VICTORIAN AGE

The Victorian age took its name from Queen Victoria. It is considered an age of stability and it is considered the longest reign in British history.

Some speak of the Victorian age as a period of splendid isolation due to the fact that Great Britain did not fight wars at home. Queen Victoria was very young when she ascended the throne. The Victorian age shows the period in British history when the industrial revolution was in full flood. The country had gradually transformed from an agricultural country into an industrial one. you could record a significant growth in population thanks to scientific discoveries which had improved medical conditions.

There is an interplay between agriculture and industry: a new class come to the front. The middle class, which become the backbone of the country because they could invest their capitals into the new industries, thus creating a new problem inside the social organization, the birth of a new class, thus creating a working class. The clash between the capitalists and the working class become a new dynamic in the relationship between the people, and the Victorian novel, in the first half of the XIX century, mainly recorded such clash.

The industries that mainly contributed to the economic progress of society were the wool and cotton industries, that is textile industries on the one side which implied the existence of factory regions where you could see the development of manufacturing towns and improvements in the road system could be made. Also canals were built (see Coketown, fictional name of a town in Charles Dickens's Hard Times); Hard Times well represents the Utilitarianism (Of the Principles of Utility à Jeremy Benthal). Faith in progress, technology and development of society were the general attitudes of society in that time, generally visible in the face of respectability which is also known as the double-faced nature of Victorianism.