Essays on Victorian Era We found 13 free papers on Victorian Era. Quality of Life in the Victorian Era. Middle class. Victorian Era. Words: (5 pages) The different lifestyles and experiences, of rich and poor people in the 19th century Britain. The quality of life in the Victorian times depended on whether people were rich or blogger.comted Reading Time: 3 mins Historical Essays. The Victorian Child, c Marah Gubar, University of Pittsburgh. See Closeup Figure 1 The novels of Charles Dickens, the most popular author of the Victorian era, also reveal an intense concern about the vulnerability of children. When Dickens was twelve, his father was imprisoned for debt and he was sent to work May 10, · The Victorian Age (the nineteenth century) saw the rise of a large working class, where women, men, and children are spent long hours in employment in substandard conditions. Working conditions were poor, and physical mistreatment was common, as were long hours, unhealthy conditions, and poor wages. As a direct result of these poor conditions
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Download PDF Version Figure 2 Used by permission of the World Publishing Company. Figure 3 Used by permission of Corbis Images for Education. The idea that children have rights that the state should protect may have seemed silly at dawn of the nineteenth century, but by the time Queen Victoria died init had gained significant support. Beginning in the s, the Victorians passed a variety of laws aimed at protecting the wellbeing of children at work, at school, or in the home, victorian essays. This activism was motivated in part by a growing acceptance of the Romantic idea that children are innocent creatures who should be shielded from the adult world and allowed to enjoy their childhood.
As the century wore on, writers and artists began to produce increasingly sentimentalized images of children, emphasizing their angelic, victorian essays, adorable qualities, victorian essays. Yet despite such rhetoric, real reform did not come quickly. High infant mortality rates, inadequate schooling, and victorian essays labor persisted right to the end of the century, victorian essays, suggesting that many Victorians remained unconvinced that childhood should be marked off as a protected period of dependence and development. Throughout her long reign, one out of every three of her subjects was under the age of fifteen. The population explosion that occurred during this period was accompanied by a tremendous amount of industrialization and urbanization; by the end of the century, a vast majority of children lived in towns rather than rural communities.
Families tended to victorian essays large, although victorian essays birth rate declined a bit over the course of the century as more information on contraception became available. The rapid growth of towns quickly outstripped affordable housing, leading to overcrowding and shockingly poor sanitary conditions. Coupled with infectious diseases and impure milk and food, these factors contributed to very high infant and child mortality rates. Poor children who survived infancy were often put to work at an early age. In the s and 40s, many children labored in textile mills and coal mines, where working conditions often proved deadly. Girls as young as five went into domestic service as nurses or maids to wealthy families. Rural children worked on farms or in cottage industries, while thousands of urban children worked as street hawkers, victorian essays, selling matches or sweeping crossings see figure 1.
Child labor was not new, but as industrialization continued it became more visible, as masses of ragged, stunted children crowded the city streets. Calls for Reform Philanthropists, religious leaders, doctors, journalists, and artists all campaigned to improve the lives of poor children. Shaftesbury went on to become president of Ragged School Union, an evangelical organization which established hundreds of schools for the poor. Famous victorian essays like Mary Carpenter and Dr, victorian essays. Thomas Barnardo taught in Ragged Schools before opening their own institutions for destitute youths.
The novels of Charles Dickens, the most popular author of the Victorian era, also reveal an intense concern about the vulnerability of children. When Dickens was twelve, his father was imprisoned for debt and he was sent to work in a blacking factory, an incident that haunted him his whole life. His novels are full of neglected, exploited, or abused children: the orphaned Oliver Twist, victorian essays, the crippled Tiny Tim, the stunted Smike, and doomed tykes like Paul Dombey and Little Nell.
Like Barrett Browning, Dickens was galvanized by revelations of real-life horrors facing the poor. Oliver Twist was written in response to victorian essays draconian New Poor Law ofwhich had been inspired by the theories of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. This law relegated the needy to prison-like institutions called workhouses, splitting up families and subjecting them to repugnant living conditions and hard labor. Similarly, in creating the pathetic character of Jo the street-sweeper in Bleak HouseDickens was inspired victorian essays the victorian essays of a real child laborer interviewed in an law report, victorian essays.
Both boys admit, under questioning, that no one has ever bothered to teach them anything, not even the shortest prayer. Dead, your Majesty. Dead, victorian essays, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, victorian essays, Right Reverends victorian essays Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day. Chapter XLVII. Baby Steps It is easy to interpret the outraged activism of writers like Dickens as indicative of a transformation in public sentiment about children. But such protests were fuelled by the fact that many people still believed that children did not need to be shielded by the state from adult responsibilities. Thus, although legislation aimed at regulating and reducing child labor was passed throughout the century, there was no attempt to outlaw it completely.
Loopholes in laws like the Factory Act and the Workshops Act, coupled with a lack of local enforcement, meant that many children continued to work. As late asovervictorian essays, girls between the ages of 10 and 14 were still employed as domestic servants in England and Wales. That same year, victorian essays British government dragged its feet at raising the minimum age for part-time factory work from 10 to 11, even though they had promised to extend it to 12 at an European congress on child labor. Education reform also proceeded at a slow pace. Another powerful impediment to the victorian essays of a public school system was religious; dissent between the Church of England and nonconformists over the content and amount of religious instruction stalled legislative efforts untilwhen the Elementary Education Act finally created a national network of primary schools.
A similarly provision for secondary education was not passed victorian essays Middle- and upper-class families could employ tutors, or send their children to private schools, but these were unregulated and varied widely in quality. Girls were worse off than boys, since many people believed that domestic skills and basic literacy were all they needed to learn. What explains the sluggish pace of reform? The rise of industrial capitalism created a huge demand for cheap victorian essays, which children certainly were. Responding to this boom, Victorian economists and politicians embraced a laissez-faire approach which involved keeping state interference to a minimum. The Innocent Ideal Nevertheless, as the century wore on, more and more people began to accept the idea that childhood should be a protected period of education and enjoyment.
However slow education reform was in coming, it did come: infully one third of English children received no education at all, whereas by the end of the century, nearly ninety percent went to school for seven to eight years. At the same time, victorian essays, there was an explosion of books, magazines, toys, and games aimed at entertaining children. Mixing fantasy and realism, victorian essays, authors like Juliana Ewing, Mary Louisa Molesworth, victorian essays, and E. Nesbit painted a vivid picture of the middle-class nursery as a hotbed of hobbies: private theatricals, victorian essays, elaborate games, gardening, the composition of family magazines, victorian essays, and so on.
Women were also praised for embodying these qualities, and together with children they were urged to inhabit a separate sphere: to withdraw from the workforce, embrace their status as dependents, and provide the male breadwinner with a refuge from the dog-eat-dog capitalist world outside the family. Consuming Childhood Ironically, though, even as the Victorians represented children as opposed by nature to the materialistic world of trade and profit, the figure of the child was commodified and put on display as never before. When Cherry Ripe was victorian essays as a color centerfold in a Christmas annual, the magazine quickly soldcopies.
Kate Greenaway also took advantage of the increased public appetite for images of childhood; her watercolors of children playing appeared not just in her wildly popular books but on tea towels, wallpaper, stationary, soaps, and clothes. Actual young people were paraded before the public as well. New presentation furniture victorian essays the bassinet and the perambulator allowed infants to be displayed to an admiring world, victorian essays. Child actors appeared on stage in record numbers, performing in pantomimes, ballets, operettas, straight dramas, minstrel shows, music halls, victorian essays, and circus acts. By the s, Drury Lane Theatre was hiring children per pantomime.
Child prodigies like Jean Davenport and Lydia Howard astonished audiences by playing multiple roles in the same evening, while numerous companies routinely ran all-child productions. The Cult of the Child As children became more visible on the stage, victorian essays, the question naturally arose: did such work constitute labor? Considerable controversy arose over this issue in the s. Educational activists like Millicent Garrett Fawcett insisted that children under ten should be banned from full-time theatre work as they had been from factories and workshops. Theatre people and other artists, including Carroll and the poet Ernest Dowson, strongly disagreed.
Acting was not a labor but an art, they maintained, and children benefited from and enjoyed doing it. Some commentators have suggested that the child gradually replaced God victorian essays an object of worship. He was not alone; eminent Victorians like John Ruskin and the Archbishop of Canterbury also wooed young girls, and child prostitution was an accepted if deplored fact of London life. Strange Inconsistencies To victorian essays eyes, the Victorians seem very inconsistent in terms of victorian essays attitudes toward children. Child-worshippers who waxed rhapsodic about the perfect purity of children simultaneously eroticized them. These contradictory impulses of cruelty and concern informed the actions victorian essays individual Victorians.
Journalist W. Stead provides a perfect example. Inhe launched a campaign to victorian essays awareness about child prostitution and prod the government to raise the age of consent. But his method of pursuing these admirable goals landed him in jail. To prove that virgins were being sold on the street in record numbers, he abducted a thirteen-year-old girl without telling her parents what he planned to do with her. After subjecting the unwitting girl to a medical exam to prove her purity, he drugged her, victorian essays, pretended to accost her, victorian essays, and sent her off to Paris, victorian essays.
Victorian essays bizarre event encapsulates some of the conflicting discourses circulating around the Victorian child. Recommended reading Victorian essays, Troy. Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire, victorian essays. New York: Routledge, Bristow, Joseph. London: HarperCollins, Coveney, Peter, victorian essays. The Image of Childhood: The Individual and Society: A Study of the Theme in English Literature, victorian essays. Baltimore: Penguin books, Cunningham, Hugh. The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood Since the Seventeenth Victorian essays. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, Davidoff, Leonore and Catherine Hall.
Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, Chicago: U of Chicago P, Garlitz, Barbara. Higonnet, Anne. Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood. London: Thames and Hudson,
Victorian Letter-Writing Etiquette Rules
, time: 13:15Victorian Age Essays: Examples, Topics, Titles, & Outlines
May 10, · The Victorian Age (the nineteenth century) saw the rise of a large working class, where women, men, and children are spent long hours in employment in substandard conditions. Working conditions were poor, and physical mistreatment was common, as were long hours, unhealthy conditions, and poor wages. As a direct result of these poor conditions Essays on Victorian Era We found 13 free papers on Victorian Era. Quality of Life in the Victorian Era. Middle class. Victorian Era. Words: (5 pages) The different lifestyles and experiences, of rich and poor people in the 19th century Britain. The quality of life in the Victorian times depended on whether people were rich or blogger.comted Reading Time: 3 mins Victorian Era essaysThe Victorian Era was a time of wide extremes. elegant city streets, gas lamps, and in contrast, grinding poverty. It was also a time of exploration and invention. With their pioneer spirit, wild frontier towns were born across the world. and with their flare and ingenuity the V
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