#42 The Victorian Age. General Survey

When in 1837 William IV died, his 18-year-old Victoria became queen. Her reign of more than 63 years (1837-1901) was the longest in English history.

The era was preceded by the Georgian period and followed by the Edwardian period. The latter half of the Victorian age roughly coincided with the first portion of the Belle Époque era of continental Europe and the Gilded Age of the United States. In international relations the era was a long period of peace, known as the Pax Peace Britannica, and economic, colonial, and industrial consolidation, temporarily disrupted by the Crimean War in 1854. The end of the period saw the Boer War. Domestically, the agenda was increasingly liberal with a number of shifts in the direction of gradual political reform, industrial reform and the widening of the voting franchise (право участвовать в выборах). Two especially important figures in this period of British history are the prime ministers Gladstone and Disraeli, whose contrasting views changed the course of history. Disraeli, reputed to be favoured (наход-ся под покровительством) by the queen, was a gregarious (общительный) Tory. Gladstone, his historical rival, a Liberal, served more terms and oversaw (следить) much of the overall liberal law-making of the era.

The Victorian age can be characterized as a period in which Britain became the strongest world power: besides being the greatest industrial power (the “workshop of the world”), it was also the greatest financial and commercial power, the greatest sea & colonial powers. Although conservatism was at its height, the Victorian age was also a period of change: reforms were carried out in education, franchise, hospital and nursing services. Many things that have become a permanent feature of everyday life in present day Britain and in the whole modern world, originated in Victorian England, for example, the use of postage stamps, the underground railway, the modern form of popular sports such as football and tennis.

The Victorian era was a time of demographic increase in England. The population rose from 13.897 million in 1831 to 32.528 million in 1901. Two major factors affecting population growth are fertility (рождаемость) rates and mortality rates. England was the first country to undergo the Demographic transition (переход) and the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions.

The names of queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert continue to live in the names of some illustrations and geographical names: the Victoria Cross, the Albert Hall, the Victoria and Albert Museum etc.

The long reign of Queen Victoria can be divided into 3 parts: early( 1837-60),mid(1860-80) and late (1880-1901) Victorian

#43 The Early Victorian Period (1837-1860)

Economic, political, social difficulties became increasingly evident during these two decades, and it was clear that "the spirit of the age" differed from anything that had gone before. Industrial development and urbanization, as discussed above, were key factors, along with increasing class consciousness and strife. The two most important political events during this period are the Whig Prime Minister Earl Gray's First Reform Bill of 1832, which gave limited representation to the prosperous middle class sections of Britain, and Tory Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel's repeal of the protectionist Corn (i.e. Wheat) Laws in 1846.

The First Reform Bill (1832). By 1830, when William IV became king, England had already seen the makings not so much of French-style revolutionism as of the kind of agitation for change that would come to characterize the Victorian "Age of Improvement," as historian Asa Briggs calls it. There was some violence by and against laborers - most notably the violent repression of working people at a gathering in London's Saint Peter's Fields, 1819, but with the coming into power of the Whig Party in 1830, the political system passed into the hands of men willing to make concessions if not to the unskilled working people, then at least to the capitalists of Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham-men responsible for Britain's new and remarkable urban and industrial development and for augmenting its economic power at home and abroad. Following the prime ministership of the Tory war hero Wellington, Whig Earl Grey and his cabinet saw that Britain had serious problems, and they made a decision to adapt the system sufficiently to stave off disaster. When the Reform Bill finally made it past the conservative House of Lords in 1832, the vote was extended to men of much less wealth than before; further, some of the most absurd abuses in parliamentary districting were removed. The Whig reformers saw their decision not as a great revolution but as a final, moderate settlement. Still, what they did influenced Britain's future development, setting the stage in future decades for further democratization that would keep pace with changing demographics and expectations.

Repeal of the Corn Laws (1846). The Corn Laws were a protectionist measure from the Napoleonic Period that had served the landed aristocracy well by keeping their wheat sales safe from cheap foreign competition. But the working, of course, people disliked such protectionism because it increased food prices, and industrial capitalists disliked it because they had to pay those workers higher wages. And in more philosophical terms, protectionism offended the manufacturers and men of commerce whose dissent went into the making of the first modern "interest group," the Anti-Corn Law League (founded 1839) under the leadership of Richard Cobden and John Bright. Such men favored the laissez-faire principals of Political Economy as laid out by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and others. The removal of the wheat tariff was a triumph, then, for middle-class economic aspirations.

The Hungry Forties and Chartism. While amounting to a momentous show of good sense on the part of England's rulers, the 1832 Reform Bill and the Corn Law Repeal didn't solve all of the country's problems-economic troubles continued to generate working-class unrest, and the manufacturing class still didn't have the control they wanted over the political system. The 1840's were particularly tough times, railroad-building and investment aside-they are sometimes called the "Hungry Forties" because of famine in Ireland and intense misery in Britain. Many people feared a continental-style socialist revolution (Marx's Communist Manifesto was published in 1848, a year of revolution on the Continent.) The 1830's-40's are the era of Chartism, or working-class radicalism; though this loosely organized movement failed to transform the system, it certainly made a deep impact on the consciousness of the well-to-do and the middle classes alike. (The People's Charter that gave the movement its name is included in the Tucker-Mermin anthology.)

The Sage Writers. In literature, the first Victorian sage-writers made their appearance during the early part of the period: John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle were among those debating the "Condition of England Question" and trying to find a new principle of moral authority and intelligibility for a country undergoing deep political unrest and religious doubt. John Henry Newman (later a catholic convert and Cardinal) was primarily concerned with religion-not so much with religious doubt as with what he perceived as an Anglican failure to assume its proper spiritual role in English life. He and other members of the Tractarian or Oxford Movement (1833-41) railed away at the holdover attitude of Deist rationalism into which the Church of England had fallen during the eighteenth century. But other early and mid-Victorians were concerned with the problem of outright doubt, thanks to the "Higher Critics" (textual scholars) and to precursors of Darwin like the geologist Sir Charles Lyell. Lyell's 1833 volume Principles of Geology asserted the doctrine of uniformitarianism, implying that the same forces that shaped the earth had operated consistently over vast periods of time and thereby contradicting the Bible's temporal scheme. The more readerly of the early Victorians began to feel the impact of what historian Robin Gilmour calls "deep time," and as the century wears on, science more and more takes on the role of history. While this scientific view generally came with an embedded concept of "progress" or "teleology," that embedded concept could not make up entirely for the promise offered by older, more humanistic notions of history.

Evangelical Religion. This focus on the persistence of doubt is not to say that the Victorian Age "killed god," as Nietzsche's madman says modern humans had. In fact, along with the sage-writers we should place Britain's dissenting Protestants and the more evangelical among the Anglicans: they generally comprised the middle-class commercial and manufacturing element, and were very much in favor of social reform: much of the impetus behind the era's great reforms in labor conditions and political process came from evangelical Christians who felt that improvement of the human condition was their moral duty. They tended to emphasize private or individual philanthropy over government action, but the impulse to reform was widespread.

Benthamites. Another element tending to reform was the influence of the early Utilitarians, whose leading author was Jeremy Bentham. While Benthamites supported the basic tenets of Political Economy or laissez-faire capitalism-free markets and minimal government interference in people's affairs, they also believed along with the earlier empiricist philosopher John Locke that humans come into the world as "blank slates" and that, therefore, education and government are central to the possibility of achieving human happiness. On the whole, they wanted to rearrange human affairs to suit the "greatest happiness for the greatest number," and their desire to accomplish that goal in a scientific, rational manner is responsible for the kinds of "blue-book" studies that inaugurated some of the major Victorian reforms. It is easy to criticize the cruder formulations of the thinkers that Carlyle scornfully labeled "Benthamee radicals," but the essence of their philosophy is that the goal of humanity is happiness and that society ought to be so arranged as to allow free people to seek that happiness. At its best, Utilitarian thought-especially in the formulations of John Stuart Mill, responds in a refreshingly democratic-spirited, systematic way to Aristotle's ancient questions about what constitutes "the good life" and how each person might best attain it.

The coming of Railway Age.In 1823 the Stockton-Darlington Railway had been opened; in 1829 the much more important line connected Manchester and Liverpool.At first, the railway was looked on mainly as a means of carrying goods, but it was soon discovered that it could carry the passangers more quickly and more cheap.The result was what may almost called the second Industrial Revolution. The Railway Age marks the beginning of an immense increase in all branches of industry and the commencement of modern heavy machinery.

#44 The Mid-Victorian Period (1860-1880)

The Great Exhibition (1851) and the Second Reform Bill (1867). 1851 is a good year to choose as the start of this supposed reign of confidence and optimism since during that year the Great Exhibition at the specially built "Crystal Palace" showcased the latest and grandest scientific wonders for an admiring world. Parliamentary attempts to deal with the crisis atmosphere of the 30's and the "Hungry 40's" were to a large extent successful, at least insofar as there was no Continental-style radical revolution in Britain. While the aristocracy continued to hold the reigns of political and social power, it at least accorded the urban middle classes a say in British affairs. There was still much social inequality, but Britain's increasing domestic productivity and foreign power made this period what historian W.L. Burn calls an "age of equipoise" presided over by the independent-minded Whig Prime Minister Lord Palmerston. The Second Reform Bill of 1867 (the Tory Derby/Disraeli ministership's doing) extended the vote to still more of the middle class and even to some working-class householders, furthering Britain's move towards greater democracy. The Forster Education Act of 1870 (education for children from 5-13) eventually had the same tendency in that it heralded the advent of a relatively educated, informed public that could perpetuate a democratic, adaptable, market-oriented society. Mid-Victorian England seemed to have got some sense of itself, one might say, and the necessary thing was progress-continual social, political, scientific, and economic progress. These were also the years of the Sepoy Indian mutiny, the Crimean War, and Governor Eyre's brutal mishandling of an anti-colonial uprising in Jamaica, but on the whole the mid-Victorian years were prosperous and generated much hope for better things to come.

The Culture Critics. Still, if nothing succeeds like success, nothing except abject failure comes in for more concentrated critical fire. Among those who questioned the reigning evangelical and utilitarian self-satisfaction were a matured Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold, all of whom we will study this semester. These authors were not great lovers of democracy in matters of culture or politics, but at times their critiques hit home and undercut the more sanctimonious attitudes and practices of mid-Victorian Britain. They still have much of value to say to us, provided that we read them in a truly historicist spirit. In particular, Arnold's anxiety about a world changing so much and so rapidly as to become "multitudinous" or unintelligible is illuminating. Along with expectation of change and progress, apparently, came fear of its effects upon the human psyche, and much argument over what exactly ought to be meant by that ambiguous word "progress."

Although the mid- Victorian period was not free of harassing problems, it was a time of prosperity, optimism, and stability. The achievements of modern industry and science were celebrated at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park (1851). Enormous investments of people, money, and technology created the British Empire. Many English people saw the expansion of empire as a moral responsibility, and missionary societies flourished. At the same time, however, there was increasing debate about religious belief. The Church of England had evolved into three major divisions, with conflicting beliefs about religious practice. There were also rationalist challenges to religion from philosophy (especially Utilitarianism) and science (especially biology and geology). Both the infallibility of the Bible and the stature of the human species in the universe were increasingly called into question.