American Victoriana: Did the US actually have a “Victorian” era?

Queen Victoria ruled the United Kingdom (and its empire) from 1837 to 1901.  Her reign was long—63 years, surpassing every other British monarch save Elizabeth II—and exceptionally eventful.  Her name has become synonymous with that era, which saw immense social change (for good and ill), advances in science,  medicine, industry,  art, and so much more.

But what about across the pond?

As a much larger and less culturally homogenous country than Queen Victoria’s Britain, it’s harder to pin down that time frame in America with a single definition.  It was indeed a similarly tumultuous era for us and has plenty of its own titles that conjure up distinct mental images, from the Antebellum South

through the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the Wild West.  While influences from the British Empire absolutely made their way across the sea, particularly in matters of fashion and society, it’s perhaps inaccurate to describe this as “Victorian America.”

Of course, we still do.  Sometimes.

A 2023 Notes and Queries piece in The Guardian compiled American readers’ responses to a rather baffled Brit.  He’d written in to ask why “Victorian” would be used to describe any part of American history when the country had been independent for more than 60 years by the time Victoria took the throne.  Their responses, while based mostly on personal opinion, raise a number of interesting points, from the catch-all term “Victorian” referring to architectural styles like Gothic, Italianate, Second Empire, and Queen Anne, the shorthand use of Victorian to refer to the better part of the 19^th century, and “Victorian” as a term meaning overly moralized, puritanical, or prudish.

This suggests that to us Americans, “Victorian” has gained a much broader and less specific meaning than “from 1837 to 1901.”  This does make it somewhat more difficult to pin down over here—we would probably not, for example, describe a Western frontier town as Victorian, but magazines that made their way to that far flung edge of the country would certainly have contained fashion plates that historical dress fans would describe as such. 

A plate from Hecklinger's Ladies Garments, a patterning guide & catalog published in New York, 1886

So was there an American Victorian era? It depends.  The world as a whole had a Victorian era and thanks to the coloniz—er, far-flung reach of the British Empire, its impact was felt globally. Is it meaningful to describe parts of American history in terms of British monarchy?  Probably not.  But it is exceptionally useful to refer to “Victorian” when describing elements of that history that were influenced by British culture at the time.  Dress, architecture, science, technology, social strife, literature—all of these had parallels on either side of the Atlantic and, sometimes, it’s handy to have a word to encompass both.