https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Exhibition#/media/File:Crystal_Palac...

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”—so writes Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), succinctly capturing the dualities of the Victorian age (1837-1901). In this course, we will explore dualities and contradictions of the Victorian era through fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and the visual arts. We might think of the Victorians as sin-obsessed, dignified, proper, prudish, and tight-laced, but these same Victorians lived in an age of urban squalor, disease, rampant deprivations, prostitution, and child labor. This era of production and consumption witnessed rapid expansion of the British Empire; growth in literacy and industrialization; and the glory of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the first ever World’s Fair.  Alongside these achievements came epidemics (typhoid took the life of Prince Albert in 1861); the Crimean War crisis and conflicts in India, Africa, China, and the West Indies; religious doubt; and the greed of imperialism, which underpins Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). We will encounter the angel in the house and her fallen sister in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862); Queen Victoria and Prince Albert alongside their poorest subjects in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851); a clash between agrarian southern England and the industrial north in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855); the divided human being in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886); and a scrooge transformed into a charitable man in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843).  Course work includes 4 briefs, an exhibition on the Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education (COVE), and a final 8–10-page paper.