When Victoria came to the throne in June 1837, at the age of eighteen, Britain was a country in the early stages of industrial transformation — its cities growing, its railways just beginning, its political system reformed only five years earlier to extend the vote to the propertied middle class. When she died in January 1901, Britain had become the workshop of the world, the centre of a global empire, the possessor of a welfare state in embryonic form, and a democracy that, while still far from universal, was beginning to look like one. The transformation in sixty-three years was extraordinary.
The physical transformation was most visible in the cities. Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield and a dozen other industrial towns became major metropolises within a generation. London grew from one million to seven million people between 1800 and 1900. The railway network spread from a few hundred miles in the late 1830s to over 20,000 miles by the century's end, knitting the country together, accelerating commerce and creating entirely new patterns of settlement and commuting. The British landscape was being remade at a speed that contemporaries sometimes found exhilarating and sometimes terrifying.
The political reforms of the Victorian era created the framework of modern democracy by stages. The 1832 Reform Act had extended the franchise to the middle classes; the 1867 Reform Act under Disraeli enfranchised urban working-class men; the 1884 Reform Act extended the vote to rural working men. By Victoria's death, most adult men could vote, though women remained excluded for another generation. The secret ballot was introduced in 1872. Corrupt electoral practices were progressively reduced by the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act of 1883. The Chartist movement's demands of the 1840s — universal male suffrage, the secret ballot, payment of MPs — were largely achieved by the century's end.
Victorian social reform addressed the appalling conditions created by unregulated industrial capitalism with increasing effectiveness as the century progressed. The Factory Acts limited child labour and working hours in mills and mines. The Public Health Acts created the infrastructure of clean water and sewage disposal that dramatically reduced the mortality from cholera, typhoid and other waterborne diseases that had killed tens of thousands in the urban slums of the early Victorian era. The Education Acts of 1870 and 1880 created a national elementary school system and made attendance compulsory, gradually producing a literate working class for the first time in British history.
Victorian culture was as various as its society. The great novelists — Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Hardy, the Brontës — engaged with the social transformations of their age with an analytical depth that made the Victorian novel one of the greatest forms of social documentary as well as literature. The Pre-Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts movement reacted against industrial ugliness with a romantic return to medieval craft and beauty. The scientific achievements of Darwin, Faraday, Maxwell and dozens of others changed humanity's understanding of nature, life and the universe. The philosophical and religious crises provoked by Darwin's theory of evolution — the Origin of Species was published in 1859 — are still reverberating in some quarters today.
