Victorian Quotations For the Context paper
Industrialisation ‘dark satanic mills’ – Blake on Industrialisation (pre-Victorian)
Gender ‘separate spheres’ Sarah Ellis (1859) – men active, women passive ‘The Angel in the house’
Gender ‘her intellect is for sweet ordering’ – John Ruskin, Sesames and Lillies
Family/Home Florence Nightingale – family ‘constricting’ – in Cassandra (1850s) Ruskin – home is “the place of Peace”
Prostitution Prostitution was not illegal – ‘the great social evil’
Science Darwin played down his challenge to creationism in The Origin of Species – he wrote in a private letter: ‘It was as if one were confessing to a murder’.
Technology The country was gripped by ‘railway mania’ in the 1840s