Introduction to the Victorian Period
that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses"
- improvements in steam power for railways, ships, looms, printing presses, and farmers' combines;
- the introduction of the telegraph;
- intercontinental cable;
- photography;
- anesthetics; and
- universal compulsory education.
Major Dates
Composed to avoid a revolt by the lower classes (like the French Revolution). All men owning property worth ten pounds or more in annual rent could now vote. This enfranchises the lower middle classes, who were now able to vote, but not the working classes (they had to wait for the Second Reform Bill in 1867). This first bill broke up the monopoly held by conservative landowners.
Victoria became queen at the age of 18 after the death of her uncle, William IV. She reigned for more than 60 years, longer than any other British monarch. Her reign was a period of significant social, economic and technological change, which saw the expansion of Britain's industrial power and of the British empire.
In 1834, slaves in the British empire started a four-year period of "apprenticeship," during which they were obliged to work without pay for their former owners. Abolitionists campaigned against the system and in the Caribbean there were widespread protests. When the apprenticeship period ended in 1838, over 700,000 slaves were freed in the British Caribbean. Plantation owners received about £20 million in government compensation for the loss of their slaves. The former slaves received nothing.
Increased urbanization, the consequences of the Industrial Revolution, and inadequate social safety nets lead to a rise in infant mortality, increased urban poverty, and emigration for those who could afford it. Life in Victorian factories and mines was "poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (Hobbes).
High tariffs on imported grains (corn, etc.) created to protect English farm products from competition with low-priced products from abroad. Their repeal allowed free trade, enabled the influx of lower-priced goods, and helped relieve the economic crisis.
In September 1845, the potato crop in Ireland, which had previously provided approximately 60% of the nation's food needs, began to rot. The potato blight struck again the following year. What began as a natural catastrophe was exacerbated by the actions and inactions of the British government. It is estimated that about a million people died during the four-year famine, and that between 1845 and 1855 another million emigrated, most to Britain and North America.
A significant passing of the torch; a social recognition that Romanticism had played out its string.
This event was the brainchild of Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, and was designed to provide a showcase for the world's most advanced inventions, manufactures and works of art. It was housed in the massive 19-acre Crystal Palace, designed by Joseph Paxton. The event attracted almost six million visitors during the five summer months it was open. Many ordinary people travelled to London for the first time on cheap-rate excursion trains.
The Crimean War was fought between the Russians and an alliance of the British, French and Turks who feared Russian expansion in the Balkans. Notable battles were fought at Sebastopol, Balaclava (which saw the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade) and Inkerman. Russia was forced to sue for peace, and the war was ended by the Treaty of Paris in March 1856. British troops casualties were as much from poor equipment and medical care as from fighting the Russians.
Charles Darwin's masterwork, which argued that all species evolved on the basis of natural selection, resulted from more than 20 years' research following a five-year journey around Cape Horn on HMS "Beagle." The book created an immediate stir, since Darwin's theory appeared to contradict the bible's creation story and call into question ideas of divine providence. Despite the influence of Darwin's work, very few Victorian scientists took up an atheistic position as a result of reading it.
This Reform Act was passed by a minority Conservative government led by Frederick, Earl of Derby. Its orchestrator was Benjamin Disraeli, who permitted larger extensions to the franchise than the Liberals would have countenanced. It virtually doubled the electorate, enabling one-third of adult males in Britain and one-sixth in Ireland to vote in parliamentary elections. In a few urban constituencies, working men were an electoral majority. A separate act for Scotland was passed in 1868.
India came under direct British government control in 1858, when the remaining authority of the East India Company was dissolved. The Conservative prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, suggested to the queen that she should be proclaimed empress. His motive seems mainly to have been flattery. Despite objections from the Liberal opposition, who were not consulted, the title was endorsed and Victoria used it officially from 1877.
Although WE Forster's act of 1870 had greatly expanded education opportunities, and an act passed in Benjamin Disraeli's government of 1876 had set up school attendance committees, significant gaps remained. AJ Mundella introduced a bill on behalf of William Gladstone's Liberal government which made school attendance compulsory from ages 5 to 10. State expenditure on education, about £1.25 million a year in 1870, rose to £4 million, and would reach £12 million by the end of Victoria's reign.
The first organised activity in support of votes for women dates from the 1860s, but pressure grew rapidly in the late 1880s. A turning point was the merger of the National Central Society for Women's Suffrage and the Central Committee for Women's Suffrage into the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. The NUWSS co-ordinated a range of regional activities. Its president, Millicent Fawcett, opposed violence and promoted her organisation as law-abiding and above party politics.
After the First Boer War in 1880-1881, the Boers (farmers of European descent) of the Transvaal forced the British government to recognise their independence. But the Boers refused to recognise the rights of the British (many prospecting for gold) in the Transvaal, leading to the Second Boer War. Although the Boers had initial military successes, the war ended in May 1902 with a Boer surrender. It was costly and unpopular war and Britain received much international criticism for its use of concentration camps.
Gender and Culture
Gender Roles
Women
Women in Victorian society had one main role in life, which was to marry and assume a supportive role in their husbands’ interests and business. Before marriage, unless they were from a wealthy family, women would learn domestic skills such as weaving, cooking, washing, and cleaning. The mastery of these skills, coupled with the cultivation of the traits below, was the aim of a Victorian middle-class woman.
The popular Victorian image of the ideal wife/woman came to be "the Angel in the House"; she was expected to be devoted and submissive to her husband. The Angel was passive and powerless, meek, charming, graceful, sympathetic, self-sacrificing, pious, and above all--pure.
The phrase "Angel in the House" comes from the title of a poem by Coventry Patmore, in which he holds his own angel-wife up as a model for all women. Initially this ideal primarily expressed the values of the middle classes. However, Queen Victoria's devotion to her husband and to a domestic life encouragead the ideal to spread throughout society. Patmore's poem was published in 1854, and was so influential that Virginia Woolf was railing against it in 1931, saying that "Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer."
Women's Education
In the upper classes it was assumed that a girl would marry and that therefore she had no need of a formal education, as long as she could look beautiful, entertain her husband’s guests, and produce a reasonable number of children. "Accomplishments" such as playing the piano, singing and flower‐arranging were all‐important. If she could not find a husband she faced a grim future as a "maiden aunt" whose help could always be called on to look after her aged parents or her siblings’ children. She might even be forced to take on employment as a governess, shut away in the schoolroom with children who had little interest in absorbing the information she was teaching. This became increasingly unattractive to intelligent women.
But their future was improved when Queen’s College in Harley Street, London was founded in 1848, to give governesses a recognized and marketable qualification. No "accomplishments" there. Ten more years saw the foundation of Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Other girls’ public schools followed. This increase in female education led to renewed demands for the vote. The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies was founded in 1897, hotly denounced by the Queen, who from her position of unimaginable power saw no reason why women should want to vote at all.
Men
Men in Victorian society were expected to remove themselves from domestic affairs and domestic comfort in order to achieve success in "the world." In many ways, this is an atavistic understanding of society as some kind of jungle, maze, or proving ground wherein a man both created and measured his masculinity. The ultimate achievement of this was always the recognition of one's status by one's peers.
Muscular Christianity
The influence of publications such as Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859) and, later, Nietzsche's The Gay Science (1882) — where he first has the infamous phrase about how the Enlightenment killed the possibility of belief: "God is dead" — caused a reaction in the Victorian understanding of masculinity. The response was a commitment to both spiritual and physical strength.
Muscular Christianity was characterized by a belief in patriotic duty, manliness, the moral and physical beauty of athleticism, teamwork, discipline, self-sacrifice, and "the expulsion of all that is effeminate, un-English, and excessively intellectual. Newsome, D. Godliness and Good Learning. London, 1961, p. 216.
By the turn of the century a public school manual could sum up both the anti-intellectual bent of this movement and its glorification of unthinking religious fervor and nationalism:
To the philosopher of any nation (not excluding our own) the spectabcle of the Englishman going through the world with rifle in one hand and Bible in the other is laughable; but to Englishmen, who are neither logicians nor idealists, it is not. . . . If asked what our muscular Christianity has done, we point to the British Empire." (113)
from Minchin, James George Cotton. Our Public Schools: Their Influence on English History. Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1901.
Sports and readiness for physical combat
The Victorians had a strange take on the old Latin adage, "Mens sana in corpore sano" [a sound mind in a sound body]. Traditionally this phrase was considered to represent the idea that physical exercise is just as important to one's well-being as intellectual exercise. But the Victorians made one of these dependent on the other: in order to educate one's mind, one had to educate one's body. Their fascination with health led to a sports -and game-playing mania, which was primarily promoted and acted out through the public school system for boys.
The primacy of marriage
But all of these masculine ideals could not be fully enacted unless one were married:
. . . only marriage could yield the full privileges of masculinity. To form a household, to exercise authority over dependants, and to shoulder the responsibility of maintaining and protecting them—these things set the seal on a man’s gender identity. (108).from Tosh, John. A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. Yale UP, 1999.
Three Phases of the Victorian Period
- The Reform Bill
- Repeal of Corn Laws
- Economic Depression
- The Great Famine
- Economic stability and optimism
- The Great Exhibition in Hyde Park = showcasing the triumphs of Victorian technology
- Assaults on religious faith:
- A variety of literary reactions:
Scientific attitude applied to the Bible
Geology and astronomy
The Origin of Species, 1859
Philosophy, esp. Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism: was faith useful?
Hopkins: a devout Catholic and a Jesuit, held the religious line
Tennyson: intuition leads to faith
Arnold & Carlyle: humanistic reaction— poetry and human love replaced faith
Meredith: evolution is wonderful
Huxley: agnostic, favored education
Morris & Pater: education and art can fill the void left by the loss of faith
- People became aware of the disparity between the smoothly-running institutions of mid-Victorian England and the actual turbulence in which people were living.
- The Irish Question: Irish home rule became a heated debate.
- Germany's military build up under Bismarck threatened England's military position as well as her preeminence in trade and industry.
- Competition from US after its Civil War.
- Depressions in 1873 and 1874.
- Labor became an economic and political force: the Second Reform Bill gave people the right to vote. Thus labor became a force to be reckoned with.