Victorian Politics: key words WHIG LIBERAL TORY CONSERVATIVE CHARTIST ABOLITIONIST SOCIALIST

TOWARDS A FAIRER SOCIETY FIRST REFORM BILL (franchise extended, rotten boroughs) 1830s and 1840s Slavery abolished in the Empire Poor Law Amendment, workhouses Mines Act Repeal of Corn Laws Ten Hours’ Act 1867 SECOND REFORM BILL (franchise extended to city workers)

1860S AND 1870S Sanitary Act, improvement of health conditions Universal elementary education Universities open to men of all creeds Legalization of Trade Unions Secret Ballot in all elections 1884 THIRD REFORM BILL (franchise extended to all male workers) 1884 Fabian Society (English Socialism) 1892 Independent Labour Party

An exploding population Reverend Malthus An Essay on the Principle of Population Six editions between 1798 and 1826 UTILITARIANISM (the greatest happiness of the greatest number) Jeremy Bentham John Stuart Mill DARWINISM Survival of the fittest Descent of man → religious doubt

WORKING CONDITIONS + REDUCTIVE AND MECHANISTIC MODEL OF SOCIETY were denounced by writers and intellectuals Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844 Two examples in literature: → Condition-of-England novels → Medievalism

Three Condition-of-England novels Benjamin Disraeli Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845) Charles Dickens Hard Times (1854) Elizabeth Gaskell North and South ( )

Why the Middle Ages? ‘Popular antiquarianism, and the romances of Sir Walter Scott, had enabled readers for the first time to imagine a DISTANT HISTORICAL PAST neither classical nor biblical but PART OF NATIONAL HISTORY, and to engage with an open mind in an imaginative comparison of such a past with the present state of society’ (Michael Alexander, Medievalism, 2007, pp )

Nineteenth-Century Medievalism Religion: Attempt to revive the Sacramental religion of the Middle Ages (Cardinal Newman) Arts and Decoration: Architecture (A. W. Pugin) Medieval festivals and tournaments Social Reform: Dignity of individual work Rural vs industrial life (Thomas Carlyle John Ruskin) Pre-Raphaelites Arts and Crafts Movement

The dignity of work, art, craftsmanship Ford Madox Brown, Work,

Connections between Medievalism and Socialism John Ruskin William Morris

Thomas Carlyle A famous excerpt from Past and Present (1834) Gurth, born thrall to Cederic the Saxon, has been greatly pitied. [..] Gurth, with the brass collar round his neck, tending Cederic’s pigs in the glades of the wood, is not what I call and exemplar of human felicity: but Gurth, with the sky above him, with the free air and tinted boscage and umbrage round him, and in him at least the certainty of supper and social lodging when he came home;

Gurth to me seems happy, in comparison with many a Lancashire and Buckinghamshire man of these days, not born thrall of anybody! [...] Gurth had superiors, inferiors, equals. – Gurth is now ‘emancipated’ long since; has what we call ‘Liberty’. Liberty, I am told, is a divine thing. Liberty when it becomes the ‘Liberty to die by starvation’ is not so divine!

THE PRESS Eighteenth-century famous publication The Spectator, The Tatler (Addison and Steele) The Rambler, The Idler (Samuel Johnson) The Gentleman’s Magazine Nineteenth century= Explosion of the Press

Since the beginning of the century: The Times The (Manchester) Guardian Sunday Papers Radical Pamphlets Mid-century → New Journalism 1880s → London capital of the press