The Victorian Age: appunto in lingua inglese

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Data:	09.06.2005
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THE VICTORIAN AGE

Economy and society
The Victorian age took its name from Queen Victoria, whose reign (1837 – 1901) was the longest in the history of England. It was a period of economical and territorial expansion. The modern urban economy of manufacturing industry and international trade took over from the old agricultural economy. “Free trade” became the dominant economic ethos without changes in the political and social structure. Britain was the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. This was the result of material exploitation of its growing number of colonies. With the revival of revolutionary activity in continental Europe, the unsettled masses of the urban poor were perceived as a potential danger to the existing order of things and gradually over the century steps were taken to incorporate portions of the working classes into society through a series of reforms and progressive policies.
The pressure for reform
After the French Revolution, Britain had turned politically conservative. Industrial regions of
the country were not so well represented, votes had to be declared publicly, was often subject to
bribery or intimidation. These factors gave rise to the working class Chartist movement. The Chartists' demands contained six points: votes for all males; annually elected parliaments; payment of Members of Parliament; secret voting; abolition of the property qualification for candidates seeking election; the establishment of electoral districts equal in population. The People's Charter was rejected three times over a period of 10 years. The third petition was rejected in 1848, the year that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote their Communist Manifesto denouncing the alienation of labour under capitalist organisation, and revolution was erupting again across Europe. In Britain however, there was no such risk of a mass uprising. The Chartists were poorly organised and split by internal differences. All their demands, except that for an annually elected parliament became law between 1860 and 1914. A series of reform bills in the second half of the century gradually extended the vote to members of the working classes until the first demand of the Chartists, that of giving all men the right to vote, was granted in 1918. Women, however, had to wait until 1928 before they too were all able to vote.
Technological innovation
The mid 19th century was also a time of great technological innovation: the invention of steam-powered machinery, the development of railways, became faster and more efficient, leading to the rapid expansion of urban centres. The Great Exhibition (1851) held in Crystal Palace (London), became a symbol for Britain's dominant position as an industrial and imperial trading power. Communications were also greatly improved thanks to a more efficient mail service and the invention of the telephone. Printing became cheaper, which led to a proliferation of literary production of all types. The age was characterised by a general feeling of optimism.
The cost of living
At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Britain's home economy mostly revolved around agriculture and the textile industry. Mechanisation meant increased competition. The prices of finished products fell, although profits stayed high thanks to increased sales. But high production costs decreased the manufacturers' profit margin. The only solution was to cut production costs, which was most easily done by the direct cutting of wages. The cost of living, however, was kept artificially high by the Corn Laws which maintained the price of corn in Britain at an unrealistically high level. As a result there was widespread starvation. It was the combination of these factors that sent masses of people to the cities to look for work in factories.
Poverty and the Poor Laws
The price of corn was kept artificially high by the Corn Laws, paupers risked starvation and could not feed their children. In order to solve this problem, the children were declared destitute and, forced to separate from their families, were sent to work in parish-run workhouses, in return for which they received barely enough food to survive. It was only towards the end of the 19th century that poverty was to be widely recognised as a social problem.
Managing the empire
The Victorian period saw the massive expansion of British Empire all over the world, from Asia to Africa to Central America to Oceania. This expansion was due to the need to protect trade routes to and from Britain’s main imperial “property”, India, the so-called “Jewel in the Crown” of Empire. It had been administrated since the 17th century by the East India Company, which had employed bribery and violence to take control of the country’s resources. The Indian Mutiny of 1857 led to the closure of the Company and the administration of Indian territories was taken over by the British government. In 1876 Queen Victoria was declared Empress of India to consolidate popular support for the Empire. Trade with India included tea, spices, silk and cotton and it was vital to the British economy that routes across land and sea be secured. It was partly for this reason that Britain “annexed” a number of territories including South Africa, Egypt, Burma, Malaysia and Afghanistan. But control of these routes was made more difficult by political instability. On the Asian front, Russian aggression threatened the already weak and collapsing Ottoman Empire, leading to joint British and French military intervention and the disastrous campaigns of the Crimean War during the 1850s. In South Africa the claims of the Dutch settlers eventually provoked another conflict: the Boer Wars. These wars were enormously expensive and failed to defeat the Boers. During the second half of the 19th century, both Germany and France rose to become economic powers in their own right and began to rival Britain’s position of imperial dominance in Africa. Another more independent part of British Empire was Oceania, which had originally served as a prison colony to which undesirable elements of British society such as criminals and political agitators had been transported. Later, Australia began to develop as a white colony in its own right, establishing a modern agricultural and industrial society based on the British model.
The Victorian compromise
The urban workers continued to live in conditions of abject poverty while being systematically exploited by their rich employers. To confront the appalling conditions of the urban environment, the government promoted a campaign to clean up towns devastated by epidemics, and built modern-hospitals. The police helped to safeguard the law but at the same time had the function of controlling the masses of the urban poor, since the law was invariably on the side of property owners. In the minds of many wealthy Victorians, the poor were not victims of circumstance but a
dirty, dangerous and immoral species. However, the Victorian ideal represented by such values as church, family, the home and the sanctity of childhood applied only to those happy few who could afford them. Middle-class women were expected to conform to a submissive and pious domestic role - the so-called angel in the home. By stepping outside of this role, a respectable woman could ruin her reputation. Similarly, the idea of childhood as a paradisal golden age, propagated by the children's literature of the time, masked the fact that the children of the poor were forced into labour at an extremely early age and often separated from their families.
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.
Uses and abuses of Darwin
In Darwin's mind, his theory applied strictly to the domain of biology and natural history, but unfortunately like many other scientific ideas, it was soon being abused for social and political ends. Social Darwinism was likewise used to support the theory that the underclasses were less evolved, genetically degenerate and thus had a natural vocation to vice and crime. Simplified, popularised versions of Darwin, along with anti-Semitism and nationalism, undoubtedly played a part in shaping the mind of the young Adolf Hitler.