1. The Victorian Age
December 2014

2. Tuesday, December 9th Agenda
Warm-Up: Horrible Histories Victorian Manners
Journal #4, write pair/share
Victorian England Brief Overview
Activity 2
Closing
Objective: Identify Satire in the Victorian Period

3. Journal #4
1. Girls never marry the men they flirt with. 2. It is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t.
3. Once a week is quite enough to dine with one’s own relations. 4. Health is the primary duty of life. 5. An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise. 6. I don’t like novels that end happily. 7. It is not a really serious engagement if it hasn’t been broken off at least once. 8. No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age.
1. Pick 1 item from the list that you agree with the MOST and 1 that you disagree with the MOST.
2. Write a few sentences as to why.
After letting the groups talk for a few minutes, have some groups share what they thought. Discuss each point on the anticipation guide and have the students decide whether each statement is always true, never true, or sometimes true and if so, in what situations. Discuss why some of the statements strike us as being absurd and even funny.
Explain that every statement on the anticipation guide came directly from a character’s line in The Importance of Being Earnest.

4. The Importance of Being Earnest
Written in 1895
A Comedy in 3 Acts
Immediate hit when first performed
Satirizes Victorian moral and social values
Bridges Victorian period/literature with Modern
Uses wit, puns, exaggeration, and wordplay to create humor

5. The Victorian Period Moral & Serious Culture
Women were expected to be the “angel in the house” - take care of their husband and family

6. The Victorian Period Manners were supremely important
English society was divided into classes
The Upper-class was well-educated, came from a rich and respected family (“old money”), and having good manners mattered more than anything else
Young women were always chaperoned until they were married
Again... Good manners were super important.

7. A Comedy of Manners Makes fun of well-bred, polite “high society”
“High Comedy”- uses mostly language rather than physical comedy to get a reaction
Heavy wordplay
Use of sarcasm or irony
Critiques of society, especially marriage
Contrasts between urban and rural environments

8. Comedic Timing Exercise