Victorian morality
|
Victoria
Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India |
Victorian morality is a distillation of the
moral views of people living at the time of
Queen Victoria (reigned
1837 -
1901) in particular, and to the moral climate of
Great Britain throughout the
19th century in general. It is not tied to this historical period and can describe any set of values that espouses sexual repression, low tolerance of crime, and a strong social ethic.
Historians now regard the
Victorian era as a time of many contradictions. A plethora of social movements concerned with improving public morals co-existed with a
class system that permitted harsh living conditions for many. The apparent contradiction between the widespread cultivation of an outward appearance of dignity and restraint and the prevalence of social phenomena that included
prostitution,
child labour, and an
imperialist colonising economy were two sides of the same coin: the various social reform movements and high principles arose from attempts to improve the harsh conditions.
The term
Victorian has acquired a range of connotations, including that of a particularly strict set of moral standards, which are often applied hypocritically. This stems from the image of Queen Victoria —and her husband,
Prince Albert, perhaps even more so—as innocents, unaware of the private habits of many of her respectable subjects; this particularly relates to their
sex lives. This image is mistaken: Victoria's attitude toward
sexual morality was a consequence of her knowledge of the corrosive effect of the loose morals of the
aristocracy in earlier reigns upon the public's respect for the nobility and
the Crown.
Two hundred years earlier the
Puritan republican movement under
Oliver Cromwell had temporarily overthrown the British monarchy. During
England's years as a
republic, the law imposed a strict moral code on the people (even abolishing
Christmas as too indulgent of the sensual pleasures).
When the monarchy was restored, a period of loose living and debauchery appeared to be a reaction to the earlier repression. See:
Charles II of England. The two social forces of puritanism and libertinism continued to motivate the collective psyche of the
United Kingdom from the
restoration onward. This was particularly significant in the public perceptions of the later Hanoverean monarchs who immediately preceded
Queen Victoria. For instance, her uncle
George IV was commonly perceived as a pleasure-seeking playboy, whose conduct in office was the cause of much scandal.
By the time of Victoria, the interplay between high cultured morals and low vulgarity was thoroughly embedded in British culture.
Victorian
prudery sometimes went so far as to deem it improper to say "leg" in mixed company; instead, the preferred
euphemism "limb" was used. Those going for a dip in the
sea at the
beach would use a
bathing machine. However, historians
Peter Gay and Michael Mason both point out that we often confuse Victorian etiquette for a lack of knowledge. For example, despite the use of the bathing machine, it was also possible to see people bathing
nude. Another example of the gap between our preconceptions of Victorian sexuality and the facts is that contrary to what we might expect, Queen Victoria liked to draw and collect male nudes and even gave her husband one as a present (Source:
Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud.)
Verbal or written communication of
emotion or
sexual feelings was also often proscribed so people instead used the
language of flowers. However they also wrote explicit erotica, perhaps the most famous being the racy tell-all
My Secret Life by
Henry Spencer Ashbee, who wrote under the pseudonym
Walter. Victorian erotica also survives in private letters archived in museums and even in a study of women's orgasms. Some current historians now believe that the myth of Victorian repression can be traced back to early Twentieth century views such as those of
Lytton Strachey, a member of the
Bloomsbury Group who wrote
Eminent Victorians.
Victoria ascended to the throne in
1837, only four years after the
abolition of
slavery in the
British Empire. The anti-slavery movement had campaigned for years to achieve the ban, succeeding with a partial abolition in
1807 and the full ban on slave trade, but not slave ownership, in
1833. It had taken so long because the anti-slavery morality was pitted against a powerful capitalist element in the empire which claimed that their businesses would be destroyed if they were not permitted to exploit slave labour. Eventually
plantation owners in the
Caribbean received £20 million in
compensation.
|
Charles John Huffam Dickens |
In Victoria's time the British
Royal Navy patrolled the
Atlantic Ocean, stopping any ships that it suspected of trading
African slaves to the
Americas and freeing any slaves found. The British had set up a
Crown Colony in
West Africa—
Sierra Leone—and transported freed slaves there. Freed slaves from
Nova Scotia founded and named the capital of Sierra Leone:
Freetown. Thus, when Victoria became Queen the British occupied a high moral ground as the nation that stood for freedom and decency. Many people living at that time argued that the living conditions of workers in English factories seemed worse than those endured by some slaves.
In the same way, throughout the Victoran Era, movements for justice, freedom and other strong moral values opposed greed, exploitation and
cynicism. The writings of
Charles Dickens in particular observed and recorded these conditions.
Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels carried out much of their analysis of
capitalism in and as a reaction to Victorian Britain.
*The apocryphal stories of skirts on
piano legs in the name of
modesty arose from a misunderstanding of the use of sheaths to protect the lower extremities of furniture from damage by footwear and brooms. It has also been suggested that it was used by the British Victoriansat the time to lampoon their American counterparts.
*
Sexual norm*
Sexual repression*
Victorian etiquette game
