When Queen Victoria ascended the British throne in 1837, it marked the beginning of a promising new age - the Victorian era. The preceding Georgian era had lasted from 1714 to 1830, from the reign of George I through George IV.
Popular Culture:
Illusionists and spiritualists were popular attractions in theatres and exhibition halls: audiences could sit amazed as ghosts appeared on stage and automata solved mathematical puzzles. Renowned performers appeared to levitate, slice the heads off spectators and escape out of locked boxes. There were many small collections of animals, sometimes owned by a circus manager who trundled them along the country roads before erecting his ‘Big Top’ wherever he hoped for a profitable audience. The first famous circus proprietor, ‘Lord’ George Sanger, produced spectacular winter shows in Astley’s Amphitheatre, just over Westminster Bridge.
The building in Hyde Park housing the Great Exhibition had never been intended to be permanent. When the Exhibition closed, passionate public discussion broke out. What should be done with the famous Crystal Palace? Eventually a consortium of entrepreneurs, including Joseph Paxton, bought it outright. It was almost as great a marvel to disassemble it and move it to a new site, as it had been to build it in the first place. But frame by frame, pane by pane, it moved across London and up to the Surrey heights, at Sydenham. The new building, was half as large again as the Hyde Park building had been, and built to last. Its elaborate foundations housed 50 miles of hot water piping. The new building was opened by the royal couple in June 1854 just in time to catch fashionable London before the Season ended.
Education:
The Factory Act of 1833, had imposed a duty on employers to provide half‐time education for employees under 13. In practice, the Act was easily ignored. The break‐through came in 1870. Elected school boards could levy a local rate to build new schools providing education up to the age of 10. In 1880 the provision of elementary schooling for both sexes was made compulsory, and the age raised to 13. By 1874 5,000 ‘Board Schools’ were running. Another change in the law enabled grammar schools for girls to be founded and funded. By 1898, 90 such schools had been founded.
For centuries, the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge had imposed three barriers to entrance. An applicant had to be 1: male; 2: unmarried; and 3: a member of the Church of England. While 2 and 3 could be evaded with a little cunning, 1 could not. Non‐sectarian colleges had been opened in London from 1828 onwards, grouped into London University in 1836. Durham University was founded in 1832, Owens College in Manchester in 1851, and Birmingham University in 1900. In 1878 London University admitted women to two colleges, Bedford College, and the Royal Holloway College opened by Queen Victoria in 1886, which was funded by the proceeds of patent medicines. But Oxford and Cambridge held out against women until the next century.
Technology and Industry:
By the 1860s, iron cooking ranges had arrived in most middle-class kitchens. They were an immense improvement on the old open fires, since they had built-in ovens and tanks for heating water. In the bathroom, water could be heated by gas powered ‘geysers’, which were terrifying to the user but a blessing to the maid who no longer had to carry bath water up the stairs. In the City, the old coffee houses were replaced by modern offices, using the new telegraph system to trade world wide. Women were taken on as ‘typewriters’ and telephonists (the telephone was invented in 1877).
Cotton spinning and weaving had been mechanized since the 1790s, using water power. By 1870 steam power was general. If the power-driven shafts and belts were to be economically used, factory workers had to comply with ‘factory discipline’ imposed by the overseers. Gradually the old one-to-one relationship between piece-work weaver and ‘putter-out’ gave way to impersonal contracts of mass employment.
Travel, Transport and Communication:
During Queen Victoria’s reign Britain was the most powerful trading nation in the world.
The railway network flourished between 1830 and 1870. By 1852 there were over 7,000 miles of rail track in England and Scotland, and every significant centre could rely on rail communication. Britain's railways transformed the landscape both physically and culturally, producing new opportunities for commerce and travel, and fuelling industrial and economic expansion. Goods could be transported at unprecedented rates, and it was British technologies and engineers that were responsible for railway construction throughout the world.
Meanwhile the traffic in inner cities was becoming chaotic. The answer that those astonishing Victorians came up with was obvious: move the whole problem underground. In 1863 the first underground railway in the world was built, connecting Paddington station – the London rail terminus for many prosperous commuters to the City – to Farringdon Street, just minutes away from the Bank of England.
- The British Library
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