Historical Background

Home Policy

First Reform BillWhen: 1832What: There's a change in the extension and in the importance of some electoral districts; they have to suppress the so-called “rotten boroughs” (=districts), which have no or very small population, and the “pocket boroughs”, little districts easily controlled by the aristocracy; large towns gain more parliamentary representation. The electorate is broadened by the elimination or lessening of various restrictive requirements and financial qualifications.Why: Middle class wants more political power; by this change, this power is transferred from landowning aristocrats to the middle class.

ChartismWhen: From 1838 to 1848What: Workers try to make Parliament enact into law the charters containing their demands (like the suffrage for all male citizens who are 21 years old and over and the secret ballot), but Parliament, even if these charters are signed by thousands of people, rejects them each time.Why: Workers are dissatisfied with the Reform Bill of 1832.

Second Reform BillWhen: 1867What: The political representation of some cities (like Liverpool and Manchester) is increased; the electorate is broadened by decreasing financial qualifications;Why: This act is prompted by the widespread dissatisfaction with the limited reforms of the 1832 enactment.

The Corn LawsWhen: 1846What: Robert Peele repeals the Corn Laws, which are import tariff designed to support domestic British corn prices against competition from less expensive foreign-grain imports; indeed, due to the development of faster transportation and the modernization of agricultural machinery, farms of North and South America are able to export huge quantities of cheap corn. Why: The fewer workers have to pay to survive, the more industrialists earn, since they can pay workers less.

The Factory ActsWhen: From 1833 to 1891What: The working conditions of workers (in particular, children and women) are slowly improved by several acts; among the various acts, I think that the most important are the acts of 1847 (also called Ten Hours Bill, which reduces the workday to 10 hours) and the acts of 1878 and 1891 (they focused their attention on children, raising the minimum age they can be set to work to 11 and reducing the hours per day they can work).Why: This is, in my opinion, a clear evidence of the increasing importance of workers.

Foreign PolicyThe British Empire and Jingoism

The Empire of Great Britain at the end of Victorian age was made of: Canada, South Africa, India, Egypt and Australia.

Wars of the Victorian age- Opium war (1839-1842): G.B. won against China and obtained the control of five

Chinese ports and of Hong Kong.- War of Crimea (1853-1856): G.B. supported Turkey. Russia against G.B., France,

Turkey and Sardinia. Russia lost the war, bust lost no territory. Turkey was preserved from the attack.

- India (1857-1877): British colonization provoked discontent of Indians because colonizers had revolutionized local life. G.B. had difficulty in subduing Indians. Everything was solved with an Act of Parliament that named Victoria the “Empress of India”.

- Egypt (1882): The canal of Suez was an important way to go to India for English merchants. So G.B. invaded Egypt declaring that it would have been for a short time (but they had occupied it in 1956).

- South Africa (1899-1902): G.B. fought against the Dutch settlers and the Boers because gold had been discovered in Transvaal and diamonds in Kimberley. G.B. won the war with great difficulty one year after Queen Victoria’s death.

JingoismJingoism is the word that expresses the thought of English people during the Victorian age about colonization. Indeed British people were proud of their Empire and they were proud of spreading their civilization to every country of the world.

Social Background

The Poor Law Amendment Act

The workhouse system was set up in England and Wales under the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834, although many individual houses existed before this legislation. Outdoor relief (whereby the destitute received financial support wherever they chose to live) was discouraged and each group of parishes had to provide a workhouse. Inmates were free to enter and leave as they liked and would receive free food and accommodation. However, the concern was that too liberal a regime would lead those who could easily work to take it easy in the workhouse, so life there was deliberately made as harsh and degrading as possible: the hope was that only the truly destitute would apply. Attempts were also made to provide moral guidance, training and education to the poor but, due to the ever present desire to save money, they proved to be a failure.

The Urban Habitat

During the Victorian Age, poor people lived in the "slums", described by novelists like Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell.

Slums were quarters characterized by squalor and crime. Pollution and terrible working conditions had disastrous effects on workers' health and especially on children's health. Overcrowding was another problem of slums: working-class housing lacked in services: no running water, no light, not enough room for everyone, narrow alleys, no paved roads, etc..

Only during the last part of the 19th Century the situation began to improve. The development of trams and trains enabled some to live in the suburbs, while some services (like water, gas and lighting or hospitals, prisons, police stations, schools) were introduced.

In all these Victorian institutions (school, police stations...) discipline was severe, and often involved corporal punishment. The typical Victorian "respectable" behavior was imposed; drunks, prostitutes, young criminals were isolated and prosecuted. Public

executions, which formed part of the bloody element of popular culture, continued until 1868.

The Victorian Compromise

The Victorian Age (at least the so-called mid-Victorian period, the fifties and sixties) was a period of prosperity, wealth and power, so optimism arose in England: the middle class believed in progress. A large part of English society saw industrial development only as a way to make its condition of life better, while it didn’t see or didn’t want to see social conflicts that rose from this situation because in an age based on progress it was obvious to think that material progress was based on the hard work of poor people. This is the “Victorian compromise”. Victorians felt the need to rediscover some of the old values to survive to the fast change of the traditional rhythms of life. The most important value is the idea of “responsibility”, which makes the difference between the middle class and the lower class. Responsibility can be identified with morality, hypocrisy, to have good manners, to go to church: in general to conform to social standards. But there were also thinkers and intellectuals who were against the Victorian compromise; they understood that the new wealth was based on social injustice and they criticized the ideals of a society that wanted to preserve its present condition.

Leisure time during the Victorian AgeSport, drink and pubs

SPORT: At the end of the 19th century people could devote themselves to sport because they had a shorter amount of working hours and more leisure time. The most popular were rugby, football, cycling and tennis, which remained the prerogative of the rich. By the middle of the century some illegal sports spread, for example boxing. It was very different to the sport that we can see today because boxers wore no gloves and fought until one of the contenders gave in. It was dangerous and violent. Even if it was illegal, there was a championship and people bet on the important matches. Even cock-fighting and fights between dogs were very popular but, of course, illegal. Frequently the animals died during the matches. Only the rats’ fights was not illegal. A large number of rats was put into a ring surrounded by a fence and the winner was the dog that killed the highest number of rats.

DRINK AND PUBS: Drinking in the Victorian Age was a necessity. It was safer to drink beer than water because the latter was polluted (in the beginning there was no sewerage system; running water was pumped into British towns only later in the century). Drinking beer together was also a form of entertainment and of social exchange. At the end of the century public houses offered comfort and company. In a bar people could sit chatting quietly. Behind the bar there used to be a decent middle-aged woman. Customers would normally be known, sometimes even have their own seat. They would find warmth, food, newspapers. Often food was free. Public houses provided rooms in which trade-union branches and clubs could meet and they organized sports teams and outings.

The condition of WomenWomen's status and education in Victorian Age

The status of Women in the Victorian Age is often seen as an illustration of the striking discrepancy between England's national power and wealth and what many, then and now, consider its appalling social conditions.

Women were expected to conform to an artificial notion of “feminine delicacy”; the idealization of women was evident in the worship of the mother and the young girl, often compared to angels; young girls were also thought to be like angels, not only physically, but morally too.The idealization of innocent girls was a refuge from anxiety and religious doubt. In fact the recently urbanized middle classes were desperately unsure of their social position, and in consequence obsessed with respectability. Religious doubt led Victorians to attach a high value to traditional symbols of goodness and innocence. According to this social view, women belonging to the middle class assumed the role of “angels of the house”.

Angels of the houseIn order to run a respectable household and secure the happiness, comfort and well-being of her family , a woman had to perform her duties intelligently. For example, she was expected to organize parties and dinners to bring prestige to her husband, also making it possible for them to meet new people and establish economically important relationships.At the same time she had to make sure she devoted enough time to her children and towards improving her own abilities and cultural knowledge. Another duty was that of being the "sick-nurse" who took care of family members who had fallen ill.As regards sex, Victorian society preferred to avoid talking about it; sexual activities were highly regulated in Europe by church and state law.

Women’s educationThe attitude towards women and education was that education of women needn't be of the same extended, classical and commercial character as that of men. Women were supposed to know the things necessary to bring up their children and to keep house.People thought it was unnecessary for women to attend university. It was even said that studying was against their nature and could make them ill. They were supposed to be

more or less an "ornament of society" and be subordinate to their husbands. Obedience was all that was required of them. In short words, the woman was seen as a temple and as a saint.

ProstitutionThe prostitutes in Victorian Britain were in huge number; they lived in miserable poverty and they were treated with extraordinary contempt.The “fallen women” didn’t respect the standard of the pure woman, and for this reason prostitution inspired a deep hatred; the idealization of women created a refuge from anxiety and religious doubt, the prostitute created only confusion and embarrassment.Society was very unsure: the middle class had many doubts about its new position in a new changed society, and for this reason they attached a high value to the sanctification of the mother, child and home, so as not to see the “man’s innate depravity”. Prostitutes were considered as perverted, lustful creatures, who deserved their miserable life.

Baby FarmingChildren was the faint victims of the Victorian Age; they were used in the hardest jobs (mining, textile industry), they could also be beaten to death. This process was defined as “baby farming”: a sort of “trade of human flesh”. A child for an unmarried mother was considered as a punishment, because nobody helped these women, so a woman was “obliged” to get rid of him; a huge number of these mothers tried to grow up their children working as prostitutes, but not one brothel keeper wanted a woman in these conditions.So mothers gave their children away to be kept or looked after for a sum of money to people who would sell them, in their turn, to beggars or thieves; this is roughly the meaning of baby farming. In the Fifties there were many cases of this sort; children coming either from workhouses or from baby-farms were deprived of food or treated with ferocious cruelty.

Cultural Background

Utilitarianism

Jeremy BenthamJeremy Bentham is considered the father of Utilitarianism, a philosophical theory whose consequences can still be seen nowadays.His main idea is that the world is divided into pain and pleasure, and that an action is morally good if it brings the greatest amount of pleasure to most people.However, during the Victorian Age this idea was modified and changed in order to combine it with capitalism and social Darwinism. Pleasure and happiness were seen just as money, without taking into account feelings and human relations in general. Utilitarianism is based on a scientific view of the world, shifted to society; in fact, utilitarians thought that the collective good was represented by the way money moved on the Market. If money was lost, this would damage the entire community, so economic rules had to be

strictly followed, even if this would imply to starve to death a part of society (according to the law of majority and minority), as happened during the Irish crisis.

1) Good is whatever brings the greatest pleasure to the greatest number of people.2) Good is whatever brings the greatest pleasure, even though for few people.

The passage from point 1 to point 2 occurred during the Victorian Age, because the former was contradictory to capitalism.

John Stuart MillJohn Stuart Mill found these principles inadequate and developed them to make them more “human” and not based on materialistic values like profit; he made a difference between two different types of “good”, which were high value and low value.1)High value good is everything concerned with culture, knowledge and progress;2)Low value good is physical pleasure, money and material pleasures such as possession, profit and economical power.Mill thought that high value good is the most important one, because it allows men to interact and to communicate, to express their ideas and to make the right choices.

Karl MarxMarx's thoughts about workers

Marx based his economic theory on the idea that man's life in industrial cities was unnatural and inhuman. According to him, the advent of technologies with industrialization made the life of the poor worse: many of them lost their work; others had to compete with machines. The growth of technology asked the employers to spend more on it, and so less to pay workers: they could pay them as little as they wanted!Marx saw the relation between workers and employers as a lasting conflict; the class war caused by the relationship between work and capital would only end with the abolition of private property.Also, he said that there was another problem: alienation. Man was alienated from his work and from the profit of it because he wasn't employed in anything useful for him; he was alienated from his fellowmen and from himself too because his conditions put himself in conflict with his master (class war) and he had to repeat the same tasks without being able to express his inner nature.After his death, contrary to his prediction, skilled works grew up: if machines replaced men in their work, for example, new jobs were created in engineering.

Charles Darwin

Faith and Nature

Darwin hesitated for twenty years before publishing The Origin of Species, for he knew that the book would overturn the way humans saw themselves and their world. For the first time in history, people were forced to suspect that they lived in a universe not created for them. Nature no longer seemed a benevolent mother, as the Romantics had believed, but a vast and indifferent mechanical force. Rousseau had argued that life in a state of nature was innocent and happy; Wordsworth claimed that the experience and the memory of nature make us better people. Darwin's work destroyed these beliefs.

A mechanistic universe

The most disturbing aspect of Darwin's theory was the implication that the highest human attributes, like art love and morality, are simply ”adaptations”: useful characteristics which have evolved mechanically because they helped our prehistoric ancestors to survive, just as a snail's shell or a snake's poison help the snail and the snake. The evolution works with the natural selection, i.e. process by which favourable traits that are heritable become more common in successive generations of a population of reproducing organisms, and unfavourable traits that are heritable become less common.In the first decade after The Origin of Species, this scientific, anti-romantic view of human nature came to dominate literature. Influenced by Darwin, Zola tried to uncover 'the beast in man', and described virtues and vices in the clinical tones of a biologist: they are determined, he said, 'physiologically' by 'accidents of tissue and of blood'.

Social Darwinism

Darwin also overturned attitudes to society. The ideal of equality that had inspired the Enlightenment, the Romantic movement and the revolutions of 1848 now seemed unscientific. Life was a struggle for survival; far from being equal, society was divided into winners and losers, the 'fit' and the 'unfit'. Darwin himself did not believe that man must passively follow the cruel laws of nature. What is natural, he knew, is not automatically either inevitable or ethical. But his followers assumed that whenever a law operates in the natural world, then human beings are justified in obeying it. 'Social Darwinists' (who extended Darwin's ideas to human society) believed that the poor were condemned by biology (their inferior genes) to their humble status, and that social reforms were useless or dangerous. To help the poor, it seemed, was resist revolution, which was working to eliminate them. Social Darwinism justified sexism, imperialism and racism. Like the poor, women and 'foreigners' (the Irish, Southern Europeans and of course all non-whites) were said to be less evolved, closer to our animal origins.

Natural selection in civilised society

Darwin realised that natural selection, the motor of evolution, is suspended in civilised society, where the weak are not eliminated but protected where medicine attenuates the effects of illness, and social institutions repress the struggle for survival. Many people concluded that civilisation was an attempt to evade nature's laws — a kind of evolutionary suicide, which would inevitably lead to the degeneration of the race by encouraging the propagation of the unfit. Nietzsche made this argument the basis for his attack on Christianity (which defends the weak and so obstructs the evolution of the superman); others used it to defend repressive social policies.

John Ruskin

Ruskin was both the leading Victorian critic of art and an important critic of society. He perceived criticism of modern society as a true mission. At first he was concerned with problems of art (--> Modern Painters, a defence of J.W.Turner), but then his principal interest shifted from art to architecture, especially to the problem of determining what kind of society was capable of producing great buildings. Although his enthusiasm for Gothic architecture was infectious, his concern was not to revive it but the society that had produced Gothic buildings, a society in which the individual workman could express himself and enjoy what William Morris called work-pleasure. A mechanized society could

not produce such buildings, but only poor imitations. He wished to change industrial society, not to decorate concrete towers with gargoyles. By studying the Middle Ages, he realized that Gothic architecture was not constrained by regulations, which pointed to the liberty afforded to medieval craftsmen: it was this sense of imperfection that was seen as a symbol of intellectual liberty and Christianity had the capacity to indulge human imperfection. This led him to praise the creative and spiritual benefits of medieval labour, in contrast with the working conditions of the 19 th century (mechanical production is thought to imply the degradation of the personality, the limitation on freedom and individual initiative. "It is not that men are ill-fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread [...] for they feel that the kind of work they are condemned to is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. We manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel degradation.", from The stones of Venice).The interest in the negative effect of industrialism led R. gradually into economics. After 1860 the critic of art became an outspoken critic of laissez-faire economics, but he did not embrace the ambitions of the political left (Marx, Engels): he referred to the ideals of the distant past as an alternative to Industrial Capitalism and his position was essentially conservative. He maintained that the economic life of a country should not be governed by the profit motive of individuals or of a social class, but by the interests of society as a whole.

William Morris

A devotee of Ruskin, painter, businessman, poet, designer of furniture, printer, weaver, political agitator, he was of the most active men of his century. He was involved in collaborative projects with the Pre-Raphaelites and his aim was to promote social reform through the medium of decorative arts: medieval art as an antidote to industrialism. In later years, though, he realized that art was not strong enough to change the world, so there was a shift from “romantic to revolutionary”: he embraced Marxism, launching a political programme in which the ugliness of Capitalism would be challenged by the undivided labour of the modern proletariat, the spiritual successors of medieval craftsmen (--> Carlyle and Ruskin: emphasis on the spiritual and moral value of manual work). A political revolution was the only way to restore mankind to a state in which work could be enjoyed and workers not exploited; his ideal was a communist and machineless state.

John Stuart MillMill’s vision of the condition of women

Mill approached this topic from a utilitarian point of view. He saw in women new minds, ideas, projects which could help the development of the humankind itself. So it is also clear that he would fight for men if they were subjected to women.

Nineteenth–century society saw women as persons who needed to be take care of.

The argument that Mill used to attack society is the fact that women probably are not so fragile as everyone saw them. Actually, no one knows the true nature of women, because they had always been subjected to men. So Mill suggested that society should prove what the real capacities of women are. Establishing equality between the two sexes, a great number of new minds would be free to express their ideas, and, utilitaristically speaking , this would improve society itself.

Another improvement that this would cause regards the relationship between men and women, especially in marriage. Mill thought that if both wife and husband were educated people, this would bring people to learn more and more subjects. Mill attacks also the fact that in marriage women are like slaves, even if slavery is not permitted by laws. Throughout human history the role of a husband had always been legally that of a tyrant, and the object of his far-seeing essay The subjection of Women was to change public opinion. Mill also believed that women should be allowed to vote, because they represented almost half of population, and so it is right for them to express and to defend their rights by voting those who represent them better.To make this more acceptable to everyone, Mill makes some example of great women, who had great capacity and so they modified history, Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victorian, but also Joan of Arc.

The condition of women, however, was only one aspect of the tyranny against which he fought. His main concern was to prevent the subjection of individuals in a democracy. His classic treatise On Liberty is not a traditional liberal attack against tyrannical kings or dictators; it is an attack against tyrannical majorities. Mill foresaw that in democracies like the American one, the pressure toward conformity might crush all individuals to the level of what he called “collective mediocrity”. He was concerned with demonstrating that the individual is more important than institutions such as church or state.