The Victorian Age (1837-1901)

Early on the morning of 20 June 1837, two men drove out to Kensington Palace to wake a girl of eighteen. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain had come with news that her uncle, William IV, was dead and that she was now Queen. Her name was Victoria. Nobody in that room could have guessed that she would reign for more than sixty-three years, longer than any ruler Britain had known, or that a whole age would take her name.

The country she inherited was already changing faster than any country had changed before. Steam engines pulled coal and cloth along iron rails. Villages were emptying into smoky towns. Old certainties about God, about class and about a person's place in the world were beginning to crack. When the Queen died in January 1901, Britain ruled the largest empire the world had seen, and most of its people could read.

The writers of these years lived inside all of this, and they wrote about it. They wrote about children in factories and clergymen who had lost their faith, about the poor of London and the rich who looked away, about women who wanted more from life than a good marriage. Their books were read aloud at family firesides, borrowed from lending libraries and bought in monthly parts for a shilling. The story of the age falls into three stretches. The early years, to about 1850, were years of hunger, protest and first reforms. The middle years, to about 1870, were years of pride and of the doubts that science brought. The late years were years of empire, weariness and bold new ideas.

The world of this age

Political life

The crown that Victoria wore had lost much of its shine. Her uncle George IV had been widely disliked, and many people wondered how long monarchy would last. Victoria won respect by being serious and dutiful. In 1840 she married her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and the couple raised nine children in a home that came to stand for the family ideal of the age. Albert died in December 1861, and the Queen wore black for the rest of her life.

The politics of her first years had a sharp edge. In 1832 Parliament had passed a Reform Act that gave the vote to many middle-class men in the towns, but the working man still had none, and the disappointment was bitter. In 1838 a group of London workmen published the People's Charter, which asked for six things, among them a vote for every man and a secret ballot. Millions of names were signed to petitions in 1839, 1842 and 1848, and Parliament turned each one away. The movement, called Chartism, faded after 1848, yet five of its six demands later became law.

Change came slowly through other doors. Bread was dear because the Corn Laws taxed foreign grain for the benefit of landowners, and in 1846 Prime Minister Robert Peel repealed them. Two men then dominated the later years: Benjamin Disraeli, a witty novelist turned Conservative statesman, and William Gladstone, a deeply religious Liberal scholar. Disraeli pushed the Reform Act of 1867 through Parliament, giving the vote to many working men in the towns. Gladstone's government brought in the secret ballot in 1872 and passed the Act of 1884, which gave the vote to many men in the countryside. Women still had no vote at all.

Ireland suffered the worst disaster of the age. From 1845 the potato, the main food of the poor, rotted in the fields year after year. Roughly a million people died of hunger and disease, and roughly a million more sailed away, many of them to America. Many Irish people felt that help from London came too slowly, and the bitterness lasted. Gladstone tried to give Ireland a parliament of its own, but his Home Rule bills of 1886 and 1893 both failed.

Abroad, Britain's power grew. In India the East India Company had ruled large regions for about a hundred years. In 1857 Indian soldiers in the Company's army rose in revolt, and the rising spread across the north. After it was put down, the Crown took over the government of India in 1858, and in 1877 Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India. English was already becoming the language of higher teaching there. In 1835 Thomas Babington Macaulay had argued that colleges should teach through English, and in 1857 the first universities opened at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. English literature was taught in Indian classrooms while the Victorian novel was at its height.

Social life

As the towns swelled, society sorted itself into classes. At the top stood landowners and aristocrats. Below them rose a large middle class of merchants, factory owners, clerks, teachers and clergymen, and below that came the working class of mills, mines, docks and farms. The middle class set the tone of the age. It prized hard work, thrift, church-going, tidy homes and careful speech, a set of habits that came to be called respectability. Disraeli, in his novel Sybil (1845), said that England had become two nations, the rich and the poor, who knew nothing of each other.

Inside the home the father was master. The mother was expected to be gentle, pure and devoted, an ideal that Coventry Patmore named in his poem The Angel in the House, begun in 1854. The law gave a wife very little. Until 1870 whatever a married woman earned belonged to her husband, and only the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 began to change that. John Stuart Mill argued in The Subjection of Women (1869) that such rules were unjust. A woman from a respectable family who had to earn her bread had few choices, and one of them was to become a governess in someone else's house, as Charlotte Brontë did and as her heroine Jane Eyre does.

The poor met a harder world. In 1834 a new Poor Law had decided that a healthy man who asked for help must enter a workhouse, where life was kept grim on purpose so that nobody would choose it without real need. Dickens attacked this idea in Oliver Twist. Children as young as eight worked underground in mines until the Mines Act of 1842 banned women, girls and boys under ten from such work. Schools were few until the Education Act of 1870 set up board schools, and in 1880 attendance became compulsory for children from five to ten.

The towns were dirty and dangerous. Cholera, carried by foul water, killed thousands, and in 1854 the doctor John Snow traced one outbreak in Soho to a single street pump. In the hot summer of 1858 the smell from the river Thames, into which London's sewage flowed, grew so bad that Parliament itself was disturbed, and the engineer Joseph Bazalgette was given the task of building a great system of sewers. Slowly, the Victorian conscience, the feeling that such misery was a shame to a rich country, began to turn into law.

Economic life

Britain had begun to make goods by machine in the century before, and in the Victorian years the change reached every corner of life. Railways led the way. The first steam railway between two great towns, Liverpool and Manchester, had opened in 1830. In the 1840s a wild rush of investors paid for new lines all over the country, and journeys that once took days now took hours. Coal, iron and cotton poured out of the northern towns, and Britain came to be called the workshop of the world.

In 1851 the country showed itself off. Prince Albert's idea of a great exhibition of the world's industry took shape in Hyde Park inside the Crystal Palace, a vast hall of iron and glass designed by Joseph Paxton, a gardener who had built greenhouses for the Duke of Devonshire. Queen Victoria opened the Great Exhibition on 1 May 1851, and over six million visits were made before it closed in October. The census taken in the same year showed something new: for the first time, more than half the people of England and Wales lived in towns.

Behind the glitter lay the new industrial cities, with their smoke, crowded streets and long hours. Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham swelled at astonishing speed. Dickens named his imaginary factory town Coketown in Hard Times (1854). The journalist Henry Mayhew walked the streets of London from 1849, asking street-sellers how they lived, and his reports grew into London Labour and the London Poor (1851). Good years were followed by bad ones. Workers joined unions, which won legal protection in 1871, and from the 1870s Britain's lead was challenged by Germany and the United States, whose factories were catching up.

Religion

Britain in 1837 was a deeply Christian country. The Church of England stood at the centre, with Methodists, Baptists and other Nonconformists beside it and Catholics as a small minority. Sunday was kept quiet, and the Bible was read in most homes. Yet the first cracks had come before the Queen's reign. In 1833 a group of Oxford churchmen, among them John Keble and John Henry Newman, began the Oxford Movement, which asked the Church of England to remember its older Catholic roots. In 1845 Newman himself left the Church of England and joined the Church of Rome, and the news shocked many people.

Then science added a heavier blow. The geologist Charles Lyell had shown in his Principles of Geology (1830-33) that the earth was far older than a literal reading of the Bible allowed. German scholars were studying the Bible as a book written by human hands, and in 1846 a young woman named Mary Ann Evans, later known as George Eliot, translated one of their boldest works, David Strauss's Life of Jesus, into English. In 1859 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which explained the variety of living things by natural selection rather than by separate acts of creation. Ten years later T. H. Huxley made up the word 'agnostic' for a person who holds that God cannot be known.

The poets felt the shock first. Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850) was written before Darwin's book, yet it already trembled at a nature that seemed careless of life. Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach' (1867) heard the 'Sea of Faith' draining away like a tide. The Victorians called what they felt a crisis of faith, and it became one of the great themes of their books.

Literature in this age

The reading public and the language

More people could read than ever before. Schools, cheaper paper and steam-driven presses brought books and newspapers within reach of families who had never owned them, and when the tax on newspapers ended in 1855, cheap papers multiplied. The English of these years was fully modern. Its vocabulary grew with science, trade and empire, and words from India and other far lands passed into everyday speech. Writers could also catch the way people really talked. Elizabeth Gaskell let her mill workers speak in Lancashire dialect, and Thomas Hardy later did the same for the farm people of his made-up Wessex.

How books reached readers

Most families could not afford to buy a novel, so publishers found other roads to them. One was the monthly part. Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers began in March 1836 as a story sold in shilling instalments, and its success made him famous before the Queen's reign began. Soon magazines such as Dickens's Household Words (1850) and the Cornhill Magazine (1860), whose first editor was William Makepeace Thackeray, printed novels in weekly or monthly slices. A writer who worked this way wrote chapter by chapter, ended each part on a question and heard the readers' reaction while the story was still unfinished.

The other road was the lending library. In 1842 Charles Edward Mudie opened a library in London that lent books for one guinea a year, one volume at a time. Mudie wanted books fit for the middle-class family, and he bought them in large numbers. Publishers therefore printed new novels in three volumes at thirty-one shillings and sixpence, a price that kept private buyers away but suited the library, which could divide a single novel among three borrowers. Authors learned to stretch their plots to fill the 'three-decker'. The habit lasted until 1894, when the great libraries stopped buying at that price.

Poetry

The poets who came after the Romantics inherited their gift of feeling but not their confidence. William Wordsworth, the last great Romantic, became Poet Laureate in 1843, and when he died in 1850 the post passed to Alfred Tennyson, by then the most admired poet in the country.

Tennyson's fame grew out of a grief. Born in Lincolnshire in 1809, he made a close friend at Cambridge, Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly in Vienna in 1833 at the age of twenty-two. Tennyson spent years turning his sorrow into In Memoriam A.H.H., published in 1850. The poem begins in mourning and moves, through doubt, toward a hard-won hope, and in one famous section it describes nature as 'red in tooth and claw', a world that does not care for the single life. In 1854 Britain was fighting Russia in the Crimean War, and newspapers reported a blunder at Balaclava, where a brigade of light cavalry rode into the Russian guns. Tennyson turned the news into 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', which schoolchildren learned by heart. His long retelling of the Arthur legend, Idylls of the King, appeared between 1859 and 1885.

Robert Browning took a different road. Instead of speaking in his own voice, he gave voice to other people. In 'My Last Duchess' (1842) a single speaker talks to a silent listener and, without meaning to, shows what kind of man he is. The form is called the dramatic monologue, and Browning's long poem The Ring and the Book (1868-69) uses it to tell the story of a Roman murder case from many points of view. His own life reads like a tale. In 1845 he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett, a poet who lived in poor health in her father's house in London. They married in secret in 1846 and went to Italy. Her Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) are love poems written while he courted her, and Aurora Leigh (1856) tells in verse the story of a woman who chooses to be a poet.

Matthew Arnold earned his living for thirty-five years as an inspector of schools and also served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. His poems are quiet, measured and sad. 'Dover Beach' (1867) sets a calm night by the sea beside the thought that faith is withdrawing like the tide, and it ends by asking the listener to be true, since the world offers no other certainty. In 1859 Edward FitzGerald published a free English version of the Persian Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which became one of the best-loved poems of the age.

In 1848 a few young painters and poets formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, named for their love of the clear detail of art before Raphael. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was both painter and poet. His sister Christina's Goblin Market (1862) tells how a girl saves her sister from the poison of goblin fruit. A. C. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (1866) shocked readers with its open sensuality.

The boldest experimenter lived and died almost unknown. Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest, died in 1889 with his poems unpublished, and his friend Robert Bridges brought them out in 1918. Hopkins used what he called sprung rhythm, which counts only the stressed syllables in a line, and his poems sound closer to the twentieth century than to the nineteenth. A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad (1896) closed the century with short, bitter-sweet songs of country youth.

The novel

Poetry won admiration, but the novel won the nation. Readers wanted stories about people like themselves, set in streets and homes they knew, and novelists gave them realism, a faithful picture of ordinary life. Most of these novels were told by a narrator who knew everything and was not shy of praising, scolding and explaining.

Charles Dickens was the master. In 1824, when he was twelve, his father was sent to the Marshalsea debtors' prison and the boy was put to work pasting labels on pots of boot-blacking, a shame he never forgot. The memory runs through his books. Oliver Twist (1837-39) follows an orphan from the workhouse into London's criminal underworld. David Copperfield (1849-50) draws on his own childhood. Bleak House (1852-53) sets a lawsuit that never ends in the heart of foggy London. Hard Times (1854) attacks a school and a factory town that value only facts and figures. Great Expectations (1860-61) follows a poor boy whose dream of becoming a gentleman teaches him painful lessons. Dickens read from his books to huge audiences, and when he died in 1870 his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was unfinished. Beside him stood Thackeray, whose Vanity Fair (1847-48), subtitled 'A Novel without a Hero', laughs at people who climb in society by any means.

In 1847 two books by unknown authors appeared: Jane Eyre by Currer Bell and Wuthering Heights by Ellis Bell. They were the work of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, daughters of a clergyman in the Yorkshire village of Haworth, who had chosen men's names because women who wrote were not always taken seriously. Jane Eyre tells in its heroine's own voice how a poor orphan and governess insists on being treated as an equal. Wuthering Heights is a tale of wild love and revenge on the moors. Their sister Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) shows a woman who leaves a cruel husband.

Elizabeth Gaskell, the wife of a Manchester minister, took readers into the mill towns. Mary Barton (1848) describes the hunger of cotton workers, and North and South (1854-55) brings a southern clergyman's daughter face to face with northern factory owners. Her life of her friend Charlotte Brontë appeared in 1857. Novels like these, which looked hard at the poverty of industrial England, were later called 'Condition of England' novels.

George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819-80), brought deep thought to the novel. She began writing fiction in her late thirties, and Adam Bede (1859) made her famous. Her masterpiece, Middlemarch (1871-72), subtitled 'A Study of Provincial Life', follows several people in an English town through the choices that make or mar their lives. Her own life was not conventional. From 1854 she lived with George Henry Lewes, who was legally married to another woman, and some respectable people turned away from her.

Thomas Hardy belongs to the last third of the age. Born in Dorset in 1840, he trained as an architect before he turned to writing. His novels are set in Wessex, a made-up region based on the south-west of England: Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895). His people are crushed by chance, class and rigid rules about marriage and religion. After the storm of angry reviews that greeted Jude, Hardy wrote no more novels and went back to poetry.

Meanwhile the novel kept finding new ground. The 1860s brought the sensation novel, in which secrets and crimes break into respectable homes, as in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859-60) and The Moonstone (1868), an early detective story. The last years of the century brought Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet (1887), by Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Rudyard Kipling wrote of India in Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), and Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, first printed in 1890, told of a handsome young man whose portrait ages while he stays young.

Essays and ideas

Prose that was not fiction carried the age's arguments. Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish historian and thundering moralist, warned in Past and Present (1843) that a rich nation was letting its poor go hungry, and the phrase 'Condition of England question', which he had used in 1839, became a name for the problem. John Stuart Mill defended the freedom of the individual in On Liberty (1859). John Ruskin began by writing about painting, in Modern Painters (from 1843), and then turned to the dignity of work and the true meaning of wealth in Unto This Last (1860), a book that in 1904 would change the life of a young lawyer in South Africa named Mohandas Gandhi. John Henry Newman, after leaving the Church of England, told the story of his own mind in Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). Darwin and Huxley made science readable for ordinary people, and Walter Pater turned the study of art into a kind of poetry.

Drama

Drama was the weak child of the age. Until 1843 only two London theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, were allowed to stage serious spoken plays, and the others filled their stages with music, spectacle and melodrama, plays of villains and virtuous heroines. The Theatre Regulation Act of 1843 ended that rule, and in the following decades the theatre slowly won back the middle class. T. W. Robertson's Caste (1867) put ordinary rooms and ordinary speech on the stage. W. S. Gilbert and the composer Arthur Sullivan delighted audiences with comic operas such as H.M.S. Pinafore (1878) and The Mikado (1885), and the actor Henry Irving made the Lyceum Theatre a place of dignity.

Then ideas arrived from abroad. Henrik Ibsen's plays about hidden lies in respectable families reached London in the 1880s. Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893) was a serious 'problem play', and Oscar Wilde's brilliant comedies, from Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) to The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), made audiences laugh at the manners they lived by. In 1892 a young Irishman named George Bernard Shaw staged his first play, Widowers' Houses, and the great revival of English drama in the twentieth century was about to begin.

Criticism and scholarship

The Victorians were among the first English readers to think hard about what criticism is for, and Matthew Arnold gave the age its main answer. In 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time' (1864) he said that a critic should seek out and make known the best that has been thought and known in the world. In Culture and Anarchy (1869) he looked at English society and named its upper class the Barbarians, its middle class the Philistines and its working class the Populace, and he urged all of them to pursue 'culture', a steady effort to become wiser and more humane. In 'The Study of Poetry' (1880) he foretold that poetry would more and more take the place of failing religion, and he proposed that readers test new poems against lines of the great poets, which he called touchstones.

John Ruskin taught that the art of a nation shows its moral health. In The Stones of Venice (1851-53) he praised the medieval stone carvers who had been free to shape their work and condemned the machine labour of his own day. Walter Pater, writing about the art of the Italian Renaissance in 1873, ended his book by urging readers to live each passing moment as fully as possible. Young admirers took this as the creed of 'art for art's sake', which Oscar Wilde carried to its limits.

Later scholars studied the age from many sides. Walter Houghton's The Victorian Frame of Mind (1957) described its habits of thought, such as earnestness, doubt and hero-worship. Raymond Williams, in Culture and Society (1958), traced how writers from Carlyle to Arnold used the word 'culture' as a protest against industrial life. F. R. Leavis, in The Great Tradition (1948), praised George Eliot as one of the few great English novelists. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) read Jane Eyre as a story of women's anger, with the mad Bertha Mason as Jane's dark double. Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots (1983) showed how Darwin's ideas and Victorian storytelling shaped each other. Postcolonial critics asked what lies behind the comfortable homes of these books. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in 'Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism' (1985), and Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism (1993), looked at the part that empire plays in novels such as Jane Eyre and Kipling's Kim.

How the age ends

By the 1880s the confidence of the middle years was fading. Trade was no longer as sure as in the days of the Great Exhibition, rivals were rising abroad, and writers could see cracks under the comfortable surface. The Fabian Society, formed in 1884, hoped to bring in socialism by gradual steps. The great dock strike of 1889 showed that unskilled workers could organise, and in 1900 unions and socialist groups formed the Labour Representation Committee, which later became the Labour Party.

A mood known by the French phrase fin de siècle spread among young writers and artists. They looked down on respectability, loved beauty for its own sake and enjoyed shocking their elders. Their magazine The Yellow Book (1894) carried the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. Their favourite was Oscar Wilde, whose plays were the delight of London. In 1895 Wilde was convicted under a law that made love between men a crime and was sent to prison for two years with hard labour. He left a broken man and died in Paris on 30 November 1900. In the same decade the 'New Woman', an educated and independent woman who wanted more than marriage, became a figure in novels such as Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893).

Imperial pride reached its height and then began to crack. In 1897 London celebrated the Queen's Diamond Jubilee with soldiers from every part of the empire, and Kipling wrote 'Recessional', a poem warning that the empire's pride could pass away like the glory of older empires. Two years later, in October 1899, war broke out in South Africa. Dutch-speaking settlers called Boers ran two republics there, gold had been found in their land, and Britain wanted control. The war dragged on until 1902 and cost far more in lives and money than anyone had expected. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) looked at imperial rule with grim eyes.

On 22 January 1901 Victoria died at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, and her son became Edward VII. The age was over, but its questions about faith, class, the place of women and the price of empire passed to the next century. Thomas Hardy marked the moment in 'The Darkling Thrush', first printed in the last days of 1900. In the poem the old century lies like a corpse in a frozen landscape, and a frail old thrush sings out in joy. Hardy leaves open whether the bird knows some hope that he does not.

Writers and works

Quick revision - 50 points

Quick quiz - 25 questions

Tap an answer to see at once if it is right. You do not need to log in.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Abrams, M. H., and Stephen Greenblatt, general editors. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8th ed., W. W. Norton, 2006.
• Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Smith, Elder, 1869.
• Beer, Gillian. Darwin's Plots. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983.
• Briggs, Asa. The Age of Improvement, 1783-1867. Longman, 1959.
• Drabble, Margaret, editor. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th ed., Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Smith, Elder, 1857.
• Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. Yale University Press, 1979.
• Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870. Yale University Press, 1957.
• Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition. Chatto and Windus, 1948.
• Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Chatto and Windus, 1993.
• Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. 3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 'Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.' Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, 1985, pp. 243-61.
• Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780-1950. Chatto and Windus, 1958.

Afsar Khan, Ph.D. English