Victorian era Quotes

“Wikipedia: Victorian era”

“The contrast between the labour laws of 1837 and those passed in 1875 is the contrast between harshness and mercy, distrust of the working classes and confidence in them.”

“The bettering of conditions of life for the majority of people was the material achievement of the Victorian age, parallel to its glories in literature, intellect and science.”

“When I speak of Victorian values, I mean respect for the individual, thrift, initiative, a sense of personal responsibility, respect for others and their property, and all the other values that characterised the best of the Victorian era.”

“In Victorian times business was seen as a romance and books by the score portrayed the lives of entrepreneurs both as gripping adventure stories and also as examples of high moral principle, dedication to public service and concern for others.”

“Between 1780 and 1850 the English ceased to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, riotous, cruel and bloodthirsty nations in the world and became one of the most inhibited, polite, orderly, tender-minded, prudish and hypocritical.”

“Britain under Queen Victoria was Europe's most successful polity since the early Roman Empire. In just 70 years it discovered and bequeathed to us a complete rail network, internal combustion engines, gas and electricity, wireless telegraphy, anaesthetics, public sanitation, mass education, worker protection, full employment, imperial security and democracy.”

“One thing that strikes me when I think of Booth is the nonsense that is talked today about the poverty of the Victorian age. Why the Victorian age is so unpopular today very largely arises from the fact that, in spite of all its faults, there was among its great men, who were numerous, a faith in goodness: there was a moral earnestness and there was a sense of duty and a performance of duty.”

“I don't think there has been a better time in our history. Better leaders than Palmerston, Gladstone, Disraeli and Salisbury? Braver thinkers than Mill, Ruskin, Faraday and the mighty Darwin? And, crucially, when was English literature ever more richly endowed with talent? From Hardy to Dickens, George Eliot to Mrs Gaskell, Tennyson to Browning, Arnold to Wilde, English poetry and prose was never so well served.”

“[T]he Victorian Age... cared more for life than for thought; consequently it produced abundant and fine life, while its thought was comparatively unambitious and aimed mainly at serving the practical purposes of life. It cared intensely for morals and little for metaphysics; a good deal for religion and scarcely at all for theology... It had an immense faith, a faith in goodness, in duty, in the future of mankind.”

“The postulate that there was a link of some kind between the rise of the Sunday school and the original decline of deviance is reinforced by the geographical evidence as well as the aggregate changes over time. Wales, which historically had been one of the more violent and lawless parts of Britain, became in the later 19th century an especially peaceable and law-abiding place, characterised by temperance and a strict moral code.”

“Victorian historians too often depicted the past as an inevitable progress leading to the glorious present when Britain ruled the world. And French and German and Russian and American historians did much the same thing for their nations’ stories. Like epic poems, their books were filled with heroes and villains and stirring events. Such histories, says Michael Howard, the eminent British historian, sustain us in difficult times, but they are “nursery history.””

“To the degree Victorians succeeded in "bourgeoisifying" the ethos, they also democratized it. That ethos was not, to be sure, an exalted or heroic one. Hard work, sobriety, frugality, foresight—these were modest, mundane virtues, even lowly ones. But they were virtues within the capacity of everyone; they did not assume any special breeding, or status, or talent, or valor, or grace—or even money. They were common virtues within the reach of common people. They were, so to speak, democratic virtues.”

“Audrey Russell: Do you think that there may be a reversal and that certain very strict standards may suddenly follow the present age?
Mary Stocks: Well it could happen. You see, it did in the first half of the nineteenth century, didn't it? When there was a reaction against the sort of extreme libertarianism of the late eighteenth century.”

“During the last half of the 19th century there was a marked fall in the crime rate with a substantial decrease in both crimes of dishonesty and violence, and in the illegitimacy rate, and the beginnings of a fall in the incidence of drug and alcohol abuse. It was a period of striking moral reform in personal behaviour which transformed Britain from being a violent, dishonest and addicted society into a peaceable, law-abiding, respectable and essentially moral realm that endured for much of the 20th century.”

“Take another look at the graph showing illegitimacy from the 1500s up to the present, and focus on the period from 1850–1900. It would be hard to find a time or place in which industrialisation and urbanisation were faster, more sweeping, or more wrenching than in Victorian England. And yet during that same period, illegitimacy went down, not up (crime also dropped, amazingly). The Victorian middle class was superbly efficient at propagating its values throughout society, and its success overcame the naturally disruptive forces of modernisation.”

“One of the most impressive demonstrations of the increase in the law-abiding character of the English is the following table of the number of criminal commitments in the half century between 1841 and 1891. During this period serious offences decreased 60 per cent in volume, and 80 per cent relative to the increase of population. As can be seen, the really dramatic break in criminal commitments came in the decade 1851–1861. Police forces were first established all over England by the County and Borough Police Act of 1856.”

“British rates of recorded crime fell as markedly in the latter part of the 19th century as they have risen since. The overall incidence of serious offences recorded by the police in the 1890s was only about 60 per cent of what it had been in the 1850s and, given that the efficiency of the reporting and recording of crime was improving at the time, the real fall in the crime rate was probably far greater than that indicated by official statistics. Thus in 1900 Britain was not only a less violent and dishonest country than today, but also less violent and dishonest than it had been in the earlier part of the 19th century.”

“The colonisation of Australia and New Zealand, and the acquisition of South Africa in the decline of Holland, created the new and wider British Empire still based upon sea-power and comprising a fifth of the human race, over which Queen Victoria, in the longest reign of British history, presided. In this period moral issues arising from Christian ethics became prominent. The slave trade, from which Britain had so shamelessly profited in the past, was suppressed by the Royal Navy. By a terrible internal struggle, at the cost of nearly a million lives, slavery was extirpated from the United States; above all, the Union was preserved.”

“What brighter jewel in a Sovereign's crown, what nobler record of a reign, than the fact that it witnessed the children's emancipation, that it released from toil in tender years the sons and daughters of the poor? The success of the Factory Acts has suggested other measures intended to make less oppressive the labour of those who, being, it is supposed, unable to bargain for themselves, need the protection of the Legislature; and this group of laws will be an enduring monument, if not of the wisdom of the Victorian age, of its solicitude for the welfare of its wards.”