Liberals and Conservatives: from1832
After the Reform Act, the Whig and Tory old party ties change in the changing political landscape. Due to pushing through the new regulation, the Whigs are currently viewed as the party of change; In addition, in the 1830s, they begin to adopt the new name “Liberals,” which was previously only used to refer to the left wing of the party, whose members support “liberation” movements that have been successful in Latin America and elsewhere (see Liberal and Conservative).
At the same time, the Tories begin to refer to themselves as Conservatives, capitalizing on their recent opposition to reform by implying that their policy is to preserve everything that is best about the traditional way of life in Britain.
In practice, the two parties’ perspectives on the major issues of the century are rarely predictable. In general, the Liberals are more likely to pass social welfare legislation (such as the Factory Act of 1833 and the Ten Hours’ Act of 1847). However, Lord Shaftesbury, a Conservative MP, is the most vocal advocate for these issues, and his party is responsible for the Mines Act of 1842.
The significant issue of the 1840s, the repeal of the Corn Laws, is surrounded by similar uncertainty. The issue divides the party and was forced through parliament in 1846 by Robert Peel, a Conservative prime minister. After Peel’s death, his own minority group eventually combines with the Liberals.
Many such equals can be drawn. In order to attract more voters, the Conservatives extend the franchise in 1867, and the Liberals continue the process in 1884. On behalf of British interests abroad, the Liberal Palmerston and the Conservative Disraeli have been the two prime ministers with the most aggressive foreign policy. Additionally, when Gladstone, a Liberal prime minister, pushes for Irish Home Rule, half of his party splits into the Liberal Unionists.
Because of these factors, the century is best portrayed in terms of the major issues of the day rather than through a succession of prime ministers representing different parties. The recent expansion of new cities is one of the most pressing issues.
The growth of industrial cities: 18th – 19th century
Since the introduction of steam power, the availability of work in Britain’s factories and mills has led to an ever-increasing number of people moving from the countryside into rapidly expanding cities. In 1772, there were 25,000 people living in Manchester and Salford, which is a town that is very close to Manchester. The combined population is 181,000 in 1821. This conurbation now has 455,000 residents as of 1851.
The expansion of Manchester’s textile industry brings the same prosperity to Liverpool, a nearby port, just in time for the 1807 prohibition of the slave trade, which had been Liverpool’s primary source of wealth. Cotton comes through. Between 1815 and 1835, eight new docks are built in Liverpool.
Between 1820 and 1850, Liverpool saw a threefold increase in the amount of raw cotton brought ashore, going from half a million bales per year to 1.5 million. The population also increased by 60 percent in a single decade, from 250,000 to 400,000 people in the 1840s.
Birmingham, the other great industrial city of the time, starts at a lower point. Between 1801 and 1851, its population grows from 86,000 to 233,000. The interests of Birmingham are broader than those of Lancashire, which focuses primarily on textiles. Birmingham is fortunate to be in the center of England and to have access to a wealth of coal, iron, and wood in its immediate vicinity.
The railroad’s arrival is the only thing that can fully realize Birmingham’s potential. 1838 marks the completion of the line to London. By that time, the city’s workshops, which specialize in industries based on metal, are prepared to serve a broader market. Alexis de Tocqueville, a French visitor in 1835, describes the location as “an immense workshop, a huge forge” where one hears “nothing but the sound of hammers and the whistle of steam escaping from boilers” and only sees “busy people and faces brown with smoke.”
To a withdrew eyewitness the Modern Upset can appear to be heartfelt during the 1780s and fascinatingly odd during the 1830s. However, it is also becoming clear that it creates an atmosphere where working can be extremely unpleasant.
Factories and slums: 19th – 20th century
The children of any peasant community work in the fields. Children joining their parents in the factories is not particularly unusual as families move in from the countryside to work in Britain’s developing industrial cities. Additionally, the factory owners welcome a supply of economically constrained workers willing to work long hours for low pay.
Without sanitation, the poor in any rapidly expanding city always have worse living conditions than peasants in the countryside. However, at the beginning of the 19th century, exploitation in the factories in Britain is the catalyst for the initial reform measures.
In 1802, the first Factory Act enacts a rule that, even by today’s standards, seems remarkable. It restricts a child’s ability to work in a factory to twelve hours per day.
The reformers manage to make significant enhancements to the Factory Act of 1833 despite facing a lot of opposition. Children under the age of nine are now prohibited from working. Those matured somewhere in the range of nine and thirteen are restricted to eight hours of work and should be given two hours of schooling every day (this is the principal little step towards obligatory training in England). Furthermore, an inspectorate is set up for the manufacturing plants, but at first with just four examiners for the whole country.
The Ten Hour Act of 1847 is the final significant regulation of working hours. It sets a maximum number of hours for women and children to work in the country’s factories and textile mills. Lord Shaftesbury, who also authored the Mines Act of 1842, is largely responsible for this legislation. This makes it unlawful for ladies of all ages and for young men under thirteen to be utilized underground.
By the mid-century Shaftesbury is highly worried about the state of London ghettos, crusading effectively for upgrades in lodging and public sterilization. In the twentieth century ecological contamination comes to be viewed as one more deficiency to be charged against the Modern Upset.
Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League: 1838-1846
In the same year, 1838, two political organizations are established in London and Manchester. Although they are vastly distinct, each builds on the Reform Act from earlier in the decade.
The London Working Men’s Association creates and publishes the People’s Charter in May. In addition to being a protest against the reformed parliament’s restrictions on the middle class, it is also a response to the economic depression and high unemployment of the past two years. Six political demands are made in the document: a secret ballot, equal-sized constituencies, universal male suffrage, payment for MPs, no property requirement for MPs, and annual parliaments.
Even though all of them, with the exception of annual parliaments, are taken for granted a century later, the Liberal government currently led by Lord Melbourne views these as seditious proposals. During 1839 a considerable lot of those talking around the country in the Chartist cause are condemned to a couple of years in gaol. Nevertheless, a network of local organizations had gathered more than three million signatures for the Charter by 1842. Chartism has developed into the first national movement of the working class in Britain.
In the meantime, the middle classes’ own pressure group is making even more impressive progress, which is related to the power shift promised by the Reform Act.
The continuation of tariffs on grain from outside the United States demonstrates the landed gentry’s absolute power in parliament prior to the Reform Act and its continued strength after it. Intended to ensure an adequately enormous English yield in season of war, the impact of the Corn Regulations in harmony time is to keep costs misleadingly high – impressively supporting the pay of the landed grandees.
Because cheap bread benefits both groups, this is a topic on which the interests of the working class and their employers in the mills coincide. The Anti-Corn Law League was founded in October 1838 by seven Manchester merchants and mill owners to advocate for the repeal of restrictive laws.
Richard Cobden and John Bright, two men, emerge as the League’s driving force. In the early 1840s, both enter parliament; Both put in a lot of effort to raise awareness of the issue throughout the country and in the house of commons.
Bit by bit their contentions win. When the 1845 potato famine in Ireland solidifies Robert Peel’s position, the prime minister is already in doubt. Food imported at a low cost is now more important than ever. Peel introduces the bill to repeal the Corn Laws in June 1846 with the support of a small portion of his Conservative party and the Liberals. He resigns four days later for bravely taking a significant step toward free trade, despite the predictable result of a party split.
Victoria, Albert and the Great Exhibition: 1837-1851
The campaigns of the Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League take place immediately following Victoria’s 18-year-old accession to the throne, which she succeeds in 1837 to her uncle William IV. Her rule of 64 years can later be viewed as one of the characterizing times of English history, matched exclusively by that of another sovereign – Elizabeth I.
Numerous components add to the strong brand picture known as the ‘Victorian age’. Some are economic and have to do with Britain’s leadership as the first industrial nation and the first country to use trains for transportation. Some are royal, mirroring the significance of India as the main state of the 100 years.
Other aspects of the Victorian image are personal, with a focus on the queen herself and her marriage to the German prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840, when they are both 21 years old. The young couple could not be more different from George IV, the queen’s debauched and childless uncle, who set the tone in the early 1900s. They were clearly in love and soon had nine children.
The new Victorian ethos is complete when prince Albert’s sincere moral qualities are added to the mix. It is confident, prosperous, forward-thinking, family-oriented, and profoundly deserving.
The extraordinary Great Exhibition of 1851 exemplifies the best aspects of the Victorian era. It was Prince Albert’s idea, and its full title, The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, reflects its purpose and scope. This is to be a festival of the new modern time and of England’s driving job in carrying it to pass.
Incredibly the main council to examine the proposition, led by Albert in January 1850, meets an only a brief time before the concurred opening date. In that short period shows are welcomed and assembled in from everywhere the world. In the meantime, new discussions begin regarding the proposed new building in London’s Hyde Park.
There is a competition for architects, and 245 designs are submitted. The members of the building committee come up with their own composite design using these suggestions, which they do in a way that seems a little overbearing. It is phenomenally dull (a long low block building, similar to cultivate latrines, covered by a mixed up vault), and it proposes to Londoners that Albert’s show will be similarly horrid.
Joseph Paxton, superintendent of the gardens at Chatsworth, submits a daring design for a massive hall made of glass and iron in June 1850, just as construction tenders are about to be submitted.
The structure board of trustees is naturally mindful (no tests exist to demonstrate that such a structure will try and endure areas of strength for a), yet Paxton secures the issue by distributing his plan in the Showed London News. A journalist suggests the Crystal Palace as the perfect name for the excitement in London.
At the end of July, construction begins on the site, and the building is finished in January 1851. The display opens on time on the main day of May. When it closes, in October, 6,000,000 guests have wondered about this trendy castle and its items.
Typhoid kills prince Albert ten years later, in 1861. After forty years of mourning, his adoring wife becomes the typical widow. She is also once more a symbol of the Victorian era because she is both strict and sentimental at the same time. She is also heavily upholstered spiritually and physically.
The Albert Hall and the Albert Memorial, both built in his honor in the 1860s, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, which was established in 1852 with funds generated by his international exhibition, remain prominent in the Crystal Palace’s neighborhood after it was demolished in 1852. In the meantime, during the last ten years of his life, Britain has involvements in China and the Crimea that are less peaceful.
Gunboat diplomacy: 1850-1856
An incident that suggests a new British approach to foreign policy marks the beginning of the Great Exhibition decade. This is the strategy that was later referred to as “gunboat diplomacy,” in which one nation uses military force to impose its will on another.
The incident, which is related to a Portuguese Jew by that name who traded in Athens, is known as the Don Pacifico incident. At the point when an enemy of Semitic group consumes his home, in 1847, he sues the Greek government for harms – with little outcome, until he requests to England for help because he is an English resident (because of being brought into the world in Gibraltar).
Palmerston, the Liberal foreign secretary, responds with ferocity, igniting intense debate. In 1850, he sends a naval squadron into the Aegean to seize Greek ships for Don Pacifico’s claim’s value. Palmerston’s actions in the commons, in which he argued that “a British citizen, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong,” win him a majority, despite being censured in the house of lords.
After four years, Lord Aberdeen, a Conservative prime minister, is in charge of England’s watchful eye and strong arm. He also sends warships to the Aegean to back up discretion, this time on the side of Turkey.
A joint English and French armada steams through the Dardanelles in 1854 as a token of caution to Russia. In this instance, there will be full-scale war in the Crimea. Britain and France once more collaborate in distant waters a few years later. As a pretext for reviving the Opium Wars, they use two minor incidents that would normally fall under diplomacy (in the British case, the action of some Chinese officials in 1856 to board a British merchant ship and lower the red ensign).
A powerful nation can now, for the first time ever, enforce its will across the entire globe using a steam-powered warship. Additionally, the general public now has an unprecedented sense of closeness to the events.
