2. Victoria, daughter of the Duke of Kent, one of the sons of
George III, succeeded her uncle, William IV, in 1837
when she was a girl of eighteen.
She was not a clever woman like the great Elizabeth I
and was limited in her tastes and outlook, but she had
character, a great sense of public duty and resposibility,
and was perhaps the best possible monarch for
nineteenth-century Britain.
She marries the Prince Consort, Albert of Saxe-Coburg, a
minor German prince, her first cousin.
Her reign lasted almost 64 years, making her the longest
reigning monarch in the history of England.
3. The Victorian Age was a period of great expansion for
the British Empire.
Britain acted as the police force throughout the world
taking parts in many major wars such as:
- Franco-Prussian war (1870-1871)
- Crimean war (1854-1856)
As the result of Crimean War, bringing some influence in
culture such as the cigarette smoking habit and keeping a
beard as a fashionable style for men also about the great
idea that come from Florence Nightingale (the
improvement of nursing service for soldiers on the
Crimean war)
4. The material progress of these years was tremendous.
The country was covered with an intricate network of
railroads. Industrial cities and towns grew like
mushrooms. With factories being built everywhere,
plenty of employment, and some attention at last to
public health, the population figures went leaping up.
And there was progress on other that material fronts.
Steam engine
Steamboats
Shipbuilding
Trains
Iron industry
5. Print technology
Telegraph and other forms of telecommunication
Textile manufacture
6. Michael Faraday (1791-1867), who experimented
successfully with electricity.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882), whose researches
biology, was popular because of the evolution
theory.
7. The typical Victorian outlook is well expressed in the
essays of Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59), the
most popular historian of the mid-Victorian period, and
in the kind of verse that Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92)
wrote in his official capacity as Victoria’s Poet Laureate.
Macaulay was a Whig who believed that the “Glorious
Revolution” of 1688, which created a constitutional
monarchy, and the Reform Bill of 1832, which increased
the number of voters, were the greatest political triumphs
of the human race.
8. With such examples of wisdom to follow, together
with all the material improvements that the age,
led by Britain, was devising, the world had only
to be sensible to assure itself forever of peace,
prosperity, and progress. Macaulay’s influence
was enormous and, in spite of all the catastrophes
of the present century, there are still people who
believe more or less that Macaulay was right.
9. The thought expressed in Tennyson’s official
verse, actually his weakest verse though it rarely
fails in craftsmanship, follows the same patterns
as Macaulay’s. Everything, with Britain serving as
a shining example, is surely, if slowly, getting
better and better. In this official verse Tennyson
seems to be forcing himself to be almost as
insensitively and blindly optimistic as Macaulay.
10. But the real Tennyson, a magnificent poet, breaks
through in finer works—those of a belated
Romantic. This poetry is steeped in longing and
regret and dreamy melancholy, often expressed in
lines of the most exquisite and haunting beauty. It
is not when he is celebrating Victoria as Queen-
Empress or offering Britain’s “broadening
freedom” as an example to the world that
Tennyson is a magical poet. His magical appeal
shines through when he is writing about the aging
Ulysses or the lotus eaters or the dark sorrows of
Guinevere and Lancelot.
11. Victorian literature as a whole represents a protest
and rebellion against the Victorianism of
Macaulay and Tennyson in his official mood,
against all that is characteristic of the self-
confidence, complacency, and optimism of the
age.
12. A country is not a commercial firm, to be judged
by the amount of trade it does or by its balance
sheets and profits.
A country is the home of thousands of people.
Industrial England was so horrible that more than
one foreign visitor compared it to hell.
13. The middle class consisted of bankers, merchants,
ship-owners, smaller factory owners, mine owners,
barristers, solicitors, engineers, architects and all but
the most successful doctors. The industrial revolution
not only helped the upper classes rise, but also helped
the middle classes by providing opportunities for
shopkeepers and merchants to sell the products of the
factories. Clerks and managers were needed to run
the growing economy and the expanded cities. The
government also expanded, creating new jobs for the
middle class.
14. The Victorian middle-class is largely associated with the
growth of cities and the expansion of the economy. The
term was used from around the mid-eighteenth century to
describe those people below the aristocracy but above the
workers.
As a social category, the 'middling sort' always referred
to a broad band of the population, but this diversity
increased in the nineteenth century. Alongside the
businessmen associated with the growth of
manufacturing, the period saw the increased numbers of
small entrepreneurs. Shopkeepers and merchants who
undertook to transport and retail the fruits of industry and
empire.
15. The increased scale of industry and oversees trade, together
with the expansion of empire fuelled the proliferation of
commerce and finance such as banks, insurance companies,
shipping and railways. This system needed administrating by
clerks, managers and salaried professionals. The expansion of
cities, towns and the economy produced new spaces that
needing regulating and running.
The Victorian period witnessed the massive expansion of
local government and the centralised state, providing
occupations for a vast strata of civil servants, teachers,
doctors, lawyers and government officials as well as the
clerks and assistants which helped these institutions and
services to operate.
At that time the middle class family In England often
portrayed by novelist in Victorian age as a family that live in
a good condition and didn’t care about the fact that they live
their happy live above the head of low class family that have
to work hard for a small wages to barely kept them alive.
16. Such diversity makes a satisfactory definition of the
middle-class impossible. There is no clear relationship to
the means of production. Although there were some
individuals that accumulated spectacular wealth in the
nineteenth century through entrepreneurial activity, there
were many more businessmen who scraped a living and
many who worked for wages as public servants,
managers or clerks. The economic boundary of the
'middle-class' was not clear. Some members of the
middle-class used their wealth to buy land and stately
homes, becoming as rich, if not richer than the
aristocracy. At the same time, many members of the
skilled working class could earn as much if not more than
some members of the lower middle-class.
17. Education reform, factory reform and the New Poor Law
emphasised progress and civility through work, thrift and
rationality. But, perhaps more significantly, local
voluntary societies such as Mechanics Institutes and
temperance societies promoted improvement cross class
communication and rational recreation. Personal
narratives of success were an important part of this
culture. Records of achievement were popularised and
promoted in books like Self Help as examples of how all
individuals could and should improve.
