The Victorian Age (1830-1901)

____Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre________C. Doyle's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_________

(1847) (1891)

(From The Norton Anthology of English Literature (7ed.), vol.2, ed. M.H. Abrams, 2000)

 The Victorian Age fully coincides with Queen Victoria's long reign from 1837 to 1901,
which is why the historical period bears her name. It begins with London as a metropolitan
site of imperial power as Victoria brings England to its highest point of development as a
world power. In terms of moral and manners, the age is identified with qualities like
earnestness, moral responsibility and rectitude, and domestic propriety. The era itself is an
age of transition towards modernity.

 The rapid growth of London as the pivotal city of Western civilization demarcates the shift
from a way of life based on the ownership of land to a modern urban economy based on
trade and manufacturing as England reaches the apex of its industrialization process and
captures markets all over the globe. England became the world's workshop and London the
world's banker. Fast railways, iron ships, printing presses, intercontinental cable,
photography, anesthetics, are all developments of this age. Electric street lighting was
introduced in 1878.

 In particular England amassed vast amounts of wealth from the exploitation of its colonies,
which, by 1890 comprised more than a quarter of all the territory on the surface of the earth.
By the end of the 19th century England was the world's foremost imperial power.

 In 1830, the Liverpool-Manchester Railway opened, becoming the first steam-powered,

public railway line in the world. The train transformed England's landscape, supported the
growth of its commerce, and shrank the distances between its cities.

 In 1832, Parliament passed a Reform Bill that transformed England's class structure. The
Reform Bill extended the right to vote to all males owning property worth £10 or more in
 annual rent. In effect the voting public thereafter included the lower middle classes but not
the working classes, who did not obtain the vote until 1867, when a second reform bill was
passed.

 Even more important was the redistribution of parliamentary representation, which broke up
the monopoly of power that the conservative landowners had so long enjoyed through the
“rotten boroughs” (communities that had become depopulated but nonetheless elected the
nominees of the local squire to Parliament). Some of the new industrial cities (like
Manchester) were unrepresented or underrepresented in Parliament, while the rotten
boroughs would send two members of Parliament. The bill abolished that archaic privilege
and redistributed representation in parliament to new major population centres.

 The 1830s and 1840s became known as The Time of Troubles, as a crash in 1837 and a
series of bad harvests produced a period of unemployment, desperate poverty, and rioting.
Conditions in the new industrial and coal-mining areas were terrible. Workers and their
families in the slums of such cities as Manchester lived in horribly crowded, unsanitary
housing, and the conditions under which women and children toiled in mines and factories
were unimaginably brutal. The fiction of Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Benjamin
Disraeli and Charles Dickens made poignant depictions of such harsh realities. For his novel
Sybil, Disraeli chose an appropriate subtitle for the period: The Two Nations --- a phrase that
pointed out the line dividing the England of the rich from the other nation, the England of
the poor.

 The mid-Victorian period (1848-1870), however, was a phase of economic prosperity. The
Queen and her husband, Prince Albert, were themselves models of middle-class domesticity
and devotion to duty. Agriculture flourished together with trade and industry. And through a
succession of Factory Acts in Parliament, which restricted child labour and limited hours of
employment, the condition of the working classes was also being gradually improved.

 England's technological progress, together with its prosperity, led to an enormous expansion
of its influence throughout the globe: the export of goods, people and capital increased
(emigrants leaving Britain for the colonies, plus investments of British capitalists abroad, in
particular, Australia, Canada and India). In 1857, Parliament took over the government of
India from the private East India Company and started to put in place its civil service
government. The scramble for African colonies came later, towards the end of the century.

 Abroad, Britain sought wealth, markets for manufactured goods, sources of raw materials,
and world power and influence. Many English people also saw the expansion of empire as a
moral responsibility, what Kipling termed “the white man's burden” (the expansion of
progress and civilization through empire). Missionary societies flourished, spreading
Christianity in India, Asia and Africa.
  Another influential doctrines were Utilitarianism (derived from the thought of Jeremy
Bentham and James Mill, father of John Stuart Mill. Its firmest doctrine is that a morally
correct action is that which provides the greatest pleasure to the greatest number (the
greatest happiness possible principle). Utilitarianism provided a philosophical basis for
political reform in terms of fair taxation, against slavery, in favour of feminism and the
welfare state, free speech, etc.

 1859 saw the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species explaining evolution, natural
selection, the survival of the fittest, and many other concepts that debunked religious
concepts like that of Creation derived from the Bible.

 The final decades of the century (immortalised in the prose of Henry James, the theatre of
ideas of George Bernard Shaw and aestheticism or 'art for art's sake' of Oscar Wilde (The
Picture of Dorian Grey, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Ballad of Reading Gaol), the
tales of empire building and keeping of Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad) see the
emergence of wars and massacres (the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the Jamaica Rebellion in
1865, the massacre of Gral Gordon in the Sudan in 1885, and the Boer War at the end of the
century.

 Another change in the mid-Victorian balance of power was the growth of labour as a
political and economic force: first with the second Reform bill that extended the right to
vote to sections of the working classes, then with the development of trade unions and
socialism.

 From the perspective of the twentieth century, however, it is easy to see in the 1890s the
beginning of the modernist movement in literature which will reach its apex in the period in-
between the war with Joyce, Woolf, T.S. Eliot and all the high modernists.

The Woman Question

 The Victorian period did much to extend its citizens' rights, but women did not share in
these freedoms. They could not vote or hold political office. Although petitions to
Parliament advocating women's suffrage were introduced as early as 1840s, women did not
get the vote until 1918. Until the passage of the Married Women's Property Acts (1870-
1908), married women could not own or handle their own property. Although men could
divorce their wives for adultery, wives could divorce their husbands only if adultery were
combined with cruelty, bigamy, incest or bestiality. Educational and employment
opportunities for women were limited. These inequities stimulated a spirited debate about
women's roles known as the “Woman Question.”
 The changing conditions of women's work created by the Industrial Revolution posed an
equally strong challenge to traditional views of women's roles. The explosive growth of the
textile industries, and the need for coal to fuel England's industrial development brought
women to factories and mines but under gruelling working conditions. The Factory Acts
(1802-1878) introduced increasing regulation of the conditions of labor in mines and
factories, including reduction of the 16-hour day.

 Other changes in legislation extended women's rights. The Custody Act of 1839 gave a
mother the right to petition the court for access to her minor children and custody of children
under seven (raised to sixteen in 1878). The Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857
established a civil divorce court (divorce previously could only be granted by an
ecclesiastical court) and provided a deserted wife an opportunity to apply for rights to her
property. Feminists also worked to enlarge educational opportunities for women. In 1837
none of England's three universities was open to women. By the end of Victoria's reign,
women could take degrees at twelve universities or university colleges and could study,
although not earn a degree, at Oxford and Cambridge.

 Bad working conditions and underemployment drove thousands of women into prostitution,
which became increasingly professionalised in the nineteenth century. The only occupation
at which an unmarried middle-class woman could earn a living and maintain some claim to
gentility was that of governess, but a governess could expect no security of employment,
only minimal wages, and an ambiguous status, somewhere between servant and family
member, that isolated her within the household.

 Victorian society continued to sustain for the large part and ideology that relegated women
to an inferior or secondary role to that of men. An ideology that claimed that woman had a
special nature peculiarly fit for her domestic role. Coventry Patmore's influential poem “The
Angel in the House” (1854-62) epitomised a concept of womanhood that stressed woman's
purity and selflessness. Protected and enshrined within the home, her role was to create a
place of peace where man could take refuge from the difficulties of modern life.