The Victorians

 

How do you define an era? What symbolises or characterises the Victorian period more than anything else? Perhaps it is top hats and bustles or steam trains and gaslight? Perhaps it is smog and ‘the Great Stink’ or, even, Empire and war? The Victorian period is not just a period of great endeavour, invention, reform and discovery to rival our own, but it is also a period when many of the ills of city life really began to affect us all.

Our research has taken us on a great adventure, from outlining Victoria’s life, as a beginning, to lifting the lid on the truth of Victorian life across the socio-economic structure. Our classroom research and other activities have lead us to want to experience relics of the Victorian period for real. As a consequence, we have had several group visits to museums in London. We have had the opportunity to directly experience Victorian design, artefacts and art objects, to experience the nature of Victorian medicine and we will soon be exploring one of London’s most famous pieces of grand Victorian engineering.

Whilst the Victorian’s lived without many of the devices which characterise our world, from televisions to iPhones, there is a relatively familiar sense of social structure, at least by the end of the period. The Victorian school, for example, famous for its rules and punishments, offers us a highly reflective mirror for our own daily behaviour. Moreover, it is easy to see parallels in communication, with the development of the telephone in the 1870s to the first transatlantic telegraph cables, having as important an influence on Victorian culture as the Internet has for us in our own times.