When Did the Victorian Period End? Introduction

In 11.1, JVC invited a number of scholars to debate Richard Price's British Society 1680-1880 in the context of a question posed by Price: 'Does the notion of Victorian Britain make sense?' In this roundtable, JVC extends the debate about periodization by inviting Barbara Caine, Stephen Kern and David Peters Corbett – respectively a social historian of feminism and gender, an intellectual historian, and an art historian – to discuss the question 'when did the Victorian period end?' Feminist history has questioned the relevance of traditional forms of periodization for women's history and Barbara Caine's contribution launches the discussion by continuing to interrogate Richard Price's argument about the 1880s as an endpoint from the perspective of continuities and changes in the women's movements and feminist aesthetics. Her piece also reminds us that period boundaries can be felt and perceived acutely by contemporaries and that in the Bloomsbury circles, the end of the Victorian was a moment of generational as well as intellectual release. Stephen Kern focuses on the profound degree of intellectual release and innovation that coincided with the end of the nineteenth-century to argue, boldly, that Victorians and Modernists thought in markedly different ways about science, sexuality and narrative art. From the perspective of art history, David Peters Corbett wonders whether we are asking the correct question about periodization; instead of positing an endpoint for historical closure, he suggests that we should look increasingly to 'a sort of micro-history, studies of moments and connections that are not dependent on the framing devices of periodization'. The pieces interrogate the end of the Victorian period from the point of view of intellectuals and artists, and while their writings and artefacts will continue to be important sources for answering this question, we may yet need to know much more about the meanings of the 'Victorian' in everyday life and consciousness among 'ordinary' people, among working, lower middle, and suburban classes – about when and why they stopped seeing themselves as Victorian – and think what such perceptions might tell us about popular historical consciousness in the first half of the twentieth century.