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Judith Flanders examines the state of housing for the 19th-century urban poor, assessing the 'improvements' carried out in slum areas and the efforts of writers, including Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew, to publicise such living conditions.

Between 1800 and 1850 the population of England doubled. At the same time, farming was giving way to factory labour: in 1801, 70 per cent of the population lived in the country; by the middle of the century only 50 per cent did. Cities swelled as people flocked from the countryside to find work. This was exacerbated by migration (especially from Ireland during the Famine years in the middle of the century). As a result, cities only big enough to contain 18th century populations were under pressure to house their new residents.

Previously, the rich and poor had lived in the same districts: the rich in the main streets; the poor in the service streets behind. Now, the prosperous moved out of town centres to the new suburbs, while much of the housing for the poor was demolished for commercial spaces, or to make way for the railway stations and lines that appeared from the 1840s. Property owners received compensation; renters did not: it was always cheaper to pay off the owners of a few tenements than the houses of many middle-class owners. Thus the homes of the poor were always the first to be destroyed.

The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow

Photographs taken in 1868 capture the realities of housing for the poor in 19th-century Glasgow.

Usage terms: Public Domain

'Improvements'

The reshaping of the city was always referred to as making 'improvements'. In 1826, when the process was just beginning, one book boasted that 'Among the glories of this age, the historian will have to record the conversion of dirty alleys, dingy courts and squalid dens of misery...into stately streets...to palaces and mansions, to elegant private dwellings'.

Usage terms: Public Domain

Yet few worried what was to happen to those whose houses - and neighbourhoods - vanished. These people could not afford to live in the nice new streets. Instead, they ended up just moving into other already crowded districts, which therefore became even worse - and even more expensive. Many couldn't even afford that, and ended up instead moving endlessly from place to place, without a home.

London illustrations by Gustave Doré

Artistic representation of overcrowded housing in London, from London, a Pilgrimage by William Blanchard Jerrold with illustrations by Gustave Doré, 1872.

Usage terms: Public Domain

Usage terms: Public Domain

For the 'improvers', this was not a problem, since it was easier to think of the inhabitants of the slums as being, not hard-working but impoverished people, but only drunkards and thieves. Field Lane, in Clerkenwell, for example, was said to have been 'occupied entirely by receivers of stolen goods, which...are openly spread out for sale'. The police frequently excused their lack of oversight of the slums by saying they were too dangerous to enter, but Dickens, for one, knew better, and that insomniac author frequently walked these areas, learning about the other London: 'I...mean to take a great, London, back-slums kind of walk tonight, seeking adventures in knight errant style', he wrote to a friend. And the author Anthony Trollope's younger brother claimed that, aged eight, he had wandered peacefully through the Clerkenwell slum, having heard the adults speak of its 'wickedness'.

'Indescribable filth'

In 1838, Dickens described the horrible slum called Jacob's Island, in south London. It was, he wrote, a place of 'Crazy wooden galleries...with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched...rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter...dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations'. Although this description was in Oliver Twist (ch. 50), a work of fiction, journalist and campaigner for better housing, Henry Mayhew, described it in almost exactly the same way: 'The water of the huge ditch in front of the houses is covered with a scum...and prismatic with grease...Along the banks are heaps of indescribable filth... the air has literally the smell of a graveyard.'

Usage terms: Some rights reserved
Held by: © Mark Charles Dickens, Head of the Dickens Family

Much slum-housing was down narrow alleys, the passageways that had originally been designed to give access to stables. Built around dead-end courtyards, the houses therefore could have windows on just one side. Sometimes courts had even more buildings erected behind them, in what had been the yards of the houses behind; these buildings had no windows at all. In Bleak House, the orphaned 12-year-old Charley lives in a room with her baby brother and sister and, she notes with pride, 'When it comes on dark, the lamps are lighted down in the court, and they show up here quite bright - almost quite bright' (ch. 15). 'Almost quite bright' made their room not a slum at all, but ordinary working-people's lodgings.

Charley was, like many slum-dwellers, a hard worker. She and her siblings were only three in a room, but often a single room was home to a family of five or six, who might even take in 'lodgers', to share the cost. Different rooms in each house had different rents. The cheapest of all were the cellars, which at best were just damp and dark; in particularly bad lodgings, the liquids from the cesspools beneath seeped up through the floor.

Sanitation and disease

Sanitation was a pervasive problem. Few houses had drainage, and there were few privies. Usually an entire court, several hundred people, shared one standpipe - a single outdoor tap - for all their water supplies, and had one, or at most two, privies (toilets in a shed outside) for everyone.

In 1849 a letter was published in the Times, giving a rare voice to the slum-dwellers themselves.

Sur, - May we beg and beseach your proteckshion and power, We are Sur, as it may be, livin in a Willderniss, so far as the rest of London knows anything of us, or as the rich and great people care about. We live in muck and filthe. We aint got no priviz, no dust bins, no drains, no water-splies, and no drain or suer in the hole place. The Suer Company, in Greek St., Soho Square, all great, rich and powerfool men, take no notice watsomedever of our cumplaints. The Stenche of a Gully-hole is disgustin. We all of us suffur, and numbers are ill, and if the Colera comes Lord help us.

This was in St Giles, steps away from Tottenham Court Road, and written after the area had been 'improved' - in fact the courts' single privy had been removed to make way for 'improvements'.

When the Times followed up this letter, they found one room filled with the living and the dying side-by-side: a woman with cholera, two boys with fever, and their families. As Dickens addressed the authorities directly, after the homeless boy crossing-sweeper Jo dies in Bleak House of a similar fever: 'Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen...Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.'

Footnotes

[1] James Elmes, Metropolitan Improvements (London: Jones & Co., etc., 1827), p.2.

[2] Thomas Adolphus Trollope, What I Remember (London : Richard Bentley & Son, 1887), p.11.

[3] Charles Dickens, 'New Uncommercial Samples: On an Amateur Beat', in The uncomercial traveller and other papers, 1859-1870, ed. by Michael Slater and John Drew, 4 vols (London: Dent, 2000), IV, pp.377-385 (p.380-381).

[4] Henry Mayhew, 'Home is home, be it never so homely', in Meliora: or, Better Times to Come, ed. by Viscount Ingestre (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1852), pp.258-280 (pp.276-7).

[5] The Times, 5 July 1849, p.5.

Judith Flanders is a historian and author who focussed on the Victorian period. Her most recent book The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London was published in 2012.

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Judith Flanders examines the state of housing for the 19th-century urban poor, assessing the 'improvements' carried out in slum areas and the efforts of writers, including Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew, to publicise such living conditions. Between 1800 and 1850 the population of England doubled.

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The Beehive isextraordinary illustration, produced by the graphic artist George Cruikshank in 1840. And it's this extraordinary kind of cross-section of all the different kinds of people that go to make up British society, from the Queen at the top, who is, Cruikshank says, 'Queen by lineal descent,' it's her absolute right to be there. Then on the next tier you have the Lords and the Commons. And then we go down to other important institutions, like trial by jury, freedom of all religious denominations, these things that make Britain great, Cruikshank seems to be saying.

And then you go further and further down and each strata has a different set of people, all arranged by occupation. So we have medical science, we have lawyers, and further down we have grocers and cheesemongers. Until you get right to the bottom, where we have chimney sweeps, costermongers, people who are literally the lowest of the low.

Now while Cruikshank was in a sense, you know, a radical commentator, he's also deeply conservative with a small c. He has a sense in which these roles that everybody's inhabiting, tea dealers, cheesemongers, drapers, are going to be like that forever. There's no sense in which how you could get from being a sweep at the bottom of the pile, right up to the top. It's fixed and it's permanent.

It's a cliché but I think it's an absolutely true one, that the Victorians were obsessed with class. They were obsessed with placing people in particular social categories. Now the reason for this was that their world was changing in absolutely extraordinary ways.

There were new kinds of wealth. The rising middle class, which we hear about so much, is something that's quite different because for the first time people are getting rich in new ways.

They're getting rich through production, through manufacture, through trading money, through trading articles, through building things, by becoming an engineer, a stockbroker. These are kind of new kinds of jobs, so there's a worry about where do these people fit? What you get from the beginning of 19th century is this kind of huge movement of population. People are pouring into the newly important cities, especially into London. And suddenly, everybody's a stranger. And of course you needed some way of placing people, of organising your world, of knowing who you were going to be friends with, who you were going to feel superior to, and who were going to feel in awe of. I think that's where the obsession with class comes from. This sense of trying to work who are these people, where do they belong, how should I behave towards them, what's my relationship towards them?

What it meant to be middle class was to hold a whole basket of values. One was a belief in the absolute power of the individual to make their way in the world. That sense in which, if you work hard enough, if you work harder than the next man, and it would be the next man, not the next woman, you will make it in the world. You can overcome any number of obstacles and make yourself who you want to be. Now of course along with that goes a very particular way of understanding the economy. A belief in free trade, the free movement of goods and services, and actually people as well, was fundamental to the idea of this new middle class. There were going to be no old-fashioned monopolies. Men and goods and prices and corn and everybody, will find their proper level if only we have free trade.

But of course it sounds wonderful, this idea that you can make yourself into anything you want to be, but along with that comes this slightly judgemental sense, that if you haven't 'made it', there's something wrong with you. That you don't really deserve any kind of respect. And we see the middle class imposing that value system on the working classes in a series of legislation in the 1830s, in particular the new Poor Law, which introduced the idea that there were deserving poor and undeserving poor. Now the deserving poor are the very elderly, the handicapped, people who really can't be expected to help themselves. They are worthy of charity and pity and Christian kindness. But the greatest part of the poor were undeserving people. These are people who are lazy, stupid, just aren't trying hard enough, and for them there's to be no compassion at all. They are going to be spirited in to the much hated institution of the Workhouse.

It could feel like an extraordinary burden, this feeling that you had to deserve your good fortune, and it's something Dickens satirises so well in Great Expectations. Because if you remember, Pip, who is a young working class boy, finds himself turned into a gentleman by a mysterious benefactor. Somebody is funding his rise through society. He doesn't know who. In fact, it turns out to be Magwitch, he's a criminal. But he doesn't know that. And he starts to feel incredibly guilty because he hasn't actually laboured for all the wonderful things he has, for the clothes he has, the food he eats, his toff-like ways. He hasn't really deserved them. And in fact, that's his undoing in the end. And Dickens was, you know, very, very critical of that idea, that there was something intrinsically wonderful about working for your place in the world.

There is of course another downside to this ideology of making your way in the world. I mean men are supposed to be out there fighting dragons in the sense of getting on in the free market economy, beating the next man, undercutting him, getting a bigger fortune. That's all good middle class stuff but it doesn't sit very well with the sort of Christian belief in the sense of brotherhood of man and not damaging anybody else by your actions. And one of the solutions that the middle class developed was by as it were keeping the man out in the world, in the world of free exchange of kind of intense commercial opportunism and competition, but by isolating his wife and his daughters in the middle class home.

Now in the middle class home all is sweetness and light and gentility. There is no competitiveness. I mean inevitably there's a sort of hypocrisy involved in kind of being immensely competitive in the outside world and coming home and as it were becoming somebody who is, you know, a good Christian, gentle, meek and mild. But perhaps more important than hypocrisy, it must have been a terribly difficult tension to live out in yourself.

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The Beehive isextraordinary illustration, produced by the graphic artist George Cruikshank in 1840. And it's this extraordinary kind of cross-section of all the different kinds of people that go to make up British society, from the Queen at the top, who is, Cruikshank says, 'Queen by lineal descent,' it's her absolute right to be there.

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What was The Victorian era? When was Victorian era?

Victorian age is named after Victoria, who became a queen in 1837 at age of 18 and ruled for 68 years until her death in 1901. So, the period from 1837 to 1901 is called Victorian era.

Who was the longest serving monarch of Britain?

The current queen of United Kingdom, Elizabeth II, has the longest reign. She broke the record of Queen Victoria on 9 September 2015.

Victoria took over at a time where the citizens of England, called Victorians, really did dislike royalty for the way things were being handled. As well, there was simply very little respect for the throne as the relatively new way of doing things through a democratic system was still relatively fresh in thinking for the majority of the country.

Victorian era Waddesdon Manor Garden

See

Queen Victoria is often claimed to have been a very good monarch. As noted above, coming in as monarch at a time where there was little respect for the throne, she is credited with bringing some respect back to it. The people of England adored her for the majority of her reign.

How was the governance during Victorian times?

The Victorian Government featured one of the earliest constitutional monarchies of the world. While Queen Victoria was viewed to have a very respectful position, in reality, she had a limited amount of power in comparison to monarchs that were living two centuries before her era.

Instead of holding the responsibility of making day to day decisions for the entire country, she was often there simply to give advice to Parliament and the Prime Minister which was an elected official that now made the calls on the day to day tasks. The country was growing so rapidly that the number of jobs just could not justify it.

How was the Victorian society?

The Victorian time period is known for its hierarchy based social order. Victorian society was a class based. You can see the various nobility titles in Britain. Therefore, the Victorian middle class not only would lose their jobs and have to find another, but they had to compete with immigrants for work.

This drove the prices down on the wages and most poor class families struggled to even put food on the table. The wedding day in Victorian times was considered to the most important day in the life of a Victorian girl.

The girls were from the very beginning had been taught to marry and to take of the family. The marriage of a girl was something very special for the mother, the soon to be bride and her family.

Check out what were the popular Victorian age last names and play with our Victorian name generator.

What is so special about Victorian costumes?

During the Victorian era, women's costumes underwent a major change. During the early Victorian era, the dressing style resembled the Georgian age clothing style. Victorian clothing style was linked to etiquette as well.

What are examples of The Victorian era architecture around the world?

When people hear the word Victorian, one thing that comes to their mind is the majestic Victorian architecture. However, it is in the reign of Queen Victoria that radical changes in architecture took place, each having their own distinct characteristics.

How were The Victorian ethics and morality?

Victorians were known for their morality and ethical conduct. Church had an influence on the society and daily lives of people.

Why Victorian era Literature and Art are famous?

Victorian literature is a matter of study in most courses in the English language even today. There were several popular authors who are relevant even today. Charles Dickens, Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy are well known because of their work and several films based on their books.

What were famous Victorian Inventions?

Several inventions during Victorian era changed the life of humanity forever. Whether it was in the field of medicine, engineering or transportation, these Victorian discoveries are worth looking at.

Check out information on the website using the search tool on the left. If you think some information can be added, feel free to contact us. You can also read more about other facts about Britain on Elizabethan Era, Tudor era, and Jacobean Era.

If you are planning to visit England to visit some of the wonderful museums which are home to many paintings described on Victorian era site, do refer London places to see.

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Victorian Era life in England. Victorians society & daily life

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Victorian age is named after Victoria, who became a queen in 1837 at age of 18 and ruled for 68 years until her death in 1901. So, the period from 1837 to 1901 is called Victorian era. The current queen of United Kingdom, Elizabeth II, has the longest reign.

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Victorian Era Morality Facts: Moral Behavior, Values, Ideals, Ethics

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Ethics and morals relate to "right" and "wrong" conduct. While they are sometimes used interchangeably, they are different: ethics refer to rules provided by an external source, e.g., codes of conduct in workplaces or principles in religions. Morals refer to an individual's own principles regarding right and wrong.

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Victorian Values in a New Age [ushistory.org]

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http://victorian-era.org/victorian-morality.html

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Rise to power

Such economic and financial divergences were compounded by differences of religion, background and politics. But, whilst it is difficult to talk of the Victorian middle-class as a group with a coherent outlook, they nevertheless gained coherence out of the political and social changes of the period. Giving voice to urbanisation and industrialisation this emerging middle-class emphasised competition, thrift, prudence, self-reliance and personal achievement as opposed to privilege and inheritance. The moral terms of this outlook enabled the middle-class to accommodate diversity. Being middle class was defined by taking responsibility for one's self, one's family and the community but the precise terms of this were open to individual interpretation.

The success of the middle-classes in the Victorian period can be seen in their ability to universalise a set of principles based on individuality and progress. In moving from a society based on rank and privilege to one based on free exchange, the very idea that an individual, through hard work, thrift and self reliance, could achieve social and economic success provided an equalising principle. But, whilst the idea of social mobility was, and still is, central to legitimising the idea of a market economy, many critics of industrialisation, such as Thomas Carlyle, feared that the community was threatened by the aggressive individualism of some or the frustrated aspirations of others.

A sense of social order was formulated in the mixing of political economy, paternalism and evangelical religion which ascribed specific roles to groups of people. The working classes were encouraged to improve but they were also reminded they should be content with their lot as labourers. Whilst women's work, either for wages or to ensure the success of the family business, might be essential, the idealised wife and mother was prescribed the responsibility for cultivating morality and spirituality in the home as a corrective to the worst excesses of competitive industry.

These perspectives were popularised in a range of books and articles in the nineteenth century but are perhaps best demonstrated by Samuel Smiles and his best seller Self Help published in 1859. Smiles argued, along with others of his time, that individuals were responsible for their own future: men had the same characteristics and potentialities that could be maximised through hard work, perseverance, thrift, prudence and self-reliance. These ideas emphasised individuals rather than classes, morals rather than economic realities, and talked of the deserving and undeserving, the rough and the respectable, thus reducing persistent inequalities to moral rather than economic causes.

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Such economic and financial divergences were compounded by differences of religion, background and politics. But, whilst it is difficult to talk of the Victorian middle-class as a group with a coherent outlook, they nevertheless gained coherence out of the political and social changes of the period.

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Great pioneers

The designer of the Great Western was the brilliant young engineer of the Great Western Railway, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who had persuaded his directors that a transatlantic shipping line was the natural way to expand the services offered by their railway. Brunel's response to the challenge posed by his rivals was to design a bigger and better ship. In July 1839, the keel was laid in Bristol for a new 3270 ton iron super ship. Designed for speed and comfort, this was to be the most revolutionary steamship of the early Victorian period. Equipped with cabins and state rooms for 360 passengers and the largest and most lavish dining room afloat, and the first large ship to be screw-driven, the Great Britain set the standard for large liners for many decades to come. By 1853 the Great Britain, refitted to accommodate up to 630 passengers, was operating an efficient London to Australia service and continued to do so for nearly twenty years.

The success of the Great Britain encouraged Brunel and his backers to create one more ship. In 1854 work started at Millwallon the Thames in east London on the building of the Great Eastern. Designed to carry 4000 passengers and enough coal to sail to Australia without refuelling en route, the ship was 693 feet long, 120 feet wide and weighed over 18,900 tons. Nothing on this scale had ever been considered before, and when she was finally broken up in 1888, the Great Eastern was still the largest ship in the world. The records of scale set by the Great Eastern were only finally broken by the super liners of the Edwardian era, the Lusitania of 1907, the Titanic of 1912 and the Imperator of 1913. On the Great Eastern's maiden voyage in June 1860 the ship carried only 38 paying passengers.

This became a pattern and the ship never sailed with all berths filled. Scale and technical virtuosity were not enough and the smaller, simpler and faster ships of Samuel Cunard captured the traffic. Increasingly a white elephant, the Great Eastern came out of passenger service in 1863 and was chartered by the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company to lay telegraph cables across the Atlantic and from India to Aden, a task for which her huge size and powerful engines made her eminently suitable.

From an early date the British government realised that the successful operation and maintenance of an expanding trade empire depended upon fast, regular and reliable steamship services, supported by coaling and supply stations scattered all over the world. The primary function of the Royal Navy in Victorian Britain was the protection of these trade routes and their supply bases. As a result, the government sponsored the development and maintenance of the routes and, increasingly, the cost of building the ships. In 1840 the Peninsular Company became the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, with government contracts to operate services to Egypt, South Africa, India, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. In the process, as the Cunard name was becoming synonymous with the Atlantic so P&O developed its long term association with routes east of Suez.

Booming railways

Equally important were the links established between shipping lines and ship yards. During the Victorian period British shipyards on the Clyde, the Tyne, the Mersey, the Thames, at Barrow and Belfast came to dominate the world, having pioneered the use of iron and steel in ship-building, and developed marine technology to a high level. In 1900, for example, 739,000 tons of shipping was built and registered in Britain. British yards built ships for owners all over the world and were still in a dominant position at the end of the century, despite increasing competition offered by ship builders in Germany. Cunard had close links with the Glasgow yard of Robert Napier, while the Belfast firm of Harland & Wolff backed a new Atlantic challenger, the White Star Line, launched in 1871 and went on to have interests in other shipping companies, including the Union Castle Line.

Like the steamship, the railway predates the Victorian era. The start of the modern railway age is usually marked by the opening in 1825 of the Stockton & Darlington line. Other, mostly local, lines followed, the most important of which was the Liverpool and Manchester of 1830, famous for Robert Stephenson's Rocket locomotive. With its multitube boiler, blast pipe exhaust, pistons connected directly to the driving wheels and its ability to haul its train at over 30 miles per hour, this machine set the standard for locomotive design. The first long distance lines were opened in the first years of Queen Victoria's reign, the London and Birmingham in 1838, part of Brunel's London to Bristol route the same year and the London and Southampton in 1840. A railway boom and mania followed during the 1840s, with promoters and speculators planning lines all over Britain.

By 1845 2441 miles of railway were open and 30 million passengers were being carried. The railways, offering as they did new opportunities for travel and commerce, and breaking down social barriers in the process, were immediately popular, a popularity encouraged by acts of parliament that ensured that trains conformed to standards of speed and comfort and offered rates that were affordable by all. The spread of the railways also brought about, through time-tabling, a regularisation of time throughout Britain. Excursions and day trips, particularly to the seaside, became a familiar part of British social life. In 1851 many of the six million visitors to the Great Exhibition travelled by train to London in organised excursions. Queen Victoria made her first train journey on 13 June 1842 and then became a regular user of the rail network, for speed and convenience and because it gave her ample opportunity to show herself and her family to her subjects.

Expansion of the rail network was rapid and continuous. Between 1861 and 1888 the mileage grew by 81 percent and the traffic carried by 180 percent. By 1900, 18,680 miles were in use and over 1100 million passengers were being carried, along with huge quantities of freight. From 1852 the carriage of freight provided the railway companies with the bulk of their income. Safety standards, at first almost non-existent, gradually improved with advances in signalling and vehicle technology. By the end of the century trains ran regularly, and with complete safety, at speeds in excess of 70 miles per hour. Comfort also improved. The first lavatories appeared in family saloons in the 1860s, the first proper sleeping cars were introduced in 1873 and dining cars came into use from 1879.

Communication revolution

The building of the railway network was the major achievement of the Victorian period, changing for ever both social patterns and the landscape of Britain. The great engineers, Stephenson, Brunel, Locke, Vignoles and many others built their lines across hills and valleys, across mountains and marshland and over great rivers with determination and style, and often regardless of cost. Their legacy are the great embankments, viaducts, tunnels and bridges that cover the face of Britain, in many cases still visible long after the trains they served have disappeared. Their stations, wondrous constructions in iron and glass and great cathedrals to modernity, brought a new building type into British culture.

As the railway was, in essence, a British creation, it was readily exported to many parts of the world, as a concept, and in component form. British engineers, British construction teams and British capital built railways throughout the Empire, in the Americas and in many parts of Europe. The famous railway contractor Thomas Brassey built railways in France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Russia, India, Argentina and Australia. Imperial railway building projects were often inspired by strategic as well as industrial and commercial motives, but such projects, notably in India and Africa, opened up huge and long lasting markets to British manufacturers.British-made locomotives, rolling stock and railway equipment were exported around the world throughout the Victorian period.

The spread of the railway in Victorian Britain was closely linked to the development of the electric telegraph. The idea of communicating via electricity dates back to the eighteenth century but it was the understanding of electromagnetism from the 1820s that gave the idea a practical reality. In 1837 Cooke and Wheatstone developed the electric telegraph which used an electric current to move magnetic needles and thus transmit messages in code. The first operational telegraph system linked Euston station and Camden town, and from there it spread all over the railway network, used both to carry messages and to control signalling. The technology of the telegraph rapidly expanded, making possible mass communication on both national and global scales. With instruments in every post office, the telegraph, and its visible offspring, the telegram, personal communication on a scale hitherto inconceivable became commonplace. A telegraph cable was laid across the Channel in 1851, followed by others across the Irish and North Seas.

In 1866 Brunel's huge ship, the Great Eastern, laid a durable telegraph cable across the Atlantic. The global network spread rapidly, with many countries establishing their own systems. Colonial, military and commercial implications were quickly appreciated. By 1878 Britain had constructed two overland and one maritime telegraph links to India, part of a network that by the end of the century had reached almost every corner of the world. Related to the telegraph, but far more practical on a personal level, was the telephone, developed by the Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. By 1887 there were 26,000 telephones in use in Britain (and 150,000 in the United States) and multiple switchboards had been installed in most major towns and cities.

With the development by Marconi of practical radio transmissions at the very end of the nineteenth century, the foundations for the global communications systems of the twenty first century were in place in Victorian Britain.

In Britain, the attitudes and achievements of the Victorians are still part of many aspects of modern life today. These legacies are probably most tangible in the fields of communication. The Victorians not only built a British railway network which was more than twice as large as today's network but often operated with greater effiency. Urban transport systems such as buses and underground railways were also created by the Victorians. With those systems came the habit of commuting, one of the most durable and least appealing of nineteenth century legacies. The post service, the electric telegraph which was the forerunner of today's internet and the phone paved the way for the making of a world which relies heavily on complex structures of domestic and worldwide communications.

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The designer of the Great Western was the brilliant young engineer of the Great Western Railway, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who had persuaded his directors that a transatlantic shipping line was the natural way to expand the services offered by their railway. Brunel's response to the challenge posed by his rivals was to design a bigger and better ship.

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If you were born in the early nineteenth century, you were in for a big surprise: by 1900, the world you had grown up in was gone for good. How had the enthusiasm for speed transformed the Victorians' world?

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How had the enthusiasm for speed transformed the Victorians' world?

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Find out more
Books
Poverty and Poor Law Reform in Nineteenth Century Britain 1834-1914 - from Chadwick to Booth by David Englander (Longman, 1998). A comprehensive account of poverty and the response to it in Victorian Britain, with an extensive bibliography of useful national, local and regional material.

Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain by Edwin Chadwick, 1842, ed. M.W. Flinn (1965). The full text of Chadwick's report includes his use of extracts from the reports of the local investigators. The book includes an introduction to the Report and an explanation of its significance to public health reform.

The English Town by Mark Girouard (Yale University Press 1995). A colourful illustrated introduction to all aspects of the history of towns with an extensive section on Victorian Britain. (publisher, date)

State, Society and the Poor in Nineteenth Century England by Alan Kidd, (Palgrave, 1999). This book in the Social History in Perspective series focuses as much on self-help, voluntary and charity provision for the poor as it does on assistance provided by the state.

Places to visit

The Public Record Office at Kew is the major repository of Poor Law Union, Commission and Board papers. Local History Libraries are a rich source of many of the records of the 19th century.

Thackray Medical Museum, Beckett Street, Leeds, LS9 7LN, Tel: 0113245 7084 (on the St James's Hospital/Jimmy's site). This museum is housed in the building that was the Leeds Union Workhouse built in 1861. A visit there opens with Robert Baker's description of Leeds in 1842 and an invitation to tour the reconstructed unhealthy and insanitary streets of the town. You are able to choose a character and follow their life expectancy, and to find out about the possible - and impossible - cures for illnesses.

Ripon Workhouse Museum, St Marygate, Ripon, North Yorkshire, HG4 1LX, Tel: 01765 690799. This is believed to be the only workhouse museum in the country, it is established in the Men's Casual Wards of 1877 in the Workhouse buildings. The cells, dayroom and workyard have been refurbished, and with a Hard Times Gallery of images, this museum gives a unique picture of the reality of the Poor Law at work.

The Workhouse, Southwell, Nottinghamshire. (Not yet open, but due to open at Easter 2002.) This workhouse is currently being renovated by the National Trust.

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Beneath the Surface: A Country of Two Nations

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Books Poverty and Poor Law Reform in Nineteenth Century Britain 1834-1914 - from Chadwick to Booth by David Englander (Longman, 1998). A comprehensive account of poverty and the response to it in Victorian Britain, with an extensive bibliography of useful national, local and regional material.

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Ireland

The United Kingdom's population at Victoria's accession in 1837 was about 25.5 million, eight million of whom lived in Ireland. At her death in 1901, it had risen to 41 million.

These figures, however, mask an enormous contrast. While the population of England and Wales increased by some 116% (15 million to 32.5 million), that of Ireland almost halved (eight million to 4.5 million), its population declining in every decade of the reign.

This stark contrast is explained by two linked factors. Ireland, the Protestant north east around Belfast excepted, did not experience an industrial revolution in the Victorian age.

It also endured a devastating famine from 1845 - 1847, the result of a failed potato crop among a peasant population dangerously dependent on one food source for sheer existence.

Ireland lost more than one million people to the ravages of famine in the 1840s. It lost far more over the next half century to the steady drip of emigration to Britain, the Americas and Australia.

This ticking demographic timebomb had far-reaching consequences. Large numbers of Irish Catholics - both those who stayed and those who left - blamed the British government for the famine and saw in it the ultimate proof that the Act of Union had been a ruse from which Britain benefited and for which Ireland continued to suffer.

The famine extinguished any realistic hope that the Irish, like the Scots a century earlier, might come to realise the economic, commercial and cultural benefits of political union with a larger and more prosperous national partner.

Inevitably, 'home rule' campaigns grew in both numbers and violence in the second half of Victoria's reign. These also impacted massively on British politics.

'The Irish Question' dominated the last phase of the career of William Gladstone, probably Victoria's ablest - and certainly her most driven - prime minister.

His Liberal party's split on home rule for Ireland in 1886 began the long process of marginalisation of the political party which dominated much of the queen's reign. Ireland would not get home rule in Victoria's lifetime, but it set the political agenda unlike any other issue.

Politics

What, finally, of the Victorian political structure? It is easy to see that it was far from democratic.

At the beginning of Victoria's reign, about a fifth of adult males were entitled to vote. That proportion increased, through parliamentary reform acts passed in 1867 and 1884, to one-third and two-thirds respectively.

No women could legally vote in parliamentary elections until almost 18 years after Victoria's death - and the queen herself was no suffragist. Women did, however, play an increasingly influential role both in locally-elected school and poor law boards and in local government from the 1870s onwards.

If not democratic, the political system was becoming increasingly representative. By 1901, few argued - as had frequently been asserted against the Chartists in the 1830s and 1840s - that to allow working men to vote would be to cede power to an ignorant, insensate and unworthy majority.

Victorian politicians increasingly learned how to 'trust the people'. They also noted how many among 'lower orders' could help themselves economically while improving themselves educationally.

The working-class Victorian autodidact was an increasingly significant figure. His modest successes enabled his 'betters' to claim that Britain was a specially advanced, perhaps even a divinely favoured, nation.

Britain managed to modernize its political system without succumbing to the political revolutions that afflicted virtually all of its European competitors.

The quality of political debate in Victorian Britain, in newspapers and in both houses of parliament, was also very high. The struggle for political supremacy between William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli in the late 1860s and 1870s represents perhaps the most sophisticated political duel in the nation's history.

During the Victorian era, then, the United Kingdom could plausibly be considered as the world's superpower. However, Germany and the United States had already begun to surpass its industrial capacity and Germany's naval build-up would shortly present a powerful challenge to long-held British supremacy.

On the home front, the nation was only beginning to get to grips with widespread poverty while considerably more than half the adult population remained without a vote. Victorian supremacy by 1901 was only skin deep.

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Overview: Victorian Britain, 1837 - 1901

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The United Kingdom's population at Victoria's accession in 1837 was about 25.5 million, eight million of whom lived in Ireland. At her death in 1901, it had risen to 41 million. These figures, however, mask an enormous contrast.

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help people live or die

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In 'Muck and Brass' you will have to imagine you are running a city at the height of the Industrial Revolution, and make choices regarding the welfare of your workforce and the prosperity of your business. How ready is your conscience for the realities of Victorian Britain? Play the game to find out.

Once you start, you'll find it's the 1850s. Britain's landscape is dominated by industrial towns and rapidly expanding cities. Market towns have become provincial backwaters. Millions of people live in poverty, whilst a lucky few amass enormous wealth.

This social gulf is the reality of Victorian Britain. Towns are built for industry and trade; not for people. Homes are thrown up in a hurry, without a thought for their dwellers. Britain has become an economic powerhouse, but a country of extremes.

In this game you have to help iron out some of these extremes and improve the image of 'Cottonopolis'. To succeed you will have to think and act like a Victorian.

The results of your decisions will be measured in a macabre combination of coffins and coins. Your unenviable task is to keep the city's coffers full, whilst trying to save as many of your citizens as possible from an early grave.

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In 'Muck and Brass' you will have to imagine you are running a city at the height of the Industrial Revolution, and make choices regarding the welfare of your workforce and the prosperity of your business. How ready is your conscience for the realities of Victorian Britain? Play the game to find out.

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BBC - History - British History in depth: Victorian Medicine - From Fluke to Theory

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Bruce Robinson explores the dramatic progress of Victorian medicine.

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Find out more
Books
Women's History in Britain, 1850-1945 ed. June Purvis (London UCL Press 1995) A collection of essays covering a range of topics from women's work and the family to education, health, sexuality and politics.

Women, Gender and Industrialisation in England, 1700-1870 by Katrina Honeyman (Basingstoke Macmillan, 2000) A concise volume good on gender, class and industrialisation.

The First Industrial Woman by Deborah Valenze (Oxford OUP, 1995) Good on the implications of shifting employment patterns, agricultural work and domestic service.

A History of European Women's Work, 1700 to the present by Deborah Simonton, (New York Routledge, 1998) Good for the longer time perspective and for European similarities and contrasts.

Links

The Womens' Library An organisation of historians of women in Britain promoting research and writing on women's history. This website also contains a number of very useful links to other websites associated with the history of women.

Spartacus Schoolnet A website directed at schools containing biographies of key women in the history of the British women's movement.

Places to visit

There a several museums which help to recapture the nature of Victorian society and the place of women within it, most obviously the Victoria and Albert Museum in London which has wonderful collections of art and artefacts reflecting the nature of the middle- and upper-class Victorian home. Smaller museums yield information and evidence of women's work and their patterns of dress and consumption. Most notably Quarry Bank Mill at Style, Cheshire; the textile museum in the Halifax Piece Hall; and Platt Hall Museum, Manchester.

The new industrial and commercial middle classes of the Victorian era were great patrons of the arts, and some British provincial art galleries contain major collections of the sorts of works which they commissioned as well as work depicting domestic interiors and women. Amongst the best of these art galleries are the Birmingham City Art Gallery and the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

Consult some primary sources detailing the nature of women's work and household activities such as business records, census enumerators' books, trade directories, household budgets and private diaries. Details of business records relating to women in the West Yorkshire textile industries can be found in The West Riding Wool Textile Industry: a catalogue of business records by Pat Hudson, (Edington, Pasold, 1976). Other guides to archive holdings can be found on the websites of most major repositories. Many collections of working class autobiographies have been published and include several written by women. For a guide see for example, The Autobiography of the Working Class: an annotated critical bibliography vols 1-3 ed. by J. Burnett, D. Vincent and J. Mayall, (Hassocks Harvester 1984, 1987, 1989).

Examining surviving Victorian housing from outside and from within can be very revealing particularly if these can be matched to information from Census returns. It is possible to reconstruct Victorian households at each census point and to imagine where each household member resided within the house. In many major cities there are now organised walks which are helpful in tracing Victorian history and women's history trails. Details of these can usually be obtained from local history libraries.

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Discover what life was like for Victorian women who worked wage-paying jobs alongside their domestic duties. How did this affect society?

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Just some interesting images to look at...

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Dash my wig!

Let's get real for a second: there are a lot of important moments in fashion history, but nothing is as fierce as the Victorian Era.

Hulton Archive / Via Getty

1. What other era brought us these stylish top hats?

2. And this dapper bowler hat?

11. Compared to today's hairstyles, women in the Victorian era were killing the game.

General Photographic Agency

"If you touch my hair, I'll kill you." - Every Victorian woman.

12. And women's hats were larger than life.

General Photographic Agency

Talk about a fashion statement.

It's definitely hard to deny that Victorian fashion is simply the best there ever was.

Hulton Archive / Via Getty

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23 Charming Photos That Prove The Victorian Era Had The Best Fashion

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Dash my wig! 1. What other era brought us these stylish top hats? 2. And this dapper bowler hat? 11. Compared to today's hairstyles, women in the Victorian era were killing the game. "If you touch my hair, I'll kill you." - Every Victorian woman. 12. And women's hats were larger than life.