Victorianism

Victorianism is the term used by some social and cultural historians to refer to certain beliefs, assumptions, codes, tastes, behaviors, and social arrangements associated principally, but not exclusively, with the middle class in Britain and the United States during much of the 19th century.

Like any label that purports to cover diverse social and cultural phenomena, Victorianism is problematic. Historians do not agree on the exact chronology or content of Victorianism. Some scholars, even allowing for strong transatlantic influences, question whether a label imported from monarchist Britain can accurately describe developments in republican America. Others avoid the term altogether because to moderns it is has long been a pejorative, suggesting narrow-mindedness, hypocrisy, and prudery.

Nevertheless, some of the most subtle and perceptive commentators on 19th-century America have found Victorianism to be both valid and useful. That is because, by and large, the American middle class, like its British counterpart, shared well-defined values and tastes during the period. To earn approval, the arts, literature, and popular entertainment had to be consistent with the social codes of Victorianism. The 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, for instance, celebrated Victorian confidence and faith in progress. In art, Victorianism meant romanticized history, uplift, pathos, and idealizations of middle-class life. In theater, Victorians preferred melodrama, in which good conquered evil. In literature, they favored romanticism and gentility. Culture typically upheld such Victorian values as polite behavior, social order (especially patriarchy and Protestantism), duty, and self-restraint.

Victorians, whether in Britain or the United States, considered behavior to be the outward expression of character, hence their emphasis on integrity, good grooming, propriety, and emotional control. Sexual prudence, if not prudery, was an essential part of the code, especially for women, though modern studies have argued that Victorian sexuality differed from that of later eras only in vocabulary, not in passion. Eros, it seems, was as powerful as ever, but it was not admitted into polite discourse or public demeanor.

The behavioral standards of Victorianism were not limited to the middle class. They could be extended to other groups, though expectations varied, depending upon gender, race, class, ethnicity, or religion. Servants, laborers, immigrants, even racial minorities, could earn respect, if not status, by honoring the code. Victorianism also made allowances for (and perpetuated) presumed gender differences by consigning women to a “domestic sphere” and by limiting the “public sphere” almost exclusively to men.

Women were, however, significant agents of Victorianism at both home and church. In their domestic sphere they were arbiters and exemplars of culture, manners, and morals for family and even servants. Also active in church work, women joined with ministers to propagate a “culture of feelings,” the sentimental (some would say “feminine”) aspect of Victorianism. Beyond hearth and pulpit, schools, armed with their McGuffey readers, were also strongholds of Victorian values.

Of course, not everyone adhered to Victorianism, though it was the standard against which moralists defined deviancy. Even among its adherents, tensions and strains often surfaced. Indeed, women frequently found it difficult to reconcile the contradictory Victorian notions of “true womanhood” (emotional, dependent, gentle, passive) and “ideal motherhood” (practical, self-reliant, strong, protective, nurturing).

As the 19th century drew to a close, Victorianism faced powerful new challenges. Social and political unrest, immigration, and economic change jarred the middle class. Gilded Age opportunism undermined Victorian moral-ism. Popular entertainment offered more amusement and pleasure and less uplift. In art and literature, realism and naturalism challenged gentility and romanticism. On the intellectual front, the theories of Darwin, Marx, and Freud threatened cherished Victorian pieties. Even antimodernists, such as Henry Adams, defected from Vic-torianism. Although social and cultural reorientation was well advanced by the 1890s, Victorianism did not finally give way to modernism until the second quarter of the 20th century.

See also art and architecture; painting.

Further reading: Daniel Walker Howe, ed., Victorian America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976); Steve Ickringill and Stephan Mills, eds., Victorianism in the United States (Amsterdam: U. V. University Press, 1992); T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981); Peter N. Stearns, Battleground of Desire (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

—William Hughes

Villard, Henry (1835-1900) businessman, journalist Henry Villard was not only a journalist and a reformer but also a financier and a railroad president. Born in Speyer, Germany, on April 10, 1835, Villard migrated to America in 1853, bouncing from job to job in the Midwest until 1858 when he began a career in journalism as a correspondent for the New York Staats-Zeitung and covered the Lincoln-Douglas debates. He switched to the Cincinnati Commercial in 1859, reported on the Pikes Peak gold rush in Colorado, and was in Chicago for the 1860 Republican National Convention. He described Civil War battles for the New York Herald and later for the New York Tribune, and after the war in 1865 he became the Washington correspondent of the Chicago Tribune and was its man at the 1867 Paris Exposition.

Like his fellow German immigrant Carl ScHURZ, Villard was a supporter of liberal reforms. Those ties were strengthened in 1866 by his marriage to Helen Frances “Fanny” Garrison, the daughter of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. In 1865 a number of eastern patrician reformers had established the American Social Science Association to analyze problems and to promote the answers—civiL service reeorm, free trade, monetary policies—which they already had in hand. Villard became the association’s secretary in 1868 and, combining diligence and charm, drummed up support for its program and made useful contacts. By 1870 Villard embarked on a career in finance and was able in 1881 to support the liberal reform agenda by purchasing the New York Evening Post and the weekly The Nation, installing Schurz and Edwin L. God-kin as coeditors.

After a slow start, Villard succeeded in finance because he took advantage of the depression following the panic of 1873 that plunged many railroads into bankruptcy. In Europe from 1870 to 1873, he used his family connections and returned to the United States as the representative of German investors in the Oregon & California Railroad. With that leverage, Villard helped reorganize it and the Oregon Steamship Company, assumed the presidency of the Oregon Steam and Navigation Company in 1879 and became the dominant force in transportation in the Pacific Northwest. Villard’s brilliant accomplishments as a reorganizer earned him the backing of the investment banker John Pierpont Morgan, who supported Villard’s acquisition of the Northern Pacific Railroad (NPRR) in 1881. Morgan also backed Villard’s optimistic plunge into a massive NPRR construction program that linked the Great Lakes with his Oregon properties. The enormous cost of completing the NPRR just in time to take the brunt of the next economic slump (1883-86) left the NPRR deeply in debt, and Villard was ousted from its presidency in 1884. Morgan, however, did not lose faith in Villard, and he was back on the NPRR board of directors in 1888 and became its chair in 1889. With Morgan’s backing, Villard in 1890 gained control of the Edison Lamp Company of Newark, New Jersey, and the Edison Machine Works of Schenectady, New York; he combined them in 1891 as the Edison General Electric Company and named himself president.

Villard’s financial career, which took off in the depression of the 1870s, was terminated by the panic of 1893. His optimistic tendency to overreach again proved to be his undoing, and his two major enterprises had to be reorganized. As a result, in 1893 he was removed from the board of directors of the NPRR and from the presidency of Edison General Electric, which was reconstituted as the General Electric Company. Villard died at Dobbs Ferry, New York, on November 12, 1900.

Further reading: Dietrich G. Buss, Henry Villard: A Study in Transatlantic Investments and Interest, 1870-1895 (New York: Arno, 1978); James B. Hedges, Henry Villard and the Railways of the Northwest (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1930).