A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (2 page)

With this hindsight any number of later commentators, and writers of memoirs, have referred to the Victorian era, or some part of it, with unabashed sentimentality as a ‘golden age’, or a ‘golden calm’, an ‘Indian summer’ or a ‘long afternoon’. It is inaccurate, and misleading, to think of this or any other period
in such terms. The Victorian world was not in any sense golden or summery. Epochs only gain allure when seen in retrospect, once their problems are solved or forgotten or – as in the case of Ireland – passed on so that they then belong to another generation. Any age is filled with tension, uncertainty and despair.

Nevertheless while conservatives lamented the erosion of traditional values or practices, to progressive Victorians such as Besant it seemed that there
was
a golden age, not in the past but in the future. Theirs was an era of technological breakthrough and ever-increasing confidence, in which the efforts of the present were visibly making a better world for their successors. Meanwhile, for all the Victorians’ perceived complacency, no set of practices or assumptions could expect to be left unquestioned, for everything was open to debate, modification, improvement.

Science was solving medical problems, making childbirth easier, infant mortality lower, life expectancy longer; the temperance movement was combating the scourge of drunkenness; people like Besant were successfully awakening the public conscience to social evils; education was becoming universal and providing opportunities for self-improvement, and a great deal of practical help – most of it the result of private charity and enterprise rather than governmental intervention – was being given to the unfortunate, for this was the age of Dr Barnardo and of William Booth’s Salvation Army. Many of the savageries that had been unquestioned in earlier generations were being abolished or ameliorated – public executions, animal-baiting, the transportation of convicts, the flogging of soldiers and sailors. Within the sixty-four years between 1837 and 1901 spanned by Victoria’s reign – three distinct generations – the British developed into a gentler, more generous, more civilized people than their uncouth Georgian
grandfathers had been (by the fifties animal-baiting had been banned; in the following decade transportation and public hangings ceased; and flogging was abolished under Army reforms that began in the seventies). It is in the nature of all ages to disdain – and react against – their immediate predecessors. The Victorians hated the moral laxity of the Georgians as much as they found their architecture and their manners and their ideas passé. The sheer scale of Victorian buildings, ships, bridges or railway networks made everything that had gone before seem small and parochial by comparison. There were of course some setbacks – the disastrous collapse in 1879 of the new railway bridge across the Tay destroyed faith in the invincibility of progress – but there remained a belief that all difficulties could be overcome. Whatever the setbacks, the achievements of former ages were dwarfed by those of the present.

This spirit was already apparent in the early years of the reign, for the adjective ‘Victorian’ had distinct meaning from the time it first came to be self-consciously applied to the Queen’s subjects. It meant belonging to an exciting new generation and a new world. As one historian has remarked, the 1840s were proving to be a time of intense self-scrutiny; newspapers and journals were calling their era ‘Victorian’, and the term was being associated with ‘decency, modernity, a humane and progressive spirit and mechanical advance. To be “Victorian” was to be up to date.’
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One of the features of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations was the Victorian Era Exhibition, at which her people could look back at the achievements of their own and their parents’ generations. By any measure, they were entitled to feel that the Victorian world had lived up to its initial promise, for in every field it was an age in which giants had roamed the earth. The literature of Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, the Brontës, Lewis Carroll,
Conan Doyle; the theatre of Kean and Macready, Irving and Ellen Terry; the scientific discoveries of Lister and Faraday; the explorations of Livingstone, Burton and Speke. It almost seemed as if the British Isles might sink under the weight of contemporary genius.

It was reasonable to expect that this process, continuing in the decades to come, would bring about a better society. A character in George Gissing’s 1894 novel
In the Year of Jubilee
had remarked of the Queen’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations that: ‘It’s to celebrate the fiftieth year of the reign of Queen Victoria – yes, but at the same time, and far more, it’s to celebrate the completion of fifty years of Progress. Compare England now, compare the world, with what it was in 1837. It takes one’s breath away!’
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A commentator who looked at the Queen’s reign from the perspective of the 1920s, W. R. Inge, paid tribute to the sense of confident optimism that had guided so much of Victorian achievement: ‘The nineteenth century has been called the age of hope, and perhaps only a superstitious belief in the automatic progress of humanity could have carried our fathers and grandfathers through the tremendous difficulties which the rush through the rapids imposed on them.’
⁵

People could not imagine where science, and human enterprise, would take them next. Exploration was solving the mysteries of the world – it was Britons who found the source of the Nile and the great African falls named after their Queen. Intellectual and doctrinal Rubicons were crossed by the theories of Darwin. Through the innovations of Lister, surgery became safer and easier, and the operating theatre less like a butcher’s shop.

For all the scientific marvels that the era produced, the two most far-reaching and influential innovations were in transport and literacy. Though the railway had been developed
before Victoria’s accession, it was in her reign that it spread through Britain and the world and became an element in daily life. The advent of the bicycle extended the possibilities for independent travel by enabling even the poor to make journeys cheaply and freely. The Education Act of 1870 (1873 in Scotland), which made basic schooling compulsory, created – within a matter of decades and for the first time in history – a whole population that could read. The implications for literature and the press and for higher education were immense. Both the advent of personal mobility and of access to news and literature changed people’s expectations for ever. These things created the world in which we ourselves live.

In more specific respects the world of the Victorians bears a striking resemblance to our own. Like Besant and his contemporaries, the present generation of Britons is ruled by a popular and respected female sovereign who has been on the throne for so long that no one under sixty has known another. Like the Victorians we are constantly in thrall to innovation and to new technology, taking for granted things that only a decade ago seemed like scientific fantasy. The possibility of cloning humans, or carrying a computer in one’s pocket, were matched in the nineteenth century by the marvels of having one’s image captured through photography or of preserving one’s voice by use of the phonograph (it still seems a miracle that we can listen to Tennyson reading his ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’). Our generation’s fixation with the mobile phone is in some ways an echo of Victorian reverence for its first ancestor, patented in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell.

Not only the impact of technology but many of the occurrences in their lives show an odd similarity with issues that have preoccupied the present generation. The Victorians feared recession and deplored the prohibitive cost of housing. They were familiar with terrorist bombs at home and with
costly, inconclusive wars abroad – not least in Afghanistan. They experienced an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (1883) and a collapse of Baring’s Bank (1890). They were the victims of an appalling level of crime, and believed that the streets of their cities were not safe after dark. They tutted over scandals within the Royal Family, feeling that while – in terms of personal morality – the Queen had never put a foot wrong, the behaviour of some of her younger relatives caused concern for the future. By the end of the reign, when the cult of respectability had long passed its peak of influence, many believed that standards of behaviour had fallen alarmingly. The Queen herself put the blame for this on the ‘fast’ element within the aristocracy, which became mired in divorces and public scandals, and set a bad example. Manners and reverence – both for people and for institutions – were in noticeable decline; a great deal of culture was shallow and ‘dumbed down’; and a scurrilous tabloid press was obsessed with minor celebrities.

For Victorians – and innumerable historians ever since – their era was perceived as a single entity, but the Queen’s reign, which was to last sixty-four years and prove to be the longest to date in British history, could not be categorized so neatly. Indeed the only thing that its disparate decades and generations had in common was the fact that the same head of state presided over them.

As numismatists know, three different portraits of the Queen appeared on Victorian coins. From 1838 until 1887 she was depicted as a young girl, bareheaded and with her hair tied back in the style that was to give ‘bun pennies’ their name. By the time of her Golden Jubilee, this youthful figure understandably seemed outdated and a new portrait of her, wearing a crown and veil and looking somewhat severe, was struck. This too was replaced, in 1893, by the final image – an elderly
woman, still noble, but less austere and perhaps more sympathetic. These are known as Young Head, Jubilee Head and Old Head.

Similarly, her reign might be divided into three phases, though they do not correspond with the dates above. The beginning – effectively a continuation of the Regency – was a time of depression, hardship and frightening social unrest. Her first full decade, the ‘Hungry Forties’, witnessed further depression at home and the horrors of the potato famine in Ireland, as well as the threat of political upheaval from the Chartists and from the European revolutions.

The hugely successful Great Exhibition of 1851 is seen as ushering in the long middle period – the ‘mid-Victorian calm’, though there was nothing calm about the Crimean War or the Indian Mutiny, and fear of invasion by the French was so acute that the country’s southern coast bristled with fortifications, while volunteer soldiers enlisted in their thousands. In the sixties there were bad harvests and recession once more, as well as the threat of sedition in Ireland. The seventies witnessed a major agricultural depression that resulted from a series of bad harvests. It lasted into the nineties as the price of produce continued to fall, and brought widespread misery throughout rural Britain. For the aristocracy and landed gentry, many of whom now found it impossible to live on the proceeds of their estates, it marked the moment at which it became necessary – and socially acceptable – for their sons to work for a living in the City.

To some observers the eighties were an apogee of British civilization, though there was serious trouble in Ireland, and terrorism, developed in its modern sense by Russian anarchists at this time, spread to Britain; Scotland Yard’s Special Branch was founded in 1884 to counter the threat from Irish bombers. The arts became openly decadent in a way that shocked
respectable opinion – for the ‘naughty nineties’ began in the eighties – and led to a number of strident and vigorous campaigns against certain books and plays. In spite of these, the public continued to be shocked. There was thus a feeling among people concerned with moral health that the nation was losing its way and failing to meet its own high standards of civilization. In the event, the backlash against decadence made considerable headway, so that those who advocated freedom in the arts were as frustrated as those who opposed it.

The last phase of the era was seen by many older Victorians as a time of tastelessness, loose morals and unrestrained materialism. Society seemed to have become the preserve of newly titled plutocrats, whose vast and ostentatious wealth – often gleaned from gold and diamond mining or from large-scale trade – offended the sensitivities of traditionalists. Britain was seen as taking its cultural cue from the United States, then in its ‘Gilded Age’ of vast commercial fortunes, and the possessors of some of these were marrying their daughters into the British aristocracy. Not only had an unapologetic, even boastful attitude to wealth been imported from across the Atlantic, but so had a brash and lowbrow tabloid press (‘yellow journalism’).

The trial of Oscar Wilde brought into the glare of public scrutiny one aspect of a world of vice that the respectable had preferred to ignore. The traditions of religion had been challenged by Darwinism, religious observance had noticeably lessened, and although society had a structure and a hierarchy, its rules were always changing and its conventions were under constant attack. In addition, Britain was an immensely richer and more advanced country than she had been in 1837, but the sense of steady and unstoppable technological progress that observers had remarked upon was not matched by any feeling that society was much happier or that the worse characteristics of human nature had been subdued.

Speed of travel was eliminating distance and making the world ever smaller. Medicine was conquering pain, saving lives and prolonging life. Machinery was taking the strain out of work. People became richer than their forefathers. They had more money to spend, more choice in the shops, more leisure in which to spend it. The standard of living for millions was continually improving. More people had access to foreign travel, education and culture than had been imaginable a few generations earlier. Mass marketing, mass media and mass culture were all inventions of this time. Predictably, these changes could be seen as negative or dangerous. There was a feeling that with novelty and plenty had come a trivialization and a thoughtless haste that did not represent improvement. In one of his books for boys, the author Talbot Baines Reed remarked on the frantic tempo that had come to characterize people’s lives: