Watches and Fashion in The Victorian Era

The Victorian era is lasted through the reign of Queen Victoria between the years 1837 and 1901. It was a period of time in which great transformations took place in society. Without a doubt, it was an incredibly complex age which has sometimes been referred to as the Second English Renaissance. And, it was the beginning of modern times.

Conditions of the working class were poor through the century. Three reform bills gave the vote to most males over the age of twenty-one eventually, where before only white, land-owning males could vote. Child labor was a detestable wart on the fair face of the era, persisting throughout the period. When a bill was passed banning children under nine from working in the textile industry, there was no expectation to apply the same or even similar bills to other industries.  Child prostitution was a rampant problem as well.

The Victorian Era saw Darwin make his Voyage of the Beagle and posit the Theory of Evolution. The Great Exhibition of 1851 happened in London. Great men of the era like Sigmund Freud would pioneer the initial groundwork for modern psychology.

The dress of the early Victorian era was distinctive. Women wore corsets, large billowing puff sleeves and crinolines in the middle 1840’s. For men, mens cufflinks were an important accent as were stove-pipe pants and cravats.  All in all, the style of dress can be best summed up as the sort of clothing you would expect to see in a Jane Austen movie.  Her novels of course were set in the period, as were the works of literary giants such as Edgar Allen Poe, among others. 

In this important and game-changing era, so many advances were made in technology and manufacturing that an industrial revolution  was born from it, and helped it to define the direction of societal progress throughout the 20th Century.