The Victorian Era: Between Progress, Contradictions, and National Pride

The Rise of a Young Queen

In the UK in 1837 Queen Victoria came to the throne as she was only 18 years old, and she ruled for almost 64 years and gave her name to an Age of prosperity, scientific progress and social reforms. Her sense of duty made her the ideal head of a constitutional monarchy. This can be considered an age of reforms, including the Great Reform Act in 1832 which provided the extension of voting rights, the Factory Act in 1833, which prevented children from working more than 48 hours per week, indeed workhouses spread around the whole country in those years.

The Terrible Conditions of Workhouses

Workhouses were places where the poor had to work in return for board and lodging, and even though they seem helpful, they were terrible, overcrowded places in which families were split up, all meals were taken in silence, and people were starving. The disabled, orphans, elderly, physically and mentally sick, and unmarried women went there, but they were feared places. The government believed that workhouses would spread awareness of such a dreadful life in order to inspire the poor to try to improve their conditions.

The Failure of Chartism

In this Age, precisely in 1838 a group of working men drew up a people's charter demanding equal electoral districts, universal male suffrage, voting by secret ballots and the abolition of the property qualifications for membership. This phenomenon gave life to what is called chartism, even though this movement failed because no one in power was ready for such democracy.
The Victorian Age was marked by complexity: it was a time of unprecedented change but also great contradiction, indeed it was an age in which progress, reforms and political stability coexisted with poverty, diseases and injustice, that's why Trade Unions became fundamental to safeguard the weakest category of people, that is to say children and women. This is called Victorian compromise, since two distinct realities coexisted. Religion played an important role in people's lives, especially evangelicalism, which encouraged public and political action and created a lot of charities addressing to every kind of poverty. Freedom was linked with religion as regarded freedom of conscience, with optimism over economic and political progress, and with national identity.

Notwithstanding as Charles Darwin's “On the Origin of Species” was published in 1859, a new mentality was forged and it contributed to spread scepticism.

Sexual Respect and Repression

A very important value was respectability, which is the quality of being socially accepted, it is a mixture of morality and hypocrisy, since the unpleasant aspects of society, like poverty and social restlessness, were hidden under a prudish attitude. Moreover sexuality was repressed both in public and in private forms and moralising attitudes led to the denunciation of nudity in art. as a consequence people paid much attention to good manners and appearance: unaccompanied women had to preserve their chastity or if they had children, their role was to bring them up and control the family budget. Although there was a growing emphasis on the duty of men to respect women, who were physically weaker but morally superior.

National Pride and Progress

This era was also marked by a strong national pride and faith in progress, which were celebrated in 1851 in the Great Exhibition, the very first expo, which showed to the world Britain's industrial and economic power, and it was hosted at the Crystal Palace, a building of glass in Hyde Park. Moreover in 1860 the building of the Long Underground began and railways transformed both the landscape and people's lives.