Example Of Plum Unpeck’d Cherries Essay

Victorian Technology and Art

Today, technology has become such a fundamental factors in the development and evolution of art. We see how photoshop is used to create new forms of art, including in videography, photography, among others. But this is nothing original. As it were, technology has throughout history provided new tools for the creation of art (Gever 1). Particularly, an the focus of this paper, technology did influence art even in Victorian times- even if that technology was inferior to the technology that people know today-, and just as context reveals itself in the works of art, so did the influence of technology reveal itself in Victorian art.
The influence of Victorian technology on the art of those times took many forms. By asserting that “Few aspects of Victorian life escaped the impact of industrialization”, Daly (43), for instance, implies that industrialization did impact on nearly all aspects of social life. Indeed, industrialization did bring new forms of production. On this point, one of most probable technological influence on the creation of art was the typewriter printing press. Like all technology is meant to make work easy, the typewriter was invented to make writing, easier, quicker and neater. The printing press was meant to ensure mass production of literature. Chrisitina’s Goblin Market was written at a time that typewriters and printing press were already in use. But more than that, there were publishers who helped in the mass production of literature, as well as the marketing and distribution of such material. In other words, Christina’s work directly benefited from technology- from production, to marketing and distribution, and even the fact that the work has remained over time for use to read it today.
But in other ways, Victorian technology also provided new language, new material for setting and characterization. We see this in a number of poems (the focus of this discussion). For instance, industrialization brought urbanization, which did change the lives of the people in several ways: migration, new social ills (such as alcoholism). Equally, both directly and indirectly, technology did bridge geographical gaps and the people from these places, leading to the interactions that- at first in subtle ways and then more explicitly- started the decline of the influence of the religion (the church). One way or another, these have been reflected in many Victorian arts.
Christina Rosetti’s poem Goblin Market, for example, opens with one of the redundant scenes of commerce in the industrial age. A gobbling cries out, “Come buy our orchard fruits, come buy, come buy”. The goblin is calling buyers to his merchandise (fruits and vegetables). One can easily infer that the goblin stood at a place that had many people. Otherwise he would not be calling so loudly. The market is, therefore, an urban center.
We also see in this case one of the earliest and archaic forms of marketing and advertising. This is still common in many parts of the world. One of the characters of advertising and marketing is for the person doing it that their product is very best among the rest. This is some form of selfishness, the shutting out of others and overplaying the goodness of oneself. This is expressed in colorful language, which is mostly exaggerated. We see this in this poem:

Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches
All ripe together
In summer weather,-
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly
Taste them and try:
Currants and Gooseberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,

Citrons from the South,

Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;
In agreement, Herbert Tucker does argue that the poem was Rosettis’critique of the emergence of the advertising industry in the pre-capitalist period that was the Victorian age, which involved the use of clever marketing tactics (such as the ones the goblins use to woo Laura Hartman).
This was (and still is) the character of the commercialization that came with industrialization. In other words, industrialization, even if in its most simple form, did eventually provide Rosettti with a setting and characters for this poem.
The interpretation of Goblin Market has been one elusive thing for many. Some argue that it was an expression of the author’s feminist stance and even homosexual politics. If this is the case, then we can infer that feminism was already a noteworthy (if not popular) social agenda that was already invading the creation of art. But feminism was larger helped by the successes of other women in other places (stories which could have reached the Victorian Rosetti, like others before or after her, through process of in human interaction enabled by technology, including printing press) or even self-reflection of some educated women in the Victorian times. In this regard we may be seeing the influence of technology.
Indeed, the influence of technology on literature (even the Victorian age) goes beyond the ones discussed here. It is not always in terms of production and even new linguistic material. Still, this discussion provides a basic insight into this phenomenon.

Works Cited

Daly, Nicholas. Technology, in Francis Gorman (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
Victorian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Print.
Gever, Eyal. Technology and Art: Engineering the Future. BBC News, Oct. 04, 2012. Web.