VICTORIAN SOCIETY AND CULTURE
There was also a small but active secularist agitation;
1. The family was the central institution in society.
2. The traditional ideal of "the gentleman" was still
respected along with the new ideal of the self-made
man.
3. People were more concerned with self-help than
with class conflict. (Samuel Smiles, Self-Help in
1859).
4. The social theory: class-dividing lines could and
should stay, provided that individuals in each class
could move.
5. Social discipline was strong (more than the exten-
sion of the local police forces).
6. Victorianism came to represent a cluster of restrain-
ing moral attributes: "character," "duty," "will," ear-
nestness, hard work, respectable behaviour, and
thrift.
7. These virtues were defended by the hard-working
bourgeoisie, but also appealed to aristocratic sec-
tions and trade-unionists.
desacuerdo
8. Later in the century, however, these values were
taken apart and criticised.
9. Dickens frequently made fun of the Victorian
smugness and unwillingness to face unpleasant
facts.
10. The critics John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, each
arguing from a different point of departure, ques-
tioned many of the accepted beliefs and prejudices
of the age.
11. There was always a Victorian underworld. Belief in
the family was accompanied by a high incidence of
prostitution, and in every large city there were dis-
tricts where every Victorian value was ignored.
RELIGION
1. Discoveries in geology and biology continued to
challenge all accepted views of religious chronology
handed down from the past.
2. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859).
3. There was a confident belief that inquiry itself, if
freely and honestly pursued, would do nothing to
dissolve shared ideals of conduct. Even writers who
were "agnostic" talked of the "religion of humanity"
or tried to be good "for good's sake, not God's."
4. Standards were felt to count in institutional as well
as in private life.
5. Emphasis on conduct was, of course, related to
religion.
6. The Church of England was flanked on one side by
Rome and on the other by religious dissent.
7. The Roman Catholic Church was growing in im-
portance (Ireland and university students and teach-
ers).
8. Dissent was common among large sections of the
middle classes. Nonconformists opposed church
rates (taxes), challenged closed foundations, and
preached total abstinence and educational reform.
9. A whole network of local voluntary bodies, led
either by Anglicans or Dissenters, usually in rivalry,
came into existence.
10. The Evangelicals, the most influential group, were
concerned with individual conduct as a force making
for social conformity. They cared about housing,
and stirred men's consciences; but also with profit
overseas as well as domestic legislation.
11. There were other members of the church who urged
the cause of "Christian Socialism" (Anglican theolo-
gian Frederick Denison Maurice).
12. There were thousands of people in mid-Victorian
England who were ignorant of, or indifferent to-
ward, the message of Christianity.
13. Movements like the Salvation Army, founded by
William Booth in 1865, attempted to help the poor
of the great cities; there were many signs of apathy
or even hostility.
14.
London "secularism" (more goods, more leisure,
more travel) could undermine spiritual concerns.
opposite religion
VICTORIAN MORALITY
1. In the 1920s, writers debunked what they condemned
as Victorian prudery, hypocrisy, and stuffiness.
2. “Victorian” remains for us a synonym for old-
fashioned when referring to attitudes toward sex.
3. Victorianism is less a universally congenial or univer-
sally practised moral and social code than a set of ide-
als about efficiency and thrift, seriousness of charac-
ter, respectability, and self-help to which the Victori-
ans themselves often failed to adhere.
4. The maxim "Honesty is the best policy" was both a
slogan and an accepted and demonstrable truth.
5. In the business world, it was by the practice of such
virtues that a merchant or an industrialist justified his
role in society.
6. Bankruptcy had come to be regarded both as a finan-
cial and as a moral disgrace.
7. Morality in government was given similar stress, and
the institution of a non-political Civil Service was "the
one great political invention in nineteenth-century
England." (State examinations).
8. Emphasis on morality also existed in art, architecture,
and music.
9. The most popular paintings were large, realistic, and
sentimental (painted by “earnest” artists).
10. The most widely reproduced painting of the 1850s
was Holman Hunt's The Light of the World. +
11. In music: hundreds of new hymns were composed
(Hymns: Ancient and Modern sold four and a half million
copies during the first seven years after 1861).
12. German-born Felix Mendelssohn, the queen's favour-
ite composer, exemplified Victorian domesticity and
sentiment. There appeared thousands of amateur cho-
ral (church and chapel) societies.
7
13. In architecture it was Augustus Welby Pugin (1812-
1852), a Roman Catholic by conversion, who delib-
erately popularised Victorian "Gothic" as a style
more religiously inspired than the classical Geor-
gian. (After a fire in 1833, the houses of Parliament
at Westminster were rebuilt in this style).
14. Perhaps the most widely remembered element of
Victorianism is its deliberate de-emphasis of sex.
15. Ideally, sex was never to be referred to in conversa-
tion or in print, and one Victorian critic regarded
Charles Dickens's greatest merit as the fact that "in
forty works or more you will not find a phrase
which a mother need withhold from her grown
daughter."
16. For Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), the purpose of
a novel was "to instruct in morals while it amuses."
17. Purity was the standard for a lady, and continence
the professed ideal for a gentleman (who in the sex-
ual as in the business world was expected to post-
pone immediate gratification for ultimate domestic
and financial benefit).
18. To be named in a divorce suit equalled bankruptcy
as a source of social disgrace.
19. Although the reproduction of the species became
the only publicly avowed justification for sexual re-
lations, the praise of domestic family life came to be
sung more loudly than ever before in British history.
20. The Victorian family was a patriarchal one in which
a wife was in no sense her husband's legal equal.
21. Ideally, however, she was supposed to be "the An-
gel of the House," served as the exemplar of morali-
ty, and the arbiter of proper behaviour.
22. She was expected to beautify both herself and the
home over whose operations she presided. Her
most highly esteemed role was that of mother.
23. Families were large, and the average wife spent
"about fifteen years in a state of pregnancy and in
nursing a child for the first year of its life."
24. It was the home that Victorians felt to be the centre
of moral virtue and a refuge against the barbarism
of the outside world.
25. The roles played by Victorian women were deter-
mined in part by law, in part by social convention
and gender ideology, and to a considerable degree by
social class.
26. Although men were thus expected to dominate the
"public sphere" and women the "private sphere" of
life, many lower-class women worked for pay and
many middle-class women were active in charitable
enterprises.
27. Victorian prudery could lead to such absurdities as
the separation of the works of male and female au-
thors on library shelves and the use of euphemisms
such as "limbs" for "legs."
28. It was Victorianism that helped give the word im-
moral the connotation it retains—that of opposing or
challenging sexual convention rather than of prac-
tising fraudulent bookkeeping or telling lies or beat-
ing children.
29. The fact that not all Victorians found it possible to
live up to so rigid a sexual code is suggested both by
the existence of a flourishing trade in illicit pornog-
raphy and by the prevalence of prostitution. Too
strict a code promoted a hypocritical (double) mo-
rality.
30. Many railway-station waiting rooms had reading
stands with chained Bibles for passengers to consult
while changing trains.
31. The Victorian unbeliever appears to have been pos-
sessed by as strong a sense of duty as was the pro-
fessing Christian, with a moral code not outwardly
distinguishable from that of the churchgoer.
32. For a Utilitarian like John Stuart Mill, being good for
good's sake was obviously as powerful a motive as
being good for God's sake.
33. Thus "good behaviour" was the result not only of
religious teaching or fear of the police on earth or
punishment in the next world, but also of the pres-
sures of social conformity and the hope, stemming
from the Age of Enlightenment, that human beings,
when left to their own devices, were fundamentally
well-intentioned.
34. The Victorian code was a response to the needs of an
emerging industrial society and the consciousness that
civilisation provided a thin false front at best for hu-
manity's antisocial tendencies. It stressed the virtues
of duty and industry because absenteeism and idleness
were dangerous relics of the past. The emphasis on
thrift was a reaction to the still-popular attitude of
"Eat, drink, and be merry" and take no heed for the
morrow. The creed of self-help was a virtue preached
most earnestly to those who were not necessarily in a
position to practice it. "Character" was a highly ac-
claimed ideal because wild behaviour and drunken-
ness, despite the efforts of a growing army of largely
Nonconformist temperance reformers, were still
widespread.
35. Seen as a set of ideals rather than as the attribute of a
whole society, Victorianism becomes more under-
standable. Its snobbery reflected the impact of new
classes wishing to secure a position in the traditional
hierarchy. Its hypocrisy resulted from the attempt to
lay claim to standards of conduct that proved too
hard to maintain consistently. Its prudery was the by-
product of a battle for decency by a people many of
whom were just emerging into civilised society.
Man for the field and woman for the hearth,
Man for the sword and for the needle she;
Man with the head, and woman with the heart;
Man to command, and woman to obey,
All else confusion.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson thus epitomised the Victorian
doctrine of "separate spheres" for the two sexes.