While things like race, religion, and occupation were all meaningful aspects of personal identity and status, the main organizing principles of Victorian society were gender and class.

Victorian gender ideology was based on the “doctrine of separate spheres,” which stated that men and women were different and meant for different things. Men were physically strong and women were weak. Men needed sex and women needed to reproduce. Men were independent, while women were dependent. Men belonged in the public sphere, while women belonged at home. Men were meant to participate in politics and in paid work, while women had to raise families.

While most working-class families could not live out the doctrine of separate spheres because they could not survive on a single male wage, the ideology was influential across all social classes.

The working class made up about 70 to 80 percent of the population and got their income from wages, with families usually earning under £100 per year.

The middle class, which got its income (of £100 to £1,000 per year) from salaries and profit, grew rapidly during the 19th century, from 15 to over 25 percent of the population. During the 19th century, members of the middle class were the moral leaders of society and even achieved some political power.

The very small and very wealthy upper class got its income (of £1,000 per year and often much more) from property, rent, and interest. The upper class had titles and wealth, and owned most of the land in Britain while controlling the local, national, and imperial politics.

With the earliest phases of industrialization over by around 1840, the British economy expanded, and it became the richest country in the world. However, many people worked long hours in harsh conditions.

Overall, standards of living were rising. While the 1840s were a bad time for workers and the poor—the decade was dubbed “the hungry forties”—the trend was toward a less precarious life.

Most families not only had a home and enough to eat but also had something left over for alcohol, tobacco, and even vacations to the countryside or the seaside.

Relative prosperity meant that Britain was a nation not only of shopkeepers but of shoppers, with the rise of the department store from mid-century transforming the shopping experience.

Increased wealth, including higher real wages from the 1870s, meant that even working-class people could purchase discretionary items, and mass production made clothes, souvenirs, and newspapers affordable to almost everyone.

During the Victorian era, Britain was the cultural capital of the English-speaking world, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Victorian performance and print culture were rich and varied.

Theatre thrived, but even more popular were music halls, which featured varied programs of singing, dancing, sketches, and other performances; these emerged in the 1850s, and by the 1870s there were hundreds across Britain, some seating thousands of people.

Print culture was also big and diverse, supported by high literacy rates for the time.

There were hundreds of magazines and newspapers available at increasingly cheaper prices. The 1880s saw the emergence of New Journalism, which drew in readers with pieces on violent crime and scandals in high society.

Novels were also popular. By the mid-century, Britons of all classes could afford and read novels. Some were aimed at highly educated and well-off people while others were published for the less-educated readers looking for appealing and exciting stories. Victorian novels were often quite long, with complicated plots (often centered on marriages) and many characters.

However, not everyone lived long enough to experience all of these pleasures. Life expectancy at birth for the average Victorian was about 42, and more than 25 percent of children died before their fifth birthday.

Until 1842, when new laws were introduced which prevented children under 10 from working underground, children made up 25 per cent of the workforce in mines, factories, and workshops. Infants as young as four could be found holding open ventilator doors for coal wagons to pass through, usually pushed by other children. They would also crawl beneath moving machines to clean and tidy. It's no surprise that accidents were so common.