The Victorian Age

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Data:	16.10.2006
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The Term “Victorian”
The Victorian age usually covers in literary histories a period of time longer than the actual reign pf Queen Victoria, stretching from 1832 (the year of the first Reform Bill) to 1902 (the end of the Boer War).
This is a period of expansion and prosperity, of industrial development and unceasing scientific and technological progress. England enjoyed several decades of unequalled wealth and power, and a new wave of optimism began to sweep over the country.

Victorian Values
It was a complex and contradictory era: it was the age of progress, stability, great social reforms but it was also characterised by poverty, injustice and social unrest. The Victorians promoted a code of values that reflect the world as they wanted it to be, not as it really was, based on personal duty, hard work, respectability and charity. In thi periods was very important to work hard for improve the society. The idea of respectability distinguished the middle from lower class. Respectability was a mixture of both morality and hypocrisy, severity and conformity to social standards. It implied the possession of good manners, the ownership of comfortable house with servants and a carriage, regular attendance at church, and charity activity.
Philanthropy was a wide phenomenon: the rich middle class exploited the poor ruthlessly and at the same time managed to help “stay children, fallen woman and drunk men”.
The husband represented the authority and the key role of woman regarded the education of children and the housework.
Sexuality was generally repressed in its public and private forms, and prudery in its most extreme manifestations led to denunciation of nudity in art, and the rejection of words with sexual connotation from everyday vocabulary.

Evangelicalism
It was a religious movement who contributed to the abolition of slavery and to the First Reform Bill. But they had also a puritanical view of life, so they advocated the abolition of some public entertainments.

Darwin
In the first part of Darwin's theory was not new: this was the idea that all forms of life on the planet had gradually derived over hundreds of millions of years from a common ancestry, and were not, as religion had always taught, preconceived, fixed species designed by some divine being. The second part of Darwin's theory concerned the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. Before Darwin, biology and natural history had been the last refuge for the belief in a creation ordered by divine providence. It was Darwin who showed that all existing species had undergone considerable mutation, and that their adaptive characteristics had evolved through an extremely long process of
natural selection. In a given environment, members of the same species compete for survival, and
it is those best adapted to the environment who will survive. The characteristics which help them to survive are biologically selected and copied so that they are inherited by their descendants, who by this measure become even better adapted.