The Victorian Era of Great Britain is considered the height
of the British industrial revolution and the apex of the
British Empire. It is often defined as the years from 1837 to 1901, when Queen Victoria reigned, though many historians
consider the passage of the Reform Act 1832 to mark the true
inception of a new cultural era. The Victorian era was preceded by the Georgian
era and came before the Edwardian period.
Politics
The period is ostensibly characterized as a long period of peace and economic, colonial, and industrial consolidation,
temporarily disrupted by the Crimean War. Towards the end of the century, the
policies of New Imperialism led to increasing colonial conflicts and
eventually the Boer War. Domestically, the agenda was increasingly liberal with a
number of shifts in the direction of gradual political reform and the widening of the franchise.
In the early part of the era the House of
Commons was dominated by the two parties, the Whigs and the Conservatives. From the late 1850s onwards the Whigs became the Liberals.
Many prominent statesmen led one or other of the parties, including Lord Melbourne, Sir Robert Peel,
Lord Derby,
Lord
Palmerston, William Ewart Gladstone, Benjamin Disraeli
and Lord Salisbury. The unsolved problems relating to Ireland played a great part in politics in the later Victorian era, particularly in view of Gladstone's
determination to achieve a political settlement.
In January 1858, the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston,
responded to the Orsini plot against
French emperor Napoleon III, the bombs for which were purchased in
Birmingham, by attempting to make such acts a felony, but the resulting uproar forced him to resign.
In July 1866, an angry crowd in London,
protesting Russell's resignation as prime minister, was barred from Hyde Park by the police; it tore down iron railings and
trampled the flower beds. Disturbances like this convinced Derby and Disraeli of the need for further parliamentary reform.
During 1875 Britain purchased Egypt's shares in
the Suez Canal as the African nation was forced to raise money to pay off its
debts.
In 1882 Egypt became a protectorate of Great Britain after British troops occupy land surrounding the Suez Canal in order to secure
the vital trade route, and the passage to India.
In 1884 the Fabian Society was
founded in London by a group of middle-class intellectuals, including Quaker Edward Pease, 17, Havelock Ellis, 25, and Edith Nesbit, 26, to
promote socialism. George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells would be among many famous names to later join this society.
On Sunday, November 13, 1887, tens
of thousands of people, many of them socialists or unemployed, gathered in
Trafalgar Square to demonstrate against the government. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren ordered armed soldiers and 2,000 police constables to respond. Rioting broke out,
hundreds were injured and two people died. This event was referred to as Bloody Sunday.
Events
In 1851, the Great
Exhibition (the first World's Fair) was held in Hyde Park, London with great success and international attention.
In 1888, the serial killer known
as "Jack the Ripper" murdered and mutilated prostitutes on the streets of London, leading to world-wide press coverage and
hysteria. Newspapers used the deaths to bring greater focus on the plight of the unemployed and to attack police and political
leaders. Although the killer was never caught, the affair led to Sir Charles Warren's resignation.
Science, technology and engineering
The impetus of the industrial revolution had already occurred, but it was during this period that the full effects of
industrialisation made themselves felt, leading to the mass society of the
20th century. The revolution led to the rise of railways across the country and massive leaps forward in engineering, most famously by Isambard
Kingdom Brunel.
During the Victorian era, science grew into the discipline it is today. In addition to the increasing professionalism of
university science, many Victorian gentlemen devoted their time to the study of natural history.
Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in 1859 and had a
tremendous effect on the popular mindset.
In January 1863, Prime Minister Gladstone opened the first section of the London Underground.
In 1882, incandescent electric lights were introduced to London streets, although it
took many long years before they were installed everywhere.
Culture
Notable cultural elements of the Victorian era include:
In literature:
- The novels of George Eliot, Thomas Love Peacock, Charles Dickens, Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, Anne Brontė, Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, Charlotte
Brontė, Emily Brontė, Walter Scott, William
Makepeace Thackeray, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Hardy.
- The poetry of Alfred Tennyson, William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti, Emily Bronte, Lionel Johnson, Ernest
Dowson, the young W.B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins,
A.E. Housman and Robert Browning
- The essays of Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman, John Stuart Mill,
and Walter Pater.
Of particular interest is the decade of the 1890s, which saw the first attempts by English writers to adopt the methods and
ideals of the French symbolists.
In drama:
- Stage adaptions of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and of the new genre of vampire novels. In 1849 The
Frankenstein and Vampire stories are finally combined in Frankenstein; or The Vampire's Victim. In 1887, The Model Man, a stage play in which the Frankenstein monster and a vampire were tracked to the
Arctic, appeared in London.
- The wit and drama of Oscar Wilde.
- Controversy over the plays of Henrik Ibsen on the London stage, with
men such as James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw supporting the new dramatic style of the frosty Norwegian.
In music:
In the visual arts:
- The Gothic revival movement in architecture
- John Ruskin, the first major English art critic.
- The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in art
(partly inspired by Ruskin).
- The Clique
- William Morris' Arts and Crafts movement.
- The influence of the aesthetic ideal of American painter James McNeill Whistler.
- The reign of Queen Victoria of Great Britain, from 1837 to 1901, was Britain's Golden Age, and it was also the Golden Age of
British Art. There was peace at home, and prosperity increased, leading to conditions in which painting flourished. The era
produced Constable, Turner, Landseer, Rossetti, Millais, Burne-Jones, Leighton, Watts and Whistler, all living in the reign of
Queen Victoria (except for Constable who died in the year of Victoria's accession). There were some 11,000 recognized artists,
many mediocre, but a great number with high talents and artistic accomplishment.
The period saw a huge amount of artistic production, and the public flocked to exhibitions, with the wealthy accumulating
large picture collections. Queen Victoria patronized living British artists, and many artists occupied a place of honor mixing on
equal terms with the aristocracy and high society. As a result Victorian Britain experienced a flowering of creativity, which
compares favorably with any of the previous great ages of art.
The Victorian Age, for many, has connotations of sentimentality, prudery, and ornamental excess. However, the Victorian
painters successfully illustrated the fruits of the unprecedented achievements of the industrial revolution and its profound
social and moral challenges. The novels of Dickens and George Eliot, the plays of Oscar Wilde, and the poems of Tennyson and
Browning, had their counterparts in Victorian paintings. The period saw the beginning of the split between establishment and
progressive taste, which created the modern idea of an avant-garde. Artist's groups proliferated, with the best known being the
Pre-Raphaelites, the Clique, the St.John's Wood clique, the Cranbrook Colony, and the Newlyn School. The Pre-Raphaelites believed
that the particular and the truth was all important in both life and art. People and things in a painting should not be idealized
but should reflect the reality of life, warts and all. Some artists simply preferred to be independent, and avoided joining any
colony or group. In English art it is diversity and individualism that makes it fascinating.
Victorian painters chose to create art that could be understood by a population of widely contrasting social and educational
backgrounds, so that they were offering entertainment as well as cultural improvement. Victorian art was popular art, and
paintings were more widely discussed in society than they are even today when technology offers so many rival attractions. The
extraordinary richness, variety and complexity of Victorian art reflect an equally rich and complex society. The paintings should
be seen in the context of the ideas, social structure, and aspirations of Britain's heyday of wealth and power; a period that
became known as the Victorian Age.The Industrial Revolution had a powerful impact on the arts. Romanticism and Realism are both
seen as reactions to the powerful changes that took place during the era.
In religion:
The Victorian period is now often regarded as one of many contradictions. It is easy for many to see a clash between the
widespread cultivation of an outward appearance of dignity and restraint, and the widespread presence of many arguably deplorable
phenomena. These include prostitution, child labour, and having an economy based largely on what many
would now see as the exploitation of colonies through imperialism and of the working classes. The
expression Victorian values thus may be two-edged.
The term Victorian has acquired a range of connotations, including that of a particularly strict set of moral standards, often applied hypocritically. (See Victorian morality.)
Related topics
Sources and further reading
- Altick, Richard Daniel. Victorian People and Ideas: A Companion for the Modern Reader of Victorian Literature. W.W.
Norton & Company: 1974. ISBN
039309376X.
- Burton, Antoinette (editor). Politics and Empire in Victorian Britain: A Reader. Palgrave Macmillan: 2001. ISBN 0312293356.
- Flanders, Judith. Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England. W.W. Norton &
Company: 2004. ISBN 0393052095.
- Mitchell, Sally. Daily Life in Victorian England. Greenwood Press: 1996. ISBN 0313294674.
External links and references
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