The Victorian Age

The Victorian Age was one of unprecedented economic development following the Industrial Revolution, remarkable scientific and technical achievements, colonial expansion on extend security as England was not engaged in any great war during the epoch. “The expansion of commerce, communication and transport was due to the railway, steam power, electricity and the iron and petrol output, so that there was perhaps no exaggeration in defining England as the “workshop of the world””. (Galea, Victorianism and Literature, 15).

Queen Victoria’s ascent to the throne of England in 1837 and her death in 1901 do not set in fact the limits of the epoch as the signs of the new era may be traced to the decade between 1830 and 1840. The new age really began in 1832 with the passage of the Reform Bill which opened the way to a series of important changes in political and administrative life of Britain, and it closed at the end of the Boer War in 1902.
   
This age is usually divided into three periods:
1. Early Victorian (1832-1848) is the period when the conditions for England to become a modern and industrialized state were prepared.
2. Mid Victorian (1848-1870), when England achieved economic and political preeminence. The period is associated with the middle-class complacency and general feeling of prosperity.
3. Late Victorian (1870-1901) which marks a gradual decline of the Victorian certainties and threatening of England’s economical, financial and political supremacy.