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• The Victorian age is the period of the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) and it is characterized by a series of changes from the economical, political and social point of view: In these years Grand Britain went through long century of prosperity and economical power. However, the decisions made in the political field gave rise a lot of worries: In fact, since 1832 with the Reform Bill, a period of major reforms, including the important Education Act, started. Moreover, this reign was marked by the Industrial Revolution, which gave a significant push to the already thriving British economy. In general, the achievements of men in the most diverse fields of study contributed to the increase of wealth of the country, which was not divided equally between the various social classes.
While these developments were highly profitable for a few entrepreneurial individuals, the majority of the population suffered as amore modern social structure, with power concentrated in upper and middle class groups was established. Unskilled labourers moving to towns had little choice but to live in slums, renting only the worst built dwellings in the most overcrowded and unsanitary district while more prosperous suburbs developed away from the town centres for the more wealthy classes.
The large impersonal factories also served to make the workers faceless. A process of dehumanization started right in this period. Without question, industrialization led to great
prosperity and growth for the country as a whole, and the feeling of the age was gloriously embodied through the Great Exhibition of 1851, but on an individual level, it could be difficult to see urbanization as a positive progression.
The workers had to endure a lot of problems. Their places of work – the factories – were unpleasant and dangerous, and their detrimental effects on the environment form the mental image often associated with the Industrial Revolution.
Country and Town, Middle Class and Low Class.
During the Victorian age there was a profound difference between life in the country and life in the city town. Rural accommodation was primitive, and the likelihood of having any form of sanitation was low. Communities were isolated, unlike urban communities which thrived to such a degree that they developed their own informal economies. However, despite the improvements which were certainly a result of urbanization the country remained the goal of many: Throughout the nineteenth century, large numbers of English businessmen who had made money in the city wanted nothing better than to establish themselves in appropriate style in the country.
The first people to benefit from urbanization were the upper and middle classes, followed by the skilled workers who were unthreatened by mechanization. As is so often the case,
It was the unskilled laborers, who had unwittingly laid the foundations for many of the developments that occurred over the following century giving greater personal satisfaction and political freedom, that were the last to benefit.
Architecture and Urbanism in literature
Consequently, both in life and in literature, discordant voices emerged: while many were praising the technological and economic boom, many other claimed that human happiness and the same relationships were falling apart just because of innovations. In fact one of the major consequences of the spread of factories was the rapid increase in urbanization, which led not only to the increase of mass poverty (those who worked in the factory was often underpaid and forced to live in inhumane sanitary conditions), but contributed also to the deterioration of the English countryside.
Authors such as Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw fervently opposed to materialism, mechanization and injustice in their works, denouncing the problems of urban-industrial middle class.
Charles Dickens
Dickens was a great urban novelist in England, but also one of the most important social commentators who used fiction to criticize economic, social, and moral abuses in the Victorian era. Maybe also because of a suffering experience in a factory during his childhood, he showed compassion and empathy towards the vulnerable and disadvantaged components of his time and indirectly contributed to several important social reforms. In his novels he often lingered in the description of building and structure to support his social analysis and he depicted persuasively the disorder, squalor, blight, decay, and the human misery of a modern industrial city.
Dickens’s novel Hard Times is set in a fictional industrial town called ‘Coketown’, a name immediately suggesting sooty buildings and a general grimy atmosphere. Here the times are "hard" not only because of poverty, working conditions and the class struggle, but also because of infertility, barrenness and waste of human life, derived, according to the author, from the repression of the imaginative and emotional side of men.
The novel of social criticism, showing the effects of the industrial revolution, after which men are reduced to "arms" and to a pure labor force and the result of the Utilitarian principles. He also lingers on a reflexion on the educational system, with a school in which originality and creativity are no longer stimulated.
Opposed to the ugliness and squalor of Coketown, it is then presented the reality of the Circus, described as the world of entertainment, solidarity, mutual support and sincere affection, home to those who have a non-material wealth, but internal. Dickens describes the typical industrial city and compares it with Hell. In fact it is characterized by pollution, smoke and a thumping and repetitive noise. The author also uses others metaphor to portray the town: the buildings were “black, like the painted face of a savage”, and the air contained “interminable serpents of smoke”.
The monstrous machines and the ‘’titanic’’chimney allude to the idea of control. These metaphors describe the urban setting as an "alien" and ditressing world, in which man moves with difficulty. Even if it is a fictional town, it could also have been based upon either Manchester, which gives a sense of the overall nastiness of the contemporary urban environment.
Coketown is the city of facts and it’ dominast feature is ugliness. Its anonymous and insignificant inhabitants are the product of a inhuman, materialistic society in which relationship are contamined by economics.
With this work, Dickens critique the capitalistic and utilitarianistic mentality by offering an alternative attitude which encompasses good-hartedness, charity and solidarity.
Conclusion:
In nineteenth century Britain saw a huge increase in population accompanied by rapid urbanization stimulated by the industrial revolution. The countryside was emptied and most of the population took to the most industrialized cities. The large number of unskilled people looking for work and helped to keep wages barely subsistence level. The available housing was scarce and expensive, and resulted in overcrowding. These problems were obviously magnified in London, where the population was growing at record speeds. Large houses were turned into flats and tenements, and while the owners not providing for the restructuring of these residences, appeared the slums. People in slums and factory lived and worked in the worst conditions and they were part of an enormous mechanism that was destined for lasting years and years.
The structure and the organizations of towns, perfectly mirrors the Victorian society:
The difference between the luxurious houses and the squalid hovels correspond to the social gap between the rich and dominant middle class and an exploited mass of workers. Also in literature, that tragic situation has been represented in a critique way by authors as Dickens and Shaw, However, as architecture is a direct expression of the culture and of the mood of an age, the deep-rooted middle class mentality continued ruling and the urban setting remained the same for a long time as a manifestation of it.
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