19 th Century Victorian England – “ The Golden Age of the Middle Class ”

1. 19th Century Victorian England – “The Golden Age of the Middle Class” • Great expansion in size, power, and wealth • Factory Owners and Industrial Capitalists and bankers joining with older traditional middle class of merchants and professionals • Develop a great “class consciousness”= feeling that they were in a special group – a real sense of identity • “The only class you could fall out of” • Benefitted from the societal changes of the 19th century industrial world that allowed talent to rise and not have social status based on birth or rank but on hard work, self-reliance, education, and thrift = the “self made man” • Middle Class wants to set themselves apart: appearance, proper and highly moral behavior and dress, ornate homes and furnishings, education • WHAT WILL THE MIDDLE CLASS BE POLITICALLY?? = “Liberal” • Middle Class/Victorian Age Features: • - tea time • - domestic servants – maids, butlers • - department stores • - “the Golden Age of Funerals” – elaborate • - Sports: horse racing, soccer, cricket, tennis, bicycle riding • - CHRISTMAS! • - Literature! = the Novel – Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol” (1843) Queen Victoria 1837 - 1901

2. The British Middle Class – 19th Century • Family / Women’s Roles • Father = symbol of authority • The sole income = “breadwinner” • “separate spheres” • “the family home” • “Middle class domesticity” • Women • - raise children • - protect children • - take charge of home—manage household • - keep order, cleanliness • - manage servants • Consumer Culture • “Consumerism” • Consumerism represents the increasing disposable income of all classes, but especially the middle class in the 19th century • Consumerism had to be encouraged to keep pace with the quantity of products due to mass production • ADVERTISING • newspapers • “product crazes” • Bon Marche / Harrods Department Stores • Children • Long childhood encouraged • Protected from the adult world • Games, toys—fun but also to teach (dolls, puzzles) • Participation in sports for boys • Boy Scouts formed (GB-1908) - combined, sports, adventure, military • Lifestyle • Tea Time!! • Cigarettes—first cigarette shop opened in England in 1863—impact of the Crimean War (British soldiers observed the Russians—bring back habit) • Funerals—”Golden Age of Funerals” - very elaborate—many rituals—long period of mourning—impact of photography = “post mortem photography” • —posing of bodies— (late 1800’s 3/20 infant mortality, average life expectancy is 40) • Leisure activities/sports—tennis, horse racing, cricket, bicycling (big craze in late 1800’s) • Team sports—baseball, basketball, football, soccer • Olympics—modern games revived 1896 • Travel = vacations • Christmas • Greatly declining as a holiday by the 1830’s—impact of the Ind Rev—factory work = no time, no$ • Victorians revive—had been re-established by 1840’s • First Christmas tree and Card sent in England in 1840 • Charles Dickens writes “A Christmas Carol” 1843 • Holiday fit in well with the highly ritualized and stylized lives of the Victorians

3. Interior view of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London during the Great Exhibition of 1851. I like cake.

4. “Portrait of Louis Bertrin” 1833 Dominque Ingres This portrait of an early 19th century successful entrepreneur captures the very epitome of the self-reliant, aggressive man of the industrial middle class.

5. The Hon. Charlotte Noel William Dyce (1806 - 64) This sensitive and detailed depiction of a middle-class woman is a fine example of Victorian portraiture. The rising middle-class became important patrons of art in the 19th century. Female beauty and innocence were popular themes. Their taste in art reflected their values; propriety, respectability and the sanctity of family life.

6. William Powell Firth—detail from “Life at the Seaside” Matt Salerno is my favorite student. Ever. (1851) Frith understood the appeal that contemporary crowd scenes would have for the middle-class audience. Here was daily life painted on the grand scale traditionally reserved for history painting, for the noble and the great. Frith's paintings and those of a large number of imitators, bore a clear relationship to the novel, the most popular literary genre among the middle-class. Thus Frith weaves together multiple sub-plots, showing the crossing and juxtaposition of diverse narratives, lives and social classes,

7. John White—”The Village Christening” (1880) A fashionable subject for Victorian painters was the portrayal of everyday life. This particular painting depicts a working class rural christening which has been idealised so as to suite middle class tastes. However, by the end of the 19th century some painters moved away from this idyllic depiction of country life in order to record working life more accurately.

15. Girls paddling at Yarmouth in 1892. Seaside holidays became popular, thanks to the new railways.

17. In 1891 it was estimated that, country-wide, more than a million – that is, one in three women between the ages of fifteen and twenty – were in domestic service; kitchen maids and maids-of-all work (sometimes referred to as ‘slaveys’) were paid between £6 and £12 a year. ‘Tweenies’, maids who helped other domestics, moving between floors as and when they were needed, were paid even less. There was a tax on indoor male servants – and their wages were considerably higher – so only the wealthy could afford to employ them. Women servants were cheap and generally more easily dominated and kept in their place. The mistreatment of servants was commonplace, and young maids were especially vulnerable to being sexually exploited. Once hired, they found themselves in households in which a strict and unbreachable hierarchy below stairs ensured that they stayed on the lowest rung of that society. In 1740 Mary Branch and her mother were executed for beating a servant girl to death and, on the gallows, she admitted that she had considered all servants as ‘slaves, vagabonds and thieves’. Clipping your master's toenails, ironing his shoelaces, spending 17-hour days doing back-breaking work with no employment rights were just some of the realities facing servants in Victorian Britain.

21. Sport was mainly a luxury for the wealthy as most of the time it required special clothing which was really expensive in Victorian times. Cricket, golf, archery and croquet became popular for the upper class. Clubs for golfers were begun in the later part of the 1800s and the golf bag was designed in 1880. Scotland is still famous for gold nowadays and people come from all over the world to try out the course in St. Andrews. The Football Association was formed in 1863 and the World Champions at one point were the players of the Renton Football Club in Scotland.