DDs teacher giving serious misinformation WWYD?

[phantomnamechanger]

How to deal with this please......

DD has recently got a new English teacher. They are reading Pride & Prejudice (just started). Today in the lesson, the teacher has on several occasions referred to it being set in "the Victorian era"
that's a massive error to make, right? how do we point this out? DD was like when she told me, but there will be other kids who believe the teacher and for whom that will stick.
DD did not want to correct the teacher for fear of being reprimanded/thought rude.
WWYD?

Oh gawd remembering from 20 years ago...

The Victorian novel was concerned with realism and social change sometimes formulating a political answer to the social conundrum - think Dickens, Zola and also lurid sensational novels such as Wilkie Collins The Woman in White.

In the 20th century you move to modernism and questions of self identity.

Einstein is the most over-cited example of so many things

yy to this. There are so mant misconceptions about him and his work. You would think he had invented and discovered practically everything!

many

LRD - I am teaching OCR A-Level and syllabus is:

AS coursework - three post-1900 texts of any genre.
AS exam - one prose text and one poetry text (from set list) 1800-1945

A2 coursework - three texts from any time and any genre but one must be prose and one poetry.
A2 exam - Shakespeare text, one pre-1800 drama, one pre-1800 poetry (all from set list).

I teach history and a surprising amount of people think the entire 19th century was Victorian.

Thanks SPB.

well I learnt something today! Thanks MN!

My University does an MA in Victorian Studies and it concersn the 'long' 19th Century - From 1790-1914.

Good luck OP. Last week ds1 informed me that bipolar Disorder means having two/multiple personalities...according to his y5 teacher who is now, sadly off sick long term.

I can't say anything. This will never be corrected.

Oops, sorry, missed your post ubik.

I wonder if this is something that shifts with academic fashions quite a lot.

But all this new fangled chat about 'long era' has thrown me. I always understood the Victorian novel as a genre.

May I just say, there is no such thing as "the American school system," just as there is no such thing as the UK school system.

As others have suggested, I think the teacher may be equating Victorian with the whole of the nineteeth century. I think OP's DD should be encouraged to correct the teacher, but privately.

BTW, has anyone seen the old 1940 P and P film with Laurence Olivier? The costumes in that are definitely Victorian rather than Regency.

Ubik, I think that's just using a post-hoc description of Victorian novels and applying it. It's also inaccurate and reductive.

Well, I am thrown too, and my undergrad was ten years ago. The idea of long and short centuries was old-fashioned then, so I think it's not that it was too new for you, but that it was too old?

I can see why people would teach 'the Victorian novel' as a genre but I think it would be problematic. There was a MN thread a while back with people disagreeing over whether the Little House books were 'Victorian' - you know, because the genre is quite similar to some stuff being written over here, but obviously it's a bit dubiously colonial to slap a label 'Victorian' on something written in another country.

But I dunno.

Even if the teacher is trying to make a subtle point about genre, surely if she is confusing the whole class over what wars Wickham could be fighting in, she's lost them already.

(Ok, I wittered and MI just explained. Whoops.)

Maybe the idea is to try and completely seperate it from the even longer 'Georgian' period in terms of ideals and outlook.

Ach it's a intellectual wankery in the end.

Of course it's reductive - I'm posting on mumsnet not writing a dissertation - but the Victorian novel reflects concerns with social realism and social change, also advances in printing technology, masdive political change The Grwat Reform Act abd the rise of capitalism using literature as a commodity - ie Dickens and Wilkie Collins and also the idea that literature could be an agent fir social change rather than just art.

But I'm sure you could write a lovely essay about how the concept of Victorian novel as a genre is reductive and whatever and it would be fabulous.

Sorry, didn't mean to offend you.

Frankly I could argue that Jonathan Franxen's The Corrections is an example of the Victorian novel in terms of themes and genre ...

Which means that yes Victorian novel as genre is problematic ... Why didn't I wrote this at university??

Wrote? Write...sorry fat fingers

I still think that's taking a definition of 'The Victorian Novel' and then saying that novels that don't fit into that group are by definition non-Victorian even if they were, er, written during the time of Victoria. It's ignoring all that lovely Gothic stuff, from Wuthering Heights to Dracula to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. And it's shoe-horning in all those fabulous sensational novels of the 1860s in a slightly tangential way.

Yes, what motherinferior said. Think of the Brontes. Only Anne is anything like a Victorian realist. Emily is essentially Gothic, and Charlotte does surface realism/feminist social criticism but is really as Gothic as Emily.

And yes, the Olivier Pride and Prejudice film shifts it to some unspecified period within Victoria's reign, judging by the costumes, but have only seen bits, so no idea what happened with the Napoleonic wars, militias etc. it looks very odd indeed.

Mind you, the recentish film with Keira Knightley shifted the design/costumes etc back to the 1790s, when JA wrote the first draft.

My MA thesis was all about how Jane Eyre is an attempt at recouping the Gothicism of Wuthering Heights into a more acceptable form, which then gets skewed by CB's own preoccupation with realism and feminism- before CB goes totally off her trolley and does the fabulous split ending of Villette.

Quite a few Gothic elements in the Tenant, too.

But this a just academic debate isn't it. I could argue that Wutheribf Heights is an example of Victorian concerns with social change/ realism. And the sensation novels were also part of the genre - The Woman in White and Dracula

Sorry have to do school run..the pram in the hall etc etc

How would you argue it?