19. The Victorian Age

On 20 June 1837 at about two o’clock in the morning King William IV died. Four hours later his eighteen-year-old niece Victoria was woken up in Kensington Palace and, still in her dressing-gown and slippers, learnt that she had become the queen. Thus began a reign that was to be the longest in British history, spanning the greater part of the 19^th century and ending in the 20^th(1901); and Victoria was to give her name to a glorious age.

Victoria started her reign as a willful and passionate young woman, who was also ill-educated and inexperienced. Very soon she was to recover that the political role of the Crown had been further reduced in the years preceding her accession. Although all acts of government continued to be carried out in the name of the sovereign and the monarch still chose the Prime Minister and asked him to form a ministry, the choice was narrowed to someone who had the general confidence of Parliament and especially the House of Commons.

At the beginning of Victoria’s reign her headstrong (несговорчивый) temperament, her susceptibility (восприимчивость) to the undemocratic ideas of Continental royalty and open preference for Lord Melbourne and the Whigs became a real danger to the monarchy. Fortunately, she also had a sense of duty, earnestness (серьезность, вдумчивость).

When Victoria came to the throne Melbourne had been Prime Minister for two years. Melbourne gave a great of time and attention to the political education and advising of the young queen.

The Court at Victoria’s time changed greatly compared with the previous two reigns. The royal family, guided (руководствующаяся) by an ideal of personal duty, became a model for private morality, decency, economy. Interest in the arts and sciences, in learning and education both the general masses and their own children, in national achievements and good works was now the focus of the royal attention. Belief in the improvement was to become the essence of the whole Victorian age.

The mid-Victorian years (1841-1865) were a time of remarkable prosperity. Free trade and not yet encountering any foreign competition, Britain had reason to enjoy its industrial leadership. The achievements of industry and the country’s supremacy (превосходство) in world leadership gave rise to a spirit of confidence in the present and faith in the idea of progress. Britain moved into a new age of transition and reform, an age of High Victorianism.

The election of 1841 gave the Tories a clear majority, and by this time both the queen and the Parliament had recognized that the monarch must choose a Prime Minister. Victoria had to ask Robert Peel to form a government. Peel accepted the idea of gradual reform, free trade, and the industrial society as the basis of Britain’s prospering economy. He faced the agitation of the Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League. Chartism had originated in the late 1830s. They called for universal male suffrage, the abolition of the property, annual general elections, and electoral districts of equal size. Later they became revolutionary.

The first change concerned the monarchy and started in 1861, when Victoria’s husband died of typhoid fever. The sudden and unexpected death of the Prince Consort led his widow to seclude (изолировать) herself for twenty years from public life. However, though she didn’t afterwards take a part in public life as before, she never neglected any of her essential duties as queen. By the 1870s Victoria was beginning to be viewed in a different light due to the longevity of the reign, her domestic virtues, her role through the marriages of her many children as the matriarch of Europe, as well as being the focus of the world. In 1876 Victoria was made Empress of India. The monarchy became the symbol of stability, tradition and Empire. People could now travel to see the spectacles, read about them in newspapers, see photographs. Victoria was in fact the first media queen.

The second major change is connected with the two main parties that were in response to the new political and social conditions. In 1859 the Peelites came together with the Whigs, Liberals and Radicals to form the future Liberal party, with Palmerston as the Prime Minister and Gladstone as a major force in the party. Benjamin Disraeli was ambitious and amoral. He rescued the Conservative party from the political wilderness and Gladstone’s rival. The conservative party was the party of the establishment and of property.

A distinctive feature of Victorian society in 90s years was that there was no group confrontation of classes. The idea of hierarchy was universally accepted. What held society together was deference (уважение).

Another common ground was respectability (почтенность). It embodied (включало) financial independence achieved through one’s own efforts and self-discipline. Respectability brought with it a cult of work and deep respect for home and family. Those who were not respectable were the extravagant, the unreliable, the drunkard, the passive, and those who lived off the state.

If the queen, deference, religion and respectability drew classes together, so too did philanthropy and good works. The philanthropy of Victorian Britain by far exceeded that of any other European country.

In the last decades of the 19^th century the discovery of gold and diamonds in Transvaal had brought there a lot of foreigners, many of whom were Britons. Relations between Boers, descendants (потомки) of Dutch and French Calvinists, and Britons worsened. The war began. The Boer War was to last three years (1899-1902). It began disastrously for Britain and only gradually moved towards victory with the taking of Pretoria in June 1900. However, two more years of guerilla warfare followed until peace was finally made at Vereeniging. The Boers were subjugated and their two states annexed to form the Union of South Africa. Yet, the Boer war isolated the country diplomatically, cost 300 million pounds and claimed the lives of 30,000 men.