Notes on Victorian Period

The Victorian Period was a time that brought about great change in Britian, and it was these changes that impacted on the english language and helped it to evolve to what it is today.
 One of the main aspects that the Victorian Period is remembered for is the breakthroughs in medicine in a time where deadly diseases like smallpox, cholera and TB were insatiable. Middle class men at the time were expected to possibly live to, on average, to 45, whereas the average lives of workmen and labourers spanned just half that time. Children were lucky to survive their fifth birthdays, in contrast to the modern current life expectancy being around 80, and rising. was believed that bad smells caused disease. It was obvious; in poor districts, the air was foul and the death rate high. In the prosperous suburbs, no smells – therefore no disease. Parliament was worried by the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858, when the Thames flowed with undiluted sewage, because the smell itself might kill the Members of Parliament in their debating chamber overlooking the river. Florence Nightingale believed in the miasma theory. The miracles she achieved in the Crimean War hospitals resulted from her insistence that bad smells must be eradicated by thorough cleaning. There were recurrent, terrible epidemics of cholera between 1832 and 1853. It took Dr John Snow years to persuade the establishment that cholera is a water-borne disease: nothing to do with bad smells. Yet this was a significant breakthrough, and through these breakthrough's in science, new scientfiic words could be incorporated into the english language.

Victorian women might be almost continually pregnant, between marriage and menopause. Some contraceptive advice was available, and condoms could be bought, but only ‘under the counter’. Coitus interruptus remained the principal method of family limitation. Childbirth was risky and painful. There was a wide belief that labour pains were imposed by God because Eve had sinned in the Garden of Eden. It took Dr Snow – the same man who discovered the source of cholera – to alleviate labour pains by administering chloroform. When Queen Victoria and the daughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury used it, anaesthesia had become respectable. Treatment for mental illness or nervous disorders had changed little since medieval times. Those sufferers lower down the social scale were locked up in County Asylums. Private ‘madhouses’ were often profitable institutions. Women might be locked away there by their husbands if he disapproved of her behaviour. Such dramatic stories were the subjects of popular fiction such as The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Again reinforcing how the Victorian period influenced literature and langauge.  The Victorian medical scene was not bad at all. In London, St Thomas’s, a medieval foundation, had to move to make way for a railway line; its new site was beside the Thames, where the air was now pure, due to Bazalgette’s magnificent new drainage system. Nevertheless Florence Nightingale insisted on open balconies and airy wards, to counteract any hospital-generated miasma, and her designs influenced hospital architecture for decades, in Britain and the Empire.Many hospitals were founded to research into, and care for sufferers from, specific diseases such as tuberculosis. Their titles were grand – the Royal National Hospital for Chest Diseases, for example – but since they were privately funded they frequently ran out of money.


Victorian prisons and punishments
One topic which touched most citizens was the criminal law. In 1811 there had been a brutal multiple murder in the east end of London, which brought about a debate about policing. Until then the law had been enforced, with varying degrees of efficiency, by unpaid constables and watchmen appointed by each parish. London began to be seen as the haunt of violent, unpunished criminals, which was bad for trade. This may have had both a negative and positive impact on the english language evolution, with damage to trade hindering it, but new words emerging within this semantic field. At last, in 1829, the Metropolitan Police force was established, their headquarters in Scotland Yard, just off Whitehall. Their uniform made them look more like park‐keepers than soldiers, to allay the fears of those who feared law enforcement by a centrally controlled military such as existed on the continent. They walked their beats in top hats and blue swallow‐tailed coats, armed only with truncheons. It took several years for them to be popularly accepted; some people looked back with regret to the old days of corruption and inefficiency. But even the City of London agreed, after initial resistance, to remodel its own police force on New Police lines. The Metropolitan Police Act of 1839 gave them wide powers. Small boys could be arrested for bowling hoops or knocking on doors, street musicians could be arrested just for playing. But London became a safer and quieter place. In 1869 their powers were extended to allow them to raid brothels and similar dens of vice. In 1851 opponents of the Great Exhibition gloomily foretold that it would attract criminals, assassins and revolutionaries from all over Europe. In the event, the law enforcement officers greatly outnumbered the criminals. Only 12 pickpockets were arrested, foreign visitors were astounded to see the Queen walking calmly through the crowds without a military escort, and several of the foreign detectives who had crossed the Channel to watch for suspected foreign criminals went to watch for them on English race courses, instead. By 1860 boroughs and counties outside London had their own police forces. They were still locally organised, because of the in‐built English resistance to the idea of a central force such as existed on the Continent, but they were partly funded by grants from the central government.
Few trials lasted longer than two days. Public interest, stirred up by the popular newspapers, could be intense. Tickets were issued to those who knew the right people, such as diplomats and fashionable ladies, but even so the court room could be so crowded that the ticket‐holders had to share the dock with the accused. This public interest may have brought about well known more frequently used words in this particular semantic field, as well as the investment in prisons to make them more controlled creating prison jargon.
Transportation of prisoners helped to evolve the english language.The huge number of capital offences with which the reign began had been pruned to only two, murder and treason, by 1861. The main receiving territory was Australia: an average of 460 convicts were sent there each year, but some were sent to Gibraltar, or fever‐ridden Bermuda. In 1853 the colonies refused to accept England's convicts any longer, and sentences were converted to hard labour in English prisons instead.

The common law

England was proud of its individuality. Napoleon had imposed a codified system of law throughout his continental Empire, based on Roman law. In theory any citizen anywhere in his domain could consult a written source and see where he stood. Of course it was not so easy as that, and the legal profession continued to make a good living, interpreting the law to non‐lawyers. England never accepted Roman law. The English preferred their own system of ‘common law’, which was, they felt, appropriate to the rugged English character. It relied on what judges had decided in previous cases on the same point of principle, which was not always easy to identify. The law relating to wills and land, in particular, became so obscure that a parallel system grew up, more nearly related to the idea of abstract justice: it was called ‘equity’. Again, it relied on decisions by earlier judges, and since one judge’s idea of justice might vary from another’s, not much clarification resulted. Cases in the courts of equity could drag on for many years. The costs of employing lawyers put such cases out of the reach of all but the richest.

Women

When a woman married, all that she owned, and anything she earned after the marriage, became the property of her husband. Divorce could be obtained only by a private Act of Parliament, at great expense. The situation eased slightly after the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857, which set up matrimonial courts.

A husband could divorce his wife on the ground of a single act of adultery, whereas she had to prove him guilty of other offences such as cruelty, as well as adultery, and she was very unlikely to be granted custody of their children. The court proceedings were widely and pruriently reported in the popular press. The status of married women gradually improved; from 1870 a woman could keep £200 of her own earnings – just enough to live on, with care – and from 1884 she had the same rights over property as an unmarried woman, and could carry on a trade or business independently. Her rights to custody of her children improved, too, but it was not until 1923 that adultery by her husband was sufficient ground for a wife to seek divorce.

The Crystal Palace
The Great Exhibition was the brain-child of Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert. Britain was at peace. The Chartists had meekly delivered their Petition to the House of Commons in three cabs, and gone home. Albert could write to his cousin King William of Prussia, that ‘we have no fear here either of an uprising or an assassination. England was experiencing a manufacturing boom. This was the time to show off, on the international stage. The exhibits There were some 100,000 objects, displayed along more than 10 miles, by over 15,000 contributors. Britain, as host, occupied half the display space inside, with exhibits from the home country and the Empire. The biggest of all was the massive hydraulic press that had lifted the metal tubes of a bridge at Bangor invented by Stevenson. Each tube weighed 1,144 tons yet the press was operated by just one man. Next in size was a steam-hammer that could with equal accuracy forge the main bearing of a steamship or gently crack an egg. There were adding machines which might put bank clerks out of a job; a ‘stiletto or defensive umbrella’– always useful – and a ‘sportsman’s knife’ with eighty blades from Sheffield – not really so useful. One of the upstairs galleries was walled with stained glass through which the sun streamed in technicolour. Almost as brilliantly coloured were carpets from Axminster and ribbons from Coventry.There was a printing machine that could turn out 5,000 copies of the popular periodical the Illustrated London News in an hour, and another for printing and folding envelopes, a machine for making the new-fangled cigarettes, and an expanding hearse. There were folding pianos convenient for yachtsmen, and others so laden with curlicues that the keyboard was almost overwhelmed. There was a useful pulpit connected to pews by rubber tubes so that the deaf could hear, and ‘tangible ink’ for the blind, producing raised characters on paper. A whole gallery was devoted to those elegant, sophisticated carriages that predated the motorcar, and if you looked carefully you could find one or two velocipedes, the early version of bicycles. There were printing presses and textile machines and agricultural machines. There were examples of every kind of steam engine, including the giant railway locomotives…In short, as the Queen put it in her Diary, ‘every conceivable invention’. Canada sent a fire-engine with painted panels showing Canadian scenes, and a trophy of furs. India contributed an elaborate throne of carved ivory, a coat embroidered with pearls, emeralds and rubies, and a magnificent howdah and trappings for a rajah’s elephant. (The elephant wearing it came from a museum of stuffed animals in England.) The American display was headed by a massive eagle, wings outstretched, holding a drapery of the Stars and Stripes, all poised over one of the organs scattered throughout the building. Although the general idea of the Exhibition was the promotion of world peace, Colt’s repeating fire-arms featured prominently, but so did McCormick’s reaping machine. The exhibit that attracted most attention had to be Hiram Power’s statue of a Greek Slave, in white marble, housed in her own little red velvet tent, wearing nothing but a small piece of chain. This was of course allegorical. The largest foreign contributor was France. She exhibited sumptuous tapestries, Sevres porcelain and silks from Lyons, enamels from Limoges and furniture. Unlike British exhibits in the same class, many of which were sadly lacking in taste, the visual impact of the French display was stunning. It was backed up by examples of the machinery used to produce these beautiful objects. France was a worrying competitor in the markets on which Britain prided itself, especially in textiles. The Russian exhibits were late, having been delayed by ice in the Baltic. When they did arrive, they were superlative. They included huge vases and urns made of porcelain and malachite twice the height of a man, and furs and sledges and Cossack armour. Chile sent a single lump of gold weighing 50kg, Switzerland sent gold watches. Amid all these wonders, there were two which caught the public imagination. The first was the famous Koh-i-Noor diamond. It was supposed to be of inestimable value, but most people found it disappointing, although they crowded round to see it. It lay in a safe like a large parrot-cage, and on special days it was lit by a dozen little gas jets, but it still failed to sparkle. (It was not until it had been skilfully cut that its beauty emerged. It is now part of the Crown Jewels).The other was a collection of small stuffed animals arranged in whimsical tableaux, such as a set of kittens taking tea, sent by the German Customs Union. (Germany was still at that time a collection of small states.) With that unerring bad taste that distinguishes the British public, admiring crowds were never absent.

The visitors

Queen Victoria opened the Exhibition on 1 May, on schedule. She became a frequent visitor. At first the price of admission was £3 for gentlemen, £2 for ladies. They came in throngs, in their elegant carriages, leaving them at a separate entrance to be valet-parked. Saturday mornings were reserved for invalids. From 24th May the masses were let in for only a shilling a head. And they came in their thousands, factory workers sent by their employers, country villagers sent by benevolent landowners, strings of schoolchildren. The country men came wearing their best smocks, staring at all the Londoners and foreigners. The travel agent Thomas Cook arranged special excursion trains. A third-class return ticket from York cost only five shillings. One old lady even walked, all the way from Penzance. There was even a mysterious Chinese man in full mandarin robes, who stepped forward as the royal procession passed. He was treated, just in case he was important, as a visiting dignitary, but he turned out to be the captain of a Chinese junk moored in the river.

By the time the Exhibition closed, on 11 October, over six million people had gone through the turnstiles. Instead of the loss initially predicted, the Exhibition made a profit of £186,000, most of which was used to create the South Kensington museums. Those were Albert’s memorial. His Queen commissioned the statue of him, sitting under a gilt canopy opposite the Royal Albert Hall with a copy of the Exhibition catalogue on his knee.

Travel, transport and communications
The railway network flourished between 1830 and 1870. By 1852 there were over 7,000 miles of rail track in England and Scotland, and every significant centre could rely on rail communication. Britain's railways transformed the landscape both physically and culturally, producing new opportunities for commerce and travel, and fuelling industrial and economic expansion. Goods could be transported at unprecedented rates, and it was British technologies and engineers that were responsible for railway construction throughout the world.  At home, major cities, such as Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol were were now interconnected. Until the creation of the railway, the fastest speed known to man had been that of a galloping horse. Now, an express train could reach speeds of 80 miles an hour. Newspapers printed in London in the early hours could be loaded on a train to be sold that morning ‘hot from the press’ in the provinces. Fresh produce such as milk or meat could be rushed from rural producers to city consumers on a daily basis. Conan Doyle’s famous detective Sherlock Holmes could send a letter at breakfast time and receive a reply before lunch the same day – something previously unimaginable.  Some people feared that such speed might endanger the human frame. Queen Victoria asked the driver to go more slowly than his average speed of 40 miles an hour on her journey from Slough to London, finding the experience terrifying. She travelled in comfort. The first class was tolerably comfortable, but packed excursion trains provided transport only. The third class coaches were like converted cattle trucks, open to the weather. Nevertheless an intrepid provincial traveller could attend a public execution in London, or the Great Exhibition, and be home the same day.  Turnpikes and canals Communications had rapidly improved since the days of the first stage-coaches. By 1830 22,000 miles of road across England and Wales had been ‘turnpiked’. This refers to a moveable barrier, sometimes armed with ‘pikes’ or barbs, across a road, turned aside only after a toll was paid. Many turnpike-keepers’ cottages can still be seen beside rural roads. Heavy loads were more economically carried by the canal network which had developed piecemeal since 1757, linking the growing industrial centres to the ports, and to London, with an important nexus at Birmingham. Some spectacular routes were created, tunnelling through mountains and soaring across valleys on viaducts, with locks, sometimes in series, to manage changes in level. The Underground Meanwhile the traffic in inner cities was becoming chaotic. The answer that those astonishing Victorians came up with was obvious: move the whole problem underground. In 1863 the first underground railway in the world was built, connecting Paddington station – the London rail terminus for many prosperous commuters to the City – to Farringdon Street, just minutes away from the Bank of England. Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-59) pioneered railway engineering, and even designed his Great Western Railway to connect at Bristol with his trans-Atlantic steamship The Great Western, to carry travellers easily between London and New York. The railway termini were magnificent structures. Brunel’s Paddington Station, with its soaring arches and unimpeded space, is the cathedral of the railway age.
The Electric Telegraph Beside the rails ran the telegraph wires. To begin with, they were confined to railway matters, but their usefulness was soon perceived by the business community, and as the Victorian world expanded, the telegraph kept pace. Another of Brunel’s ships, The Great Eastern, played a major part in laying thousands of miles of submarine cable. It reached almost every part of Queen Victoria’s vast empire. When Queen Victoria pressed a button in the telegraph room in Buckingham Palace, on 22 June 1897, to send her Diamond Jubilee message – ‘Thank my beloved people. May God bless them’ – she was speaking to nearly a quarter of the population of the earth.



Popular Culture
Alcohol was still served during the performance but the audience was less riotous and the repertoire less gory. The price was still surprisingly low: a box at the Garrick Theatre cost only two or three pence.  1834 saw a particularly horrid murder. Waxwork figures of the murdered woman and her four murdered children, dressed in their own clothes, had the public paying to see them in the very rooms where they had died. From 1843 Madame Tussaud’s ‘Chamber of Horrors’ documented current murders, exhibiting uncanny likenesses of the murderers within a few days of their executions. From 1888 Jack the Ripper could be seen in waxwork, even in penny peepshows. Circuses There were many small collections of animals, sometimes owned by a circus manager who trundled them along the country roads before erecting his ‘Big Top’ wherever he hoped for a profitable audience. The first famous circus proprietor, ‘Lord’ George Sanger, produced spectacular winter shows in Astley’s Amphitheatre, just over Westminster Bridge.In 1884 his Gulliver’s Travels had a cast of 700 humans, 13 elephants, nine camels and 52 horses, with miscellaneous lions, buffaloes, ostriches and kangaroos thrown in. Phineas T. Barnum’s circus in Olympia specialised in themed spectacles, such as his Venetian pageant in 1891, when the vast arena was flooded and the spectators could take gondola rides down the canals, before watching a great sea battle involving over 1,000 performers.
Street artists The Punch and Judy men preferred to perform outside gentlemen’s houses in the West End of London, by arrangement, rather than walking perhaps 20 miles in a day through the streets, carrying their ‘show’. Genteel evening parties might also be enlivened by the Fantoccini man’s marionettes – a type of puppet show. Companies of street acrobats could make as much as £100 a year. There were conjurors, ‘salamander men’ (fire-eaters) and sword-swallowers.Clowns strode high above the streets on stilts, and contortionists writhed on the ground. There were innumerable ballad singers and bands of differing musical abilities, but all able to produce such a noise that they were sometimes paid just to go away. As if they were not enough, Scots and Irish bagpipes wailed through the cacophony. Zoos The Zoological Society’s collection in Regent’s Park had been open to the public since 1828 (and it still is). Among many exotic animals were two elephants, called Jumbo and Alice. The world’s first reptile house opened there in 1843. The Zoo became famous for its rattlesnakes and giraffes. In 1849 there were nearly 170,000 visitors. The heyday of the London pleasure gardens had been in the previous century. The mystery is how they managed to attract such huge crowds, despite the English weather, for they were mostly out of doors. Vauxhall struggled on until 1859. (The site is now covered by the south end of Vauxhall Bridge).
Cremorne Gardens in Chelsea opened in the 1840s, with a thousand flickering gas lights, a theatre, firework displays and an American bowling alley – claimed to be the first in London. The army made soldiers available to perform in massive pageants there. In 1855 they were re-enacting the storming of Sebastopol in the Crimean war. They advanced with their bayonets fixed. The scaffold collapsed, and they fell, impaling themselves on their bayonets. Nine years later in 1864 Goddard, the famous hot air balloonist, rose to 5,000 feet above Cremorne, but he misjudged his descent and his balloon landed fatally on a church spire in Chelsea. People being fired from cannons, ‘French female velocipedists’ (riders of early bicycles) wearing short trousers – they could all draw the crowds.

By day Cremorne was thronged with respectable parties, but they went home by ten o’clock and hundreds of prostitutes took their places. The Crystal Palace revived The building in Hyde Park housing the Great Exhibition had never been intended to be permanent. When the Exhibition closed, passionate public discussion broke out. What should be done with the famous Crystal Palace? Eventually a consortium of entrepreneurs, including Joseph Paxton, bought it outright. It was almost as great a marvel to disassemble it and move it to a new site, as it had been to build it in the first place. But frame by frame, pane by pane, it moved across London and up to the Surrey heights, at Sydenham. The new building, was half as large again as the Hyde Park building had been, and built to last. Its elaborate foundations housed 50 miles of hot water piping. The new building was opened by the royal couple in June 1854 just in time to catch fashionable London before the Season ended. The aim of the promoters was to educate the British masses by a series of historical panoramas. There was an Assyrian palace, Pompeian and Roman courts, a Medieval court, an Alhambra court with a copy of the Lion Fountain, a Byzantine court and an Egyptian court containing authentic copies of the immense statues in Abu Simbel, standing 51 feet high. As well as these ‘Architectural Courts’ there was a vast interior space used for public meetings and concerts, such as the triennial Handel concerts attended by a total of 40,000 people. In 1857 Charles Spurgeon, the celebrated Baptist preacher, addressed a congregation of 23,654. Popular amusements included ascents by the official Crystal Palace Astronaut in his gas-filled balloon. For £5, a considerable amount in those days, you too could look down on London from a mile high, or more. From 1865 Charles Brock began his magnificent weekly firework displays. The 200-acre park contained three lakes, in one of which was an island housing models of ‘Extinct Animals’ made as lifelike as the then state of pre-historical knowledge allowed. The Iguanodon alone was 34 feet long, made of four iron columns, tiles, bricks, hardcore and 38 casks of cement. Paxton was given free rein in designing magnificent fountains and water works, but they were so expensive to operate that they were turned on only for very special occasions. His vast expenditure contributed to the growing financial problems of ‘The People’s Palace’. During its first 30 years the average annual attendance was two million people. But gradually the high-minded aims of the original promoters had to give way to commercial pressure. The People’s Palace was completely destroyed by fire in 1936.