The Victorian Age was a complex and contradictory era: it was the age of progress, stability, great social reforms but it was also characterized by poverty, injustice and social unrest. The Victorians promoted a code of values that reflect the world as they wanted it to be, not as it really was, based on personal duty, hard work, respectability and charity. Respectability was a mixture of morality and hypocrisy, severity and conformity to social standards. It implied the possession of good manners, the ownership of comfortable house with servants and a carriage, regular attendance at church, and charity activity. Philanthropy addressed itself to every kind of poverty, to 'stray children, fallen women and drunken men' and absorbed the energies of thousands of Victorians.
The concept of 'fallen woman' was a fate imposed upon thousands of women by a society with intense concern for female chastity. Sexuality was generally repressed in its public and private forms. In the late 19thcentury patriotism was influenced by ideas of racial superiority. Since the Victorians, under the strict reign of Queen Victoria, had to compromise many essential features of individuality and modes of expression, the term ‘Victorian Compromise’ came to be coined and applied to this particular age. As expected, this characteristic of the Victorian era also came to be reflected in the literature of that age.
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