Chapter I. Victorian era. I. 1 Government and politics in the Victorian era

CHAPTER I. Victorian era.

I.1 Government and politics in the Victorian era
The Victorian era of the United Kingdom and its overseas Empire was the period of Queen Victoria's rule from June 1837 to January 1901. The era was preceded by the Georgian period and succeeded by the Edwardian period. Some scholars would extend the beginning of the period—as defined by a variety of sensibilities and political concerns that have come to be associated with the Victorians—back five years to the passage of the Reform Act 1832. This was a long period of prosperity for the British people, as profits gained from the overseas Empire, as well as from industrial improvements at home, allowed a large, educated middle class to develop.The era is often characterized as a long period of peace, known as the Pax Britannica, and economic, colonial, and industrial consolidation, temporarily disrupted by the Crimean War. In fact, Britain was at war every year during this period. Towards the end of the century, the policies of New Imperialism led to increasing colonial conflicts and eventually the Anglo-Zanzibar War and the Boer War. The empire's size doubled during the era. The latter half of the Victorian era roughly coincided with the first portion of the Belle Époque era of continental Europe and other non-English speaking countries within Europe. Domestically, the agenda was increasingly liberal with a number of shifts in the direction of gradual political reform and the widening of the voting franchise. The term Victorian morality is often used to describe the ethos of the period, which embraced sexual proprietary, hard work, honesty, thrift, a sense of duty and responsibility towards the less well off, provided that they deserved help (alcoholics and the work-shy did not). Anomalies existed, not least of all how the British treated their colonial subjects. Yet, sometimes unwittingly, the Victorians did much to create an increasingly inter-connected world, in which some people could speak of co-responsibility to make the world a better place. When Victorians spoke about justice, ending poverty or child-labor and about improving the quality of life, even if their practice was often parochial, their vision was global. In the early part of the era the House of Commons was dominated by the two parties, the Whigs and the Tories. From the late 1850s onwards the Whigs became the Liberals even as the Tories became known as the Conservatives. These parties were led by many prominent statesmen including Lord Melbourne, Sir Robert Peel, Lord Derby, Lord Palmerston, William Gladstone, Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury. The unsolved problems relating to Irish Home Rule played a great part in politics in the later Victorian era, particularly in view of Gladstone's determination to achieve a political settlement. The Victorian era was a time of unprecedented population increase in England. One reason for the increase was that there was no catastrophic epidemic or famine in England or Scotland in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Ireland’s population decreased rapidly, primarily due to the Irish Potato Famine (1845–1849), from 8.2 million in 1841 to less than 4.5 million in 1901. Popular forms of entertainment varied by social class. Victorian Britain, like the periods before it, was interested in theater and the arts, and music, drama, and opera were widely attended. There were, however, other forms of entertainment. Gambling at cards in establishments popularly called casinos was 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 bands and 'The Bandstand' 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 changeable British weather. It was common to hear the sound of a brass band whilst strolling through parklands. At this time musical recording was still very much a novelty.Another form of entertainment involved 'spectacles' where paranormal events, such as hypnotism, communication with the dead (by way of mediumship or channelling), ghost conjuring 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. The impetus of the Industrial Revolution had already occurred, but it was during this period that the full effects of industrialization made themselves felt, leading to the mass consumer society of the twentieth century. The revolution led to the rise of railways across the country and great leaps forward in engineering, most famously by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.Another great engineering feat in the Victorian Era was the sewage system in London. It was designed by Joseph Bazalgette in 1858. He proposed to build 82 mi (132 km) of sewerage linked with over 1,000 mi (1,600 km) of street sewers. Many problems were found but the sewers were completed. After this, Bazalgette designed the Thames Embankment which housed sewers, water pipes and the London Underground. During the same period London's water supply network was expanded and improved, and gas reticulation for lighting and heating was introduced in the 1880s.During the Victorian era, science grew into the discipline it is today. In addition to the increasing professionalism of university science, many Victorian gentlemen devoted their time to the study of natural history. This study of natural history was most powerfully impacted by Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution first published in his book "On the Origins of Species" in 1859.Photography was realized in 1829 by Louis Daguerre in France and William Fox Talbot in the UK. By 1900, hand-held cameras were available.Although initially developed in the early years of the nineteenth century, gas lighting became widespread during the Victorian era in industry, homes, public buildings and the streets. The invention of the incandescent gas mantle in the 1890s greatly improved light output and ensured its survival as late as the 1960s. Hundreds of gasworks were constructed in cities and towns across the country. In 1882, incandescent electric lights were introduced to London streets, although it took many years before they were installed everywhere. Nineteenth-century Britain ²saw a huge population increase accompanied by rapid urbanization stimulated by the industrial revolution. The large numbers of skilled and unskilled people looking for work suppressed wages down to barely subsistence level. Available housing was scarce and expensive, resulting in overcrowding. These problems were magnified in London, where the population grew at record rates. Large houses were turned into flats and tenements, and as landlords failed to maintain these dwellings, slum housing developed. Kellow Chesney described the situation as follows "Hideous slums, some of them acres wide, some no more than crannies of obscure misery, make up a substantial part of the, metropolis... In big, once handsome houses, thirty or more people of all ages may inhabit a single room." (The Victorian Underworld) The Victorian era became notorious for employing young children in factories and mines and as chimney sweeps. Children were expected to help towards the family budget, often working long hours in dangerous jobs and low wages.^[7] Agile boys were employed by the chimney sweeps; small children were employed to scramble under machinery to retrieve cotton bobbins; and children were also employed to work in coal mines to crawl through tunnels too narrow and low for adults. Children also worked as errand boys, crossing sweepers, shoe blacks, or selling matches, flowers and other cheap goods.^[7] Many children got stuck in the chimneys that they were sweeping and eventually died. In factories it was not uncommon for children to lose limbs crawling under machinery to pick things up.Several Factory Acts were passed to prevent the exploitation of children in the workplace. Children of poor families would leave school at the age of eight and were then forced to go to work. School was not free at this time. Beginning in the late 1840s, major news organizations, clergymen and single women became increasingly concerned about prostitution, which came to be known as "The Great Social Evil." Although estimates of the number of prostitutes in London by the 1850s vary widely (in his landmark study, Prostitution, William Acton reported that the police estimated there were 8,600 in London alone in 1857), it is enough to say that the number of women working the streets became increasingly difficult to ignore. When the United Kingdom Census 1851 publicly revealed a 4 percent demographic imbalance in favor of women (i.e. 4 percent more women than men), the problem of prostitution began to shift from a moral/religious cause to a socio-economic one. The 1851 census showed that the population of Great Britain was roughly 18 million; this meant that roughly 750,000 women would remain unmarried simply because there were not enough men. These women came to be referred to as "superfluous women" or "redundant women," and many essays were published discussing what, precisely, ought to be done with them.While the Magdalene Asylums had been "reforming" prostitutes since the mid-eighteenth century, the years between 1848 and 1870 saw a veritable explosion in the number of institutions working to "reclaim" these "fallen women" from the streets and retrain them for entry into respectable society—usually for work as domestic servants. The theme of prostitution and the "fallen woman" (an umbrella term used to describe any women who had sexual intercourse out of wedlock) became a staple feature of mid-Victorian literature and politics. In the writings of Henry Mayhew, Charles Booth and others, prostitution began to be seen as a social problem.When Parliament passed the first of the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1864 (which allowed the local constabulary to force any woman suspected of venereal disease to submit to its inspection), Josephine Butler's crusade to repeal the CD Acts yoked the anti-prostitution cause with the emergent feminist movement. Butler attacked the long-established double standard of sexual morality.Prostitutes were often presented as victims in sentimental literature such as Thomas Hood's poem The Bridge of Sighs, Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Mary Barton and Dickens' novel Oliver Twist. The emphasis on the purity of women found in such works as Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House led to the portrayal of the prostitute and fallen woman as soiled, corrupted, and in need of cleansing.This emphasis on female purity was allied to the stress on the homemaking role of women, who helped to create a space free from the pollution and corruption of the city. In this respect the prostitute came to have symbolic significance as the embodiment of the violation of that divide. The double standard remained in force. Divorce legislation introduced in 1857 allowed for a man to divorce his wife for adultery, but a woman could only divorce if adultery was accompanied by cruelty. The anonymity of the city led to a large increase in prostitution and unsanctioned sexual relationships. Dickens and other writers associated prostitution with the mechanization and industrialization of modern life, portraying prostitutes as human commodities consumed and thrown away like refuse when they were used up. Moral reform movements attempted to close down brothels, something that has sometimes been argued to have been a factor in the concentration of street-prostitution in Whitechapel, in the East End of London, by the 1880s. The formal political system was a constitutional monarchy. It was in practice dominated by aristocratic men. The British constitution was (and is) unwritten and consists of a combination of written laws and unwritten conventions. At the national level, government consisted of the monarch and the two houses of Parliament, the House of Lords and the House of Commons. The monarchs during this period were Queen Victoria (1837–1901), preceded by King George IV (1820–30) and King William IV (1830–37) and followed by King Edward VII (1901–10) and King George V (1910–36). During the Victorian period, the House of Commons became the centre of government, the House of Lords lost power (though it remained influential until the Parliament Act of 1911), and the monarchy transformed into a symbol of the nation. The House of Commons consisted of about 600 men called members of Parliament (MPs), who were elected to represent the counties and boroughs of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. England had many more representatives than the other three nations, by virtue of its status as first among these four equals, the product of tradition as well as its greater political power and wealth. The upper house, the House of Lords, was populated principally by several hundred noblemen who had life tenures. Members of both houses were wealthy men. Formal national politics was dominated by two major parties, the Liberal Party and the Conservative (or Tory) Party. At the start of the period, MPs were elected by the half-million property-owning men (in a population of 21 million) who had the vote. In 1829 the vote was granted to Catholic men and in 1832, to most middle-class men; in 1867 and 1884 the franchise was extended to working-class men. Most women over age 30 got the right to vote in 1918. Full adult suffrage, with no property requirement, was achieved with the second Representation of the People Act (1928). This story of the expansion of the national electorate is important, but there is more to political participation than voting at the national level. Local politics were also important. And being denied a voice and access to institutions certainly did not render nonvoters indifferent to politics or to how power was wielded; they made their opinions on these known via demonstrations, petitions, and pamphlets.Important political events during this period included the abolition of slavery in the British Empire; the expansions of the franchise; working-class political activism, most notably Chartism; the rise of liberalism as the dominant political ideology, especially of the middle class; and the nationalization of Conservative and Liberal parties (and the emergence of the British Labour Party in 1906). The growth of the state and state intervention were seen in major acts that limited hours for factory workers and miners, in public health acts, and in the provision of elementary education by the state. Political conflicts between Ireland and Britain and the rise of Irish nationalism were also hallmarks of the era, as were women’s rights activism, which resulted in the Married Women’s Property Acts, the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, and the growth of education and employment options for women.³