The Victorian Age.

Historical background.
The Reform Bill of 1832 had brought no-political representation to working classes.
So working classes, in order to obtain further reforms, organized in a movement
called CHARTISM and asked for a charter called PEOPLES CHARTER demanding
universal suffrage , vote by ballot, annual parliaments , payment of members of
Parliament. . The Chartist movement showed the rise of a new class- consciousness
, but its demands were too utopian and failure was inevitable. However the English
TRADE UNION MOVEMENT grew out of the failure. It become stronger and stronger
and in the end Trade Unions were legalized . It was much later that the political
reforms asked for by the Chartist movement were obtained : The SECOND REFORM
BILL in 1867 which gave the right of vote to the town laborers and the THIRD
REFORM BILL which gave the vote to the agricultural laborers and miners as well. In
such a way universal suffrage was extended to all male workers . The development
of the Trade Unions brought to the birth of a new party whose name has been
closely connected with the Trade unions themselves . It is, in fact, in the Victorian
Age that the INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY was founded. It was a party where the
working classes were able to present many competitors for political power. Even if
this party was not really powerful it prepared the way for the MODERN LABOUR
PARTY. Also in the social field the Victorian Age was characterized by such reforms
as:
The Factory acts which improved the conditions of workers in factories;
The mines act which prohibited the working of women and children in
mines;
The Ten hours Act which limited the working hours to ten a day;
The Emancipation Act which opened the universities of Oxford and Cambridge to
non-Anglicans. A great political problem of the time was Ireland ( the Irish Problem).
Since the Union Act (1707) , Ireland had been governed as a part of Britain, like
Wales and Scotland. But in Ireland nationalism was a much stronger feeling mainly
because of the majority of Catholics living there. And in fact Catholics were also
excluded from the political scene because the Irish Members of Parliament in the
British Parliament had to be chosen from the protestant minority. The Irish wanted
a kind of self-government ( Home Rule ) demanded by The Nationalist leader
Charles Parnell. Really Home Rule was twice rejected by the Conservatives; it was
only after the First World War that it was granted to Ireland , As far as foreignpolicy , the Victorian Age was above all the period in which the British Colonial
Empire took its final form. Victorias reign is usually referred to as Britain period of
splendid isolation. Britain avoided being directly involved in foreign affairs and
limited her interactions to preventing any power from acquiring a position of
predominance. The CRIMEAN WAR may be considered the best example of this.
Such a war originated from a dispute between Turkey and Russia over the
boundaries of the the Turkish Empire. England sided with Turkey fearing the growing
power of Russia in the Balkans. The war ended with the defeat of Russia. It is also
famous because of the humanitarian work done in war hospitals by Florence
Nightingale , the real founder of modern nursing.

The last quarter of the 19th century is usually referred to/as the AGE OF
IMPERIALISM . At first there was an enlargement of the India territories; in fact when
East India company was abolished, India passed under the control of the British
Government and Queen Victoria became Empress of India. Besides India, the British
Empire included Canada, Australia, New Zeland, Malta, Hong Kong, a number of
trading posts in the West.
English penetration into Africa was accompanied by a war the BOER WAR with the
South Africa provinces of Orange and Transvaal rich in gold and diamonds, ruled by
Dutch colonists called Boers. After the war, also Transvaal and Orange were
annexed to the British Empire.
Social Background.
Anyway the class that benefited most from the changes of the time was the middle
class, made up of manufacturers , merchants and bankers . They, thanks to the
progress in industrial and technological field and to colonial expansion, increased in
power and took the reins of the government. All this led to a strong feeling of
optimism among middle-class people on the one hand, but on the other the gap
between middle class ad poor and working classes increased more and more.The
mentality of the period and the general attitude of middle classes could defined as
Utilitarian. Utilitarianism is the name of the doctrine expounded by Jeremy Bentham
. According to this theory any intervention in the market would have terrible social
consequences . The only useful thing was to make money and profits without taking
care that the great mass of unemployed should starve to death . This attitude found
an ally in Darwin1 theory of evolution based on the survival of the fittest. it is easy
to see the analogies between Darwinism and Utilitarianism : the week succumb
according to a universal low which benefited the collective good. Thus the Victorians
were proud of their welfare , of their good manners and of their middle-class values,
and tended to ignore the problems which still afflicted England. There was, in fact, a
part of the society mainly the working class among which misery was still
widespread. Workers lived in slums and whole families were often crowded in simple
rooms , where lack of hygiene led to a lot of health problems. This particular
situation which saw prosperity and progress on the one hand and poverty and
injustice on the other is usually referred to as the VICTORIAN COMPROMISE. The
sense of compromise is at the basis of the Victorian society. on the one hand there
was welfare as shown in the Great Exhibition during which Victorian celebrated
English prosperity, on the other hand people were still dying of starvation . A strong
feeling of humanitarianism characterized middle class mentality. Victorians were
shocked by the many abuses of industrialism and terrified by the ghettos of London
but nobody tried to improve the standards of life of those people who lived in subhuman conditions.
At the same time there was a revival of puritanism. As a consequence sex became a
taboo subject and all the words with vaguely sexual or indelicate connotations were
driven out of everyday language. Manners and speech were to be restrained and
sober, so that respectability became the keyword of the Victorian age. Nevertheless
Victoria gentlemen frequently led double lives. They were respectable by day and
frequenters of brothels by night. In brief there was a substantial and diffused
hypocrisy that made people expect all the privileges of their position while, at the

same time, they protested against slavery , busied themselves in philanthropic

activities intended to alleviate poverty but they did not renounce the privileges that
depended on that poverty.
Literary production : Victorian prose
The changing attitudes in the victorian age also affected literature which, voicing
the ferments and the conflicts of the age, became a compromise between old and
new models, so giving rise to different literary movement (Late Romanticism,
Realism, Naturalism, Aestheticism and Decadentism)
Prose was really the true mirror of the contrasting views of the age and reflected the
deep changes that marked it . To tell the truth, the 19th century was the great age
of the English novel. This was partly because this essentially middle class form of
literary art was bound to flourish increasingly as the middle classes rose in power
and importance, partly because of the increase of the reading public with the
growth of lending libraries and the development of a new form of publishing. After
1820 novels began to be published in SERIAL INSTALMENTS . Before this date they
were usually published in volumes which, sold at a high price, could only be bought
by wealthy people. Thanks to the publication in instalments , usually monthly
instalments, at the very low price of one shilling everyone could afford to buy and
read novels. This eventually tended to modify the structure itself of the novel and in
fact the plot became episodic, it increased the number of readers among the lower
classes, giving rise to the so-called mass literature, and the writer had to find
devices , to recur to sensational stratagems in order to catch and hold the reader's
attention, create suspense and expectation. There is another reason why novel
developed much in the Victorian age; in fact it was the vehicle that best presented
a picture of the life the middle class reader wanted to read about. The Victorian
novel reader wanted to be entertained but at the same time he wanted to be close
to what he was reading about; he expected to read a realistic book which, at the
same time, could also provide escape from routine life.
Victorian novelists are usually divided into EARLY VICTORIANS and LATE
VICTORIANS. There is a deep difference between the novelists of the first half of the
Victorian age and those of the second half.
The former identified with their age and were its speakers , the latter, instead, wrote
in some sense against their age , they were critical and even hostile to its dominant
assumptions.