Victorian morality
Nineteenth-century English ethics
Victorian morality refers to the moral attitudes associated with Britain's Victorian era (1837–1901), characterized by strict codes of conduct, sexual restraint, and public propriety.
The term often implies rigid social expectations, repression of bodily topics, and the hypocritical gap between stated values and private behavior: Behind the Victorian morality lay considerable scandal.
Used broadly for any prudish or repressive moral stance.
- bibleAuthoritative reference work
- proprietyCorrectness of conduct
- chastityAbstaining from sexual activity
- hypocrisyPretense of virtue
- virtueMoral goodness or merit
Charles Dickens · proper lady · domesticity · temperance · respectability · piety · sermon · decorum · fallen woman · fallen women · white slavery · public decency · modesty · double standards · workhouse · patriarchy · civilization · self-restraint
- Victorianaseances, Dickens, spiritualism, Sherlock Holmes, phrenology
- Victorian literatureDickens, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Eliot, Thomas Hardy
- Victorian reformpoor laws, poorhouse, temperance movement, abolitionists, child labor
- moral philosophymoral philosophy, moral judgment, moral reasoning, moral principles, moral conduct
- conformity themessocial norms, peer pressure, conformity, group think, obedience
- ideologiescapitalism, communism, conservatism, liberalism, socialism
Victorian moralitysexual liberation
Freedom in intimate matters
free love · permissiveness · libertinism · hedonism · sexual freedom
Victorian moralityopenness
Quality of being accessible
candor · explicitness · body positivity · sex positivity · naturism
Victorian morality1960s counterculture
Sixties anti-establishment movement