@kevcvs57 said
I suppose if your determined to force a correlation on to things you can.
I agree with some of your points (for instance, it's certainly an important fact that populations were become less transient). But I'd take issue with most of them:
The late Victorian era was rife with industrial exploitation of children
This had been true since the late eighteenth century and remained true in the
early Victorian era, but reforming legislation began to take steps to address the problem thereafter. Of course it wasn't solved entirely, but it was very much better to be a child, even a poor child, in 1900 than in 1840.
https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/child-labour
Further progress was made towards the end of Victoria's reign. The Factory Act of 1878 prohibited work before the age of 10 and applied to all trades. It was bolstered by the Education Act of 1880, which introduced compulsory schooling up to the age of 10. Subsequent amendments raised the school-leaving age to 12, with dispensations to leave before this age if pupils reached the required standards in reading, writing and arithmetic. By the end of Victoria's reign, almost all children were in school up to the age of 12. This helped to ensure that a marked improvement in child welfare occurred between the beginning and end of Victoria's reign.
When you can be imprisoned or transported for stealing a loaf of bread...
Which you could in 1799, but not in 1899. Transportation ceased to be a punishment in the 1850s. Indeed, the trend over the course of the nineteenth century was that punishments became steadily less draconian. In 1810, Sir Samuel Romilly could declare that "[there is] no country on the face of the earth in which there [have] been so many different offences according to law to be punished with death as in England"; there were, under the so-called "Bloody Code", more than 200 crimes punishable by death. By 1861, the number of capital crimes had been reduced to five. So punishment became notably less harsh during the Victorian era, and at the same time public order conspicuously improved.
The late Victorian era also saw the rise of street based police forces which had become much more organised.
The Metropolitan Police were established in 1829 (before Victoria came to the throne), as a decidedly light-touch alternative to heavy-handed military responses to public disorder in the early nineteenth century. With the exception of a small number of night patrols, Victorian police didn't even carry arms! The Peelite model of policing depended fundamentally on the consent of the citizenry, and late nineteenth-century Britain was astonishingly lightly policed by contemporary European standards.
I would have thought any societies crime rates are governed by the detection and punishment equation together with poverty / prosperity levels.
Needless to say, these things are both important, but they're not the only important factors. People's propensity to commit crime is in part a function of their beliefs (religious and otherwise). Other things being equal, a citizenship that has
internalised ideas of virtue is much less likely to commit crime, and nineteenth-century religious activism played a crucial role in fostering those ideas widely.
The idea that the church or a belief in the Protestant version of god was a civilising influence whilst being used to rape and pillage Queen Victoria’s Imperial possessions is a really big stretch.
Earlier in the nineteenth century, William Wilberforce's devout Christianity had been the central motivating factor behind his ultimately successful push to abolish slavery.
As for the British empire, it was essentially the product of capitalism and strategic imperatives. That many of its proponents were motivated, too, by a measure of Christian idealism probably made it less brutal than it would have been otherwise. Compare Belgian King Leopold II's wholly commercial, and wholly disgusting imperial enterprise in the Congo.
29 Sep '22 07:29
Europe increasingly right wing
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