Module One Lecture One Introduction to the Victorian Middle Class Society, Politics,

Mentality and Culture.

a) enduring historical, sociological and political labels and competing insider views
the Victorian age the age of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), who became Empress of
India in 1876 after previously changing the name of the Hanoverian British dynasty
to that of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, when she married Prince Albert of
the latter house) in Romanian, epoca victorian (small case)
the age of the British Empire (a geopolitical label) - the British monarch controlled
one third of the world in the British colonies which extended in Asia to Afghanistan
and Tibet, covering the whole of India ( thirty-four times the size of England),
extending to New Zealand and Australia (where Magwitch in Great
Expectations or Hetty Sorrell in Adam Bede by George Eliot and many a real
Victorian villain got transported in a kind of surrogate of a criminals execution). The
British Empire also extended to Canada, 40 times the size of England. In Africa,
the British Empire occupied Nigeria and Egypt to the North, after the Purchase in
1875 of the Suez Canal, and went as far down as the tip of the continent where it
conquered South Africa after the Boer War, in the 1890s. (see G. M. Trevelyan.
Illustrated History of England, 1962, translated into Romanian in 1975 ; Book 6,
3rd Chapter).The union of Ireland with Great Britain ( to create The United Kingdom
of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801) sanctioned and brought to its climax the
centuries-old domination of Ireland by the rich, powerful neighbour.

the country of the industrial revolution (an economic, social label). It is interesting
to see what caused the industrial revolution and what its historical consequence
were. In the span of a single century the history of science unites in Britain the
names of James Watt, Michael Faraday, William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, George Boole,
James Clerk Maxwell. The technological advances include the invention of the
telegraph, the intercontinental cable, the generalisation of steam power (with the
large scale implementation of the steam hammer, the steam turbine, the steam
loom and the steam plough) or the universal milling machine; the communication
industry was revolutionized by the invention and the world-wide spreading of the
telegraph, the intercontinental cable or photography and by the rotary printing
press; land transportation developed tremendously with the building in Britain of the
first successful railroad system in the world followed by the construction of the
first underground railway system, the Metropolitan, in 1860; the electric lamp
increased the urbanization standards, too; the commodity industry was changed by
the introduction of the vacuum cleaners, and the war industry thrived after the
invention of the automatic guns, the shell gun and the Winchester gun (cf. 1991
Information Please Almanac, Houghton Mifflin, Boston).

an age of material progress (this label is the consequence of the former one) which
constantly sought to accommodate the demographic and environmental changes so
as to allow other areas of life to keep pace with material progress. Education, for
example, was torn between the old and the new liberal models as a tool for
controlling, in a disciplined and benevolent/progressive way, the minds of people
and make them fit members of the new society. (See the lectures on the dominant,
residual and emergent models in education in the nineteenth century)
an age of considerable environmental change: the change of the countryside and
the city alike. Quite often, a plain would be spectacularly transformed into a canyon
by the sprouting railways which cut through meadows in depth or cut tunnels
through the mountains: all these site changes amounted to a special kind of
environmental events thought worthy of being celebrated in work songs about the
navies (or railway workers) and their prowess in taming nature (as the theme park
folklore demonstrates today, in the most recent and fashionable kind of
museographical exhibition in Britain, aimed at recreating the commoners everyday
life in the regional British near past). Urbanization became overriding, with the
displacement of the rural population in the mass. In literature, this was reflected by
the nostalgic rememberance of the rural past in quite a number of success, or
simply representative, Victorian novels, such as the majority of George Eliots
novels or the rural gentry and family chronicles that spawned into a picturesque
Victorian genre.
the first mass age in history, the precursor, of the 20 th century mass society (a
sociological label)
an age of liberal reforms meant to strengthen the economically liberal state (a label
that demonstrates the connection between economy and politics) Liberal politics is
middle class politics with little regard for the lower classes (from a populist or

social-democratic viewpoint this could be seen as a cruel state: it did not

bother to manage the interests of other than the capitalistic entrepreneurs
and did not interfere with the market. The label for the Victorian or liberal
state was a non-interventionist state, dominated by mercantile free market
a regulations. It was based on the political doctrine of laissez-faire that
gave free reign to the private capitalistic enterprise without regard to the
public welfare. Thus, the liberal legislation was double-edged: protectionist,
for the capitalistic, entrepreneurial class and impoverishing when not simply
indifferent or even oppressive towards the working class
- laws which enfranchised the man of property, called Reform Bills, since they
completely changed the voting qualifications at the beginning from nominal to real
property qualifications by eliminating the old rotten boroughs and the
appointment of constituencies by royal charter. The Reform Bill of 1832
enfranchised all the male owners of property worth at least 10 pounds in annual
rent; the Reform Bill of 1867 doubled the number of voters; and the 1884 Bill
brought about the universal male enfranchisement. The parliamentary battle was
fought throughout the 19th century between the representatives of the two political
parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, with William Ewart Gladstone,

nicknamed The Old Man, at the head of the Liberal Party and four times at the
head of the executive as the British Prime Minister, between 1868-74, 1880-85,
1885-6 and 1892-3; the other mandates were held for the Conservatives by Sir
Robert Peel, first, then by Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victorias friend and British
Prime Minister between 1874-1880. The two parties are also distinguished by their
foreign policy, in so far as the Tories advocated a big England, imperial policy,
while the Liberals were the little England party.
- property-strenghthening and free-trade measures required by a successful
political machine meant to sustain the kind of progress associated with the British
power in control of a newly industrial economy and a modern empire. Thus, in 1846,
the old Corn laws were repealed, which had offered protectionist tariffs for British
agriculture. This was the pre-requisite for effectively securing free trade, by 1860.
- the 1830 Catholic Emancipation meant the modernization of the British
polity now capable of making allowance for other than its own Reformed, Anglican
political formations . A similar modernization embraced the British polity services
and institutions, thanks to the measures passed by Gladstones administration
during the 1868-1874 mandate. (See the relevant chapter in G. M. Trevelyans
Illustrated History of England for a pertinent discussion of the Liberal
modernization of the British institutions, including the religious and military ones).
- reforms in education, reformism meant that essential education was generalised,
so that the 1870 Education Act opened the way to generalised literacy in
Britain. By 1871, the abolition of the university tests virtually transformed the
leading universities of Oxford and Cambridge into lay, metropolitan, universalist
universities.
- public administration and municipal management reforms, which created town
councils instead of rotten boroughs and heightened the quality of urban life As a
result, what we know today as roughly modern city life became a reality translated
into higher living standards and the increased number of commodities. The
Victorian periodical, serialised pamphlets, the formal discourses, not to mention the
fiction and satirical documents of the age retain numerous traces of the eventful
addition to cities of public baths and laundries, museums, libraries (public reading
rooms), parks, public gardens and later trams, gas and electricity facilities or water
networks.

an age of social unrest in the mass section of the society the poverty problem

which represented the reverse of the great imperial and colonial coin,
included in the Victorian age the passing of a number of poor laws, such as
the 1834 Poor Law Amendment which created the workhouses or prisons in
disguise for containing what was considered to be, at the time, the social
scum of the street villains. The poor street population literally haunted the
Dickensian imaginary in so many of his youthful novels. The Chartist
Movement of 18361854 proved that beyond the middle-class modern
paradise there reigned supreme social chaos. For almost the entire first half

of the age, the Victorian masses demonstrated in the streets and sent
petitions of rights (charts) signed by ever-increasing numbers of people to
the leaders of the nation but they were never listened to (the 1840 Chart, for
example, was signed by over three million three hundred people who
requested for the lower classes precisely what came to be granted to the
middle classes in the course of the century). This prolonged street
demonstration reminds one of the long demonstration for democracy in
Bucharest, in the Piata Universitatii Square at the beginning of the 1990s);
under Chartist inspiration, there were organised strikes, such as the first
general strike of 1842 but all these got practically nowhere and had to
continue their fight by the better organised trade-unionist movement of
the 1860s and 1870s (after the repeal of the Combination Acts, which had
forbidden gatherings of riotous people, in the wake of the French Revolution
between 1799, i.e., and 1824). This proved that there exisited virtually two
nations in Britain, as Benjamin Disraeli put it, the rich and the poor. The rich
passed and enacted quite a big number of consistent laws for the poor, but it
appears that the former were too busily engrossed in their business to
devote enough attention or resources to rescuing the poor. The Factory Acts
of the period 18331878, however, eliminated child labour and gross
overworking in factories. Some support was granted also by the
governments Public Health Acts of 1871 1875 which granted some
measure of medical assistance to the poor as well. Still, for all the echoes of
the social unrest and unhealthy living conditions of the poor in the printed
Victorian media, including the literature of the age, the 1880s saw the rise of
more radical social movements, such as the wide-spread socialism of the
Fabian brand or the utopian socialism of the intellectuals (cf. Martin Day: A
History of English Literature. 1837 to the Present, Doubleday, New York,
1964, the chapter on Victorian prose) and of Marxian communism, some
time after the publication of the Communist Party Manifesto by Karl Marx, in
1859. By 1903, the Socialist Labour Party had also been formed as a
potential opposition force on the political stage.