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To
many people, the Victorian era, the period
during Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901), was a time of stiff manners
and unbending rules, tea parties and rose gardens, steam engines and
dirty streets, bustles and stiff collars. Those are true, if limited,
characterizations of the era. At its most basic, the Victorian era was
a time of great change. And though The Irish Healer
predates
the Victorian period by a few years, it deals with many of the issues
that society would increasingly come to confront: the strain on the
social fabric caused by a large influx of ill-educated and poor rural
folk and immigrants into London; the shifting role of women as more
left the home to work outside of it; new developments in medicine and
the sciences and what they meant to prior notions of how the world
functioned; and the changes that industrialization created, both for
good and for ill.
At the beginning of the
nineteenth century, England was largely
rural. Families worked on farms or in cottage industries much as they
always had, living in or near where their ancestors had lived and died.
Transportation and farm work was accomplished with horses. Labor was
done during daylight, by firelight, or, if it could be afforded, by
candlelight. Women and children worked to support the farm or the
family business unless they were hired out as servants. It was a
traditional way of living that had existed for hundreds of years.
By 1900, however, almost 80
percent of the population had moved to
cities to work in the factories. New technology changed the face of
farming as well as traditional cottage industries, putting many rural
people out of work. Also, unrest in Eastern Europe and famine in
Ireland drove large numbers of immigrants into English cities, taking
London from a population of one million at the beginning of the century
to over eight million by the end. Gas lighting enabled factories to
function twenty-four hours a day. Women and children, some as young as
eight or nine, worked in dangerous factories, their newfound
livelihoods causing an often uncomfortable rearrangement to domestic
life.
Making a living was difficult
and the streets were, indeed, dirty.
Cities couldn’t effectively manage the enormous increase in population,
so a dozen people might crowd into a one-room apartment meant for a
small family. The sewer systems couldn’t handle the overcrowding
either, resulting in regular and fatal outbreaks of typhoid and
cholera. In London, the Thames River went from a clean source of
drinking water loaded with fish to so badly reeking from garbage that
those working in the Parliament buildings alongside dreaded opening the
windows in summer. Poverty and crime rates grew, as well, leading to
all sorts of possible solutions: the creation of the modern police
force; increased numbers of workhouses and debtors prisons; the
foundation of so-called “ragged” schools, where volunteers attempted to
educate, feed, and provide Christian instruction to more students than
they could possibly attend to.
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And
by the late 1800s, there was the dreadful
London fog—smog, actually—caused by hundreds of thousands of
coal-fueled fires, so thick that on the worst days people couldn’t see
the street from their windows, even at noon. Soot covered everything,
seeping into the houses through every crack. Keeping clean must have
been a nightmare.
But the Victorian era also
brought positive change. The railroad and
steamers shrank the world, enabling people and goods to travel to
nearly every corner in a fraction of the time it took before. The
invention of the microscope and improved surgical techniques allowed
medicine to move from believing in “bad humors” and “miasma in the air”
to understanding infection and contagion, and learning how to better
treat disease. Factory-produced items became more affordable: clothing,
furniture, kitchen wares, toys. For those women who wished it, the
period provided them with new opportunities at jobs and at home, where
domesticity became more greatly appreciated and marriage was pursued
for love, even among the wealthy. Also across the span of this period,
more of society recognized the great need that existed in their
communities, so there was an accompanying upswing in organized
Christian charity. Significant numbers of hospitals, schools, and
benevolent societies were founded to take care of the unfortunate.
Society struggled and managed to persevere.
So yes, people did drink tea
(which became the drink of choice over
coffee) and stroll in rose gardens, wear bustles and stiff collars, and
believe in proper manners. But by the end of the era, the world had
forever altered.
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