The representatives of the victorian age

1.2.Historical and social background
The Victorian Age, so-called after Queen Victoria, usually covers in literature a period of time longer than the actual reign of Queen Victoria(1837-1901), stretching from 1832, the year of the first Reform Bill, to the death of Edward VII in 1910. Some critics maintained that it ended in the 1890s, when the Anti-Victorian reaction reached its climax and the writers began to search for new forms of style and for innovations.
In both cases, it is a long period of time and so it is difficult to consider it as a single unit. The 60 years are usually divided into three periods: a first period from 1837 to 1848, a second period from 1848 to 1870 and the last one from 1870 to 1901.
The years up to 1848 were characterised by civil unrest and popular protests, industrial recession and hunger. They were also called The Hungry Forties because there was a period of bad crops and consequently of famine. The cutting of wages to cut production costs and the effect of the Corn Law, which taxed imported corn and maintained the cost of corn high, contributed to a widespread starvation among the agricultural workers. In Ireland the failure of the potato crop, known as the Potato Famine ,caused the death of a million people and forced another one and half million to emigrate to Britain and America.
The second was instead a period of prosperity, Reforms and great profits. Thanks to the exploitation of the great technological innovation and of the imperial foreign trade Britain had a dominant position in the industry.
The beginning of the last period was characterized by Britain’s imperial power and then by the starting of Victorian Decline. In the last three decades of the 19th century, especially after the dramatic war of 1870/71 between Prussia andFrance, there was dissatisfaction with Victorian materialism and a wave of pessimism spread over Europe and reachedEngland, too. This reaction took many aspects: Carlyle denounced the corruption and materialism of men who were accumulating gold at the expense of other people; Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites denounced the development of industrialism as a brutal force which prevented a moral and artistic conception of art.
On the whole The Victorian Age was an Age of prosperity and progress, of reforms and expansion. The Great Exhibition of 1851 showed the triumph of Victorian technology and drew attention on the new social classes. The colonial Empire took enormous proportions, stretching from Australia to Canada, from Pakistan to Hong Kong, for Malta to Rhodesia:’ The sun never sets on the British Empire’, they said. Britain had become the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. We have to point out that its wealth was reached through the exploitation of its colonies and thanks to the lowly paid workers who worked in the factories. The urban poor were perceived as a potential danger and gradually steps were taken to better both democracy and working class conditions.
Parliament passed many laws: the Second Reform Bill (1867) and the Third Reform Bill (1884) extended the right to vote to all male workers and the electorate of Britain was doubled; many representatives of the working class entered The Commons while the importance and the legality of the Trade Unions was recognized by the Trade Union’s Act (1865). Labours condition was bettered by the Ten Hours Act (1847) which limited the working hours to ten a day both for men and women, and by the Mines Act (1862) which prohibited the working of women and children in mines. The Public Health Act (1875) improved health conditions and the Educational Acts (1870/1876) reorganized elementary education. The Compensation Act ensured some compensation for workers in case of accidents and bettered the living condition of the working class⁴.
In the field of politics there were lots of changes. Parliament grew stronger and stronger and the King’s powers weaker and weaker. Great Britain gradually turned into an actual Constitutional monarchy. In 1882 The Independent Labour Party was founded and the first Labour M.Ps. entered Parliament. The Labour Party became the third Party in England, after the Tories (now called Conservatives) and the Whigs (the modern Liberals).
Strictly connected to politics and to the dissatisfaction of the poor classes, the Victorian Age saw the rise of some social movements with the aim of bettering the quality of life of the poor: The National Association for the Protection of Labour, Chartism, The Cooperative Movement, Utilitarianism and Fabianism.
Chartism developed during the Hungry Forties. The Chartist asked for a social reform and presented Parliament with a document, the People’s Chart, asking for full democratic participation of the working classes in politics. It contained six points: votes for all males, annually elected Parliament, payment of Members of Parliament, secret voting, abolition of property ownership for candidates, establishment of electoral districts equal in population. These demands were ignored by the ruling class and they were rejected three times in ten years. The Chartists were politically immature, poorly organised and split by internal differences. After the third rejection in 1848 they disappeared even though their ideas continued to circulate. However it was not a failure because it inspired Trade Unions, cooperatives and leagues. In 1868 the skilled workers joined together to start the Trade Union Congress(TUC).Further all their demands, except the one of annually elected parliament, became laws between 1860 and 1918.
The Cooperative Movement was founded by Robert Owen and a group of Chartists in 1844. It consisted in shops where goods were sold at market prices and the profits were divided among the members.
Utilitarianism come from the principle of utility that only what was useful was good. It was above all followed by the industrial Middle Classes. It developed from a theory based on the ideas of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham and developed by Stuart Mill in his writings. Bentham believed that laws should be socially useful and not just reflect the majority’s view. He also stated that the actions were right when they were directed towards achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.
A more important movement was FABIANISM.
The Fabian Society was a socialist and radical movement founded in 1884. The name derived from Quintus Fabius Maximus, called The Cunctator, that is The Delayer, who had won a campaign against Hannibal by avoiding direct engagement. The Fabians contrasted the Communists who believed in revolution and thought that society had to be changed through gradual reforms. The Fabian society eventually led to the foundation of the Labour Party.
As we have seen, Victorian Age is considered an Age of success, but not all the Victorians accepted this interpretation. Many of them attacked its contradictions because they realised that though the new industrial civilization had brought about economic well-being, it had left the problem of the distribution of wealth unsolved. The poor went on living and working on bad conditions, education had its problems and the success was achieved through the exploitation of workers and at the expense of the poor. Then Victorian Age was for some social classes a period of poverty and injustice, of social unrest and bad living, of overcrowding of towns and migration from the country, of dissatisfaction and popular discontent. The Victorians have been progressive in theory but the opposite in practice. The Victorian ideals and values, such as church, family, the home and the sanctity of childhood, were only applied to the affluent people and the children of the poor were forced into labour at an early age and even separated from their families and often sent to parish-run workhouses in return of which they received scanty food just to survive⁵. Poverty was seen as a moral problem, like a ‘crime’ to be repressed by strong measures rather than solved through an adequate redistribution of the resources. It was only towards the end of the 19th century that poverty was recognized as a social problem. This situation is referred to as The Victorian Compromise, that is the utilitarian compromise of a large section of English society which saw industrial development only as a source of prosperity and progress, while it tended to ignore the many social conflicts and problems raised by it.