Victorian Background |
| The Romantic Period: began in 1798It ended in one of the following years:1832–Reform Bill is passed *
1837–Victoria becomes Queen
1850 — Death of William WordsworthThe Victorian period: ended 1901 |
By-
Priyakshee Choudhury
Introduction
The Victorian era is generally agreed to stretch through the reign of Queen Victoria from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. Victoria’s reign lasted for 63 years and 216 days; the longest in British history up to the present day. It was a tremendously exciting period when many artistic styles, literary schools, as well as, social, political and religious movements flourished. It was a time of prosperity, broad imperial expansion, and great political reform. It is also the beginning of modern times.
For much of this century the term Victorian, which literally describes things and events (roughly) in the reign of Queen Victoria, conveyed connotations of “prudish,” “repressed,” and “old fashioned.” Although such associations have some basis in fact, they do not adequately indicate the nature of this complex, paradoxical age that saw great expansion of wealth, power, and culture.
The Victorian age was not one, not single, simple, or unified, only in part because Victoria’s reign lasted so long that it comprised several periods. Above all, it was an age of paradox and power. The Catholicism of the Oxford Movement, the Evangelical movement, the spread of the Broad Church, and the rise of Utilitarianism, socialism, Darwinism, and scientific Agnosticism, were all in their own ways characteristically Victorian; as were the prophetic writings of Carlyle and Ruskin, the criticism of Arnold, and the empirical prose of Darwin and Huxley; as were the fantasy of George MacDonald and the realism of George Eliot and George Bernard Shaw.
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The Victorian Age was characterised by rapid change and developments in nearly every sphere – from advances in medical, scientific and technological knowledge to changes in population growth and location. Over time, this rapid transformation deeply affected the country’s mood: an age that began with a confidence and optimism leading to economic boom and prosperity eventually gave way to uncertainty and doubt regarding Britain’s place in the world.
QUEEN VICTORIA
Born on 24 May 1819.
On 10th June 1837, following the death of her uncle, William IV, she became queen at the age of eighteen.
She fell instantly in love with her German cousin, Prince Albert and they were married on 10 February 1840. Between 1841 and 1857 Queen Victoria had nine children – four sons, five daughters. Prince Albert was very interested in art, science and manufacturing and took a keen interest in the building of the Crystal Palace. He died suddenly of typhoid in 1861. His widow was overcome with grief and wrote in her diary, “My life as a happy person is ended!” She wore black for the rest of her life. For a long time she refused to appear in public, which made her very unpopular.
Queen Victoria died aged 80 on 22 January 1901 and a new age – the Edwardian – began.
IMPERIALISM
In 1876 Victoria was declared Empress of India and the English Empire was constantly being expanded. The prevailing attitude in Britain was that expansion of British control around the globe was good for everyone.
One, England had an obligation to enlighten and civilize the ‘less fortunate savages’ of the world (often referred to as the “White Man’s Burden”).
Second, they (as a chosen people) had a destiny to fulfil — they were ‘destined’ to rule the world.
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Finally, they needed money, resources, labour, and new markets for expanding industry in England.
The British Empire (map) was the largest empire ever, consisting of over 25% of the world’s population and area. It included India, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Rhodesia, Hong Kong, Gibraltar and several islands in the West Indies and various colonies on the African coast. In 1750 the population of Britain was 4 million. By 1851 it was 21 million. By 1900, Queen Victoria reigned over 410 million people. British Victorians were excited by 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.
SOCIAL CLASS
Class is a complex term, in use since the late eighteenth century, and employed in many different ways. In our context classes are the more or less distinct social groupings which at any given historical period, taken as a whole, constituted British Society. Different social classes can be distinguished by inequalities in such areas as power, authority, wealth, working and living conditions, life-styles, life-span, education, religion, and culture.
working class – men and women, who performed physical labour, paid daily or weekly wages
Middle class – men performed mental or “clean” work, paid monthly or annually
Upper class – did not work, income came from inherited land and investments
The social classes of England were newly reforming, and fomenting. There was a churning upheaval of the old hierarchical order, and the middle classes were steadily growing. Added to that, the upper classes’ composition was changing from simply hereditary aristocracy to a combination of nobility and an emerging wealthy commercial class. The definition of what made someone a gentleman or a lady was, therefore, changing at what some thought was an alarming rate. By the end of the century, it was silently agreed that a gentleman was someone who had a liberal public (private) school education (preferably at Eton, Rugby, or Harrow), no matter what his antecedents might be. There continued to be a large and generally disgruntled working class, wanting and slowly getting reform and change.
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Conditions of the working class were still bad, though, through the century, three reform bills gradually gave the vote to most males over the age of twenty-one. Contrasting to that was the horrible reality of child labour which persisted throughout the period. When a bill was passed stipulating that children under nine could not work in the textile industry, this in no way applied to other industries, nor did it in any way curb rampant teenaged prostitution.
GENDER ROLES
There were gender stereotypes certainly, women were regarded as weaker and more fragile than men, and the ideal was that a woman’s place was in the home, caring for the children and exercising a good influence over husband and children. Women’s natures were thought to be purer and more virtuous than men’s. Women were expected to stay at home, always quiet, pure, cautious, always perfectly looking, never in a bad mood, a perfect accessory for their husbands. Men, in contrary, where expected to be the brave knights, defending their country and their women, standing upright in the society, working hard – the same perfect picture of men, as it always had been.
Feminists would describe it the following way:
The female gender role was constructed as an opposite to an ideal male role, and helps to perpetuate patriarchy.
However, the reality was that a great many women had to work for a living outside the home, whether they wanted to or not. It is true that opportunities for employment were restricted, many forms of employment were closed to women, and women were generally paid less than men. Women teachers for instance, of whom there were a great many in the Victorian era, were generally paid a lot less than their male colleagues. Men were considered to be the heads of the household- the men as the aggressive part: strong, rational, always ready to fight, to defend; also the sexual active part belongs to their characteristics. Women, on the other hand were dependent and subdued to a male protector, only in charge of inner-familiar relationships, weak, emotional, irrational, compensating male aggressions, sexually passive or disinterested. After a woman married, her rights, her property, and even her identity almost ceased to exist. By law she was under the complete and total supervision of her husband. It was not until after 1850’s that the effective women’s organizations arose and finally began to stand up against male oppression.
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EDUCATION
Education in nineteenth-century England was not equal – not between the sexes, and not between the classes. Gentlemen would be educated at home by a governess or tutor until they were old enough to attend Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester, Westminster, Charterhouse, or a small handful of lesser schools. The curriculum was heavily weighted towards the classics – the languages and literature of Ancient Greece and Rome. After that, they would attend Oxford or Cambridge. Here they might also study mathematics, law, philosophy, and modern history. Oxford tended to produce more Members of Parliament and government officials, while Cambridge leaned more towards the sciences and produced more acclaimed scholars. However, it was not compulsory, either legally or socially, for a gentleman to attend school at all. He could, just as easily, be taught entirely at home. However, public school and University were the great staging grounds for public life, where you made your friends and developed the connections that would aid you later in life. Beau Brummel met the Prince of Wales at Eton and that friendship helped him conquer all of London Society despite his lack of family background.
A lady’s education was taken, almost entirely, at home. There were boarding schools, but no University, and the studies were very different. She learned French, drawing, dancing, music, and the use of globes. If the school, or the governess, was interested in teaching any practical skills, she learned plain sewing as well as embroidery, and accounts.
SCIENCE AND PROGRESS
The Victorian era is known as the “Age of Progress” because it was an Era of great Scientific and Mechanical developments. The Victorian era was a time of great change. The Victorian era ushered in a tremendous surge of technological invention. Victorians believed in progress and viewed with optimism their Industrial Revolution.
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Industrial Revolution: the developments that transformed Great Britain, between 1750 and 1830, from a largely rural population making a living almost entirely from agriculture to a town-centred society engaged increasingly in factory manufacture.
An important development during the Victorian era was the improvement of communication links. Stage coaches, canals, steam ships and most notably the railways all allowed goods, raw materials and people to be moved about, rapidly facilitating trade and industry. Steamboats allowed America to engage in transportation and trade as never before, while railroads connected the nation from north to south and east to west. During this period, the ingenious and prolific Thomas Edison developed the first electric light bulb and phonograph, and improved numerous inventions such as the telegraph, telephone, and motion picture projector. Huge ships were built, the first aeroplanes were built, the first steel bridges, great machinery for factories, the telegraph line started and many other developments:
In 1846, the first sewing machine was in use, making stitching of garments much easier. In 1870, the first typewriters appeared. In 1882, incandescent electric lights were introduced to London streets, although it took many years before they were installed everywhere.
RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY
Victorian England was a deeply religious country. A great number of people were habitual church-goers, at least once and probably twice, every Sunday. The Bible was frequently and widely read by people of every class; so too were religious stories and allegories. Yet towards the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, the hold of organized religion upon the English people began to slacken for several reasons.
The bible was becoming questioned and all that was natural was replaced by what was industrial. Religion took a backseat to science and it seemed as if God was powerless against the rising age of machine. Both Hopkins and Arnold express their views towards this in their poems `Gods Grandeur’ and `Dover Beach’. The theory of evolution proposed by Charles Darwin also struck at core truths of Christianity: that man was created by God, created in God’s image, and responsible for his sinful actions.
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VICTORIAN FASHION
During the Victorian era, the precise cut, material and colour of a garment revealed the social class of the wearer. With the growing prosperity of the day, fashions for women of the higher classes became increasingly complex. Dresses were composed of several layers of different shades, cloths and trimmings, and intended to be worn with both under-dresses and over-dresses. Properly dressed ladies accessorized with gloves, hats and bonnets. The Victorian era also saw the progression from crinoline skirts to hoop skirts and finally to bustled skirts.
Men’s fashions of the era were comparably more comfortable for the wearer. It was considered impolite society for a gentleman to appear in his shirt sleeves before a lady other than his wife, so Victorian men nearly always wore an informal “sack coat” during the day. The sack coat was a loose-fitting, single-breasted garment appropriate for travel or business, which was distinctive for its small collar, short lapels, a fastened top button close to the neck, moderately rounded hems, flap or welt pockets on the hips, a welt pocket on the chest and a slightly baggy appearance. Men’s formal attire consisted of a top hat, dapper cutaway coat or frockcoat, waistcoat, cravat and trousers.
VICTORIAN LITERATURE
The Victorian era was the great age of the English novel—realistic, thickly plotted, crowded with characters, and long. It was the ideal form to describe contemporary life and to entertain the middle class. Victorian literature is characterized by a strong sense of morality, and it frequently champions the downtrodden. Victorian literature is also known for its attempts to combine imagination and emotion with the neoclassical ideal of the accessibility of art for the common person. A great deal of change took place during this period–brought about because of the Industrial Revolution; so it’s not surprising that the literature of the period is often concerned with social reform.
In the early years of the Victorian Period, poetry was still the most visible of literary forms. Like everything else, poetry and poetics underwent an evolution during the nineteenth century. Both the purpose of poetry and its basic style and tone changed drastically during the Victorian Period. In the first half of the nineteenth century, poetry was still mired in the escapist, abstract imagery and themes of the earlier generation. While essayists and novelists were confronting social issues head-on, poets for their part remained ambivalent at best. The obsession with the natural world and the imagination that so clearly distinguished the Romantic poets was supplanted during the Victorian Period by a clear-headed, almost utilitarian kind of poetics. Alfred Lord Tennyson was the master of simple, earthy lyricism to which everyone could relate. Victorian poets were nothing if not masters of variety and inventiveness. Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, for example, covered a wide array of subjects, from lucid dreams to the nature of art and even the meaning of existence. Throughout his various aesthetic experiments, Browning never failed to inject humanity into his subject matter.
At some point in the Victorian era, the novel replaced the poem as the most fashionable vehicle for the transmission of literature. This fundamental shift in popular taste has remained to the present day. Victorian novels tend to be idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end; virtue would be rewarded and wrongdoers are suitably punished. They tended to be of an improving nature with a central moral lesson at heart. While this formula was the basis for much of earlier Victorian fiction, the situation became more complex as the century progressed. Serial publications in magazines and journals became more and more popular, and soon these pieces were being bound and sold in their complete forms. Dickens made full use of the serial format. Charles Dickens is a prime exemplar of Victorian novelist. The influence of Dickens was so severe that every novelist who came after him had to work under his aesthetic shadow. Part of his appeal certainly owed to the fact that his literary style, while always entertaining, put the ills of society under the microscope for everyone to see. His Hard Times was a condemning portrait of society’s obsession with logic and scientific advancement at the expanse of the imagination.
The novels of George Eliot were concerned with ethical conflicts and social problems. William Makepeace Thackeray is best known for Vanity Fair (1848), which wickedly satirizes hypocrisy and greed. Brontë sisters, Charlotte and Emily, made a tremendous sensation in England when, from their retirement, they sent out certain works of such passionate intensity that readers who had long been familiar with novels were startled into renewed attention. Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily’s only work, in particular has violence, passion, the supernatural, heightened emotion and emotional distance, an unusual mix for any novel but particularly at this time. It is a prime example of Gothic Romanticism from a woman’s point of view during this period of time, examining class, myth, and gender. Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) was perhaps the more gifted of the two sisters, and her best-known works are Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853).
The Victorians are credited with ‘inventing childhood’, partly via their efforts to stop child labour and the introduction of compulsory education. As children began to be able to read, literature for young people became a growth industry. Authors like Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland) and Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book) were especially favoured.
Conclusion
The death of Queen Victoria sees the end of this era. The period is beloved for its attention to high morals, modesty and proper decorum, as inspired by the Queen and her husband, Prince Albert. The Victorian era was also an optimistic time in which scientific and industrial invention thrived. Developments in printing produced a proliferation of Victorian scrap art, cards, and magazines. The importance placed on civic conscience and social responsibility engendered notable developments toward gender and racial equality, such as the legal abolishment of slavery in America. In addition, humanitarian and religious organizations such as the Salvation Army reflected the Victorian concern for the poor and needy of the period.
