Tiago Delgado

IV S

Victorian Age

1. What changes did the Industrial Revolution bring during the Victorian Age?

2. State the main social reforms during Victoria’s reign.

3. Find out what the four reform bills established.

4. What characteristics did the early Victorian novels have?

5. Which were the main features of Charles Dickens as a writer?

1. In 1837, Britain was still a rural nation with 80% of the population living in the
countryside. Most people were farmers or spun wool and cotton to weave into cloth.
Soon new machines were invented that could do these jobs in a fraction of the time.
This left many people out of work, so they flocked to the towns in search of jobs in
new industries. By the middle of the nineteenth century over 50% of the population
lived in towns and cities. Also, The Industrial Revolution rapidly gained pace during
Victoria's reign because of the power of steam. Victorian engineers developed bigger,
faster and more powerful machines that could run whole factories. This led to a
massive increase in the number of factories (particularly in textile factories or mills).

2. (1832) First Act abolished rotten boroughs, redistributed seats on a more equitable
basis in the counties, and extended the right to vote to any man owning a household
worth £10.
(1867) Reform Act extended the right to vote to all settled male tenants (the electors
were two million in England and Wales).
(1884) The Act and the 1885 Redistribution Act tripled the electorate again, giving the
right to vote to most agricultural laborers.

3. The First Reform Act reformed the antiquated electoral system of Britain by
redistributing seats and changing the conditions of the franchise. Fifty-six English
boroughs lost their representation entirely; Cornwall’s representation was reduced to
13; 42 new English boroughs were created; and the total electorate was increased by
217,000. Electoral qualifications were also lowered to permit many smaller property
holders to vote for the first time. Although the bill left the working classes and large
sections of the lower middle classes without the vote, it gave the new middle classes a
share in responsible government and thus quieted political agitation. However, the Act
of 1832 was in essence a conservative measure designed to harmonize upper- and
middle-class interests while continuing traditional landed influence. The Second
Reform Act, 1867, largely the work of the Tory Benjamin Disraeli, gave the vote to
many workingmen in the towns and cities and increased the number of voters to
938,000. The Third Reform Act of 1884–85 extended the vote to agricultural workers,
while the Redistribution Act of 1885 equalized representation on the basis of 50,000
voters per each single-member legislative constituency. Together these two acts
tripled the electorate and prepared the way for universal male suffrage.
Tiago Delgado
IV S

4. Victorian novels tend to be idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work,
perseverance, love and luck win out in the end. They were usually inclined towards
being of 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.

5. His writing style is marked by a profuse linguistic creativity. Satire, flourishing in his gift
for caricature, is his forte. An early reviewer compared him to Hogarth for his keen
practical sense of the ludicrous side of life, though his acclaimed mastery of varieties
of class idiom may in fact mirror the conventions of contemporary popular theatre.
Dickens worked intensively on developing arresting names for his characters that
would reverberate with associations for his readers, and assist the development of
motifs in the storyline, giving what one critic calls an "allegorical impetus" to the
novels' meanings. To cite one of numerous examples, the name Mr. Murdstone in
David Copperfield conjures up twin allusions to "murder" and stony coldness. His
literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism. His satires of British aristocratic
snobbery he calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator" are often popular. Comparing
orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats, or dinner-party guests to furniture
are just some of Dickens's acclaimed flights of fancy.