Search on a topic like "Victorian attitudes" or "Victorian mindset," and you won't find much of anything positive. Victorians, we're told, had pretty rotten attitudes. Merriam-Webster, for example, defines a Victorian attitude as "typical of the moral standards, attitudes, or conduct of the age of Victoria especially when considered stuffy, prudish, or hypocritical." Terms like prudishness, hypocrisy, sexual repression, and rigid class and gender roles pop up repeatedly. Rather than take issue with some of these specific claims, let's look at the logic surrounding the notion of a "Victorian" attitude or mindset. Can a single mindset, or specific set of attitudes, be said to define the entire Victorian era? Let's start with the issue of time. The Victorian era covered a period of 64 years – the better part of the 19th century. Some sites, however, refer to "19th century" attitudes, thus expanding the timeframe to 100 years. Do attitudes truly remain constant for 64 (or 100) years? When we think of our own era, we think in terms of decades, not centuries. When discussing the 20th century, we speak of the forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, and so on. Each decade is characterized by very different attitudes, beliefs, values, developments, technologies, styles, fashions, and so on. The same is true of the Victorian era. Attitudes, values, technologies, fashions, and so forth vary dramatically from one decade to the next. The 1860s look quite different from the 1870s, the 1880s look different from the 1890s – and there is a vast gulf between the 1890s and the 1840s. "Law and Order" "Believes in Army Expenditure" "An Old-Fashioned Tory" Victorians were well aware of the diversity of opinions in their society. These images (and those below) come from a pictorial essay designed to show how many different viewpoints to be found within a single pub. English Illustrated Magazine, 1892 Think about your own family tree. Do you have the same attitudes and beliefs as your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents? (Actually, some of our great-grandparents probably were Victorians!) Victorians felt the same way; people of the 1890s refer to the early part of the era as their grandparents' day, and gently mock how quaint that era was compared to their own. It's not so hard to imagine attitudes changing from one generation to the next, but how about individual attitudes? Might they also change over time? Here's how, in 1901, Emma Brewer describes how her views changed over the years: Great was the prejudice against the first lady doctors in England, and lady surgeons were regarded as utterly improper. I remember in the early days being present at a reception in the house of a celebrated physician [who introduced] a lady student... preparing to be a doctor. I feel ashamed now at the manner in which we looked upon her; it was rather as we should have regarded a new animal at the Zoological Gardens.... Notwithstanding the former opposition to girls entering medical life, there are now some hundreds of women doctors practising in the United Kingdom... Many girls have become chemists and druggists, and it is quite a usual thing to see them occupied as dispensers in hospitals. Extremely good appointments are open to women in the General Post and Telegraph Offices... The demand for trained nurses grows day by day, and I might go on enumerating the occupations of girls of the present day, some of which were not even known by name to those of fifty years ago. Brewer's attitudes changed partly because the world changed – and the world, surely, changed because attitudes changed. There's a chicken-and-egg issue if there ever was one! Now let's look at geography. The "Victorian era" existed in Britain and America – and one might also mention, briefly, the vast number of British Victorians who lived in foreign colonies. Much of America's law, social customs, etiquette, fashion, and more stemmed from Britain. But Americans didn't possess the exact same attitudes as their cousins across the pond. For example, while Americans embraced the notion of the hard-working self-made man and the value of personal achievement, such ideas were slow to become acceptable, at least to the upper classes, in Britain. So one can hardly assume that the "same" attitudes and mindset prevailed on both sides of the Atlantic. A quick glance at history shows that the Victorian era was one of constant controversy. But you can't have controversy if everyone shares the same attitudes and beliefs! The existence of such ongoing political and social ferment demonstrates clearly that there was no single "mindset" for the era, but rather, an abundance of conflicting viewpoints. I suspect some writers might, at this point, declare that "Well, the prevailing mindset was held by the upper and ruling classes, who just imposed their viewpoint on everyone else." That argument, however, simply demonstrates the lack of a prevailing mindset. A manner of thinking imposed from above isn't a mindset; it's a rule, and while others may be compelled to follow that rule, that doesn't mean it matches their mindset. "The Man in the Corner, Who Says Nothing but May Think the More" "The Blacksmith is for Free Education" "Wants an Eight-Hour Bill, and Believes in One Man, One Vote" Now let's ask whether a particular mindset can be ascribed to a particular demographic. I've noticed that responses to this type of search nearly always brings up statements indicating that men ruled and women obeyed. This would lead one to suppose that, at the very least, one could divide prevailing attitudes and counter-attitudes along gender lines. Of course, women in Britain quite often outnumbered men – by over 500,000 according to the 1851 census! So if one could divide attitudes along gender lines, one would have to argue that the attitudes of women were surely more prevalent simply by weight of numbers. So why don't we see responses like "Most Victorians believed that women should be able to work outside the home," or "The majority of Victorians believed that women should have access to higher education," or "Many Victorians believed women deserved the right to vote"? You'll find no shortage of articles reminding us that many Victorians opposed those ideas. However, the reality is that women achieved remarkable strides in all three of those areas – and for those things to happen, an awful lot of people had to believe that they should happen. However, it's far too simplistic to assume that this mindset was predominant in the female side of the population, and rare on the male side. Women might argue that a law should be changed, but it was up to men to change it. Women's suffrage is a good example. It's easy to assume that women wanted it and men didn't, but that's far from the truth. In Britain, suffrage bills were introduced (by men) in Parliament repeatedly from 1868 onwards; by 1872, one petition gained 243,000 signatures. Though such bills never passed, they weren't defeated by landslides. In 1870, a bill in the House of Commons failed by 220 to 151 – meaning nearly 40% of the voters favored women's suffrage. In America, Senator George Hoar noted in 1894, Nor am I one of those who think that the right to vote is denied to women by men because of a tyrant's desire to keep to themselves the rule of the State... We convert men to our cause almost as fast as we convert women... The chief single argument of the opponents of woman suffrage is that women do not want it... This shows that men were regularly converted to the cause of women's suffrage... and many women didn't want it. In fact, thousands of women in Britain and America opposed suffrage. In 1895, Clara Temple Leonard responded to Hoar's comments, noting: Having given a share in government to tens of thousands [of immigrants] who are unfitted for it, it is proposed with easy assurance to give it to millions still more unfitted. We must not look at the intelligent, virtuous, and high-minded women alone... but at the female compeers of the ignorant and brutal men who menace our safety in holding political power... Are not women also possessed of moral infirmities? Will not many women sell their votes, bargain for office, intrigue, combine with others for selfish ends?... Women are like men... only their pursuits, occupations, and habits of life differ; their sphere is domestic, their intercourse with the world far more limited... "An Advocate of Disestablishment" If we can't divide Victorian attitudes along gender lines, what other demographic discrepancies might we consider? "Class" would certainly be one. For example, it's quite clear from reading articles on "how to manage the servants" that many employers (not all!) considered their servants to be an inferior class. But one could surely assume that servants probably didn't share this attitude. And since there were far more servants in Britain and America than employers, such a notion of inferiority could hardly be considered a prevailing attitude amongst "all" Victorians. That's one of the key problems with broad statements about Victorian attitudes: they generally refer to the attitudes of the rich, titled, and powerful. Perhaps one might argue that the attitudes of these classes are most likely to influence the direction of public affairs – but as we've seen in the "woman question," that's certainly not always the case. Many people might have held the attitude that women shouldn't pursue an education or a career – but such attitudes didn't prevent women from doing exactly that. In fact, most descriptions of "prevailing" attitudes show, not so much what "Victorians" believed, but what they changed. The rich, titled, and powerful were referred to, in Britain, as the "upper ten thousand," which shows just what a small segment of society this was. Rarely do references to Victorian attitudes take into consideration the mindset of the rising middle class, the much larger working class, the impoverished classes, the servants, the women, the immigrants, and so on. Yet whenever you hear that "Victorians" thought thus-and-so about a less powerful group, it's important to remember that the members of this group were also Victorians. Their attitudes, their mindset, and their voices are just as important to the evolution of the Victorian world as the attitudes of those "above" them. To ignore them and focus on the attitudes that might have been held by the "upper ten thousand" is, in a very real way, to follow in the footsteps of that very small segment of Victorian society, and believe that only those attitudes "mattered." Find Out More: Merriam-Webster Definition of Victorian attitude https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Victorian What were the dominant virtues and values in the Victorian period and how have historians challenged their alleged ubiquity? by Oskar Pyke, December 2018 https://medium.com/@mollberg/what-were-the-dominant-virtues-and-values-in-the-victorian-period-and-how-have-historians-29d78bf7b4af Woman Suffrage (Century Magazine, 1894B) A debate over women's suffrage between Senator George F. Hoar and J.M. Buckley. What Women Can Do Best, by Clara Temple Leonard (Century Magazine, 1895A) Girls of Fifty Years Ago and Now, by Emma Brewer (Girl's Own Paper, 1901) "Fulfilling the Essentials of Woman's Being": How the 1851 British Census Legitimized Victorian Misogyny https://epubs.utah.edu/index.php/historia/article/view/1204 Census statistics on the number of males vs. females in Victorian Britain.

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