Social History of the Victorian age

Social history of the Victorian age

Condition of life and labor

The hidden world of the Victorian working classes

                   Within what seemed a closed and rigid social structure the working classes constructed their own exclusive world, remote from the acquisitive, accumulative impulses of Victorian economy. In past, it was an escape from the harshness of real world, in part an attempt to create community in the anonymity of the Industrial town. Ultimately, through the growth of education and democracy, improvement in living standards, working condition, housing food and dress, the working classes became, to a degree, participant member of society, but for most of the period covered by these writing they were both excluded, and excluded themselves, from public life. Behind the great public institution and images of the Victorian age the working classes inhabited an inner, secret life which perpetuated traditional values and pattern of behavior, essentially of rural origin. Into the new urban industrial society. In past times almost the whole life, including work, had gone forward within the circle of the family; increasingly, as the nineteenth century progressed, though much less quickly than is commonly supposed, work became separated from the family and the home, and the new cult of work sought to erect it into the center of human existence. The working classes, it seems, for long rejected this unpalatable and alien notion.

Child labor

                   That the shameful practice of child labor should have played an important role in the Industrial Revolution from its outset is not to be wondered at. The displaced working classes, from the seventeenth century on, took it for granted that a family would not be able to support itself if the children were not employed. In Defoe’s day he thought it admirable that in the vicinity of Halifax scarcely anybody above the age of the 4 was idle. The children of the poor were forced by economic condition to work, as Dickens, with his family in debtor’s prison, worked at age 12 in the Blacking Factory. In 1840 perhaps only twenty percent of the children of London had any schooling, a number which had risen by 1860, when perhaps half of the children of between 5 and 15 were in some sort of school, if only a day school or a Sunday school; the others were working many of the more fortunate found employment as apprentices to respectable trades or as general servants there were over 120,000 domestic servants in London alone at mid-century, who worked 80 hour week for one halfpence per hour but many more were not so lucky. Most prostitutes between 15 and 22 year of age.

                   Many children worked 16 hour days under atrocious condition, as their elders did. Ineffective parliamentary acts to regulate the work of workhouse children in factories and cotton mills to 12 hour per day had been passed as early as 1802 and 1819. After radical agitation, notably in 1831, when “short time committees” organized largely by evangelicals began to demand a ten hour day, a royal commission established by the Whig government recommended in 1833 that children aged 11-18 be permitted to work a maximum of twelve hour per day. After further radical agitation, another act in 1847 limited both adults and children to ten hour of work daily.

What cause an increase child labor during Victorian times?

      1)    Child labor played an important part of agriculture life-children always helped on the farm, on which fourteen hour days were not uncommon-so it’s not surprising that it continued when people moved from the country to the city.

     2)    Since mechanization often created condition in which adult male strength and skill lost much of its importance, children who were paid much less than adult males, became widely employable.

  3)    Young children had jobs in which their small size and agility made them better qualified than adult men and women. For example, Slater mill in Pawtucket, Rhode island, the first textile mill in America that began marked the beginning of the North America industrial revolution, employed young boys to dart rapidly moving machinery to fix broken threads while machines work at top speed, often at the cost of terrible accidents in which children lost hands or arms.

Victorian working women: sweated labor

                   There is modern myth to the effect that until quite recent years the vast majority  of women devoted themselves exclusively to home-making and the bearing and rearing of large families, and that only a few engaged in gainful employment. What has, in fact, changed is that more married women and more middle class women now work than formerly. Given the huge size of Victorian working class, the demographic consideration that because of the unequal sex ratio one in three women were “doomed” to spinsterhood anyway, and the fact that the wages of many semi-skilled and unskilled made workers were low or so uncertain that they would not support a family unless supplemented by the earnings of wives and children, it cannot be doubted that a high proportion of victorian women, both single and married, regularly engaged in paid work.

                   Victorian women provided a vast reservoir of labor, necessary for an expanding though immature economy whose fluctuations demanded additional workers at one time, fewer at another. The precise size of the female working population is impossible to know since the census returns almost certainly underestimated it; the numbers of women factory workers may well have been more as less accurate, domestic servants probably rather less so, but thousand of milliners and seamstresses, washerwomen, framework knitters, nailers, straw-plaiters and women worker in the score or more of ‘sweated’ trade where they worked in their own homes, sometimes whole-time, sometimes part-time, must have escaped the census investigators, especially when it was feared that penalties might follow from a full declaration of income. The census of 1851, the first to attempt to count occupations in any detail, gave a total of 2.8 million women and girls over the age of ten in employment out of a female population of 10.1 millions, forming a proportion of 30.2 percent of the whole labor force. Domestic service took by far the greatest number in 1851-905,000, not including 145,000 washerwomen and 55,000 charwomen.

 Women of the “lower” working class

                   The lower working classes were distinguished from the upper by having less education, no pretensions to gentility, fewer resources or opportunities and, in some cases, simply less luck. Unlike many other towns, Hastings had no large industry except fishing, a male occupation. some women prepared and sold fish, or male and repaired nets, but most lower working class women were engaged in servicing the wealthy residents and visitors in one way or another. Roughly half of all employed women in Hastings were in domestic service. Others were barmaids, waitress and chambermaids. In 1860 there were strikes by some of the town’s washerwomen.

                  While ‘upper’ working class women rented shops, the ‘lower’ hawked on the streets and beaches. They sold flowers, toffee apples, ice-cream, cold drinks, shrimps, oysters and whelks, and offered donkey and goat rides and even fortune-telling, sometimes by budgerigar. For some late nineteenth century photographs.

                  For recreation they crowded into taverns, the women joining in the noisy revelry. Drunkenness was a problem, as was violence. For example see the Hasting’ newspaper report from the 1850s.

                  One of the problems in Hastings was the seasonal nature of women’s work in the town: in the winter months many who made a living from selling goods and service to visitors had no income. A good number were obliged to accept charity or to reply on almost as-poor relation. Some slipped permanently into the underclass. Low-class prostitution was rife throughout the mid-century and Hastings had its share.

Race, class, and gender issues

Race and class prejudices and the childlike

                   Fricans and other supposedly inferior groups, such as Irishmen, Indians, Maoris, and women, all displayed, it was held, childlike characteristic. Thus The Saturday Review of 8 September 1866 could refer to the Indian as “childish and impulsive”, the term impulsive referring to lack of weighed, considered thought. Similarly, Francis Galton’s “Hereditary Talent and character” in the 1865 Macmillan’s magazine argued that “the Negro has strong impulsive habits, and neither patience, reticence, nor dignity”. This prejudice had behind it the scientific theories of arrested development and recapitulates the adults of more primitive ancestors. If Irish adults, for example, display “child-like” emotions or conduct, then they are clearly closer to primitive early man.                      

                   Herbert Spencer similarly argued that “the intellectual traits of the un civilized….are traits recurring in the children of the civilized’. This emphasis upon the childlike qualities of supposedly lower races certainly parallels the frequent references one comes across of the immature working classes. Repeatedly one reads that they had no thought for the morrow that they wallowed in instant gratification, and that they were irresponsible, impulsive, and self-indulgent, spending a week’s wages on ribbons or a hat.

Social class

                   Class is a complex term in use since the late eighteenth century, and employed in many different ways. In our context classes are the more or less distinct social groupings which at any given historical period, taken as a whole, constituted British society. Different social classes can be distinguished by inequalities in such areas as power, authority, wealth, working, and living condition, life-style, life-span, education, religion, and culture.

                   Early in the nineteenth century the labels “working classes” and “middle classes” were already coming into common usage. The old hereditary aristocracy, reinforced into on “upper class” which tenaciously maintained control over the political system, depriving not the working classes but the middle classes of a voice in the political process. The increasingly powerful middle classes, however, undertook organized agitation to rapidly this situation: the passage of the reform act of 1832 and the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846 were intimation of the extent to which they would ultimately be successful.             

                   The working classes, however, remained shut out from the political process, and became increasingly hostile not only to the aristocracy but to the middle classes as well. As the industrial revolution progressed there was further social stratification. Capitalist, for example, employed industrial workers who were one component of the working classes, but beneath the industrial workers was a submerged “under class”- contemporaries referred to them as the “sunken people”- which lived in poverty. In mid-century skilled workers had acquired enough power to enable them to establish trade unions which they to further improve their status, while unskilled workers and the underclass beneath them remained much more susceptible to exploitation, and were therefore exploited.

                   The basic hierarchical structure comprising the “upper classes”, the “middle classes” the “working classes”, and the impoverished “under class” remained relatively stable despite periodic upheavals, and despite the Marxist view of the inevitability of class conflict, at least until the outbreak of world war 1 . A modified class structure clearly remains in existence today.

 Liberalism and cultural shock in the Victorian age

                   Most textbooks correctly stress that the liberalism characterized the Victorian legislative mind and was central to Victorian middle-class needs and national ideals. Here are some of the legislative changes in the period of the “age of Reform”:

1829- Catholic emancipation act enables catholic to sit in parliament.

1832- Parliamentary Reform act enfranchises the middle classes; now                                one in five adult males have the vote.

1833- Ten of 22 church of Ireland sees are united, that is, abolished.

1834- Poor law Amendment act replaces outdoor relief by poor houses.

1835- Municipal corporation act widens suffrage for town government.

1838- Character of London University creates a non-denominational university.

1850- Catholic hierarchy restored in England.

1854, 1856- Oxford and Cambridge open to non conformist undergraduates

1858- Jewish emancipation act: Jews can now enter parliament

                   Each of these act, which contributed importantly to the progress towards a much more diverse and open society, also produced a sharp reaction. After all, what an enormous challenge to the Anglican establishment this reform represented and what lightning changes. Nonconformists, catholic, and Jews now voted in a parliament responsible for Anglican ritual and organization; the Catholic Church was allowed, for the first time since Mary Tudor’s day, to re-establish its entire hierarchy. Nonconformists could now enroll in those seminaries for Anglican ministers, oxford and Cambridge; and, by the Reform Act, and town governments and possessed a non-denominational university of their own in the nation’s capital. These reforms also challenged established society as well as the established church. Liberalism thus represented the threat of pluralistic, relativistic, open society.

Arts and culture

Royal academy and other galleries

Art student

Music:-

Social taradiddles

                   Social taradiddles George du Maurier scanned image and text by George p. Landow. This is one of du Maurier’s many satiric commentaries in the common combination of pretentiousness with ignorance of the arts. It is also exemplifies the action of what Michel Focult terms the “author function”- the process by which a name becomes a guarantee of supposed aesthetic quality and aesthetic homogeneity.