This chapter discusses legislation of social change; women, reform, and sexuality; reform and religion, Victorian science; education, imperialism, and culture in 1870. According to social historian Jose Harris, the 1870s and 1880s mark the crucial turning point between one era and another. The 1870 Forster Education Act established elementary education for the masses, helping usher in an era of mass (print) media and mass leisure, both of which had profound implications for British literary production. Though it seems no more possible now than in 1870 to articulate a model of unified culture in that year, this chapter looks in turn at a number of cultural formations that derived from early- and mid-Victorian assumptions but paradoxically helped precipitate a society that differed from earlier eras in fundamental ways. A number of events disclosed shifting intellectual and social formations in England, particularly the professionalizing of knowledge, division of labor, and scientific method.