At the Platinum Jubilee the memorial to Queen Victory was totally at center throughout.  Of course we know that the Goddess Victory was really the star.  But, I wanted to look at Queen Victoria to see what was so great about her and/or her reign.

Wow… I learned a lot.  Not only was the Victoria Era not at all what it is professed to be, but it was a total nightmare and the Queen was a totally not worthy of adoration.

Turns out that the Victorian Era was a tremendous victory for the forces of darkness.  Further more, it was not that different than what we see happening in our world today.

Follow along with me and see what you think.
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Known as the Victorian era, her reign of 63 years and seven months was longer than any previous British monarch. It was a period of industrial, political, scientific, and military change within the United Kingdom, and was marked by a great expansion of the British Empire. In 1876, the British Parliament voted to grant her the additional title of Empress of India.

Victoria married her first cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840. Their children married into royal and noble families across the continent, earning Victoria the sobriquet “the grandmother of Europe” and spreading haemophilia in European royalty.

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Queen Victoria

In the late Victorian era, a movement called Spiritualism, in which people talked to ghosts, became popular with all social classes in Great Britain. Many of the era’s greatest figures participated, including Queen Victoria herself. The queen and Prince Albert, her husband, were deeply interested in Spiritualism, regularly attending seances and other psychic meetings.

When Albert died in 1861, Victoria was devastated. Grieving in the only way that made sense to her, she searched for a medium who could help her make contact with her dead husband. She knew that many mediums were frauds but finally found one who seemed genuine: Robert James Lees, a 13-year-old medium who claimed to channel the spirit of Albert.

She sent her courtiers to investigate the young medium. After impressing them with impossible-to-know details of Albert’s personal life, Lees was invited to see the queen at Buckingham Palace.

He went to the palace nine times. Each time, Victoria was left completely at his whim, prompting her to ask him to become resident medium of her royal household. The boy refused, promising that she could continue communicating through Albert’s former gun boy, John Brown. For more than 30 years, Brown remained Victoria’s medium, having a complete hold over her.

After Brown’s death, the queen wanted to publish a study of his seances. But her courtiers convinced her that public knowledge of her reliance on a medium might damage her reputation. She agreed not to publish the study, and the history of Victoria’s interest in Spiritualism was swept under the rug.   Source

THE MESSED UP TRUTH OF QUEEN VICTORIA
Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons
BY TIM BUTTERS/UPDATED: NOV. 19, 2021 3:59 PM EDT
Scratch the surface of the official PR job and you’ll find a cesspit of calamity and controversy bubbling beneath. It’s fair to say her life was more than a little messed up. In the name of queen and country let’s dig deep, hold our noses, and dive into this particular swamp together.

QUEEN VICTORIA’S GRANDSON MIGHT HAVE BEEN JACK THE RIPPER
Wikipedia
Every family has a black sheep. It might be the slightly racist uncle, the cross-dressing granddad, or that distant cousin with a glass eye who grows award-winning turnips, yet just imagine if you were related to the most notorious serial killer in history?

According to History, there’s a theory Victoria’s grandson, Prince Albert Victor, was Jack the Ripper. Eddy, as he was affectionately known, was rumored to have contracted syphilis from a prostitute in the West Indies. The story goes: as syphilis began to rot Eddy’s brain, the playboy prince began taking his revenge by killing ladies of the night in London’s East End.

Of course, none of this can be proven, but Queen or no Queen, it’s not a very nice skeleton to have in the family closet.

THE IRISH CALLED VICTORIA ‘THE FAMINE QUEEN’
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There was little love for Queen Victoria on the Emerald Isle. During her rule, the country suffered the darkest and most despair-riddled seven years in Irish history: the Great Hunger. This fierce and unforgiving famine caused the death of one million men, women, and children and caused a further million to forsake their native country and emigrate to distant shores.

According to Irish Central, the Queen did make a token gesture of donating £2,000 to aid victims of the famine, but it did more harm than good. As royal protocol dictated no one could appear more generous than the Queen, when the Sultan of Turkey offered £10,000 (nearly two million in today’s coin), he was told to reduce it to below £2,000 so as not to offend Her Majesty. Historian Christine Kinealy explained, “There is no evidence that [Queen Victoria] had any real compassion for the Irish people in any way … In her very long reign, she only visited Ireland four times and one of those times was 1849 when the famine was still raging but coming to an end. She didn’t do anything…”

A LOT OF PEOPLE TRIED TO KILL QUEEN VICTORIA

You can’t kill an idea and neither could they kill Queen Victoria. Despite a staggering eight assassination attempts on her life, the little lady (she was barely five feet tall) had a lot of heart and a survivor’s soul. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and the attempts on her life actually boosted her popularity. The public loves an underdog and according to Smithsonian, Victoria herself took a philosophical view on the crazed and wild-eyed assassins who wanted to do her in, saying, “It is worth being shot at to see how much one is loved.”

HARDCORE COLONIALISM WAS RIGHT UP QUEEN VICTORIA’S STREET

Victoria had an Indian servant called Abdul who she treated as an exotic pet. The Independent points out some royal-lovers use her relationship with Abdul to justify what a progressive Monarch she was, which is questionable at best. Although Queen Victoria was called Empress of Indian she never set foot in the country. The History Press states she regarded India as a remote and exotic place but one which also had to be ruled by the British. At its peak, the Empire included over 13 million square miles of territory and a quarter of the world’s population.

But Britain’s policy of colonialism did untold damage. The Conversation reports Abdul’s fellow countrymen and women suffered terribly. In the years 1876-1879 and 1896-1902, 12 to 30 million Indians died from starvation. The UK benefited immensely from plundering India of all its loot. Al Jazeera reports renowned economist Utsa Patnaik calculated colonial Britain made nearly $45 trillion from India.

Indian MP Shashi Tharoor, author of Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, states the UK exploited India to economize its industrial revolution. British imperialism led to widespread poverty, famine, and genocide. While Queen Victoria had no say in government policy, she was the figurehead as the British Empire thrived and the inhabitants of the countries it occupied… didn’t.

AS A MUM, QUEEN VICTORIA KIND OF SUCKED

Her difficult upbringing had a detrimental effect on her relationship with her own children. She could be fiercely critical and an acid tongue. She even blamed her son Bertie for Albert’s death, which she believed was caused by typhoid fever he contracted whilst visiting his troublesome son in Cambridge to give him a stern talking to. Apparently, the trip was cold, damp, and stressful.

According to Victoriana, she didn’t think much of babies or pregnancy either. She branded it the “shadow side” of marital life and once wrote, “An ugly baby is a very nasty object — and the prettiest is frightful when undressed.” According to the New York Times she once told her daughter childbirth was “a complete violence to all one’s feelings of propriety.“ Mother earth she was not, but doctors have since suggested the nine-time mother was a sufferer of post-partum depression.

VICTORIA GAVE THE WORLD THE PLAYBOY KING

Before Prince Andrew, there was Edward VII, The Playboy King. Bertie set a new royal standard in affairs, drinking, gambling, and basically being an extremely accomplished all-round ne’er-do-well. Bathing in champagne was one of his preferred pastimes and just the tip of a rather debauched iceberg. Being born in such a repressive society may have instilled a need in Bertie to rebel, but more likely an indulgent yet distant mother led to Bertie behaving like a hell-raising and party-loving rock star before the likes of Led Zeppelin had even strummed a chord, banged a drum, or screamed, “Oh baby, baby, baby.”

According to Factinate, Bertie once remarked, “I don’t mind praying to the eternal Father but I must be the only man in the country afflicted with an eternal mother.” Like most people who act out, inside there was probably a little, lost child looking for the attention their parents never gave them. To rub salt into an already raging wound, Bertie also had to wait 60 long years before he got to step up to the throne and wear the crown. That’s gotta hurt. Sadly for Bertie, his reign was rather short-lived compared to his mother’s epic 63-year stint. After nine years, three months, and 12 days of rule, he died of pneumonia in 1910.

THE CURSE OF QUEEN VICTORIA

Queen Victoria was the first carrier of what was once referred to as the “royal curse.” Today it has a name — hemophilia. But in Victoria’s time, the blood clotting disorder was an unknown factor. All doctors knew was Victoria and many of her descendants inherited the “curse” which can lead to excessive bleeding and even death. Scientific American reports Victoria was afflicted with a very rare strain of hemophilia caused by a spontaneous mutation of the X chromosome. Since females possess two X chromosomes and males possess XY chromosomes, the disease is passed on by females who manifest no symptoms to male descendants who do. Her son Prince Leopold was the first of Victoria’s line to inherit the “curse.”  Through two of Queen Victoria’s daughters, Princess Alice, and Beatrice, the “curse” spread into many of Europe’s royal dynasties.

GETTING HIGH WAS A ROYAL PASTIME

According to Historic UK, Victorian London was soaked in opium. The sailors who made their home in the East End had been smoking opium recreationally for years. Then opium dens became favored by aristocrats looking to forget reality. Oscar Wilde wrote, “There were opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.”

Ruling over all this chemical chaos was Queen Victoria, who was no stranger to mind-altering substances. The BBC reports she was rumored to use opium tinctures and once chewed cocaine-laced gum with a young Winston Churchill. But all that was legal. Where she shocked society was when she insisted on inhaling chloroform for 53 minutes from a handkerchief when she was in labor with her eighth child. According to the New York Times, she described it as, “Blessed chloroform, soothing, quieting and delightful beyond measure.”

Her use of the drug went against medical advice. Doctors believed pain relief during birth was dangerous and would interfere with child labor. According to General Anaesthesia, prominent American obstetrician, Charles Meigs, even warned against, “Stopping the natural and physiological forces that the Divinity has ordained us to enjoy or to suffer.” As someone with plenty of experience of giving birth, Victoria had no truck with such nonsense and told the doctors to bring on the happy juice. Her stubbornness helped pioneer the use of pain relief during pregnancy.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL BRANDED HER ‘HUMPY, DUMPY, AND STUMPY’

It’s difficult to imagine the awe with which the Victorians must have greeted the advent of the telephone. The ability, as The Telegraph reports one advertisement explained it at the time, to “converse miles apart, in precisely the same manner as though they were in the same room,” must have appeared like a rare voodoo indeed.

For someone who ruled over the industrial revolution and was the first British royal to ride in a train, it’s only fitting Queen Victoria had a ringside view of this high magic when it first changed the world. According to Island Echo, on January 14, 1878, Alexander Graham Bell conducted a significant moment in the smartphone and internet’s origin story when he demonstrated exactly how the phone worked to Her Royal Highness. It was the first time the UK had publicly witnessed a long-term call and minds were blown and eyebrows raised. The Queen was so taken with Bell’s invention she became the first European monarch to own one.

SHE WAS A ‘GOTH’ WHO INVENTED WHITE WEDDINGS

After the death of her beloved Albert in 1861, Queen Victoria stopped wearing colors pretty much forever and dressed like a crow every day. For 40 long years until her death in 1901, Queen Victoria presented herself to the world in 50 shades of black.

The Victorians could be inherently more gothic than the Cure’s Robert Smith on a bad hangover. According to Inside Hook, they tended to romanticize pretty horrific things like tuberculosis, and looking like you were at death’s door was often all the rage, so society tried to be pale, frail, and morbid. By committing herself to wear nothing but black widow’s weeds, Queen Victoria provided a nation with a cast-iron template on how to be a moody Mary and diva of despair.

Such was her gothic greatness you could go out on a limb and call Queen Victoria the “Patron Saint of Goth.” So strangely enough, Queen Victoria’s greatest sartorial legacy was white wedding gowns. Vanity Fair reports as a 20-year-old blushing bride she started the fad for white weddings and single-handedly influenced nearly two centuries of what women wear when getting hitched.

WHAT’S MY NAME?

Perhaps the most famous Queen of England ever, the one who was the figurehead of its mighty Empire, wasn’t even English. Teutonic blood flowed through Victoria’s Hanoverian veins like the majestic sweep of the Rhine River. The throne passed to the solidly-German George I in 1714, and since then, the family only married other Germans. Victoria’s mother was a German princess and for the first three years of the Monarch’s life, not a word passed her lips unless it was German. Despite learning English, The Independent reports German remained Victoria’s first language for the rest of her days and she and Albert would speak to each other in their native tongue during their marriage. During Victorian times the halls of Buckingham Palace would not have sounded a whole lot different to party hour at a Munich beer festival. When Victoria did speak English, so strong was her German accent, tutors were put on the payroll to curb it.

Victoria’s surname Saxe-Coburg-Gotha also proved kind of tricky for her descendants when Britain went to war with Germany. So in 1917, it was declared all living male descendants of Victoria would go by the extremely English surname of Windsor. According to The Guardian, over the years their German roots were forgotten and Victoria and her heirs have since become an enduring symbol of all things British.

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THE VICTORIAN ERA’S OBSESSION WITH THE OCCULT EXPLAINED

n_defender/Shutterstock
BY RICHARD MILNER/UPDATED: APRIL 15, 2022 9:10 AM EDT
The tarot, mediumship and Spiritism, seances and Ouija boards, prophecy and clairvoyance, Rosicrucianism’s rise in popularity and the advent of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: Take all of these esoteric, arcane, and magical traditions and toss them in a pot, stir for about a century, and blammo: we’ve got the entire Victorian era’s occult craze.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the Industrial Revolution had an impact on almost every aspect of life during the 19th century, particularly during Queen Victoria’s reign. She was born in 1819, ascended to the throne in 1837 and reigned until her death in 1901, a period matched only by an equal and opposing preoccupation with all things mystical. Professions were turning mechanized. People obeyed the clock and not the sun. Lives became dependent on and defined by all things quantifiable, tangible, and rational. As The New Yorker summarizes, the mysteries of nature and God felt stripped away, and despair settled in as folks were forced to ask, “Is there nothing more? Am I mere mechanism, too?” This sense turned inward and ballooned into the desire for something beyond what the eyes could see and hands could touch, but separate from — as people saw it — the failed practices of a religious past that did nothing in the end but engender a dehumanizing present.

The occult “possessed” the minds of people not only in Queen Victoria’s Great Britain, but basically anywhere that agriculture rolled over to industry, particularly in the United States, France, and to a lesser extent, Germany. And the marks of that era, mystical and technological alike, persist to the present.

BIRTHED ON THE HEELS OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Wikimedia Commons
The Victorian obsession with the occult had been building for centuries, hand-in-hand with the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment (roughly 1600-1815) marked, without hyperbole, one of history’s most radical, fundamental shifts in human thought and perception, from which the entire world subsequently flowed. As History explains, the Enlightenment encompassed what we call the “Scientific Revolution,” and gave us not just modern chemistry, biology, physics, medicine, and lives defined by technological doo-dabs, but the belief that the world existed to be deciphered, and human life to improve.

The Renaissance had set the stage. Folks in Renaissance Italy (about 1350-1600) looked back to the glories of past art and republicanism for inspiration, as History relates in its overview, and wound up believing that the future was something to make, not endure. The greatest times of humanity were not past and relegated to scholasticism (analyzing and debating religious texts), but ahead and a by-product of human will and self-improvement. This way of thinking, which spread through Europe at the time, is “humanism.” Anytime someone says, “I can do it, I can be better,” they’re practically quoting the Enlightenment’s humanist ethos. Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: these philosophers and more defined the back-and-forth discoveries and discussions of the age. But by the time Queen Victoria took the throne, many folks were left feeling empty and wanting a reconnection to the divine.

WHEN MAGIC LOOKS LIKE SCIENCE

n_defender/Shutterstock
The Spiritism, mediumship, magical practices, and the like of the Victorian era weren’t new inventions. They were rediscoveries of ancient pagan and occult practices reinterpreted through the scientific age. The Enlightenment necessitated a diminution of traditional religious doctrine, particularly of the Christian variety, which allowed latent, submerged but not forgotten, ways of the past to rise once again. Such practices took on a “scientific” tenor, couched as they were between the natural sciences of the past and the hard scientific formality of modernity.

Alchemy is one example (circa the 1600s, per Live Science), built on the old notion of substances as “perfectable” in the way that the heavens were perfect because they were nearest to God, unlike Earth. Investigate and experiment with the right combination of materials and ingredients, like chemistry, and bam: Lead becomes gold. Freemasonry led to 17th-century Rosicrucianism, a sort of remixed combination of a bunch of ancient religions (via the Rosicrucian Order), which yielded to the Order of the Golden Dawn in 1887 in Victorian London. Each was a more rigidly formalized version of magical practices than the last, with rankings, levels, initiations, and ultra-standardized rituals. If you want to see exactly how systemized — imitating the form of science — the Order of the Golden Dawn is, have a look at their curriculum of the Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn. All such lines of inquiry were attempts to see beyond the obvious, denigrative, material truth of the then-modern world.

SPIRIT OVER MATTER, AND LIFE AFTER DEATH

Jbruiz/Shutterstock
While some people in the Victorian era engaged in systematized versions of magical inquiry like that of the Order of the Golden Dawn, others went the totally opposite direction towards all things “spiritual.” Seances, hypnotism and mesmerism, mediumship, divination, clairvoyance: These all fall under the header of “Spiritism,” which was all the rage from the mid-Victorian era to the beginning of the 20th century. We’re talking celebrity mediums, levitating tables, ectoplasm spewed from the mouth, voice-swapping when communicating with the Great Beyond, you name it (as The New Yorker describes).

Queen Victoria herself was a big believer in Spiritism, and attended seances after her beloved husband Prince Albert died in 1861 (via The Conversation). Across the Atlantic, Spiritism took off following the end of the Civil War in 1865. The creation of “talking boards” (like the brand name “Ouija,” via the Smithsonian) aided such endeavors, while the rise of mesmerism and hypnotism reinforced hope in the power of spirit over matter (via Victorian Web).

Looking at these examples alone, it’s not too hard to see why Spiritism took root. Not only had life and careers become mechanized and depersonalized, but so had war and death. Those living in such an age of spiritual ennui desperately wanted to believe in life after death. Those whose loved ones had died by the distant, detached cannon fire of battlefields wanted to feel some personal, human connection to those lost.

PHOTOGRAPHY AND RITUAL DRUG USE

General Photographic Agency/Getty Images
Not only did Victorian Spiritism and occult practices develop as a reaction to scientific progress, they were aided by technology, too. Photography, in particular, helped buoy the popularity of the occult. Mediums often doctored photographs to provide evidence of “spirits,” such as ghostly figures or hands intruding into photos (as The Old Operating Theater depicts). Researchers John Pavlik and Shravan Regret have gone so far as to suggest that the Victorian “mixed-method” approach to photographic manipulation, especially the understanding of visual illusions and stereography (overlapping right-left images to give something a 3D look), prefigured everything from cathode ray tubes to virtual reality (VR) (via Rutgers).

Less mechanical of an influence, but no less scientifically aided, were Victorian drugs. Laboratory-made chemicals like morphine piggybacked on the invention of the hypodermic needle in 1840 (via Welcome Collection). People could not only eat or smoke drugs, drop them into drinks in liquid form (like ether), dissolve them into powders like laudanum (a powdered opium mixed with alcohol), but inject them directly into the body. Many of these drugs were meant for medical use, but could be bought at any random apothecary (via the National Trust for Scotland). Those attracted to the occult sought such drugs for their mind-altering “clairvoyant and telepathic effects,” including folks such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, writer of “Sherlock Holmes” (also via Welcome Collection). Also on the list? Nitrous oxide used as a global anesthetic, which Queen Victoria herself rather enjoyed (via Science History).

CELEBRITY OCCULTISTS AND CLASS DISTINCTIONS

PhotoChur/Shutterstock
As Victorian occultism rose in popularity, so did celebrity occultists. In France, figures like poet and artist Éliphas Lévi (1810-1875) made a huge impact on generations of occultists with writings on Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, and much more, as St. John’s Seminary describes. Incidentally, we have Lévi to thank for popularizing the famous “Baphomet” image that’s come to be adopted by the Church of Satan (via Britannica). In the U.S., Helena Petrovna Blavatsky formed the Theosophical Society in 1875, which sought to fuse western magical traditions with eastern mysticism into a kind of universal, pan-religious belief system, as the Theosophical Society in America explains. Meanwhile, mediums like Cora Hatch grew to fame and acclaim, as shown by a 1859 New York Times article about her lecture “The Unity of the Law of God.”

Amid ardent believers and blatant charlatans, some folks in the Victorian era got involved in the occult simply because it was something to do. Friends went to séances, society at large was interested, and so on. Young girls, for instance, as The Old Operating Theater explains, might go to a medium just to ask the age-old question, “What boy likes me?” The occult was also a way for people to reach across industry-forged class gaps that were widening at the same time as they were becoming more flexible. In a very real way, the Victorian era forecasted modernity’s “everyone find what works for them” attitude towards spirituality.

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A time marked by gothic architecture, wide skirts, and the utmost in elegance, the Victorian era was a time that most romanticized and associate with some of the world’s best literature and most legendary lifestyles. While Victorian influences made their way around the world, there were also many dangers associated with this period and time that many didn’t immediately realize. Innovation and invention were two things that were in abundance between the early 1800s and the year 1900, but this also led to some unexpected consequences as well as unsavory situations for many uninformed people.
From ill-fated ship passage to other countries to the use of harmful chemicals that had the intention of bettering lives, the Victorian era was just as morbid as it was elaborate. A truly contradictory period full of experimental nature and a desire to advance human life, these were the most fatal flaws that affected people living during that time, from travel to home life.   Source

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Elite/Globalization

Victorian England, was wrought with contrasts of morality and hypocrisy, splendour and squalor, prosperity and poverty.

At the start of the Victorian era, the elite were in total control of society and its politics. The peoples of the Victorian Era, specifically those in the West, shared a set of moral and social values that were keenly showed, but were not always followed.

While the elite maintained their traditional values, Victorian values and attitudes changed and the elite began to recognise and promote the middle class.

National differences and antagonisms between different cultures and nations were disappearing and rapid globalization, was a core theme of the Victorian Era, 

During Victorian times, the landed gentry became wealthy business owners who still controlled politics and the economy.

The Victorian era is often thought of as a time when society and its rules were rigid and strict.

Morality

In many ways the Victorian age reflected values that Queen Victoria herself espoused: moral responsibility and domestic propriety and for the first time, this morality was imposed on the upper class.

If one has to define Victorian morality, it is based upon a group of principles or standard of moral conduct including practising sexual restraint, zero acceptance of criminal activity and a stern demeanour. This was the platform where all that Victorian morality and inventions and discoveries were showcased to the world at large.

Religion, morality, elitist thinking, industrialization all played an important role in the formation of what we today know as the Victorian era morality.

A façade of sobriety, sternness and piety was adopted while turning a blind eye to the many evils that were rampant in Victorian England.  The era saw a widespread cultivation of an outward appearance of dignity and restraint, together with the prominence of negative social phenomena such as the widespread use of tobacco, drugs, alcohol, prostitution, and child labour

The ruling class were claiming propriety on the one hand but showing a total lack of regard for human welfare on the other.

Religious morality changed drastically during the Victorian Era. ^[1] 

Children

Victoria’s England was a child-dominated society. Throughout her long reign, one out of every three of her subjects was under the age of fifteen. The population explosion that occurred during this period was accompanied by a tremendous amount of industrialization and urbanization; by the end of the century, a vast majority of children lived in towns rather than rural communities. Families tended to be large, although the birth rate declined a bit over the course of the century as more information on contraception became available. The rapid growth of towns quickly outstripped affordable housing, leading to overcrowding and shockingly poor sanitary conditions. Coupled with infectious diseases and impure milk and food, these factors contributed to very high infant and child mortality rates.

The novels of Charles Dickens, the most popular author of the Victorian era, also reveal an intense concern about the vulnerability of children. 

The Victorian era produced an abundance of artists, writers and poets.  Much of the art they produced reveals a disturbing tendency to conceive of the child as the ideal romantic partner. In novels like Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and J. M. Barrie’s The Little White Bird (1902), besotted bachelors pursue children rather than women, while Dowson wrote a sonnet sequence celebrating the charms “Of a Little Girl.” Dowson also fell in love with an eleven-year-old named Adelaide Foltinowicz, proposing to her when she was fourteen. He was not alone; eminent Victorians like John Ruskin and the Archbishop of Canterbury also wooed young girls, and child prostitution was an accepted if deplored fact of London life.

High infant mortality rates, inadequate schooling, and child labor persisted right to the end of the century, suggesting that many Victorians remained unconvinced that childhood should be marked off as a protected period of dependence and development.

Despite Victorian values that espoused dignity and social responsibility, England’s underclass was exploited through child labor and prostitution.

The British government dragged its feet at raising the minimum age for part-time factory work from 10 to 11, even though they had promised to extend it to 12 at an 1890 European congress on child labor. Poor children who survived infancy were often put to work at an early age.

Elizabeth Barrett’s poem The Cry of the Children (1843) may strike us as exaggerated, but it was based upon reliable evidence concerning children of five years of age who dragged heavy tubs of coal through low-ceilinged mine passages for sixteen hours a day.

Life in early Victorian mines and factories was much like Thomas Hobbes’ “state of nature”-“poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

As a part of Common law system, abortions were considered to be illegal in the Victorian England anytime after the movements of the fetus can be felt for the very first time by its mother. However, despite the enforcement of abortion laws, abortions were very common in Victorian England

Health

Rising health concerns in the late Victorian era cultivated a veritable hypochondriac siege mentality among middle class men. ^[17] 

Rabies was of relatively high concern in the 1800s, according to Geri Walton. One of the most well-known instances of rabies took place in Manchester in 1881 when a rabid dog ran into a shop, biting a girl twice before being chased down. Patients would seem fine until they, too, became infected with hydrophobia, to which there was no cure. A vaccine was believed to be invented in 1885 until it was revealed to be ineffective and still to this day, there is no vaccine or cure for the animal-transmitted disease.

While fog and smoke are often associated with London, during the 1800s, it was from a rather unpleasant source. Between the steamboats that were fully operational in the harbor and the fact that coal was the main source of energy, soot and smoke was constantly escaping from houses and businesses. Aside from visibility and lung health being an issue, the scent and smells of London during the 1800s was far from glamorous. With businesses booming – from glue workshops to farms and slaughterhouses, leading to manure and other unsavory, putrid scents – there was a consistent string of scents being pumped into the city air. There weren’t many places city residents could go to escape offensive smells such as these, thus limiting air purity greatly.  Many of the health risks associated with these smells were not immediately realized as people inhaled them on the daily

It was a time of peace, and medicine was seeing incredible advances, travel was not something that was up to par. As entertainment such as circuses and festivals were on the move, people would turn to ships to get them from country to country. Safe passage was something that was not guaranteed, as many didn’t immediately realize how cramped, primal, and rough traveling by ship would be.

Religion

Victorian England was a deeply religious country, one in which matters of religion were regarded with a high degree of importance. Victorians had a very relationship to God, and an acute awareness of time, past, present, and future.

The Victorian era was the first great “Age of Doubt” and a critical moment in the history of Western ideas. 

The theory of evolution based on empirical evidence would call into question Christian beliefs and Victorian values.  In many places, including the United States, debates over evolution and religion in society that began during the Victorian era still rage on today.

The story of Victorian doubt is both fascinating and important for understanding why we continue to be mired in fierce cultural battles over the status of evolution and the value of religious faith.  Victorians succeeded in turning doubt from a religious sin into an ethical necessity.

Orientalism offered several avenues for approaching the many different paths for seeking answers to spiritual questions in the Victorian era.  Romanitic stories of the Orient such as Arabian Nights, theatrical peformances, opium dens, etc. was the beginning of eastern influence over the west.

The contradictions and perplexities of rapid transition were more felt in religion than in any other subject, it may be doubted whether organised Christianity has ever been more influential in England than during the Victorian age.

Imperialism

The Victorian Era is probably best known for its expansion of England as a global power into what became known as the British Empire

The Victorian Era started with the rise to power of Queen Victoria in 1837 however, some people interpret that it starts in 1830. Queen Victoria’s imperialist principles gave Great Britain; India, Australia, Canada, Cape Colony (known today as part of South Africa), Kenya and Uganda.

In their 1993 study, British Imperialism, P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins presented it as the result of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’. In their view, imperialism was the product of surplus capital deployed globally by genteel investors who turned to high finance as a way to generate wealth without having to engage directly in trade.

Philanthropy

Dickens’ novels capture the contradictions of Victorian philanthropy the enormous need for generosity in an age where poverty and plenty literally rubbed shoulders, and the inadequacy of so much of the charity actually provided.  Dickens ridiculed a selfish, paternalist attitude to philanthropy that, even today, colours our perception of the Victorians, taking a direct swipe at the leading philanthropic body of the time, the Charity Organisation Society (COS). ^[7] A brief exploration of charity giving in the Victorian times denotes that their philanthropist nature had little purpose in uplifting the poor out their miserable conditions. ^[7]

Critics of Victorian philanthropy have questioned whether this type of giving was really very effective, for, as the Socialist thinker G.D.H. Cole put it, “The great Trusts of the nineteenth century put most of their money into immortalising their benefactors in bricks and mortar.

Society/Behavior  

the British parliament passed a reform bill in 1832 that (at least to some degree) redistributed voting rights to reflect growing population in newly industrializing centers like Manchester and Liverpool. ^[8] The Victorian period saw the real birth of the middle class as a force in politics and social structure.

Victorian gender ideology was premised on the “doctrine of separate spheres.” This stated that men and women were different and meant for different things. Men were physically strong, while women were weak. For men sex was central, and for women reproduction was central. Men were independent, while women were dependent.

In the Victorian Era, etiquette lubricated the mechanism of social exchange: There were rules for making new friends, keeping up with old friends and even cutting out morally dubious friends. In the Victorian era women were to get married to a man of the same or a better social status, be good wives, and be a mother to her husband’s children

Contradictions inherent within notions of the ideal, civilized British man created anxiety for men. Middle class men in the late Victorian era thus defined, policed, and filtered the world around them in an effort to secure an amorphous ideal of civilized masculinity.

There was greater social mobility as men from the bourgeoisie were able to work for aristocratic titles and women were allowed to marry into wealthy aristocratic families.  But, while the Middle Classes prospered in the Victorian era, the working class did not.

All of these changes brought to the fore what Victorians called The Women Question, which concerned issues of sexual inequality in politics, economic life, education, and social intercourse. Samuel Butler (1835-1902), for example, in his novel, The Way of All Flesh, Butler satirized family life, in particular the tyrannical self-righteousness of a Victorian father,

Despite its having been an era of great social change, the Victorian period (particularly its early and middle periods) saw little progress for women’s rights. 

Sexuality

Today, the term “Victorian morality” can describe any set of values that espouse sexual restraint, low tolerance of crime and a strict social code of conduct. If such were the living conditions of labourers, those of the other two social classes of Victorian society were quite different. Contrary to popular conception, however, Victorian society recognised that both men and women enjoyed copulation. 

With Victorians, presenting such oddities as hairdressing and spiritualism, children’s literature and funerals, even the queen’s libido — “she was highly sexed.

According to historical record, contrary to what might be expected, Queen Victoria liked to draw and collect male nude figure drawings and even gave one to her husband as a present.

Victorian men and women may have undressed behind screens rather than in front of their spouses, but all bets were off, apparently, at the beach, where just about everybody went fully nude.

Literature

From a literary point of view, the Victorian Age was above all the age of fiction, mainly because of the great popularity this literary genre gained in the period. The first part of the Victorian Age is characterized by the triumph of the realistic novel: the aim of the realistic fiction is to represent life as it really is.

Science/Technology

The first Industrial Revolution In the period 1760 to 1830 the Industrial Revolution  was largely confined to Britain. Aware of their head start, the British forbade the export of machinery, skilled workers, and manufacturing techniques.  Source

Science and Technology were enjoying the spotlight as new discoveries and inventions were abundant, changing peoples lives and perspectives. It was the Industrial Revolution, and a trying time for biblical faith.

Queen Victoria, perhaps more so than any previous monarch, became visually synonymous with the country she ruled, in part because she was the first monarch who lived in the age of photography: her image could be relatively easily produced, reproduced, and distributed.

The rapid growth of London is one of the many indications of the most important development of the age: the shift from a way of life based on the ownership of land to a modern urban economy based on trade and manufacturing.

All branches of science including botany, zoology, geology, anthropology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, medicine saw major developments and expansions.

One of the most important and effective issues of the Victorian era that has impacted us is that of the invention of the middle class. It was through the ideas of Karl Marx and socialism that this came about. This was the theory behind it. The act was the formation of factories, as well as the birth of the industrial revolution.

It was an era of rapid transition and change. The “Age of Reform” of industrializations and technological progress, of extreme poverty and the exploitation of factory workers, of social reforms, of scientific discoveries and religious unrest.

Gas lighting became widespread during the Victorian era in industry, homes, public buildings and the streets, and public railways expanded on an unprecedented scale. Travel exploded and people were able to make use of more hours of the day.  SOURCE

Complete list of famous Victorian era inventions

Here is a timeline of inventions during the Victorian era. Please note that not inventions are from Britain, but includes inventions from other countries like USA, France etc. as well.

Year	Invention
1838	First photograph
1839	Photographic paper to develop pictures
1839	Invention of the first pedal bicycle
1839	The first paddle steamship
1840	First postage stamps introduced
1843	First Christmas card
1844	Invention of Morse Code message
1845	Invention of rubber tyres
1845	London Road in Nottingham covered with tarmac (tarmacadam) making roads smoother
1846	Sewing Machine invented
1849	Concrete development helped further construction
1849	First glider flown by a pilot
1850s	Invention of post boxes
1850	Petrol
1850	Sewing machine with possible home use
1851	Invention of ice cream in the USA
1852	Opening of first public flushing toilet  in London
1854	Iron converted to steel, giving strength and making buildings and shipbuilding possible
1855	Safety matches
1856	Pasteurizing process
1859	Discovery of oil
1860	Horse-drawn tram
1863	The world’s first underground steam powered railway becomes operational in London
1864	First jelly babies made
1872	Invention of the penny-farthing bicycle with huge front wheels and no breaks
1873	Typewriter invention
1875	The first chocolate Easter eggs
1876	Invention of telephone on 7 March 1876
1877	Voice recording
1878	Electric street lighting starts in London
1879	Invention of the electric light bulb
1885	Safety Bicycle with chain, driven rear wheel and same size wheels
1883	Electric railway started
1884	Blackpool has first British electric tram network
1885	Invention of first petrol motorcar
1887	Invention of the gramophone
1888	Pneumatic tyres by Dunlop
1888	Kodak box camera
1894	Moving pictures  invented
Dec 18 1890	The first electric public rail / underground train in London
1890	First comic book
1891	The first hydro-electric power station which generated electricity from water flow
1895	X-rays which revolutionised modern medicine
1895	Wireless radio

This list of inventions during the Victorian era is surely not an exhaustive one but hope it highlights the things Victorians did for us.

End of the Era

This era was characterized by rapid change and developments, furthermore it was a time of prosperity, broad imperial expansion and great political reform. ^[2] Today, the historians view this period in history as a contradiction in terms. ^[3] For many Victorians, this final phase of the century was a time of serenity and security, the age of house parties and long weekends in the country. Among the poets, one topic that links their writings together is love, for love, despite the reputed strain of puritanism in the age, is as prominent in Victorian poetry as it had been in the time of John Donne and his followers. Much Victorian nonfiction prose is marked by a sense of urgency, which reflects the pace of change of the age: many authors felt that society would, at some point, be overwhelmed by change and descend into some form of what Matthew Arnold called simply “anarchy.”

it can be said that although most perceptive Victorians did share a sense of satisfaction in the industrial and political preeminence of England during the period, they also suffered from an anxious sense of something lost, a sense too being displaced persons in a world made alien by technological changes which had been exploited too quickly for the adaptive powers of the human psyche.

If we strip away the gadgets and fashions, Victorian England was not unlike the United States today.
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With all the changes that took place in the Victorian Era it is hard to pick out the most important ones.  This was a time of total upheaval of all that the world had known.  There is one factor that in my observation was extremely important and highly overlooked.  The changes in TIME.  How we marked it, how we kept it, how it affected us.  We know that the Devil is all about changing Times and Seasons, and turning everything upside down.  This Victorian Era was a major win for the Devil.  He managed to fool the world into questioning the truth of God’s word and their very origins.  Time moved from God’s time to Mechanical Time, for the purpose of Control of Humanity.
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