THE VICTORIAN AGE 1830-1901

1. THE VICTORIAN AGE 1830-1901

2. Queen Victoria had the longest reign in British History and the cultural, political, economic, industrial and scientific changes that occurred during her reign were remarkable as well as British imperial expansion. She was beloved especially by the middle classes for her exemplary family life, her strictly respectable and decent code of behaviour. She reigned constitutionally, giving the active role to the parliament and to her Prime Minister Robert Peel, so becoming a mediator of party politics When she ascended to the throne, England was essentially agrarian and rural; upon her death, the country was highly industrialized and connected by an expansive railway network. But this transition, as any transition, was full of troubles.

3. THE VICTORIAN AGE 1830-1901 In 1897, on the 60th anniversary of queen Victoria�s coming to the throne, Mark Twain said: "British history is two thousand years old, and yet in a good many ways the world has moved farther ahead since the Queen was born than it moved in all the rest of the two thousand put together." Twain's comment captures the sense of dizzying change that characterized the Victorian period and its passage from a way of life based on ownership of land to a modern urban economy based on trade and manufacturing. By the beginning of the Victorian period, the Industrial Revolution had created profound economic and social changes, including a mass migration of workers to industrial towns, where they lived in new urban slums. Other important changes were the democratization resulting from extension of the franchise; challenges to religious faith, in part based on the advances of scientific knowledge, particularly of evolution; and changes in the role and rights of women (e.g.: they gained the legal right to their property upon marriage, the right to divorce and the right to fight for custody of their children upon separation)

4. All of these issues, and the controversies attending them, informed Victorian literature. In part because of the expansion of newspapers and the periodical press, debate about political and social issues played an important role in the experience of the reading public. The Victorian novel, with its emphasis on the realistic portrayal of social life, represented many Victorian issues in the stories of its characters, and writers gave voice to those who had been voiceless. There was a profound social change: the formation of a new class of workers � men, women, and children � who had migrated to cities, particularly in the industrial North, in huge numbers, to take jobs in factories, and the growing demand for expanded liberties for women who became writers, teachers, and social reformers, and they claimed for more rights.

5. The world of print became more inclusive and democratic. At the same time, novelists and even poets sought ways of representing these new voices. The novelist Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her first novel, Mary Barton, in order to give voice to Manchester's poor, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning tried to find ways in poetry of giving voice to the poor and oppressed.

6. The Industrial Revolution � the substitution of hand labour with machines - developed in England in the eighteenth century. Towns quickly grew in central and northern England; the population of the city of Manchester, for example, increased by ten times in the years between 1760 and 1830. By the beginning of the Victorian period, the Industrial Revolution had created profound economic and social changes. Hundreds of thousands of workers had migrated to industrial towns, where they made up a new kind of working class. Wages were extremely low, hours very long � fourteen a day, or even more. Employers often preferred to hire women and children, who worked for even less than men

7. Families lived in horribly crowded, unsanitary housing. Moved by the terrible suffering writers and men in government drew increasingly urgent attention to the condition of the working class. In her poem The Cry of the Children, Elizabeth Barrett Browning portrays the suffering of children in mines and factories. In The Condition of the Working Class, Friedrich Engels describes the conclusions he drew during the twenty months he spent observing industrial conditions in Manchester. His 1845 book prepared the ground for his work with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto (1848), which asserts that revolution is the necessary response to the inequity of industrial capitalist society.

8. In Mary Barton (1848) Elizabeth Gaskell portrayed the suffering of the working class and In Hard Times (1854), Charles Dickens created the fictional city of Coketown to depict the harshness of existence in the industrial towns of central and northern England. During the 1830s and 1840s a number of parliamentary committees and commissions introduced testimony about the conditions in mines and factories that led to the beginning of government regulation and inspection, particularly of the working conditions of women and children. Was the machine age a blessing or a curse? Did it make humanity happier or more wretched?

9. EVENTS: In 1832 the Reform Act, almost all male members of the middle classes were granted the right to vote In 1833 the Factory Act prevented children from working more than 48 hours a week and people under 18 from working more than 69 hours a week 1838-1848 the radical working-class movement called Chartism asked for new laws and above all for the universal male suffrage, but all their demands were refused by the House of Commons In 1842 a law was passed to ban women and children working in mines

10. In 1847 the Ten Hours� Act limited the working hours, for adult workers too, to ten a day In 1849 two thousand people a week died in a cholera epidemic In 1851 the Great Exhibition (the first world�s fair) was held in the Crystal Palace, with great success and international attention In 1859 Charles Darwin published �The Origin of Species�, which lead to great religious doubt and insecurity

11. In 1861 Prince Albert died and Queen Victoria refused to go out in public for many years and when she did she didn�t wear the crown but a widows bonnet In 1870 the Education Act established the right of all children to schooling The 1880 Act obliged all children between the ages of 5 and 10 to attend school In 1888 the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper murdered and mutilated prostitutes on the streets of London, leading to world-wide press coverage and hysteria. Newspapers used the deaths to focus on the plight of the unemployed and to attack police and political leaders. The killer was never caught. In 1891 education becomes free for every child