...Throughout the mid Victorian era, (1850-1870), Britain was in its golden years. While growth in textiles, trade and machinery put twice as much money in British Merchants pockets a new order began to form. The first World’s Fair in 1851 marked the first stepping stone for modern technologies and the middle class. Families began to fall into a cultural norm, the idea that an individual, through hard work, could achieve economic success was in the front of men and women's minds. Gender roles established by a hard scrabble life in the past made a separation between men and women where men were superior to most women, women could work in...
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...The Victorian Age Angela Anderson Troy University Victorian Family Life The term ‘Victorian’ describes everything what is connected with period of the reign of Victoria Regina (1837-1901). Queen Victoria acceded to the throne in 1837 at the age of eighteen. She reigned for 63 years until 1901. The Victorian Age in the history of England is the period of transformation and developments in approximately each sphere. Although this period was a time of unprecedented changes, the fabric of society remained invariable throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. The British people at that time were traditionally puritan and straight-laced. They adhered to the codes of conduct and took care of their moral appearance. Despite the fact that the working class predominated quantitatively, the Victorian age was the time of the middle class prosperity. Significant part of the working class representatives struggled to meet some unspoken social demands to deserve the right to be called middle class. A family as a social unit was regarded a foundation stone of the Victorian society. Men and women played different social roles and fulfilled different functions as family members. There was no equality between sexes and social classes; and it could be traced in all spheres (education, availability of work and salary rank). In general, the Victorian Age is a period of striking social contrasts and...
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...a law that gave the right to vote for all property-owning men. ∙ It was only the aristocrats (lords) who could vote before that. ∙ However women and the working classes still did not have the right to vote. ∙ The conditions of the working class were horrible. 2. What do you know about the Chartist movement? ∙ It was a political organization organized by the working class. ∙ (A charter is a written statement describing the demands of a group.) ∙ The Chartist did not meet any of their demands. ∙ Chartists were jailed or transported to Australia ∙ The middle class had won this battle but there was a tension between the middle- and working class. 3. Would the lives of working men and women be different if they had the right to vote? If they had someone who represented them properly in the Parliament, then yes. 4. How are the mid-Victorian and the late-Victorian periods different? mid-victorian: ∙ A time of success and wealth ∙ Factory acts improved the conditions of the working class: Child labour was limited, and working hours were shortened. ∙ Britain earned profit from selling machinery to the rest of Europe and America. ∙ Britain kept out of war. ∙ In 1854-1855 Britain fought against Russia in the ”Crimean War”. ∙ Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s: ”The Charge of the Light Brigade”. late-victorian: ∙ Economic depression, because of the other countries who became competitors instead of markets for British goods. ∙ The Labour Party were formed in the...
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...By the second half of the nineteenth century Britain was a mature industrial society and was able to experience many of the benefits of the industrial revolution. Discuss. By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain experienced enormous industrial expansion, thereby creating an improvement in the lives of most of its people. The middle classes fare well by the opening of new opportunities in employment, residing, for the most part, in the new suburbs of the industrial cities and towns. They surrounded themselves with the clutter of possessions associated with a new consumer age. There were modest improvements in the working and living conditions of working class people, many of whom were drawn to the cities from rural areas in the hope of a better life. This essay will examine the conditions of life in late Victorian Britain in order to establish the extent of the benefits brought about by industrial transformation, insofar as they affected the lives of the different classes. In 1800, twenty five per cent of the population of England lived in the cities and towns. Within a period of eighty years this position was reversed. In 1850, the year of the Great Exhibition, which was a celebration of British industrial achievement, the ‘number of urban dwellers exceeded those who dwelt in the countryside’. The cities of Birmingham and Manchester more than doubled their populations between 1801 and 1831. The industrial revolution was synonymous with the cotton industry in...
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... II Abstract The purpose of my study is to show the conflict between idealism and society in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. In this novel, Hardy portrays the strife of the two individuals Jude and Sue to make their own ways in society by seeking to realise their ideals. He also reveals the difficulties met by the two idealists in front of society’s attempts to thwart their ideals and to force them to surrender to its norms. This study allows the reader to have a deep understanding of the origin of the conflict, the climax of the confrontation between the two opposing sides and the result of the conflict. In this respect, the present study helps the reader to acquire a thorough knowledge of Hardy’s thought and the values of the Victorian society to which he belongs. III Résumé L’objectif de cette étude est de montrer le conflit entre l’idéalisme et la société décrit dans le roman de Thomas Hardy Jude the Obscure. Dans ce roman, Hardy dépeint la lutte des...
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...move the reader through its depiction of working class struggles. Elizabeth Gaskell's main purpose of the novel is to bring to light the struggles that are faced by the poor. Gaskell does this through the use of descriptive language and also by presenting a number of themes through certain characters, such as a belief of injustice in the industrial working class. As a female writer, there is much criticism against her for writing a novel so out of depth of her class and gender. However, even with this criticism Gaskell still brings to light key socio-political issues, such as the need for the worker and employer to understand each other. The era in which "Mary Barton" is written is known as the Time of Troubles. During a period of prosperity from 1832 to 1836 during the industrial revolution, Gaskell's experience of these conditions are sensed strongly in the narrative, in particular her contact with the working class in her home city of Manchester, as she "elbows" the working class everyday on the streets. This historic document therefore brings you closer to the struggles of the working class, as suggested by Gaskell: "The more I reflected on this unhappy state of things...as the employers and employed must be, the more anxious I became to give some utterance to the agony." It can be argued that Gaskell does not achieve this and instead removes you slightly from these struggles, as she in avertedly separates the reader from the working class, as suggested by the Manchester...
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...set up to prevent workers from claiming poor relief, and instead earning to keep. Victorian workhouses were undoubtedly a phenomenon that defined a huge aspect of Victorian society, notably the grim reality for the working class in England. Oppression and discrimination towards the working class was an established issue at the time, reflecting in some of the most classic pieces in Victorian Literature, specifically, in the writings of Charles Dickens, who rebuked many social and economic aspects of Victorian Society. Dickens addresses his fascination with the sympathy for the poor, especially the children. In this essay, I will be discussing how social class,...
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...Victorian Era Research Paper The victorian era was a very difficult time for people and for the most part your life was based on luck depending on what kind of social class you were born into that would also for the most part determine how your education was and how your lifestyle was.Some of the main things thats was really big in the victorian era social class system was education,jobs and medical treatment.The whole reason of my paper is to tell you how your life was mostly gonna be depending on what class you were born into First,How the social classes worked were if you were born into say the lower class or the working class you got the worst of the worst doing mostly physical labor jobs like for example;farming and cleaning for very little pay usually paid daily.Now say you were not poor nor rich you would be placed in the middle class mainly doing mental work for say the church for instance,you would get a get amount of pay monthly or annually.For the lucky citizens who were born into the upper class you did no work and you gained your money from inheriting land or property from your family and investments and unlike the lower class you made a lot of money from not doing anything because they were just special like that(Victorian-era)....
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...People living in the Victorian era had many dangers to their health due to so many diseases and lack of knowledge of medicines. Death rates were high and children never lived long because of all the horrible conditions people lived in. Because of these horrible illnesses, diseases, and lack of medicinal knowledge, many people suffered. Consequently, Victorian age health was horrible with nutrition, general health, and diseases affecting their daily life. Back then, general health was greatly affected by simple things such as a window being closed. Due to this, life expectancy was very low and women's health was highly affected. Life expectancy was so low that even at the of the Victorian period, infant mortality was about ten times as high as it is today (Mitchel 192). Rural people lived longer than the city dwellers due to the fact that they weren't packed together spreading diseases, rural people had lots of space between each others so that getting sick or dying was not as common. Women were also extremely affected to the uncontrolled illness and sickness being passed around. Because of women's working class, many of them got sick off of the patients they worked with....
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...“How do you see the role of the Registered nurse change over the next ten years?” The nursing profession has a long history of being undervalued and has faced many challenges in regards to professional status, wages and working conditions. These challenges have been fairly constant and all the while, nurses have been fighting to enhance nursing skills and roles, while also maintaining the core nursing values. This research aims to identify the future of the registered nurse and how this may be expected to change over the next ten years; in order to do this it will explore the past history of nursing, their working conditions, challenges and achievements. Following this brief historical overview , a detailed view of modern day nursing will be the key focus of the paper, with particular relation to the latest professional battle of the 2012 Enterprise bargaining agreement and the Australian government’s planned policies for Australian nurses and what this means for their future. Nursing began in the homes of families as an intuitive and untaught way of caring for sick family members, with the role being given to women based on their care experience and observation. Throughout the dark and middle ages (500 AD to 1400 AD) this ‘care’ later developed a religious aspect, and nursing became an expression of Christianity and seen as ‘acts of mercy’ (D’antonio 2007). This ‘care’ aspect of practice still exists strongly in modern nursing today. However, the nursing reputation took...
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...existed without the Industrial Revolution, seldom thought is ever given to the real women, men and children whose lives were directly affected by the innovative technologies that changed labor and social normality’s throughout western civilization. An example of the vast economic and social change brought about by industrialism can be observed in Britain during the Victorian age where the way of life for the common laborer completely changed, as the text describes: Transformations in the production of textiles led to the first and most dramatic break with age-old practices … by the beginning of the Victorian period, the Industrial Revolution had already created profound economic and social changes. Hundreds of thousands of workers had migrated to the industrial towns … Employers often preferred to hire women and children, who worked for even less money than men (1581). Prose writer Henry Mayhew and poets Elizabeth Barret Browning and William Morris offer profound insight into the hardships of industrialism and its effect upon the poorest laborers, child workers and socialist political movements during the Victorian era of Great Britain. The poor and common laborer suffered greatly during the progress of industrialism. The advent of technological advances caused a great deal of influx in labor pools, as the text describes: “and increase in agricultural efficiency that released much of the workforce from field labor” (1580). The increase in the labor pool from the traditional...
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...protects the crimes of antagonists and villains. The creation of evil and is association with the city is also influenced by the early Victorian perception of the city and the crimes that occurred in the city. Irene Adler the primary antagonist and villain, in the Arthur Conon Doyle’s “Scandal in Bohemia” (1891), outwits Sherlock Holmes – One of the greatest detectives and brilliant minds in literature to date. The nature in which if she operates, is helped by the nature of the city which encourages, promotes and even hide the criminality and violence....
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...characters and was regarded as one of the best writers of the Victorian Era. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular. But the debate still continues. Was this man just an English storyteller or a campaigner for social justice? I believe Charles John Huffam Dickens was one of the greatest social critics the world has ever seen for his commentary on the English social structure. But why did Dickens commentate on social injustice? Was he ever affected? Dickens’s deep social commitment and awareness of social ills are derived from his traumatic childhood experiences when his father was imprisoned and he at the age of twelve worked in a shoe-blacking factory. Imagine that, working at the age of 12 in a factory with no guidance from a mother or father? As a result, Dickens developed a strong social conscious which put into his two most recognisable novels, A Tale of Two Cities which continues to be the best seller of all time with over 200 million copies and Oliver Twist. Dickens succeeded in making the Victorian public aware of the conditions of the poor through his book Oliver Twist and through the characterisation of his titular character, Oliver Twist. In Oliver Twist Dickens presents a portrait of the macabre childhood of a considerable number of Victorian orphans. The orphans are underfed, and for a meal they...
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...many respects. Increase of wealth, the general prosperity of England as a whole an account of its colonial hold over other countries, immense growth in scientific and industrial development, are some of the clearly noticeable characteristics of this age. Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate of Victorian era glorifies the reign of Queen Victorian through his ode On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria. On the other side of this picture of commercial and scientific expansion we see the appalling social condition of new industrial cities, the squalid slums, and the exploitation of cheap labour ,the painful fight by the enlightened to introduce social legislation and Victorians were caught between materialism and spiritualism, between realism and romanticism, peace and unrest, science and religion, mechanism and humanism .They could not give up the conventional morality or religious practices so, they try to reconcile religious dogma and scientific truth. Thus Victorian age is often known as an age of compromise. The Victorian age was not only the longest, but also the greatest age in the history of English Fiction. The Novel was the most appealing form of literature during the Victorian age. It was partially because of the steady increase of reading public with...
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...home all day to oversee the domestic duties in the reign of Queen Victoria. A woman's place was in the home, as domesticity and motherhood were considered by society at large to be a sufficient emotional and economic fulfillment for females. These constructs kept women far away from the public sphere in most ways, but during the 19th century charitable missions did begin to extend the female role of service, and Victorian feminism emerged as a potent political force. The transformation of Britain into an industrial nation due to the industrialization had profoundly influenced the ways in which women were to be believed ideally in Victoria times. Newly emerged urban jobs formed an urban living style that no one had lived before, it prompted a change in the ways in which appropriate male and female roles were perceived. In particular, the notion of separate spheres, which woman was in the private sphere of the home and hearth, man was in the public sphere of business, politics and sociability - came to influence the choices and experiences of all women. The Victorian era from 1837 to 1901 is characterized as the domestic age, idealized by Queen Victoria, who came to represent a sort of femininity that was centered on the family, motherhood, and respectability. Accompanied by Albert, Prince Consort, her beloved husband, and by her many children in Balmoral Castle, Victoria became an icon of late 19th-century middle-class femininity and domesticity. In fact, Queen Victoria came...
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