Explaining Britain and Her Empire: 1851-1914: A Student's Guide to Victorian Britain

By Nick Shepley

In the six decades between 1851 and 1914 Britain was transformed by industrialisation and empire. Her politics, society, culture and economy all underwent a radical transition. This is an Explaining History e-book written specifically for A level students to help them master this complex and challenging period of study. It covers
* The evolution of the party system in Victorian Britain
* The development of working class culture and politics
* The expansion of empire and the rise in international tensions
* Everyday life for Victorian people of differing social classes
* The impact of the industrial revolution
* The growth in the franchise
* Unrest in Ireland and the issue of home rule
* Liberal and Conservative social reforms
* Popular imperialism
* The causes of the First World War.
The e-book also contains a link to a resources web page with downloadable study aids, exam help and essay writing guides.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AUK Academic
• Release date: Dec 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781785382437

Book preview

below.

Part One

Reform and Empire, 1851–1886

Chapter One

The Mid-Victorian Boom and Society, 1851–1886

Chapter Overview

Between 1851 and the mid-1870s, Britain experienced the longest economic boom in her history and by the 1880s she had amassed the largest empire in world history, one that would continue to grow in size even after the First World War. How did a small island, close to Europe but never quite fully part of it, come to dominate the world in the mid to late 19th Century?

The source of Britain’s extraordinary prosperity was the industrial revolution that had been gathering pace across the country for almost a century. Britain’s capacity for the mass production of manufactured goods and materials was, in the view of historian Eric Hobsbawm, the most important event in world history, only rivalled by mankind’s discovery of agriculture or the development of towns and cities. It meant that by the end of the century more people lived in towns and cities than lived on the land and that no longer were people in Britain dependent on harvests or the cycles of nature for their livelihood. Instead a new urban world of cities, factories and in many cases pollution, poverty and disease, was born. This chapter will explore the hard realities of nineteenth-century living and the move for social reform to try to improve living standards. Reforms to education, public health, housing, sanitation and working conditions were not simply acts of kindness by wise politicians to the working classes, they were essential policies to appeal not just to the workforce but to a new electorate. After 1867 the vote was extended to a majority of working class men, meaning that the political priorities of the main parties were forever changed; electoral reform and social reform were closely linked, as we shall see in section three.

In this chapter we will explore the following topic areas

Monarchy and Parliament: The ruling elites and the political system.

Industrial expansion, railways and the Great Exhibition.

The development of British society throughout the period.

Section 1

Monarchy and Parliament: the ruling elites and the political system

Question: How was the monarchy changing in the 19th Century? Why was Victoria and Albert’s appeal to the public so important?

Victoria, Albert and Victorian Society

In 1837, Princess Victoria, the niece of William IV and daughter of the late Duke of Kent, became heir to the throne after her uncle died. She was 18 years old and very inexperienced, but she quickly became very popular with the British public, who were better educated and more engaged with politics than any previous generation. When this book is published in 2015, Queen Victoria will still (by a matter of a few months) be the longest reigning monarch in British history. When she died in 1901 an entire age of British and indeed world history was seen to draw to a close. Because Victoria’s importance stretched far beyond herself as an individual, she lent her name to an entire generation and culture: the Victorians.

In 1839 she married her cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, after her uncle King Leopold of Belgium arranged the match. She fell deeply in love with Albert when they met and he became Prince Consort to the Queen. Albert’s role in Britain was different to that which he was accustomed to in Germany, the Queen herself had very little constitutional role in governing, she was simply there to be consulted, and to sometimes advise. Albert became a patron of the arts, commerce and science and acted as an unofficial mediator in diplomatic affairs. Both Victoria and Albert’s public appeal were hugely important; since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 Britain had seen decades of unrest and protest from the urban and rural poor. On the continent there had been Europe-wide revolutions in 1848 where countless monarchs and princes had been overthrown. Public opinion in an age of mass population, growing literacy and mass democracy was essential for the royal family to harness and to stay on the right side of. Victoria came to rely on Albert over the next two decades and she retreated into the life of their marriage and their rapidly growing family (by the time of Albert’s death in 1861 they had produced eight children together). From 1859 onwards Albert’s health declined and he complained of increased back and stomach pains and in 1861, after exhausting himself mediating between Britain and the USA over Britain’s tacit support for the Confederacy in the South[1], he died, doctors diagnosing typhoid as the cause.

Victoria’s grief was all consuming, she became a reclusive figure, mourning for much of the rest of her life. Her self imposed retreat from the public scene was harmful to her public standing, the natural sympathy that many had for her loss was replaced by criticism of her excessive grief. This was fuelled by the Victorian press and their growing readership whose articles added to a culture of scandal and speculation, particularly when Victoria established a close friendship with her highland ghilly (groundsman) John Brown. Victoria was an enthusiastic imperialist, she had little to do with the day-to-day running of the British Empire but believed it had a ‘civilising mission.’

Victoria’s Later Years

Victoria became synonymous in the mind of the public with Britain’s growing imperial power and military might, particularly following her coronation as Empress of India in 1877. Towards the end of her life she became the matriarch of many of Europe’s royal houses, having arranged the marriage of her children and then grandchildren to rulers and heirs to the throne as far away as Germany, Denmark, Russia and Greece. Her granddaughter Alexandra of Hesse married the ill-fated Nicholas II of Russia and was murdered alongside him in Ekaterinburg in Russia in 1918. Her eldest grandson was Wilhelm II, the German Kaiser who played a crucial role in raising Anglo-German tensions in the years preceding the First World War.

Traditionally, historians have argued that the Queen’s uptight attitude to sex and intimacy (born of her revulsion at the debauched and scandalous behaviour of her mother, uncles and the Georgian court in general) filtered down into Victorian Society and was greatly influential in shaping attitudes. Marxist historians have instead argued that Victorian propriety and repressed attitudes were a result of the development of a middle class who chiefly benefitted from the industrial revolution. It seems unlikely that Victoria’s personal feelings had no bearing on the development of popular attitudes, but British sensibilities most likely developed primarily as a result of the economic and social conditions that confronted people in the nineteenth century.

Question: How did the party system evolve? What was the impact of the Corn Laws?

The Liberals and the Tories

The two main political parties throughout this period were the Liberals and the Conservatives or Tories.

Before the 1840s neither party existed as a unified national organisation, instead there were loose and shifting coalitions of MPs and Peers who had descended from the Whig Faction, a group of aristocrats that had formed around Charles II in the later 17th Century. Politics in the first half of the century was dominated by the Whigs and the Tories with the latter holding office until 1830. The next twenty years were dominated by Whig Governments with the Tories under Robert Peel holding office only twice between 1835 and 1837 and from 1841 to1846.

One issue would forge these groups and factions into parties, the question of free trade. Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, protective tariffs (known as the ‘Corn Laws’) had existed in Britain to stop the import of foreign corn from Europe and America undercutting the prices charged by landowners across the country. This form of protectionism[2] benefitted the wealthy landed gentry and penalised the rural and urban poor who were dependent on cheap bread to feed their families.

Question: Who were the Liberals?

The opponents of the ‘Corn Laws’ initially were the new class of merchants and industrialists who needed cheap food for their work force. When this newly emerging social class were able to vote representatives to parliament they tended to vote for two factions, the Whigs and Radicals who would later merge into the Liberal Party. These politicians shared the following beliefs or values:

An increase in the rights and role of the individual in society.

A limited role for the government in the economy, with fewer taxes, tariffs and regulations.

An extension in the franchise,[3] allowing more people to vote.

Social reform to deal with the worst urban conditions of the industrial revolution.

Limited foreign policy, an avoidance of treaties and war, all three being considered bad for commerce.

It is hardly surprising that a political party that championed middle class and business interests should emerge, as it was now Britain’s bankers, manufacturers, lawyers and engineers who were the creators of her wealth, not the old landed interests of the previous century. The Liberal Party was finally founded in 1859, but from the 1830s onwards the term ‘liberal’ was being used to describe the Whig-Radical coalition.

When famine devastated Ireland in the 1840s the Tory government came under intense pressure to repeal the Corn Laws to allow cheap food into the country, but landowners resisted. Prime Minister Robert Peel, a Tory, had come over to the idea of free trade a decade earlier and saw the famine as an opportunity to repeal the Corn Laws. In doing so he split the Tories, with the free trade supporters (christened Peelites) subsequently joining the Liberal faction and then the party in 1859. In the 1870s the Liberals would become deeply connected with the issue of social reform and the party would be dominated and defined by its crusading and morally driven leader William Ewart Gladstone.

Question: Who were the Conservative (Tory) Party?

The two politicians who had the greatest impact on creating the Tories in the 19th Century were Robert Peel and Benjamin Disraeli. When the franchise was extended in 1832 it placed the Tories in a difficult position, they had almost universally opposed extending the vote to the middle classes, as their natural supporters were the land-owning aristocracy. In order to compete after 1832 they had to demonstrate that they had moved with the times and were able to appeal to the new voters.

In 1834 Peel produced the Tamworth Manifesto which accepted the verdict of the 1832 Reform Act as ‘a final and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional question’, indicating that the Tories were not seeking to undo the act. Further reform, Peel said, would happen if it were necessary. He would examine whether reforms to government or the Church were needed, and reform if they were, but would oppose ‘unnecessary change’, suggesting that it was possible that the country could descend into anarchy if too many aspects of the established order were interfered with. The manifesto was a clever political device which allowed Peel to distance himself from unpopular reactionaries like the Duke of Wellington, but also clearly laid out an antipathy for further reforms unless they were absolutely essential. This stance appealed to the majority of new middle-class voters who were happy to have the franchise but not particularly enthusiastic about extending it to the working class.

During his second term in office, Peel, as we have seen, was faced with a famine in Ireland that claimed a million lives, but gave him the opportunity to repeal the Corn Laws. The repeal was passed and the laws were scheduled for final abolition in 1849, but the most vociferous opponent from within the Tory Party was the future prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, who argued that by sabotaging the landowning class, power would inevitably shift towards the ‘commercial classes’ the professional middle class who were the natural supporters of the Liberals. This would weaken Conservatism in Britain permanently.

As the party split over the issue of the Corn Laws, the repealers, along with Peel, became the Peelite faction who later joined the Liberals. The Conservatives who opposed the repeal were eventually united around the figure of Disraeli (see Chapter Two), who would become a favourite of Queen Victoria’s and, along with Gladstone, the prime minister who would define Victorian Britain.

Section 2

Industrial expansion, railways and the Great Exhibition

Question: What impact did industrialisation have on Britain and her economy?

From the late 18th Century onwards Britain became the first fully industrialised nation in the world. Throughout the 19th Century her four staple industries, iron, cotton, coal and ship building would dominate world markets and bring huge in-flows of wealth into the country. Foreign rivals, particularly France went to great lengths to discover Britain’s commercial secrets and imitators from as far away as Japan and Russia would attempt to emulate her success. Opinions are still divided as to how and why Britain had the first full-scale industrial revolution, in other European countries there were abundant scientists, engineers and industrialists along with universities capable of teaching maths and science. What France, Britain’s main rival, did not possess, however, was the legal framework that enshrined private property rights as effectively as Britain’s did, meaning that there was a greater incentive in Britain to take risks. And there was a system of banking dating back