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Victorian era

period of British history encompassing Queen Victoria's reign (1837-1901)

In the history of the United Kingdom, the Victorian era was the period of Queen Victoria's reign, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. The era followed the Georgian period and preceded the Edwardian period, and its later half overlaps with the first part of the Belle Époque era of Continental Europe.

Queen Victoria in 1859 by Winterhalter

Quotes

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  • One thing that strikes me when I think of Booth is the nonsense that is talked today about the poverty of the Victorian age. Why the Victorian age is so unpopular today very largely arises from the fact that, in spite of all its faults, there was among its great men, who were numerous, a faith in goodness: there was a moral earnestness and there was a sense of duty and a performance of duty.
    • Stanley Baldwin, speech to the Salvation Army William Booth Centenary Celebrations, London (10 April 1929), quoted in This Torch of Freedom (1935), pp. 106-107
  • In Victorian times business was seen as a romance and books by the score portrayed the lives of entrepreneurs both as gripping adventure stories and also as examples of high moral principle, dedication to public service and concern for others.
    • Ian Bradley, 'Saints amid the satanic mills', The Times (14 March 1987), p. 8
  • It is in the connection of the conflict with the Yankee...that we can perhaps best understand the South's unusual proneness to sentimentality.
    The root of the thing, obviously, was in the simple man... It was part and parcel, in fact, with his unrealism and romanticism, and grew as they grew. It gathered force, too, from the Zeitgeist, of course—from the great tide of sentimentality which, rolling up slowly through the years following the French Revolution, broke over the Western world in flooding fullness with the accession of Victoria to the throne of England. Nowhere, indeed, did this Victorianism, with its false feeling, its excessive nicety, its will to the denial of the ugly, find more sympathetic acceptance than in the South.
    • W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941; 1991), p. 82
  • During the last half of the 19th century there was a marked fall in the crime rate with a substantial decrease in both crimes of dishonesty and violence, and in the illegitimacy rate, and the beginnings of a fall in the incidence of drug and alcohol abuse. It was a period of striking moral reform in personal behaviour which transformed Britain from being a violent, dishonest and addicted society into a peaceable, law-abiding, respectable and essentially moral realm that endured for much of the 20th century.
    • Christie Davies, 'Moralization and Demoralization: A Moral Explanation for Changes in Crime, Disorder and Social Problems', in Digby Anderson (ed.), The Loss of Virtue: Moral Confusion and Social Disorder in Britain and America (1992), p. 3
  • British rates of recorded crime fell as markedly in the latter part of the 19th century as they have risen since. The overall incidence of serious offences recorded by the police in the 1890s was only about 60 per cent of what it had been in the 1850s and, given that the efficiency of the reporting and recording of crime was improving at the time, the real fall in the crime rate was probably far greater than that indicated by official statistics. Thus in 1900 Britain was not only a less violent and dishonest country than today, but also less violent and dishonest than it had been in the earlier part of the 19th century.
    • Christie Davies, 'Moralization and Demoralization: A Moral Explanation for Changes in Crime, Disorder and Social Problems', in Digby Anderson (ed.), The Loss of Virtue: Moral Confusion and Social Disorder in Britain and America (1992), p. 5
  • [A]n earlier generation of Britons succeeded in changing the character of their people and producing a diminution in the many forms of deviance that have reappeared and flourished in our own time, because they saw them as constituting not a social but a moral problem whose solution lay in the reform of personal conduct. One key agency in spreading and transmitting Gorer's "strict conscience and self-control" from being "a feature of a relatively small part of the population" to becoming "general throughout nearly the whole of society" was the Sunday school whose enrolments rose as the incidence of deviant behaviour fell in the late 19th century. Significantly, the numbers enrolled in and the influence of this institution then fell in the years prior to the reversal of the U-curve of deviance which has produced Britain's present high level of moral problems. There seems to be a clear inverse relationship between the rise and fall of the Sunday school...and the fall and rise of deviant behaviour.
    • Christie Davies, 'Moralization and Demoralization: A Moral Explanation for Changes in Crime, Disorder and Social Problems', in Digby Anderson (ed.), The Loss of Virtue: Moral Confusion and Social Disorder in Britain and America (1992), p. 10
  • The postulate that there was a link of some kind between the rise of the Sunday school and the original decline of deviance is reinforced by the geographical evidence as well as the aggregate changes over time. Wales, which historically had been one of the more violent and lawless parts of Britain, became in the later 19th century an especially peaceable and law-abiding place, characterised by temperance and a strict moral code.
    • Christie Davies, 'Moralization and Demoralization: A Moral Explanation for Changes in Crime, Disorder and Social Problems', in Digby Anderson (ed.), The Loss of Virtue: Moral Confusion and Social Disorder in Britain and America (1992), p. 10
  • No one will ever understand Victorian England who does not appreciate that among highly civilized...countries it was one of the most religious that the world has known. Moreover its particular type of Christianity laid a peculiarly direct emphasis upon conduct; for, though it recognized both grace and faith as essentials to salvation, it was in practice also very largely a doctrine of salvation by works. This type, which had come to dominate churchmen and nonconformists alike, may be called, using the term in a broad sense, evangelicalism... [I]t became after Queen Victoria's marriage practically the religion of the court, and gripped all ranks and conditions of society. After Melbourne's departure it inspired nearly every front-rank public man, save Palmerston, for four decades... [N]othing is more remarkable than the way in which evangelicalism in the broader sense overleaped sectarian barriers and pervaded men of all creeds... Even Disraeli, by nature as remote from it as Palmerston, paid every deference to it in politics, and conformed to all its externals in Hughenden church.
  • It is...beyond question that the century now expiring has exhibited since the close of its first quarter a period of unexampled activity both in legislative and in administrative changes; that these changes, taken in the mass, have been in the direction of true and most beneficial progress; that both the condition and the franchises of the people have made, in relation to the former state of things, an extraordinary advance; that of these reforms an overwhelming proportion have been effected by direct action of the Liberal party, or of statesmen such as Peel or Canning, ready to meet odium and to forfeit power for the public good; and that in every of 15 Parliaments the people of Scotland have decisively expressed their convictions in favour of this wise, temperate, and in every way remarkable policy.
    • William Ewart Gladstone to Sir John Cowan (1 July 1895), quoted in 'Mr. Gladstone's Farewell to Mid Lothian', The Times (4 July 1895), p. 6
  • During the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries the strict conscience and self-control, which had been a feature of a relatively small part of the English population, became general throughout nearly the whole of the society... The forces which led to this transformation in character are difficult to establish; although religious belief is not nowadays typical of the prosperous working class, it is possible that the evangelical missions of John Wesley, of whom it is said that he prevented the French Revolution reaching England, may have played a significant part in their time, particularly in the industrial Northern regions. So too may have done the gradual spread of universal education. On the basis of the evidence available to me, however, I should consider that the most significant factor in the development of a strict conscience and law-abiding habits in the majority of urban English men and women was the invention and development of the institution of the modern English police force.
  • One of the most impressive demonstrations of the increase in the law-abiding character of the English is the following table of the number of criminal commitments in the half century between 1841 and 1891. During this period serious offences decreased 60 per cent in volume, and 80 per cent relative to the increase of population. As can be seen, the really dramatic break in criminal commitments came in the decade 1851–1861. Police forces were first established all over England by the County and Borough Police Act of 1856.
  • To the degree Victorians succeeded in "bourgeoisifying" the ethos, they also democratized it. That ethos was not, to be sure, an exalted or heroic one. Hard work, sobriety, frugality, foresight—these were modest, mundane virtues, even lowly ones. But they were virtues within the capacity of everyone; they did not assume any special breeding, or status, or talent, or valor, or grace—or even money. They were common virtues within the reach of common people. They were, so to speak, democratic virtues.
    • Gertrude Himmelfarb, 'In Defense of the Victorians', The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Summer 1988), pp. 98-99
  • They were also liberal virtues. By putting a premium on ordinary virtues attainable by ordinary people, the ethos located responsibility within each individual. It was no longer only the exceptional, the heroic individual who was the master of his fate; every individual could be his own master. So far from promoting social control, the ethos had the effect of promoting self-control. This was at the heart of Victorian morality: self-control, self-help, self-reliance, self-discipline. A liberal society, the Victorians believed, depended upon a moral citizenry. The stronger the voluntary exercise of morality on the part of each individual—the more internalized that morality—the weaker need be the external, coercive instruments of the state. For the Victorians, morality served as a substitute for law, just as law was a substitute for force.
    • Gertrude Himmelfarb, 'In Defense of the Victorians', The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Summer 1988), p. 99
  • Britain under Queen Victoria was Europe's most successful polity since the early Roman Empire. In just 70 years it discovered and bequeathed to us a complete rail network, internal combustion engines, gas and electricity, wireless telegraphy, anaesthetics, public sanitation, mass education, worker protection, full employment, imperial security and democracy.
    • Simon Jenkins, 'An elegy for England', The Times (4 April 1998), p. 22
  • The gentleman of the nineteenth century had broken, once Victorianism loomed on the horizon, with the wild and liberalistic vagaries of his forefathers. His background was frequently middle class and in England it was the influence of the Low Church which molded his type. He was deadly afraid to be different. On the Continent it was compulsory military service and in England the public school which fostered the herd instinct. To be different was treason and indecency. The religious principles of old were replaced by taboos. The return to primitive society had begun.
  • Victorian historians too often depicted the past as an inevitable progress leading to the glorious present when Britain ruled the world. And French and German and Russian and American historians did much the same thing for their nations’ stories. Like epic poems, their books were filled with heroes and villains and stirring events. Such histories, says Michael Howard, the eminent British historian, sustain us in difficult times, but they are “nursery history.”
  • Take another look at the graph showing illegitimacy from the 1500s up to the present, and focus on the period from 1850–1900. It would be hard to find a time or place in which industrialisation and urbanisation were faster, more sweeping, or more wrenching than in Victorian England. And yet during that same period, illegitimacy went down, not up (crime also dropped, amazingly). The Victorian middle class was superbly efficient at propagating its values throughout society, and its success overcame the naturally disruptive forces of modernisation.
  • Now the Victorian Age, or the nineteenth century as a whole, was a great moral reformer... It proclaimed that men, even courtiers and noblemen, ought not to be drunken or dissolute or even corrupt, that politics were really concerned with the welfare of the people, that the rich had duties towards the poor. The transition from George IV and his unpleasing brothers to the young Queen and the Prince Consort was typical of a much wider change. When Lord Palmerston was caught chasing a maid of honour into her bedroom, the excuse made for him was: "Your Majesty should remember that he is a very old gentleman and accustomed to the manners of the late Court".
    • Gilbert Murray, 'The Civilization of the Nineteenth Century: Its Greatness and the Flaw which led to its Collapse', The Ordeal of This Generation: The War, the League and the Future (1929), p. 43
  • There was a re-birth of public spirit. Gentlemen ceased to take bribes. Justice became incorruptible... It has been observed that up to about 1820 the laws passed by Parliament had almost all been for the protection of the privileged few against the many; after that time they are predominantly for the protection of the nation as a whole against abuse and privilege. Instead of the ferocious defence of property, a spirit of sympathy and help to the oppressed begins to inspire legislation. The old revolutionary doctrine of the infinite perfectibility of mankind, which had set on fire the enthusiasm of Godwin, Shelley and Condorcet, passed in a milder and more reasonable form into the general imagination of the age.
    • Gilbert Murray, 'The Civilization of the Nineteenth Century: Its Greatness and the Flaw which led to its Collapse', The Ordeal of This Generation: The War, the League and the Future (1929), p. 44
  • Whether or no man might be made perfect, he certainly might be made better and happier than he is; and the conscious pursuit of that object became an accepted source of inspiration to politics and literature. With it went the conception that the necessary condition of the pursuit was freedom: set man free, let him have room to move and external conditions which do not starve or cramp him, and human nature of itself will strive to rise higher. This spirit shows itself in almost all the best English fiction of the period, from romantics like the Brontës, and realists, like George Eliot, to satirists, like Dickens and Thackeray. It had been utterly lacking in Fielding and Smollett, and even in Jane Austen. It shows itself in the immense increase of charitable institutions, of religious missions, of societies for the education of the people. There is no question of hypocrisy. To suppose there is, is the mere petulance of jealously. Shelley's or Gladstone's love of moral improvement was just as genuine as Falstaff's love of sack. But an age of moral earnestness seems in our own day to have been succeeded by an age of relaxation; and one can see in, for instance, such a book as Mr. Strachey's Eminent Victorians that the moral earnestness of Gladstone or Dr. Arnold is felt by the author to be a hateful quality and not easily to be forgiven.
    • Gilbert Murray, 'The Civilization of the Nineteenth Century: Its Greatness and the Flaw which led to its Collapse', The Ordeal of This Generation: The War, the League and the Future (1929), pp. 45-46
  • [T]he Victorian Age... cared more for life than for thought; consequently it produced abundant and fine life, while its thought was comparatively unambitious and aimed mainly at serving the practical purposes of life. It cared intensely for morals and little for metaphysics; a good deal for religion and scarcely at all for theology... It had an immense faith, a faith in goodness, in duty, in the future of mankind.
    • Gilbert Murray, 'The Civilization of the Nineteenth Century: Its Greatness and the Flaw which led to its Collapse', The Ordeal of This Generation: The War, the League and the Future (1929), p. 51
  • Between 1780 and 1850 the English ceased to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, riotous, cruel and bloodthirsty nations in the world and became one of the most inhibited, polite, orderly, tender-minded, prudish and hypocritical.
    • Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society (1969), p. 280
  • Meanwhile, it may with little fear of contradiction be asserted that there never was, in any nation of which we have a history, a time in which life and property were so secure as they are at present in England. The sense of security is almost everywhere diffused, in town and country alike, and it is in marked contrast to the sense of insecurity which prevailed even at the beginning of the present century. There are, of course, in most great cities some quarters of evil repute, in which assault and robbery are now and again committed. There is, perhaps, to be found a lingering and flickering tradition of the old sanctuaries and similar resorts. But any man of average stature and strength may wander about on foot and alone, at any hour of the day or the night, through the greatest of all cities and its suburbs, along the high roads, and through unfrequented country lanes, and never have so much as the thought of danger thrust upon him, unless he goes out of his way to court it.
    • Luke Owen Pike, A History of Crime in England, Illustrating the Changes of the Laws in the Progress of Civilisation, Written from the Public Records and Other Contemporary Evidence (1876), pp. 480-481
  • When I speak of Victorian values, I mean respect for the individual, thrift, initiative, a sense of personal responsibility, respect for others and their property, and all the other values that characterised the best of the Victorian era.
  • I had great regard for the Victorians for many reasons – not least their civic spirit to which the increase in voluntary and charitable societies and the great buildings and endowments of our cities pay eloquent tribute. I never felt uneasy about praising ‘Victorian values’ or – the phrase I originally used – ‘Victorian virtues’, not least because they were by no means just Victorian. But the Victorians also had away of talking which summed up what we were now rediscovering – they distinguished between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving poor’.
  • No class in the community has more reason to be satisfied with the results of the last sixty years than the working men. Into that period have been crowded a series of economic changes, on the whole making for their comfort, and of reforms which have made them the envy of the same classes in other countries. They have got their "Six Points," or something better. It was the utmost demand of their best friends at the beginning of the present reign that they should be free to work out, by combination or otherwise, in their own way, their salvation, that their societies should be legalized, and that the criminal law should not be used to increase the power of capital—in a word, that they should suffer from no disabilities. They find themselves in 1897 in the position of a privileged or favoured class, fenced about with special legislation, and possessed of some rights denied to others. And this period has also been for them one of unexampled material prosperity. Their wages have risen, while the prices of food and most articles of consumption have fallen. The State educates their children gratis. The State makes the acquisition of allotments easy for them. The municipalities give them recreation-grounds and free libraries.
    • 'Labour in the Victorian Age', The Times (23 June 1897), p. 18
  • What brighter jewel in a Sovereign's crown, what nobler record of a reign, than the fact that it witnessed the children's emancipation, that it released from toil in tender years the sons and daughters of the poor? The success of the Factory Acts has suggested other measures intended to make less oppressive the labour of those who, being, it is supposed, unable to bargain for themselves, need the protection of the Legislature; and this group of laws will be an enduring monument, if not of the wisdom of the Victorian age, of its solicitude for the welfare of its wards.
    • 'Labour in the Victorian Age', The Times (23 June 1897), p. 18
  • Could some one who had emigrated from our shores sixty years ago return to-day he would scarcely recognize in the ordinary working men the sons or grandsons of the working men whom he knew. He would note that their dress and that of their families were much improved; they wear better clothes than their masters wore in 1837. They eat and drink better food and drink than was then within their reach; and, with the price of wheat which has ruled in recent years, they know nothing of the sharp pressure of want, the periodic returns of semi-starvation which then visited large masses of men. Such an observer would find that the working-man's house was more commodious and better furnished, and, if his tastes kept him from the publichouse, had its little store of luxuries and ornaments. Model dwellings are erected for him... If he is ill, hospitals which he does little to support receive him... Should he or his sons be studious, there are free libraries, institutions which, at convenient hours, give him sound instruction, and plenty of people disposed to applaud his efforts to better his lot or enlarge his intelligence. In short, he is better fed, better clothed, better housed, better paid, better educated, lives longer, probably, as a rule, weighs more than his father or grandfather.
    • 'Labour in the Victorian Age', The Times (23 June 1897), pp. 18-19
  • The bettering of conditions of life for the majority of people was the material achievement of the Victorian age, parallel to its glories in literature, intellect and science.
    • G. M. Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century (1782–1901) (1922), p. 367
  • The middle and later years of the nineteenth century, the most progressively prosperous and, in the sum of genius and achievement, perhaps the most solidly great in our annals, have been called the Victorian era...
    Though all was not well in 1897, yet, in those sixty years past, millions had come out of the house of bondage and misery into which the unregulated advent of the Industrial Revolution had plunged its victims. In the same years our people had spread far over the face of the globe, carrying with them, on the whole, justice, civilisation and prosperity where they went. Great men of genius in literature, science and thought had adorned an age when civilisation seemed for awhile to be strong both in quantity and in quality, and had helped to make common during her reign certain standards of intellectual seriousness and freedom.
    • G. M. Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century (1782–1901) (1922), p. 424
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