Part of the reason I set my books in London in the 1870s is that for me this decade is one of the most interesting and progressive in Queen Victoria’s long reign (1837-1901). In the 1850s and 1860s, there were waves of social unrest, spurred in part by popular and sensation novels such as George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, M.E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White that represented bigamy, adultery, and spousal and child abuse; and by reports of famous legal cases and ardent discussions in the growing number of newspapers and journals. Quite a few bills on issues such as divorce, voting rights, property, child custody, education, and factory working hours were proposed but then shot down in Parliament. But during the 1870s, as Gladstone the liberal and Disraeli the conservative battled for the Prime Ministership and control of the government, a wave of legislation was passed in response to the call for policies that would secure public safety and wellbeing. Many of these had to do with the status of women. Below are some short synopses of legal trends and developments that reshaped England’s social fabric.
In 1856, the first Married Women’s Property petition and bill was debated in the House of Commons and defeated. The bill was one of several that would be proposed and killed before it finally succeeded in 1870. At issue was the fact that under the existing legal doctrine of coverture, a married woman could not own property; and if, as a feme sole (a single woman) she did own property, upon her marriage it became the property of her husband, unless her family had made a special provision or trust that secured her fortune to herself (and her heirs). Also, after 1870, working class women who earned a wage could actually keep it.
In 1857, the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes bill received royal consent and was finally made law. Divorce became recognized as a civil (legal) and local process rather than something requiring visiting two courts and obtaining an Act of Parliament. With this law, women could now divorce husbands if (and only if) he had both committed adultery and committed one of the following four: incest, bigamy, cruelty (defined as bodily injury) or desertion for a period of four years. Men could still divorce wives for adultery alone. But hey, small steps, right? This law also had implications for child custody: now, for the first time, divorce courts had some latitude in assigning custody of children. And the 1878 Matrimonial Causes Act finally provided legal protection for abused wives. If beaten, she could apply for a separation order from a local magistrate (provided she had not committed adultery). Again—small steps.
Until 1832, the only people allowed to vote in England were the wealthy landowners. After the riots of 1831, including some dangerous fires in Bristol that killed 12, the government became willing to consider a reform in order to avoid an outright revolt—or a revolution such as the one in France in 1830, when King Charles X was overthrown and hereditary right was replaced by popular sovereignty. The First Reform Bill of 1832 eliminated some of the rotten boroughs, where only a few voters still sent 2 MPs to parliament. It also extended the franchise to include all men who owned property worth at least £10—approximately one million of the seven million men. Encouraged by the Union victory in the American Civil War (1865), some groups of British men demanded more democracy and public influence. In 1867, the Second Reform Bill was passed, which extended the vote to 2/5 of the male population, to those men who earned £7 annually from rents or who had £50 in savings. In effect, this meant that urban working class men could vote; but the “feckless and criminal” poor was still left out in the cold. However, the fact that the vote was being extended to members of the middle classes provided hope to some suffragists that it might one day be extended to women. In 1866, Barbara Bodichon spoke on women’s rights in Manchester, and Lydia Becker, later the editor of the Wall Street Journal heard her and was profoundly affected. That same year, the Women’s Suffrage Petition was carried to Parliament and defeated … and England did not grant women the vote until 1927, eight years after the vote was given to women in America.
There was reform in the area of education as well. In 1862, Lowe’s Revised Code was an attempt to institute “payment by result” in schools. Matthew Arnold disagreed vehemently, saying this policy would only provide the rich with better educations and the poor with worse. In 1870 the Educational Endowments Act (aka the Education Act) made education compulsory for all children of ages 5-13 in England and Wales and set up school boards.
Beginning with the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802, various bills were proposed—and some passed—in an attempt to secure decent working conditions for women and children, particularly in the textile industries. These included dropping the work week hours to 55, and then the working days to 12 hours, or 10. But it was very piece-meal and incomprehensive until finally in 1878 the Factory and Workshops Consolidating Act brought together all regulated industries under one statute and stiffened enforcement of workshop regulations by placing power in factory inspectors. Some industries still remained unregulated, but the movement toward safety and reasonable conditions and hours in all workplaces was cresting.
Perhaps the largest global political change however, occurred in 1871, when the balance of power tipped in Europe as a result of the Franco-Prussian War that began July 1870 and ended only a few months later. Before the war, Otto von Bismarck longed to unite all the German states and regions into one entity. In 1870, working as the chancellor, von Bismarck misrepresented the contents of a telegram in order to antagonize France and stir up resentment in Berlin. As a result, France declared war. The southern states, including Bavaria, were largely unarmed, and in the new situation, set aside their wariness of the northern Prussian states and asked for their protection. Von Bismarck had been stockpiling weapons and troops at the French border, and the moment war was declared, they rolled toward Paris, laying siege on the city and taking control within a matter of months. When France surrendered, the May 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt gave Germany the Alsace region and part of Lorraine, and awarded Germany millions of francs worth of reparations and the right to occupy France until they were paid. Germany’s consolidation, France’s determination to reclaim the Alsace-Lorraine region, and British fears that Germany would use their occupation of France as a pretext for further expansion altered the political landscape of Europe forever and became some of the underlying causes of WWI.