Contrasts and Reforms in Victorian Society: An In-Depth Analysis

What was the rise of Queen Victoria?

Victorian age was essentialy similar with the romantic society for the social problems that affected society.

In 1837 Queen Victoria ascend to the throne; she married prince Albert in 1840.

In 1838 People’s Charter calls for rights and social reform. The Chartist movement asked for a charter (list of rights) of social reforms: with the Reforms bill 1, voting right was extendend to all males citizen that owned an house; with the Reform bill 2 all the workers could vote.

Social Reforms and Laws

Victorian age was an age of many reforms: both Victoria and the government started caring about social problems. Following People’s Charter, the Parliament issued the Ten Hours Act, that limited the working hours to ten a day for everyone. With the Elementary Education Act, that made elementary education compulsory for everyone, the government started caring about children. As a consequences of this acts, there was an huge spread of newspaper (with stories in istalments), circulating libraries and authors (more people had time to write). The Health Act established new hospitals, sewers, water distribution in the houses and the public gas lightning. At the time, only Puritans could enter universities and government; the Emancipation of all religious sects Act established that everyone can join university, regardless of religion.

The Great Exhibition was wanted in London (Crystal Palace, Hyde Park) by Prince Albert to show the most important British technological innovations from the colonies and to expand industry and trade.

Many people lived in town: there were problems connected to overcrowded cities and criminality. At the same time, hospital, social services and police were improved. The poverty was seen as a crime, and poor people went to prison. Children of poor families were separated from their families and sent to stay in parish and religious workhouses (like Dickens), in which children has to pay (with their work) in exchange.

Contrasts of Victorian Society

The victorian age can be considered an age of contrast: poverty and squalor on one hand, progress and reform on the other hand. This is known as the Victorian compromise. 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. These values can be resumed in the word “prudery” (bigottismo). 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.

Victorian Family and Values

The ideal Victorian family was patriarchal: Victorian private lives were dominated by an authoritarian father. 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’. Queen Victoria didn’t like to wear wonderful clothes and didn’t want to be pictured with colorful clothes, but as she was, with all ages’ signs and her dark clothes

Literature and Society

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 (also in consequences of spreaded education) and 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).

The voice of the omniscient narrator provided a comment on the plot and erected a rigid barrier between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ (Dickens didn’t follow this scheme). 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 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.