Social issues during the Victorian Age.

6.3.1. The earliest and most persistent movement for social reform concerned child labor. Children formed an important component of the industrial labor force because employers could pay them lower wages. From a very young age they worked the same hours as their parents in the same difficult conditions. Parliament first limited the hours children could work in textile factories in 1833, following a public outcry over a parliamentary inquiry into working conditions for children. The law prevented children under nine years of age from working more than nine hours per day. In 1842 a law extended this protection to children working in mines. Other improvements were made. For instance, an act of 1881 finally made education compulsory for children aged five to ten.

6.3.2. The underlying belief of Victorian society was in progress—that things were better than ever before and could be made better still. This belief was the impetus for thousands of voluntary associations that worked to improve the lives of the poor both at home and abroad. It also underlay the charitable foundations created by wealthy benefactors and the public philanthropies of some of the greatest industrialists. Social experiments were conducted by individuals such as factory owner Robert Owen, who founded utopian communities in which wealth was held in common.

6.3.3. Concern with social issues led people like Booth, William to looking for other ways to ameliorate the society. In 1865 Booth and his wife, to propagate the Christian faith and to furnish spiritual and material aid to needy persons, founded the Christian Mission in London, which later became known as the Salvation Army. Members of the army, equipped with uniforms and flags, drums and cornets, were greeted with riotous demonstrations on their first appearances in the streets and were frequently arrested for disturbing the peace. The work progressed, however, and branches of the army were established in all parts of the world, with international headquarters in London.

6.3.4. The age produced outstanding individuals like Florence Nightingale who was a hospital reformer, and humanitarian. After the Crimean War broke out, Nightingale was stirred by reports of the primitive sanitation methods and inadequate nursing facilities at the British barracks-hospital and volunteered her services in Crimea. Through her tireless efforts the mortality rate among the sick and the wounded was greatly reduced. Florence Nightingale's contributions to the evolution of nursing as a profession were invaluable. Through her efforts the stature of nursing was raised to a medical profession with high standards of education and important responsibilities.

6.4. Cultural life: literature and other arts.

6.4.1. During the last two-thirds of the 19th century, the Victorian era produced an amazing number of popular novelists and poets. This time period saw the rise of an increasingly urbanized, middle-class, and educated society that included a much larger reading audience. Many authors wrote about characters and situations well-known or easily comprehensible to their audience and became universally popular and in touch with their vast readership to a degree not matched in the 20th century. Perhaps the most famous author of this time was Charles Dickens, who portrayed the hardships of the working class while criticizing middle-class life.

6.4.2. Writers prominent during the heart of the Victorian period include William Makepeace Thackeray, who wrote humorous portrayals of middle- and upper-class life; the Brontë sisters — Charlotte, Emily, and Anne — whose novels tended to be autobiographical; and Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote children’s books, adventure stories, and poetry. The Victorian age was the time when Rudyard Kipling rose to literary stardom later becoming the first-ever British winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907.

6.4.3. Many painters stood against Victorian middle-class materialism, with its concern for worldly objects. In 1848 several painters came together and founded a movement called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They sought to return to an earlier, simpler time, and their works exhibited the brightness, color, and purity of medieval and Renaissance painting done before the time of Italian artist Raphael. Artist and poet William Morris sought to return to medieval traditions in craftsmanship. He is credited with founding the Arts and Crafts movement, which became influential in furniture, decorative items, and textile designs.

6.4.4. Victorian architecture borrowed from a variety of styles, including classical, Gothic, and Renaissance. The most famous Victorian neo-Gothic building is Parliament, built between 1840 and 1870. The only truly original building of the Victorian era was the Crystal Palace. It was designed by English architect Joseph Paxton to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. Spreading over 7,3 hectares (18 acres), the building consisted entirely of panels of glass set within iron frames. Paxton adapted two major features of the Industrial Revolution to the architecture of the Crystal Palace: mass production (in the manufactured glass panels and iron frames) and the use of iron rather than traditional masonry (stones or brick). Many things were done for the first time during that famous exhibition. For instance, the first constructions of dinosaurs were exhibited at the Crystal Palace, where their creator zoologist Richard Owen held a banquet inside the belly of the Iguanodon before its reconstruction was completed.

LECTURE 07

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