe and more isolated?

a) geology
b) evolution
c) discoveries in astronomy about stellar distances
d) all of the above
e) tractarianism


13. Which of the following contributed to the growing awareness in the Late Victorian Period of the immense human, economic, and political costs of running an empire?

a) the India Mutiny in 1857
b) the Boer War in the south of Africa
c) the Jamaica Rebellion in 1865
d) the Irish Question
e) all of the above


14. Which of the following authors promoted versions of socialism?

a) William Morris
b) John Ruskin
c) Edward FitzGerald
d) Karl Marx
e) all but c


15. Which best describes the general feeling expressed in literature during the last decade of the Victorian era?

a) studied melancholy and aestheticism
b) sincere earnestness and Protestant zeal
c) raucous celebration mixed with self-congratulatory sophistication
d) paranoid introspection and cryptic dissent
e) all of the above


16. Which of the following acts were not passed during the Victorian era?

a) a series of Factory Acts
b) the Custody Act
c) the Women's Suffrage Act
d) the Married Women's Property Rights Acts
e) the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act


17. Which contemporary discussions on women's rights did Tennyson's The Princess address?

a) the grueling working conditions for women in textile factories
b) the debate on women's suffrage
c) the need to enlarge and improve educational opportunities for women, resulting in the establishment of the first women's college in London
d) the question of monarchical succession and if a woman should hold royal power
e) the establishment of a civil divorce court


18. Fill in the blanks from Tennyson's The Princess.
Man for the field and woman for the _____:
Man for the sword and for the _____ she:
Man with the head and woman with the _____:
Man to command and woman to _____.

a) crop; scabbard; foot; agree
b) throne; scepter; soul; decree
c) school; scalpel; pen; set free
d) hearth; needle; heart; obey
e) field; sword; head; command


19. Which of the following Victorian writers regularly published their work in periodicals?

a) Thomas Carlyle
b) Matthew Arnold
c) Charles Dickens
d) Elizabeth Barrett Browning
e) all of the above: (In addition to short fiction, most Victorian novels appeared serialized in periodicals.)


20. What best describes the subject of most Victorian novels?

a) the representation of a large and comprehensive social world in realistic detail
b) a surrealist exploration of alternate states of consciousness
c) a mythic dream world
d) the attempt of a protagonist to define his or her place in society
e) a and d


21. Why did the novel seem a genre particularly well-suited to women?

a) It did not carry the burden of an august tradition like poetry.
b) It was a popular form whose market women could enter easily.
c) It was seen as a frivolous form where one shouldn't make serious statements about society.
d) It often concerned the domestic world with which women were familiar.
e) all but c


22. What was the relationship between Victorian poets and the Romantics?

a) The Romantics remained largely forgotten until their rediscovery by T. S. Eliot in the 1920s.
b) The Victorians were disgusted by the immorality and narcissism of the Romantics.
c) The Romantics were seen as gifted but crude artists belonging to a distant, semi-barbarous age.
d) The Victorians were strongly influenced by the Romantics and experienced a sense of belatedness.
e) The Victorians were aware of no distinction between themselves and the Romantics; the distinction was only created by critics in the twentieth century.


23. Experimentation in which of the following areas of poetic expression characterize Victorian poetry and allow Victorian poets to represent psychology in a different way?

a) the use of pictorial description to construct visual images to represent the emotion or situation of the poem
b) sound as a means to express meaning
c) perspective, as in the dramatic monologue
d) all of the above
e) none of the above: Victorians were not experimental in their poetry.


24. What type of writing did Walter Pater define as "the special and opportune art of the modern world"?

a) the novel
b) nonfiction prose
c) the lyric
d) comic drama
e) transcripts of Parliamentary debates


25. What factors contributed to the increased popularity of nonfiction prose?

a) a new market position for nonfiction writing and an exalted sense of the didactic function of the writer
b) a Puritanical distrust of fictions and a thirst for trivia
c) the forbiddingly high cost of three-volume novels and the difficulty of finding poetry in bookshops outside of London
d) the deconstruction of the truth-fiction dichotomy and an accompanying relativistic sense that every opinion was of equal value
e) c and d


26. For what do Matthew Arnold's moral investment in nonfiction and Walter Pater's aesthetic investment together pave the way?

a) a renewed secularism in the twentieth century
b) modern literary criticism
c) late–nineteenth-century and early–twentieth-century satirical drama
d) the surrealist movement
e) none of the above: Victorian prose was mostly forgotten until recently and had little impact on literature of or after its time.


27. Which of the following comic playwrights made fun of Victorian values and pretensions?

a) W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
b) Oscar Wilde
c) George Bernard Shaw
d) Robert Corrigan
e) all but d



1)c
2)c
3)d
4)c
5)c
6)b
7)a
8)a
9)c
10)b
11)b
12)d
13)e
14)e
15)a
16)c
17)c
18)d
19)e
20)e
21)e
22)d
23)d
24)b
25)a
26)b
27)e