Biography of Victoria I of England | Queen de Inglaterra ascended to the throne at the age of eighteen

Under his long reign, which gave name to the Victorian era, Britain became a major economic and colonial power.

Queen Victoria de Inglaterra ascended to the throne at the age of eighteen and stayed in it longer than any other sovereign in Europe. During his reign, France met two Royal dynasties and a Republic, Spain three monarchs and four Italy. During this lengthy period, is precisely known as "Victorian was" England became an industrial country and a power of the first order, proud of its capacity to create wealth and Excel in a world ever more dependent on scientific and technical progress. In the political arena, the absence of internal revolutions, entrenched English parliamentarianism, the birth and consolidation of a middle class and the colonial expansion were essential features of the victorianismo; socially, its foundations settled in balance and compromise between classes, characterised by a marked conservatism, respect for the label and a rigid morality of Christian Court. All protected and promoted by the majestic and impressive, figure at the same time maternal and vigorous, of Queen Victoria, real star and inspiring of all 19th-century European.

Victoria I of England

Which would become sovereign of Great Britain and Ireland and Empress of the India was born on May 24, 1819, fruit of the union of Eduardo, Duke of Kent, son of rey Jorge III, with the Princess María Luisa de Sajonia-Coburgo, descendant of one of the most ancient and vast European families. It is not surprising, therefore, that many years after victory not found large differences between their personal relationships with the different monarchs and Great Britain with foreign Nations, because since its birth it was related with the Royal houses of Germany, Romania, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Belgium, this led many times to consider Europe crowns as simple farms family and international disputes as mere domestic disagreements.

The girl, whose full name was Alejandrina victory, lost his father when he was only one year old and was educated under the watchful eye of her mother, soon revealing an affectionate and sensitive, character at the same time sniffing and little inclined to be mastered by anyone. The paternal void was widely supplemented by the energetic temperament of the mother, whose surveillance on the small was so tyrannical that, at the dawn of adolescence, Victoria still had could not find a step in the Palace or numbered public events without the company of ayas and governesses or your same progenitor. But as he would later patent in its relations with the Ministers of the Kingdom, Victoria was indomitable if first is not conquered his affection and respect he earned.

Victory at four years (table
(Stephen Poyntz Denning)

His grandfather Jorge III died the same year that his father, did not hesitate to be evident that Victoria was destined to occupy the throne of their country, for none of the remaining sons of King was offspring. When reported to the Princess in this regard, showing him a family tree of the British rulers that ended with his own name, victory remained quiet a while and then said: "I will be a good Queen". Scarcely had ten years and already showed a presence of mind and a resolution which would be remarkable qualities throughout his life.

George IV and Guillermo IV, uncles of Victoria, occupied the throne between 1820 and 1837. Hours after the death of the latter, the Archbishop of Canterbury knelt before the young Victoria to inform you officially that it was Queen of England. That day, the girl wrote in her diary: "since Providence has wanted to put myself in this position, will do their utmost to fulfill my obligation to my country. I'm very young and perhaps in many things experience, Miss me but not in all; but I'm sure that there are too many people with goodwill and firm desire to do things well that I have." The solemn ceremony of his coronation took place in Westminster Abbey on June 28, 1838.

A Queen of eighteen

The tightness of the relations of victory with her mother, which would increase with his advent to the throne, was already evident in his first act of Government, which surprised the Super-capitals members of the Council: asked if, as Queen, it could do what come you in real wins. As too young and inexperienced to calibrate the constitutional mechanisms, said yes. She, with a delicious youth mohin, ordered his mother that one leave it time and locked himself in his room. The output returned to give another order: which vacate immediately your bedroom Duchess absorbent bedding, because henceforth he wanted to sleep without sharing it. Complaints, maneuvers and even veiled rupture of the mother could do nothing: his empire had ended and his authoritarian and willful daughter was going to impose his own. And not just in intimacy; It would also provide an unmistakable hallmark a whole era, which has been rightly called with his name.

Victoria receiving Lord Conyngham and the Archbishop
Canterbury News of his ascension to the throne

The German blood of the young Queen did not come only from the maternal line, with its more remote ancestry in a medieval lineage; He had entered with the enthronement of the same dynasty, the Hanover, which were called in 1714 from the eponymous Principality in the North of Germany to Crown the constitutional building which had been erected in the 18th century the English revolution. His sovereign left, in general, a stormy remembrance by their public and private behaviour and the vicious punishments inflicted on those who dared to criticize them, but presided over rapid ascension of Britain towards the European hegemony.

A pale except Jorge III attempted it, long and unhappy life (his reign lasted almost as much as the victory), because of its periodic crises of insanity. It was, however, respected by his subjects, due to this misfortune and its irreproachable domestic virtues. The majority of his six children did not participate this exemplary and the heir, Jorge IV, especially damaged the prestige of the monarchy, which only his successor, Guillermo IV could partly repair with their scandals.

To the dying King Guillermo IV on June 20, 1837 and become his successor to the throne, Victoria was a long task. The jealous mother care had attempted to remove it completely to the harmful influences of the uncles and dissolute environment Court, regulating your instruction according to austere guidelines, imbued with a severe Anglicanism. Intellectual upbringing was somewhat precarious, it seemed far-fetched to think that the death of other direct heirs and the lack of offspring of Jorge IV and Guillermo IV would open you the passage to the succession. But this would not prevent that Queen played a key role in the resurgence of an undisputed royalist sentiment approached the Crown the town, erasing the memory of their ancestors to solidly establish the institution in the collective psychology of his subjects. It was not an easy task. Their statesmen had to spend long hours at teach to delimit the regio field in constitutional practices, and attempted to cut the influence of dubious characters of the Court, as baron Stockmar, doctor, or the Baroness Lehzen, a former governess. The higher friction would occur with their interference in foreign policy, and particularly in the stormy issues in Germany, when under the aegis of Prussia and Bismarck there arose the great rival of Great Britain, the German Empire.

Queen Victoria in 1843
(Franz Xavier Winterhalter portrait)

At the time of the coronation, the English political scene was dominated by William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, occupying the post of Prime Minister since 1835. Lord Melbourne was a man rich, bright and equipped with superior intelligence and a sensitive and affable temperament qualities that fascinated the new Queen. Victoria, young, happy and carefree for the first months of his reign, began to depend completely on that excellent gentleman, in whose hands could leave the Affairs of State with absolute confidence. And since lord Melbourne was head of the party whig (liberal), she picked up ladies who shared the liberal ideas and expressed his desire to not ever see a tory (conservative), because the political enemies of his dear lord had passed his enemies will be automatically.

Such was the situation when various votes that occurred in the House of Commons Cabinet whig lord Melbourne's failed to reach the majority. The Prime Minister decided to resign and the tories, led by Robert Peel, got ready to form a Government. It was then that victory, obsessed with the terrible idea of spreading of lord Melbourne and be forced to replace him with Robert Peel, whose manners considered obnoxious, brought out his temper and stubbornness, hidden until then: his refusal to accept the relay was so emphatic that the crisis was solved through a series of negotiations and agreements that restored in office the Prime Minister whig. Lord Melbourne returned the Queen and with him went the happiness, but was soon to be displaced by a new influence.

Prince Albert

On February 10, 1840 Queen Victoria got married. It was a union provided from many years before, and determined by the political interests of England. Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, German and cousin of victory, was one of the few young men that the sovereign teenager had tried in your life, and undoubtedly the first that he was allowed to talk alone. When he became her husband, or predetermination or the fear of change that supposed wedding prevented that a feeling of genuine veneration towards that man not only good-looking, exquisite and attentive, but also with a thin political intelligence was in it.

Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha
(portrait of Franz Xavier Winterhalter, 1846)

Alberto stopped nor have their difficulties at the beginning. On the one hand, you soon get used to the position which had plotted it beforehand the Parliament, the Prince Consort, a status which it acquired from it (in Britain and in Europe) its specific dimensions. On the other hand, it took even more to do is to forgive a certain unsuitability to the ways and means of the English aristocracy, to avoid its innate shyness with the classic appeal of the official stiffening and the haughtiness of treatment. But with tact and perseverance of the Prince, and natural resiliency and sense of victory, the Royal couple cleared in a same will all obstacles and won universal respect with its initiatives. His was a happy, peaceful and homey, love that were born four sons and five daughters; they and their respective descendants took a most of the Royal and Imperial courts of the continent, putting a brilliant header to the hegemony of Great Britain in the world, until the first world war clean sweep. It came the day that Victoria was designated "the grandmother of Europe".

Alberto was a perfect husband for Victoria and replaced lord Melbourne in the role of counselor, protector, and factotum in the scope of the policy. He served his mission with so much success that the sovereign, even inexperienced and in need of such support, not experienced panic one when in 1841 the once hated Peel replaced finally to Melbourne at the front of the Cabinet. Since then, Victoria discovered that politicians tories were not only not terrible monsters, but that for their conservatism, they were much closer than the whigs of their spirit and their beliefs. From now on, both she and her husband showed a defendant predilection for conservatives, being frequent his polemics with the Liberal cabinets headed by lord Palmerston and lord Russell.

Queen Victoria and the Prince at Windsor Castle

The political skill of Prince Albert and the scrupulous respect by the Queen to the mechanisms of parliamentarians, often against their own preferences, largely contributed to restore the prestige of the Crown, severely undermined since the last years of Jorge III because of the manifest incompetence of the sovereigns. With the birth, in November 1841, of the Prince of Wales, who happen to win more than half a century later with the name of Eduardo VII, the succession issue was resolved. It could be said, therefore, that in 1851, when the Queen opened in London the first great international exposure, the glory and the power of England were at their peak. It should be noted that Alberto was the organizer of the event; There is no doubt that happened to be the true King in the shade.

The splendor of widowhood

Over the following years, Alberto continued relentlessly focusing on difficult matters of Government and high matters of State. But his energy and his health began to suffer from 1856, one year before the Queen would give him the title of Prince Consort that were recognized her husband fully their rights as English citizens, because we must not forget his foreign origin. It was in 1861 when Victoria went through the most tragic period of his life: in March, died his mother, the Duchess of Kent, and on December 14 was her beloved husband, the man who had been his guide and supported the weight of the Crown with it.

As on other occasions, and despite the pain experienced, the Queen reacted with an extraordinary fortitude and decided that the best way to pay tribute to the late Prince was making his main objective that had encouraged her husband: working tirelessly in the service of the country. Small and thick figure of Queen covered thereafter with a mourning attire and remained eternally loyal to the memory of Alberto, evoking it always talks and more baladies daily episodes, while she had consummate the indissoluble union of monarchy, town and State.

The British Royal family in 1880

From that moment until his death, victory never ceased to give samples of his iron will and his enormous capacity to direct the destiny of England with apparent ease. While in the political arena two new protagonists, the Gladstone liberal and conservative Disraeli, gave beginning to a new Act in the history of English parliamentarianism, the Queen reached from its privileged position a notorious international celebrity and a parent about his people which had not enjoyed any of its predecessors. In a Supreme success, he also managed a proverbial licentious aristocracy was wetting of the morals of the bourgeoisie, as it took the industrial revolution to its peak and cercenaba competences of the last noble stronghold, the House of Lords. Herself were more rigid guidelines that morality and printed that personal touch something quiet and shortsighted, which is called Victorian bucket.

Brought the only break in this state of permanent widowhood Governments of Disraeli, the politician who best knew how to penetrate the nature of the Queen, cheer her and flatter her, and divert it definitively his old favorite by the whigs. Also it became symbol of imperial unity to the Crown it in 1877 Empress of the India, after dominating the great national and religious revolt of the sepoys there. Business policy of Disraeli put also snap to the formidable expansion colonial (the British Empire came to understand up to 24% of all the emerged lands and 450 million people, ruled by the 37 million of the Metropolis) with the acquisition and control of the Suez canal. London became, for a long time, the first financial and World Trade Center. Endless colonial wars took the British presence until the last corners of Asia, Africa and Oceania.

Queen Victoria in 1897, during ceremonies
it commemorated the 60th anniversary of his coronation

During the last three decades of his reign, Victoria became a living myth and the reference of all political activity on the world stage. Its small and robust, image with all of an extraordinary Majesty, was the subject of reverence in and out of Britain. Their overwhelming common sense, quiet security that accompanied all its decisions and its intimate identification with the wishes and concerns of the middle class got the widow call of Windsor protective shadow projected on a whole era and impregnase of victorianismo the second half of the century.

His life was extinguished slowly, with the same quiet Cadence with which passed the years of her widowhood. When his death on 22 January 1901, was published it seemed as if he were on the verge of producing a frightful cataclysm of nature. The vast majority of his subjects did not remember a day when victory had not been his Queen.

Chronology of Victoria I of England

1819	Born in Kensington Palace, London, on 24 May.
1920	Death of his father.
1837	King Guillermo IV dies.
1838	She is crowned Queen at Westminster Abbey on June 28.
1838-41	It supports the Prime Minister lord Melbourne and shows his penchant for the Liberals.
1840	He marries his cousin Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, with whom he would have four sons and five daughters.
1841	His son Eduardo, that would happen it on the throne as Eduardo VII is born. Under the influence of her husband, is inclined to the Conservatives, but maintaining the proper neutrality.
1850	Consolidated parliamentary bipartisanship, with peaceful alternation between Liberals and conservatives (tories) (whigs).
1851	It opened in London the first great international exhibition.
1856	Alberto is named Prince Consort.
1861	Killed his mother, the Duchess of Kent, and her husband Alberto.
1867	Reform the electoral law, extending the right to vote.
1877	It is crowned Empress of the India.
1893	The Labour Party is founded.
1901	He died on 22 January at Osborne on the Isle of Wight Castle.

Victoria I of England and the Victorian was

The United Kingdom knew a period of maximum splendour during the second half of the 19th century, period which coincides with the long reign of Victoria I (1837-1901), the so-called "Victorian era". Britain became the first world power for the prosperity of the economy and the extent and importance of its colonial empire, culminating in the proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India (1877).

In England, the constitutional pact brought by the revolution had relegated to a purely subsidiary role the character or the worth of the Kings as a historical factor. Britain had just beat France on the gigantic confrontation that part of the French Republic and Napoleon's wars. Was mistress of the seas and, consequently, trade, and was ideally prepared for takeoff industrial and technical, which had undertaken in advance to the continent. The English sovereigns reigned but not governed, something still unusual at the time. But it can, and less in the case of Victoria, refusing all weight and historical influence to your figure.

Political reforms

The Constitutionalism in the England of the early 19th century was far the meanings that then it would be the term. It was really the drive belt of a notable oligarchy, distributed between the more enterprising fractions of the nobility, defeated by the revolution and the upper layers of the bourgeoisie, big traders and industrialists. Power-sharing was done through an electoral system based (only voted the holders of higher incomes), secured with thousand irregular procedures.

Queen Victoria (portrait of Alexander Melville, 1845)

In 1832, five years before the coronation of Victoria, it had proceeded to a transcendental, rather imperfect political reform yet, but that significantly expanded the body of electors and removed the most obvious abuses. The uninterrupted increase in the urban population and the changes in the social fabric as a result of industrialization did see some lucid politicians need to incorporate sectors arising from such transformations to active political life, in particular the urban proletariat and the middle classes. Despite the reservations of powerful sectors, middle and lower classes became aware of their rights as citizens with the American civil war: the Northern victory encouraged the British working classes in the conquest of their demands in terms of suffrage.

The two major parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, representatives of former whigs and toriesgenerally, respectively, were taking shape at the beginning of the reign of Victoria I, and the two-party parliamentary system was definitively consolidated around 1850. The Liberals, with Palmerston to the head, and the Conservatives, with Peel as a leader, presided over the first Victorian period policy. The two figures in the second half of the century were the Gladstone liberal and conservative Disraeli. The liberal party took as flag the need go by reforming the structures of the State and advanced towards the ideal of full democracy. His political struggle, based on political liberalism, was answered by always rigorous opposition from conservatives, converted in the defenders of the values of the past, helpers of the interests of the rural environment and supporters of economic protectionism. Disraeli changed the party's image by orienting it towards reformism and the defense of free trade. With broad policy reforms carried out by both parties, initiated around the 1930s, new very advanced performances of secularizador and democratic character is promoted for its time. However, the period was not without internal difficulties and social upheaval.

The path that was to lead to a new electoral reform was sown obstacles. Planned initially by the most progressive circles of the liberal party, the opposition of the most reactionary spheres of this determined, paradoxically, that it was the tories who finally materialize it. Not without tears or internal divisions on their wings more ultras, Disraeli got that finally his first Minister lord Derby given green light during his third Ministry (15 August 1867) electoral reform law. With the new law, was enough for the owner or tenant urban condition to access the right to suffrage; This doubled the number of English with right to vote. But although in the rural districts was downgraded the Census required to exercise the right to vote, this remained unattainable for small farmers.

Benjamin Disraeli

The jump into the void that had predicted the critics of electoral reform would never occur; reform does not depart more than profits in the face of greater social integration of the country and for the development of a regime of freedoms and effective democracy. The redistribution of seats in favour of the large urban circumscriptions and the consequent increase of the labor vote in the cities did not lead to the parliamentary working dictatorship foretold by the noble spheres and altoburguesas of the nation.

According to a current paradox in British political life, the Conservative Party was dismissed from power in elections the following year, which recorded an overwhelming victory of the Liberals, presided over by a personality of exception: William Gladstone. His long and brilliant career as parliamentary and Government (in particular, as Treasury of the Palmerston Cabinet) granted, without discussion, the leadership of the party whig to the death of Palmerston. The first stage of the Gladstone Cabinet was characterized by translate to everyday realities the triumphant spirit of the electoral reform of 1867.

However their firm convictions, religious, and despite the recommendations of Queen Victoria, the liberal leader performed the separation of Church and State in the Protestant Ireland and also obtained from Parliament an agrarian law for the entire territory of the island, in order to protect settlers against unfair evictions. The pacification of Ireland progressed in these efforts, although the true meaning of the actions of the Ministry rested at that, finally, all the sectors concerned in solving the Irish question understood that the determined will surrender to the task peacekeeping with all energy existed in Gladstone.

William Gladstone

His desire for reform was also evident in the University issue, that Gladstone had reflected long and hard. At the beginning of the 1970s, religious tests were abolished in Cambridge and Oxford, and centres of higher education would open its doors on all students, regardless of spiritual beliefs. A transcendental Education Act established, in 1870, the obligatory nature of the school attendance of all children under the age of 13 years, creating also the means necessary to make it effective.

In the field of Justice, provisions were also adopted to simplify and modernize processes. The establishment of a single Supreme Court, as well as the promulgation of a Judicial Act, were the most important instruments of this profound reform. No less momentous was the operated in the army. Dysfunctions and macules in its recruitment system, the direction, the Administration and health had been blatantly exposed in the Crimean War. Also in this three-year period of the first Cabinet of Gladstone, considered by their bosses as an unbeatable machine ruling, created the famous Civil Service, which would give Britain the Administration demanded by its position in the world and the huge development of colonial life.

The labour movement

Of course, the pressure of the working class had to do with the implementation of political and social reforms. The disappointment that produced in working-class conservatism of the 1832 Reform Act, especially in what they referred to their demands in demand for greater political participation, resulted in the formation of new labour movements.

In 1836 two moderate leaders, Lovett and Hetherington, founded the London Association of workers. Incorporated by skilled craftsmen, they obtained a great success of affiliation. In 1838 went to Parliament, with the collaboration of the also trade unionist Francis Place, the famous letter of the people, which is demanding, among other rights, universal male suffrage. About its contents would match workers and other radical movements, but the chartists, as they were called, were conquering major plots of prominence thanks to the support of the working mass, and radicalized their protests against corporate abuse and unemployment caused by the machinery. Gradually the police repression and the dismissals and reprisals from employers made dent in good part of the working class. The chartist movement began to lose support, especially when they began the internal divisions among its leaders.

Overcome the critical moments of the Central years of the century, and to the economic prosperity of the next few decades, Union representatives and labor leaders they understood the uselessness of maintaining continuing political demands. Thus, were guiding their activities to strengthen associations of mutual aid or Trade Unions. Interests would be assumed and defended in Parliament by the Liberal Party, but the Trade Unions never forgot to put pressure on the employer. In 1875 they succeeded in the adoption of the right to strike and the implementation of a system of public health. These associations began to collect new political and social dimensions, with the first meeting employees which was held in London in 1864. There was first a joint programme of action based on socialist principles, the same people who advocated thinkers like Marx and Engels.

Foreign policy and the colonial empire

Mid-century Britain continued the path path in foreign policy by the Viscount Palmerston, brain and executor of it since the beginning of the Decade of the thirties. When the revolution of 1848 became clear Russian power and the ascendant, Britain sought to weaken them to prevent, especially, the Empire of the tsars was lodged in the path of the India and came to become a serious rival in the area. The war was a pro record for that London to deploy its strategy without discovering too much your letters. From this conflict, Palmerston dominated without dispute both domestic politics and the outside of your country. On the last slope, he continued faithful to his pronacionalista ideology without watching the danger involving the unstoppable German ascension to the European balance. Obsessed by the Napoleonic memory, Palmerston more attention paid to the French claims that to the of the Germany bismarckiana, who, precisely following the death of the famous British politician (1865), began the unstoppable march towards your unit.

British imperialism adopted new political methods. In 1830 was a group of reformers who saw a way out for the fast growth of the population of the United Kingdom in the rational administration of the colonies. John Stuart Mill, Charles Buller, Edward Gibbon and Lord Durham felt that it was an opportunity for the creation of new communities based on principles of responsible self-government. With them would be possible a new ideal of cohesion of the British Empire, based not on the control or in the restrictive measures, but in independence and freedom. In 1865, the colonial laws validity act declared that the laws passed by the colonial legislatures only would be cancelled when they collide openly with the laws of the imperial Parliament. This constituted a general security of internal self-government for all the colonial legislatures, considered sovereign although subordinate to the British Parliament. This would be the beginning of the future Commonwealth.

The most extensive part of the Empire, the India, was reorganized by these colonial reformers. Introduced new models of competition and of righteousness which in turn influenced the administrative system in the United Kingdom. The criminal code drafted by Macaulay, who introduced administrative reforms came into force in 1860. In 1876, was proclaimed in Delhi to Queen Victoria as Empress of India, a fact whose last intention was the secure face to the international community the goods traffic with the metropolis.

The British colonial empire

During the reign of Victoria I, the British followed colonizing new lands: New Zealand in 1840, Hong Kong in 1842, and large areas of Malaysia. At the end of the 19th century, the Salisbury Government annexed territories of Zambezi and Zanzibar, along with other areas of the Somali region. Benjamín Disraeli, during the last third of the century, also devoted himself to encouraging imperialism, strengthening the position of Britain in the Mediterranean and China. The general philosophy of this development, both in the metropolis and in the colonies, was compendiada in the imperial defense systems designed in 1870. In the event of war, the British Navy had cardinal mission the block enemy ports and keep open vital routes that linked the commercial and naval bases of the Empire.

Economic prosperity

The reign of Victoria I coincided with a second phase of the industrial revolution that would lead to the establishment of the principles of economic liberalism and capitalism great. On the basis of all this process was the exaltation of freedom. The United Kingdom fell in what could its interventionist role, limited to promote economic activities in open and autonomous character.

From mid-century, golden age of economic prosperity, adopted principles of the philosophy of free trade, abolishing tariffs and deleting the old minutes of navigation from the 17TH century. The market began to be adjusted by free competition and the laws of supply and demand. Strategic trade agreements with other countries; were promoted from the Government the United Kingdom was importing cereals at a good price to keep bread prices, placing Exchange abroad their surplus textile and metallurgical.

In this whole process began to glimpse the accumulation of capital as an essential element for the promotion of industrialization. This began to favor the spectacular growth of some companies who abandoned their national or local dimension to become true multinational powers. The small companies of shareholders at the end of the 18th century were replaced since 1840 by capitalist companies whose partners had a limited liability: were not obliged to cover his personal fortune with an occasional bankruptcy; they lost only their actions or saw lower its value. English banking exponentially multiplied their activities and assets, mostly due to its loan to the industry that needed important sums as a result of the high costs of production, distribution and technological innovation. The strength of the pound sterling marked maximum contributions, and was during the 19th century the international currency. The Bank of England became the first bank in the world.

There were also significant bankruptcies and some cyclical crisis International. The crisis of 1873 to 1879 started in Vienna as a result of the low profitability of the railways, which had repercussions on the iron and coal mining industries. It spread to Germany and France, and came to the United Kingdom essentially hurting the textile industry, whose production fell sharply, generating low wages and loss of jobs. These probably inherent in the capitalist system, and social, economic busts were repeated periodically.

The crisis caused the disappearance of many companies; others, backed by prosperous international business, got out graceful and attract a greater number of shareholders. The accumulation of capital allowed them to take care of essential public services: railways, ports and water and gas supplies. Created large monopolies often managed by powerful families able to decide events on several continents at the same time. It was born a form of capitalist Empire, yet unnoticed by the man standing and worrisome to politicians and jurists. The enormous economic power of certain British entrepreneurs largely determined the political lines of some Governments.

The Victorian society

The economic prosperity experienced during the Victorian era favoured broadly the conditions of life of British society. The strengthening of the hegemony in the international arena, along with the recovery of the prestige of the monarchy as a symbol of national cohesion, formed a social model in which the middle classes were imposing behaviors based on sobriety and discretion of customs. Conformity of this social class (middle class) the cult of money, the exaltation to the work and the recognition of individual effort made the fundamental elements to achieve economic prosperity. The order and stability are concreted in the ideal domestic and independence of home, family life and Temple of a strict religious observance flattering of Temperance and contrary to the disordered inclinations.

But in reality, the Victorian society remained a society with deep contrasts and inequalities. At the top of society continued to maintain a leading role the nobility, owner of large estates and heiress of the old social values. The noble emparentaron is, now much more, with the high capitalist bourgeoisie owns businesses and industries who chose to join the aspirations and modes of the so-called upper class to access its titles through the capital and marriage. The remaining middle class grew during the last third of the century: wholesalers, officials, professionals... They were these people really adopted Puritan principles that characterized the Victorian society: discrete and orderly life, economic austerity, Methodism religious and political conservatism.

Queen Victoria in 1894

In the lower classes (lower classes), specialized artisans, with adequate wages and a good professional reputation, they formed a vantage group who knew how to maintain its pre-eminence due to the weight of their labour associations, authorized even before unions. Was the last step the proletariat, very numerous as a result of industrialization. It was a collective living with large gaps, alleviated in part from 1850. Unemployment and the many mouths to feed caused many daughters of these employees would become part of the domestic servants of the nobility, the gentry and middle classes; Thus, servitude has doubled in the last third of the 19th century. Women of the middle class had not many job opportunities; most of them who want to have a professional career were placed as governesses or teachers. The living conditions of the proletariat were infamous. On the outskirts of the cities, near factories, were working-class neighbourhoods (slums) who, as a result of the continuous growth of the population, quickly stayed small. The families piled in damp and small dwellings where the lack of hygiene originated serious diseases and epidemics.

On other social issues such as education also increased public interventions. The result was a noticeable advancement of literacy and a reduction of the absenteeism caused by the need to work. On another level, as a result of the new economic and social reality, new universities were founded as the Manchester in 1851 and the old universities of Oxford and Cambridge were renovated with new statutes. The Victorian society, or at least the upper classes, was gradually transformed into a society of educated, although without great intellectual efforts, who liked reading and going to the theatre and concerts. The proliferation of schools for the sons of aristocratic families allowed the implementation of a highly selective educational model based on an ideology of conservative court.

Extracted from the website: Biografías y Vidas