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U n i t
An age of industry
and reforms
The Chartist Movement and the Reform Bills.
Queen Victoria
(1837-
1901) came to the throne during a difficult political and economic
period. The middle class had been partly satisfied by
the Reform
Bill of 1832
, but the working class still endured very poor conditions,
aggravated by crises in industry and agriculture. Workers’ meetings and
demonstrations were common, and protest often seemed on the verge of
revolution, as in the rest of Europe.
The largest organized workers’ movement was that of the Chartists, so
called because they asked for a charter of social reforms. In 1838 they
drew up a
People’s Charter
asking for the extension of the right to
vote to the working class. However, it was only in 1867 that a
second
ReformBill
was passed: it gave town workers the right to vote, but still
excluded miners and agricultural workers. The latter were finally granted
franchise
with a
third ReformBill
(1884), by which suffrage was
extended to all male workers.
Free trade and the Great Exhibition.
The traditional policy of
protectionism was abandoned, and after 1846
free trade
was adopted.
Partly because of the prosperity resulting from free trade policies,
England did not have the armed revolutions that broke out all over
Europe in 1848. A large Chartist demonstration in London seemed to
threaten revolution, but nothing came of it. Three years later, in 1851,
the
Great International Exhibition of London
, opened by Queen
Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, displayed the wonders of
industry and science: it revealed Britain as the world’s leading political
and economic power to an admiring world (
➤
Sister Arts
, p. 9
).
Industry and science.
The
triumph of industry
coincided with the
invention of the steam locomotive.
Railways
developed quickly too, and
by 1848 covered much of the country: it took only thirteen hours to get
from London to Edinburgh or Glasgow. By 1849 regular
steamboat
services
linked Britain with America and the rest of the world (
➤
MillenniumOverview
, p. 118
).
Scientific research
was no longer
mainly theoretical, but was applied to the invention and construction
of machines. The study of
electricity
, for instance, carried out by such
scientists as Alessandro Volta, Michael Faraday, and the Frenchman Louis
Ampère, led to the American Samuel Morse’s invention of the
telegraph
.
Gas lighting
in city streets was first introduced in London in 1816.
The poor: urban slums.
The poor endured terrible conditions. The
new
Poor Law
of 1834 was far from being a solution to the problem:
the poor were amassed in
workhouses
which closely resembled jails,
History and society
DICTIONARY
charter
a document which describes the
rights of a particular group of people or
which demands rights for them
franchise
the right to vote in an election
free trade
the international buying and
selling of goods, without limits on the
amount of goods that one country can sell
to another, and without special taxes on
the goods bought from a foreign country
workhouse
a place where poor people
did very unpleasant jobs in return for food
and shelter
labour
the workers of a country or
industry, considered as a group, either as
a political force or as one of the resources
that are needed to produce goods and
services
Portrait of
Queen Victoria
in 1859, when the
queen was forty.
text store
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70, 72
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