T

he Victorian eraof theUnited Kingdomwas the period ofQueen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of prosperity for theBritish people. Some scholars extend the beginning of the periodas defined by a variety of sensibilities and political concerns that have come to be associated with the Victoriansback five years to the passage of theReform Act 1832.

The era was preceded by theGeorgian periodand succeeded by theEdwardian period. The latter half of the Victorian era roughly coincided with the first portion of theBelle poqueera of continental Europe and theGilded Ageof the United States.

The era is often characterised as a long period of peace, known as thePax Britannica, and economic,colonial, and industrial consolidation, temporarily disrupted by theCrimean War, although Britain was at war every year during this time. Towards the end of the 19th century, the policies ofNew Imperialismled to increasing colonial conflicts and eventually theAnglo-Zanzibar Warand theBoer War. Domestically, the agenda was increasingly liberal with a number of shifts in the direction of gradualpolitical reformand the widening of thevoting franchise.

Thepopulation of Englandhad almost doubled from 16.8 million in 1851 to 30.5 million in 1901.Scotland's population also rose rapidly, from 2.8 million in 1851 to 4.4 million in 1901. Ireland's population decreased rapidly, from 8.2 million in 1841 to less than 4.5 million in 1901.At the same time, around 15 millionemigrantsleft the United Kingdom in the Victorian era and settled mostly in the United States, Canada, and Australia.[4]During the early part of the era, theHouse of Commonswas headed by the two parties, theWhigsand theTories. From the late 1850s onwards, the Whigs became theLiberals; the Tories became theConservatives. These parties were led by many prominent statesmen includingLord Melbourne, SirRobert Peel,Lord Derby,Lord Palmerston,William Ewart Gladstone,Benjamin Disraeli, andLord Salisbury. The unsolved problems relating toIrish Home Ruleplayed a great part in politics in the later Victorian era, particularly in view of Gladstone's determination to achieve a political settlement. Indeed, these issues would eventually lead to theEaster Risingof 1916 and the subsequentdomino effectthat would play a large part in the fall ofthe empire.

Victoria reigned for 63 years and 216 days,the longest in British historyup to this point. However, the present monarch,Elizabeth II, will surpass this if she remains on the throne until 9 September 2015.

2. Culture

Gothic Revival architecturebecame increasingly significant during the period, leading to theBattle of the Stylesbetween Gothic andClassicalideals.Charles Barry's architecture for the newPalace of Westminster, which had been badly damaged in an1834 fire, was built in themedieval styleofWestminster Hall, the surviving part of the building. It constructed a narrative of cultural continuity, set in opposition to the violent disjunctions ofRevolutionary France, a comparison common to the period, as expressed inThomas Carlyle'sThe French Revolution: A HistoryandCharles Dickens'Great ExpectationsandA Tale of Two Cities. Gothic was also supported by criticJohn Ruskin, who argued that it epitomised communal and inclusive social values, as opposed to Classicism, which he considered to epitomise mechanical standardisation.

The middle of the 19th century sawThe Great Exhibitionof 1851, the firstWorld's Fair, which showcased the greatest innovations of the century. At its centre wasthe Crystal Palace, a modular glass and iron structure - the first of its kind. It was condemned by Ruskin as the very model of mechanical dehumanisation in design, but later came to be presented as the prototype ofModern architecture. Theemergence of photography, showcased at the Great Exhibition, resulted in significant changes in Victorian art with Queen Victoria being the first British monarch to be photographed.John Everett Millaiswas influenced by photography (notably in his portrait of Ruskin) as were otherPre-Raphaeliteartists. It later became associated with theImpressionisticandSocial Realisttechniques that would dominate the later years of the period in the work of artists such asWalter SickertandFrank Holl.

3. Entertainment

Popular forms of entertainment varied bysocial class. No matter how poor people were, they could usually raise a penny or so for some light entertainment.Victorian Britain, like the periods before it, was interested in literature (seeCharles Dickens,Arthur Conan DoyleandWilliam Makepeace Thackeray),theatreandthe arts(seeAesthetic movementandPre-Raphaelite Brotherhood), andmusic,drama, andoperawere widely attended.Michael Balfewas the most popular Britishgrand operacomposer of the period, while the most popularmusical theatrewas a series of fourteencomic operasbyGilbert and Sullivan, although there was alsomusical burlesqueand the beginning ofEdwardian musical comedyin the 1890s. Drama ranged fromlow comedytoShakespeare(seeHenry Irving). There were, however, other forms of entertainment. Gentlemen went to dining clubs, like theBeefsteak clubor theSavage club.Gamblingat cards in establishments popularly calledcasinoswas wildly popular during the period: so much so that evangelical and reform movements specifically targeted such establishments in their efforts to stop gambling,drinking, and prostitution.

Brass bandsand 'TheBandstand' became popular in the Victorian era. The band stand was a simple construction that not only created an ornamental focal point, but also served acoustic requirements whilst providing shelter from the changeableBritish weather. It was common to hear the sound of a brass band whilst strolling throughparklands. At this time musical recording was still very much a novelty.Another form of entertainment involved 'spectacles' where paranormal events, such asmesmerism, communication with the dead (by way ofmediumshipor channelling),ghostconjuring and the like, were carried out to the delight of crowds and participants. Such activities were more popular at this time than in other periods of recent Western history.

Natural historybecame increasingly an "amateur" activity. Particularly in Britain and the United States, this grew into specialisthobbiessuch as thestudy of birds, butterflies, seashells (malacology/conchology), beetles and wildflowers. Amateurcollectorsand natural history entrepreneurs played an important role in building the large natural history collections of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Many people used the train services to visit the seaside, helped by theBank Holiday Actof 1871, which created a number of fixed holidays which all sectors of society could enjoy. Large numbers travelling to quiet fishing villages such asWorthing,Brighton,MorecambeandScarboroughbegan turning them into major tourist centres, and people likeThomas Cooksaw tourism and even overseas travel as viable businesses.

3 .1 Penny gaffs and music halls

Just one penny admitted you to the back room of a public house thick with tobacco smoke. There a raucous singer delighted the audience with a repertoire of crude ballads, competing with shouts for more gin. An evening at a penny gaff made a pleasant change from their crowded slum rooms.

By the late 1860s penny gaffs were giving way to more respectable, and comfortable, music halls and theatres. There you could sing along to your favourite popular songs, or watch entertainment as diverse as acrobats, trapeze artists, operatic selections, black-face minstrels, or can-can dancers.

At a Music Hall, The Graphic, April 5th 1873

Alcohol was still served during the performance but the audience was less riotous and the repertoire less gory. The price was still surprisingly low: a box at the Garrick Theatre cost only 2 or 3 pence.

3.2 Magic, freak shows and waxworks

Illusionists and spiritualists were popular attractions in theatres and exhibition halls: audiences could sit amazed as ghosts appeared on stage and automata solved mathematical puzzles. Renowned performers appeared to levitate, slice the heads off spectators and escape out of locked boxes.

Modern Witchery, 1894

Victorian audiences had no qualms about staring at human beings with disabilities or physical abnormalities. Among theexhibits at travelling circuses and fairs were mermaids, bear boys, frogmen, 'giants', 'dwarves', conjoined twins and people from exotic climes. The income from being exhibited was often the only way for some of these people to live. In fact, the lucky few would achieve fame and fortune such as Chang and Eng the renowned conjoined twins.The famous Elephant Man, whose face was badly deformed, was given sanctuary from a life of freak shows in the London Hospital, where he lived for four years till he died in 1890.

Royal American Midgets at the Piccadilly Hall, c. 1880

Harvey's Midgets, 1884

Waxwork shows provided another form of cheap entertainment. Figures included mythological, historical and literary characters as well as royals, and politicians. In addition, the shows kept abreast of any big stories in the press such as those involving celebrities, tragic accidents or murders. 1834 saw a particularly horrid murder. Waxwork figures of the murdered woman and her four murdered children, dressed in their own clothes, had the public paying to see them in the very rooms where they had died. From 1843 Madame Tussauds Chamber of Horrors documented current murders, exhibiting uncanny likenesses of the murderers within a few days of their executions. From 1888 Jack the Ripper could be seen in waxwork, even in penny peepshows.

3.3 CircusesThere were many small collections of animals, sometimes owned by a circus manager who trundled them along the country roads before erecting his Big Top wherever he hoped for a profitable audience. The first famous circus proprietor, Lord George Sanger, produced spectacular winter shows in Astleys Amphitheatre, just over Westminster Bridge.

Sanger's Grand National Amphitheatre, Lambeth, 1881

In 1884 hisGullivers Travelshad a cast of seven hundred humans, thirteen elephants, nine camels and fifty-two horses, with miscellaneous lions, buffaloes, ostriches and kangaroos thrown in. Phineas T. Barnums circus in Olympia specialized in themed spectacles, such as his Venetian pageant in 1891, when the vast arena was flooded, and the spectators could take gondola rides down the canals, before watching a great sea battle involving over 1,000 performers.

Covent Garden Circus, c. 1880

3.4 Street artists

The Punch and Judy men preferred to perform outside gentlemens houses in the West End of London, by arrangement, rather than walking perhaps twenty miles in a day through the streets, carrying their show. Genteel evening parties might also be enlivened by the Fantoccini mans marionettes - a type of puppet show. Companies of street acrobats could make as much as 100 a year. There were conjurors, salamander men (fire-eaters) and sword-swallowers.

Street acrobats performing, in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, 1851

Clowns strode high above the streets on stilts, and contortionists writhed on the ground. There were innumerable ballad singers, and bands of differing musical abilities but all able to produce such a noise that they were sometimes paid just to go away. As if they were not enough, Scots and Irish bagpipes wailed through the cacophony.

3.5 Pleasure gardens

The heyday of the London pleasure gardens had been in the previous century. The mystery is how they managed to attract such huge crowds, despite the English weather, for they were mostly out of doors. Vauxhall struggled on until 1859. (The site is now covered by the south end of Vauxhall Bridge).

Royal Vauxhall Gardens, 1848

Cremorne Gardens, in Chelsea, opened in the 1840s, with a thousand flickering gas lights, a theatre, firework displays and an American bowling alley claimed to be the first in London. The army made soldiers available to perform in massive pageants there. In 1855 they were re-enacting the storming of Sebastopol in the Crimean war. They advanced with their bayonets fixed. The scaffold collapsed, and they fell, impaling themselves on their bayonets. Nine years later in 1864 Goddard, the famous hot air balloonist, rose to 5,000 feet above Cremorne, but he misjudged his descent and his balloon landed fatally on a church spire in Chelsea. People being fired from cannons, French female velocipedists (riders of early bicycles) wearingshort trousers they could all draw the crowds.

By day Cremorne was thronged with respectable parties, but they went home by ten oclock and hundreds of prostitutes took their places.4. The middle class4.1 Domestic servants

A middle class woman was entirely dependent on a supply of domestic servants, ranging from the untrained slavey to a staff of several highly trained specialists.A young wife newly elevated to her husbands status in the middle class might not have the accumulated knowledge of an old-established household. Here was a huge market for Advice Books, such as Isabella BeetonsBook of Household Management,published in 1861 [and still in print, updated].

Its usefulness in a middle class home was not so much in teaching the servants themselves, many of whom would be illiterate, but in enabling the mistress, after a quick look at the relevant pages, to pretend to an encyclopedic and impressive knowledge herself.

Mrs Beeton, Illustration of crockery

4.2 Retail therapy

A Victorian high street, 1894

Having set the maid to clean all the silver, and the cook to prepare for that nights dinner party, and kissed her husband as he left for the City, the prosperous housewife had the day before her. She might briefly interview her children before returning them to their governess or nursery maid. She was not concerned with buying food, much of which was delivered on a daily basis, nor with the wine for the evening, which her husband would have ordered, perhaps with the collaboration of the butler. (The germ of supermarkets was sprouting even then, in Mr. Harrods grocery store, opened in 1849, and William Whiteleys department store in Bayswater, proudly titledThe Universal Provider, in 1863.)

Illustration of Ladies' Fashions, from The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, 1860The housewife could take a hansom cab, or perhaps their own carriage, to visit her friends, or sample the fashionable new emporia in the town centre. The modest establishments sheltering behind uninformative faades had long gone. The glory of plate glass, and the brilliance of gas lighting, enabled the retailer to entice his clientele into his premises, where male and female staff waited to serve them. The motto of the up-and-coming shopkeeper was the customer is always right, and the sales staff had to bow, in every sense, to the customer.

If she could afford to, she would have her clothes made for her in one of the fashionable and very expensive - salons. The London season lasted only a few months, from Easter until August, when Parliament rose and everyone who mattered could retire to their grouse moors with sighs of relief. But during the season a rich woman expected to be able to order from her dressmaker an elaborate gown to be deliveredthe next day.

A lady in less exalted circles might buy a dress ready-made, or buy a ready-made bodice, which was complicated to make, with a length of the same fabric to make the skirt herself. She, or her dressmaker, might use one of the paper patterns distributed free by fashion magazines such asThe World of Fashion,from 1850.

Dress patterns, 1860

5. Education

A lady B.A. graduate of London University, 1885

In an increasingly complicated world, the chances for an illiterate boy or girl were slim.

5.1 The Ragged Schools

Ragged schools originated in the Sunday School founded in 1780 by Robert Raikes in Gloucester, who taught children to read so that they could read the Bible. Then a Portsmouth cobbler, John Pounds, gathered groups of children to play with his disabled nephew, and by 1818 had a class of 30 or 40 who he was teaching to read, from the Bible because it was the only book easily available. The idea spread to London. In 1844, nineteen Ragged Schools joined to form a Ragged School Union, headed by Lord Shaftesbury. By 1861 they were teaching over 40 thousand children in London, including the children of convicts, drunks and abusive stepparents, and deserted orphans and even the children of poor Roman Catholics who do not object to their children reading the Bible. By 1870 there were 250 Ragged Schools in London and over 100 in the provinces. Meanwhile Quintin Hogg, the exEtonian son of a prosperous London merchant, had set up a Ragged School, just off the Strand in London, in 1863, when he was just eighteen. His pupils were the wildest and most destitute of the street children. Hogg persevered, and even set up a doss house for homeless boys. One of his sisters was enlisted to run classes for girls, who were just as wild. The London Polytechnic, now the University of Westminster, can trace its origin to Quintin Hogg.

5.2 Apprentices

The idea of apprenticeships was admirable: for a fixed term, usually seven years, a master or mistress of a trade would train a young person so that he could earn his living at that trade. The master kept the apprentice in board, lodging and clothes, but had no duty to pay him, although many did in the final years of the term, when the apprentice had learned enough to be helpful. The system applied throughout society. Prosperous merchants, goldsmiths and bankers made tidy sums from the premiums paid by the parents of hopeful apprentices. The members of the Company of Watermen and Lightermen of the River Thames, who had a monopoly of river traffic, had 2,140 apprentices in 1858. Poor masters could profit from the unpaid labour of children taken from the parish workhouse. There were many scandals of parish apprentices being so illtreated that they ran away, or even died.5.3 Parish schools

Parish workhouses were supposed to provide education for the children in their care whom they had not managed to apprentice out, but this duty was poorly observed. Some satisfied it by shunting their children to the Central London District School for Pauper Children on the outskirts of London, known as the Monster School because of its size it housed 1,000 pupils. (Charlie Chaplin was one, later.)

5.4 Church schools

The Church of England and the nonconformist movement both provided elementary education, and both adopted the Lancaster system whereby the brightest pupil taught what he had learned, to a group of fellowpupils, each of whom in turn passed it on, and so on: tidy and superficially efficient but prone to errors. Nevertheless Joseph Lancaster himself gave 1000 children some grasp of the rudiments, reading, writing and reckoning, in this way. The system was replaced by properly trained pupilteachers in 1846. Both establishments set up teacher training colleges, which gave their graduates the entrance to employment as welltrained, certificated teachers.

5.5 The Jews Free School

The Jews Free School had opened in the east end of London in 1817. By 1822 it offered a religious, moral and useful education to 600 Jewish boys and half as many girls already almost up to the Monster School level. From 1842 to 1897 its head was Moses Angel, a brilliant polymath with a genius for teaching. By 1870 it had 2,400 pupils, and was perhaps the largest school in the world. (It still exists today in Harrow.)

5.6 The public schools

The Clock Tower, Eton College, 1860

Only the English could call their most exclusive and expensive educational establishments public. Winchester College was the earliest, founded in 1382. The College of St Mary at Eton followed, in 1440. There was a burst of new foundations in the nineteenth century, reflecting the aspirations of the middle classes to the status symbols of the nobility and gentry. They emphasized the importance of sportsmanship and of a brand of Christianity later called Muscular Christianity. They produced selfconfident young men ready to become leaders destined for the army or the civil service, at home or in the Empire. Scholarship came lower down in their priorities.

5.7 Education for girls

First lady M.D. of the University of London, 1889

In the upper classes it was assumed that a girl would marry and that therefore she had no need of a formal education, as long as she could look beautiful, entertain her husbands guests, and produce a reasonable number of children. Accomplishments such as playing the piano, singing and flowerarranging were allimportant. If she could not find a husband she faced a grim future as a 'maiden aunt' whose help could always be called on to look after her aged parents or her siblings children. She might even be forced to take on employment as a governess, shut away in the schoolroom with children who had little interest in absorbing the information she was teaching. This became increasingly unattractive to intelligent women. But their future was improved when Queens College in Harley Street, London was founded in 1848, to give governesses a recognized and marketable qualification. No accomplishments there. Ten more years saw the foundation of Cheltenham Ladies College. Other girls public schools followed. This increase in female education led to renewed demands for the vote. The National Union of Womens Suffrage Societies was founded in 1897, hotly denounced by the Queen, who from her position of unimaginable power saw no reason why women should want to vote at all.

Cheltenham Ladies' College, 1885

5.8 State intervention

The Factory Act of 1833, had imposed a duty on employers to provide halftime education for employees under 13. In practice, the Act was easily ignored. The breakthrough came in 1870. Elected school boards could levy a local rate to build new schools providing education up to the age of 10. In 1880 the provision of elementary schooling for both sexes was made compulsory, and the age raised to 13. By 1874 5000 Board Schools were running. Another change in the law enabled grammar schools for girls to be founded and funded. By 1898 ninety such schools had been founded

5.9 The Universities

For centuries, the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge had imposed three barriers to entrance. An applicant had to be 1: male; 2: unmarried; and 3: a member of the Church of England. While 2 and 3 could be evaded with a little cunning, 1 could not. Nonsectarian colleges had been opened in London from 1828 onwards, grouped into London University in 1836. Durham University was founded in 1832, Owens College in Manchester in 1851, and Birmingham University in 1900. In 1878 London University admitted women to two colleges, Bedford College, and the Royal Holloway College opened by Queen Victoria in 1886, which was funded by the proceeds of patent medicines. But Oxford and Cambridge held out against women until the next century.

The opening of Royal Holloway, 1886