Karl Marx's prediction that the working class would suffer increasing misery did not come to pass during the Victorian Age (the reign of Queen Victoria, 1837-1901), for wages climbed upward while the working day grew shorter. Even Marx and Engels were forced to admit that the English proletariat was becoming more bourgeois because of the Victorian world's prosperity and optimism. The recognized economists of the day expressed that optimism with little reference to Marx, who was dismissed as a crank. His theories, along with those of Malthus, the utopians, and three of the five Victorian Age economists, were confined to the underworld of economics.
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