Wikipedia:Peer review/Victorian era/archive1

Victorian era

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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I've been working on this article a great deal this year. I have recently got it to good article status and it will be appearing on the front page in the next couple of days. I'm hopping to get it to featured article status over the next few months which would be my first featured article. What kind of changes do you think would be needed to get their?

P.S I'd like to try and avoid adding to much additional detail because this article used to have a problem with being way to long.

Thanks, Llewee (talk) 15:27, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

STANDARD NOTE: I have added this PR to the Template:FAC peer review sidebar to get quicker and more responses. When this PR is closed, please remove it from the list. Also, consider adding the sidebar to your userpage to help others discover pre-FAC PRs, and please review other articles in that template. And, since you are still seeking your first successful FAC, I suggest seeking a FA mentor and start reviewing FACs now to build goodwill among the FAC regulars. Z1720 (talk) 14:57, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

@Llewee: This has been open for over a month without comment. Are you still interested in receiving feedback? If so, I suggest posting on the Wikiprojects attached to this article, asking for a review. Z1720 (talk) 19:33, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

@Z1720: Ok, I will do that.--Llewee (talk) 14:31, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

I would have expected to see something on Victorian architecture and Victorian restoration, or at least some links to these articles, as they were signifcant in the Victorian era and still affect many buildings today.— Rod ^talk 15:01, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

• Needs a complete rewrite to reach FA standard.

Thanks for the notification[1] at WT:IRELAND, @Llewee. That's what brought me here, and I start my comments with a focus on Ireland.

It seems to me that there is a difficulty in extending the article to cover more of Ireland, because the Victorian era is rarely used by historians of Ireland as a framing for the 19th cetury. Instead, the defining landmark of 19th-century Ireland is the so-called "Great Famine" of 1845–1852, in which Ireland lost 25% of its population and began a series of huge changes in its social and demographic structure.

So Irish history is usually divided into pre- and post Famine eras; the Victorian era as described in the article has some validity as a lens for looking at the history of Dublin and Belfast, both of which experienced industrialisation and professionalisaton, as did (to a lesser extent) the cities of Cork, Limerick and Waterford. But in rural Ireland, the dominant issues of land tenure, repression, religious division, unrepresentative politics and post-Gorta Mor emigration bear little relationship to the issues dominating that framing of the history of the island of Britain. As but one example of the gulf between the histories of the two islands, the >100 Coercion Acts imposed on Ireland in that era are simply incompatible with the picture of liberalisation and democratisation painted for Victorian Britain.

The article fails to mention of the great ironies of the Victorian era: that while Ireland was formally an integral part of the UK, it was in practice governed as a colony, where mostly English men held the office of Chief Secretary and used military force to impose their will on a highly-resistant population which never once accepted Brtish rule, let alone voted for the men who governed them. There is no mention at all of how Ireland was ued as a revenue farm, its taxation subsidising Britain and its land a lucrative income stream for largely non-resident landlords, many of them avaricious and cruel rent seekers such as the notorious Lord Palmerston. (Shockingly, Palmerston's role in elevating drug-pushing to imperial policy in the Opium Wars is also not mentioned, despite its glaring clash with the themes of pogress and liberalisation).

The article Victorian era presents an English Whiggish history which is a long way from contemporary scholarship. For instance, the article says "Domestically, Britain liberalised and gradually evolved into a democracy". Sorry, but while that's a common Whiggish narrative, it's also demonstrably absurd. By the time of Victoria's death, the upper house of the UK Parliament was still wholly populated by hereditary peers, bishops and judges; it was 100% unelected, and its veto power was not challenged until 1910. Even by the time of Queen Victoria's death, only ~25% of British adults were allowed to vote in Parliamentary elections. Until 1918, most men were disenfranchised and no women could vote. The vote was not extended to all women until 1928, and one-person-one-vote didn't happen until 1950 in Britain; but Northern Ireland got one-person-one-vote only in 1968, after a highly-contested civil rights campaign. And even in 2023 (122 years after Victoria's death), Britain still allocates Parliamentary seats by the number of registered voters rather than by the census-based number of residents, a scam which for various reasons massively under-represents urban areas; and its FPTP voting system both blocks new entrants and hands whopping Parliametary majorities to parties with a minority of votes. AFAIK, nowhere else in Europe pulls off both those scams; and when the UK designed electoral systems for Ireland (1919) and Germany (late 1940s), it took great care not to allow FPTP. So the article's unqualfied description of 1901 Britain as a "democracy" is a common trope of Whiggish history, but it is a self-serving fantasy which the article should portray as propagada rather than fact. Victorian Britain was not a democracy; it was an imperial oligarchy which had made a series of major concessions to democracy, but still had a very long way to go. 8 years after Victoria's death Lloyd George's People's Budget was vetoed by the unelected House of Lords. That was not democracy.

Similarly, the Whiggish narrative is wildly misleading in relation to both Wales and Scotland. The suppression of the Welsh language continued throughout the Victorian era, and the minority Church in Wales was disestablished only in 1920; most Welsh people endured religious adverity throughout the Victorian era. In Scotland, while Glasgow famously became the workshop of the British Empire, land ownership continued to be consolidated into a tiny number of haands as the Highland Clearances were completed, leaving most of Scotland as an ethnically-cleansed playground for a tiny Anglo-Scots class. But the current article doesn't even mention the Highland Clearances, which is an astonishing omission.

I commend Llewee for their hard work in bringing the Victorian era article to GA standard, for incoporating some of the scholarship of the likes of E. P. Thompson (tho it's odd that Thompson himself is not cited even once), and esp for not airbrushing over the holocaust in Ireland. Tho the article sadly makes no acknowledgement whatsoever of how the mass death of the Great Famine was largly due to UK governemnt policy than to Ireland running short of food. That omission is spectacularly non-neutral, as is the failure to note how Victorian properity was funded by the profits of a global empire whose repressive measure such as flaying, flogging, branding and blowing from a gun were not particularly liberal.

Llewee is clearly well-intentioned and diligent and amicably collaborative, and I especially welcome Llewee's effort to seek Irish input. But the article lacks not just neutrality. It lacks a scholarly overview and framework; in outline, its framing belongs to an era well before even the 1950s revolution in English historiography, let alone representing views from outside England. To reach the higher FA standard, the article needs a radical rewrite from the ground up, in which the Whiggish view is discussed as a widely-used but problematic political narrative, rather than adopted as the framing. The Victorian era was a time of colossal contradictions and huge hypocrisies, but the article does not convey that. Due weight should be given at the framing level to non-English scholars such as Tom Nairn, and Tom Devine, and to critics of both Empire and industrialisation. I would suggest that the rewrite starts with the historiography, and proceeds to place much more emphasis on the clashes of contradictions. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:16, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you who responded. Sorry about the delay replying I have been away from Wikipedia for the past week or so. BrownHairedGirl The article as it is currently written is to a large extent based on the sources that were here before I started working on it, especially in the politics section, though I appreciate my own biases as someone from quite an anglophone part of Wales may have influenced what I chose to include. For instance, I didn't include the highland clearances simply because I had inaccurately assumed they had concluded prior to this period. I will have look at some work by the authors you suggested. The fact that Britain in 1901 wasn't a democracy in a 21st century sense could do with being made clearer. I think the economics section could probably be a lot better which would also cover a significant part off what you mention about Scotland, Ireland and the UK's relationship to the wider empire. However, it may be some time until I'm ready to make significant changes to the article. Rodw I will try to write a legacy section which should include information on Victorian architecture.--Llewee (talk) 11:23, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, @Llewee.

But please note that I did not suggest tweaks or the addition of new material. I suggested a complete reframing of the article.

I know that would be a big task, and you are of course under no pressure to take on such a big task. i just note that without such a reframing, the article won't reach FA standard. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:31, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

BrownHairedGirl, I will try to rewrite from scratch if that's necessary but that will probably take a long time to do.--Llewee (talk) 12:20, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

@Llewee: There is no deadline. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:24, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

@Llewee: It has been over a month since the last comment. Are you still interested in receiving reviews? If not, can this be closed? Z1720 (talk) 00:09, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

@Z1720: OK, I will close it momentarily.--Llewee (talk) 12:42, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.