SERIES FOREWORD
Although the nineteenth century has almost faded from living memory—
most people who heard firsthand stories from grandparents who grew u
before 1900 have adult grandchildren by now—impressions of the Victoria
world continue to influence both popular culture and public debates. Thes
impressions may well be vivid yet contradictory. Many people, for exampl
believe that Victorian society was safe, family-centered, and stable becaus
women could not work outside the home, although every census taken dur
ing the period records hundreds of thousands of female laborers in field
factories, shops, and schools as well as more than a million domest
servants—often girls of fourteen or fifteen—whose long and unregulate
workdays created the comfortable leisured world we see in Merchant an
Ivory films. Yet it is also true that there were women who had no househol
duties and desperately wished for some purpose in life but found that soci
expectations and family pressure absolutely prohibited their presence in th
workplace.
The goal of books in the Victorian Life and Times series is to explain an
enrich the simple pictures that show only a partial truth. Although the Vic
torian period in Great Britain is often portrayed as peaceful, comfortabl
and traditional, it was actually a time of truly breathtaking change. In 183
when eighteen-year-old Victoria became queen, relatively few of England
people had ever traveled more than ten miles from the place where the
were born. Little more than half the population could read and write, chi
dren as young as five worked in factories and mines, and political power wa
entirely in the hands of a small minority of men who held property. By th
time Queen Victoria died in 1901, railways provided fast and chea
