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Great Britain, 1815–1914
Mid-Victorian society and culture
After the excitements of the 1830s and 40s, mid-Victorian England was relatively quiet, with the family being regarded by most mid-Victorians as the central institution in society. ...
Victorian attitudes
Various kinds of balance rested, however, on economic as well as on psychological and sociological factors. ... Indeed, those supporters of protection who had argued in the 1840s that free trade would ruin British agriculture were mocked by the mid-Victorian prosperity of agriculture in a golden age of high arable farming. ... Later in the century, however, these values were taken apart and criticized, even lampooned, one by one, in the course of a late-Victorian revolt. More recently they have again received praise as essential “Victorian values.”
Yet despite their widespread appeal, all of these Victorian virtues were subjected to contemporary criticism. ... There was always a Victorian underworld. Belief in the family was accompanied by a high incidence of prostitution, and in every large city there were districts where every Victorian value was ignored or flouted.
Galsworthy’s characters are more or less emblematic. These characters are the crystallization of the forces underlying the active and determining principles of the age in which their prototypes have their physical being.
The Possessive Philistinism of Soames and the liberalism of Young Jolyon,– what are they but the era of Victoria,
Galsworthy reveals the distortion inherent in the institutions of propertied Victorian England, and discloses, as the root of the evil, the sense of Property.
Approximate Word count = 1060
Approximate Pages = 4.2
(250 words per page double spaced)
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