The Victorian Age

1830-1901

1832: The First Reform Bill.

1837: Victoria becomes queen.

1846: The Corn Laws repealed.

1850: Tennyson succeeds Wordsworth as Poet Laureate.

1851: The Great Exhibition in London.

1859: Charles Darwin's Origin of Species published.

1870-71: Franco-Prussian War.

1901: Death of Victoria.

In the 18th century the pivotal city of Western civilization had been Paris; by the second half of the nineteenth century this center of influence had shifted to London, a city that expanded from about two million inhabitants when Victoria came to the throne to six and a half million at the time of her death. The rapid growth of London is one of the many indications of the most important development of the age: the shift from a way of life based on the ownership of land to a modern urban economy based on trade and manufacturing. "We have been living, as it were, the life of three hundred years in thirty" was the impression formed by Dr. Thomas Arnold during the early stages of England's industrialization. By the end of the century—after the resources of steam power had been more fully exploited for fast railways and iron ships, for looms, printing presses, and farmers' combines, and after the introduction of the telegraph, intercontinental cable, photography, anesthetics, and universal compulsory education—a late Victorian could look back with astonishment on these developments during his or her lifetime.

Because. England was the first country to become industrialized, its transformation was an especially painful one: it experienced a host of social and economic problems consequent to rapid and unregulated industrialization. England also experienced an enormous increase in wealth. An early start enabled England to capture markets all over the globe. Cotton and other manufactured products were exported in English ships, a merchant fleet whose size was without parallel in other countries. The profits gained from trade led also to extensive capital investments in all continents. England gained particular profit from the development of its own colonies, which, by 1 890, comprised more than a quarter of all the territory on the surface of the earth. After England had become the world's workshop, London became, from 1870 on, the world's banker. By the end of the century England was the world's foremost imperial power.

Victorians is now only a matter of the history of taste, but its aftereffects still sometimes crop up when the term Victorian is employed in an exclusively pejorative sense, as prudish or old-fashioned. Contemporary historians and critics now find the Victorian period a richly complex example of a society struggling with the issues and problems we identify with modernism. But even to give the period the single designation Victorian suggests a problem. The period takes its name, of course, from what was felt to be the unifying presence of its monarch, who gave symbolic representation to the moral virtue and national pride with which her subjects identified their epoch, for a period almost seventy years in length, however, we can hardly expect generalizations to be uniformly applicable. It is therefore helpful to subdivide the age into three phases: Early Victorian (1830-48), Mid-Victorian (1848-70), and Late Victorian (1870-1901). It may also be convenient to subdivide the Late phase by considering the final decade, the nineties, as a bridge between two centuries.

THE EARLY PERIOD (1830-48): A TIME OF TROUBLES In the autumn of 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened, becoming "the first locomotive-operated public line in the world. The Reform Bill of 1832 was passed in response to the demands of the middle classes, who were gradually taking control of England's economy and who were also committed to technological and industrial change.

More precisely, the Reform Bill of 1832 extended the right to vote to all males owning property worth £10 or more in annual rent.

The changeover was in fact a painful one, attended with discord and conflict. This early period came to be called the Time of Troubles. In the early 1840s a severe depression, with widespread unemployment, led to rioting. Workers and their families in the slums of such cities as Manchester lived in horribly crowded, unsanitary housing, and the conditions under which women and children toiled in mines and factories were unimaginably brutal.

In reality many remedies were being pointed out. One of the most striking was put forward by the Chartists, a large organization of workingmen. In 1838 the organization drew up a "People's Charter" advocating the extension of the right to vote, the use of secret balloting, and other legislative reforms.

In 1848, when armed revolutions were exploding violently in every country in Europe, England was relatively unaffected. A large Chartist demonstration in London seemed to threaten revolution, but it came to nothing. The next two decades were relatively calm and prosperous.

This Time of Troubles left its mark on some early Victorian literature. It is the novelists of the 1840s and early 1850s, however, who show the most marked response to the industrial and political scene.

In 1851 Prince Albert opened the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, where a gigantic glass greenhouse, the Crystal Palace, had been erected to display the exhibits of modern industry and science.

Pride in technological progress, however, is only one element of the mid-Victorian period. Equally significant is the conflict between religion and science. This conflict was not, of course, altogether a new one. Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850), like much mid-Victorian literature, carries on the religious debates of earlier decades. Instead of treating the Bible as a sacredly infallible document, scientifically minded scholars examined it as a mere text of history and presented evidence about its composition that believers, especially in Protestant countries, found disconcerting, to say the least. The second kind of damage was effected by the view of humanity implicit in the discoveries of geology and astronomy.

In the mid-Victorian period, biology reduced humankind even further into "nothingness." Darwin's great treatise The Origin of Species (1859) was interpreted by the nonscientific public in a variety of ways. Some chose to assume that evolution was synonymous with progress, but most readers recognized that Darwin's theory of natural selection conflicted not only with the concept of creation derived from the Bible but also with long-established assumptions of the values attached to humanity's special role in the world.

THE LATE PERIOD (1870-1901): DECAY OF VICTORIAN VALUES The third phase of the Victorian age is more difficult to categorize. At first glance its point of view seems merely an extension of mid-Victorianism, whose golden glow lingered on through the Jubilee years of 1887 and 1897 (years celebrating the fiftieth and sixtieth anniversaries of the queen's accession) down to 1914. For many Victorians, this final phase of the century was a time of serenity and security, the age of house parties and long weekends in the country.

In much of the literature of this final phase of Victorianism we can sense an overall change of attitudes. Some of the late Victorian writers expressed the change openly by simply attacking the major mid-Victorian idols. Samuel Butler (1835-1902), for example, set about demolishing Darwin, Tennyson, and Prime Minister Gladstone, figures whose aura of authority reminded him of his own father. More typical were Walter Pater and his followers, writers who concluded that the striving of their predecessors was ultimately pointless, that the answers to our problems are not to be found, and that our role is to enjoy the fleeting moments of beauty in "this short day of frost and sun."

THE NINETIES

The changes in attitude that had begun cropping up in the 1870s became much more conspicuous in the final decade of the century and give the nineties a special aura of notoriety. Of course the changes were not in evidence everywhere. Throughout the empire at its outposts in India and Africa, the English were building railways and administering governments with the same strenuous energy as in the mid-Victorian period. The stories of Kipling and Conrad variously record the struggles of such people.

Much of the writing of the decade illustrates a breakdown of a different sort. Melancholy, not gaiety, is characteristic of its spirit. Artists of the nineties, representing the Aesthetic movement, were very much aware of living at the end of a great century and often cultivated a deliberately fin-de-siecle ("end-of-century") pose. The Yellow Book, a periodical that ran from 1894 to 1897, is generally taken to represent the aestheticism of the nineties.

From the perspective of the twentieth century, however, it is easy to see in the nineties the beginning of the modernist movement in literature; a number of the great writers of the twentieth century—Yeats, Hardy, Conrad, Shaw—were already publishing.

The connections between literature in the Romantic and Victorian ages are close. Victorian poets as different as Browning and Swinburne show the strong influence of Shelley. Tennyson frequently writes, in the tradition of Keats, and Arnold, in that of Wordsworth. Many other instances of such continuity and influence may be cited. Most Victorian writers, both in poems and in essays, grappled with the same religious issues that had been a central concern for Wordsworth, Blake, and Shelley.