Victorian Society, Religion, and Science

Victorian society was structured in a relatively rigid class hierarchy: the landed aristocracy at the top, a growing industrial, commercial, and professional middle class, and a broad urban and rural working class at the base. Victorian moral values emphasized respectability, self-control, industriousness, punctuality, and sexual restraint as fundamental virtues, particularly among the expanding middle classes, and the concept of "separate spheres" ideally assigned men the public domain of work and women the domestic sphere of home and family — although social reality was considerably more complex, since many women in fact worked in factories, domestic service, and agriculture.