Society, Politics and Class

In 1800 about 80 per cent of the population of Great Britain lived in the countryside; in 1900 about 80 per cent in the towns and cities. When considering this massive demographic shift, the result of property enclosures and the Industrial Revolution, students of the Victorian period must be careful to guard against idealized conceptions of pre-Victorian Britain as a natural or ‘organic’ society, an unchanging, localized rural order distinguished by stable, prosperous communities. Equally, it is worth remembering that although after the middle of the nineteenth century agriculture was no longer the hub around which the entire British economy turned, it was only in 1901 that transport and the metal industries surpassed it as the main employers of the British population. Notwithstanding, it remains the case that Victorian society was dramatically marked by the twofold processes of industrialization and urbanization, and it is important to recognize the extent to which Britain was transformed by new living conditions, working environments, modes of social interaction and organization — and the possibilities and pressures associated with such changes. As Marx and Engels famously noted, it was a period when it seemed that ‘All that is solid melts into air’. Victorian society, politics and culture were energized at once by excitement and anxiety.