Factoids of the Victorian Era

I’ve been preparing for the Brass Screw Confederacy, a steampunk festival going on this weekend, and have been doing a lot of research into the time period most closely associated with this eccentric subgenre. With that in mind, I thought I’d share some of the more interesting statistics and facts I learned from this unique period in British and world history.

Dates

- The Victorian Era is defined as the period of time during Queen Victoria’s reign from 1837 to 1901.

- The Industrial Revolution roughly started in the 1760’s and ended around the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign

- The Second Industrial Revolution began sometime between 1840 and 1860 and ended with the 1st World War

- Between 1831 and 1901, the population of England more than doubled from 14 million to 32.5 million

- Several other western nations had similar periods of growth and prosperity at this time, including France’s Belle Epoche and America’s Gilded Age

Innovations of the First Industrial Revolution

- Improvements in steam power efficiency reduced fuel consumption by 5 to 10 times what it had been

- Automated weaving machines were developed for the mass production of yarn and a variety of fabrics

- Coal replaced wood as the primary fuel source, proving to be easier to acquire and more readily available

- Machine tools allowed metal to be shaped into uniform pieces quickly, rather than having a craftsman build each piece by hand

Innovations of the Second Industrial Revolution

- More effective furnaces were hot enough to melt steel, allow this stronger metal to be used in the construction of railways, buildings, bridges, and ships

- Paper was first mass-produced from wood pulp, coinciding nicely with the invention of the fountain pen and the pencil

- The incandescent lightbulb provided a safer, more effective lighting source than oil lamps

- Developments in petroleum production, rubber, and electric assembly lines paved the way for the automobile

- The telegraph (and later, the telephone) connected the world through the first telecommunications networks

Child Labor and Prostitution

- Children as young as 5 years old worked in England’s coal mines, were expected to work 16 hours a day, and were usually dead by age 25

- In 1831, the number of inspectors tasked with enforcing child labor laws was just four for all of England

- Charles Dickens worked in a boot-black factory at 12 years old to support his family that had been placed in debtor's prison

- In 1857, there were 8,600 prostitutes in London that were known to police, although estimates at the time of the true number of “fallen women” was as high as 80,000

- An 1851 census showed that there were 4% more women than men in the United Kingdom, a disproportion that served to increase the number of prostitutes as women struggled to sustain themselves without options for marriage or other employment



This is just a small sampling of some of the information that I found. If you’d like to learn more, then check out The Victorian Web, an amazing collection of period documents and historical papers all focusing on the Victorian Era. And for those of you who are going to the Brass Screw Confederacy in Port Townsend, I’ll see you this weekend!