This document provides historical context about the Victorian period in Britain from 1837-1901. It describes the immense poverty and poor living/working conditions during the early Victorian period of industrialization. The mid-Victorian period from 1848-1870 saw Britain's Golden Age with the peak of the British Empire and advances in science. The late Victorian period from 1870-1901 involved a decline of the empire and fears of decay as art/literature moved away from "stuffy" Victorian styles and values. The document outlines the major economic, social, and political developments that characterized these periods of the Victorian era in Britain.

1. Dr Sarah Law

2. 1837 - 1901

3.  Early Victorian Period - 1830-1848
 A time of troubles characterised by immense poverty and hardship
among the working classes. The shift to industrialisation led to an
exodus from the countryside to the cities and the creation of slum
dwellings with workers crammed into unsanitary cramped housing
and terrible working conditions for men, women and children.
 Mid-Victorian Period – 1848-1870
 The Golden Age: The British Empire is at its pinnacle, major
advances in science are being made and the country is wealthy.
Also a time of religious doubt and gender debate (The Woman
Question).
 Late Victorian Period – 1870- 1901
 Decline of the empire, fears of decay. Art and literature move away
from the practices and styles of the “stuffy” Victorians.

5.  ‘‘350,000 working-people […] live, almost all of them,
in wretched, damp, filthy cottages […] In the working-
men's dwellings of Manchester, no cleanliness, no
convenience, and consequently no comfortable family
life is possible […] in such dwellings only a physically
degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded,
reduced morally and physically to bestiality, could feel
comfortable and at home.’

6.  Cotton and wool textiles - economy fundamentally
affected by cotton price. Cotton price had boomed
between 1834-7 then crashed causing a credit crunch
and the 1837 recession.
 Trade from West Indies. By 1800, 25% of Britain’s
income came from imports from the Caribbean
 Steel & iron industry
 Engineering industry
 By mid-century Britain is world-renowned for its
engineering and manufacturing economy. The British
economy is the biggest in the world.

8.  Steam Travel
 Railways
 Embankments, tunnels, viaducts, bridges – feature of
landscape, great defining national engineering
projects
 Associated with the railway was the telegraph, built as
part of the infrastructure of the rail network.

9.  ‘A town, such as London, where a man may wander for
hours together without reaching the beginning of the end,
without meeting the slightest hint which could lead to the
inference that there is open country within reach, is a
strange thing. This colossal centralisation, this heaping
together of two and a half millions of human beings at one
point, has multiplied the power of this two and a half
millions a hundredfold; has raised London to the
commercial capital of the world, created the giant docks
and assembled the thousand vessels that continually cover
the Thames […] All this is so vast, so impressive, that a man
cannot collect himself, but is lost in the marvel of
England's greatness before he sets foot upon English soil.’
 Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in
England

11.  The 19th century is a century of upheaval as economic,
cultural and political elites try to manage the
conditions and demands of the working class.
 Surely, workers unions argue, at some point capital
surplus must be used to better the conditions of the
working classes?
 But there is no Labour party, no representation of
working people in parliament.
 This is the political fight of the 19th century.

12.  Peterloo Massacre 1819
 Reform Act crisis 1829-1832
 Tolpuddle Martyrs - 1834
 Mills and Factories Act 1833
 Slavery Abolition Act 1833
 Poor Law 1834
 Chartism 1838-48
 1844 – Factory Act limiting working hours
 1867 – Second Reform Act
 1870 – Elementary Education Act

13.  J.S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy 1848 – free
trade and liberal economy
 Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto 1848 – political
force of industrial working class
 Darwin, Origin of Species 1859 – transformation of
understanding of biological life and origins of life on
earth, associated religious changes

14.  The activity of reading benefited hugely from wider
schooling and increased literacy rates, from the
cheapening costs of publication, from improved
distribution that resulted from better transportation,
and, towards the end of the century, from the arrival of
gas and electric lighting in homes, which meant that
reading after dark no longer had to take place by
candlelight or oil lamp.
 Many novels were available in monthly parts especially
through magazine serialisation

16.  “Old Leisure…knew nothing of weekday services, and
thought none the worse of the Sunday sermon if it
allowed him to sleep from the text to the blessing…for
he had an easy, jolly conscience, broad-backed like
himself, and able to carry a great deal of beer or port-
wine – not being made squeamish by doubts and
qualms and lofty aspirations. Life was not a task to
him, but a sinecure: he fingered the guineas in his
pocket, and ate his dinners, and slept the sleep of the
irresponsible.”
 from George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859)

18.  In his book The Victorians AN Wilson suggests that if “returning to the
nineteenth century in a time machine , the twenty-first-century
traveller would notice immediately dozens of differences between our
world and theirs … But the greatest and the most extraordinary
difference is the difference between women then and now”.
 Victorian period and particularly the decades from the 1860s saw vast
legislative changes affecting the lives of Victorian women. Many of
these changes brought about as a result of campaigning and
consciousness raising by women.
 These discussions about the Woman Question can also be seen to be
taking place in the literature of the period and in sensation fiction in
particular.
 Characteristics of Sensation fiction / sensation fiction and the canon
 It was said that sensation novels such as Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in
White (1860) and Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) “offered pleasures so
intense that their detractors claimed they could drive you to drink,
insanity or copycat crime”.
 Sensation in the news

19. 25 June 1870 22 September 1888

20.  The break-up of the middle-class, Victorian culture ..
 The Rise of Aestheticism
 A conscious revolt against Victorian values by the
decadent movement
 Artists e.g. Aubrey Beardsley; writers e.g. Oscar Wilde.
 Seminar Thursday: selected poems
 Next Week: Jane Eyre