A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (16 page)

After Ruskin, the most important artistic influence of the century was one of his numerous admirers, William Morris (1834–96). Morris shared Ruskin’s veneration for craftsmanship, seeing it – in an attitude by now familiar among the thoughtful and creative – as an important expression of individuality in an era that had forgotten the value of work done by hand. He, like Ruskin, developed a socialist outlook that married neatly with his idealized view of the dignity of labour, though it was only because both men inherited sufficient wealth that they could afford to devote their lives to the pursuit of artistic integrity.

Morris was as much in love with the Middle Ages as Pugin was, and claimed to have read all the novels of Sir Walter Scott by the age of seven. While at Oxford he formed lifelong friendships with several like-minded young men (they were known as the Brotherhood), began writing poetry, tried painting (he worked for Dante Gabriel Rossetti on neo-medieval decorations for the Oxford Union) and decided to become an architect. When he married, he commissioned another architect, Philip Webb, to create a home for him. The Red House, at Bexleyheath, was completed in 1860, and Morris designed all its furnishings and interiors. The house became a showpiece for his vision and a definition of the Arts and Crafts movement that was to form under his influence. As a history of the building states:

Webb and Morris were young, idealistic and reformist. Their house was more than just a home. It was a statement, in three dimensions, of their beliefs, a challenge to the tyranny of the machine. It was formed and shaped in simplicity from traditional materials – brick and tile, robust walls and massive barn-like roofs.
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Though it is original in appearance and design, it did not represent a revolution in domestic practices:

Not all the architectural conventions of the mid nineteenth century were challenged in the design, which like other middle class homes at that time relied firmly on a ready supply of cheap domestic labour. The house was heated by coal fireplaces, and hot water by a ‘copper’ in the scullery; there were no bathrooms; and the servants slept in a dormitory.
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Morris became not an architect but a general craftsman. He designed decorative tiles, woodwork, tapestries and carpets, wallpaper and stained glass. Though he himself worked on the carving, printing, weaving or production of all these items – for he believed in learning the processes of making things before designing them – he had the assistance of a workforce. He founded a business – Morris and Co. – to produce artefacts commercially. The firm was established at Merton Abbey Mills in Surrey, where its weaving-looms were operated exclusively by women. Perhaps the most famous of Morris’ products was his wallpaper. The plant themes of his patterns became an easily recognized trademark and they sold well. They were, however, highly complicated to make. To produce his Acanthus design in 1876, for instance, the firm of Jeffrey and Co. had to use thirty blocks to print the intricate patterns and the fifteen colours involved. Later in life he added to his fields of activity an interest in manuscript illumination and printing. He established the Kelmscott Press at a manor house of that name in Oxfordshire in which he was by then living. The press created a number of fine bindings and beautiful printings that included a work of surpassing excellence – an edition of Chaucer (1896), printed and bound as if it were a medieval book and illustrated by
his friend Edward Burne-Jones. Morris died before it was completed.

Unlike much that was created by the Victorians and reflected their taste, Morris’ designs, like those of the Arts and Crafts movement that he inspired, have never gone out of fashion. In every subsequent generation there have been admirers who have reprinted the patterns, reproduced the furnishings and written – or read – books about them. However, his notion of combining socialist principles with traditional craftsmanship was hopelessly impractical. The things made by his workshops used such expensive materials, and required so many man-hours to produce, that no one below the level of the wealthy middle class could afford to buy them. The artisan class could not directly enjoy their beauty and artistry, which
de facto
became the property of an elite, and it was only in the century after his death that a wider public could enjoy them through exhibitions, publications and better reproduction techniques.

In Arts and Crafts houses the textures were very different from what had preceded them. Wooden surfaces – whether doors, tables or cupboards – were often not waxed or polished, and thus had a plain, workmanlike, natural appearance. The same would be true of metal fittings like door handles, lamps and window-catches. Colour, whether in textiles, wallpaper or painted decoration, was frequently flat and toneless – the very antithesis of the complex and ‘realistic’ floral designs of the fifties.

It was not easy to convert an existing house to the Arts and Crafts style, and it was only with new buildings that architects and designers could pursue their ideas to fulfilment. In Britain one among many that can be visited is Blackwell, a house set on a hill above Lake Windermere in Cumbria. It was built between 1898 and 1900 by the architect M. H. Baillie Scott
(1865–1945) as a summer residence for Sir Edward Holt, an industrialist and philanthropist who was twice Lord Mayor of Manchester. Scott wished to use local materials, such as Westmoreland slate for the roofs, and he was fortunate; Ruskin’s presence in the area had awakened local interest in artistic craftsmanship, and there were firms nearby that could provide both carving and textiles appropriate to the architect’s vision.

Outside, the house is simple and not ornate, lacking the multitude of decorative touches – tiles, coloured bricks, terracotta panels – that were still in general vogue at the time. The walls are white roughcast, the windows have no hoods or deep sills, and are of small, leaded-glass panes rather than the plate glass of a previous generation. The chimney-stacks are round, in reference to the traditional style of the region, and the overall effect is vaguely that of a Tudor farmhouse. Inside, the windows have been positioned to make maximum use of sunlight (the drawing-room is oriented to catch the sun in late afternoon). There is a comparative emptiness that is a deliberate reaction against the busy and crowded interiors of the time. Walls in rooms and corridors are covered in a warm, honey-coloured oak panelling that glows in the light. The equally rich wooden floors are uncarpeted, though there would have been rugs in the rooms. There are light-shades of copper. The entrance and the main hall are half-timbered, providing another powerful Tudor echo, as does the use of stained glass, and rooms are focused – as was commonly the case with Arts and Crafts architecture – on large ingle-nook fireplaces. The drawing-room panelling is painted white – the most emphatic contrast to the darkness of earlier Victorian interiors – and the fireplace has a shelf that runs right around the walls; the shelf at ‘frieze height’ for the display of artefacts was as important as ever.

The chief glory of Blackwell is its décor. There is a riot of carving, depicting roses and rowans. There are friezes in hessian, wallpaper and plaster depicting local plants and birds, and – perhaps most distinctive of all – there are stylized plaster trees. The overall impression is of space and light and a quirkiness of detail that is enchanting.

The Arts and Crafts style, having originated in Britain, spread to America, Europe and Scandinavia. In return, Britain absorbed from Europe in the final years of the reign the style known as New Art. This had much in common with the work of architects like Baillie Scott, for it represented yet another revolt against Victorian ‘stuffiness’. It was a new and exciting – even decadent and daring – style in the nineties, and though its presence in the United Kingdom was short-lived, it produced in Scotland an architect and designer of international stature. This was Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928), who left a number of both exterior and interior masterpieces. His greatest achievement was Glasgow School of Art (1896–1910) and, though he himself described his buildings, with their liquid lines, as looking like ‘melting butter’, they bear witness to the fact that Britain could, on occasion, match the artistic achievements of Paris and Vienna, a notion that would not have been taken seriously when Victoria was crowned.

‘When she came to the throne coaches still ran’, as Soames Forsyte observed while watching Victoria’s funeral procession. He might have added that, by the time of her death, motor cars had begun to run. The age of the automobile had not yet fully arrived, and understandably not everyone could see that horse-drawn transport would soon be extinct, or that powered flight was only a few years away. Nevertheless, people can have been in no doubt that further wonders were on the way, and that the fictional creations of Jules Verne or H. G. Wells might have become fact by the time their children were grown up. Perhaps nothing suggests the extent of the change in British life during her reign more tellingly than this revolution in transport. Its impact on the Victorian experience cannot be overestimated, for it affected virtually every one of the Queen’s subjects,
enabling the mass of the population for the first time in history to travel swiftly beyond the distance they could walk.

In 1897 Walter Besant once again summed up the advances of the previous six decades for the
Illustrated London News
:

Steam and electricity have conquered time and space to a greater extent during the last sixty years than all the preceding six hundred years witnessed. Think of the ocean greyhounds of today, capable of crossing the Atlantic in less than five and a half days. The broad Atlantic has, indeed, become a mere pond.

The very streets bear evidence to the presence of the god of Speed. What would Dr Johnson think if he strolled down Fleet Street to-day, with its network of telephone and telegraph wires above, that make it the very cradle of the world; with its endless stream of hansoms and ’buses and bicycles; with its future procession of motor cars? Is there anything more insistent on the progress of the reign than that?
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These changes altered for ever the familiar patterns of settlement and movement, making it possible to see other places, to attend events in far-off towns or districts, to work at some distance from home, meet people from other areas – perhaps even court someone whose home was scores of miles away. It was not, of course, only land travel that became easier and cheaper. The increased speed and relative safety of journeying by sea made it possible for millions to cross the oceans, as emigrants or tourists or business travellers. It was in this era that ‘package tourism’ was born. Efficient railway travel made it possible for armies of middle-class Britons to see the vistas and monuments that had previously been accessible only to the wealthy or intrepid. Rome, which in the days of the Grand Tour had taken months to reach by carriage over mountains and bad roads, was by the 1870s accessible in about sixty
hours from London. Thomas Cook, whose travel agency pioneered the concept of mass tourism, brought so many British visitors to Egypt that the Nile was flippantly dubbed ‘Cook’s Canal’. In this we can see a striking parallel between the world of the later Victorians and our own, for this democratization of travel was very similar to the budget airlines and other cut-price arrangements that are familiar today. As with the changes in our time, the public was quick to make use of these new conveniences and – within a remarkably short time – to take them for granted.

It is true, though somewhat misleading, to say that stage-coaches still ran at the time of Victoria’s accession, for the age of steam had by then arrived and they had been supplanted by the railway on some routes. They were, in 1837, already therefore a symbol not of the present but of the past. The railway age had begun as long ago as the reign of George III.

The mail coach did not have a long pedigree. This system for carrying passengers and mail had been organized only in 1784. It had, however, very quickly become the most efficiently run transport network in Europe, and was something of a marvel to foreign visitors. Mail coaches ran from the General Post Office close to St Paul’s cathedral in London, departing every evening for destinations all over the British Isles. The service began to decline as the railways provided increasingly efficient competition, and with the massive surge in railway building during the 1840s and 50s, the coach was effectively doomed as a major form of transport.

Mail coaches were extremely elegant. They were painted in a maroon and black livery and sported the royal coat of arms on their sides. Their wheels were scarlet, and their numerous
brass and leather accoutrements were always polished and gleaming before they set off. They often had names that suggested either the sleekness of a racehorse, the glories of British arms or the cities that they served – Flyer, Meteor, Wellington, Waterloo, Bristol, Manchester. They could carry only a few passengers – six inside and up to a further six or eight on the roof, next to the driver and guard. The interior contained two horsehair seats that faced each other, and straw would be put on the floor to warm the passengers’ feet, for the vehicles were unheated. Those travelling outside, who had to be sufficiently agile to reach the roof by a series of iron rungs, naturally fared badly. They had no protection from the elements except whatever rugs, hats or umbrellas they brought with them. Luggage was carried in a ‘boot’, or stowed on the roof next to the passengers, who might therefore share their journey with baskets of live animals (before the advent of refrigeration, food had to travel fresh, which meant live). There was little privacy. Cooped up inside, or squeezed together outside, for long hours or even days at a time, passengers would know each other very well by the time they reached their destination.

Coach travel reached a peak of speed and efficiency in the early nineteenth century thanks to the improvement in roads. Road-building techniques had vastly improved through the efforts of two men – Thomas Telford, who devised the right combination of layered gravel and stones to create a permanent stable roadbed, and John Macadam, who invented a process for coating the surface to protect it from pot-holes and mud. A series of toll-houses at which travellers had to stop and pay provided funds for the upkeep of these highways, which were equivalent to – and as innovatory as – the motorway-building of the mid-twentieth century. The principal beneficiaries were the coaches, which could travel faster
and therefore run more reliably to a timetable. By the twenties, the journey from London to Holyhead, to take one example, had been reduced from twenty-four and a half hours to sixteen and a quarter hours. Long-distance travel became less of an ordeal and, with more coaches operating, it also became cheaper. In the 1820s fares were fixed at £2 for an outside journey and £4 to travel inside. To contemporaries it seemed as if a transport revolution were already taking place, and that ‘distance had been annihilated’ – a phrase that would be reused with the advent of railway, steamship, automobile and air travel. Within two decades those who had admired the speed of road transport would find opportunities for travel that would make these attainments seem unremarkable indeed.