VICTORIANISM.

Even seemingly unshakeable axioms are prone to reassessment by historians, and Victorianism is no exception. Even the very period of Victorianism itself stands challenged: historians no longer refer unquestioningly to the "Victorian Age" as the precise years associated with the monarch but instead concentrate on a shorter period—a "high age"—from about 1830 to 1880. Yet critics shadowed the entire period in question, and the negative connotations were fired dramatically forward soon after the period ended, notably with Lytton Strachey's (1880–1932) mocking attack Eminent Victorians (1918). Moralizing, prudish, repressed (and repressive), and old-fashioned (rather than traditional)—each of these notions captures what Victorianism has meant to later generations.

Early Victorianism

The early Victorian years witnessed the emergence of a cluster of values and beliefs that represented the central ideas of Victorianism. These years are associated with developments in governance, economic and social life, science, and learning that capture the essential features of Victorianism. In governance, one can look to the reforms which, if not immediately democratic, changed the structure of parliament, ushering in a tradition of evolutionary change (with major Reforms Acts in 1832, 1867, 1884) and the expansion of local, middle-class political power with the Municipal Corporations Act (1835). In economic life, the hard-nosed essentials of political economy and utilitarianism reached a high point prior to the 1850s. Associated with such notable names as Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), James Mill (1773–1836), and David Ricardo (1772–1823), and later refined and developed by luminaries such as John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), political economy helped to shape the policy conditions for the reform of the Elizabethan Poor Law (in the form of the Poor Law Amendment Act, 1834), and the ideology of self-help which, for a while, attained the status of mantra. By the time Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) penned the popularized guide to the joys of this creed (Self Help, 1859), the concept had already begun to be pushed to one side by a creeping state and the tendency of the working class to collectivize in the face of demands for Smilesian individualism: hence, the staggering rise of friendly societies, trade unions, the co-operative movement, and countless other examples of collective identification by the people.

Values and Beliefs

In religion, Victorianism balanced the ancient regime Anglicanism of the Church of England with a growing pluralism through alternative Christianities, new faiths, and the toleration of unbelief. The backdrop to this was a crisis of faith for Anglicans, dating to the early Victorian years, when the Church of England was rocked by fierce debates about Tractarianism, "Romish" rituals, and the intellectual contribution of the Oxford movement. At a more prosaic level, the Religious Census of 1851 revealed a general weakening of popular interest in the established church and many dissenting faiths, whilst Roman Catholicism prospered through Irish migration. Victorianism may be equated with spiritual piety and Christian morality, but alternative and opposite forces also had some importance. Agnosticism, advocated most notably by Thomas H. Huxley (1825–1895), offered, by the 1870s, an alternative to faith in the attempt to answer profound questions about the nature of being.

Victorianism came to be associated with patriarchical social values, stressing the importance of family and an image of motherhood captured well in Alfred Lord Tennyson's (1809–1892) poem, The Princess (1847):

Man for the field and woman for the hearth;
for the sword, and for the needle she;
Man with the head, and women with the heart;
Man to command, and woman to obey;
All else is confusion.

Thus, poetry, as well as prose, painting, and music, reflected hegemonic notions. Yet, the stereotype of the Victorian family perhaps assumed its importance precisely because there were so many challenges to it. In the cities, drink and crime denied many children the full influence of parental guidance, and the critics of industrialism saw in female and child labor a collection of evils that had to be addressed. But economic conditions placed women and children in this position. Poverty, drunkenness, and alcoholism were sometimes causes of prostitution. Charles Dickens's (1812–1870) portrayal of Nancy, the pathetic, doomed heroine of Oliver Twist (1837–1839), obliquely, and somewhat coyly, suggested how easy it was for a woman to fall prey to professional gangs. In Mary Barton (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1901) captured the horror that Victorian society felt at the sight of a "fallen women" in her portrayal of the stunted relationship of the widower John Barton and his sister-in-law, the fallen woman. Social reportage also emphasized this aspect of Victorianism: Bracebridge Hemyng's (1809–1898) study of prostitution suggested that, in 1857, London had 8,600 who plied this trade.

Anti-Victorianism

Behind the facade of staidness there was another sort of Victorianism—a kind of anti-Victorianism. Here, stifling mores were replaced by more adventurous and plural sexualities. Liaisons outside marriage, such as Dickens's longstanding affair with the actress Nelly Ternan, were common. William Gladstone's (1809–1898) self-flagellation—a habit the four-time prime minister shared with the bohemian Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909)—was his punishment for the sexual feelings (though there are no known sexual acts) aroused by his attempts to rescue London's prostitutes. Pornographic pictures and texts were readily available in the nineteenth century. Peep shows were commonplace and provided titillation to a broad spectrum of male society. As Simon Winchester's The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1999) demonstrates, William Chester Minor (1834–1920), the American military doctor, murderer, and prolific contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary, aggressively pursued a sex life that utterly contradicted the conventional image of his age. Obsessed with sex and a regular user of prostitutes—prior to his incarceration in 1872 in the new Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum for murdering a man in London—Minor harbored such a strong sense of self-loathing that he cut off his own penis. Homosexuality may have scandalized Victorian sensibilities, but it was not invisible. Literary works with a homosexual theme, such as Teleny (1883), were produced; Oscar Wilde's (1854–1900) trial and imprisonment reminded Victorians that homosexuality and pedophilia were part of their worlds; while the artist and aesthete Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) helped to create a self-image of sexual radicalism, including an unfinished pornographic novel, Under the Hill (1894). Not long after, in 1899, Lord Longford was recorded for posterity in Hansard with a telling contribution to a parliamentary debate: "Of course I have seen people recover from homosexualism. A boy at Eton assaulted my elder brother in the bath there and was later expelled for repeating the offence on another boy. Later he became a pillar of society and captained the county cricket team" (Sweet, p. 190).

Victorianism and Progress

No other age was quite so strongly associated with a faith in the progress of technologies. Victorianism is correctly and inextricably intertwined with inventions and the rise of the machine. Steam locomotion, iron, and then steel ships, telegraphy, and many other developments receive attention from historians, for the Victorians triumphed over so many challenges of distance and power that had held up such progress in earlier times. Justifiably, Victorianism remains associated with industrialism, urbanization, transport, technologies, travel, and communication. The essential character of Victorian technological determinism was that science and the practical men could change the world through invention and implementation.

Leaps in technology were matched by developments in social thought. Prophets of progress and the enemies of industrial modernity competed for space, and both groups contributed to the sense of what Victorianism was about. From the 1830s, the critics of Victorianism grew. Modernity was feared by many and loathed by some. Tories, such as the "Young England" group (which included Benjamin Disraeli [1804–1881]) looked back to a bygone age of preindustrial harmony, where deference, social equilibrium, and a more agreeable life was once thought to exist. Disraeli's classic, Sybil; or the Two Nations (1845), captured these sentiments brilliantly. Another stern early critic, the Scot Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), shared the "Young England" aversion to modernity but looked forward, not back. He abhorred the Victorian tendency to seek mechanical solutions to human problems and sought, instead, a reinvention of an earlier morality, but in a future setting. This style of criticism connected many early nineteenth-century thinkers, such as Carlyle and Robert Owen (1771–1858), to later socialists, such as William Morris (1834–1896). By the 1880s the critique of Victorianism was powerful indeed. Unlike on the continent, where Marxism was much more influential and where anarchism and communism posed a seemingly greater challenge, most British socialism sought accommodation with capitalism and was reformist in character. The Fabian, Sidney Webb (1859–1947), represented an administrative type of socialism, based upon efficiency and organization. William Morris's utopian socialism was characterized by a more fundamental attack upon capitalism and a pursuit of an alternative moral and spiritual way of life. Socialist criticism of modernity also had echoes in the growing feminist challenge to Victorianism. Although suffragism achieved its ends beyond the Victorian period, its seeds were sprouting long before Victoria's end.

Traditional interpretations of society as a static entity were undermined as the period progressed. Charles Darwin's (1809–1882) theories of evolution and Herbert Spencer's (1820–1903) considerations upon human development were to have a startling impact, radically altering classic Victorian notions of society and how to manage it. A social science, borrowed from evolutionary theory, that downplayed contractual in favor of organic ideas of society emerged. Social Darwinism and other evolutionary theories played some part in the development of a philosophy of state interventionism, which marked later Victorian, and particularly twentieth-century, thought (though recent studies, for example, H. S. Jones's Victorian Political Thought [2000], sound more cautious and complicated notes). The search for perfectibility in society, which echoed nature's selection of the fittest, could be set up for or against the collectivization of social welfare.

Victorianism Beyond Britain

Victorianism—in architecture, science, governance, and culture—impacted heavily upon the wider world. Britain's short-lived preeminence as an imperial power bequeathed a rather hardier cultural imprint on the world. After the globalization of the English language, the most striking effect was in the character of civic culture in the English-speaking colonies and dominions: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In these places, political systems, bureaucracies, and education took on a clearly Victorian character. Victorianism also affected street design and civic building programs—in India, parts of Africa, and the Far East, as well as in the Dominions. Urbanism marked the Victorian world outside of Britain, as well as within. So great was the growth in Sydney, for example, that in 1901 that city (not Liverpool or Glasgow) boasted "it now stands as the second city of the British Empire, as estimated by the annual value of its rateable property" (Briggs, p. 310).

Even when it stood at the leading edge of world culture, exercising a hegemonic power over large swaths of the globe, Victorianism had its critics. In politics, social thought, and economics, interventionism and a demand for action pushed classical laissez-faire ideologies to one side. Sexual repressiveness was challenged; many on the left of politics rejected capitalism; and an imperial rot set in after the arduous struggles of the Boer War (1899–1902). The challenge to Victorianism often came in the shape of a wholesale anti-Victorianism from a disparate array of groups: workers, women, socialists, bohemians, and from anticolonialists beyond the metropolitan stage.

See also Empire and Imperialism ; Europe, Idea of ; Progress, Idea of ; Social Darwinism ; Utilitarianism .

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Donald M. MacRaild