THE VICTORIAN AGE
Economy and society
The Victorian age took its name from Queen Victoria, whose reign (1837 - 1901) was the longest in
the history of England.
It was a period of economical and territorial expansion. The modern urban
economy of manufacturing industry and international trade took over from the
old agricultural economy. "Free trade" became the dominant economic ethos
without changes in the political and social structure. Britain was the
wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. This was the result of
material exploitation of its growing number of colonies. With the revival of
revolutionary activity in continental Europe,
the unsettled masses of the urban poor were perceived as a potential danger to
the existing order of things and gradually over the century steps were taken to
incorporate portions of the working classes into society through a series of
reforms and progressive policies.
The pressure for
reform
After the French Revolution, Britain had
turned politically conservative. Industrial regions of
the country were not so well represented, votes
had to be declared publicly, was often subject to
bribery or intimidation. These factors gave
rise to the working class Chartist movement. The Chartists' demands contained
six points: votes for all males; annually elected parliaments; payment of
Members of Parliament; secret voting; abolition of the property qualification
for candidates seeking election; the establishment of electoral districts equal
in population. The People's Charter was rejected three times over a period of
10 years. The third petition was rejected in 1848, the year that Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels wrote their Communist Manifesto
denouncing the alienation of labour under capitalist organisation, and
revolution was erupting again across Europe.
In Britain
however, there was no such risk of a mass uprising. The Chartists were poorly
organised and split by internal differences. All their demands, except that for
an annually elected parliament became law between 1860 and 1914. A series of reform
bills in the second half of the century gradually extended the vote to members
of the working classes until the first demand of the Chartists, that of giving
all men the right to vote, was granted in 1918. Women,
however, had to wait until 1928 before they too were all able to vote.
Technological
innovation
The mid 19th century was also a time of great
technological innovation: the invention of steam-powered machinery, the
development of railways, became faster and more efficient, leading to the rapid
expansion of urban centres. The Great Exhibition (1851) held in Crystal Palace
(London), became a symbol for Britain's
dominant position as an industrial and imperial trading power. Communications
were also greatly improved thanks to a more efficient mail service and the
invention of the telephone. Printing became cheaper, which led to a
proliferation of literary production of all types. The age was characterised by
a general feeling of optimism.
The cost of living
At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Britain's home
economy mostly revolved around agriculture and the
textile industry. Mechanisation meant increased competition. The prices of
finished products fell, although profits stayed high thanks to increased sales.
But high production costs decreased the manufacturers' profit margin. The only
solution was to cut production costs, which was most easily done by the direct
cutting of wages. The cost of living, however, was kept artificially high by
the Corn Laws which maintained the price of corn in Britain at an unrealistically high
level. As a result there was widespread starvation. It was the combination of
these factors that sent masses of people to the cities to look for work in
factories.
Poverty and the Poor
Laws
The price of corn was kept artificially high by
the Corn Laws, paupers risked starvation and could not
feed their children. In order to solve this problem, the children were declared
destitute and, forced to separate from their families, were sent to work in
parish-run workhouses, in return for which they received barely enough food to
survive. It was only towards the end of the 19th century that poverty was to be
widely recognised as a social problem.
Managing the empire
The Victorian period saw the massive expansion of
British Empire all over the world, from Asia to Africa to Central America to Oceania. This expansion was due to the need to protect
trade routes to and from Britain's
main imperial "property", India,
the so-called "Jewel in the Crown" of Empire. It had been administrated since
the 17th century by the East India Company, which had employed
bribery and violence to take control of the country's resources. The Indian
Mutiny of 1857 led to the closure of the Company and the administration of
Indian territories was taken over by the British government. In 1876 Queen Victoria was declared
Empress of India to consolidate popular support for the Empire. Trade with India included
tea, spices, silk and cotton and it was vital to the British economy that
routes across land and sea be secured. It was partly for this reason that Britain "annexed" a number of territories
including South Africa, Egypt, Burma,
Malaysia and Afghanistan.
But control of these routes was made more difficult by political instability.
On the Asian front, Russian aggression threatened the already weak and
collapsing Ottoman Empire, leading to joint
British and French military intervention and the disastrous campaigns of the
Crimean War during the 1850s. In South Africa the claims of the
Dutch settlers eventually provoked another conflict: the Boer Wars. These wars
were enormously expensive and failed to defeat the Boers. During the second
half of the 19th century, both Germany
and France rose to become
economic powers in their own right and began to rival Britain's position of imperial dominance in Africa. Another more independent part of British Empire
was Oceania, which had originally served as a
prison colony to which undesirable elements of British society such as
criminals and political agitators had been transported. Later, Australia began
to develop as a white colony in its own right, establishing a modern
agricultural and industrial society based on the British model.
The Victorian
compromise
The urban workers continued to live in
conditions of abject poverty while being systematically exploited by their rich
employers. To confront the appalling conditions of the urban environment, the
government promoted a campaign to clean up towns devastated by epidemics, and
built modern-hospitals. The police helped to safeguard the law but at the same
time had the function of controlling the masses of the urban poor, since the
law was invariably on the side of property owners. In the minds of many wealthy
Victorians, the poor were not victims of circumstance but a
dirty, dangerous and immoral species. However, the
Victorian ideal represented by such values as church, family, the home and the
sanctity of childhood applied only to those happy few who could afford them.
Middle-class women were expected to conform to a submissive and pious domestic
role - the so-called angel in the home. By stepping outside of this role, a
respectable woman could ruin her reputation. Similarly, the idea of childhood
as a paradisal golden age, proated by the
children's literature of the time, masked the fact that the children of the
poor were forced into labour at an extremely early age and often separated from
their families.
Darwin
In the first part of Darwin's theory was not
new: this was the idea that all forms of life on the et had gradually
derived over hundreds of millions of years from a common ancestry, and were
not, as religion had always taught, preconceived, fixed species designed by
some divine being. The second part of Darwin's
theory concerned the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest.
Before Darwin,
biology and natural history had been the last refuge for the belief in a
creation ordered by divine providence. It was Darwin who showed that all
existing species had undergone considerable mutation, and that their adaptive
characteristics had evolved through an extremely long process of
natural selection. In a given environment,
members of the same species compete for survival, and
it is those best adapted to the environment who
will survive. The characteristics which help them to survive are biologically
selected and copied so that they are inherited by their descendants, who by
this measure become even better adapted.
Uses and abuses of Darwin
In Darwin's
mind, his theory applied strictly to the domain of biology and natural history,
but unfortunately like many other scientific ideas, it was soon being abused
for social and political ends. Social Darwinism was likewise used to support
the theory that the underclasses were less evolved,
genetically degenerate and thus had a natural vocation to vice and crime.
Simplified, popularised versions of Darwin,
along with anti-Semitism and nationalism, undoubtedly played a part in shaping
the mind of the young Adolf Hitler.
