LECTURE 1

VICTORIAN ENGLAND
THE AGE AND THE FRAME OF MIND

I. The Age
In broad lines, what is conventionally designated as the Victorian Age/the
Victorian Era in the political, socio-economic and cultural history of Great Britain was a
time of great change and development in nearly every sphere of human life - from
advances in medical, scientific and technological knowledge to changes in population
growth and mentalities. When we think of this specific period, words like stability,
progress, prosperity, reform, and Imperialism come to mind. The British had grounds for
some satisfaction because the evidence of great economic growth and technical progress
seemed to be abundant. At the same time, however, Victorian England recorded
widespread poverty, teeming, miserable slums and poor working conditions in many
industries as well.

Queen Victoria (1837 -1901)

Victoria became Queen of England at the age of 18, in 1837, when her uncle,
King William IV, passed away, and she died on January 22nd of 1901, after a reign of 63
years. She was the first English monarch to see her name given to the period of her reign
whilst still living - she ruled England during a long period of prosperity for the British
people, since the profits gained from the overseas British Empire, as well as from major
industrial improvements at home, allowed the development of a large, educated middle
class.
Among the many events that made Victoria’s reign seem undoubtedly different
from the earlier stages of British history, two are especially worthy of attention. The first
is the French Revolution (1789-1793/1815), and the second is the Industrial Revolution
that began around 1780 and accelerated all through the Victorian Age.
The French Revolution. It is undeniable that Victorians lived through historic
times – the Revolution in France had overthrown an ancient feudal aristocracy in the
name of democratic ideals. In England there was much early enthusiasm on the part of
artists and intellectuals for the Revolution’s “liberty, equality, and fraternity" claim. The

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revolutionaries’ purpose was to annihilate an undemocratic and corrupt system and to put
in place more democratic institutions. By late 1792, however, the Reign of Terror
(Régime de la terreur) had begun. The newly-formed French government, known as the
French Jacobins, were determined to purify their country and did so by means of the
guillotine. By 1793, France and England were at war - and the situation lasted on and off
till 1815. By the late 1790’s Napoleon Bonaparte had become First Consul, and he
declared himself Emperor in 1804. The final confrontation between the French and the
British armies took place at Waterloo, in 1815, and it ended with Napoleon’s defeat at
Waterloo and final exile.
After 1815, the British Tories, who had conducted the war against France,
wanting no manifestations of revolutionism in a post-war Great Britain (whose economy
had been badly hit by the war), introduced repressive legislation to diminish dissent by
“the lower orders” (for instance, freedom of speech and assembly were limited). The king
remained popular, but there were serious socio-economic troubles that were marking the
age. In fact, there are several historians who place the beginnings of what we call “the
Victorian Period” right back to 1815, the end of the War. The arguments for such an
association are connected to the fact that there really was no going back to the stable
aristocratic order prior to the revolution; new developments were in process, and the
expectation of change that gave birth to the French Revolution itself continued into the
new century, becoming a constant of the Victorian Age.
The Industrial Revolution. The second great event that marked the Victorian
Era. Its beginnings could be traced back to the late eighteenth century, around 1780.
Trade had long been important in Europe, and the commercial classes had obtained from
the monarchy the right to control their own property. They also required a broader market
for their goods along with more and more raw materials with which to make them. That
broader market came into being partly through foreign exploration and conquest in India,
Africa, and the Americas. Population growth in Europe itself also encouraged an increase
in the size of the market as well as more labour for the work force. So an increasingly
important commercial class, bigger markets, and expanded population made the
Industrial Revolution possible.

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The Industrial Revolution occurred in Britain first since the British economy was
powerful - there was capital to invest, and some of the people already had a high standard
of living compared to those in Continental Europe. The food supply was impressive
thanks to farming, London was already a great commercial centre and, by 1780, England,
with its huge naval power, its successive foreign expansions, and its business-oriented
commercial class, was ready to revolutionize its means and modes of production to meet
the greater demand for goods that was to come with expanded markets. Exports also
flourished during this period (cotton textiles -40% of British exports by 1815).
Other developments which made the revolution take off were coal power and,
above all, steam power (James Watt and Matthew Boulton, 1769). As steam power
gradually replaced water as the source for industrial production, it became possible to
locate large factories conveniently in large urban complexes in the north of England, and
great industrial towns like Manchester begin to transform English life and landscape. The
coming of the railroads from the 1830’s-40’s, which networked commercial centers and
greatly increased the speed of production and sale of commodities while at the same time
amounting to a new investment and manufacturing opportunity, and the effect is
stunning: people’s mentalities and ways of living were changing at an exciting speed -
but also anxiety-provoking.

The Effects of Industrialization

Industrial and economic transformation brought with them intensely felt social
transformation, too: urbanization meant employment for some, unemployment for others-
an example of this fact be rural handloom weavers thrown out of work by the new cotton-
working devices. Thus, there was a human cost of urbanization: the early industrial city
was no paradise - in its rawest form, industrial production was carried on at great risk to
the workers (men, women, and children) and with great harm to their quality of life.
Wages were extremely low, hours very long – 14 a day, or even more. Employers often
preferred to hire women and children, who worked for even less then men. Families lived
in horribly crowded, unsanitary housing. Before the reformist wave in the 1830’s, there
was little talk of "labor laws" to protect those whose toil made the augmentation of
capital possible. Moreover, life was rather precarious in other ways since the kinds of

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sanitary knowledge and measures we take for granted in the twenty-first century simply
did not exist through much of the Victorian Period. Outbreaks of typhus and cholera due
to unsanitary water were a fact of life, even for those above the lowest levels of society,
and the same was true of infant mortality.
As a result of concentration and discontent, a sense of “class consciousness”
began to infiltrate British life and discourse -poor people were no longer so inclined as
formerly to respect their betters, while the new factory owners often saw their employees
as little more than chattel or cogs in the profit-engendering machine.

Politics - The British EMPIRE

During Victoria’s reign, Great Britain was not just a powerful island nation. It
was the centre of a global empire that encouraged British contact with a wide variety of
other cultures. By the end of the nineteenth century, approximately one-quarter of the
earth’s land surface was part of the British Empire, and more than 400 million people
were governed by Great Britain. An incomplete list of British colonies in 1901 would
comprise Australia, British Guiana (now Guyana), Brunei, Canada, Cyprus, Egypt,
Gambia, the Gold Coast (Ghana), Hong Kong, British India (now Bangladesh, India,
Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka), Ireland, Kenya, Malawi, the Malay States (Malaysia),
Malta, Mauritius, New Zealand, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Singapore, South Africa,
Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and Trinidad and Tobago.
Queen Victoria’s Empire was a truly heterogeneous entity, governed by
heterogeneous practices. It included Crown Colonies like Jamaica, and protectorates like
Uganda, which had granted only partial sovereignty to Britain. Ireland was an internal
colony whose demands for home rule were alternately entertained and discounted. India
had started the century under the control of the East India Company, but was directly
ruled from Britain after the 1857 Indian Mutiny (the first Indian war of independence),
and Victoria was crowned Empress of India in 1877. Colonies like Canada and Australia
with substantial European populations had become virtually self-governing by the end of
the century and were increasingly considered near-equal partners in the imperial project.
By contrast, colonies and protectorates with large indigenous populations, i.e. Sierra
Leone, would not gain autonomy until the twentieth century.

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The distinction between imperialism and colonialism is difficult to pin down,

because the two activities can seem indistinguishable at times. Roughly speaking,
imperialism involves the claiming and exploiting of territories outside of one’s own
national boundaries for a variety of motives. For instance, Great Britain seized territories
in order to increase its own holdings and enhance its prestige, to secure trade routes, to
obtain raw materials such as sugar, spices, tea, tin, and rubber, and to procure a market
for its own goods. Colonialism involves the settling of those territories and the
transformation - the Victorians would have said reformation - of the social structure,
culture, government, and economy of the people found there.
•••
If the first political coordinate of the Victorian Era was the expansion of the
empire (British Victorians were interested in geographical exploration, by the opening up
of Africa and Asia to the West, yet were troubled by the intractable Irish situation and
humiliated by the failures of the Boer War), the second important coordinate is the birth
and spread of political movements, most notably socialism and liberalism.

The Victorian Era and the Industrial Revolution

By the beginning of the Victorian period, the Industrial Revolution had created
profound economic and social changes.
For the most part, nineteenth century families were large and patriarchal. They
encouraged hard work, respectability, social deference and religious conformity. While
this view of nineteenth century life was valid, it was frequently challenged by
contemporaries. Women were often portrayed as either Madonnas or whores, yet
increasing educational and employment opportunities gave many a role outside the
family.
During the Victorian heyday, work and play expanded dramatically. The national
railway network stimulated travel and leisure opportunities for all, so that by the 1870s,
visits to seaside resorts, race meetings and football matches could be enjoyed by many of
this now largely urban society. Increasing literacy stimulated growth in popular
journalism and the ascendancy of the novel as the most powerful popular icon.

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The progress of scientific thought led to significant changes in medicine during

the nineteenth century, with increased specialisation and developments in surgery and
hospital building. There were notable medical breakthroughs in anaesthetics - famously
publicised by Queen Victoria taking chloroform for the birth of her son in 1853 - and in
antiseptics, pioneered by Joseph Lister (1827-1912). The public's faith in institutions was
evident not only in the growth of hospitals but was also seen in the erection of specialised
workhouses and asylums for the most vulnerable members of society.