Moral Decline In Victorian Decline

The progress of civilisations has allowed new possibilities and opportunities for both positive and negative concepts such as with Victorian perspectives of city life and moral corruption and criminality. These ideas of moral decline through economical and political class tensions, sexual liberation, narcotics and disease highlighted the predominant social fears whilst the studies of criminology were largely anthropological and focused upon physiognomy, theories on evolutionary regression and crime as a product of a neurosis. These views on moral decline centred on the urban environment as the main cause and this was due to how the city landscape worked as a metaphorical personification of the monstrous Gothic.

Moral decline in regards to economic corruption in the Victorian city stemmed in part from tensions within the basic hierarchical class

The connection to the Gothic setting is illustrated with the bifurcated nature of the city using the separation of “the wealth of the West End and the poverty of the East End” (Smith, 2004 p73). Further social stratification divided the working class into skilled and unskilled labour leading to the formation of Trade Unions. In contrast, the middle-class economic drive was largely associated with industrial expansion and factory manufacturing (Host, 2002 p17), as well as the urban growth of the cities, which enabled the fears being how “the prevailing political and fiscal arrangements [seemed] to be slowly throttling the economy” (Hobsbawm, 1999 p55). The increasingly powerful middle class was also viewed as the moral leaders of society (Steinbach, 2012 p 124), being educated, class conscious and socially mobile. Political morality did take the form of challenging aristocratic entitlement, but also lead to electoral corruption (Kam, 2007 p2). Also, the economic freedom now at the disposal of