VICTORIAN AGE

The Victorian family (role of woman, man, children and the Victorian gentleman’s moral values
The Victorians were very proud of their scientific and technological achievements and of their really
high moral values. They believed in hard work, respectability, getting wealthier and wealthier and
religion.

The typical Victorian family was composed by the husband, who was a gentleman, who supported his
family financially and went to church every Sunday; the woman had to be the so-called “angel of the
home”, meaning that she had to be a loving wife and mother, and took care of her children. Sex out of
marriage, and not with the only purpose of procreation, was forbidden for everyone and especially for
women. If they enjoyed sex and/or were prostitutes, or got pregnant before marriage, they were called
“fallen women”. Of course it was not like that: the children were brought up by a governess who looked
after them. They did not go to school because they were not supposed to mix with lower class children,
so they kept on living in a golden cage of lies: the perfect Victorian world. When they got older they
were sent to college, where they got to know the real truth about society, so it wasn’t a gradual
discovery, but it happened all of a sudden. This brought a serious life shift into their reality, and the
psychological outcomes were major.

Unfortunately these high moral standards were never the reality: middle class men were very good at
keeping up appearances, they could go to church with their family the day before, and go to a casino
and pay for prostitution the next day. So there was a lot of hypocrisy in the whole Victorian society.

A very famous poem that lists the virtues of the Victorian gentleman is “If” by Kipling. It teaches man to
be faithful, to never lie, to never hate, to never show off, to learn to start over as best as he can with
what he has, to never despair, to use his own will to persist, to never lose touch with reality, to never
love too much because it takes away balance in life, and to use every second of his time.

Utilitarianism
Another important part of the Victorian society was Utilitarianism, which is the belief that only the
useful things in life are the good and important ones, so: working hard, making money and being
respectable. This took away the importance of art, love and beauty, so artists became outcasts in
society. Wilde wrote the fairy tale “The Nightingale And The Rose” to expose Utilitarianism. (PLOT) The
nightingale is the symbol of the poet, who is ready to give his life for art and love, which are symbolized
by the rose, while the Victorian utilitarian society, which is portrayed by the student and the mayor’s
daughter, does not even recognize it.

Victorian compromise (the conditions of workers) and social darwinism

While all the Victorian gentlemen were supposed to live by these high moral values, the working class
lived in poverty and vice: they moved from the countryside to the big cities, where the industrial
revolution was spreading, and where all the jobs were. This brought overcrowding in cities, and poor
people were forced to live in slums, where there was no sanitation, no running water and very poor
hygiene. There were no institutions that protected the workers (they worked an inhuman amount of
hours, little children could work, there was no safety and no assurance), so poor people became poorer
and poorer, and rich people became richer and richer. This was a time of many contradictions: Dickens
uses the phrase “the best of times, the worst of times” to describe this so-called Victorian compromise.

Victorians also believed in Darwin’s evolution thesis and applied this “survival of the fittest” theory to
society. This is called social Darwinism: rich people thought they were wealthy because they were
fittest, better and they deserved it, because they were chosen by nature and God; this also derives from
their Lutheran culture, which was based on capitalism. It was a sin to be poor, because you were not
morally fit to live well, so poor people were poor because they wanted to, and so they deserved it. Of
course it was not like that because they worked under terrible conditions, for many hours and made
just enough to survive, because there was the so-called free trade (or laissez-faire), which meant that
the market regulated itself , so the rich, who were in power, took advantage of it.

But the conditions of workers got better after Queen Victoria gave more rights to them, in order to
maintain peace. In 1833 there was the “Factory Act”, which stated that the minimum age of workers had
to be 9, and children had to work less than adults, and there had to be factory inspectors. In 1870 the
Elementary Education Act stated that elementary education was compulsory for children between the
age of 5 and 12.