British children playing a game of marbles, circa 1850s.
Ahhh, Victorian Britain. The good old days. 1837-1901. It covered an era when Britain was the mightiest power that the world had ever known. It commanded a huge Empire. Its navy ruled the waves. Its industrial might - such as the fact that by 1848, two-thirds of all the world's coal was produced in Britain and huge cotton-spinning mills dotted the landscape of Northern England - caused it to be known as "The Workshop of the World." By 1890, NINETY PER CENT of all the world's ship - huge and small - were built in Britain. There were several reasons why Britain became the world's superpower - unification with all of Ireland between 1801 and 1922 meant that Britain was the largest free-trade area in Europe; its people were hard-working and weren't too bothered about Health and safety (women, children as young as ten, worked in the coal mines) and it had a head start over the rest of the world in the introduction of hi-tech new machinery. Britain became the world's first industrialised nation and became the first nation in history to have the majority of its people live in the towns and cities rather than the countryside. But all this industrial and manufacturing might meant that Britain was a dangerous and dirty place to live in. In 1870, Britain's share of world trade was a massive 38%. Even the United States today only accounts for around 25%.
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Basic facts are vital to the Victorians:
Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else!
Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)
Population In the British Isles - 20.88 million peoplem including 6.51 million in Ireland in 1851 (between 1801 and 1922, all of the island of Ireland was part of Great Britain. Nowadays, only Northern Ireland is), 26.16 million (5.40m) in 1871, 33.12 million (4.68m) in 1891, and 37.09 million (4.45m) in 1901.
In 1801 the first national census is held, and is repeated every tenth year.
The turning point is 1851, when – for the first time in history anywhere in the world – more people in Britain live in towns than in the countryside. By 1901, only one fifth of the British population remains rural.
By 1860, 12% of the population lives in Lancashire because of its cotton mills and factories.
Government Constitutional monarchy. After the death of Prince Albert in 1861, Parliament governs in Queen Victoria's name. In 1870, the army is 195,000 strong, the navy 60,000.
Dynasty House of Hanover.
Religion Protestant. The established Church is Anglican (Church of England, Church of Scotland, Church of Wales), but by 1851 there are almost as many Nonconformists as Anglicans. There are also large minorities of Roman Catholics and, by 1901, Jews.
Currency Pounds, shillings and pence, or £sd.
What is money worth?
• In 1873, four-fifths of the land is held by 7,000 individuals, mainly aristocrats.
• A four-wheel carriage with two horses costs £1,000 a year to run. A one-horse carriage costs £700. You should set aside 10% of your income to run your horse and carriage.
• When the earl of Yarborough dies in 1875, his stock of cigars is sold for £850, the equivalent of 18 years' pay for the impoverished agricultural labourers on his estate.
• The successful railway contractor Thomas Brassey leaves a fortune of £3.2 million on his death in 1870.
• In 1841, manufacturing workers made up 44% of the work force, agricultural workers 22% and domestic servants 18%.
• In 1860, the average income per head of the population is just £44 a year. That's the equivalent today of some of the world's poorest countries - but in those days, Britain was the richest country on the planet.
• In 1880, the average income of a skilled worker is £62 per year.
• Between 1860 and 1914, real wages double. The boom years are 1868-74 and 1880-96, during which real wages go up by almost 45%.
• Between 1875 and 1900, prices fall by about 40%.
• By 1860, Britain has about 2,650 cotton factories operated by 440,000 workers who together earn about £11.5 million a year.
• In 1860, the total value of the current accounts in Britain's 650 banks is about £41.5 million.
• In the 1890s, there are 300,000 miners. The same number of people work in the retail sector.
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Christian duty - Victorian Britons are a God-fearing Protestant nation, although about a quarter of them don't bother to go to church. Christian duty is expressed through the high moral tone of public life and in the desire of the better-off to do good deeds (see Philanthropy below). In everyday life, it means that all classes try to be respectable and moral. Duty takes precedence over inclination, morality over pleasure. But Protestantism also means prejudice: in 1851, Roman Catholic bishops are banned from using their titles in Britain, and there is considerable prejudice against Jews. And moralism means repressing any mention of sexuality, which often leads to double standards.
But Protestantism is not a monolith: by 1851, the Anglicans are almost matched in number by dissenting Nonconformists. The latter are partly excluded from public life and make up the bulk of the reforming Liberal party (see Liberalism below). Victorian Christians are often reformers. In the first part of the 19th century, puritanical evangelicals help abolish slavery and reform the electoral system (see The vote). Then, by the 1840s, the Oxford Movement – a revival of High-Church Anglicanism that mixes moral fervour with the desire to make worship beautiful – attempts to make the established Church more holy by recovering its Catholic roots. The leaders of the Oxford Movement – also known as the Tractarians because they publish pamphlets (tracts) – are John Keble (1792-1866), John Henry Newman (1801-90) and Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-82).
Charles Darwin with his son, 1842
Darwinism - The implications of the ideas of Charles Darwin eventually appeal to many Victorian minds. Taking some of his ideas about nature – for example, natural selection – and applying them to society means that 'evolution', 'progress' and 'survival of the fittest' gradually become popular notions.
Above all, the majority of Victorians believe in progress. Evolution is preferred to revolution, progress to stagnation, and survival of the fittest is an excuse to ignore the poorer people in society. Social Darwinists argue that the poor have only themselves to blame for their poverty. By the end of the century, they also hold that, because the Britons are the fittest race and so the likeliest to survive, they have the right to colonise the world. This attitude is particularly popularised by Darwin's cousin Francis Galton (1822-1911), who becomes an influential proponent of eugenics, which he defines as 'the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, whether physically or mentally'. These ideas eventually led to the euthanasia practised by the Nazis, including the Holocaust.
In Britain, the Social Darwinists' racism becomes a way of justifying imperialism. By the 1880s, the struggle of the 'fittest' for survival is seen less in terms of individuals in the marketplace – competitive individualism – and more in terms of nations fighting for 'a place in the sun'.
Free trade - Also known as laissez-faire (French for 'leave well alone'). The idea of free trade – no taxes on making goods and no tariffs paid on goods crossing a nation's borders – is dear to Victorian manufacturers and industrialists. They believe that anything that impedes free trade will reduce their profits. This idea was articulated by the 18th-century Scottish economist Adam Smith, who argued in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that trade flourishes best when it is left entirely free of government interference.
The most active believers in free trade in the mid-19th century are the Manchester School, whose leading lights are John Bright (1811-98 ) and Richard Cobden (1804-65). Such laissez-faire ideas – whose greatest exponent is John Stuart Mill – are developed into the Victorian theory that the state should not interfere in the life of the individual. In Mill's words: 'Laissez-faire, in short, should be the general practice: every departure from it, unless required by some great good, is a certain evil.' (See also Protectionism below.)
Imperialism - This means the colonisation of other countries, from nearby Ireland to distant India, by the British state. Usually, colonies are governed from the imperial centre, London, but some – for example, Canada and Australia – are granted political self-government. Other colonies, such as Hong Kong, are primarily examples of economic imperialism, but in almost all cases, trade is very important. At its height, in about 1900, British imperialism becomes an object of national pride, leading to jingoistic outbursts and crude racism.
WE Gladstone - Prime Minister 1868-74
Liberalism - The distinctive political theory of the Victorian age is liberalism. Until about 1868, radical liberals espouse a highly individualistic creed. Their slogan is 'Peace, retrenchment and reform' and their social ideal is laissez-faire (see Free trade above). This liberalism tries to limit government powers and redress the prejudice against Nonconformist Christians (see Christian duty above). As ever, liberals see themselves as being progressive and just.
With W E Gladstone's government of 1868-74, however, liberalism is redefined, as radicals try to address the social problems of industrial society. They want to make life not only free of excessive government control, but better for the people. In Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain embarks on a major set of social reforms. In central government, the cry is reform and social improvement.
By the 1890s, liberalism changes yet again when Gladstone retires. Now, liberal leaders such as the earl of Rosebury want to prove that they can run the empire as efficiently as the Conservatives.
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In 1888, London experiences an autumn of terror: between 31 August and 9 November, five women have their throats slit in Whitechapel in the East End, an area seen by respectable citizens as a 'frightful hell-hole'. The victims all work as prostitutes – and the last one, Mary Kelly, is gruesomely mutilated. While these murders terrify the population, and hog newspaper headlines, the killer – nicknamed Jack the Ripper – sends mocking letters to the police, claiming to have eaten the liver of one of his victims.
Not only are local people horrified, but Queen Victoria demands that the police service be improved. At the same time, a brilliant fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, makes his debut in Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet. In the end, although the Whitechapel murders stop, Jack the Ripper is never found. And, horrific as he is, most Londoners are more at risk from cholera than from serial killers.
Cholera
The most life-threatening hazard facing city-dwelling Victorians is cholera, closely followed by typhoid fever and typhus. Four epidemics of cholera – in 1831/32, 1848/49, 1853/54 and 1866 – kill about 140,000 people, with more than 60,000 perishing in the second epidemic alone. The main problem is ignorance. The medical establishment believes that diseases are spread by 'miasma' (bad air) rather than by infected water.
Crusading doctors such as Dr John Snow (1813-58 ) and reformers such as Edwin Chadwick (1800-90) demonstrate by 1854 that the best way to combat cholera is to separate drinking water from sewage. In that year in London's Soho, Snow removes the handle of a drinking pump infected by leakage from a sewer – and stops an outbreak of cholera that, in two weeks, had killed almost 700 people in just this small area. He also recommends boiling water before use.
In London, there are still open cesspools, and the sewers run straight into the Thames. The metropolis stinks. In 1858, when Victoria and Albert try to take a pleasure cruise on the Thames, they have to turn back after a few minutes because of the river's stench. Parliament has to stop sitting because the smell from the river is unendurable.
In general, the only way to cut disease is by promoting cleanliness: building new drains, protecting the water supply, setting up public washhouses and baths. In Belgravia, where the upper classes wash their hands, deaths from cholera are fewer than 30 per 1,000; in the slums, they are almost seven times that. But gradually the greater availability of soap and clean running water also makes working-class houses cleaner.
Hospitals and doctors
If you are sick, you might have a chance of getting a place in one of the new hospitals. By mid-century, the number of people treated in these has doubled to 8,000. By 1860, more than 70 special hospitals have been set up, including the London Fever Hospital, the Kensington Children's Hospital and the Free Cancer Hospital, Fulham. In the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale pioneers nursing practice. However, as late as 1900, patients under a doctor's care have only a 50% chance of being better off than if they and their diseases had been left alone.
Hospitals not only provide more room for patients, but also give opportunities for doctors to train: you may find yourself being treated as a human guinea pig. In 1832, the Anatomy Act is passed, which allows all unclaimed bodies to be sent to hospitals to be dissected. As a result, these places have become important centres for the study of anatomy. Sometimes, the system is abused – guards are often employed to watch over new graves to deter grave robbers. And doctors don't yet realise that touching a dead body and then a live one can spread infection – this lack of hygiene makes giving birth in hospitals much more dangerous than at home.
Disposal of bodies is moved away from inner-city graveyards to cemeteries (run by private companies) located on the outer edges of urban areas. This shift is, in part, due to the conditions of urban graveyards where body snatching, communal or mass graves and unsanitary conditions are all too common.
Work
For most of the working classes, work itself is a hazard. Urban workers are stunted in growth and afflicted by debilitating diseases such as rickets, tuberculosis and bronchitis. Long hours of toil and poor diet weakens their resistance. In countless factories, both children and adults are mutilated by industrial accidents due to unsafe working conditions.
Small boys, used as chimney sweeps, are undernourished and often suffer burns. (The 18th-century doctor Percival Potts had already discovered that sweeps, who work naked, are susceptible to scrotal cancer – the first occupational disease.) In Manchester and Birmingham, workers in match factories suffer from 'phossy jaw' from phosphorus contamination. Workers in wallpaper factories are poisoned by the arsenic used in dyes. Some trades are more deadly than others: London bakers, who toil through the night in temperatures of 90°F (32.2°C) and more, seldom live beyond the age of 40.
Workhouses
These children are in a workhouse. These weren't nice places to stay. To stay in one, you had to work hard to pay your way. At one point, there were 350 workhouses in Southern England alone.
In the large Victorian institutions, such as workhouses, conditions are hazardous to health. After the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, workhouses proliferate. 'Outdoor relief' for the able-bodied – that is, payments made to the destitute living independently – is now rare. Parishes are grouped into unions under Boards of Poor Law Guardians, who set up workhouses in each union. The homeless poor are lodged in them and, to discourage applicants, the law requires that conditions there are 'less eligible' (that is, much worse) than those outside them. (For more about the origins of the Poor Law, see
Georgian Underworld.)
By 1839, there are about 350 workhouses in southern England alone. To stay in one, you have to work to help pay your way. Jobs are menial and repetitive and some are simply punishments, such as oakum picking (separating strands of old rope). Until the 1840s, 'disorderly and profligate women' – a category that includes impoverished single mothers – are forced to wear distinctive yellow clothes, which leads to them being bullied. In the 1860s and 1870s, conditions in the special wards for the insane or for those with venereal (sexually transmitted) disease are especially grim.
Although some areas, such as south Lancashire, are slow to build these fearsome institutions, the image of the workhouse succeeds in stigmatising poverty and spreading fear among the poor. Many proud and independent spirits prefer starvation or prostitution to going into the 'Bastille'. By 1850, out of one million paupers, only 110,000 are workhouse inmates.
Not all workhouses are equally bad, but it is not until the 20th century – with the introduction of old age pensions and National Insurance (1911-12) – that a more compassionate treatment of the poor becomes common.
Prisons
Prisons are cleaner than workhouses but equally grim. The Victorians are firm believers in punishment for criminals, but realise that the old punishments – transportation to the colonies or execution for trivial offences – are not very liberal (or effective). So, by the 1840s, lots of new prisons are built and the decaying old ones are repaired.
Being morally upright and strict, the prison authorities make their institutions as unpleasant as they can, to deter people from committing crimes. Once inside, prisoners are made to face up to their own faults by being kept in silence. To suffer, they are made to do hard, boring work. The most common forms of hard labour are walking a treadwheel or picking oakum (see above).
Scarcely less pleasant are the debtor's prisons, such as the Marshalsea in London. The message is simple: Don't get into debt.
Schools
Equally hazardous are Britain's public schools (private boarding establishments meant to educate the children of the rich). The élite boarding schools – Eton, Harrow, Winchester and Rugby, among others – are defined as 'public' schools in 1861-4 by the educational Clarendon Commission. They are maintained by fees and private endowment. In 1897, fewer than 7% of academic secondary school pupils come from the working classes.
By the time Thomas Arnold becomes head of Rugby, public schools are characterised by awful teaching, bullying, sexual abuse and dreadful living conditions. Floggings are common. Between 1873 and 1876, 40 public floggings are ordered at Eton alone. The more minor schools, as shown by Dotheboys Hall in Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby (1839), are equally violent and food is often reduced to starvation rations.
Arnold emphasises house systems, school spirit, 'muscular Christianity' and games such as football and cricket as means of improving character. As a result, Rugby – graphically depicted in Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) – becomes a model for reformed Victorian public schools. Knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, takes second place to the rigid division between classes. Nevertheless, even at their best, these schools concern themselves more with producing gentlemen than with preparing their pupils for the challenges of an industrial world. (For more about the history of education, see Criticising Education: A history.)
Crime
Despite the horrors of the Jack the Ripper murders, Victorian Britain is a remarkably ordered society. Crime, whether theft or violent assault, is uncommon – despite the hysterical reporting of shocking events by the newspapers. In fact, crime declines, contradicting the fear that greater urbanisation inevitably leads to more criminality. Gun crime, for example, is a rare occurrence even in London.
In 1901, the Criminal Registrar notes that Britain has witnessed a marked 'decline in the spirit of lawlessness'. This is largely due to the good work of voluntary organisations – from churches to charities – that reform the unruly manners and lax morals of the new mass society. Temperance societies combat the 'curse of drunkenness', philanthropists act as social workers and the godly see it as their Christian duty to help prostitutes change their lifestyles and to aid the 'deserving' poor.
Urban hazards
A 19th Century photograph of two drunken women fighting each other
Towns and cities remain hazardous places in which to live. The stone tenements of Glasgow, the back-to-back houses of Yorkshire or the 'two-up, two-down' cottages of the mining towns are often built of poor-quality brick and little or no plumbing. Damp, draughty and cramped living conditions contribute to the spread of tuberculosis. As Sir John Simon, a pioneer of public health, says in 1854: 'It is no uncommon thing, in a room of 12 feet [3.7 metres] square or less, to find three or five families styed together.'
This kind of accommodation is usually rented by the working classes and thus precarious. In the 1880s, the word 'unemployment' gets its modern meaning – and the loss of work can easily result in eviction and even confinement in the workhouse (see above). Other new words include 'overcrowding' and 'slum'.
Growing towns are dominated by railways, and filth and noise characterises the Victorian city, especially in the poor neighbourhoods. Factory chimneys pour dense smoke into the sky, steam trains are noisy and dirty and soot from thousands of coal fires fills the air. Carts, carriages and horses clatter across cobblestones, adding to the cacophony.
Food
During the 19th century, much of the food consumed by the working classes is adulterated by foreign substances, contaminated by chemicals or fouled by animal and human excrement. By the 1840s, the practice of home-baking bread has died out among the rural poor; in the small tenements of the urban masses, which have no ovens, it has never existed. In 1872, Dr Arthur Hill Hassall (1817-94), the pioneer investigator into food adulteration, demonstrates that half of the commercially made bread he examines is full of alum, which inhibits digestion.
The list of poisonous additives includes:
• strychnine in rum and beer
• sulphate of copper in pickles, bottled fruit, wine and preserves
• lead chromate in mustard and snuff
• sulphate of iron in tea and beer
• ferric ferrocyanide and lime sulphate in Chinese tea
• copper carbonate, lead sulphate, bisulphate of mercury and Venetian lead in sugar confectionery and chocolate
• lead in wine and cider.
The Privy Council estimates in 1862 that one-fifth of butcher's meat in Britain comes from animals that are 'considerably diseased' or have died of pleuro-pneumonia or other diseases.
As late as 1877, the Local Government Board finds that about a quarter of the milk it examines contains excessive water, or chalk, and 10% of butter, 8% of bread and 50% of gin contains copper to heighten the colour. Red lead gives Gloucester cheese its 'healthy' red hue. In the long run, these additives result in chronic gastritis and, often, fatal food poisoning.
Even the rich are not safe. For example, the London county medical officer discovers the following in ice cream: cotton fibre, lice, bed bugs, bug's legs, fleas, straw, human hairs and cat and dog hairs. Such contamination can (and does) cause diphtheria, scarlet fever, diarrhoea and enteric fever.
Still, over the 19th century, diet improves among the masses. Working people's regular meals of bread, potatoes and beer are increasingly supplemented by meat, milk and vegetables.
Disasters
The massive industrial expansion of Victorian Britain results in bigger disasters than in previous centuries. Public interest in disasters at mines and other industrial sites is fed by the Illustrated London News and other popular magazines, who immediately dispatch artists to capture the scene of every major catastrophe.
The most serious danger in mines is caused by the need for light. At first, miners carry candles underground, but this proves dangerous, as pockets of gas can ignite without warning. In 1816, the scientist Humphrey Davy had invented the safety lamp, which should make such explosions impossible. However, in October 1849, the Morning Chronicle reports:
It will astonish many persons to learn that, during the 18 years previous to 1816 when the safety-lamp was introduced, the loss of life [in mines] in the counties of Northumberland and Durham by explosion was 447, whereas during the 18 years subsequent to 1816, the amount of loss of life in this way was 538 – the difference being accounted for by the working of the many 'fiery collieries', previously inaccessible; by the neglect and carelessness of the workmen themselves in the management of their lamps; and by the too frequent relaxation of ventilation measures that were previously rigidly carried into effect.
On 28 December 1879, the Tay Bridge collapses in a gale while the Edinburgh–Dundee train is crossing it. In what would remain Britain's worst railway accident, all 75 passengers and crew are killed. The Scottish doggerel poet, William McGonagall, who specialises in memorialising shipwrecks and railway disasters, mourns the 'Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay'. The structure, designed by Sir Thomas Bouch, had been opened the previous year.
In other disasters, some people have lucky escapes. Lord Colville of Culross is a passenger in one of three trains wrecked in a collision during a blizzard at Abbot's Ripton, Cambridgeshire in 1876; he walks away unharmed, but two men who had been sitting opposite him are killed. At Abergele in north Wales, the three front carriages of the passenger train burst into flame and all inside them die; the remaining 10 vehicles are pulled clear with all their passengers unharmed. However, during the construction of the Woodhead railway tunnel near Sheffield in 1839-45, at least 32 men are killed or injured.
As accidents multiply on Britain's railways between 1840 and 1870, the notion arises that they are becoming more likely, deadly and destructive. In reality, Victorian railways are generally safe and reliable. In 1861, for example, 46 passengers die in eight accidents, but for each fatality, more than 3.5 million journeys are safely undertaken.
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In 1844, an unknown 24-year-old German exile in Britain, the son of a textile manufacturer, writes a book that paints an unforgettable picture of daily life in the new industrial towns – Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool – which have sprung up in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Friedrich Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England is a masterpiece of committed reportage and a classic of social history.
Industrial production makes Britain the 'workshop of the world' and the greatest trading nation on the globe. But it also has terrible social effects: abject poverty, overcrowded dwellings, child labour, sexual exploitation, dirt and drunkenness. Engels not only describes the horrors of industrial growth, he also wants to do something about them. In 1848, he teams up with Karl Marx and they write The Communist Manifesto, a call to revolution.
But working people do not heed the call, preferring to celebrate Britain's industrial might. In 1851, the Great Exhibition of All the Nations is held in London. It attracts more than 6 million visitors, of which 4,500,000 visit on the cheap 'Shilling Days'. More than half of the 14,000 exhibitors represent Great Britain and the colonies.
Instigated by Prince Albert, the exhibition is held in Hyde Park in the purpose-built Crystal Palace (a new glass building three times longer than St Paul's cathedral, designed by Joseph Paxton, the duke of Devonshire's gardener and a model of self-help). At the entrance stands an enormous block of coal, weighing 24 tons – a symbol of power married to technology. The exhibition also features the latest in consumer goods, including matches, steel pens and envelopes.
Industrialisation
In what Thomas Carlyle calls 'the age of the machine', Britain is the workshop of the world. In the 19th century, the factory becomes the dominant form of organising production. This has a dramatic impact on the lives of more than two million labourers.
'An additional race'
the 1851 Census records that 1,296,000 people are employed in the textile industries, 572,000 in metal manufacture and 394,000 in mining. As factory workers, they become servants of machines and subject to the relentless discipline of mechanisation. They have to clock-in to and clock-off from work and, while in the factory, are under the authority of the master or overseer.
This industrial discipline creates a working class – which Robert Peel calls 'an additional race of men' – that is not only dragooned into factories but also compelled to be hard-working, sober and respectable.
Cotton
Cotton is king. The northern cotton mills have a huge impact because, for the first time, large numbers of workers, particularly women and children, are employed in one building. By 1830, cotton spinning in Lancashire is almost entirely a steam-powered factory operation, and weaving soon follows suit. Raw cotton imports rise 30-fold during the century, and Britain produces more than half the total world production of cotton cloth.
Coal
Coal is the fuel of industry. Production increases 20-fold in the 19th century. By 1848, British coal output is two-thirds of total world production. The number of miners doubles between 1840 and 1880. By the 1850s, the north-east is the foremost coal-producing centre in the world, with Newcastle, Jarrow and Gateshead expanding rapidly.
Demand for coal means deeper pits and more complicated machinery – which raises safety issues and scandals about children and women working in terrible conditions.
Iron and steel
The new technology increases the requirement for iron. By 1848, the output of iron in Britain is greater than the total for the rest of the world. Iron production rises sharply from about 1830 onwards, spurred on by the demand from the railways and by solutions to the technical problems of smelting. Heavy goods of all kinds are exported in ever-growing quantities.
Steel is a major industry after 1860 when new processes become available to produce it cheaply, quickly and in large quantities. In 1880, Britain produces 980,000 tons of steel. However, by 1900, the United States and Germany overtake Britain in steel production by using their extensive deposits of phosphoric ores. By now, both the United States and Germany are rapidly becoming more productive and innovative. For British industry, the writing is on the wall.
Ships
Shipbuilding undergoes a remarkable expansion. The development of, from the 1860s, iron ships, steam power and larger tonnages concentrates the industry in places – along the Clyde, Tyne and Mersey and at Barrow and Belfast – that have access to coal, iron, steel and engineering skills. In 1890, Britain builds 90% of the world's ships. By 1901, shipbuilding has become a major industry in which Britain dominates the world.
Trade
Britain is the supreme trader. Its merchant navy carries the world's goods all around the globe. The value of British exports in the mid-1850s is more than seven times higher than in the 1780s. Exports to Asia are worth more than £20 million in the mid-1850s, while Africa, Australasia and Latin America all provide substantial markets.
Enormous gain
Overseas investment plays a vital role in British prosperity between 1800 and 1901, by which time about £4,000 million has been invested. This provides an enormous gain to the British economy by providing lucrative profits, much of which are used to finance imports. Over a third of all investment is in railways, mostly in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The City of London quickly becomes the centre of the financial world, and service industries expand.
Upsurge in exports
During the Victorian era, industrial products such as iron and cotton begin to dominate trade. Because of the increasing popularity of free trade, all restrictions are lifted so that, by the 1850s, there is an upsurge in the volume of trade, spurring further economic development.
Although Britain's share of world trade falls from 38% to 27% between 1870 and 1913, its exports double. Principal British exports are cottons and other textiles, iron and steel, machinery, coal and vehicles.
The railway age
Railways are the most powerful symbol of Victorian progress. Although the first purpose-built railway, from Stockton to Darlington, opens in 1825, 12 years before Queen Victoria ascends the throne, the early years of her reign witness the most extraordinary boom.
In 1850, there are 10,000 miles of railway in Britain; by 1901, that number has grown to about 35,000. The railway age changes social habits and enables economic growth. One painting, The Railway Station (1862) by William Powell Frith (1819-1909), perfectly conveys the bustling atmosphere of the mid-century railways. By the end of the century, there are 9,000 new stations.
Navvies
Thousands of miles of track are laid by companies funded by an army of private investors. In the peak year 1847, more than a quarter of a million railway workers – 'navvies', a term originally use for the 'navigators' who built the canals – are employed in this work. They are partly Irish immigrants, who come to Britain during the potato famine (1845-51), and partly locals.
The professions
Railways also help the development of the professions. Railway engineering, for instance, is specialised and highly skilled work that, coupled with the construction industry, produces great works of civic engineering such as the Sankey Viaduct on the Liverpool–Manchester railway.
Railways also need sharp lawyers to protect their interests, and the legal profession profits from sorting out contentious issues of landownership, sale and conveyancing. The actuarial side of the railway business helps the emergence of accountancy as a separate profession.
'This strange disease'
Railways help existing industries, especially iron production on which they have a massive impact. Some important developments, such as the new postal service, could not have happened without railways. But not everyone is happy with the new industrial pace of life. The poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822-88 ), for example, complains of 'this strange disease of modern life with its sick hurry, its divided aims'.
Urbanisation
Industry needs cities. It needs to have a workforce that is close to the factories and mines. And workers, who in Victorian times cannot afford the cost or time to travel to work, have to live within walking distance of their place of employment.
The cities created by the Industrial Revolution are both inspiring and frightening, both magnificent in their scale and monumentality and frightful in their horrific slums. Yet, at the same time, cities are magnets, offering women and men much better opportunities for work and marriage than ever before.
Booms and conurbations
In 1801, only London has more than 100,000 people. By 1851, there are 10 towns of this size. London grows from 959,000 in 1801 to 2,362,000 in 1851, Manchester from 75,000 to 303,000. London is now the largest city in the Western world. The textile towns of Lancashire, Yorkshire and Scotland attract migrants because of the possibility of employment they offer. Metal-working centres around Birmingham also experience a boom.
The expansion of the industrial cities becomes particularly marked after 1871 with the development of 'conurbations' – the densely populated regions that grow up around the centres of manufacturing, mining and shipbuilding. In 1851, the Census records that more people live in towns than in the countryside. By 1881, only 12% of the population are agricultural workers.
Despoiling
The growth of industry and cities frightens some commentators, such as John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, who believe that money-making and manufacturing will soon take over and despoil the whole landscape.
Some philanthropic industrialists and visionary town planners realise that urban sprawl is both ugly and unhealthy. In the 1850s, Sir Titus Salt (1803-76) moves his alpaca and mohair mills out of Bradford and sets up Saltaire – a model town that provides not only houses for workers but shops and schools, too. The Cadbury family establishes Bournville in the 1880s, and in 1899, Sir Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) founds the Garden City Association, which advocates towns built in the countryside with clean centres where a garden would be surrounded by public amenities. In the early 20th century, this results in the building of Letchworth (1903) and Welwyn Garden City (1920).
Conditions at work
Labourers working in the countryside, circa 1860s. In those days, even women and children worked in Britain's coal mines. Only 30 minutes allowed for eating and recreation each day.
In 1830, in a letter to the Leeds Mercury, Tory churchman Richard Oastler denounces the appalling working conditions that industrialisation has brought. He points out that:
Thousands of little children, both male and female, but principally female, from seven to 14 years of age, are daily compelled to labour from six o'clock in the morning to seven in the evening, with only – Britons, blush when you read it! – with only 30 minutes allowed for eating and recreation.
This description, along with those of many other humanitarians, persuades Parliament to carry out a series of measures to improve working conditions.
Child labour
A series of Factory Acts provides for the inspection and regulation of factories and mines. In the first, in 1819, Parliament had already prohibited children from working more than a 12-hour day. In 1833, a second act lays down that, in textile factories, children under 9 years are prohibited from working, and those between 9 and 13 years old are to work no more than 9 hours a day. In 1842, the Mines Act abolishes female labour in mines, and boys under 10 are prohibited from working underground.
Successive acts in 1844 and 1847 establish the 10-hour day for females and the 6.5-hour day for children under 13.
Resistance
Although the Factory Acts improve the conditions of work, there is often resistance to reform among workers. Some of them see limitations on work as a danger to their livelihoods – they cannot afford a reduction in the family income from the loss of women's and children's wages. The acts are also opposed by factory owners who see in the reduction of wages the danger of an economic crisis if workers don't have enough money to buy goods.
In his 1867 masterpiece Das Kapital, Karl Marx shows that, although the Factory Acts force factory owners to lower the hours worked by women and children, they also make numerous concessions to employers. For example, none of the acts challenge the idea that men over the age of 18 should work a 15-hour day, from 5.30am to 8.30pm.
Saving the workers
While working men tend to gather in pubs and taverns to discuss politics, find out news and listen to music, mid-Victorian society soon begins to frown on the drunkenness and lechery associated with these places. To create more respectable meeting places, the Reverend Henry Solly, a Unitarian minister, sets up the Workingmen's Club and Institute Union in 1862.
Soon these clubs proliferate all over the industrial north. But although their origins are in the temperance movement, many of them quickly shake off the restrictions of their founders and introduce beer, then music and entertainment. Working men take what they want from the philanthropists and reject the rest.
In 1865, William Booth and his wife Catherine launch their Christian mission to save the souls of 'the heathen of our own country'. In 1878, this expands into the Salvation Army, which is organised along military lines into officers and soldiers. Mainly comprising working men and women, its recruits are people who have themselves experienced conversion and practise self-denial, avoiding especially the temptations of drink. From the 1880s, the Salvation Army becomes more philanthropic, setting up night shelters for the homeless and helping the poor in urban slums.
Education
One way of helping the children of the working classes is to educate them. Philanthropists and reformers such as Sir James Kay Shuttleworth (1804-77) accept the need to 'rescue' children from the moral as well as the physical effects of poverty by means of schooling.
Shuttleworth advocates using the poor law system to train children in practical skills, and helps develop a broad curriculum in schools. By 1870, William Edward Forster's Elementary Education Act allows board schools to be funded out of local rates to fill gaps left in the education system by the patchy provision of church schools. Elementary schooling becomes compulsory.
Technology
Industrialisation and technology go hand in hand. The Victorian age is a time of inventors and inventions, of rapid progress in creating the objects of modern life – from the steam engine to the steam printer, from the skyscraper to the machine-gun, from the radiator to the flush toilet. In general, steel replaces iron as a material for ship's hulls and boilers, refrigeration is developed and petroleum harnessed for the first motor cars. As technology improves travel speeds, the world is divided into 24 time zones.
Engineers
King of the engineers is Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-59). In 1858, his ship, the Great Eastern, is launched. For the next 40 years, this is the largest ship to run a transatlantic service. In 1856, inventor and engineer Sir Henry Bessemer (1813-98 ) patents the first method for mass-producing steel. Now steel production begins to rival iron production (see 'Industrialisation' above).
Communication
In 1876, Scottish-born scientist Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) manages to transmit the first sentence by telephone (although, despite his name on the US patent, he did not invent the instrument). The first working telephone is built a year later. In 1860, the chemist, physicist and inventor Joseph Swan (1828-1914) demonstrates the first electric light, having developed a carbon-filament incandescent lamp some 20 years before US inventor Thomas Edison. In 1878, Swan also produces an all-glass hermetically sealed bulb.
At about the same time, the British Admiralty begins to install radio equipment devised by Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) in some of its ships. Radio transmission is pushed to greater lengths, and by 1899 – the year in which the Italian inventor established the Marconi Telegraph Co. in London – he sends a signal nine miles across the Bristol Channel and then 31 miles across the Channel to France. Two years later, he is able to transmit across the Atlantic, thus opening the door to a rapidly developing wireless industry.
In the 1840s, Rowland Hill (1795-1879) invents the penny post, which replaces the more-expensive system of payment by recipients. The 42-year-old Hill publishes his pamphlet Post Office Reform: Its importance and practicability in 1837, and advocates the use of pre-printed envelopes and adhesive postage stamps. He also calls for a uniform low letter-sending rate of one penny per half-ounce to anywhere in the British Isles. The cost makes communication more affordable to the working classes. There are five deliveries a day.
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