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1 | The nineteenth century in a nutshell |
It is not necessary for either you or your students to become experts in nineteenth-century history in order to access its literature meaningfully. However, a good understanding of the major events and ensuing debates of the period will enable you to spot cultural, historical and ideological references in texts with more ease, and allow you to draw inferences and meaning from them that you may otherwise have missed.
What is important for students to understand, first and foremost, is that generalisations about ‘Victorians’ and how they thought and felt about the world around them need to be avoided. Just as someone growing up in the 1980s would have experienced an entirely different lifestyle to someone growing up in the 1940s, such would have been the difference for those living in the 1880s as opposed to the 1840s. Therefore, we must encourage students to view the nineteenth century as a period made up of ten separate decades between which quite distinct changes happened, and not as a single unit of time populated by homogenous ‘Victorian’ people with beards and hats and big dresses. For over a third of the nineteenth century, after all, Queen Victoria was not even on the throne, and the largely rural, unindustrialised, provincial Britain of 1800 had become a cosmopolitan, metropolitan centre of the world’s largest empire by 1900. Nineteenth-century texts, therefore, need to be looked at within the context of their decade rather than as part of a loosely generalised ‘nineteenth century’, and the timeline provided in this chapter will help you to see at a glance what events and ideas will be most relevant to discuss when talking about your specific text. As the concept of this chapter is to give a brief, essential overview of the period, we will not go into enormous depth on any of the topics of importance to nineteenth-century society, but merely give you the nutshell knowledge you will need in order to support your students. Suggested reading on the period is given throughout the chapter should you wish to find out more about any of the topics discussed.
BRIEF NINETEENTH-CENTURY TIMELINE
| 1789 – | French Revolution begins |
| 1792 – | Publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women |
| 1798 – | Malthus’ Essay on Population published – this influenced Darwin and many nineteenth-century thinkers – said that world population was growing faster than our ability to produce food, and that unless something was done to check the growth in population, terrible poverty and want would result |
| 1805 – | Battle of Trafalgar – Nelson defeats French and Spanish fleets |
| 1807 – | Slavery is abolished in the British Empire (but not the slave trade) |
| 1815 – | Battle of Waterloo – defeat of Napoleon and peace in Europe; passing of the Corn Laws, which set the price of corn at an inflated rate to protect British producers against imports, raising prices of basic foodstuffs |
| 1819 – | Peterloo Massacre – eleven people killed and hundreds wounded at a mass meeting agitating for political reform |
| 1830 – | Opening of the world’s first passenger railway, the Liverpool and Manchester railway |
| 1832 – | Great Reform Act is passed, abolishing ‘rotten boroughs’, creating new boroughs to take into consideration the expansion of small towns into cities as industry developed, and widening political representation (amongst men only) |
| 1833 – | Slave trade is abolished in the British Empire; Factory Act – abolished child labour under the age of nine |
| 1837 – | Queen Victoria comes to the throne |
| 1838 – | The People’s Charter calls for democratic reform – becomes the most significant political pressure group, particularly amongst working people, over the next decade. Its supporters are called ‘Chartists’; opening of the London–Birmingham railway line – precipitates the ‘railway boom’ of the 1840s |
| 1840 – | The penny post is introduced, making it much cheaper to send letters |
| 1845 – | Irish Potato Famine begins – it lasted four years, killed about 1 million people and caused the emigration of a million more |
| 1846 – | Corn Laws abolished |
| 1848 – | ‘Year of Revolutions’ across Europe |
| 1851 – | The Great Exhibition takes place in London |
| 1854–6 – | The Crimean War |
| 1858 – | India Act, giving control of India to the British Crown |
| 1859 – | Publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species |
| 1861 – | Prince Albert dies, plunging Queen Victoria into deep mourning |
| 1866 – | Second transatlantic cable laid between Britain and US (the first, in 1858, failed after a few months and it took eight years to raise the funds to lay another) |
| 1867 – | Second Reform Act, extending the vote to the male working classes and doubling the electorate |
| 1870 – | Married Women’s Property Act – allowed women to retain wages earned and property inherited during marriage independently of their husbands (this was extended in 1882 to all property a woman owned or acquired regardless of when it was obtained); Elementary Education Act – it becomes compulsory for all children between the ages of five and thirteen to attend school |
| 1876 – | Queen Victoria declared Empress of India |
| 1885 – | Partition of Africa to European powers at conference of Berlin |
| 1886 – | First Irish Home Rule bill for Ireland introduced to parliament |
| 1898–1902 – | Boer War |
| 1901 – | Queen Victoria dies |
Political reform
The nineteenth century saw a considerable amount of political changes that would transform Britain and take it from a society ruled solely by aristocratic elites to being a democratic nation where – as long as you were a man – your class did not prohibit you from having a say in how your government was run.
The call for reform started in the eighteenth century, with the French Revolution triggering a desire for change across Europe. After the Napoleonic wars at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was much dissent amongst the working classes, who had been hit badly by rising unemployment, famine and the introduction of the Corn Laws, which raised the price of food by restricting imports to benefit British producers. The industrial north of England, home to many of England’s largest towns and cities, had hardly any political representation as boroughs had not been changed to reflect the huge shifts and growths in population over the latter half of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1819, a demonstration agitating for political reform in St Peter’s Field, Manchester led to tragedy when many were killed and injured after troops stormed the protestors – this became known as the Peterloo Massacre. Initially this caused a crackdown on reforms by the government, who were terrified of further uprisings and facing their very own French Revolution, but this only fanned the flames of discontent even further. In 1832 the government relented and introduced the Great Reform Act, which abolished many ‘rotten boroughs’ (boroughs where there were hardly any eligible voters and which were usually controlled by a prominent family), established new boroughs to reflect the changing population distribution of the country and allocated a greater number of MPs to boroughs with larger populations. This Reform Act also extended the franchise to men under certain financial and property conditions, which widened the electorate considerably but still effectively excluded the working class. Obviously there was no question at this point of widening the franchise to women.
The Chartist movement developed out of this Reform Act, and was instigated by a group of working-class men who wrote ‘The People’s Charter’, agitating for universal male suffrage (again, no concern for women!), and, amongst other things, the property qualification for MPs to be abolished and a salary introduced for the role, allowing anyone to stand as a member of parliament rather than only those who could afford to do so. The Chartists hosted demonstrations and caused a great deal of anxiety to the government, who feared violence and unrest would spread throughout the working classes. However, in reality their movement did not have enough popular support to truly cause a threat. Even so, the government did take notice of their demands and recognised the need to give more working-class men the vote; this was addressed fully in the Second Reform Act of 1867, which considerably extended the franchise to the working classes and doubled the male electorate overnight.
The issue of securing votes for women started to develop alongside the Chartist movement, and the first formal organisations formed to lobby for female suffrage were created in the 1860s. However, it was only really with the creation of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage, founded by Millicent Fawcett in 1897, that a real movement developed, with many smaller organisations joining under this umbrella, allowing for a more strategic and effective campaign. The real fight for votes for women happened in the Edwardian period, and so falls outside the scope of this book. What students should realise about the nineteenth century is that it was a time when women had very few political rights and freedoms and this was something that was not actively challenged or considered to be problematic by the Establishment. The reason why women were not given votes was because they were considered too feeble-minded and emotional to make a choice, and if they did vote, they would only vote as their nearest male relative instructed them anyway. Even Charles Darwin’s works advocated the belief that women’s brains were smaller and intellect less well developed, and it was only due to petitioning from upper-class women, who were threatened with losing their dowries and children if they wanted to divorce their abusive husbands, that the Married Women’s Property Act was passed in 1870.
Aside from franchise reform, another major political issue throughout the mid- to late nineteenth century was Ireland. Ireland became part of Great Britain after the 1800 Act of Union, and was problematic from the start, for obvious reasons. From the 1860s there was call for ‘Home Rule’: an Irish parliament with responsibility for its own domestic affairs, while Westminster would continue to make decisions in foreign affairs. Fenians, however, wanted complete separation, with Ireland becoming fully independent of the rest of Britain once more, whereas Unionists didn’t want a separate parliament at all, as they feared it would become dominated by the Catholic Church. William Gladstone’s Liberal Party saw Home Rule as the best option, whereas the Conservatives wanted a Unionist approach. This caused a great deal of conflict inside the Houses of Parliament, and the wrangling dominated newspaper headlines. Gladstone tried repeatedly to push through Home Rule, after being impressed by the leader of the Home Rule Party, Charles Parnell, but he was defeated several times and lost power because of it. Ireland dominated the political scene for much of the latter nineteenth century, but continual infighting and blocking of bills by the House of Lords meant that Home Rule was not passed until 1920, and remains a contentious issue today.
Political literature
Middlemarch (1871) by George Eliot is set around the time of the Reform Act and provides an interesting commentary on contemporary attitudes to reform.
The less well-known The Semi-Attached Couple (1860) by Emily Eden, great aunt of Prime Minister Anthony Eden, contains a very interesting section on a pre-Reform Act election, revealing the corruption of the process.
Sensation novels, particularly those of Wilkie Collins, deal very well with the political position of women in nineteenth-century society, with many of Collins’ female characters, such as The Woman in White’s Laura Fairlie and No Name’s Norah and Magdalen Vanstone, used and abused by men due to having no legal recourse to keep their own property.
Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series (1864–79) charts the rise of the ridiculously named politician Plantagenet Pallister and is a wonderfully witty and surprisingly contemporary-feeling commentary on political life.
Foreign policy
The Victorian era is commonly viewed as one of peace and prosperity, but the reality is that almost constant wars were being fought throughout the nineteenth century to either gain or maintain foreign territories. Once the wars were over with the European powers at the beginning of the century, much of the other battles going on across the Empire have disappeared from public memory, with the Crimean and Boer Wars in particular no longer being matters of general knowledge. However, they were certainly defining events to Victorians, and feature heavily in their literature.
At the peak of the Empire, in the 1870s, when Queen Victoria was given the title Empress of India, British-controlled lands made up a quarter of the world’s surface. Imperialism was an enormous driving factor in foreign policy decisions. There was an overriding belief that the Empire was not just about gaining land, but about civilisation. Victorians saw the main purpose of Empire as taking the moral values of a very British form of Christianity to ‘uncivilised’ cultures. There was a genuine belief that it was in the best interests of the colonised nations to come under the protection of the British flag, and though in our postcolonial times it is difficult to view this attitude with anything other than criticism, it must be remembered that many Victorians saw their actions as benevolent and characterised them as such.
Britain’s position as a benevolent and civilising force no doubt stemmed from the smugness many British people felt (particularly towards America) at Britain being one of the first nations to ban slavery in 1807; this was followed by a total ban on the slave trade in 1833. This was very much a popular movement in Britain, with it becoming a passionate cause célèbre across all sectors of society, particularly amongst women. Though much anti-slavery literature of the period is American, with Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe being the most famous example, Jane Austen’s use of a slave plantation being the source of income for the Bertram family in Mansfield Park (1814) provides an intriguing insight into British attitudes towards slavery.
India came fully under control of Britain in 1858 after the passing of the India Act, which dissolved the East India Company, who had been governing India in the name of the British government, and gave power over India directly to the British Crown. This was a result of the Indian Mutiny in 1857, when many British soldiers were killed and around two hundred British women and children savagely murdered while under hostage in Cawnpore. This massacre of innocents, with them being labelled ‘The Angels of Albion’ by the British press, was responded to with outrage and horror in B...
