The Victorian Age
The Victorian Age
The Victorian Age
The Victorian age took its name from Queen Victoria whose reign was the longest in the
1832: Reform Bill
history of England (1837-1901) or (1832-1914)
1914: First world war
This is an ages of technical / economical progress with new sources and machinery and the
spread of industrialism and urbanization. The modern urban economy of manufacturing
industry and international trade took over from the old agricultural economy. Cities became
bigger and bigger but also more polluted. This progress (big advance and richness) is based
on exploitation: poor were considered a social problem, something like crime. Poor children,
forced to separate from their families, were sent to work in workhouses, in return for which
they get very little, they received barely enough food to survive. The poor were thus forced
into overcrowded slums whose appalling sanitation led to epidemics of cholera and other
diseases.
The first Reform Bill of 1832, extended the right of vote to the mercantilist middle classes,
excluded the working classes completely.
Luddites (1881): they show machineries as the cause of their poverty and problems, so
they destroyed them.
In this age the cost of living was kept artificially high by the Corn Laws which
maintained the price of corn in Britain at an unrealistic high level, by taxing imported
corn. People who wanted to keep the price of corn high were especially land owners.
The Whig Anti-Corn law League fought against this measure and were supported by
the workers anxious for cheap food. They asked for the abolition of the corn-law, and
they have success.
The 19th century was also a time of great technological innovation. The Great Exhibition
(1851) held in Crystal Palace in London, a magnificent glass edifice, is a symbol for Britain’s
dominant position as an industrial and imperial trading power. It was meant to show the
world the Britain superiority.