Economy, Culture, and Imperialism, 1850 to 1914: Society and Thought

This is Unit Twelve of Western Civilization Two, part one of two: the society and thought of the decades from eighteen fifty to nineteen fourteen, the exam's ninth band. Unit eleven ended with nations built from above and the balance of power broken. This unit is the society those nations governed, and its governing idea, which part two pays off, is that the first societies able to read, buy and count themselves believed two things about themselves at once. The confidence was earned: germs found, cholera cut, buying power doubled, literacy near universal, Darwin's evidence. The fear was the same knowledge turned inward, sorting the living into fit and unfit. Part one carries the confidence and its shadow from Victorian respectability through the sciences, the pseudo-sciences, mass society and the arts. Part two takes the women's movement, anti-Semitism and the methods. By the end you will be able to describe Victorianism and its fears. To describe the sciences from sewers to Darwin. To distinguish pseudo-science from social science. To describe mass society. And to describe the arts.

Three entries on Victorianism: virtue tied to wealth, the fears beneath respectability, and men and women cast as opposites.

A hat told your income.

WC2 1101 Victorianism: Security, Shame, and Virtue Tied to Wealth

Victorianism, named for Victoria's reign from eighteen thirty-seven to nineteen-oh-one, was the culture of the dominant bourgeoisie: top hats, covering dresses, rigid gender norms. Its defining wish was security from the lower classes. Morality was secularized into economics: wealth proved character, and a hat told your income, the anchor says. The anchor's reading of Victorian hypocrisy is attributed.

The beast under respectability.

WC2 1102 Fear of the Working Class, Degeneration, and the Beast Beneath: Dracula and Jekyll

If everyone got what they deserved, the poor deserved poverty, and a demand for shorter days was laziness. Beneath the confidence ran fear: of revolution, of the poor outbreeding the rich, of degeneration. Dracula and Jekyll and Hyde put the beast under respectability; strawberries in ether are among the anchor's examples. The novels are the anchor's reading of the age.

Ornament, not agent.

WC2 1103 Separate Spheres: Men and Women as Opposites

Victorian thought cast men and women as opposites: rational and forceful against irrational and gentle. Men wore sensible clothes; women wore impractical dresses and corsets, ornaments rather than actors. The man held the public sphere, the woman the home under his veto. Feminism began as a reply to this infantilization; the legal detail waits for part two.

Four entries on disease and the sciences: sewers and anesthesia, Pasteur's germs, Lyell's deep time and Darwin's selection, and why Darwin shocked.

Cleanliness as a class badge.

WC2 1104 Sewers, Anesthesia, and the Cult of Cleanliness

Disease was the century's greatest killer. Urban growth forced sewers and water pipes, which cut cholera and typhoid; anesthesia came in the eighteen forties. Cleanliness became a class badge: caustic soaps for those with servants, nothing for the slums. London's great sewers date from the fifties and sixties; the anchor says forty-eight, but the works followed the cholera years.

Germs found, deaths cut, no antibiotic yet.

WC2 1105 Pasteur: Germs, Pasteurization, Vaccines

Louis Pasteur, from fermentation experiments in eighteen fifty-four, showed that microorganisms cause disease and putrefaction and that life does not generate spontaneously. Heating killed them: pasteurization. Vaccines followed, for anthrax first. With Koch he founded germ theory, and hygiene cut infectious deaths sixty percent, the anchor says, before any antibiotic existed. Newtonian in scope is the anchor's verdict.

Malthus applied to every living thing.

WC2 1106 Lyell's Deep Time and Darwin's Origin of Species, 1859

Marine fossils on mountains and layered rock implied millions of years; Lyell's Principles of Geology made deep time standard. Darwin, with Beagle evidence, published On the Origin of Species in eighteen fifty-nine: species change by small variations, and those that help survive are naturally selected. Malthus applied to every living thing, Darwin says. Part two reads the book.

No plan, and monkey caricatures.

WC2 1107 Why Darwin Shocked; The Descent of Man, 1871, and Mendel Rediscovered, 1900

Darwin contradicted a static creation: nature was hostile, adaptation random, no plan. By eighteen seventy three-quarters of British scientists accepted it, and the caricatures drew Darwin as a monkey. The Descent of Man in seventy-one derived humans from hominids. Mendel's pea experiments, presented in sixty-five and forgotten, gave the mechanism when rediscovered in nineteen hundred. Figures are the anchor's; Mendel is anchor-only.

Four entries on pseudo-science and social science: Spencer's fittest, the unfit and eugenics, the founders of sociology and scientific history, and Freud.

Spencer's phrase, not Darwin's.

WC2 1108 Social Darwinism: Spencer, Survival of the Fittest, and Race Made Biological

Herbert Spencer turned Darwin into a defense of class and race: the rich deserved wealth by superior breeding, the poor their poverty. Survival of the fittest was his phrase, not Darwin's. Encyclopedias printed chains from apes through non-white peoples to Europeans. The witness calls it a pseudoscientific belief, Spencer its advocate; the anchor's skull caption says human skulls do not differ by race.

A discredited doctrine, taught as the record.

WC2 1109 The "Unfit" and Eugenics

Social Darwinists found the unfit inside Europe too: alcoholics, the promiscuous, unwed mothers, criminals, the disabled. Charity and unions were artificial checks on selection. The conclusion was eugenics: let the unfit die, and limit their breeding by sterilization. Fear of degeneration, of bad traits spreading by high birth rates, gave it urgency. Anchor-only, and taught as the record of a discredited doctrine.

Real social science beside the frauds.

WC2 1110 Durkheim, Weber, Ranke: The Social Sciences Founded

Beside the pseudo-science, real social science took shape. Durkheim read Christianity as ritual regulating behavior; Weber studied governments, religions and education; together they founded sociology. Ranke founded academic history on documents. All hoped for laws as certain as geology's, which made them hard to tell from the frauds. Anchor-only; no witness names them.

Respectability as repression.

WC2 1111 Freud and the Unconscious: Thought at the Century's Turn

Sigmund Freud read Victorian respectability as repression of instinct, with shame as the enforcer. His Interpretation of Dreams argued that dreams reveal cravings of the inner mind: the unconscious as a nineteenth-century discovery. The anchor uses him to explain the age; the art witness uses him for the Surrealists. Nietzsche and Einstein are in no source the course holds, and are disclosed.

Four entries on mass society: literacy and the cheap press, buying power and the department store, the demographic transition and the great migration, and the second industrial revolution.

Papers that fed opinion rather than testing it.

WC2 1112 Mass Literacy, Ferry's Schools, Cheap Paper, and Yellow Journalism That Made Politics

French male literacy went from under half at the Revolution to near all by nineteen hundred; Ferry's schools of eighteen eighty-two bound the nation in standard French. Wood-pulp paper and the linotype made print cheap. Sensational papers, Le Petit Journal the anchor's example, fed opinion rather than testing it, playing up naval races and Dreyfus. Figures and the law are anchor-only.

Fashion, not wear, as the reason to buy.

WC2 1113 Purchasing Power Up 165 Percent: Consumerism and the Bon Marché

French buying power rose one hundred sixty-five percent from eighteen fifty to nineteen hundred, the anchor says. Goods got cheap enough that fashion, not wear, became the reason to buy. The department store, fixed prices and advertising, made the Bon Marché a tourist site, seventy thousand a day at the white sales. The witness confirms the store; the counts are the anchor's.

Sixty million left.

WC2 1114 Population, the Demographic Transition, and the Great Migration

Europe's population grew as death rates fell; then, from the eighteen seventies, working-class families shrank toward middle-class size, the demographic transition. Cities swelled with country migrants. About sixty million Europeans left the continent, twenty-eight million of them for the United States; Argentina, Brazil and Canada took millions more. Witness-built; the anchor has no demography section.

Steel, current, wire, and America ahead.

WC2 1115 The Second Industrial Revolution: Steel, Electricity, Chemicals, the Telephone

Cheap steel came with the Bessemer process in the eighteen fifties, electrical generators about seventy and the light bulb by seventy-nine, Bell's telephone in seventy-six, and Marconi's wireless crossed the Atlantic in nineteen-oh-one. Demand for rubber, ores and cotton reached overseas, and the United States overtook Europe in manufacturing. The anchor leaves Bessemer unnamed; the witness names him.

Two entries on the arts: Realists and Impressionists leaving the Salon for ordinary life and light, and the fin de siècle taking color and form apart before the war.

The moment, not the finished detail.

WC2 1116 Realism and Impressionism

From eighteen forty-eight Realists such as Courbet painted objective views of ordinary life, workers and peasants, against the Salon's myths and histories. From seventy-four to eighty-six the Impressionists showed outside the Salon: light and color, quick strokes, painting outdoors. A critic mocked Monet's Impression, Sunrise and named them. Witness-built on the LibreTexts art history.

Color, then form, taken apart.

WC2 1117 The Arts at the Fin de Siècle

Post-Impressionists pushed past light into feeling: Seurat's dots, Cézanne's simple shapes, Van Gogh's swirls, Gauguin's color. Art Nouveau's natural lines spread through design from the eighteen nineties. Matisse's Fauves loosed raw color, and Picasso and Braque broke objects into cubes after nineteen hundred. Witness-built on the LibreTexts art history; music is not covered.

Look at what you can now do. You can describe Victorianism's wealth as virtue, the beast beneath it, and the sexes as opposites. You can describe sewers and anesthesia, Pasteur's germs, Lyell's deep time, Darwin's selection, and the shock of a nature without plan. You can distinguish Spencer's fittest and the eugenists' scalpel from Durkheim, Weber and Ranke, and place Freud's unconscious. You can describe mass literacy and the sensational press, buying power and the Bon Marché, the demographic transition and sixty million emigrants, and steel, electricity and the telephone. And you can describe painters leaving the Salon for light, then feeling, then broken form. Part two takes what women could not do in eighteen fifty and how they fought it, the oldest hatred made modern, four procedures, and the capstone that pays off confidence and fear.