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THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE.
It was a complex and contradictory era: it was the age of progress, stability, great social reforms but it was also charactersised by poverty, injustice and social unrest (agitazione). The Victorians promoted a code of values that reflect the world as they wanted it to be, not as it really was, based on personal duty ( dovere ), hard work, respectability and charity.In this periods was very important to work hard to improve the society. The idea of respectability distinguished the middle from lower class. Respectability was a mixture of both morality andhypocrisy. It implied the possesion of good manners, the ownership( proprietà) of confortable house with servants and a carriage( carrozza), regular attendance at church, and charity activity.
Philanthropywas a wide( ampio) phenomenon: the rich middle class expoited ( sfruttare) the poor and at the same time managed to help “stay children, fallen woman and drunk men”.
The husband represented theautority and the key role of woman regarded the education of children and the hosework.
Sexuality was generally repressed in its public and private forms, and prudery in its most extreme manifestations ledto denunciation of nudity in art, and the rejection of words with sexual connotation from everyday vocabulary.

The Novel in the Victorian age

This is the period of novel because novelrepresents the complexity of the period and the profound changes that characterised it. For the first time there was a communion of interests and opinions between writers and their readers. Same code ofvalues: optimism, conformism and philanthropy.
The writers depicted (raffiguravano) society as they saw it; they were aware of evils of their society and denunced them, however they did not criticise theworld they lived in, they just said that there was social injustice .
The setting was the city because it was the main symbol of the industrial civilisation, the expression of anonymous lives and...