A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (3 page)

It is a common complaint in these degenerate days that we live harder than our fathers did. Whatever we do we rush at. We bolt our food, and run for the train; we jump out of it before it has stopped, and reach the school door just as the bell rings; we ‘cram’ for our examinations, and ‘spurt’ for our prizes. We have no time to read books, so we scuttle through the reviews, and consider ourselves up in the subject; we cut short our letters home, and have no patience to hear a long story out. We race off with a chum for a week’s holiday, and consider we have dawdled unless we have covered our thirty miles a day, and can name as visited a string of sights, mountains, lakes, and valleys a whole yard long.
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The more people
could
do, the more they
sought
to do, and thus the greater the stress under which they put themselves – a notion that is considered equally true of our own time.

The speed of communications was undoubtedly a blessing, but it meant a loss of ‘quality of life’. Winston Churchill, writing to his brother in the nineties, lamented this. As an up-to-date young man, Churchill was the very archetype of the thrusting, impatient, indecently ambitious new generation, yet he mourned the loss of good habits that had characterized more leisured days:

In England, you can in a few hours get an answer to a letter from any part of the country. Hence letter writing becomes short, curt and if I may coin a word ‘telegramatic’. A hundred years ago letter writing was an art. In those days pains were taken to avoid slang, to write good English, to spell well and cultivate style: Letters were few and far between & answers long delayed. You may appreciate the present rapidity of correspondence, but you will hardly claim that modern style is an improvement.
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It is almost uncanny to compare these remarks with what is said today about the effects of email on the art of letter-writing and of ‘texting’ on people’s ability to spell correctly. When complaining to his mother about the mistakes made in the proof-reading of his first book, Churchill once again blamed the times: ‘I might have known that no one could or would take the pains that an author would bestow, a type of the careless slapdash spirit of the age’.
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The fact that a multitude of labour-saving domestic devices could now take much of the burden from housewives was expected to make life easier, yet somehow it was not having this effect, as
The Sphere
noted in 1900: ‘Every sort of contrivance now lessens labour – carpet sweepers, knife machines, bathrooms, lifts – in spite of these the life of a housewife is one long wrestle and failure to establish order.’
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Galsworthy’s character Soames Forsyte was right in identifying the emergence of a confident middle class as one of the most important aspects of the age. The existence of an influential mercantile element in society was, of course, not unique to the Victorians but was deeply rooted in the culture of Britain’s ‘nation of shopkeepers’. Nonetheless it was during the Queen’s reign that this class gradually consolidated its control over the country’s political, financial and cultural institutions, its power increasing as that of the aristocracy declined. By the end of the reign it was effectively running the country (despite the presence in government of aristocratic figures like Lord Salisbury and Lord Curzon), as it has been ever since. Writing in 1988, the historian John Lukacs suggested that future generations will refer to our times as ‘the Bourgeois Age’. If so, we will share the label with the Victorians, in whose day this age began.

Britons had, long before 1837, developed the belief that they had a moral superiority over others, and that this had been earned by the nation’s adherence to (Protestant) Christian ethics, its pragmatic common sense, its ingenuity and industry, its enlightened form of government, military skills and superior administrative ability. It was, however, the Victorians who identified most closely with these attitudes, for a larger Empire and greater influence made them more evident and more widespread. It was, they felt, for the British to show the way to less fortunate peoples, and there were splendid examples of men who did. The best of this breed were superb, and their achievement in organizing and running a single community that covered a quarter of the globe was undoubtedly impressive. Whatever faults the British Empire may have had, it produced a number of significant benefits for its subject peoples and for the world at large. The greatest of these was the Pax Britannica – with a major military power to police the
oceans and put down banditry, more people throughout the world probably slept peacefully in their beds than at any time before or since.

Looking at photographs of those who lived during this era, it is often difficult to feel any sense of kinship, even in cases where they are our own ancestors. The outlandish clothes and hairstyles, the awkward-looking hats, the sticks and parasols and the dresses belong to a way of life that is often beyond our understanding. Their solemn, unsmiling faces seem pompous, humourless, uncomfortable. But it is worth remembering that these images usually bore little resemblance to the sitters’ normal lives or personalities. They were positioned uncomfortably in unnatural attitudes that had to be held for several minutes. They were often in their best clothes because people dressed up to have their picture taken, and they were
told
not to smile.

Anyone who thinks they lacked humour should simply read a novel by Jerome K. Jerome, or look through one of the volumes of
Punch
that can still sometimes be found on the shelves of libraries. The cartoons are a triumph of draughtsmanship, and the jokes, in a remarkable number of cases, are still funny. This magazine, with the insight it gives into the lighter side of our forebears’ world, is another precious legacy of the era and one still appreciated. A member of a later generation, recalling the library at his school, captured the sense of affection the periodical still evokes:

For the newcomer the bound copies of
Punch
are the most potent drug. I’ve seen boys work through several volumes in one evening (most of them with the jokes signposted by italics), unsmiling and completely happy.
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While they were proud of their nation’s accomplishments and of the qualities of leadership that their schools, universities and
regiments could produce, the Victorians were never able to feel that the work was finished, for someone was always letting the side down – an aristocrat would bring disgrace on an ancient family by marrying a chorus girl; a colonial administrator in some remote outpost would go mad and shoot himself; a national hero would be found to have a scandalous private life. A small, but revealing, example of this perpetual disappointment that the high-minded were wont to encounter is perhaps worth citing. In descriptions of genteel summer boating parties on the Thames, it is often remarked that the pleasure of ladies and gentlemen in admiring the scenery was marred by the sight of ‘savages’. This term refers to small boys, and sometimes men, swimming naked from the banks. The implication was that Britons, who sent missionaries and officials all over the world to clothe the naked and bring civilization to others, should know better than to behave in their own country as if they were no better than natives. In their world there were always ‘savages’ to mar the beauty.

To deal in a single book with a period so lengthy and crowded is a formidable task. It is also difficult not to generalize about a people so multi-faceted and diverse. Their era was not a solid block of history but a long series of different experiences and a constantly re-forming set of attitudes. The Victorians were not as confident or complacent as we may suppose, and the individuals or organizations that represented particular ideals were not necessarily typical of the populace as a whole.

Inevitably it has been necessary to leave some subjects by the wayside. I have sought to dwell upon, and illustrate, two basic themes: one is that the Victorians’ world was created by a set of historical circumstances, unique and unrepeatable, that placed their country in a position of largely unchallenged military and industrial might throughout much of the
nineteenth century. The other is that, to a surprising extent, they were very like us. They had a fixation with technology, and were guilty of gross materialism, yet this was balanced – as it is in our generation – by a genuine concern for the less fortunate and a willingness to give charitable aid.

The Victorians are not so far away from us after all. We live in homes and walk streets that they built, eat food that they devised ways of preparing, flush our lavatories into sewers that they created, enjoy pictures and music and buildings that they produced. They bequeathed to our world so many of the things we now use that we would be foolish to regard them as irrelevant museum-pieces. They gave us organized sports, efficient transport and postal systems (the pillar-box was invented by the novelist Anthony Trollope); vigorous, informative and entertaining journalism; cinema; the motor car; electronic communications; modern medicine; and a galaxy of wonderful monuments, museums and art galleries. They built the railways – and most of the docks – that carry people and goods around the world, and many of the hospitals and schools from which we benefit. Our debt to them is enormous.

By virtue of her long reign over what was then the world’s wealthiest, most powerful and influential nation, it was inevitable that Victoria would give her name to the era in which she lived. She had, in fact, two names. The first was Alexandrina (as a child she was known as Drina), in recognition of the fact that her godfather was the Russian Tsar, Alexander I. Had she not abandoned this when she became Queen, the nomenclature of many familiar things – a London railway terminus, a series of waterfalls in Africa, a state in Australia, an award for gallantry, as well as the term for the mid and late nineteenth century – would have been significantly different. ‘Victoria’ was a French name. Some in government circles felt that both her names sounded too unEnglish, and debated whether, at her coronation, she should adopt the name Charlotte or Elizabeth. Had she taken the latter she would, of course, have been Queen Elizabeth II.

From the moment she succeeded to the throne, at the age of eighteen, in June 1837, it was clear that a new era had begun. There had not been a female sovereign since the death of Queen Anne in 1714, and there had not been one so young since Edward VI almost three centuries earlier. Her immediate predecessors had been two of her uncles, and both had been elderly. The former, George IV, had been highly unpopular with the public, and his death was greeted with indifference or relief. The latter, William IV, had been amiable and conscientious, and had begun the work of restoring public confidence in the monarchy that his niece was to continue. William’s large illegitimate family, the Fitzclarences, linked him however with the debauchery and repeated scandal which had latterly made the Hanoverian dynasty a target for hostility and ridicule, and it was refreshing that the new, eighteen-year-old monarch carried no baggage.

At the time of Victoria’s birth the elderly, blind and mentally unbalanced George III had still been alive. His eldest son ruled in his name as Prince Regent, and the Royal Family included the King’s six other sons: the Dukes of York, Clarence, Kent, Cumberland, Sussex and Cambridge. This large family had not, between them, produced enough legitimate children to ensure the succession. There had been only one heir to the throne: Princess Charlotte, the Regent’s daughter. When she died in 1817, the future of the monarchy was placed in doubt.

Since the Prince Regent refused to have any further children by his wife, Parliament was reduced to badgering his brothers to procreate. The Duke of Kent was successful. Abandoning his mistress, he married a German princess, Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and went to live with her in the dukedom of Gotha. There the child was conceived. For dynastic reasons, however, it was necessary for the birth to take place in Britain.
In haste and in some confusion, the couple and their entourage travelled to London, where their daughter was born on 24 May 1819.

Unusually for a royal child, Victoria had no siblings. She did not know her father, who died in 1820, and she was brought up in genteel poverty by her mother and a German governess. Though it was in many respects a somewhat dull and lonely childhood, Victoria was a bright and lively girl, gifted at singing and drawing, articulate in her use of words (she spoke well, and kept a journal from 1832 until the end of her life), interested in ballet and passionately keen on opera, and with an immense collection of dolls, to all of whom she gave names and identities.

The personification of the country’s future – the ‘Nation’s Hope’ – she was the subject of great public interest from early youth. George IV, as the Regent became in 1820, allowed her to live in Kensington Palace. Parliament voted her an allowance, and William IV tried to befriend her. The increasingly bitter feud between her mother and William, however, kept Victoria away from Court, and she did not attend his coronation in 1831.

The girl’s early years were dominated by her mother and the ambitious comptroller of her household, Sir John Conroy, who isolated her from the tainted Hanoverians – a successful move that increased her popularity – but both also wished to exert influence through her once she was Queen, a fact that she was shrewd and strong-minded enough to resent and resist. Nevertheless she gained important qualities from her upbringing – her governess taught her the value of regular and conscientious work; her mother taught her always to be kind and appreciative toward servants, an attitude that she was to display through the whole of her life. As well as excellent manners, she learned from the Duchess to discipline her temper, and to regard her position with relative modesty.

As a child she became increasingly aware of her destiny, famously stating at the age of eleven that, as sovereign, ‘I will be good.’ By the time she was an adolescent, her training had already begun. She studied history, and was inspired by the personality of Queen Elizabeth. From the age of fourteen she received a thorough grounding in how to rule from her Uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians and husband of the deceased Princess Charlotte, who took a paternal interest in the girl and had a significant influence on her character. To acquaint her with her future realm, she embarked with her mother on a series of annual tours throughout the country, staying at the homes of local aristocracy.