The Victorian Period: 1832-1901
Many Victorians thought of themselves as living in a time of great change. They were right,
but the changes during Queen Victoria’s long reign (1837–1901) occurred in a period of
relative political and social stability, and many were the result of conditions that began
before Victoria and most of her subjects were born.
Peace and Economic Growth: Britannia Rules
After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, Britain was not involved in a major European
war until World War I began in 1914. The empire that had begun in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries with British interests in India and North America grew steadily, until by
1900, Victoria was queen-empress of more than 200 million people living outside Great
Britain.
At the same time the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century greatly expanded. It
moved through booms and depressions, but over the course of the century it steadily created
new towns, new goods, new wealth, and new jobs for tens of thousands of people climbing
through the complicated levels of the middle class. These social and economic changes were
expressed in gradual political reforms. Piece by piece, middle-class and, ultimately, workingclass politicians and voters achieved political power while leaving the monarchy and
aristocracy in place.
The Idea of Progress
The English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay eloquently voiced the middle-class
Victorian attitude toward government, history, and civilization. For Macaulay, history meant
progress, and progress largely meant material improvement that could be seen and touched,
counted and measured. Macaulay admired cleanliness and order. He wanted the London
streets free of garbage, drained and paved, lighted at night, and patrolled by a sober police
force. He wanted the city planned so that residents of respectable neighborhoods did not live
next to slums and were not annoyed by beggars and peddlers. He would have the houses
numbered and a population literate enough to read signs. He did not claim that his own time
had entirely met these standards of material comfort and security, but his cool, almost
amazed regard of the disorder and squalor of the past conveyed his sense of progress: How
could those people have lived like that? How different we are; how far we have come.
Many Victorians regretted or disputed Macaulay’s confident tone and materialistic standards.
But in his satisfaction with the improvements that empire had brought to England, his views
were typical of those of his contemporaries.
The Hungry Forties
The first decade of Victoria’s reign was troubled—in fact, the period came to be known as the
Hungry Forties. Victoria came to the throne in the first year of a depression that by 1842 had
put 1.5 million unemployed workers and their families (in a population of 16 million in
England and Wales) on some form of poverty relief.
■ Poor Working Conditions
Government commissions investigating working conditions learned of children mangled when
they fell asleep at machines at the end of a twelve-hour working day. They discovered young
girls and boys hauling sledges of coal through narrow mine tunnels, working shifts so long
that in winter they saw the sun only on Sundays.
■ The Potato Famine
In Ireland the potato blight (1845–1849) caused a famine that killed perhaps a million people
and forced two million others—more than 25 percent of Ireland’s population—to emigrate.
Some went to English cities, where they lived ten or twelve to a room in slums that had two
toilets for every 250 people.
■ Pollution and Filth
The rapid growth of cities often made them filthy and disorderly. Nearly two million people
lived in London during the 1840s, and commercial and industrial cities such as Manchester
and Liverpool expanded rapidly. In Manchester in the 1840s, 40 percent of the streets were
still unpaved. The Thames River in London was polluted with sewage, industrial waste, and
the drainage from graveyards, where bodies were buried in layers six or eight deep. In the
1850s, Parliament sometimes had to adjourn from its new riverside building because of the
stench from the Thames.
The Movement for Reform: Food, Factories, and Optimism
Violence broke out at massive political rallies called in the 1840s to protest government
policies that kept the price of bread and other food high and deprived most working men
(and all women) of the vote and representation in Parliament. In 1848, a year of revolution
in Europe, nervous British politicians got the army ready and armed the staffs of museums
and government offices when working-class political reformers organized what they called a
monster rally in London to petition Parliament and the queen.
■ Improvements in Diet
Still, most middle-class Victorians believed that things were better than in the past and that
they were going to be better yet in the future. Their opinion was in part founded on a steady
improvement throughout the Victorian era in the material condition of people in all social
classes. The price of food dropped after midcentury, largely because of increased trade with
other countries and the growing empire. Diet improved as meat, fruit, and margarine (a
Victorian invention) began to appear regularly in working-class households. Factories and
railroads made postage, newspapers, clothing, furniture, travel, and other goods and
services cheap.
■ The Reform Bills
A series of political reforms gave the vote to almost all adult males by the last decades of the
century. In 1832, the First Reform Bill extended the vote to all men who owned property
worth ten pounds or more in yearly rent. Continued pressure led to the Second Reform Act in
1867, which gave the right to vote to most working-class men, except for farm workers.
Decades of agitation for suffrage by Victorian women succeeded only in the next century.
Strengthened by their domestic contributions during the Great War, women age thirty and
over won the vote in 1918. Universal adult suffrage in 1928 extended the vote to women at
age twenty-one.
A series of factory acts limited child labor and reduced the usual working day to ten hours,
with a half-holiday on Saturday. State-supported schools were established in 1870, were
made compulsory in 1880, and were made free in 1891. In the 1840s, 40 percent of the
couples getting married could not write their names on their marriage certificates. By 1900,
using that simple definition of literacy, more than 90 percent of the population was literate.
An Age in Need of Heroines: Reform in Victorian Britain
Great Britain was the world’s first industrialized nation, and its smoky cities illustrated the
dangers of “progress.” Unsanitary housing and rampant disease were unremarkably
common. Legal remedies addressed some of these abuses, but Victorian social reform was
not merely a parliamentary process. It was also a passionate struggle to change public
opinion through hard work and education.
“Do noble things.” Following the Reverend Charles Kingsley’s urging to “do noble things,
not dream them,” many women approached social reform as a moral and religious duty. The
social worker Octavia Hill (1838–1912) believed that adequate housing could “make
individual life noble, homes happy, and family life good,” and she became an authority on
housing reform. She was also a conservationist, founding the National Trust to protect
historic buildings and scenic spots from industrial development. Because of Hill’s efforts, the
public can visit sites such as the Runnymede meadow. Thanks to the National Trust,
Runnymede looks much as it did when King John accepted the Magna Carta there in 1215.
Spoiling the brutes. Perhaps the best-known Victorian reformer is Florence Nightingale
(1820–1910), who transformed the public’s perception of modern nursing during the
Crimean War. Two inventions—the camera and the war correspondent—made her career
possible. Newspaper reports revealed that bureaucratic bungling had cost thousands of lives
in the army’s hospitals in Scutari, Turkey. Public indignation gave Nightingale the opportunity
to become an army nurse. In Turkey she saw scores of wounded soldiers dying from diseases
caused by poor hygiene, lack of medical supplies, and sheer neglect. The ordinary British
soldier was thought to be, in the words of the duke of Wellington, “the scum of the earth.”
When Nightingale asked medical authorities for clean bedding or warm clothing, she was
told: “You will spoil the brutes.”
Nightingale believed British soldiers were “murdered” by incompetence, and she vowed to
avenge them. With gritty tenacity, she became an authority on public health, observing that
sanitation could save lives. Queen Victoria read her meticulous reports and said, “I wish we
had her at the War Office.” Nightingale’s efforts changed hospital management and made
nursing a respected career.
“We make no compromise.” Reformers such as Nightingale and Hill devoted themselves to
aiding the victims of Victorian “progress,” agitating for better conditions and improved
educational opportunities. In the name of charity, they often stepped outside the bounds of
“ladylike” behavior. Josephine Butler (1828–1906) exposed the exploitation of women and
girls, working to repeal acts that deprived poor women of their constitutional rights. In the
name of reform, she declared that “we make no compromise; and we are ready to meet all
the powers of earth and hell combined.”
These reformers redefined the idea of “women’s work”; in the process they set public policies
that curbed many abuses and saved countless lives. As we enter the twenty-first century, we
continue to benefit from these Victorian efforts to improve the quality of life.
“Blushing Cheeks”: Decorum and Prudery
Many Victorians thought of themselves as progressing morally and intellectually, as well as
materially. In fact, the powerful, mostly middle-class obsession with gentility or decorum has
made prudery almost a synonym for Victorianism. Book publishers and magazine editors
deleted or altered words and episodes that might, in the phrase of the day, bring “a blush to
the cheek” of a young person. In art and popular fiction, sex, birth, and death were softened
by sentimental conventions, made into tender courtships, joyous motherhoods, and deathbed
scenes in which old people were saints and babies angels. In the real world, people were
arrested for distributing information about sexually transmitted diseases. Victorian society
regarded seduced or adulterous women (but not their male partners) as “fallen” and pushed
them to the margins of society.
Authoritarian Values
Victorian decorum also supported powerful ideas about authority. Many Victorians were
uneasy about giving strong authority to a central government. (The fundamental
conservatism of British society is revealed in the fact that its version of the 1848 European
revolutions was a peaceful gathering to petition Parliament.) In Victorian private lives,
however, the autocratic father of middle-class households is a vivid figure in both fact
(Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s father, for example) and fiction.
Women were subject to male authority. Middle-class women especially were expected to
marry and make their homes a comfortable refuge for their husbands from the male domains
of business, politics, and the professions. Women who did not marry had few occupations
open to them. Working-class women could find jobs as servants in prosperous households,
while unmarried middle-class ladies could become governesses or teachers. Many middleclass women remained unmarried because men often postponed marriage until they
achieved financial security. Life for these unmarried, “redundant women,” as they were
called, was painful, although in literature, especially literature written by men, the figure of
the middle-aged maiden was often played for comedy.
The excesses, cruelties, and hypocrisies of all these repressions were obvious to many
Victorians. But the codes and barriers of decorum changed slowly because they were part of
the ideology of progress. Prudery and social order were intended to control the immorality
and sexual excesses that Victorians associated with the violent political revolutions of the
eighteenth century and with the social corruption of the regency of George IV (1811–1820).
Intellectual Progress: The March of the Mind
The intellectual advances of the Victorian period were dramatically evident to those living in
it. Humans began to understand more and more about the earth, its creatures, and its
natural laws. Geologists worked out the history of the earth written in rocks and fossils.
Based on countless observations, Charles Darwin and other biologists theorized about the
evolution of species. The industrialization of England depended on and supported science and
technology, especially chemistry (in the iron and textile industries) and engineering.
Thomas Huxley and the Game of Science
Those who made and used scientific and technological knowledge had a confidence of their
own. Thomas Huxley, a variously accomplished scientist who wrote and lectured frequently
on the necessity of scientific education, imagined science as an exhilarating, high-stakes
chess game with the physical universe.
“The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the
game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We
know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he
never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who
plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which
the strong shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated—without haste,
but without remorse.”
—Thomas Huxley, from A Liberal Education
Huxley resembles those confident Victorians who built railways and sewers, organized
markets and schools, and pushed through electoral reforms and laws regulating the
conditions of work. These reformers believed that the world offered a challenging set of
problems that could be understood by human intelligence and solved by science,
government, and other human institutions. Huxley made the game exciting by warning that
humans could lose. But so long as the game is played in the material world, Huxley and
others like him saw no reason that they would not win.
Questions and Doubts
Despite the confidence of the age, the Victorian period was filled with voices asking questions
and raising doubts. Speaking for many of their contemporaries, and speaking to others they
thought shallow and complacent, Victorian writers asked whether material comfort fully
satisfied human needs and wishes. They questioned the cost of exploiting the earth and
human beings to achieve such comfort. They protested or mocked codes of decorum and
authority.
In the first half of the period, some writers complained that materialist ideas of reality
completely overlooked the spirit or soul that made life beautiful and just. Later in the
century, writers like Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman thought that Macaulay’s and Huxley’s
ideas of history and nature presupposed a coherence that did not really exist. Literature in
Victorian culture often reassured its readers that, rightly perceived, the universe made
sense. But some writers unsettled their readers by telling them that their understanding of
the universe was wrong or by asking them to consider whether human life and the natural
world made as much sense as they had once hoped.
The Popular Mr. Dickens
Charles Dickens, the most popular and most important figure in Victorian literature, is a case
in point. The son of a debt-ridden clerk, Dickens lived out one of the favorite myths of the
age. Through his own enormous talents and energy, he rose from poverty to become a
wealthy and famous man. His was a peculiarly Victorian success. It was made possible by
increasing affluence and literacy, which gave him a large reading public, and by improved
printing and distribution, which made book publishing a big business.
The conventional happy endings of Dickens’s novels satisfied his readers’, and probably his
own, conviction that things usually work out well for decent people. But many of Dickens’s
most memorable scenes show decent people neglected, abused, and exploited. Children,
especially, endure terrible suffering. The hungry Oliver Twist begs for more gruel in the
workhouse; the handicapped Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol cheerfully hobbles toward his
possible early death; and young David Copperfield is abused by his stepfather, the cold, dark
Mr. Murdstone.
In his later novels, Dickens created characters and scenes to show that even the winners in
the competition for material gain had reason to be as desperate and unhappy as the losers.
In Our Mutual Friend, his last novel, Dickens describes a dinner party at the home of a family
called the Veneerings, a name that emphasizes the family’s superficial qualities. (A veneer is
a thin layer of wood applied to cheap wood to make it look more costly.) The Veneerings are
the “new rich,” “bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London”:
“The great looking-glass above the sideboard reflects the table and the company. Reflects
the new Veneering crest, in gold and eke in silver, frosted and also thawed, a camel of all
work. The Herald’s College found out a Crusading ancestor for Veneering who bore a camel
on his shield (or might have done it if he had thought of it), and a caravan of camels take
charge of the fruits and flowers and candles, and kneel down to be loaded with the salt.
Reflects Veneering; forty, wavy-haired, dark, tending to corpulence, sly, mysterious, filmy….
Reflects Mrs. Veneering; fair, aquiline-nosed and fingered, not so much light hair as she
might have, gorgeous in raiment and jewels…. Reflects Podsnap; prosperously feeding, two
little light-colored wiry wings, one on either side of his else bald head, looking as like his
hairbrushes as his hair…. Reflects Mrs. Podsnap;…quantity of bone, neck, and nostrils like a
rocking horse, hard features, majestic headdress in which Podsnap has hung golden
offerings…. Reflects…mature young gentleman; with too much nose in his face, too much
ginger in his whiskers, too much sparkle in his studs, his eyes, his buttons, his talk, and his
teeth.”
—Charles Dickens, from Our Mutual Friend
Attacks like Dickens’s on the hollowness, glitter, superficiality, and excesses of Victorian
affluence were common in Victorian literature. Dickens also raised questions about the costs
of progress in his descriptions of the huddle and waste of cities and the smoke and fire of
industrial landscapes. In 1871, the art historian and social critic John Ruskin noted a new
phenomenon that we call smog; he called it the plague wind, or “the storm-cloud of the
nineteenth century,” and concluded, chillingly, “…[M]ere smoke would not blow to and fro in
that wild way. It looks more to me as if it were made of dead men’s souls.”