A Two-Faced Reality (page 148)

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Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,
Margaret Layton © 2015
 A Two-Faced Reality

1. The Victorian era (1837- 1901)

1840 Marriage of
1837 Queen Queen Victoria to 1877 Queen Victoria was
Victoria comes Prince Albert 1853-56 crowned Empress of 1899- 1902 The
to the throne The Crimean War India British won the Boers

1838 People’s 1837 Charles 1851 The Great 1886 Expansion of

Charter calls for Dickens publishes Exhibition opens at the British Empire in
social reforms Oliver Twist Crystal Palace Africa and Southeast
Asia

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 The Victorian Age was an age of important social and political reforms, of
technological and scientific progress, and Britain became the most
powerful country in the world thanks to its colonial expansion.

• Queen Victoria was loved especially by the middle classes for her way of
life and moral code.
• The Queen always reigned constitutionally, respecting Parliament and
acting as a mediator above party politics (the two main political parties
were the Liberals and the Conservatives, who alternated in goverment).
• This allowed: material progress, imperial expansion, social reforms.

Some important reforms:

• Ten Hours Act (1847): it limited working hours to ten a day.
• Abolition of the Corn Laws (1846), (the Corn Laws kept the price of corn
artificially high by taxing corn).

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 Birth of the Chartist movement (1838): working class people asked for
a charter (= a list of rights) of social reforms, such as the extension of
the right to vote to all male adults.
The Chartists were strongly opposed: the movement’s leaders were
arrested, some protesters were killed, so the Chartist Movement
dissolved.

However, between 1860 and 1914 most of the Chartists’ demands

became law. In particular, in 1918 the right to vote was extended to all
men, and in 1928 to all women.

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 A Two-Faced Reality

2. The Great Exhibition gave préstige to Great Britain.

Housed in the Crystal Palace, in Hyde Park, 1851

It showed some of the most important British technological innovations and

increasing power expansion of scientific and

of the middle industry and technological
classes trade developments

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 A Two-Faced Reality

3. Life in the Victorian town

As a consequence of the Industrial
Revolution, many people lived in towns.

Problems linked to:

• overcrowded urban environment;
• high death rate;
• terrible working conditions in polluted
atmospheres; Regent Street, London, around 1850
• cholera epidemics and tuberculosis.

Some reforms were made to clean up the

towns.

St. Thomas Hospital, London

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 A Two-Faced Reality

Radical change in medicine:

• professional organisations were founded;
• modern hospitals were built.

• New social services were introduced: water, gas lightning, paved roads,
places of entertainment, pubs, parks, stadiums and shops.

• The Metropolitan Police was introduced in 1830 by the Prime Minister

Robert Peel, who were called “Bobbies” from the name of its founder.

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 A Two-Faced Reality
Poverty
Poor people lived in overcrowded slums, in terrible, non-hygenic conditions,
which led to epidemics of cholera and other diseases.

The poor laws of 1834 only made the situation worse: children of poor families
were separated from their families and sent to work in parish workhouses.

In the poem “London” Blake already

criticized this exlpoitation of Poverty was seen as a crime.
children by the Church (how the
Chimney-sweeper’s cry every
black’nin Church appalls).
Dickens described the terrible Only at the end of the 19th century
conditions of workhouses in Oliver poverty was seen as a social
Twist problem.

So, the Victorian Age was an age of great contrasts: poverty and squalor on one
hand, progress and reform on the other.
A contrast also visible in the grandeur of some public buildings compared to the
numerous terraced houses and slums present in towns.
 A Two-Faced Reality

3. Victorian London
• Victorians often revived previous styles.
• Classical forms were preferred for civic and public
buildings, like government offices, town halls;
Gothic ones for ecclesiastical and domestic works.
• After 1855 the Gothic revival prevailed over the
classical faction (see the Houses of Parliament).

The Victoria and Albert Museum The British Museum Buckingham Palace

(Read page 151: the birth of the high street)

 A Two-Faced Reality

4. The Victorian compromise (read page 154)

The Victorian Age was an age of contrasts and social imbalance

(progress and reforms vs poverty and social injustice).

Victorian society was based on a set of moral values that could only be
fulfilled by the middle and upper classes: hard work, respectability, good
manners and education, patriarchal family, female chastity, repression of
sexuality. Philantropy (charitable activity) was carried out by a lot of
respectable women.

These values derived from the Puritan tradition. All those who didn’t
conform to these values were considered evil and immoral .

So, the Victorian compromise is a mixture of hypocrisy and morality,

the attempt to hide the unpleasant aspects of progress and the materialistic
philosophy of life under a veil of respectability and optimism.

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 A Two-Faced Reality

4. The Victorian family

The ideal Victorian family was patriarchal:

a. Victorian private lives were dominated by an authoritarian
father.
b. Women were subject to male authority; they were expected to
marry and make home a ‘refuge’ for their husbands.
‘Victorian’, synonymous with prude, stood for extreme
repression; nudity was denounced in art and even furniture
legs had to be concealed under heavy cloth not to be
‘suggestive’.

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5. The role of the woman (read pages 168-169)

In Victorian society women were mainly considered as “the angel in the house”.
Husband and wife had different roles. The wife’s duties were to educate the children,
to manage the house and make it a comfortable place for her husband. The husband
was considered the head of the family and his main responsibility was to work.
The royal family was a powerful model for this. In fact Queen Victoria showed both her
authority as a queen and her female humility in the presence of her husband.

However, many women took on new challenges:

• Women were encouraged to play sport (the only difficulty were bulky skirts).
• Some women were great travellers, like Anne Blunt who travelled in the Arabian
desert with her husband, or all the women who emigrated to America and Australia.
• Florence Nightingale can be considered the founder of modern nursing: she led a
team of nurses in the war of Crimea, and then founded the first training school for
nurses in London.
• Marianne North travelled in many distant countries and she painted a lot of unknown
species of animals and plants.

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 A Two-Faced Reality

6. The British Empire (pages 173-174)

During the reign of Queen Victoria, Great Britain ruled
over a wide and powerful empire, that brought the
British in contact with different cultures.

An area of 4 million people

more than
400 million squares miles.

British Empire throughout the World,

19th century, Private Collection

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 A Two-Faced Reality

6. The British Empire

• Britain’s imperial activity started with Queen Elizabeth 1 st , in the
second half of the 16th century.

• After the 1857 Indian Mutiny (a rebellion in India against the rule of
the British East India Company) India came under direct rule by Britain
and Queen Victoria was crowned Empress of India in 1877.

• The British occupied new territories,

such as Australia, New Zealand, Hong
Kong, and expanded their possession in
Africa and South East Asia.

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6. The British Empire

The Victorians believed that

• the ‘races’ of the world were divided

by physical and intellectual differences;

• some were destined to be

led by others;

• it was an obligation imposed by God on the British to impose their

superior way of life, their institutions, law and politics on native
peoples. (This was called “the white man’s burden”, after a poem by
Rudyard Kipling).

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 7. The Victorian novel (page 155)
• In the Victorian Age the writers and their readers shared the same
interests and values.
• Novels became very popular, they were widely read by the middle
classes ans especiallly by women. People borrowed books from
circulating libraries; books were read aloud in the family.
• A lot of novels were published in instalments in the pages of periodicals.
• Novelists described society as they saw it, reflecting the social changes
that were happening. They made people aware of social injustices but
their criticism wasn’t radical.
• There were a lot of women writers (from Jane Austen to George Eliot,
they explored the daily lives and values of women)

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 Early Victorian writers
• They felt they had a moral and social responsibility. They described the
social changes, they were aware of the evils of society and denounced
them, although it was never radical criticism (they didn’t question the
foundations of society).
• They were mainly social and humanitarian novels (Charles Dickens) or
psychological novels (Emily and Charlotte Bronte).

Late Victorian writers

• In the second half of the century writers no more identified with the
values of society and openly criticised them. Their new realism was
influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution (individual characters
influenced by the environment, by the historical moment and by
hereditary traits), and by Positivism (scientific precision in describing
social and psychological aspects). They were nearer to European
Naturalism. (Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde).

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7. The Victorian novel: main features (page 155)

• The voice of the omniscient narrator provided a
comment on the plot and erected a rigid barrier between
‘right’ and ‘wrong’.

• The setting chosen by most Victorian novelists was the

city, which was the main symbol of the industrial
civilisation as well as the expression of anonymous lives
Charles Dickens
and lost identities.

• Victorian writers concentrated on the creation of

characters and achieved deeper analysis of the
characters’ inner life.

• Retribution and punishment were to be found in the

final chapter, where the whole texture of events,
adventures, incidents had to be explained and justified.

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