The Victorian age

The Victorian age is considered to have begun in the 1832 with the promulgation of the First Reform Act, which granted the vote to almost all male members of the middle classes. It was undoubtedly a period of unprecedented material progress.

Besides the Queen became a mediator above party politics and the government was formed alternatively by Liberals and Conservatives.

Other social reforms were the Factory Act, which prevented children from being employed more than forty-eight hours a week, and the People's Charter, which asked for universal male suffrage and reforms. But the Corn Law, which maintained the price of corn artificially high to protect the landed interest, was repealed. It brought the increasing of the power of the middle class and the expansion of the industry and trade. The Great Exhibition made manifest Britain's leading political and economic power.

In the meantime the workers had begun to organise themselves in Trade Union and after in Labour Party. The great progress was called 'municipal socialism'.

By the middle of the nineteen-century Britain had become a nation of dwellers; it was brought to the industrial development. So the most important problem of the Victorian age was the urban overcrowding. The poor lived in segregated areas known as slums, characterised by squalor, disease, crime, illnesses like cholera and tb. Moreover the death rate was high and the work conditions were disastrous. So were founded professional organisations to control medical education and research and were built modern hospitals. Other services were introduced such as water, gas and lighting, paved roads, places of entertainment, shops, prisons, police stations and schools. In 1829-30 the Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police. For this reason the policemen are known as 'Bobbies'.

The age of Queen Victoria underlined the expansion of the British Empire all over the word. The British power was extended into Asia, Africa, Central America and Oceania. A lot of people thought that the expansion would absorb excess good, but for other people it was a mission.

Patriotism was influenced by ideals of racial superiority, which said that the races of the world were divided by fundamental physical and intellectual differences and that some were destined to be led to other people. And God give to the British the superiority way of life.

Dorian Gray is a young man whose beauty fascinates an artist, Basil Hallward, who decided to paint him a portrait. While the young man's desires are satisfied, including that of eternal youth, so the signs of age, experience and vice appear on the portrait. So Dorian lives only for pleasure, making use of everybody and letting die because of his insensibility. When his painter sees the corrupted image of the portrait, Dorian kills him and then he obliged an old friend to destroy the body.

CHARLES DARWIN was a English scientist who wrote 'the origin of the species', where he sustained:

1. The variation of organism is inherited by their offspring
2. Organism produce more offspring so that he can survive
3. In a good environment offspring vary in a better way
4. The variation are random and rather small

So he said that the fittest species would survive.

Herbert Spencer adopted this theory to the society, introducing the social Darwinism, where only the fittest men will survive. This other theory is connected to economical and social orders.

About economy the state could be characterised by liberalism where the trade was free or by prohibitionism where the trade was taxed. About culture there is Kiplin who sustained the superiority of certain culture like the English because it had an important role: the with man burden (the inferior races needed the white men to civilize them). About church Chamberlain said that Germans and Jude were the fittest so they were in conflict. And the German had to kill the Jude because Jesus wasn't a Jude.

The Darwin method was divided in three parts: observation, thesis and demonstration.