T
he Victorian eraof theUnited Kingdomwas the period ofQueen
Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January
1901. It was a long period of prosperity for theBritish people.
Some scholars extend the beginning of the periodas defined by a
variety of sensibilities and political concerns that have come to
be associated with the Victoriansback five years to the passage of
theReform Act 1832.
The era was preceded by theGeorgian periodand succeeded by
theEdwardian period. The latter half of the Victorian era roughly
coincided with the first portion of theBelle poqueera of
continental Europe and theGilded Ageof the United States.
The era is often characterised as a long period of peace, known
as thePax Britannica, and economic,colonial, and industrial
consolidation, temporarily disrupted by theCrimean War, although
Britain was at war every year during this time. Towards the end of
the 19th century, the policies ofNew Imperialismled to increasing
colonial conflicts and eventually theAnglo-Zanzibar Warand theBoer
War. Domestically, the agenda was increasingly liberal with a
number of shifts in the direction of gradualpolitical reformand the
widening of thevoting franchise.
Thepopulation of Englandhad almost doubled from 16.8 million in
1851 to 30.5 million in 1901.Scotland's population also rose
rapidly, from 2.8 million in 1851 to 4.4 million in 1901. Ireland's
population decreased rapidly, from 8.2 million in 1841 to less than
4.5 million in 1901.At the same time, around 15
millionemigrantsleft the United Kingdom in the Victorian era and
settled mostly in the United States, Canada, and
Australia.[4]During the early part of the era, theHouse of
Commonswas headed by the two parties, theWhigsand theTories. From
the late 1850s onwards, the Whigs became theLiberals; the Tories
became theConservatives. These parties were led by many prominent
statesmen includingLord Melbourne, SirRobert Peel,Lord Derby,Lord
Palmerston,William Ewart Gladstone,Benjamin Disraeli, andLord
Salisbury. The unsolved problems relating toIrish Home Ruleplayed a
great part in politics in the later Victorian era, particularly in
view of Gladstone's determination to achieve a political
settlement. Indeed, these issues would eventually lead to theEaster
Risingof 1916 and the subsequentdomino effectthat would play a
large part in the fall ofthe empire.
Victoria reigned for 63 years and 216 days,the longest in
British historyup to this point. However, the present
monarch,Elizabeth II, will surpass this if she remains on the
throne until 9 September 2015.
2. Culture
Gothic Revival architecturebecame increasingly significant
during the period, leading to theBattle of the Stylesbetween Gothic
andClassicalideals.Charles Barry's architecture for the newPalace
of Westminster, which had been badly damaged in an1834 fire, was
built in themedieval styleofWestminster Hall, the surviving part of
the building. It constructed a narrative of cultural continuity,
set in opposition to the violent disjunctions ofRevolutionary
France, a comparison common to the period, as expressed inThomas
Carlyle'sThe French Revolution: A HistoryandCharles Dickens'Great
ExpectationsandA Tale of Two Cities. Gothic was also supported by
criticJohn Ruskin, who argued that it epitomised communal and
inclusive social values, as opposed to Classicism, which he
considered to epitomise mechanical standardisation.
The middle of the 19th century sawThe Great Exhibitionof 1851,
the firstWorld's Fair, which showcased the greatest innovations of
the century. At its centre wasthe Crystal Palace, a modular glass
and iron structure - the first of its kind. It was condemned by
Ruskin as the very model of mechanical dehumanisation in design,
but later came to be presented as the prototype ofModern
architecture. Theemergence of photography, showcased at the Great
Exhibition, resulted in significant changes in Victorian art with
Queen Victoria being the first British monarch to be
photographed.John Everett Millaiswas influenced by photography
(notably in his portrait of Ruskin) as were
otherPre-Raphaeliteartists. It later became associated with
theImpressionisticandSocial Realisttechniques that would dominate
the later years of the period in the work of artists such asWalter
SickertandFrank Holl.
3. Entertainment
Popular forms of entertainment varied bysocial class. No matter
how poor people were, they could usually raise a penny or so for
some light entertainment.Victorian Britain, like the periods before
it, was interested in literature (seeCharles Dickens,Arthur Conan
DoyleandWilliam Makepeace Thackeray),theatreandthe
arts(seeAesthetic movementandPre-Raphaelite Brotherhood),
andmusic,drama, andoperawere widely attended.Michael Balfewas the
most popular Britishgrand operacomposer of the period, while the
most popularmusical theatrewas a series of fourteencomic
operasbyGilbert and Sullivan, although there was alsomusical
burlesqueand the beginning ofEdwardian musical comedyin the 1890s.
Drama ranged fromlow comedytoShakespeare(seeHenry Irving). There
were, however, other forms of entertainment. Gentlemen went to
dining clubs, like theBeefsteak clubor theSavage club.Gamblingat
cards in establishments popularly calledcasinoswas wildly popular
during the period: so much so that evangelical and reform movements
specifically targeted such establishments in their efforts to stop
gambling,drinking, and prostitution.
Brass bandsand 'TheBandstand' became popular in the Victorian
era. The band stand was a simple construction that not only created
an ornamental focal point, but also served acoustic requirements
whilst providing shelter from the changeableBritish weather. It was
common to hear the sound of a brass band whilst strolling
throughparklands. At this time musical recording was still very
much a novelty.Another form of entertainment involved 'spectacles'
where paranormal events, such asmesmerism, communication with the
dead (by way ofmediumshipor channelling),ghostconjuring and the
like, were carried out to the delight of crowds and participants.
Such activities were more popular at this time than in other
periods of recent Western history.
Natural historybecame increasingly an "amateur" activity.
Particularly in Britain and the United States, this grew into
specialisthobbiessuch as thestudy of birds, butterflies, seashells
(malacology/conchology), beetles and wildflowers.
Amateurcollectorsand natural history entrepreneurs played an
important role in building the large natural history collections of
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Many people used the train services to visit the seaside, helped
by theBank Holiday Actof 1871, which created a number of fixed
holidays which all sectors of society could enjoy. Large numbers
travelling to quiet fishing villages such
asWorthing,Brighton,MorecambeandScarboroughbegan turning them into
major tourist centres, and people likeThomas Cooksaw tourism and
even overseas travel as viable businesses.
3 .1 Penny gaffs and music halls
Just one penny admitted you to the back room of a public house
thick with tobacco smoke. There a raucous singer delighted the
audience with a repertoire of crude ballads, competing with shouts
for more gin. An evening at a penny gaff made a pleasant change
from their crowded slum rooms.
By the late 1860s penny gaffs were giving way to more
respectable, and comfortable, music halls and theatres. There you
could sing along to your favourite popular songs, or watch
entertainment as diverse as acrobats, trapeze artists, operatic
selections, black-face minstrels, or can-can dancers.
At a Music Hall, The Graphic, April 5th 1873
Alcohol was still served during the performance but the audience
was less riotous and the repertoire less gory. The price was still
surprisingly low: a box at the Garrick Theatre cost only 2 or 3
pence.
3.2 Magic, freak shows and waxworks
Illusionists and spiritualists were popular attractions in
theatres and exhibition halls: audiences could sit amazed as ghosts
appeared on stage and automata solved mathematical puzzles.
Renowned performers appeared to levitate, slice the heads off
spectators and escape out of locked boxes.
Modern Witchery, 1894
Victorian audiences had no qualms about staring at human beings
with disabilities or physical abnormalities. Among theexhibits at
travelling circuses and fairs were mermaids, bear boys, frogmen,
'giants', 'dwarves', conjoined twins and people from exotic climes.
The income from being exhibited was often the only way for some of
these people to live. In fact, the lucky few would achieve fame and
fortune such as Chang and Eng the renowned conjoined twins.The
famous Elephant Man, whose face was badly deformed, was given
sanctuary from a life of freak shows in the London Hospital, where
he lived for four years till he died in 1890.
Royal American Midgets at the Piccadilly Hall, c. 1880
Harvey's Midgets, 1884
Waxwork shows provided another form of cheap entertainment.
Figures included mythological, historical and literary characters
as well as royals, and politicians. In addition, the shows kept
abreast of any big stories in the press such as those involving
celebrities, tragic accidents or murders. 1834 saw a particularly
horrid murder. Waxwork figures of the murdered woman and her four
murdered children, dressed in their own clothes, had the public
paying to see them in the very rooms where they had died. From 1843
Madame Tussauds Chamber of Horrors documented current murders,
exhibiting uncanny likenesses of the murderers within a few days of
their executions. From 1888 Jack the Ripper could be seen in
waxwork, even in penny peepshows.
3.3 CircusesThere were many small collections of animals,
sometimes owned by a circus manager who trundled them along the
country roads before erecting his Big Top wherever he hoped for a
profitable audience. The first famous circus proprietor, Lord
George Sanger, produced spectacular winter shows in Astleys
Amphitheatre, just over Westminster Bridge.
Sanger's Grand National Amphitheatre, Lambeth, 1881
In 1884 hisGullivers Travelshad a cast of seven hundred humans,
thirteen elephants, nine camels and fifty-two horses, with
miscellaneous lions, buffaloes, ostriches and kangaroos thrown in.
Phineas T. Barnums circus in Olympia specialized in themed
spectacles, such as his Venetian pageant in 1891, when the vast
arena was flooded, and the spectators could take gondola rides down
the canals, before watching a great sea battle involving over 1,000
performers.
Covent Garden Circus, c. 1880
3.4 Street artists
The Punch and Judy men preferred to perform outside gentlemens
houses in the West End of London, by arrangement, rather than
walking perhaps twenty miles in a day through the streets, carrying
their show. Genteel evening parties might also be enlivened by the
Fantoccini mans marionettes - a type of puppet show. Companies of
street acrobats could make as much as 100 a year. There were
conjurors, salamander men (fire-eaters) and sword-swallowers.
Street acrobats performing, in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and
the London Poor, 1851
Clowns strode high above the streets on stilts, and
contortionists writhed on the ground. There were innumerable ballad
singers, and bands of differing musical abilities but all able to
produce such a noise that they were sometimes paid just to go away.
As if they were not enough, Scots and Irish bagpipes wailed through
the cacophony.
3.5 Pleasure gardens
The heyday of the London pleasure gardens had been in the
previous century. The mystery is how they managed to attract such
huge crowds, despite the English weather, for they were mostly out
of doors. Vauxhall struggled on until 1859. (The site is now
covered by the south end of Vauxhall Bridge).
Royal Vauxhall Gardens, 1848
Cremorne Gardens, in Chelsea, opened in the 1840s, with a
thousand flickering gas lights, a theatre, firework displays and an
American bowling alley claimed to be the first in London. The army
made soldiers available to perform in massive pageants there. In
1855 they were re-enacting the storming of Sebastopol in the
Crimean war. They advanced with their bayonets fixed. The scaffold
collapsed, and they fell, impaling themselves on their bayonets.
Nine years later in 1864 Goddard, the famous hot air balloonist,
rose to 5,000 feet above Cremorne, but he misjudged his descent and
his balloon landed fatally on a church spire in Chelsea. People
being fired from cannons, French female velocipedists (riders of
early bicycles) wearingshort trousers they could all draw the
crowds.
By day Cremorne was thronged with respectable parties, but they
went home by ten oclock and hundreds of prostitutes took their
places.4. The middle class4.1 Domestic servants
A middle class woman was entirely dependent on a supply of
domestic servants, ranging from the untrained slavey to a staff of
several highly trained specialists.A young wife newly elevated to
her husbands status in the middle class might not have the
accumulated knowledge of an old-established household. Here was a
huge market for Advice Books, such as Isabella BeetonsBook of
Household Management,published in 1861 [and still in print,
updated].
Its usefulness in a middle class home was not so much in
teaching the servants themselves, many of whom would be illiterate,
but in enabling the mistress, after a quick look at the relevant
pages, to pretend to an encyclopedic and impressive knowledge
herself.
Mrs Beeton, Illustration of crockery
4.2 Retail therapy
A Victorian high street, 1894
Having set the maid to clean all the silver, and the cook to
prepare for that nights dinner party, and kissed her husband as he
left for the City, the prosperous housewife had the day before her.
She might briefly interview her children before returning them to
their governess or nursery maid. She was not concerned with buying
food, much of which was delivered on a daily basis, nor with the
wine for the evening, which her husband would have ordered, perhaps
with the collaboration of the butler. (The germ of supermarkets was
sprouting even then, in Mr. Harrods grocery store, opened in 1849,
and William Whiteleys department store in Bayswater, proudly
titledThe Universal Provider, in 1863.)
Illustration of Ladies' Fashions, from The Englishwoman's
Domestic Magazine, 1860The housewife could take a hansom cab, or
perhaps their own carriage, to visit her friends, or sample the
fashionable new emporia in the town centre. The modest
establishments sheltering behind uninformative faades had long
gone. The glory of plate glass, and the brilliance of gas lighting,
enabled the retailer to entice his clientele into his premises,
where male and female staff waited to serve them. The motto of the
up-and-coming shopkeeper was the customer is always right, and the
sales staff had to bow, in every sense, to the customer.
If she could afford to, she would have her clothes made for her
in one of the fashionable and very expensive - salons. The London
season lasted only a few months, from Easter until August, when
Parliament rose and everyone who mattered could retire to their
grouse moors with sighs of relief. But during the season a rich
woman expected to be able to order from her dressmaker an elaborate
gown to be deliveredthe next day.
A lady in less exalted circles might buy a dress ready-made, or
buy a ready-made bodice, which was complicated to make, with a
length of the same fabric to make the skirt herself. She, or her
dressmaker, might use one of the paper patterns distributed free by
fashion magazines such asThe World of Fashion,from 1850.
Dress patterns, 1860
5. Education
A lady B.A. graduate of London University, 1885
In an increasingly complicated world, the chances for an
illiterate boy or girl were slim.
5.1 The Ragged Schools
Ragged schools originated in the Sunday School founded in 1780
by Robert Raikes in Gloucester, who taught children to read so that
they could read the Bible. Then a Portsmouth cobbler, John Pounds,
gathered groups of children to play with his disabled nephew, and
by 1818 had a class of 30 or 40 who he was teaching to read, from
the Bible because it was the only book easily available. The idea
spread to London. In 1844, nineteen Ragged Schools joined to form a
Ragged School Union, headed by Lord Shaftesbury. By 1861 they were
teaching over 40 thousand children in London, including the
children of convicts, drunks and abusive stepparents, and deserted
orphans and even the children of poor Roman Catholics who do not
object to their children reading the Bible. By 1870 there were 250
Ragged Schools in London and over 100 in the provinces. Meanwhile
Quintin Hogg, the exEtonian son of a prosperous London merchant,
had set up a Ragged School, just off the Strand in London, in 1863,
when he was just eighteen. His pupils were the wildest and most
destitute of the street children. Hogg persevered, and even set up
a doss house for homeless boys. One of his sisters was enlisted to
run classes for girls, who were just as wild. The London
Polytechnic, now the University of Westminster, can trace its
origin to Quintin Hogg.
5.2 Apprentices
The idea of apprenticeships was admirable: for a fixed term,
usually seven years, a master or mistress of a trade would train a
young person so that he could earn his living at that trade. The
master kept the apprentice in board, lodging and clothes, but had
no duty to pay him, although many did in the final years of the
term, when the apprentice had learned enough to be helpful. The
system applied throughout society. Prosperous merchants, goldsmiths
and bankers made tidy sums from the premiums paid by the parents of
hopeful apprentices. The members of the Company of Watermen and
Lightermen of the River Thames, who had a monopoly of river
traffic, had 2,140 apprentices in 1858. Poor masters could profit
from the unpaid labour of children taken from the parish workhouse.
There were many scandals of parish apprentices being so illtreated
that they ran away, or even died.5.3 Parish schools
Parish workhouses were supposed to provide education for the
children in their care whom they had not managed to apprentice out,
but this duty was poorly observed. Some satisfied it by shunting
their children to the Central London District School for Pauper
Children on the outskirts of London, known as the Monster School
because of its size it housed 1,000 pupils. (Charlie Chaplin was
one, later.)
5.4 Church schools
The Church of England and the nonconformist movement both
provided elementary education, and both adopted the Lancaster
system whereby the brightest pupil taught what he had learned, to a
group of fellowpupils, each of whom in turn passed it on, and so
on: tidy and superficially efficient but prone to errors.
Nevertheless Joseph Lancaster himself gave 1000 children some grasp
of the rudiments, reading, writing and reckoning, in this way. The
system was replaced by properly trained pupilteachers in 1846. Both
establishments set up teacher training colleges, which gave their
graduates the entrance to employment as welltrained, certificated
teachers.
5.5 The Jews Free School
The Jews Free School had opened in the east end of London in
1817. By 1822 it offered a religious, moral and useful education to
600 Jewish boys and half as many girls already almost up to the
Monster School level. From 1842 to 1897 its head was Moses Angel, a
brilliant polymath with a genius for teaching. By 1870 it had 2,400
pupils, and was perhaps the largest school in the world. (It still
exists today in Harrow.)
5.6 The public schools
The Clock Tower, Eton College, 1860
Only the English could call their most exclusive and expensive
educational establishments public. Winchester College was the
earliest, founded in 1382. The College of St Mary at Eton followed,
in 1440. There was a burst of new foundations in the nineteenth
century, reflecting the aspirations of the middle classes to the
status symbols of the nobility and gentry. They emphasized the
importance of sportsmanship and of a brand of Christianity later
called Muscular Christianity. They produced selfconfident young men
ready to become leaders destined for the army or the civil service,
at home or in the Empire. Scholarship came lower down in their
priorities.
5.7 Education for girls
First lady M.D. of the University of London, 1889
In the upper classes it was assumed that a girl would marry and
that therefore she had no need of a formal education, as long as
she could look beautiful, entertain her husbands guests, and
produce a reasonable number of children. Accomplishments such as
playing the piano, singing and flowerarranging were allimportant.
If she could not find a husband she faced a grim future as a
'maiden aunt' whose help could always be called on to look after
her aged parents or her siblings children. She might even be forced
to take on employment as a governess, shut away in the schoolroom
with children who had little interest in absorbing the information
she was teaching. This became increasingly unattractive to
intelligent women. But their future was improved when Queens
College in Harley Street, London was founded in 1848, to give
governesses a recognized and marketable qualification. No
accomplishments there. Ten more years saw the foundation of
Cheltenham Ladies College. Other girls public schools followed.
This increase in female education led to renewed demands for the
vote. The National Union of Womens Suffrage Societies was founded
in 1897, hotly denounced by the Queen, who from her position of
unimaginable power saw no reason why women should want to vote at
all.
Cheltenham Ladies' College, 1885
5.8 State intervention
The Factory Act of 1833, had imposed a duty on employers to
provide halftime education for employees under 13. In practice, the
Act was easily ignored. The breakthrough came in 1870. Elected
school boards could levy a local rate to build new schools
providing education up to the age of 10. In 1880 the provision of
elementary schooling for both sexes was made compulsory, and the
age raised to 13. By 1874 5000 Board Schools were running. Another
change in the law enabled grammar schools for girls to be founded
and funded. By 1898 ninety such schools had been founded
5.9 The Universities
For centuries, the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge
had imposed three barriers to entrance. An applicant had to be 1:
male; 2: unmarried; and 3: a member of the Church of England. While
2 and 3 could be evaded with a little cunning, 1 could not.
Nonsectarian colleges had been opened in London from 1828 onwards,
grouped into London University in 1836. Durham University was
founded in 1832, Owens College in Manchester in 1851, and
Birmingham University in 1900. In 1878 London University admitted
women to two colleges, Bedford College, and the Royal Holloway
College opened by Queen Victoria in 1886, which was funded by the
proceeds of patent medicines. But Oxford and Cambridge held out
against women until the next century.
The opening of Royal Holloway, 1886