Victorian Politics: key words

WHIGLIBERAL

TORYCONSERVATIVE

CHARTIST

ABOLITIONIST

SOCIALIST

TOWARDS A FAIRER SOCIETY...

1832 FIRST REFORM BILL(franchise extended, rotten boroughs)

1830s and 1840s Slavery abolished in the EmpirePoor Law Amendment, workhousesMines ActRepeal of Corn LawsTen Hours’ Act

1867 SECOND REFORM BILL(franchise extended to city workers)

1860S AND 1870SSanitary Act, improvement of health conditionsUniversal elementary educationUniversities open to men of all creedsLegalization of Trade UnionsSecret Ballot in all elections

1884 THIRD REFORM BILL(franchise extended to all male workers)

1884 Fabian Society (English Socialism)

1892 Independent Labour Party

An exploding population

Reverend MalthusAn Essay on the Principle of Population Six editions between 1798 and 1826

UTILITARIANISM(the greatest happiness of the greatest number)

Jeremy BenthamJohn Stuart Mill

DARWINISMSurvival of the fittestDescent of man → religious doubt

WORKING CONDITIONS +REDUCTIVE AND MECHANISTIC MODEL OF SOCIETYwere denounced by writers and intellectuals

Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844

Two examples in literature:

→ Condition-of-England novels→ Medievalism

Three Condition-of-England novels

Benjamin Disraeli Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845)

Charles Dickens Hard Times (1854)

Elizabeth Gaskell North and South (1854-55)

Why the Middle Ages?

‘Popular antiquarianism, and the romances of Sir Walter Scott, had enabled readers for the first time to imagine a DISTANT HISTORICAL PAST neither classical nor biblical but PART OF NATIONAL HISTORY, and to engage with an open mind in an imaginative comparison of such a past with the present state of society’

(Michael Alexander, Medievalism, 2007, pp. 84-85)

Nineteenth-Century Medievalism

Religion:Attempt to revive the Sacramental religion of the Middle Ages(Cardinal Newman)

Arts and Decoration:Architecture (A. W. Pugin)Medieval festivals and tournaments

Social Reform:Dignity of individual workRural vs industrial life(Thomas CarlyleJohn Ruskin) Pre-Raphaelites

Arts and Crafts Movement

The dignity of work, art, craftsmanship

Ford Madox Brown, Work, 1852-65

Connections between

Medievalism and Socialism

John RuskinWilliam Morris

Thomas CarlyleA famous excerpt from Past and Present (1834)

Gurth, born thrall to Cederic the Saxon, has been greatly pitied. [..] Gurth, with the brass collar round his neck, tending Cederic’s pigs in the glades of the wood, is not what I call and exemplar of human felicity: but Gurth, with the sky above him, with the free air and tinted boscage and umbrage round him, and in him at least the certainty of supper and social lodging when he came home;

Gurth to me seems happy, in comparison with many a Lancashire and Buckinghamshire man of these days, not born thrall of anybody! [...] Gurth had superiors, inferiors, equals. – Gurth is now ‘emancipated’ long since; has what we call ‘Liberty’. Liberty, I am told, is a divine thing. Liberty when it becomes the ‘Liberty to die by starvation’ is not so divine!

THE PRESS

Eighteenth-century famous publicationThe Spectator, The Tatler (Addison and Steele)The Rambler, The Idler (Samuel Johnson)The Gentleman’s Magazine

Nineteenth century=Explosion of the Press

Since the beginning of the century:The TimesThe (Manchester) GuardianSunday PapersRadical Pamphlets

Mid-century → New Journalism

1880s → London capital of the press