What Decade Of The Victorian Era Do You Belong In?

Though the Victorian era only officially began in 1837, when an eighteen-year-old Victoria became Queen upon the death of her uncle, the 1830s as a whole was a period of remarkable transition. Railways revolutionized transport as they began to stretch across the country. The controversial First Reform Act dramatically redistributed voter constituencies in 1832. As the Romantic period began to come to an end, Charles Dickens published his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, in 1836 .

The first full decade of the Victorian era was characterized by revolution in many aspects. In 1848, democratic revolutions erupted across Europe, and the Chartist movement came to a head as members of the working class petitioned parliament for the right to vote. Photography became widely available in the form of the daguerreotype, and Morse invented the telegraph. The Pre-Raphaeliite Brotherhood formed to protest the classicism of the Royal Academy, and the Brontë sisters' novels dramatized turmoil of a more emotional kind.

The 1850s was a decisive period in Britain's conception of itself as an (imperial) nation. The harshly criticized Crimean war took place between 1853 and 1856, and the Indian Rebellion of 1857 forced the East India Company to relinquish its control of that colony to the state. The Great Exhibition of 1851 displayed the wonders of industrialized production and objects culled from across the empire. George Eliot published her first work, Scenes from Clerical Life, and her first novel, Adam Bede, and Charles Dickens published some of his best-known works, including David Copperfield, Bleak House, and A Tale of Two Cities.

In 1861, the nation mourned Prince Albert's death, and Queen Victoria entered a self-imposed seclusion for the rest of the decade. Domestic politics, on the other hand, were comparatively lively during this decade, which saw the formation of the Liberal party, and the passing of the Second Reform Bill, which doubled the electorate by adding an additional one million male voters. The 1860s also saw the publication of four of George Eliot's seven novels, the end of Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire series, the beginning of his Palliser series, and Dickens's last completed novel.

In the 1870s, Queen Victoria re-entered public life, and was given the new title of "Empress of India" by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. The decade marked the beginning of a period of rapid colonial expansion, and imperialism began to be framed as a civilizing mission rather than a money making venture. In the artistic realm, James Abbott McNeill Whistler and John Ruskin (or Ruskin's lawyers) debated the aims of art in civil court, and in 1870, Charles Dickens died, while George Eliot published her last novels during this decade.

In the 1880s, technology continued to develop at a rapid pace, and in 1881, the Savoy theatre became the first public building to be lit entirely by electricity. The Arts and Crafts movement, which advocated for a return to handcrafted production in the decorative arts, developed as a reaction against ever increasing industrialization, and its most famous practitioner, William Morris, combined interior design with a socialist philosophy. Karl Marx's Capital was also translated into English for the first time in 1887. In politics, further steps towards universal male suffrage were made with the Third Reform act of 1884, and married women were finally able to own their own property in 1882..

The last decade of the Victorian era was characterized by a growing availability of leisure activities, including the explosive popularity of the bicycle and the commercial production of the first automobiles. In the 1890s, the term "New Woman" was coined and rapidly took hold of the popular imagination, speaking to anxieties about women's growing desire for independence. While authors such as Thomas Hardy and George Gissing pessimistically presented the social realities of laborers in rural and urban areas, respectively, aesthetes and decadents, such as Oscar Wilde, propagated the doctrine of "art for art's sake," which had been gaining momentum since the 1870s.