Victorian era

The Victorian Era of Great Britain is considered the height of the British industrial revolution and the apex of the British Empire. It is often defined as the years from 1837 to 1901, when Queen Victoria reigned, though many historians believe that the passage of the Reform Act 1832 marks the true inception of a new cultural era. The Victorian era was preceded by the Regency era and came before the Edwardian period.

Culture

Notable cultural elements of the Victorian era include:

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In Victorian literature:

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• The novels of George Eliot, Thomas Love Peacock, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Anne Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Walter Scott, William Makepeace Thackeray, Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Lewis Carroll, Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Hardy.
• The poetry of Alfred Tennyson, William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti, Emily Brontë, Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, the young W.B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A.E. Housman and Robert Browning
• The essays of Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman, John Stuart Mill, and Walter Pater.

Of particular interest is the decade of the 1890s, which saw the first attempts by English writers to adopt the methods and ideals of the French symbolists.

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In drama:

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• Stage adaptions of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and of the new genre of vampire novels.
• The wit and drama of Oscar Wilde.
• Controversy over the plays of Henrik Ibsen on the London stage, with men such as James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw supporting the new dramatic style of the frosty Norwegian.

In music:

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• The operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan

In the visual arts:

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• The Gothic revival movement in architecture
• John Ruskin, the first major English art critic.
• The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in art (partly inspired by Ruskin).
• The Clique
• William Morris' Arts and Crafts movement.
• The influence of the aesthetic ideal of American painter James McNeill Whistler.
• The reign of Queen Victoria of Great Britain, from 1837 to 1901, was Britain's Golden Age, and it was also the Golden Age of British Art. There was peace at home, and prosperity increased, leading to conditions in which painting flourished. The era produced Constable, Turner, Landseer, Rossetti, Millais, Burne-Jones, Leighton, Watts and Whistler, all living in the reign of Queen Victoria (except for Constable who died in the year of Victoria's accession). There were some 11,000 recognized artists, many mediocre, but a great number with high talents and artistic accomplishment.

In religion:

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• The Oxford/Tractarian movement in the early part of Victoria's reign.
• In 1865 William Booth began the Salvation Army in London.
• The rise of theosophism and other occult interests in the 1890s.

The Victorian period is now often regarded as one of many contradictions. It is easy for many to see a clash between the widespread cultivation of an outward appearance of dignity and restraint, and the widespread presence of many arguably deplorable phenomena. These include prostitution, child labour, and having an economy based largely on what many would now see as the exploitation of colonies through imperialism and of the working classes. However most of these phenomena were not specific to the Victorian era, and some (such as child labour) were addesssed with legislation during the period. The period is perhaps essentially one of complex transitions, when the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation threw up new problems and generated increasingly conflicting views about how they should be addressed. The expression Victorian values thus may be two-edged.

Related Topics:
Prostitution - Child labour - Economy - Colonies - Imperialism - Working class

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The term Victorian has acquired a range of connotations, including that of a particularly strict set of moral standards, often applied hypocritically. (See Victorian morality).

Related Topics:
Moral - Victorian morality

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