Victorian

This is the adjective from the female forename Victoria, or from places called ‘Victoria’. These places were, to the best of my knowledge, all named after the Queen Victoria who ruled over Britain in the nineteenth century – 1837-1901, to be exact.

When we use Victorian to talk of a period in History, Art etc, it is the time when Queen Victoria reigned in Britain that we mean. In practice, this is most frequently the second half of the nineteenth century (CE).

Stereotypically, the word Victorian is often used by liberal thinkers to imply repression in the fields of the emotions, morality, and behaviour. More conservative circles look back to Victorian times as a ‘Golden Age’, in which the ‘Victorian values’ of strict family behaviour, thrift and highly controlled social behaviour were supreme. Such people often associate the Victorians with the British Empire. Victoria was the first British monarch to take the title of ‘Empress of India’.