Mar 29, · The Victorian era saw considerable expenditure on monuments to civic pride. The competitive ethic which drove so much business enterprise was channelled by local worthies into spending on opulent You need to enable JavaScript to run this app Work, it might be argued, is one of the great overlooked subjects of British fiction, always in the background, always necessary, sometimes fervently desired, at other times roundly disdained, frequently a source of tension and unhappiness, but rarely conceptualized, deconstructed or otherwise considered as one of the key influences on our inner lives
Historical Analysis: Women as the "the Sex" During the Victorian Era
British Broadcasting Corporation Home. During the Victorian era, Britain could claim to be the world's superpower, despite social inequality at home and burgeoning industrial rivals overseas. How did it happen? He put these words into the mouth of a spoof peer of the realm in the comic opera 'Iolanthe', which he wrote with Arthur Sullivan in Gilbert's Lord Mountararat got it wrong.
Naval exploits in the age of Elizabeth I are regularly romanticised and their significance exaggerated. Late 16th century England, though growing in importance under an able, crafty and ruthless monarch, victorian era essay, remained a bit-part player on the European stage. Britain's naval might was not openly challenged on the high victorian era essay between the battles of Trafalgar and Jutland. Britain 'really ruled the waves' throughout Gilbert's own lifetime. He lived from toduring the reigns of Victoria and her successor, Edward VII.
Britain's naval might was not openly challenged on the high seas between Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson's famous victory at Trafalgar in and the World War One Battle of Jutland with the German navy in During the Victorian age, Britain was the world's most powerful nation. Though not always effortlessly, it was able to maintain a world order which rarely threatened Britain's wider strategic interests. The single European conflict fought during Victoria's reign - the Crimean War of - - contrasted markedly with the 18th century, during which the British were involved in at least five major wars, none of which lasted less than seven years.
Portrait photograph of Victoria ©. In Britain was in the later stages of acquiring the largest empire the world had ever seen. By the end of Victoria's reign, the British empire extended over about one-fifth of the earth's surface and almost a quarter of the world's population at least theoretically owed allegiance to the 'queen empress'.
These acquisitions were not uncontested. A number of colonial wars were fought and insurgencies put down as bloodily as the colonisers considered necessary. It would be a gross exaggeration to claim, as many contemporaries did, that those living in a British colony felt privileged to be ruled by a people anxious to spread the virtues of an ordered, advanced and politically sophisticated Christian victorian era essay to those 'lesser breeds' previously 'without the law'.
That said, there is no gainsaying the fact that both many colonial administrators and Christian missionaries took on their colonial duties with a fierce determination to do good. Britain's status as the financial capital of the world also secured investment inflows which preserved its immense prosperity. One has only to walk along Liverpool's waterfront and view the exceptional 'Three Graces', the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, Royal Liver and Cunard buildings planned and erected in the decade or so after Victoria's death, victorian era essay, to understand the centrality of commerce and overseas trade in making Britain the world's greatest power during the 19th century.
Liverpool's status as a World Heritage City is fitting testament to a period when Britain did indeed 'rule the waves'. Victoria came to the throne during the early, frenetic phase of the world's first industrial revolution. Industrialisation brought with it new markets, a consumer boom and greater prosperity for most of the propertied classes. It also brought rapid, and sometimes chaotic change as towns and cities expanded at a pace which precluded orderly growth.
Desperately poor housing conditions, long working hours, the ravages of infectious disease and premature death were the inevitable consequence.
The Victorians wrestled with this schizoid legacy of industrialism. The Victorian town victorian era essay Britain's progress and world pre-eminence, but it also witnessed some of the most deprived people, and depraved habits, in the civilised world. Taming, and then improving, Britain's teeming cities presented a huge challenge. Mortality data victorian era essay that, in the poorer quarters of Britain's larger cities, victorian era essay, almost one child in five born alive in the s and s had died by the age of five.
Polluted water and damp housing were the main causes. Death rates in Britain as a whole remained obstinately above 20 per thousand until the s and only dropped to 17 by the end of Victoria's reign. Life expectancy at birth, in the high 30s invictorian era essay, had crept up to 48 by One of the great victorian era essay of the age - tuberculosis - remained unconquered, claiming between 60, and 70, lives in each decade victorian era essay Victoria's reign.
Despite substantial medical advances and well-informed campaigns, progress in public health was desperately slow in Victoria's reign. This had much to do with healthy scepticism about the opinions of experts, particularly when those experts advocated greater centralised state interference in what they considered to be the proper sphere of local authorities and agencies. Furthermore, state involvement meant higher taxes and higher taxes were said to hamper both business and job creation.
Localism undoubtedly stymied many public health initiatives at least until the last two decades of the reign. The Victorian era saw considerable expenditure on monuments to civic pride. The competitive ethic which drove so much business enterprise was channelled by local worthies into spending on opulent town halls and other civic buildings.
By no means all of these were intended for the use of a propertied elite. Libraries, wash-houses and swimming baths were all funded as part of a determination to provide working people with the means to improve themselves. Civic identity and civic engagement were more powerful forces in Victorian than in early 20th-century Britain. Nor were the Victorian middle and upper classes parsimonious over charitable giving. The s alone saw the formation of the Society for the Relief of Distress, the Peabody Trust, Barnardo's Homes and the Charity Organisation Society.
These national organisations were multiplied several-fold by local charities. Christian gentlemen considered it a duty to make legacies to worthy causes. True, much of this giving came with strings. Most Victorian charities were aimed at those sections of the working classes disposed towards helping themselves.
Its overall impact, however, should not be underestimated. Distress caused by the famine at Kilrush, Ireland, in ©. The United Kingdom's population at Victoria's accession in was about At her death invictorian era essay, it had risen to 41 million, victorian era essay.
These figures, however, mask an enormous contrast. This stark contrast is explained by two linked factors. Ireland, the Protestant north east around Belfast excepted, did not experience an industrial revolution in the Victorian age. It also endured a devastating famine from -the result of a failed potato crop among a peasant population dangerously dependent on one food source for sheer existence.
Ireland lost more than one million people to the ravages of famine in the s. It lost far more over the next half century to the steady drip of emigration to Britain, victorian era essay, the Americas and Australia. This ticking demographic timebomb had far-reaching consequences.
Large numbers of Irish Catholics - both those who stayed and those who left - blamed the British government for the famine and saw in it the ultimate proof that the Act of Union had been a ruse from which Britain benefited and for which Ireland continued to suffer.
The famine extinguished any realistic hope that the Irish, like the Scots a century earlier, might come to realise the economic, victorian era essay, commercial and cultural benefits of political union with a larger and more prosperous national partner.
Inevitably, victorian era essay, 'home rule' campaigns grew in both numbers and violence in the second half of Victoria's reign. These also impacted massively on British politics. His Liberal party's split on home rule for Ireland in began the long process of marginalisation of the political party which dominated much of the queen's reign.
Ireland would not get home rule in Victoria's lifetime, but it set the political agenda unlike any other issue. What, finally, of the Victorian political structure? It is easy to see that it was far from democratic. At the beginning of Victoria's reign, about a fifth of adult males were entitled to vote. That victorian era essay increased, through parliamentary reform acts passed in andto one-third and two-thirds respectively.
No women could legally vote in parliamentary elections until almost 18 years after Victoria's death - and the queen herself was no suffragist. Women did, however, victorian era essay, play an increasingly influential role both in locally-elected school and poor law boards and in local government from the s onwards. During the Victorian era, the United Kingdom could plausibly be considered the world's superpower. If not democratic, the political system was becoming increasingly representative, victorian era essay.
Byfew argued - as had frequently been asserted against the Chartists in the s and s - that to allow working men to vote would be to cede power to an ignorant, insensate and unworthy majority. Victorian politicians increasingly learned how to 'trust the people'. They also noted how many among 'lower orders' could help themselves economically while improving themselves educationally.
The working-class Victorian autodidact was an increasingly significant figure. His modest successes enabled his 'betters' to claim that Britain was a specially advanced, perhaps even a divinely favoured, nation. Britain managed to modernize its political system without succumbing to the political revolutions that afflicted virtually all of its European competitors. The quality of political debate in Victorian Britain, in newspapers and in both houses of parliament, victorian era essay, was also very high.
The struggle victorian era essay political supremacy between William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli in the late s and s represents perhaps the most sophisticated political duel in the nation's victorian era essay. During the Victorian era, then, the United Kingdom could plausibly be considered as the world's superpower. However, Germany and the United States had already begun to surpass its industrial capacity and Germany's victorian era essay build-up would shortly present a powerful challenge to long-held British supremacy.
On the home front, the nation was only beginning to get to grips with widespread poverty while considerably more than half the adult population remained without a vote. Victorian supremacy by was only skin deep. Nineteenth-Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction by Christopher Harvie Oxford Paperbacks, A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain edited by Chris Williams Blackwell Publishers, The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, - by Eric J Evans Longman, The Mid-Victorian Generation, - by K Theodore Hoppen Oxford University Press, A New England: Peace and War, victorian era essay, - by GR Searle Oxford University Press, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire by David Cannadine Penguin Books, victorian era essay Eric Evans is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at Lancaster University.
He has written on British history from the age of Walpole to that of Margaret Thatcher and is the author of several books on victorian era essay and 20th-century British history. Recent publications include a 2nd edition of Thatcher and Thatcherism Routledge, victorian era essay,The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, Longman, victorian era essay,The Great Reform Act of Routledge, victorian era essay,The Birth of Modern Britain, Longman, and Parliamentary Reform, Longman, Search term:.
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The Victorian Age
, time: 5:45Complete list of Works of Oscar Wilde: Essays, Short Stories, Poems
The essay promotes Romanticism over Realism as Wilde’s view. The Picture of Dorian Gray () – This has been the only full-length novel from Wilde and had gone through a lot of scrutinies in his days, surviving them all to become a classic work of fiction Operetta is a form of theatre and a genre of light blogger.com includes spoken dialogue, songs, and dances. It is lighter than opera in terms of its music, orchestral size, length of the work, and at face value, subject matter. Apart from its shorter length, the operetta is usually of a light and amusing character. It sometimes also includes satirical commentaries Work, it might be argued, is one of the great overlooked subjects of British fiction, always in the background, always necessary, sometimes fervently desired, at other times roundly disdained, frequently a source of tension and unhappiness, but rarely conceptualized, deconstructed or otherwise considered as one of the key influences on our inner lives
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