The Victorians
“British history is two thousand years
old, and yet in a good many ways the
world has moved farther ahead since
the Queen was born than it moved in
all the rest of the two thousand years
put together.”
Mark Twain, 1897
at Queen Victoria’s
Jubilee
Queen Victoria
reigned 1837-1901
 May 24, 1819: born at Kensington Palace – only child of
Edward, Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III
 1837: on the death of her uncle, William IV, she became
queen at the age of 18
 1840: married her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha
 1861: Prince Albert died
 Nine children
 Presided over an Empire “upon which the sun never set”
 It was during Victoria's reign that the modern idea of the
constitutional monarch, whose role was to remain above
political parties, began to evolve.
 January 22, 1901: died after a reign of 64 years – longest in
British history
Prince Albert
 Son of Duke Ernest of Coburg, Victoria’s maternal uncle –
he and Victoria were first cousins, born the same year
 Became Victoria’s closest advisor
 A serious patron of the arts, a composer and a painter, an
architect and an educator
 As chancellor of Cambridge, he modernized the traditional
classics-and-theology curriculum with science and
technology
 Arranged for the design and building of experimental
houses to better serve working class families
 Organized and oversaw the Great Exhibition of 1851 -- the
first World's Fair.
 "Machinery, Science, and Taste…are of no country, but
belong, as a whole, to the civilized world."
The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park
site of the 1851 Great Exhibition
The Royal Family
Political Reform
 1832: The Reform Bill extended voting rights to all
males owning property worth £10 in annual rent –
lower middle classes
 1832: redistribution of parliamentary representation –
elimination of “rotten boroughs”
 1838-48: Chartist Movement “People’s Charter”
advocated universal suffrage, secret ballots and
legislative reforms
 1867: Second Reform Bill: extended right to vote to
some of working class
 1870-1908: Married Women’s Property Acts – granted
women the right to own property –”women were legally
recognized as individuals in their own right for the first
time in history.”
Social Reform and Education
 1846: Repeal of Corn Laws – elimination of tax on
grains – free trade
 1833-78: Factory Acts – restricted child labor, limited
work hours, required public education
 1839: Custody Act
 1857: Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act
 Higher Education for Women
 1848 – establishment of first Women’s College in
London
 By the end of Victoria’s reign, women could get
degrees at 12 universities and study at Oxford and
Cambridge
Technology
 1830: Liverpool and Manchester RR – first
public steam railway in the world
 steam ships
 telegraph -- intercontinental cables
 photography
 high speed printing
 cast iron for building
 anesthetics -- ether
 Technology on the
Victorian Web
Gustav Doré, London Underground
Science: Geology and Astronomy
 Geology
 “the hottest science going”
 all accredited geologists agreed that the earth was millions of
years old, that strata were layers from different times and that
Genesis was incompatible with the findings of modern geology
or irrelevant
 many discoveries about dinosaurs throughout the 19th c.
http://rainbow.ldeo.columbia.edu/courses/v1001/dinodis3.html
 Astronomy: new planetary and cosmic discoveries
 Geology “gives one the same sort of bewildering view of the
abysmal extent of Time that Astronomy does of Space.” – John
Sterling, 1837
The Great
Exhibition
1851
included first
exhibition of
dinosaurs
Science: Biology
 Charles Darwin (1809-82)
 1859: On the Origin of the Species
 1871: The Descent of Man, and Selection in
Relation to Sex
 1872: The Expression of the Emotions in Man and
Animals
 Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95)
 Populizer and advocate of Darwin’s theories
 On a Piece of Chalk influenced thinking about
education
 Huxley advocated broad primary school
instruction: reading, writing, arithmetic, art,
science, and music.
 The basic form of nearly every American college
curriculum is what Huxley advocated more than
100 years ago: two years of more liberal basic
studies followed by two years of specialization
 Huxley emphasized doing and observing in science
classes
Religion
 1829: Catholic Relief Act – granted Catholics the same
political rights as Protestants
 1835: Jews are granted the right to vote
 1857: Sir David Salomons elected Lord Mayor of London
 1868: Benjamin Disraeli, a convert to Anglicanism, becomes
Prime Minister
The Church of England
 Low Church – evangelical, highly individual, abolitionists,
Puritanical ( Christian right )
 Broad Church – open to modern advances in science,
emphasized inclusion ( liberals )
 High Church – emphasized tradition, ritual and authority –
the Oxford Movement – resistant to liberal ideas
(conservatives)
Biblical Studies
 Linguistic and Historic: “Higher Criticism”
 Study of original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic
texts – history of composition
 Historical contexts
 David Friedrich Struass’s Das Leben Jesu –
translated by George Eliot as The Life of Jesus
 Biblical Archaeology vs. Mesopotamian
Archaeology – Sumerian texts
Philosophy: Utilitarianism
 Philosophical Radicalism
 All humans seek to maximize pleasure and
minimize pain.
 Morality – that which provides the
greatest pleasure to the greatest number
 Religion – outmoded superstition
 Fails to provide for spiritual needs
 Attacked by:
Jeremy Bentham
James Mill
Carlyle, Sartor, Resartus (1833-34)
 Dickens, Hard Times (1854)
 Ruskin, Unto This Last (1860)
 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography ( 1873)
John Stuart Mill
Philosophy:
Marxism
Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels
in London, 1867
 Friedrich Engels
 1844: The
Condition of the
Working Class in
England in 1844
 1884: The Origin
of the Family
Private Property
and the State
 Karl Marx
1867-94: Das
Kapital
 1848: Co-authored
The Communist
Manifesto
The British Empire
Imperialism: The British Empire
 1853-1880: Over 2 million Britons emigrated to settle in British
colonies – especially Canada and Australia
 1839-42; 1856-60: Opium Wars with China
 1857: Parliament took over rule of India from East India Co. and
set up a civil service government
 1867: Canadian provinces united into Dominion of Canada
 1876: Victoria declared Empress of India
 1880s – the Irish question – Home Rule
 1899-1902: Boer War in South Africa
 By 1890, the British Empire contained ¼ of the earth’s territory,
and ¼ of the earth’s population.
Victorian Literature
The Novel
 Dominant Victorian literary form
 Initially published in serial form in periodicals
 Usually appeared in 3 volumes – “three deckers” –
in book form
 Focus on social relationships in middle class world
 Ample opportunities for women novelists although
many choose male pseudonyms to be taken more
seriously
Thackeray
Eliot
Trollope
Gaskell
Novelists
E. Bronte
C. Bronte
Dickens
Disraeli
Social Realism
 Social novels deal with the nature, function and
effect of the society which the characters inhabit –
often for the purpose of effecting reform
 “ Condition of England” novels in 1840s and 1850s:
response to . the condition of laborers in the
Industrial Revolution: Dickens’ Hard Times,
Gaskell’s Mary Barton; Disraeli’s The Two Nations
Social and political realism: Trollope’s The Palliser
Novels, The Barsetshire Chronicles, etc.
 Satirical social commentary: Thackeray’s Vanity
Fair
Probing psychological realism: Eliot’s Middlemarch
Non-fiction Prose
Matthew Arnold
 Instructional purpose:
history, biography,
theology, literary and
artistic criticism
 Centrality of
argument and
persuasion
 Professional writers
Walter Pater
Victorian Poetry
 Highly pictorial – “picturesque” – combines
visual impressions to create a picture that carries
the dominant emotion of the poem
 Narrative
 Long narrative stories – poetic novels: Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s
Aurora Leigh, Robert Browning’s The Ring and the
Book
Dramatic monologues – esp. Robert Browning
 Distinctive sound experimentation
 Poetry of mood and character
Poets
Elizabeth Barrett
Browning
Robert
Browning
Aestheticism

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

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“Art for art’s sake”
A cult of beauty: Life should imitate Art
Strong connection between visual and literary arts
Anti-Victorian reaction, post-Romantic roots
The Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure,
rather than convey moral or sentimental messages
 Pre-Raphaelites and Arts and Crafts Movement
William Morris
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Christina
Rossetti
William Holman
Hunt
Algernon
Swinburne
Aubrey
Beardsley
Gilbert and Sullivan
Dramatists
George Bernard Shaw
Oscar Wilde