Victorianism and Charles Dickens

What a fabulous week to be able to jump in and explore all those amazing connections between the Victorian Age and Sydney our home city: The Queen Victoria Building, Victoria Road, Albert Road, The Palace Gardens… the list goes on. And it is important to stress that Sydney actually grew into a city exactly in the Victorian age. So any early pictures of Sydney will show exactly what the world was like during this time.

Hi all,

Blog topics for this week provide an awesome opportunity to display your critical and creative talents.

CREATIVE

Write a paragraph describing your own city or suburb using some of the literary language techniques that we have seen working in Charles Dickens.

CRITICAL

Write a brief critical appraisal of what you think Dickens’s main complaints are about Coketown- from the passage we explored in tutorials today.

CREATIVE

Write a letter to Queen Victoria alerting her to the fact that her railway carriage does nothing to help the poorer classes love her as a queen.

CRITICAL

Explore the site The Victorian Web and provide your reader with a few insights into how this site can deepen our understanding of what motivated Dickens to write.

CREATIVE

You are a belligerent student in Mr Gradgrind’s classroom. In a short, punchy paragraph tell Mr Gradgrind exactly what you think of his teaching methods.

CRITICAL

Those of you with some knowledge of Education history write a short paragraph stating whether you think Dickens’s picture of the mid-nineteenth Century classroom is exaggerated or is true to what was happening at the time.

CREATIVE/CRITICAL

Create your own Critical or Creative topic building on the insights from this week’s class.