Industrial
Revolution and
the Victorian
Period
The Industrial
Revolution
• The Industrial revolution began in
Britain ca. 1770. There was an
enormous amount of capital in Britain
ready to be invested in industrial
development. This wealth was the
result of England’s leading position in
world trade (colonial Empire, trading
outposts, navy). Banking sector.
• The enclosures and the introduction of
new farming methods and machinery
had increased the productivity of
agriculture.
• Improvements in transport: roads
(turnpike system), canals, rivers and
ports.
• Britain was rich in coal and iron.
Key technological
innovations
• Textile machinery: Hargreave’s Spinning Jenny
(1770), Cartwright’s power loom (1785)
• Steam power: Newcomen (1712), James Watt
(1776). Brunel’s Steam-powered ship (1838).
Stephenson’s steam locomotive (first comercial
steam-powered railway starts in 1825).
Construction of a large railroad network.
• Improvements in iron foundry and steel
manufacturing (Wilkinson)
• Other industries: chemical, gas lighting, cement,
glass making…
• Britain became the world’s workshop.
Social Changes
• Population growth: from 11 to16.6
million between 1801 and 1830.
(Britain). By 1875 it was 23 million
(England and Wales).
• Urban growth: small farmers and
rural craftmen were turned into an
urban proletariat in the new
industrial towns. Terrible working
and living conditions. Child labour.
Friedrich Engels: The Condition of
the Working Class in England
(1845).
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=Mn_DLt5VGi4
Fears of revolution in
England
• Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in
France (1790)
• Thomas Paine: The Rights of Man (1791)
• 1799 Luddite Riots
• 1802: First Factory act limits child labor to 12 hours a
day.
• 1819 Peterloo Massacre (army attacks a peaceful
rally). Factory Bill prohibits employment of children
under 9 (unenforceable)
• The social labour of John Wesley’s Methodism and
‘the Evangelical Revival’ reduced social tensions.
Political changes
• 1832: Reform Bill extends the
right to vote to men owning ten
pounds or more in annual rent
(lower middle classes). It
increased the number of voters
by 50% (12% of total male
population). It addressed the
problem of ‘rotten boroughs’,
depriving most of them of
parliamentary representation.
New industrial areas gained
representation.
• 1846: Repeal of the Corn Laws
(protective tariffs on imported
corn that kept the price of food
artificially high), weakening the
workforce.
The rise of the
working class
• 1824: Worker unions allowed
• 1838: People’s Charter movement
• 1846: Repeal of Corn Laws
• 1867: Second Reform Bill. Disraeli
gives the right to vote to urban
workers
• 1868: First Trade Union Congress
• 1870: Universal primary education
is established (Forster’s Act)
• 1871: The Trade Union Act
legalises trade unions
• 1900: Foundation of the Labour
Party
The role of women
• Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Women
(1792), a pioneering Feminist manifesto.
• Women’s education possibilities were very limited:
boarding schools and finishing schools.
• Few work possibilities for unmarried women: maid,
governess, teacher.
• Puritan and Victorian morality: idealised, restrictive visions
of femininity. Devotion to home and family.
• Married Women’s Property Acts (1882, 1892) removed
husband’s control over their wives’ property.
• The long struggle for political rights: enfranchisement of
women (over 30) only came in 1918.
The Romantic Period
• The ideological climate: Edmund Burke vs
Thomas Paine
“People Will not look back to prosperity who
never look backward to their ancestors. Besides,
the people of England well know that the idea of
inheritance furnishes a sure principle of
conservation and a sure principle of transmission,
without at all excluding a principle of
improvement”
E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790)
“The vanity and presumption of governing beyond
the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all
tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither
has a generation a property in the generations
that are to follow”
T. Paine, The Rights of Man (1791)
- Songs of Innocence (1789)
The First Generation of - The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)
Romantic Poets: William - Songs of Experience (1794)
Blake (1757-1827) - Jerusalem (1804)
William Wordsworth (1770-1851)
- Lyrical Ballads (written with
Colleridge, 1798)
- Ode: Intimations of Immortality
(1804)
- The Prelude (1805)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
- Dejection: An Ode (1802)
- Kubla Khan, Christabel (1816)
2nd Generation of
Romantic Poets
Lord Byron (1788-1824)
- Child Harold (1812-1818)
- Don Juan (1823-1824)
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
- Ode to the West Wind (1819)
- Ode to A Skylark (1820)
- Prometheus Unbound (1820)
- Adonais (1821)
- A Defense of Poetry (1821)
John Keats (1795-1821)
- Ode to a Nightingale (1819)
- Ode to a Grecian Urn (1819)
- - Hyperion (1819)
The Victorian Period
(1837-1901)
Expansion of the Empire in the
Victorian period
• The reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) was a
period of great imperial expansion.
• First Opium War (1839-1842). China’s ‘century
of humiliation’.
• War in Afghanistan (1839-1842).
• First Anglo-Sikh War (1845-1846). Conquest of
Punjab.
• War against Russia in Crimea (1854).
• 1857: ‘Indian Mutiny’ against East India
Company. Direct Rule in India or ‘Raj’ (1858-
1947). Queen Victoria Becomes Empress of
India.
• South Africa: Anglo-Zulu War (1879); Boer
Wars (1880-1, 1899-1902).
• 1884-5: Berlin Conference and the Scramble
for Africa.
British Imperialism
Settler Colonisation:
The dominions
• Australia had begun as a penal colony in 1788.
Then gradually turned into a free settlement
territory. This involved genocide of the Aboriginal
inhabitants.
• Settlement in New Zeland began in the early 19th
century. It also involved dispossession of the
Maori. (New Zealand Wars 1845-1872).
• Canada had not joined American Revolution but
there were rebellions in 1837-38. The Durham
Report recommended the union of the two
Canadas and granting ‘responsable government’.
• Gradually, the Dominions were given self-
government in a process that culminated with the
creation of the Commonwealth (1931).
• During the 19th Century, the South East of Wales became an industrial region.
The working class thrived and Wales was mostly Liberal in politics and
Nonconformist.
Wales, Scotland • The Industrial Revolution also reached Scotland, especially around Glasgow and
and Ireland during the River Clyde. Scotland also became politically Liberal. The Highlands remained
backward and depopulated.
the 19th century • Repression and inequality continued in Ireland, in spite of the Catholic
Emancipation Act (1829). The Potato Famines (1845-7) were the worst disaster
in Irish history. 1,5 million people (20% of the population) died from hunger.
Massive emigration.
Early 19th century novelists
Walter Scott (1771-1832): He was interested in
Scottish folklore and traditions and
influenced by the romantic movement.
Extremely popular and influential during his
lifetime. He is one ot the fathers of the
historical novel. Notable works: Waverley
(1814), Ivanhoe (1819), Quentin Durward
(1823)
Jane Austen (1775-1817): One of the best
English novelists of all times. Her apparently
low-key novels of manner subtly dramatise
individual moral conflicts. Her work also
shows the predicament of middle-class
women forced to seek marriage to secure
their finantial situation. Selected novels:
Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and
Prejudice (1813), Emma (1816), Persuasion
(1818)
The 19th Century Novel: The Victorian Novel
• The Victorian period is the golden age of the English
novel. The roll call of Victorian novelists is absolutely
astonishing (and too long to reproduce here!).
• A typically middle-class genre, its success is favoured by
the great growth experimented by this class in Victorian
England. The middle class rose in numbers, wealth and
political influence.
• Widespread literacy and improved education led to the
creation of a large readership for the novel, including a
great percentage of women. Relative abundance of
women writers. Lending libraries. Serial publication.
• Victorian novelists try to make sense of a rapidly changing
English society. The fast transition to an urban industrial
nation, the contrast between country and city, poor and
rich, north and south, social injustice.
• They also reflect the period’s intelectual, philosophical
and religious crises and debates, brought about by
scientific and political developments: Charles Lyell’s The
Principles of Geology (1830-1833), Charles Darwin’s On
the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man
(1871). Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto (1848)
Victorian Novelists #1
Charles Dickens is the most famous Victorian novelist.
Extraordinarily popular in his day with his characters
taking on a life of their own beyond the page, Dickens is
still one of the most popular and read authors of that
time period. His first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836),
written when he was twenty-five, was an overnight
success, and all his subsequent works sold extremely
well. The comedy of his first novel has a satirical edge
and this pervades his writing. Dickens worked diligently
and prolifically to produce the entertaining writing that
the public wanted, but also to offer commentary on
social problems and the plight of the poor and
oppressed. His most important works include Oliver
Twist (1837–1838), Dombey and Son (1846–1848), Bleak
House (1852–1853), Great Expectations (1860–
1861), Little Dorrit (1855–1857), and Our Mutual
Friend (1864–1865) The Old Curiosity Shop. There is a
gradual trend in his fiction towards darker themes
which mirrors a tendency in much of the writing of the
19th century.
Victorian Novelists #2
• William Thackeray was Dickens' great rival in the first half of Queen
Victoria's reign. With a similar style but a slightly more detached,
acerbic and barbed satirical view of his characters, he also tended
to depict a more middle class society than Dickens did. He is best
known for his novel Vanity Fair (1848), subtitled A Novel without a
Hero, which is an example of a form popular in Victorian literature:
an historical novel in which recent history is depicted.
• Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë produced notable works of the
period, although these were not immediately appreciated by
Victorian critics. Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily's only work, is an
example of Gothic Romanticism from a woman's point of view,
which examines class, myth, and gender. Jane Eyre (1847), by her
sister Charlotte, is another major nineteenth century novel that
has gothic themes. Anne's second novel The Tenant of Wildfell
Hall (1848), written in realistic rather than romantic style, is mainly
considered to be the first sustained feminist novel.
Victorian Novelists #3
• Later in this period George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans),
published The Mill on the Floss in 1860, and in 1872 her
most famous work Middlemarch. Like the Brontës she
published under a masculine pseudonym.
• In the later decades of the Victorian era Thomas
Hardy was the most important novelist. His works
include Under the Greenwood Tree(1872), Far from the
Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of
Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891),
and Jude the Obscure(1895).
• Other significant novelists of this era were Elizabeth
Gaskell (1810–1865), Anthony Trollope (1815–
1882), George Meredith (1828–1909), and George
Gissing (1857–1903).
