The Victorian age

The Victorian age usually covers in literary histories a period of time longer than the actual reign of Queen Victoria, stretchinf from 1832 to 1902.

This is a period of expansion and prosperity, of industrial development and unceasing scientific and technological progress. England enjoyed several decades of unequalled wealth and power, and a new wave of optimism began to sweep over the country.

The process of industrialisation, started in the eighteen century, reached the height.

The Chartist Movement started in 1837 and ended in 1848. It aim was to obtain full democratic participation of the working classes in politics. This group was composed by radicals and workers, who in 1839 presented to Parliament a document called 'People's Charter'.

But the Charter failed and his objectives were taken again by the Reform Bill and by the Trade Union Act, which finally sanctioned the legality and importance of the Trade Union Movement.

The Corn-Laws were reason of discontent in workers and middle-class people, because they fixed a too hight price for the foreign corn. Infact, these ones were imposed during Napoleonic Wars to protect British agriculture and never more repealed.

A policy of free trade was adopted by the Prime Minister Peel, and it was supported bt industrial middle class. Because of the limited foreign competition, there was no need to impose tariffs to protect English manufacturers.

From 1854 till 1856 England together with France was engaged in the Crimean War to check Russia's expansion. From Waterloo, for Britain this has been the only international conflict during the century; but this did not touche people at home very much.

British colonisation of East and West Africa dates back to the 1880 and at the end of the century covered a quarter of the earth's landsurface and a third of its population.

England also tried to enlarge Indian territories, but this caused the Indian Mutiny.

Great Britain underwent a gradual process of democratization; know as Oxford Movement, composed by a group of Catholics who asked some reforms in favour of the Church of Rome.

England passed from an agricultural country to an industrial one. This caused a migration of rural people to the industrial areas in search of jobs. So population in industrial cities as London doubled and more people lived in towns and cities than in the countryside.

People in cities lived in intolerable situation, in bad sanitary condition that contributed to the diffusion of typhus and cholera.

Workers lived in extreme poverty and had to work sometimes up to 14 or 16 hours. Also women and children were employed in harmful and at hight risk occupations. There were two nations: one of the poors and the other one of the rich.

This period marked the triumph of the industrial middle classes, with their confidence in progress, their belief in the theory of laissez-faire in economics and utilitarianism in philosophy, their generic philanthropism and sentimentalism, their conventional religious faith and their morality observant of exterior forms and conventions characterised by a prudery that often bordered on the ridiculous.

Their values were respectability, good manners, hard work, probity, family, the unquestioned father's authority. Manners and language became very sober, and word connected with sex was considered a taboo.