Queen Victoria ( 1837-1901)

An age of transition

Thanks to industry and trade, England became the wealthiest nation

“The sun never sets on England”

• Britain was unchallenged military power• Britain dominated Global trade and

expanded as a colonial empire in India, Australia, Africa and Brazil

• Factories were founded and mass production became important and profitable.

• Railways, canals and steamships provided Britain with the transportation between Britain and its colonies.

• Urbanization, poverty and child labour emerged.

• Growth of the cities: Due to the industrialisation, people were flocking into cities to search for better lives.

• The search for employment: Both unskilled and skilled people demanded work, so the wages were low. Life conditions were too hard.

• Child Labour: Children had to work long hours and under difficult conditions to help the family budget.

• The housing shortage: Workers wanted to live nearby their working places because it was time-saving. As a result of these demands and overcrowded conditions, the housing became scarce and expensive; therefore, so many people preferred slum-housing.

Kellow Chesney made a description ofslum-housing in his book “TheVictorian Underworld” : ‘Hideous slums, some of them acres

wide, some no more than crannies of obscure misery, make up a substantial part of the, metropolis … In big, once handsome houses, thirty or more people of all ages may inhabit a single room,’

• Destitution: Many cases of death caused by starvation and destitution were reported. In 1850, an inquest was held on a 38 year old woman whose body was reported as being little more than a skeleton, and her child as a ‘skeleton infant’.

• Homeless children: There were children living with their families in these desperate situations but there were also numerous, homeless children living on the streets of London.

Children and crime: Many destitute children lived by stealing and they were seen as threats to society. Something had to be done about them to preserve law and order.

Henry Mayhew argued that:

‘since crime was not caused by illiteracy, it cannot be cured education … the only certain effects being the emergence of a more skilful and sophisticated race of criminals’

• Society’s attitude towards the poor: This is clearly demonstrated in a hymn published in 1848 Cecil Frances Alexander:

“The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high and lowly, And order’d their estate”

• Prostitution:Beginning in the late 1840s, major news organizations, clergymen, and single women became increasingly concerned about prostitution, which came to be known as “The Great Social Evil”.

In his landmark study, Prostitution, WilliamActon reported that the police estimatedthere were 8,600 in London alone in 1857.

The Victorian Age was a complex era characterizedby stability, progress and social reforms and also,by great problems such as poverty, injustice andsocial unrest.That’s why the Victorians felt obligedto promote and invent a rigid code of values thatreflected the world as they wanted it to be.

• Working class - men and women who performed physical labor, paid daily or weekly wages

• Middle class - men performed mental or "clean" work, paid monthly or annually

• Upper class - did not work, income came from inherited land and investments

• Photography • Telegraph, telephone, cars, aircraft• Sewage system and water pipes in London• Water supply, gas network for heating

and lighting• This study of natural history was most

powerfully advanced by Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution first published in his book On the Origin of Species in 1859.

• Medicine progressed during the Victorian period.

• Ether, chloroform, nitrous oxide were used as a way of anesthesia.

• In this way, operations such as dentistry cases became painless.

• The Waterloo Teeth

•Cholera, typhus and tuberculosis spreaded.

•Homemade prescriptions, folk remedies and herbal medicine were used as a cure by the poors.

Types of entertainment depends on social classes.

Victorian Britain interested in theatre, opera, the arts, music and drama.

Gambling in casinos, drinking and prostitution were popular.

Hypnotism and ghost conjuring aroused curiosity.

Hobbies such as studies of birds, butterflies, seashells and wildflowers were also popular.

• Victorian England was a deeply religious country.

• A great number of people were habitual church-goers, at least once, every Sunday.

• The Bible and religious stories were frequently and widely read by people of every class.

• Towards the end of Queen Victoria's reign, the faith of the English people began to slacken.

• Effects of realism• Major theme is the place of the individual

in society, the desire of the hero or heroine for love or social position.

• Impulse to describe the everyday world and recognize a large and comprehensive social world with a variety of classes

• Focus on moral and theological absolutes• Strict rules in society and gloomy

atmospheres

• Long complicated plots ( full descriptions and expositions, multiplotting and several central characters )

• Deeper analysis of the characters who are blends of virtue and vice

• Chronological structure• Closed form, a final chapter where the

whole texture of events is explained and justified

Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility

Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights

Lewis Carroll – Through the Looking Glass, Alice’s Adventues in Wonderland

Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle – Sherlock Holmes

Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness

• George Eliot – The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch

• Charles Dickens – A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations

• Elizabeth Gaskell – Cranford, Ruth, North and South

• Thomas Hardy – The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, Far from the Madding Crowd

• First women’s college established in 1848 in London.

• Changing conditions of women’s work created by the Industrial Revolution

• Bad working conditions and underemployment drove thousands of women into prostitution.

• Glued to the domestic sphere and viewed as property, and these attitudes gave birth to feminism.

• By the end of the century, literacy was almost universal and compulsory national education required to the age of ten.

• Thanks to technological developments, the rate of reading including newspapers, novels and periodicals increased.

• Novels and short fiction were published in serial form.