Handout - Lecture 1

VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Alina Bottez
Queen Victorias Reign (1837-1901)
an Age of Economic Development and Social Reform

Queen Victorias reign 1837-1901 = the Victorian AGE

a. Early Victorian 1830-1850;
b. Mid Victorian 1850-1880;
c. Late Victorian 1880-1901/1914 (extended Victorian Period)
a. Early Victorian Period: England changed from being a rural society governed by
traditional aristocracy and a powerful Established Church to being a mercantile and
industrialised country allowing for pluralism and diversification in the professional,
political and social spheres.
- Economic Development unprecedented. Britains emergence as a great industrial
power during the nineteenth century was driven primarily by growth in a few key
industries iron and steel, textiles, coal and shipbuilding.
- The Vict. Age the iron and coal age / the railway age: industrialisation (England
= the workshop of the world) + trade (the financial centre of the world) + colonial
expansion
- Success was greatly due to the principles of free trade and laissez-faire of the
classical political economy of Adam Smith (1723-1790 NOT Victorian)
- Free trade is a policy in which the government does not restrict importation from, or
exportation to, other countries.
- Laissez-faire is an economic system in which transactions between private parties are
free from government interference (such as regulations, privileges, tariffs, and subsidies).
- Manchester Liberalism, Manchester School, Manchester Capitalism and
Manchesterism are terms for the political, economic, and social movements of the 19th

century that originated in Manchester, England. Led by Richard Cobden and John Bright.
Its most famous activity was the Anti-Corn Law League, founded in 1838 by Cobden and
Bright
- Corn included any grain that requires grinding, especially wheat. The laws were
introduced by the Importation Act of 1815 and repealed by the Importation Act of
1846
- The Corn Laws were measures in force in the UK between 1815 and 1846, which
imposed restrictions and tariffs on imported grain. They were designed to keep grain
prices high to favour domestic producers.
- After the repeal, farmers went bankrupt and went to towns to find employment in
factories; see Hardys Tess of the DUrbervilles
- Political system: the most advanced in Europe at the time:
- 1689: The Bill of Rights the closest that Britain has to a constitution; lays out
certain basic civil rights and limits the powers of the monarch and sets out the rights of
Parliament, including the requirement for regular parliaments, free elections, and freedom
of speech in Parliament. It sets out certain rights of individuals including the prohibition
of cruel and unusual punishment and reestablished the liberty of Protestants to have arms
for their defense within the rule of law.
- 1832 (BEFORE Victoria): the Great Reform Bill enfranchised a large section of the
middle classes (all 10-pound householders); to enfranchise = to endow smb. with the
rights of citizenship, especially the right to vote. (Suffrage, political franchise or simply
franchise is the right to vote in public, political elections)
- Dissatisfaction of the working class: the 1830s a period of great social unrest
culminating with the Chartist Movement 1838-1848 a working-class movement for
political reform in Britain. It took its name from the Peoples Charter of 1838 and was a
national protest movement
- The Peoples Charter = a popular-style Magna Carta Libertatum (1215) written in 1838
mainly by William Lovett of the London Working Mens Association and launched in
Glasgow in May 1838. It detailed the six key points that the Chartists believed were
necessary to reform the electoral system:

- Universal suffrage
- No property qualification
- Annual parliament elections
- Equal representation
- Payment of members
- Vote by secret ballot
- The Charter rapidly gained support across the country and its supporters became
known as the Chartists (Chartism).
- Carlyle: Chartism = the bitter discontent grown fierce and mad, the wrong condition
therefore or the wrong disposition of the working classes of England (PEV, vol I, 103);
Misery could not be contained to one class, but infallible contagion (121)
- The Condition of England question a phrase coined by Carlyle in 1839 to
describe the conditions of the English working-class during the Industrial Revolution: the
division of society and the poverty of the majority
- Francis Place an English social reformer who became involved in the movement for
organised, public education, believing it to be a means of eradicating the ills of the
working class. In the early 1820s he also became a Malthusian, believing that as the
population increased it would outstrip the food supply. He advocated the use of
contraception. It was on this topic that he wrote his only published book, the influential
and controversial Illustrations and Proofs of the Principles of Population, in 1822. The
earliest national birth control organisation was founded in England in 1877 as a result of
his thinking and activities. In 1827 he supported Rowland Detrosier, a working class
radical activist who later greatly influenced the Manchester Radicals and the Chartists
- Trade-Union Act only in 1871: an Act of Parliament which legalised trade unions for
the first time in the UK. This was one of the founding pieces of legislation in UK labour
law. British unionism received its legal foundation; until then prosecuted (see Hard
Times)
- Reforms caused by:
- The fear of Revolution Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (18001859): On the
Reform Bill: Reform that you may preserve (speech House of Commons, 1831)
- The social conscience cultivated by the Evangelicals

- The Utilitarian philosophy

- Population explosion it practically tripled: city exodus + mass emigration (the Irish
famine the hungry forties)