1800's Britain

Britain in 1800 had changed little in centuries. It was a rural country, dominated by agriculture. For most, the people were restricted to their village - where their family had probably lived for generations. If you lived in Cornwall or Somerset, London was almost foreign, much as it had been in 1600. You wouldn't even have been using the same time - with the sun rising around ten minutes later than in London, Bristol clocks ran ten minutes behind. Horizons were limited and life was slow. It was horsepower or nothing, and daylight and the seasons ruled the countryside.

Here we have tried to give you some information on many subjects, all of these being associated with the Victorian Era in Great Britain. Below are the subjects covered in this section of our site, and they are all hyper linked, so you can quickly navigate to the section that interests you most, but why not browse through the full section which consists of ten pages, as there are so many pieces that we feel will be of interest to you. Now the 'Manchester & Salford In The 19th Century' Link will take you to a page that will give you information such as, The working people of Manchester, Workers Housing, Health & Disease issues plus a section on Victorian Salford.

Queen Victoria	The Cotton Trade & Mill Workers
Notable Dates of the 1800's	The Great Exhibition of 1851
Victorian London	The Penny magazine
Manchester & Salford In The 19th Century	Crime in The 1800's
Victorian Railways	The Children of the 1800's
Victorian Servants	Sir Robert Peel + The Bobbies
Tolpuddle And The Tolpuddle Martyrs	Pearly Queens & Kings
Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom During the 1800's

Victoria was the daughter of Edward, the Duke of Kent and Princess Victoria of Saxe Coburg.
She was born in Kensington Palace in London on May 24th, 1819. Edward died when Victoria was but eight months old, upon which her mother enacted a strict regime that shunned the courts of Victoria's uncles, George IV and William IV.

Victoria became Queen at age eighteen, but her first years as Regent were under the guidance of the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. By 1850 she had exerted her own control and vision, which came to define the next fifty years in Great Britain as the "Victorian Era". She was given the title of Empress of India in 1876. Her reign was the longest of any British monarch and coincided with the Industrial Revolution during which the British Empire reached its zenith in prosperity, and world influence. She was grandmother of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

On Feb 10th, 1840, only three years after taking the throne, Victoria took her first vow and married her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Their relationship was one of great love and admiration. Together they bore nine children - four sons and five daughters: Victoria, Bertie, Alice, Alfred, Helena, Louise, Arthur, Leopold, and Beatrice.

Prince Albert replaced Melbourne as the dominant male influence in Victoria's life. She was thoroughly devoted to him, and completely submitted to his will. Victoria did nothing without her husband's approval. Albert assisted in her royal duties. He introduced a strict decorum in court and made a point of strait-laced behaviour. Albert also gave a more conservative tinge to Victoria’s politics. If Victoria was to insistently interject her opinions and make her views felt in the cabinet, it was only because of Albert’s teachings of hard work.

The general public, however, was not enamoured with the German prince; he was excluded from holding any official political position, was never granted a title of peerage and was named Prince Consort only after seventeen years of marriage.

On Dec. 14th 1861 Albert died from typhoid fever at Windsor Castle, Victoria remained in self-imposed seclusion for ten years. This genuine, but obsessive mourning kept her occupied for the rest of her life and played an important role in the evolution of what would become the Victorian mentality.

Her popularity was at its lowest by 1870, but it steadily increased thereafter until her death. In 1887 Victoria’s Golden Jubilee was a grand national celebration of her 50th year as Queen. The Golden Jubilee brought her out of her shell, and she once again embraced public life.

The Penny Magazine, published every Saturday, was aimed at the working class. It was part of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge's program for liberal reform. For its reader, however, it was a source of information on subjects of general interest: everyday things like tea and coffee, well-known places in England, a series on animals and birds of Britain, descriptions of present-day manufacturing. Poetry was published, too, and there are several illustrations in each issue.

Victorians were worried about the rising crime rate: offences went up from about 5,000 per year in 1800 to about 20,000 per year in 1840. They were firm believers in punishment for criminals, but faced a problem: what should the punishment be?

There were prisons, but they were mostly small, old and badly-run. The most common punishments were transportation - sending the offender to Australia, or execution - hundreds of offences carried the death penalty. Although the Death Penalty was removed from pick pocketing in 1808, and from many more offences in the 1820s and 1830s. But the death penalty was still frequently imposed for murder, burglary, and robbery. Over the course of the early nineteenth centuries the proportion of whippings carried out in public declined. The public whipping of women was abolished in 1817 (after having been in decline since the 1770s) and that of men ended in the 1830s.

By the 1830s people were having doubts about both these punishments. The answer was prison: lots of new prisons were built and old ones extended.

The Victorians also had clear ideas about what these prisons should be like. They should be unpleasant places, so as to deter people from committing crimes. Once inside, prisoners had to be made to face up to their own faults, by keeping them in silence and making them do hard, boring work. Walking a treadwheel or picking oakum (separating strands of rope) were the most common forms of hard labour.

Coldbath Fields Prison was named after a well nearby. It was an old prison, re-built in 1794, holding men, women and children. In 1850 it was changed to take men only and extended again. It was known as a tough prison, used for local London criminals on short sentences.

Law and order was a major issue in Victorian Britain. Victorians were worried about the huge new cities that had grown up following the Industrial Revolution: how were the masses to be kept under control? They were worried about rising crime. They could see that transporting convicts to Australia was not the answer and anyway by the 1830s Australia was complaining that they did not want to be the dumping-ground for Britain's criminals.

The answer was to reform the police and to build more prisons: 90 prisons were built or added to between 1842 and 1877. It was a massive building programme, costing millions of pounds. There was more to Victorian plans than just bigger and better buildings. In the 1840s a system of rules called "The Separate System" was tried. This was based on the belief that convicted criminals had to face up to themselves. Accordingly, they were kept on their own in their cells most of the time. When they were let out, to go to chapel or for exercise, they sat in special seats or wore special masks so that they couldn't even see, let alone talk to, another prisoner. Not surprisingly, many went mad under this system.

Many prisons had been under local government control; some, called "Houses of Correction" were controlled by local magistrates. By the Prisons Acts of 1865 and 1877 all prisons were brought under government control.

Hard labour was meant to contribute to the reformation of offenders by teaching them to be industrious, but the punishment was also meant to deter others from committing crime. Prisoners in houses of correction were typically set to beating hemp; those imprisoned sometimes worked a water pump while men incarcerated in the hulks worked on dredging the Thames or in the naval dockyards. Others were sentenced to work on ballast lighters. Walking a treadwheel or picking oakum (separating strands of rope) were the most common forms of hard labour.

Don't forget to visit our new page which tells you about Sir Robert Peel, and a little about the Police Force that he founded.