The Victorian Age (1837-1901) PDF

The Victorian Age (1837-1901) Introduction The Victorian Age was an age of important social and political reforms, of technological and scientific progress, and Britain became the most powerful country in the world thanks to its colonial expansion. Queen Victoria was loved especially by the...

The Victorian Age (1837-1901) Introduction The Victorian Age was an age of important social and political reforms, of technological and scientific progress, and Britain became the most powerful country in the world thanks to its colonial expansion. Queen Victoria was loved especially by the middle classes for her way of life and moral code. The Queen always reigned constitutionally, respecting Parliament and acting as a mediator above party politics (the two main political parties: the Liberals and the Conservatives, who alternated in goverment). This allowed: material progress, imperial expansion, social reforms.  Queen Victoria King William IV (1830-37) had no surviving legitimate children at the time of his death, so he was succeded by his niece Victoria (who was 18 years old) in 1837. She was the daughter of Prince Edward, fourth son of King George III (1760-1820), and of Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg. Queen Victoria then married her cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840. They had nine children. She died at 81 in 1901, succeded by her son Edward VII, the first King from the House of Saxe-Coburg Gotha (future House of Windsor).  Timeline GEORGE III (1760-1820) GEORGE IV WILLIAM IV (1820-1830) (1830-1837) House of Hanover VICTORIA (1837-1901) EDWARD VII (1901-1910) House of Saxe-Coburg Gotha GEORGE V (1910-1936) changed into EDWARD VIII (1936-ABDICATION) House of Windsor GEORGE VI (1936-1952) ELISABETH II (1952-2022) CHARLES III (2022-PRESENT) The British Empire During the reign of Queen Victoria, Great Britain ruled over a wide and powerful empire, that brought the British in contact with different cultures. Britain’s imperial activity started with Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603), in the second half of the 16th century. After the 1857 Indian Mutiny (a rebellion in India against the rule of the British East India Company) India came under direct rule by Britain and Queen Victoria was crowned Empress of India in 1876. India was important especially for the control on the country’s resources: tea, spices, cotton, silk. The British occupied new territories, such as Australia (originally a prison colony), New Zealand, Hong Kong, and expanded their possession in Africa (control on Cape of Good Hope), Egypt (Suez Canal) Afghanistan and South East Asia (Malaysia and Burma). THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN The Victorian believed that: the ‘races’ of the world were divided by physical and intellectual differences; some were destined to be led by others; it was an obligation imposed by God on the British to impose their superior way of life, their institutions, law and politics on native peoples. (This was called “the white man’s burden”, after a poem by Rudyard Kipling). The Chartist Movement and the rise of the working class After the pressure for democratic reforms during the years of the French Revolution, Britain turned politically conservative. The First Reform Bill (1832) insisted on property ownership, excluding the working classes completely. Birth of the Chartist movement (1838): working class people asked for a charter (a list of rights) of social reforms, such as the extension of the right to vote to all male adults. The Chartists were strongly opposed: the movement’s leaders were arrested, some protesters were killed, so the Chartist Movement dissolved. However, between 1860 and 1914 most of the Chartists’ demands became law. In particular, in 1918 the right to vote was extended to all men from 21 and women from 30 years of age, and in 1928 also to all women from 21 years of age! The Victorian Compromise: a two-faced reality The Victorian Age was an age of contrasts and social imbalance (progress and reforms vs poverty and social injustice). Victorian society was based on a set of moral values that could only be fulfilled by the middle and upper classes: hard work, respectability, good manners and education, patriarchal family, female chastity, repression of sexuality. Philantropy (charitable activity) was carried out by a lot of respectable women. These values derived from the Puritan tradition. All those who didn’t conform to these values were considered evil and immoral. So, the Victorian compromise is a mixture of hypocrisy and morality, the attempt to hide the unpleasant aspects of progress and the materialistic philosophy of life under a veil of respectability and optimism. Poverty Poverty was considered a moral problem, like a crime, to be managed through repressive measures or to keep hidden. In industrial cities, poor were forced into overcrowded slums while the property-owning class (5% or less of the population) occupied up to the 50% of the available land. Poor Laws (1834) took away children from their families to “solve” the problem of starvation and they were sent to work in parish-run workhouses where they received in return just enough food to survive. So, the Victorian Age was an age of great contrasts: poverty and squalor on one hand, progress and reform on the other. A contrast also visible in the grandeur of some public buildings compared to the numerous slums present in towns.  Victorian London Victorians often revived previous styles. Classical forms were preferred for civic and public buildings, like government offices, town halls; Gothic ones for ecclesiastical and domestic works. After 1855 the Gothic revival prevailed over the classical faction (see the Houses of Parliament). Victoria and Albert Museum British Museum House of the Parliament  The Victorian family The ideal Victorian family was patriarchal: Victorian private lives were dominated by an authoritarian father. Women were subject to male authority: the wife’s duties were to educate the children, to manage the house and make it a comfortable place for her husband. ‘Victorian’, synonymous with ‘prude’, stood for extreme repression; nudity was denounced in art and even furniture legs had to be concealed under heavy cloth not to be ‘suggestive’. The royal family was a powerful model for this. In fact Queen Victoria showed both her authority as a queen and her female humility in the presence of her husband. However, many women took on new challenges: Some women were great travellers, Marianne North travelled in many distant countries and she painted a lot of unknown species of animals and plants. Florence Nightingale can be considered the founder of modern nursing: she led a team of nurses in the war of Crimea, and then founded the first training school for nurses in London.