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Victorian era

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Introduction

• The Victorian stereotype and double

standard
Queen Victoria • Gender and class in Victorian society
Queen Victoria, watercolour by Julia • Religion and science in the Victorian
Abercromby, 1883, after a watercolour era
by Heinrich von Angeli; in the National
Portrait Gallery, London. • Government and politics in the
Victorian era
Victorian era, in British history, the period • The Victorian British Empire
between approximately 1820 and 1914, • The Victorian British economy
corresponding roughly but not exactly to the
• Victorian culture and art
period of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–
1901) and characterized by a class-based
society, a growing number of people able to vote, a growing state and economy, and
Britain’s status as the most powerful empire in the world.

During the Victorian period, Britain was a powerful nation with a rich culture. It had a
stable government, a growing state, and an expanding franchise. It also controlled a large
empire, and it was wealthy, in part because of its degree of industrialization and its imperial
holdings and in spite of the fact that three-fourths or more of its population was working-
class. Late in the period, Britain began to decline as a global political and economic power
relative to other major powers, particularly the United States, but this decline was not
acutely noticeable until after World War II.

The Victorian stereotype and double standard

Today “Victorian” connotes a prudish refusal to admit the existence of sex, hypocritically
combined with constant discussions of sex, thinly veiled as a series of warnings. There is
some truth to both sides of this stereotype. Some few educated Victorians did write a lot
about sex, including pornography, medical treatises, and psychological studies. Most others

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never talked about sex; respectable middle-class women in particular were proud of how
little they knew about their own bodies and childbirth. In addition, Victorians lived with a
sexual double standard that few ever questioned before the end of the period. According to
that double standard, men wanted and needed sex, and women were free of sexual desire
and submitted to sex only to please their husbands. These standards did not mesh with the
reality of a society that featured prostitution, venereal disease, women with sexual desires,
and men and women who felt same-sex desire, but they were important nonetheless.

Gender and class in Victorian society

Victorian society was organized hierarchically. While race, religion, region, and occupation
were all meaningful aspects of identity and status, the main organizing principles of
Victorian society were gender and class. As is suggested by the sexual double standard,
gender was considered to be biologically based and to be determinative of almost every
aspect of an individual’s potential and character. Victorian gender ideology was premised
on the “doctrine of separate spheres.” This stated that men and women were different and
meant for different things. Men were physically strong, while women were weak. For men
sex was central, and for women reproduction was central. Men were independent, while
women were dependent. Men belonged in the public sphere, while women belonged in the
private sphere. Men were meant to participate in politics and in paid work, while women
were meant to run households and raise families. Women were also thought to be naturally
more religious and morally finer than men (who were distracted by sexual passions by
which women supposedly were untroubled). While most working-class families could not
live out the doctrine of separate spheres, because they could not survive on a single male
wage, the ideology was influential across all classes.

Class was both economic and cultural and encompassed income, occupation, education,
family structure, sexual behaviour, politics, and leisure activities. The working class, about
70 to 80 percent of the population, got its income from wages, with family incomes usually
under £100 per annum. Many middle-class observers thought that working-class people
imitated middle-class people as much as they could, but they were mistaken; working-class
cultures (which varied by locality and other factors) were strong, specific, and premised on
their own values. The middle class, which got its income (of £100 to £1,000 per annum)
from salaries and profit, grew rapidly during the 19th century, from 15 to over 25 percent of

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the population. During the 19th century, members of the middle class were the moral
leaders of society (they also achieved some political power). The very small and very
wealthy upper class got its income (of £1,000 per annum or often much more) from
property, rent, and interest. The upper class had titles, wealth, land, or all three; owned most
of the land in Britain; and controlled local, national, and imperial politics.

Religion and science in the Victorian era

Most Victorian Britons were Christian. The Anglican churches of England, Wales, and
Ireland were the state churches (of which the monarch was the nominal head) and
dominated the religious landscape (even though the majority of Welsh and Irish people
were members of other churches). The Church of Scotland was Presbyterian. There was
some religious diversity, as Britain also was home to other non-Anglican Protestants
(notably Methodists), Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and others (at the end of
the period there were even a few atheists).

Alongside their faith, Victorians made and appreciated

developments in science. The best-known Victorian
scientific development is that of the theory of
evolution. It is typically credited to Charles Darwin,
but versions of it were developed by earlier thinkers
Charles Darwin as well, and the pseudoscience of eugenics was an
Charles Darwin, 1881. ugly outgrowth of Victorian evolutionary theory.
Victorians were also fascinated by the emerging
discipline of psychology and by the physics of energy.

Government and politics in the Victorian era

The formal political system was a constitutional monarchy. It was in practice dominated by
aristocratic men. The British constitution was (and is) unwritten and consists of a
combination of written laws and unwritten conventions. At the national level, government
consisted of the monarch and the two houses of Parliament, the House of Lords and the
House of Commons. The monarchs during this period were Queen Victoria (1837–1901),
preceded by King George IV (1820–30) and King William IV (1830–37) and followed by
King Edward VII (1901–10) and King George V (1910–36). During the Victorian period,

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the House of Commons became the centre of government, the House of Lords lost power
(though it remained influential until the Parliament Act of 1911), and the monarchy
transformed into a symbol of the nation. The House of Commons consisted of about 600
men called members of Parliament (MPs), who were elected to represent the counties and
boroughs of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. England had many more representatives
than the other three nations, by virtue of its status as first among these four equals, the
product of tradition as well as its greater political power and wealth. The upper house, the
House of Lords, was populated principally by several hundred noblemen who had life
tenures. Members of both houses were wealthy men. Formal national politics was
dominated by two major parties, the Liberal Party and the Conservative (or Tory) Party.

At the start of the period, MPs were elected by the half-million property-owning men (in a
population of 21 million) who had the vote. In 1829 the vote was granted to Catholic men
and in 1832, to most middle-class men; in 1867 and 1884 the franchise was extended to
working-class men. Most women over age 30 got the right to vote in 1918. Full adult
suffrage, with no property requirement, was achieved with the second Representation of the
People Act (1928). This story of the expansion of the national electorate is important, but
there is more to political participation than voting at the national level. Local politics were
also important. And being denied a voice and access to institutions certainly did not render
nonvoters indifferent to politics or to how power was wielded; they made their opinions on
these known via demonstrations, petitions, and pamphlets.

Important political events during this period included

the abolition of slavery in the British Empire; the
expansions of the franchise; working-class political
activism, most notably Chartism; the rise of liberalism
as the dominant political ideology, especially of the
Robert Wilson: Chartist middle class; and the nationalization of Conservative
demonstration
and Liberal parties (and the emergence of the British
Chartist demonstration, Kennington
Labour Party in 1906). The growth of the state and
Common, 1848; illustration from The
Life and Times of Queen Victoria state intervention were seen in major acts that limited
(1900) by Robert Wilson. hours for factory workers and miners, in public health
acts, and in the provision of elementary education by
the state. Political conflicts between Ireland and Britain and the rise of Irish nationalism

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were also hallmarks of the era, as were women’s rights activism, which resulted in the
Married Women’s Property Acts, the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, and the
growth of education and employment options for women.

The Victorian British Empire

The Victorian British Empire dominated the globe,
though its forms of rule and influence were uneven
and diverse. The traffic of people and goods between
Britain and its colonies was constant, complex, and
multidirectional. Britain shaped the empire, the
British Empire empire shaped Britain, and colonies shaped one

Map showing the British Empire at its

another. British jobs abroad included civil and military
greatest extent. service, missionary work, and infrastructure
development. People from various imperial locations
traveled to, studied in, and settled in Britain. Money, too, flowed both ways—the empire
was a source of profit, and emigrants sent money home to Britain—as did goods such as
jute, calico cotton cloth, and tea.

Dramatic expansion of the empire meant that such goods came to Britain from all over the
world. Between 1820 and 1870 the empire grew, shifted its orientation eastward, and
increased the number of nonwhite people over whom it exerted control. Much of this
expansion involved violence, including the Indian Mutiny (1857–59), the Morant Bay
Rebellion (1865) in Jamaica, the Opium Wars (1839–42, 1856–60) in China, and the
Taranaki War (1860–61) in New Zealand. India became central to imperial status and
wealth. There was significant migration to the settler colonies of Australia and New
Zealand and later to Canada and South Africa. From 1870 until 1914 continued aggressive
expansion (including Britain’s participation in the so-called Scramble for Africa) was
assisted by new technologies, including railways and telegraphy. Britain took control of
large parts of Africa (including Egypt, Sudan, and Kenya), which together were home to
about 30 percent of the African population. The same period also saw the start of
anticolonial movements that demanded freedom from British domination in India and
elsewhere. These would ultimately lead to decolonization after World War II.

The Victorian British economy

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Britain’s status as a world political power was bolstered by a strong economy, which grew
rapidly between 1820 and 1873. This half-century of growth was followed by an economic
depression and from 1896 until 1914 by a modest recovery. With the earliest phases of
industrialization over by about 1840, the British economy expanded. Britain became the
richest country in the world, but many people worked long hours in harsh conditions. Yet,
overall, standards of living were rising. While the 1840s were a bad time for workers and
the poor—they were dubbed “the hungry forties”—overall the trend was toward a less
precarious life. Most families not only had a home and enough to eat but also had
something leftover for alcohol, tobacco, and even vacations to the countryside or the
seaside. Of course, some decades were times of plenty, others of want. Relative prosperity
meant that Britain was a nation not only of shopkeepers but of shoppers (with the rise of the
department store from mid-century transforming the shopping experience). Increased
wealth, including higher real wages from the 1870s, meant that even working-class people
could purchase discretionary items. Mass production meant that clothes, souvenirs,
newspapers, and more were affordable to almost everyone.

Victorian culture and art

More access made British cultural products more
important. Not only did they reveal much about the
society from which they emerged, but during the
Victorian period Britain was the cultural capital of the
English-speaking world (including the United States,
The Wilds of London Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). Victorian
“An Anti-Idiotic Entertainment performance and print culture were rich and varied, a
Company” from The Wilds of London
blend of melodrama, spectacle, and morality.
by James Greenwood, featuring an
imaginary music hall called the
Grampian, lithograph by Alfred Theatre thrived. Melodrama—which featured evil
Concanen, 1874. villains, virtuous heroines, and intricate plots—was
the most important and most popular genre early on;
later, sensation drama became popular. Even more popular were music halls, which featured
varied programs of singing, dancing, sketches, and more; these emerged in the 1850s, and
by the 1870s there were hundreds across Britain, some seating thousands of people. Music
halls attracted people of all classes.

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Print culture was also large and diverse, aided by relatively high literacy rates. There were
hundreds of magazines and newspapers available at ever cheaper prices. The 1880s saw the
emergence of “the New Journalism,” which drew in readers with pieces on violent crimes
and scandals in high society. Novels were another key feature of Victorian print culture. By
mid-century, Britons of all classes could afford and read novels. Some were aimed at highly
educated and well-off people, others at less-educated readers looking for appealing and
exciting stories. Penny dreadfuls and sensation novels, seen at their best in the work of
Wilkie Collins, thrilled their readers. Victorian novels were often quite long, with
complicated plots (often centred on marriages) and many characters. Many, especially those
by Charles Dickens, are still read today.

Susie Steinbach

Citation Information
Article Title: Victorian era
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 28 March 2024
URL: https://www.britannica.comhttps://www.britannica.com/event/Victorian-era
Access Date: April 06, 2024

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