The Victorian Era: Reforms, Morality, and Social Compromises

The Beginning of the Victorian Era

The Victorian Age started in the year of 1837 when the our Queen Victoria came to the throne and ended in 1861 when Prince Albert died, that was her husband.

Victoria became queen at the age of eighteen (18 anni) in 1837 and ruled for 64 years. Her sense of duty made her the ideal head of a constitutional monarchy, providing stability to her country. This Constitutional monarchy is a system of government in which there is only the monarch shares power with a constitutional government. The constitution gives the rest of power to legislature and judiciary.

The Royal Marriage and the Memorial

Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840. They had nine children and were an example of a respectable family. In 1857, Victoria gave Albert the title of Prince Consort to honor his role in the country but he died in 1861 at the age of 42 and to remember him, Victoria built the Albert Memorial in London in 1876.
The Great Exhibition took place at Crystal palace in Hyde Park in 1851 that showed the increasing power of the English middle class and people from all countries come there to see successes and innovations of the nations, but Britain’s main goal was to show its progress and modernization, highlighting its role as an industrial leader.

Reforms and Social Laws

During the Victorian Age there were many reforms no. In 1832, the First Reform Act gave voting rights to people in industrial towns, then the Factory Act limited child works to 48 hours a week. In 1834, the Poor Law Amendment Act created workhouses to stop poverty. Were also abolished the Corn Laws, and the Second Reform Act extended voting rights to some male workers.
Workhouses were places where poor people, old people or unmarried women could live and work in exchange for food and lodging. But life in workhouses was very hard, in fact the government made life inside them hard so in this way people wanted to avoid them: families were separated, food was limited, and conditions were terrible.

Victorian Morality and Compromise

The Victorians were great moralisers: they supported personal duty, hard work and respectability that was a mix of hypocrisy and morality. In this period poverty was seen as a punishment by God of not working hard. Victorian society was considered a “Giano bifronte”, for its double face. In fact on the one hand there was optimism and progress but on the other hand there was corruption and inequality and this balance between these two visions is called "Victorian compromise". In this period a person could follow a positive or a negative standard, provided that (ammesso che) it was kept secret (“la facciata vittoriana”). This was the result of a mix of morality and hypocrisy. An idea promoted by Jeremy Bentham in this period was utilitarianism according to which an action is right if it promotes happiness or pleasure and wrong if it tends to produce unhappiness or pain. Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution according to which all living creatures change over time and good physical conditions help a species survive, while bad conditions lead to extinction, but his ideas rejected the Biblical creation story.