Examining Hardships in the Victorian Age in Select Literary Works

Victorian Hardship

The Victorian age, named for Queen Victoria, lasted for 70 years and was a time of quite a bit of social and economic unrest. The world was viewed in a much more realistic way than during the Romantic period and quite a few literary works were about the hardships faced during this era. During this era, women and children had little to no rights and were expected to act a certain way and do certain things; this made their lives very difficult. A majority of Victorian poetry was inspired by this; the era gave birth to a multitude of works on the difficult lives of women and children.

During Victorian England, women were considered to be beneath men; they were seen only as wives, mothers and daughters. There was a deeply engraved ideal that women were only meant to be subservient and lesser than men, even the Queen thought so. These ideals were reflected in a multitude of Victorian poems. Women were considered the “Angel of the house”, a term coined by writer, Coventry Patmore. In a section of the poem, The Angel in the House, Patmore goes into deep description of his wife as a perfect being. “My deepest rapture does her wrong. / Yet is it now my chosen task / To sing her worth as Maid and Wife” (The Angel in the House: The Paragon 36-38) Women had no real life of their own, their marriage was the pinnacle of their existence. This poem made it appear that “the implications are that cleaning and "loving" are the only tasks a woman is good at, since they are the only ones worthy of poetry praise.” (victorianlitcrystalpalace.blogspot.com/) This was the norm at the time, and the majority was happy with it. Then came the time when women started doing the jobs men would usually do. In "Living Wage for Factory Girls a Crewe, 5 May 1894," a girl writes about the unfair conditions for women in factories. She writes about the unfair gap in pay and how ridiculously overworked women are; so much so that there is no time for life outside of work. The lives of women were “governed by the clock and by the need to produce as much as possible during their long working hours.” (BBC.co.uk) Things were not very different, except instead of being devoted to their husbands, women were devoted to their jobs. Despite all of this, due to the strong enforcement of women as the keeper of the house, women have gained a certain degree of importance in Victorian society.

In addition to women, the hardships and unfair treatment of children were reflected in poetry. Children worked in mines and factories for little pay under completely unsafe conditions. “Due to the lack of safety awareness in the mines and all of Victorian child labor for that matter, death was a constant and ever-present danger.” (victorianchildren.org) Children were taken out of school as soon as feasible to “boost their family's earning power” (BBC.co.uk) and missed out on both proper education and proper childhoods. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem, The Cry of the Children, is an excellent example of a Victorian poem regarding this issue. Browning writes, “Go out, children, from the mine and from the city / Sing out, children, as the little thrushes do / Pluck you handfuls of the meadow-cowslips pretty / Laugh aloud, to feel your fingers let them through !” (The Cry of the Children 57-60), encouraging children to leave their working lives for the serene countryside. She then says, “But they answer, "Are your cowslips of the meadows / Like our weeds anear the mine? / Leave us quiet in the dark of the coal-shadows, / From your pleasures fair and fine!” (The Cry of the Children 61-63) Though conditions and pay were less than ideal, children seemed to accept their abuse just as women did.

During the Victorian era, women and children had sparse rights and were subject to unfair expectations and working standards. Many Victorian poems were written with this attitude in mind. Some works thought very highly of this mindset, like Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House; while others, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s The Cry of the Children did not. Either way, the hardships and abuse faced by women and children inspired a great deal of Victorian literature.