Victorian Compromise

VICTORIAN COMPROMISE The Victorians were great moralizers, probably because they faced numerous problems on such a scale that they felt obliged to advocate certain values which offered solutions or escapes. As a rule the values they promoted reflected not the world as they saw it, the harsh social reality around them, but the world as they would have liked it to be. Probably the most persistently advocated notion throughout he 19th century was the need to work hard. In an age which believed in progress, it seemed natural to believe that material progress would emerge from hard work and to insist on the sense of duty rather than on personal inclination. Sunday schools and later the compulsory elementary schools placed great emphasis on punctuality and application. Diligence, good time-keeping and good behaviour were rewarded, normally by the gift of books. These values were of equal application to all strata of society, through they were refined and given their essential Victoria form by the upper or middle classes. The idea of respectability distinguished the middle from the lower class. Respectability was a mixture of both morality and hypocrisy, severity and conformity to social standards. It implied the possession of good manners, the ownership of a comfortable house with servants and a carriage, regular attendance at church, and charitable activity. Plinatropy was a broadly-based Victorian phenomenon with a range and diversity of interests: it addressed itself to every kind of poverty and absorbed the energies of thousands of Victorians, large numbers of whom were woman. It is far too easy to speculate on the motives for Victorian philanthropy. Good deeds marked out a woman or man as a person of standing in a community. In life, and then in death, charitable work was listed alongside a Victorian's varied accomplishments and qualities. In additions, many activists genuinely believed that they could, through personal example and through the charitable systems they established, reform the objects of their charity; they could save the dissolute, raise up fallen women, and instill industry and self-help where it was most needed. Bourgeois ideals also dominated Victorian family life. The family was a patriarchal unit where the position of the husband was dominant. The man was the breadwinner as well as the source of discipline; it was a role imposed upon him by divine providence, and it was equally incumbent on the woman to obey the source of authority. But this is not to deny the key role of women in child-rearing and educating, in managing servants and budgeting. The subservience of woman was clearly underlined by the enormous difficulties they faced if the cast aside the roles expected of them. The concept of "fallen women" was a fate imposed upon thousands of woman by a society with an intense concern for female chastity. Single women with a child suffered the worst of society's punishments: they were ostracized as Hardy well describes in his novel TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES. Sexuality was generally repressed in its public and private forms, and moralizing "prudery" in its most extreme manifestations led to the denunciation of nudity in art, the veiling of sculpted genitals and the rejection of words with sexual connotations everyday vocabulary. In the late 19th century expression of civic pride and national fervour were frequent among the British Patriotism was deeply influenced by ideas of racial superiority. Towards the end of Victoria's reign, the British had come to accept that, in the racial hierarchy of mankind, they stood supreme. In part, they had only to look at their empire, at the variety of races and peoples they governed, to find apparent confirmation of this view. There emerged a powerful belief that the "races" of the world were divided by fundamental physical and intellectual differences, that some destined to be led by others. It was thus and obligation imposed by the Almighty on the British to bestow their superior way of life, their institutions, law, politics, on native peoples throughout the world. This attitude came to be know as "Jingoism". Colonial power and economic progress made for the optimistic outlook of many Victorians. However, their self-confidence and moral certainties were only one element in a complex framework of Victorian ideals. It was, after all, an age riddled with contradictions and doubts, notably about religion and relationship between science and believe.