Key figures of the Victorian era

When was the Victorian era, and what defined it

The era takes its name and its dates from one reign: Victoria became queen at eighteen on 20 June 1837 and died on 22 January 1901, after sixty-three years and seven months. In that time the population of England and Wales roughly doubled, most people came to live in towns rather than the countryside, and railways, steamships, the telegraph and the penny post (1840) shrank distances. The Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park showed off British industry to some six million visitors.

Four other forces defined the period:

• Reform: Factory and Mines Acts limited child labour, the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 gave the vote to most adult men (but no women in national elections), and the Education Act of 1870 set up schools across England and Wales.
• Poverty and public health: overcrowded cities brought cholera, typhoid and child mortality. In 1854 the doctor John Snow traced a London cholera outbreak to a single water pump on Broad Street.
• Empire: after the Indian Rebellion of 1857 the British Crown took direct rule of India in 1858, and Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1877. Britain took a large share of Africa in the scramble of the 1880s and 1890s. Ireland lost about a million people to death and about a million to emigration in the famine of 1845 to 1852.
• Science and doubt: geology, evolution and biblical criticism unsettled traditional faith, while religion remained central to public life.

The queen: Victoria

Queen Victoria (1819 to 1901) married her cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840. They had nine children, who married into royal houses across Europe, which is why she is called the grandmother of Europe. After Albert died in December 1861, probably of typhoid, she wore mourning for the rest of her life and largely withdrew from public view for about a decade, which made the monarchy unpopular until her Golden (1887) and Diamond (1897) Jubilees turned her into a national symbol. She kept a journal almost every day from the age of thirteen, and in her last years took Hindustani lessons from her Indian secretary Abdul Karim, whom she defended against the racism of her household. She was also firmly against votes for women, writing to Theodore Martin in 1870 of the “mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman's Rights’”.

Writers: Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde

Charles Dickens (1812 to 1870) was sent at twelve to paste labels in a blacking (boot polish) factory while his father was in the Marshalsea debtors' prison, an experience he kept secret all his life and turned into David Copperfield. His novels came out in cheap monthly or weekly instalments, so readers of every class followed them. Oliver Twist (1837 to 1839) attacked the workhouses of the 1834 Poor Law; A Christmas Carol (1843) was written in six weeks; Bleak House (1852 to 1853) took on the courts. He campaigned for ragged schools and against public hangings, and in private letters after 1857 wrote with savage racism about Indians. Compare him with an earlier novelist in Jane Austen vs Charles Dickens.

Oscar Wilde (1854 to 1900) was a Dublin-born classicist who made himself famous as a talker and aesthete before he had written much, and toured America giving lectures in 1882. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, expanded 1891), and his comedies, ending with The Importance of Being Earnest in February 1895, made him the most celebrated writer in London. Weeks later he sued the Marquess of Queensberry for libel, lost, and was then prosecuted and convicted of “gross indecency” for relationships with men. He served two years' hard labour, much of it in Reading Gaol, and died in Paris in 1900. A 2017 law pardoned men convicted under these old laws, Wilde among them.

Science, numbers and invention: Lovelace, Nightingale, Darwin and Bell

Ada Lovelace (1815 to 1852) was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron, raised by her mother on a strict diet of mathematics. She met the inventor Charles Babbage in 1833 and in 1843 translated an Italian engineer's article on his planned Analytical Engine, adding Notes three times as long as the article. Note G sets out how the machine could calculate Bernoulli numbers, which is why she is often called the first computer programmer; historians debate how much of the plan was hers and how much Babbage's, but the Notes' claim that the engine could work with symbols as well as numbers, even music, is her own. See Ada Lovelace Day.

Florence Nightingale (1820 to 1910) took 38 nurses to the British army hospital at Scutari, opposite Constantinople, in November 1854 during the Crimean War. The image of the “lady with the lamp” comes from that winter, but her bigger work came afterwards: she showed with statistics that most soldiers who died had died of preventable disease, not wounds, and presented it in her own polar-area diagrams. In 1858 she became the first woman elected a Fellow of the Statistical Society of London; in 1860 she founded the nurse training school at St Thomas' Hospital. Mary Seacole, a Jamaican-born nurse and businesswoman, ran a hotel and canteen for officers near the front at the same time, and her memoir of 1857 is worth reading alongside Nightingale's reports.

Charles Darwin (1809 to 1882) sailed round the world on HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836, visiting the Galápagos Islands in 1835. He worked out the idea of natural selection by 1838 but published nothing for twenty years. When Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay with the same idea in 1858, their papers were read together at the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858, and On the Origin of Species came out on 24 November 1859. He wrote that he hated slavery, which he saw in Brazil, and in his last years he described himself as an agnostic. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Alexander Graham Bell (1847 to 1922) was born in Edinburgh, the son of a teacher of speech, and moved to Canada in 1870 and then Boston, where he taught deaf students. His telephone patent was granted on 7 March 1876, and in January 1878 he demonstrated the telephone to Queen Victoria at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. See Edison vs Bell for the inventor rivalries of the period.

Victorian timeline

Big themes and debates about the Victorians

• Progress for whom? Wages rose in the second half of the century and life expectancy slowly improved, but slum housing, child labour and the workhouse lasted. Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) and Henry Mayhew's interviews with London's poor give the other side of the Great Exhibition.
• Empire at home and abroad. Victorian wealth was tied to empire, from Indian cotton and taxes to the Opium Wars with China. Historians now study how the empire shaped Britain itself, including its food, money and ideas about race.
• Respectability and its victims. The same culture that built public libraries and parks also punished unmarried mothers, gay men such as Wilde and anyone who broke its codes.
• Women's work and rights. Nightingale and Lovelace succeeded in fields closed to most women; the Married Women's Property Acts (1870 and 1882) let wives keep their own earnings and property, but no woman voted in a general election in Victoria's lifetime.
• Faith and science. The 1860 Oxford debate between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce is often told as science beating religion, but the accounts were written later and disagree on what was said.

Primary sources to read

• Queen Victoria's journals, digitised by the Royal Archives: try her entries for 20 June 1837 and 1 May 1851 (the opening of the Great Exhibition).
• Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843) and the opening of Hard Times (1854) on schooling by facts.
• Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1851): street sellers and workers in their own words.
• Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), the chapter on the great towns.
• Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing (1859), and her polar-area diagram of army deaths.
• Ada Lovelace, Notes on the Analytical Engine (1843), Notes A and G.
• Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859), the final paragraph, and his Beagle diary.
• Mary Seacole, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857).
• Queen Victoria's Proclamation to the Princes, Chiefs and People of India (1858).

How to study the Victorians: projects

• Redraw Nightingale's diagram. Use her published figures to make a modern bar chart, then compare which version persuades better and why she chose hers.
• A Victorian newspaper front page for one year, say 1859, with stories on the Origin, Notes on Nursing and the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion, written from more than one point of view.
• Map the Broad Street pump. Plot John Snow's cholera deaths on a street map and explain how the pattern points to the water.
• Two Londons. Pair a scene from Dickens with a Mayhew interview on the same trade and ask which is more reliable, and for what.
• Interview a Victorian. Use the questions to ask Charles Darwin or questions to ask Florence Nightingale, and rehearse by voice with Florence Nightingale on Yuga. The recreation is built from her writings and the record, but it is not her and can be wrong, so cite her reports and letters.