ABSTRACT
The word ‘Victorian’, like all such terms, is misleading. Victorianism neither began in 1837 nor ended in 1901. A man of sixty in 1867, no less than a man who reached that age as late as 1927, could certainly be described as a Victorian. Yet the Victorianism of the first would have been shaped almost wholly by the pre-Victorian experience of the thirty years he had lived before the Queen’s accession in 1837; and the second would almost certainly carry with him, into the fourth decade of the twentieth century, ideas and attitudes acquired in the last thirtyfour years of the Queen’s reign. Victorian ideas and attitudes were in many ways symbolized by Darwin, Tennyson and Gladstone; yet all three were already twenty-eight years of age when Victoria became queen. That great ‘Victorian’ headmaster, Arnold of Rugby, was a subject of the Queen for only the last five years of his life; and Jeremy Bentham, by 1837, had been dead for five years. In 1837, Dickens, Browning and Samuel Smiles were all twenty-five, John Bright twenty-six, John Stuart Mill thirty-one, John Henry Newman thirty-six and Palmerston as much as fifty-three. When the Queen died, Bernard Shaw had another fifty years to live, H.G.Wells another forty and Florence Nightingale another nine. Stanley Baldwin was already a man of thirty-four, Neville Chamberlain
thirty-two, Bertrand Russell twenty-nine; and Beatrice Webb had completed only half her life-span. Incongruously, two of the few persons of influence whose entire lives were encompassed within the years of Victoria’s reign were Parnell and Oscar Wilde. The Victorian age cannot thus be thought of as wholly contained within the sixty-four years of the Queen’s reign, since men’s ideas and attitudes, once acquired, and their institutions, once established, change more slowly than history books sometimes suggest. Victorianism owed many of its chieflyremembered characteristics to developments which took place in the years between 1780 and 1837; and the late-Victorian era is much of a piece with the first half of the twentieth century, so that there are respects in which England remained Victorian, and was governed and administered by Victorians, throughout the century that separated the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Festival of Britain in 1951.
