CHAPTER I : INTRODUCTION

ENGLAND IN THE 19TH CENTURY

1.1 The years of power and danger

Britain in the nineteenth century was at its most powerful and self-confident.
After the industrial revolution, nineteenth-century Britain was the “workshop of the
world. Until the last quarter of the century British factories were producing more
than any other country in the world.
By the end of the century, Britain’s empire was political rather than commercial.
Britain used this empire to control large areas of the world. The empire gave the
British a feeling of their own importance which was difficult to forget when Britain
lost its power in the twentieth century. This belief of the British in their own
importance was at its height in the middle of the nineteenth century, among the new
middle class, which had grown with industrialization. The novelist Charles Dickens
nicely described this national pride. One of his characters ,Mr. Podsnap, believed that
Britain had been specially chosen by God and “ considered other countries a
mistake”.
The rapid growth of the middle class was part of the enormous rise in the
population. In 1815 the population was 13 million, but this doubled by 1871, and
was over 40 million by 1914. This growth and the movement of people to towns
from the countryside forced a change in the political balance, and by the end of the
century most men had the right to vote. Politics and government during the
nineteenth century became increasingly the property of the middle class. The
aristocracy and the Crown had little power left by 1914. However, the working class,
the large number of people who had left their villages to become factory workers,
had not yet found a proper voice.
Britain enjoyed a strong place in European councils after the defeat of Napoleon.
Its strength was not in a larger population, as this was half that of France and Austria,
and only a little greater than that of Prussia. It lay instead in industry and trade, and
the navy which protected this trade.
Britain wanted two main things in Europe: a “balance of power” which would
prevent any single nation from becoming too strong, and a free market in which its
own industrial and trade superiority would give Britain a clear advantage. It
succeeded in the first aim by encouraging the recovery of France, to balance the
power of Austria. Further east, it was glad that Russia’s influence in Europe was
limited by Prussia and the empires of Austria and Turkey. These all shared a border
with Russia.
Outside Europe, Britain wished its trading position to be stronger than anyone
else ‘s. It defended its interests by keeping ships of its navy in almost every ocean of
the world. This was possible because it had taken over and occupied a number of
places during the war against Napoleon. These included Mauritius( in the Indian
Ocean ), the Ionian Islands ( in the eastern Mediterranean ), Sierra Leone ( west
Africa ), Cape Colony ( south Africa ), Ceylon, and Singapore.
After 1815 the British government did not only try to develop its trading stations.
Its policy now was to control world traffic and world markets to Britain’s advantage.
Britain did not, however, wish to colonise everywhere. There were many areas in
which it had no interest. But there were other areas, usually close to its own
possessions or on important trade routes, which it wished everyone else to leave
alone. It was the result of defending these interests that Britain took over more and
more land.
The concerns in Europe and the protection of trade routes in the rest of the world
guided Britain’s foreign policy for a hundred years. It was to keep the balance in
Europe in 1838 that Britain promised to protect Belgium against stronger neighbours.
In spite of political and economic troubles in Europe, this policy kept Britain from
war in Europe for a century from 1815.
Until about 1850, Britain was in greater danger at home than abroad. The
Napoleonic Wars had turned the nation from thoughts of revolution to the need to
defeat the French. They had also hidden the social effects of the industrial revolution.
Britain had sold clothes, guns, and other necessary war supplies to its allies ’armies
as well as its own. At the same time corn had been imported to keep the nation and
its army fed.
All this changed when peace came in 1815.Suddenly there was no longer such a
need for factory- made goods, and many lost their jobs .Unemployment was made
worse by 300,000 men from Britain’s army and navy who were now looking for
work. At the same time, the landowning farmers’ own income had suffered because
of cheaper imported corn .While prices doubled , wages remained the same.
The general misery began to cause trouble .In 1830, starving farm workers in the
south of England rioted for increased wages. People tried to add to their food supply
by catching wild birds and animals. But almost all the woods had been enclosed by
the local landlord and new laws were made to stop people hunting animals for food.
Many poor people lived in workhouses .The workhouses were feared and hated.
They were crowded and dirty, with barely enough food to keep people alive. The
inhabitants had to work from early morning till late at night. The sexes were
separated, so families were divided. Charles Dickens wrote about the workhouse in
his novels. His descriptions of the life of crime and misery into which poor people
were forced shocked the richer classes ,and conditions slowly improved.
Since 1824 workers had been allowed to join together in unions. Most of these
unions were small and weak. Although one of their aims was to make sure
 employers paid reasonable wages, they also tried to prevent other people from
working in their particular trade. As a result the working classes still found it
difficult to act together. Determined employers could still quite easily defeat strikers
who refused to work until their pay was improved, and often did so with cruelty and
violence. Soldiers were sometimes used to force people back to work or break up
meetings.
Beside hunger, crime was the mark of poverty. Robert Peel, the Prime Minister of
the time, had turned his attention to this problem already, by establishing a regular
police force for London in 1829. At first people had laughed at his blue- uniformed
men in their top hats. But during the next thirty years almost every other town and
county started its own police force. The new police forces soon proved themselves
successful, as much crime was pushed out of the larger cities, then out of towns and
then out of the countryside. Peel was able to show that certainty of punishment was
far more effective than cruelty of punishment.
Britain’s success in avoiding the storm of revolution in Europe in 1848 was
admired almost everywhere. European monarchs wished they were as safe on their
thrones as the British queen seemed to be. And liberals and revolutionaries wished
they could act as freely as radicals in Britain were able to do. Britain had been a
political model in the eighteenth century, but with the War of Independence in
America and revolution in France interest in liberalism and democracy turned to
these two countries. Now it moved back to Britain, as a model both of industrial
success and of free constitutional government. For much of the nineteenth century
Britain was the envy of the world.

1.2 Victorian and Victorianism

For much of this century the term ‘Victorian’, which literally describes things and
events in the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), conveyed connotations of ‘prudish’,
‘repressed,’ and ‘old-fashioned’. Although such associations have some basis, in fact,
they do not adequately indicate the nature of this complex, paradoxical age that was a
second English Renaissance. Like Elizabethan England, Victorian England saw a great
expansion of wealth, power, and culture.
In science and technology, the Victorians invented the modern idea of invention- the
notion that one can create solutions to problems, that man can create new means of
bettering himself and his environment.
 In religion, the Victorians experienced a great age of doubt, the first that called into
question institutional Christianity on such a large scale.
In literature and the other arts, the Victorians attempted to combine Romantic
emphases upon self, emotion, and imagination with Neoclassical ones upon the public
role of art and a corollary responsibility of the artist.
In ideology, politics, and society the Victorians created astonishing innovation and
change: democracy, feminism, unionization of workers, socialism, Marxism, and other
modern movements took form. In fact, this age of Darwin, Marx and Freud appears to be
not only the first that experienced modern problems but also the first that attempted
modern solutions. Victorian, in other words, can be taken to mean parent of the modern,
and like most powerful parents, it provoked a powerful reaction against itself.
The Victorian age was not one, not single, simple, or unified, only in part because
Victoria’s reign lasted so long that it comprised several periods. Above all, it was an age
of paradox and power. The Catholicism of the Oxford Movement, the Evangelical
movement, the spread of the Broad Church, and the rise of Utilitarianism, socialism,
Darwinism, and scientific Agnosticism, were all in their own ways characteristically
Victorian, as were the prophetic writings of Carlyle and Ruskin, the criticism of Arnold,
and the empirical prose of Darwin and Huxley, as were the fantasy of George Mac
Donald and the realism of George Eliot and George Bernard Shaw.
More than anything else what makes Victorians Victorian is their sense of social
responsibility, a basic attitude that obviously differentiates them from their immediate
predecessors, the Romantics.

1.3 Family Life in 19th century England

Families were very important to Victorians. They were

usually large. In 1870, the
average family had five or six children. Most upper and middle
class families lived in big, comfortable houses. Each member of
the family had its own place and children were taught to “ know
their place .”
The Father was the head of the household. He was often
strict and was obeyed by all without question. The children were
taught to respect their father and always spoke politely to him
calling him “ Sir .” Very few children would dare to be cheeky to
their father or answer him back. When he wanted a little peace
and quiet he would retire to his study and the rest of the family
were not allowed to enter without his special permission.
The Mother would often spend her time planning dinner parties, visiting her
dressmaker or calling on friends. She did not do jobs like washing clothes or cooking and
cleaning. Both papa and mama saw the upbringing of their children as an important
responsibility. They believed a child must be taught the difference between right and
wrong if he was to grow into a good and thoughtful adult. If a child did something wrong
he would be punished for his own good. “ Spare the rod and spoil the child “ was a saying
Victorians firmly believed in.
Most middle class children saw very little of their parents. The children in a middle
class family would spend most of their time in the nursery and would be brought up by
their nanny. Victorian children were expected to rise early, because lying in bed was
thought to be lazy and sinful. The nanny would be paid about 25 pounds a year to wash,
dress and watch over them, amuse them, dose them, take them out and teach them how to
behave. Some would only see their parents once a day. In the evening, clean and tidy the
children were allowed downstairs for an hour before they went to bed. Some mothers
taught their children to read and write and sometimes fathers taught their sons Latin.
When the children grew up, only the boys were expected to work, the daughters
stayed at home with their mother. They were expected only to marry as soon as possible.
Children in poor families had an unhappy childhood. They worked hard to satisfy the
needs of their parents because they did not have enough money. They underwent very
difficult conditions of employment. Days were long for them: eight or twelve hours a day,
six days a week.
Many children often worked with adults in manufactories. At that time, there was no
insurance and when children had accidents or were ill they did not have any help .Lots of
children in poor families died of diseases like scarlet fever, measles, polio and TB which
are curable today. These were spread by foul drinking water, open drains and lack of
proper toilets. In overcrowded rooms if one person caught a disease it spread quickly
through the rest.
Many destitute children lived by stealing, and to the respectable Victorians they must
have seemed a very real threat to society. Something had to be done about them to
preserve law and order. Many people thought education was the answer and Ragged
schools were started to meet the need. However, there were dissenting voices against this.
Henry Mayhew argued that : “ since crime was not caused by illiteracy, it could not be
cured by education… the only certain effects being the emergence of a more skilful and
sophisticated race of criminals .”
In broad lines, we can say that the 19th century was characterized by strict ideas of
family life. Except for the rich, people no longer married for economic reasons, but did so
for personal happiness. However, while wives might be companions, they were certainly
not equals. As someone wrote in 1800, “ the husband and wife are one, and the husband
is that one.” As the idea of the close family under the” master” of the household became
stronger, so the possibility for a wife to find emotional support or practical advice outside
the immediate family became more limited. In addition, an increasing number of women
found their sole economic and social usefulness ended when their children grew up, a
problem that continued into the twentieth century. They were discouraged from going out
to work if not economically necessary, and also encouraged to make use of the growing
number of people available for domestic service.
This return to authority exercised by the head of the family was largely the result of
three things. These were fear of political revolution spreading from France, of social
change caused by industrial revolution in Britain, and the influence of the new religious
movements of Methodism and Evangelicalism.
One must wonder how much these things reduced the chance of happy family life.
Individualism, strict parental behaviour, the regular beating of children and the cruel
conditions for those boys at boarding school, all worked against it. One should not be
surprised that family life often ended when children grew up. As one foreigner noted in
1828, “ grown up children and their parents soon become almost strangers .”
The concept which defines best the parent- child relationship in 19th century
England is in fact that one which reflects Britain’s political attitude towards the other
countries, namely ‘ the ideology of the oppressor ‘.
European imperialists—most notably Victorian England—believed it to be their
moral duty to dominate the less civilized, for in English culture the human species had
found its perfect form. Not surprisingly, the relationship between the parent and the child
in Victorian England was precisely that of the relationship between colonizer and
colonized, precisely that of the relationship between the physically dominant and the
physically dominated.
In 1834, Reverend Jacob Abbot described the ideal relationship between the adult
and the child in Parental Duties in the Promotion of Early Piety, one of many child-
rearing texts of the Victorian period. The adult’s job, first and foremost, is a moral one,
and as such, any and all manipulations are therefore justified if it brings about the child’s
unqualified physical submission.

I would also remark, that parents cannot take a single step to advantage in
endeavoring to train up their children to piety, without first obtaining their unlimited,
unqualified, entire submission to their authority. The very first lesson to be taught the
child is to submit, to obey. There are various methods of obtaining this ascendancy.
In some way or other it must be done. Your children must be habituated to do what
you command, and to refrain from what you forbid; not because they can see the
reason for it, but because you command or forbid: submission, not to your reason,
but to your authority [remains vital]…. Be it remembered, insubordination is the
essence of irreligion. I repeat it—insubordination is the essence of irreligion.
(emphasis added)

In as stratified a culture as Victorian Europe—and especially Victorian England

-ultimately nearly every class—from the working masses to the middle class, the
bourgeoisie, and the aristocracy—believed in the hierarchy that Abbot articulates so
plainly in the preceding passage. Victorian child-rearing pedagogy—a fully-fledged
“black pedagogy” in its own right—reproduced imperialist ideology on an individual
basis, one child at a time. From his or her earliest moments, the child was taught by the
adult that those with power—especially physical and economic power—were morally
superior In other words, one’s ability to buy and sell another, or to destroy the other
when necessary, was a clear and present indication of one’s individual and cultural
superiority. Obviously, moral degradation followed the weak and the poor—and
especially the child.
The basis of imperial authority,” another historian writes, “was the mental attitude of
the colonist. His acceptance of subordination—whether through a positive sense of
common interest with the parent state, or through inability to conceive of any alternative
—made empire durable.” Not unlike the relationship between master and slave, then, the
durability of the imperialist relationship between colonizer and colonized required that
the subordinated accept his or her subordination as inevitable, as an obviousness, as much
a part of human nature as is, say, child-bearing
The dominant culture’s ideology of human relationship becomes of central concern
when considering Victorian imperialism. . For domination and subjugation to be an
unquestioned and even a celebrated way of life meant that the colonist’s consciousness—
and the consciousness of those masses of European people who passively acquiesced to
the inherent violence of their culture—shared a basic assumption about the nature of
relationships between cultures, races, and individuals. The church and the state supported
the shared ideological belief in the racial, cultural, and ideological superiority of
Victorian culture.
Evolutionary science was used to “prove” the superiority and therefore the natural
right of the European to dominate the global habitat. Nevertheless, church, states, and
science did not invent this hierarchy. Rather, Victorian institutions merely refracted and
intensified-what most Victorians had been taught since birth and therefore accepted
unquestioningly. From the cradle, the child learned that the world was divided between
those who physically dominate and those who were dominated. Moreover, power—as in
adult power—was always allied with moral authority. The child’s power was allied with
savagery, willfulness, indolence, wickedness, and immorality. Resistance to moral
authority was a sign of one’s otherness, and therefore justified even sterner “civilizing”
measures.
Yet the resisting child was first the vulnerable infant and, as the infant of the
Victorian middle or upper classes, was taught implicitly and explicitly that his inherent
biological reality was incomplete and inadequate and only the adult—armed with the
material expressions of the dominant child-rearing ideology—might complete what
nature had left undone. These material expressions of the dominant child-rearing
ideology include the child’s nursery, a safe distance from the adult world; the baby’s
bottle, a safe distance from the mother’s breast; the rubber nipple, another material
substitute for the mother’s breast; the bassinet; the crib; the nanny; and so on—all of
which came to be understood as the child-rearing rule justified by the ideological belief
that these practices were the hallmarks of a civilized race. All of these items share a
common theme, they allow the mother to physically detach from the child long before the
child seeks separation from her.
The anxiety and emotional desperation of the child are then transformed by
Victorian “black pedagogies” that require the unquestioned obedience of the child. The
Victorian adult believed this to be necessary, for the child’s “nature” made it obvious. Yet
the child’s “nature” was nothing more than the appropriate response to the nurturing he
received, or failed to receive. The child’s too early detachment from the mother is the
moment in which a culture’s ideological beliefs—and not human nature—shape human
growth and development, for a child separated too soon from her mother will certainly
manifest symptoms associated with “difficult” babies, including sleeplessness, colic,
frequent infection, eating problems, and so on, all of which later justify even more
cultural intervention by the adult in the form of child-rearing pedagogies that encourage
parents to expect slave-like obedience from their children. “Teach them to obey you,” one
Victorian child-rearing expert writes, and children will be happy. “That one great lesson
of all life, ‘to submit.’” To ensure the child’s submission, adult violence is necessary;
however, according to the dominant child-rearing ideology, violence is always for the
child’s own good.