OSCAR WILDE LIVED WITHIN THE VICTORIAN AGE PERIOD,SO THAT I WILL OFFER A BRIEF RESEARCH ABOUT THIS CONTEXT IN WHICH HE TOOK PART,IN ORDER TO MAKE YOU UNDERSTAND HIS WORK AS WELL AS POSSIBLE.

Victorian History

The Victorian era, from the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837 until her death in 1901, was an era of several unsettling social developments such as the growth of English democracy, the education of the masses, the progress of industrial enterprise and the consequent rise of a materialistic philosophy, and the plight of the newly industrialized worker. In addition, the unsettling of religious belief by new advances in science, particularly the theory of evolution and the historical study of the Bible, drew other writers away from the immemorial subjects of literature into considerations of problems of faith and truth. When William IV was succeeded by his 18-year-old niece Victoria in 1837, she and her husband Albert came to symbolize a close-knit family life, a sense of public duty, integrity, and respectability. This period saw a trend toward free trade continued, aided by the 1849 repeal of the Navigation Acts, and a system of administrative regulation was gradually established. Women and children were barred from underground work in mines and limited to 10-hour working days in factories. Regulations were also imposed on urban sanitation facilities and passenger-carrying railroads, and commissions were set up to oversee prisons, insane asylums, merchant shipping, and private charities. Attempts to subsidize elementary education, however, were hampered by conflict over the church's role in running schools.

From the late 1840s until the late 1860s, Britons were less concerned with domestic conflict than with an economic boom occasionally affected by wars and threats of war on the Continent and overseas. The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London symbolized Britain's industrial supremacy. The 10,600-km (6600-mi) railroad network of 1850 more than doubled during the mid-Victorian years, and the telegraph provided instant communication. Inexpensive steel was made possible by Henry Bessemer's process and a boom in steamship building began in the 1860s. In 1857 and 1858, the Sepoy Mutiny was suppressed, and Britain abolished the East India Company, making British India a crown colony. Hong Kong and Singapore served as centers of British trade and influence in China and the South Pacific and the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 led to a British protectorate over Egypt in 1882. The policies of Joseph Chamberlain contributed to the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899. Britain suffered initial reverses in that war but then captured Johannesburg and Pretoria in 1900. Only after protracted guerrilla warfare, however, was the conflict brought to an end in 1902. By then Queen Victoria was dead.

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