Industrial Revolution and Victorian Age

The industrial revolution

start

The industrial revolution

From the mid 18th to the mid 19th century great changes occured in England and then spread throughout Europe and North America.British economy shifted from agriculture to industry. The invention of the steam engine and its applications in industry, agriculture and transport (steam locomotives and ships) revolutionised British economy, society and culture. The number of factories increased and people moved from the countryside to cities and towns in order to find new job opportunities. The demand for coal and iron dramatically increased so that many people, including women and childeren, found work in coalmines and ironworks. Britain became the world's first industrial nation.

In the last two decades of the 19th century the Second Industrial Revolution took place transforming people's life, social relations and work dynamics even more dramatically.The use of electricity, chemical industry and new inventions led to great changes in agriculture (let's think of fertilizers), factories (the electric motor was introduced replacing the steam engine and new larger factories grew), and life in general (electricity could generate light, heat, movement; chemistry made possible gas for lighting, tar, cement, dyes, chlorine). Britain was not the leading industrial nation anymore.

The victorian age

1837-1901

The Victorian Age took its name from Queen Victoria whose reign was one of the longest ever, lasting almost 64 years.She came to the throne towards the end of the first Industrial Revolution, when industrialisation had brought with it new markets and a period of rapid expansion. The old agricultural economy had been supplanted by modern urban economy of manufacturing industry and international trade. Britain had become the most powerful nation in the world, its empire expanded in America, Africa, Asia.

Queen Victoria (1819-1901)

The victorian age

1837-1901

Britain became a nation of town dwellers: people were attracted to cities by the promise of new work in the new factories that were rapidly growing and expanding mainly in London and in the North of England.

Queen Victoria (1819-1901)

The victorian compromise

While the upper (nobility) and middle classes (bourgeoisie) made large profits from the expansion of industry and of the Empire, workers suffered awful conditions working up to 16 hours a day, living in overcrowded slums with no clean water nor sanitation. On the contrary deseases and epidemics were widwspread causing high mortality especially among children.

The victorian compromise

This utter dicothomy between the progress, power and wealth of the upper and middle classes on the one hand, and the poverty, deprivation and injustice suffered by the working classes on the other hand is referred to as the VICTORIAN COMPROMISE.

The victorian compromise

Victorian society with its puritanical values of family, religion, high morality, respectability, philantropy and charity showed all its hypocrisy and contradictions when faced with the sufferings of the poor.

For convenience' sake, Victorian literature is sometimes devided into

victorian literature

Victorian literature mirrors the spirit of the age. Prose writers, better than poets and dramatists, embodied the manifold, contrasting views of that era reflecting the profound changes that marked it.The Victorian age was perhaps the greatest age of English fiction thanks to many reasons, among which:

• the invention of new printing machinery
• urbanization and better ways of communication (reading material was more easily conveyed)
• publication in serial instalments (cheaper than volumes)

Early VictorianWriters who mostly identified themselves with their own age

Mid-VictorianA transition period with new trends overlapping the old ones.

Late VictorianThe sense of dissatisfaction and rebellion prevails in these authors