Victoria’s Secrets: Society and Culture in Nineteenth-Century England

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About Course

Queen Victoria, Charles Dickens, Jack the Ripper, Oscar Wilde, and Charles Darwin—all of them were “Victorian” yet just what did that word mean and what values did it encompass? This course will examine the social and cultural life of England from 1830 to 1900, from the worlds of the elite upper classes to the slums of London’s East End. We will pay particular attention to the various meanings of Victorianism and the myths and practices of progress, morality, reform, and imperial conquest that defined the era. We will focus on the “Two Nations” residing within England and how government and moral reformers addressed conditions of social inequality, poverty, and crime. We will also discuss how Victorian notions of class, race, gender, and sexuality were shaped by and influenced the politics and culture of everyday life. Lastly, we will ponder how and why today’s popular culture depicts the Victorians of the past and why we are so fascinated by them.

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What Will You Learn?

  • Challenge and debunk common stereotypes about the Victorian era and understand the complexities of the term "Victorian" and its meanings across social classes.
  • Analyze the impact of the Industrial Revolution on English society, including issues of poverty, labor, and the criminalization of poverty, through the lens of literature and historical accounts.
  • Explore the Victorian ideal of domesticity, its promotion, and the industry it became, while also examining the class-based realities and scandals of the time.
  • Investigate the Victorians' fascination with science and entertainment, including the line between legitimate science and pseudoscience, and understand how this shaped public life and imperialist ideologies.
  • Discuss the late Victorian period's domestic tensions and scandals, the role of the media in these events, and their impact on societal values and the transition to a new century.
  • Reflect on the legacy of Victorian values in modern culture and why this era continues to captivate popular imagination.

Course Content

No Sex Please, We’re Victorians!: What’s the real deal about the Victorians?
Strait-laced, prudish, and stuffy? Were uncovered piano legs really considered “indecent”? We will use the first class to discuss and debunk stereotypes of the Victorians that persist in popular culture. In truth, “Victorian” was used during the 19th century not just to refer to the Queen’s reign but as a term of pride that cut across the class divide and embodied many contradictions. This lecture also covers how Queen Victoria modernized the institution of the monarchy in the age of newspapers and public opinion, and what it meant to be a female monarch in an era that idealized the weakness of women and the notion that a man’s home is his castle.

  • Prudish Victorian
    02:38
  • Queen Victoria
  • Lecture
    01:20:32

“Are there no prisons, no workhouses?”: Industrialization and Liberal Reform
In this second class, we will discuss how the Industrial Revolution that made England a superpower also fueled terrible poverty, child labor, crime, and pollution. The liberal Parliament addressed these issues with a series of laws that reflected the newly dominant middle-class attitude of "self-help" and thus ushered in the age of workhouses and the criminalization of poverty which authors like Charles Dickens railed against.

“Home Sweet Home” and the Victorian Culture of Domesticity
More than just the title of Queen Victoria’s favorite song, this motto dominated and shaped the social, emotional, and even political world of the Victorians. How did the Victorians create our modern notion of "home"; what type of labor was involved, and what happened when the ideal of the home was not achieved by some? In this third class we will look at the religious, moral, and cultural promotion of the ideals of domesticity, and womanhood, in particular, and how domesticity became an industry. We will contrast the middle-class ideals of home with working class realities and some scandals which revealed the truth behind even the finest closed doors.

Cabinets of Curiosities: Science and Entertainment
The Victorians prided themselves on their interest in technology and followed closely innovations in medicine and science, but there was sometimes a fine line between pseudo-science and "real" academic knowledge and practices in the 19th century. In this fourth lecture, we will examine such popular fads as mesmerism, phrenology, spiritualism, and freak shows to understand how broadly Victorians interpreted and practiced science and consumed science as entertainment. Sometimes, science was corrupted, as in the case of Darwinism, to reinforce the divide between Britain and its empire, or to justify the exclusion of women from public life. Even the Queen and Parliament followed the latest scientific sensations while ordinary Victorians used them to make sense of their uncertain world.

“Apostles of the Apocalypse”: Scandals and Horrors at the End of the Century
The last two decades of the 19th century were fraught with domestic tensions and scandals about individuals breaking free from some of the confines of the age. We will look at "The New Woman"; the trial of Oscar Wilde; the media attention around the “white slavery” trade and Jack the Ripper; and how these stories that rocked the nation challenged, but also reaffirmed, Victorian values on the eve of a new century. These scandals were mostly London-focused, as tabloids helped seal the city’s reputation as “the modern Babylon.” We will conclude with the legacy of Victorianism on our own culture.

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