The Victorian Age

The Victorian Age

Along with the Tudors, this is probably the most iconic age of Britain.  So many of our current moral and ethical standards come directly from the Victorian era, and the older ones among us may remember talking to real Victorians in our grandparents and great grandparents.

Beginning in 1837 with her ascension to the throne, the young Queen Victoria ruled until 1901.  That’s almost 64 years!  An incredible record, making her the longest serving monarch until our most recent Queen, Queen Elizabeth II, broke it in 2015.  Her influence and reputation changed Britain’s status around the world, making us a true world power.

Perhaps because it is only just over a hundred years ago, the Victorian era has affected the modern world in an immeasurable way.  Our ideas on empire and colonisation, trade and industry, science and engineering, workers’ rights and welfare, and what it means to be British are all massively influenced by the Victorian age.

When Victoria ascended to the throne, the industrial revolution was in full force.  The general population was moving away from traditional countryside occupations and into the cities to power the textile mills, engineering plants and factories.  Under Victoria great leaps were made in science and engineering, alongside advances in religion, social structure, and politics.  New movements in art and literature brought many of our great modern classics, and right around the world people were moving into a new era of scientific, religious and social enlightenment.

Even today many people harken back to Victorian values, ethics and morals as being the way forward.  A belief in the power of hard work, and being able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps to achieve a better life, is an inherently Victorian attitude.  Self-reliance and moral fortitude were considered paramount and the stiff upper lip became the trademark of all that was British.  But how could people with such self-proclaimed morality and righteousness send children up chimneys and into mines to work?   Attitudes were starting to change, however, and great public works and reforms were put in place that began to change the social structure of the country.  They might not be considered pleasant by today’s standards, but being in the workhouse at least stopped you starving to death on the streets if you had no other way to survive!

The British Empire might have been great for Britain, was it great for the rest of the world?  The largest the world has ever known, they said the sun never set on the British Empire.  Because of it’s vast global reach, it was always daytime somewhere in the Empire that ranged from Canada to Australia and New Zealand, India to parts of China, Africa and the Caribbean, various islands in the great Pacific and Indian oceans, and countries in the Middle East and central Asia.  The Empire gave Britain unparalleled access to resources and trade that made her the richest country in the world, but to the detriment of the native people of those colonised lands.  Today many countries that we classify as “developing” are still suffering the results of arbitrary borders, resource depletion and lack of a stable native political system, resulting from their time as colonies under the British and other European Empires.

The Victorian age is just bursting with fascinating questions and angles from which to explore.  For example, how could an age with such scientific advances as Darwin’s groundbreaking theories, Thomas Edison’s light bulb and Brunel’s engineering feats also have such an obsession with the supernatural?  Ghosts, spirit mediums and seances were all hugely popular in Victorian times and the obsession was reflected in classic literature by famous authors like Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde.  Science Fiction also began to emerge as a genre with Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson penning some of their most famous works.

The Victorians also had a national obsession with exploration throughout the Empire and the rest of the world.  You only have to go to the British Museum to see how many artefacts were brought back from Egypt, Greece, the Middle East, India and the farther flung outposts of the Empire.  Adventure and exploration ignited the imagination of Victorian children were brought up on a diet of Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll and H. Rider Haggard.