FIRST LECTURE

The Victorian Age, named after the long reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) – is the age of the British Empire, a significant national age for Britain, which had become The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in 1801. Geopolitically speaking, the British Empire came to be in control of 1/3 of the world during the 19th century – with possessions on all the continents (Australia and New Zealand, several Islands in the Pacific West Indies, India, which began as a colony of the merchants from the East India Company and turned into a Crown possession in 1877, when Queen Victoria became Empress of India; Canada, forty times the sizes of Britain in North America; in Africa, Egypt and Nigeria to the North and South Africa at the southern tip of the continent, completely British and defeated after the Boer Wars of the century’s last decades.

Four keywords can be used to begin the economic, political and sociological description of Britain in the nineteenth century: wealth, capitalism, democracy and socialism. Wealth was produced thanks to the scientific and technological advances, which enabled Victorian man to control nature and increase the living standard of the rich, in accordance with the ideas of the classical economist Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Capitalism, the economy based on capital, rested on the accumulation of wealth as a sure path to progress. It was made possible by the massive scientific and technological advances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Zirra, vol. I, 9,10) that led to the creation of a huge, all-powerful market. The main issues of nineteenth century politics were to strengthen the free market (and the British Empire possessions essentially contributed to this) to enfranchise the men of property and turn them into mature, responsible citizens with equal rights and powers – moreover, by granting them the power to consume an increasing variety of goods. Victorian middle-class democracy, which was modern because, by comparison to Athenian democracy, it was aimed at creating a perfect middle-class establishment. Though modern democracy incorporated some of the revolutionary principles for which people had died in America and France in 1777 and 1789, respectively, in Britain1, it was actually carried out in peaceful confrontation, and in fact in cooperation, by the two political parties of the nineteenth century: the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party. (The following paragraphs reformulate the material available in Zirra, vol. 1,10-12)Between the two of them, they carried out the reforms which brought about the modernization of Britain: the electoral and free-market reforms, firstly, and then generally social, religious , urban and cultural reforms, for example the reforms in education. The first electoral reform, the Reform Bill2 of 1832 enfranchised male owners of property whose annual income

1 ‘England’ is an incorrect way of referring to Britain, in the nineteenth century, just as today: the country’s name is the UK, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, in the nineteenth century, and of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in the twentieth century. The citizens are formally ‘the British’/’the British people’, and informally, the Brits. The contrast between ‘British’ and ‘English’ comes from that between politics and linguistics/literary culture, ‘British’ being politically correct, because it naturally includes the inhabitants of the kingdoms of Wales and Scotland and Ireland. People study English in Britain and abroad, in (high)school or when they are at university.2 Because a law is just a Bill while it is discussed in the British parliament and before it receives the Royal assent to become a statute, the name ‘the Reform Bill’ as retained by history indicates the serious debates preceding its

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was at least 10 pounds, the next one, of 1867, doubled the number of middle-class voters and the third, in 1884, secured the universal male enfranchisement. In 1846, a law that put an end to the British monopoly on the corn market was the repeal of the Corn Laws and by 1860, a full-fledged free market had become operative in Britain. Other reforms that modernized British society and made it resemble nowadays’ society were the Catholic Emancipation (which became effective after 1830), which gave the Catholics equal opportunities, civil rights and access to the middle-class professions (of lawyers, doctors, professors), the 1870 Education Act, which generalized literacy by making primary education compulsory and setting up English State Schools all over the Empire, the 1871 Repeal of the Test Acts. The last of these reforms gave free access to prestigious universities ( Cambridge and Oxford) to non-Anglicans and opened their way to elite careers in the establishment. The cultural campaigns conducted in the Victorian age, which we can read about at large in the essays and fictional literature preserved in anthologies, indicate that culture was regarded as one of the important levers for social emancipation and control. This leads to the paradox that the Victorian first mass age had a high-culture. It can be stated without exaggerating that the Victorian society was held together by quality press circulated in broadsheets: one magazine which carried parliamentary reports, essays, poems and fiction, for example, was read by one hundred thousand people. Apart from the gentry, after the Education Act, even the servants in the genteel households had access to the literature read at home. In the Victorian genteel households literature was originally read on Sundays, after Church, as another instrument for the generally moral education and entertainment. In general, it is fair to say that the British Liberals were keener on home reforms, as they were partisans of the little England policy. At their head was William Ewart Gladstone, four times Prime Minister (between 1868-74, 1880-85, 1885-6 and 1892-3). One famous example of the Liberal foreign policy was the campaign for putting an end to the Union between Ireland and Great Britain through the Irish Home Rule bills unsuccessfully passed (debated) in 1886 and 1893, owing to the alliance between William Ewart Gladstone, nicknamed ‘The Old Man’, and the Irish uncrowned king, Charles Stuart Parnell. The Conservative Party was imperially minded, the partisan of the Bigger England policy, of wars and the investment policies implicit in them. The head of the Conservative Party was William Ewart Gladstone, in office as Prime Minister for one year in 1868 and between 1874-1880. He was also Queen Victoria’s friend, an elegant dandy and a writer. In his 1845 novel Sybil, or the two Nations (available on the portal of the Project Gutenberg on the net, in electronic form for anyone who may wish to read it), he introduced the idea that the rich and the poor were two separate British nations.

This point is proved by the last keyword announced at the beginning of the lecture: socialism. Throughout the nineteenth century, the lower classes were almost completely neglected by the leaders of the Victorian establishment and the non-interventionist state3. Among the few reforms which

adoption. This revolutionary measure turned the democratic masquerade practices and traditional political favoritism towards the modern, genuine political representation of wide masses of middle-class people. This meant the abolition of the so-called ‘rotten boroughs’, for example – fake constituencies that sent to parliament representatives of places on the map with no real population to represent.3 The non-interventionist state was a state committed to the principle of laissez-faire which bequeathed the political prerogative of the state to the entrepreneurial class (the capitalists) and allowed the invisible hand of the market, i.e., free competition, to rule undisturbed.

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regarded the poor in Early Victorianism was the1834 Poor Law Amendment, which created the workhouses, which resembled prisons more than asylums and in which were gathered (confined) the begging, underfed and overworked poor from the streets. The Factory Acts passed between 1833 and 1878, though, eliminated child labour and gross overworking. Moreover, there was no chance for substantially extending any modernization reforms to the people who were not represented in parliament as proved by the Chartist Movement. Between 1836 and 1848, several petitions or Charts drafted in perfect ignorance of the legal forms with which Parliament operated. Although they were endorsed by millions of signatures of people who gathered in long street-demonstrations (the 1840 Chart, for example was signed by over three million three hundred people), they were not taken into consideration by parliament because of their formal aspect and the civil rights claimed in them were not granted. The Chartist movement was a petition movement, which sent formally invalid petitions to parliament . The people’s charts (petitions) asked for : A vote for every man over the age of 21; A secret ballot; No property Payment for MPs (so poor men could serve); Constituencies of equal size; Annual elections for Parliament. The first general strike took place in Britain in 1842 and Trade Unionism became a steady movement between the 1860s and 1870s. No wonder, then, that the end of the nineteenth century saw the rise of two brands of socialism: radical or utopian socialism (which envisaged the complete abolition of property as a source of justice for a perfect modern age and as the only way for regenerating a society that reduced its people to mere mechanisms at the mercy of entrepreneurs) and Fabian (or moderate) socialism. The rise of socialism proved the limitations and actual injustice of modern, capitalistic and very partial democracy. It demonstrated that the material criteria for the general, average “greatest happiness of the greatest numbers” (as advocated by Jeremy Bentham at the end of the eighteenth century needed to be completed with virtues that the mercantile, capitalist world-order could not rise to. The failure of communism to right the wrongs of capitalism one century after the Victorian age, however, demonstrates the shortcomings of any modern utopia, be it capitalist or socialist. This is why the slow-pace, rational reformism which the Fabian socialists advocated and tried to implement in Britain seems to have more chances of success in principle because, though being moderate , pragmatic and corporatist in spirit, it does not destroy existing structures of social, economic and political life but tries to correct evils gradually while retaining the overall frames.

Examples of political reforms:

-of the three main electoral reforms, the third one, in 1884 brought about universal male enfranchisement

-the Liberal campaigns led by William Ewart Gladstone for granting autonomy to Ireland, in 1886 and 1893, when the Bill was defeated first in the Commons, then in the House of Lords brought him a majority in parliament

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Examples of free trade reforms:

-1846, the Repeal of the Corn Laws

Examples of social reforms

-civic reforms that removed social discrimination (disabilities) : 1830 the Catholic Emancipation (started in Ireland, which had a majority of Catholic population and had become part of the United Kingdom, in 1801); 1860 the Jews were also given equal rights (as a result of the fact that the Conservative Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli himself was a Jew)

-reforms that improved the general living standard: Public Health Acts, introduced between 1871 – 1875 which granted some measure of medical assistance to the poor; in the 1850s, reforms in the fields of public administration and municipal management

-reforms in education: the 1870 Education Act opened the way to generalised literacy in Britain by setting up state schools and unifying education throughout the British Empire; 1871, the abolition of university tests (the faith test, for Anglicanism) transformed the leading universities of Oxford and Cambridge into lay, metropolitan, ”universalist” universities.

Hard Times(1854) (chapter 5)

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.  It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.  It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.  It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned.  The rest of its features were voluntary, and they were these.

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You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful.  If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there—as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done—they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it.  The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs.  All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white.  The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction.  Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial.  The M’Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.

A town so sacred to fact, and so triumphant in its assertion, of course got on well?  Why no, not quite well.  No?  Dear me!

No.  Coketown did not come out of its own furnaces, in all respects like gold that had stood the fire.  First,

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