Queen Victoria’s Era: Domestic Ideals and Global Empire
Victorian Women: Angel or Pioneer?
The Ideal: Angel in the House
In 1854, the English poet Coventry Patmore published The Angel in the House, a narrative poem describing an idealised courtship. During the 19th century, the woman was idealized as the ‘angel of the house’, whose duties were to provide moral support to her husband, keep the house tidy, and educate the children. The husband maintained his role as the head of the family, and his duty was to keep his wife out of the workplace. The emblematic example of this ideal was the royal family; Victoria was both an authoritative queen and a humble and devoted wife. As a result, it was the Queen who established the ideal figure of the Victorian wife and mother.
Breaking Molds: Sport and Dress
Queen Victoria established a new trend when she visited the Isle of Wight in the 1840s. Thanks to the introduction of the railways, many women were able to enjoy a day out at the seaside. In the 1850s, girls were encouraged to try archery and croquet. However, physical exercise was made difficult by bulky skirts. The American Mrs Bloomer caused a sensation when she introduced knickerbockers for women to Britain in the 1850s.
Adventurous Spirits: Women Travellers
Despite the ideal of the woman as the ‘angel of the house’, Victorian women found that they could be independent and strong and face difficult survival challenges. This was the case of Lady Anne Blunt, who travelled extensively in the Arabian desert with her husband, or of the women who emigrated to America or Australia with their families and had to adapt to rough conditions.
Pioneering Medicine: Florence Nightingale
In 1854, Florence Nightingale left her position as superintendent of a sanatorium to lead a team of nurses to the Crimea. By the time she returned home, having reformed the military hospitals, she was a national heroine. The value of professional nurses was recognised for the first time in 1860, when St Thomas’s Hospital in London opened its training school for nurses.
Nightingale’s Lasting Impact
Florence Nightingale, founder of modern nursing, both military and civil, paved the way to a new conception of the potential and place in society of the trained and educated woman. This, in turn, led in the 1860s and 1870s to John Stuart Mill’s movement for women’s suffrage, which Miss Nightingale supported, and to the founding of women’s colleges and the improvement of girls’ schools, leading eventually to provisions for the neglected higher education of one-half of the Queen’s subjects. Later, during the two World Wars, women joined the nursing profession to take an active part in the war effort, as narrated in Atonement, the masterpiece by contemporary British novelist Ian McEwan.
Documenting the World: Artists and Writers
Marianne North was the daughter of a wealthy Victorian family. After her mother’s death in 1855, she travelled extensively with her father, and in 1869 she decided to paint the flora of the distant countries she visited. She went to Australia and New Zealand, America, Canada, South Africa, India, Japan, Sri Lanka, and Jamaica. Her paintings of natural landscapes, flowers and plants that had not yet been classified, birds, and animals can be seen at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London.
The British Empire’s Zenith
During the reign of Queen Victoria, Great Britain ruled over a wide and powerful empire that brought the British into contact with various cultures.
Empire’s Scale and Origins
In the last decades of the 19th century, the British Empire occupied an area of 4 million square miles, and more than 400 million people were ruled over by the British, although through varying practices. Britain’s imperial activity may be said to have begun during the second half of the 16th century. This was the time when Queen Elizabeth I, and later James I, encouraged “plantations” – the settling of English and Scottish people in Ireland on land forcibly taken from the native Irish. In 1600, Elizabeth I also chartered the British East India Company, a trading concern that eventually ruled over much of today’s India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.
India: Jewel in the Crown
After the 1857 Indian Mutiny, India came under direct rule by Britain. Queen Victoria was crowned Empress of India by the British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, in 1877.
Queen Victoria: Empress of India (1877)
The title Empress of India was given to Queen Victoria in 1877 when India was formally incorporated into the British Empire. Victoria’s desire for such a title probably derived from jealousy of the imperial titles of some of her royal cousins in Germany and Russia. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is usually credited with having given her the idea. When Victoria died and her son Edward VII ascended the throne, his title became Emperor of India. The title continued until India became independent from the United Kingdom in 1947.
Global Expansion
During the Victorian Age, the British also occupied Australia and New Zealand, seized parts of China – including Hong Kong in 1841 – and expanded their possessions in Africa and Southeast Asia – annexing Burma, for example, in 1886.
The Scramble for Africa
Expansionist activity reached a crescendo with the ‘scramble for Africa’ in the 1880s and 1890s. This was a race among European powers to establish territorial rights to those parts of the continent yet unclaimed. Britain took over Egypt to protect its routes to India through the Suez Canal in 1882 and the Sudan in 1884. From 1899 to 1902, Britain fought the Boer War in South Africa against Dutch settlers (the Boers) for control of gold and diamond mines. The British eventually won, but with great difficulty.
A Diverse Yet Unified Empire
Because the British came into contact with and subdued vastly different areas at different times, they were able to shape imperial and colonial policy gradually, adapting to different realities and producing an empire united in name but varied in its administration.
Imperial Ideology and Consequences
Pride, Prejudice, and “Civilising Missions”
Expressions of civic pride and national fervour were frequent in the late 19th century. Patriotism was deeply influenced by ideas of racial superiority. The British had only to look at their empire – at the variety of races and peoples they governed – to find apparent confirmation. There was a belief that the “races” of the world were divided by fundamental physical and intellectual differences – that some were destined to be led by others. It was thus considered an obligation, ‘the white man’s burden’, imposed by God on the British to impose their superior way of life, their institutions, laws, and politics on native peoples throughout the world.
The concept of the ‘white man’s burden’ was exalted in the works of colonial writers like Rudyard Kipling, and the expansion of the Empire was often regarded as a mission. Every time the British took control over a territory, they felt they brought civilisation to the ‘barbarian’, faith to the ‘heathen’, wealth to the poor, and law and social order to ‘primitive’ societies. Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden”, written in 1899 to give advice to the United States on the occasion of the annexation of the Philippines, contains the author’s most famous phrase, “the white man’s burden”, which made him the bard of the English Empire and came to symbolise the belief in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Burma: A Case Study in Independence
Burma was annexed as a province of British India in 1886, and Burmese customs were weakened. In 1941, the Japanese invaded Burma, promising independence if the British were defeated. At the end of World War II, the leader Aung San negotiated independence from Britain, which was granted in 1948. From 1948 to 1962, Burma was a democratic republic, with U Nu as the first prime minister. In 1962, General Ne Win led a military coup d’état. He ruled for twenty-six years as a dictator, suspending the constitution and establishing military rule. Outside visitors were few and restricted to Rangoon, Mandalay, and a handful of other tightly controlled towns close to the central plains. In July 1988, demonstrations broke out across the country during the so-called “Democracy Summer”. In 1988, Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of the independence hero Aung San, founded the National League of Democracy (NLD). Her party quickly gathered countrywide support. Although committed to non-violence, Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest in July 1989 for endangering the state and kept there for the next six years. Nevertheless, her party won the elections in 1990. In 1991, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; in 2003, she was imprisoned once again and released in 2010. The humanitarian situation in Burma is disastrous, and civil war still ravages the border areas. The effect of military rule has been an impoverished and underdeveloped nation; Burma is rated as the second least developed nation on the United Nations Development Index. Peace, democracy, and the most basic human rights do not exist.
Seeds of Change: Victorian Doubt
Darwin and Shifting Beliefs
In the second half of the 19th century, Britain reached the peak of its power abroad; however, some ideological conflicts were beginning to undermine the self-confident attitude that had characterised the first part of Victoria’s reign. Changes occurred in several fields, notably scientific achievements, industrialisation, sexuality, and religion. A growing pessimism began to affect intellectuals and artists, who expressed their sense of doubt in various ways.