Beginnings

Victoria's sixty-three year reign (1837-1901) was the longest in Great Britain's history, so when she died there were few who could remember having lived under any other monarch. As Richard D. Altick notes in Victorian People and Ideas, because of the length of her reign "[t]here was not one Victorian period but several. The 'spirit of the age,' as we interpret it from the records it left, was strikingly different in the earlier years and was to be in the last" (New York: Norton, 1973, 1).

Most historians mark the beginning of the age not in 1837, the year of Victoria's accession to the throne, but rather 1832 with the passage of the First Reform Bill. Reforming the electoral system and extending the franchise to all males owning property worth £10 per year, this legislation signaled the beginning of a movement toward democracy which allowed the middle classes to steadily assume greater control. The way was set for greater industrial and technological change.

And change there was. The Victorians were really the first "high-tech" society, with all of the attendant problems that we continue to face today: environmental pollution, uneasiness in the face of rapid social and technological change, strained labor relations, and urban crowding. To get a sense of the amazing technological advances during this period, look at the following "before and after" images. Taken from a series of prints commemorating the Queen's fiftieth year on the throne, they quickly show how the England of 1887 was far different from what it had been in 1837:

The "Condition of England Question"

Like all periods of social change, that first Victorian period was an uneasy one. On the one hand, it was a time of exuberant national pride, as we see reflected in George Cruikshank's The British Beehive, designed in 1840. (Note: this is a 107k image.) However, it was also a time of economic depression, unemployment, squalid living conditions for the industrial poor, and horrific working conditions for men, women, and children. One of the more vocal responses to these conditions came from the Chartists, an organization of workers who called for the right to vote and other legislative reforms. They were a center of social unrest until 1848.

Speaking of the wretchedness of the working poor, Thomas Carlyle, one of the most influential social observers of the time, noted:

It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man wretched; many men have died; all men must die,--. . . . But it is to live miserable we know not why; to work sore and yet gain nothing; to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated, girt-in with a cold universal Laissez-faire: it is to die slowly all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead, Infinite Injustice. . . . (Past and Present, 1843)

And he suggested that "England will not be habitable long, unreformed." It is, therefore, not surprising that a better-known response to these condtions appeared in 1848: Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto.

Click here to continue our discussion of what Dickens would later call the "black unpassable gulf" between rich and poor.