Mid-Victorian Girlhood Experience

The mid-Victorian decades have been characterised as the period when English prosperity was at its height, and when the dominance of middle-class values was most visible and least subject to question. The worst of the misery, dislocation and class antagonism that accompanied the first phase of industralisation had passed, giving way to relative prosperity, and to a consensus about moral, social and political values. In the words of one historian, the mid-Victorian period was ‘The Age of Equipoise.’ ¹