The Victorian Period (1832-1901)

1&2. The Victorian period was a time where industrialism made England the workshop of the world, with a mechanized factory system and extensive railways. Much of British population moved from rural areas to rapidly growing cities. This era also expanded educational opportunities, increased literacy, flourishing lending libraries and cheap periodicals. The human cost of industrialization was heavy; abuses of child labor, unsafe conditions in factories causing the wide spread of diseases also caused by contaminated water. This period had a time of crucial problems from which it also came to be known as “the hungry forties”. Victoria came to the throne in the first year of a depression that by 1842 gad put about a million unemployed workers. Government commissions investigating working conditions learned of children mangled when they fell asleep at machines at the end of a twelve hour working day.

In Ireland the potato blight caused the death of about one million people and also forced another two million others nearly twenty percent of Ireland’s population to emigrate. The rapid growth of cities often made people filthy and disorderly. About two million people lived in London during the 1840’s, commercial and industrial cities expanded rapidly. The Thames River in London was polluted by sewage, industrial waste and drainage from graveyards where bodies were buried.
The movement to reform food, factories, and optimism also took place during this period. The violence broke out at massive political rallies in the 1840’s to protest government policies that kept the price of bread and other food high at the time. In 1848 a year of revolution in Europe, British politicians got the army ready and armed the staffs of museums and government offices when working class political reformers organized what they called a “monster rally”, in London to petition parliament and the queen. At the time most middle class Victorians believed that things were better than in the past and that they were going to be better yet in the future.

3. The biggest difference I believe between the romantic period and the Victorian period was the industrialization and technology developed in the with the Victorians since the romantic period was more in a emotional and intellectual period and not yet civilized. I believe that the Victorian period changed the way people viewed things and made people realize the true and at the time raw reality of life. This can be seen in what might be the diary of Charles Kingsley:

“From the butchers and greengrocers shops the gaslights flared and flickered. Wild and ghastly, over the haggard groups of slipshod dirty women, bargain for scraps of stale meat and frostbitten vegetables, wrangling about short weight and bad quality. Fish stalls and fruit stalls lined the edge of the greasy pavements, sending up odors as foul as the language of sellers and buyers. Blood and sewer water crawled from under doors and out of spouts, and reeked down the gutters among offal, animal and vegetable, in every stage of putrefaction.” Pg.787

Many Victorians though of themselves as progressive morally, intellectual, as well as materially. In this period people were arrested for distributing information about sexually transmitted diseases. Determining that Victorian society regarded seduced or adulterous women as “fallen” and pushed them to the margins of respectability. The advances of the Victorian period were very evident to those living in it. People began to understand the earth, its creatures and its natural laws.

4. the Victorian period and its literature was filled with voices asking questions and raising doubts. Victorian writers asked whether material fully satisfied human satisfied human needs and whishes. They questioned the cost of exploiting the earth and human begins to achieve such comfort. The son of Charles dickens, the most important and popular figure in Victorian literature, lived out one of the favorite plots of Victorian progress by rising through his own talents to become a wealthy and famous man. This was made possible by the increasing affluence that gave him a large reading public.
The highest purpose of a poet, or any other writer, was to make readers aware of the connection between earth and heaven, body and soul, material and idea. Victorian writers had purposes as various as ideas or reality they believed in. some writers wanted to scare or shame readers into effective more political actions that thy believed were possible.