A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (38 page)

As well as an increase in inexpensive editions, there were more places in which books could be found. The early years of the century had witnessed a spread of libraries – subscription libraries, Mechanics’ Institute libraries, public libraries – and the trend continued in Victoria’s reign, for her subjects’ desire for progress, learning and self-improvement ensured that the momentum was kept up. For aspirational labourers and artisans there were a host of cheap subscription libraries – requiring the payment of an initial fee and then a subscription of a penny a week or so – that offered newspapers, novels and textbooks. There were also reading rooms set up by the temperance movement as an alternative to public houses. The middle classes too had subscription libraries, and these might grow to colossal proportions: Mudie’s in new Oxford Street, London, was established in 1842. It lent books all over the country, and indeed the world, becoming a byword for
respectable reading matter, for Mudie saw himself as responsible for ensuring that the books he bought, lent out and encouraged the publication of should be beyond reproach. The previous year a rather more studious establishment had already opened: the London Library, begun by Thomas Carlyle, irritated that he could not obtain a book he wanted at the British Library because of heavy demand. It rapidly grew to the proportions of a university library (it too loaned books widely in Britain and abroad) and itself became part of the history of Victorian literature through the numerous writers who became members. Though Mudie’s has long gone, the London Library is still in business on its original site in St James’ Square. Other cities opened similar facilities, many of which – the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle is an example – continue to flourish.

As with so much else in this era, the spread of literacy owed much to the railway. People making journeys in well-lit carriages had the time and the opportunity to read, and it was not long before it occurred to book-dealers that there was a ready market for their wares at the new stations. The first bookstall opened at Fenchurch Street in 1841, and was quickly followed by one at Euston. Seven years later, William Henry Smith entered this trade. Smith’s family was already well established in the business. His father had begun selling newspapers from a shop in the Strand in 1792, and the firm had already cornered the market in supplying these, via stage-coaches, to provincial cities. Where they considered the coaches too slow at bringing news of some great event, they hired their own mounted relays to deliver them. With the building of the railway network, Smith’s had been able to speed even further the distribution of newspapers, but they also saw the potential for selling them at stations. Within thirty years of taking over the bookstall at Euston, W. H. Smith was running
more than four hundred such stalls throughout the country. Smith was a man of great personal integrity, and, like Mudie, sought to give the public only reading matter that was constructive and edifying. He therefore personally controlled the material on his company’s stalls. It was not long before editions of books were being published especially for railway passengers and for the bookstalls that supplied them. Longman’s, Routledge and John Murray – all illustrious names in the publishing world – each brought out a series called ‘Railway Library’ or ‘Traveller’s Library’ and reaped the benefits in sales.

The Victorian era was, by any measure, an age of overwhelming literary achievement. Among novelists it produced Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray and Thomas Hardy, as well as highly popular but less enduring writers such as Bulwer Lytton, Whyte Melville and Benjamin Disraeli. There were outstanding and significant women writers: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Brontë sisters. In poetry there were Tennyson, Robert Browning and Rudyard Kipling. There were bestselling travel books such as Edward Whymper’s
Scrambles amongst the Alps
(1871) and Frederick Burnaby’s
A Ride to Khiva
(1877). The genre of detective fiction, created in the United States by Edgar Allan Poe, was taken to new heights from 1887 onwards by the Scottish author Arthur Conan Doyle with his novels and stories of Sherlock Holmes – achieving a popularity never surpassed by any rival author or character. In children’s literature, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson – Lewis Carroll – produced two of the greatest stories of all time in
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(1865) and its sequel
Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There
(1871).

Books for youth became a publishing industry in their own right, appearing in greater numbers than had ever been known. While authors of literature for adults were too diverse and individual to categorize, the work of those who wrote for an audience of schoolboys and adolescents has often been dismissed as a collection of ‘ripping yarns’ – a genre that has long passed out of favour, except as a curiosity. This is worth examining, however, because it had a profound influence on millions of young men throughout Britain, its Empire and the rest of the world. It reflected a self-image that remained powerful until the Second World War, and which was therefore a significant Victorian legacy.

At the beginning of the reign juvenile literature had been characterized by the scurrilous ‘penny dreadfuls’ that dealt almost entirely with crime and with the exploits of anti-heroes such as ‘Spring-heeled Jack’. Given the climate of increasing respectability that was already taking hold in Britain, it was inevitable that this branch of popular literature would undergo a significant transformation – though this happened somewhat gradually – as attempts were made to provide the young with more edifying reading matter. In 1855 Samuel Beeton (the husband and publisher of Mrs Beeton) produced the
Boy’s Own Magazine
. This is not to be confused with the
Boy’s Own Paper
, or ‘BOP’, a later publication that was sold either weekly or as an annual volume, the latter becoming the archetypal Christmas present for Victorian boys. It was to be the fore-runner of a type of literature, published in both book and periodical form, that would remain popular for almost a century. Adventure stories enjoyed a huge vogue. Often they were set in far-flung territories of the Empire, which offered – like the American West – a suitably uncluttered environment in
which to fight the battles of civilization. The British public already enjoyed a somewhat smug sense of superiority over other nations, and the literature that its younger citizens read reflected this. Because patriotism was a wholesome and worthy subject, stories stressed British virtues such as courage, loyalty and fairness; foreigners were often depicted as lacking these qualities.

The ideals presented to young readers were influenced by two particularly nineteenth-century factors: the revival of interest in chivalry resulting from the novels of Sir Walter Scott – though Scott had died in 1832, his influence continued to reverberate throughout the century – and the cult of ‘muscular Christianity’ of Dr Arnold’s Rugby, which did the same. These spread the qualities and outlook of the archetypal public schoolboy to millions who did not attend such places, and made these attributes characteristic of Victorian Britain.

Alfred Harmsworth’s journalistic influence reached into the world of Victorian juvenilia. He was the publisher of several successful boys’ magazines –
The Wonder, The Marvel, Union Jack, Boy’s Herald
and
Boy’s Friend
– whose writers became household names. Much of the sensational, exciting fiction for boys appeared initially in periodicals and was subsequently published in book form (this was the case with one of the century’s most famous adventure stories – Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
, which came out in 1883). They included R. M. Ballantyne, whose story
The Coral Island
was one of the earliest in the field. W. H. G. Kingston wrote
Peter the Whaler
and
Long Ago and Far Away
. The most prolific, and successful, was G. A. Henty, who produced one hundred and forty-four titles, all of them historical novels set in the distant or recent past and all offering similarly straightforward stories of youthful courage amid cataclysmic events.
Though they were immensely popular in their time – school libraries often had to limit borrowers to three Hentys at a time – the books became dated and discredited once the Empire that they celebrated had passed from history and had become unfashionable. They have recently enjoyed a revival in the United States, where they are especially popular among conservative parents for the narrative vigour as well as for the moral strength and clean language of their heroes; ‘suffused’, as one newspaper put it, ‘with the high moral expectations of the Victorian era’, they have found a new readership. A website has hailed them as ‘lessons of honesty, pluck, strength of character and religious tolerance’.
²
Like many aspects of Victorian culture, they may eventually enjoy a renaissance as a wider public rediscovers them.

Whatever form the written word may have taken, the spread of literacy and of the reading habit did much to shape a uniform mass culture (much the way that television would do in the following century), in which literary and fictional references could be recognized by people in all parts of the kingdom.

In 1853 an American author, George Stillman Hilliard, published a description of the English tourists he encountered in the streets and museums of Rome. His comments capture the essence of the Victorian abroad and sum up the Briton’s view of his country’s place in the world:

They walk over the land as if it were their own. There is something downright uncompromising in their air. They have the natural language of command, and their bearing flows from the proud consciousness of undisputed power. A new sense of the greatness of England is gathered from travelling on the Continent, for, let an Englishman go where he will, the might and majesty of his country seems to be hanging over him like an unseen shield. Let but a hand be laid upon an English
subject and the great British lion begins to utter menacing growls. An English man-of-war seems to be always within one day’s sail of anywhere. If there be even a roll of English broadcloth or a pound of English tea to be endangered thereby, within forty-eight hours a frigate is pretty sure to drop anchor in the harbour.
¹

This confidence was evident in British travellers up to the time of the First World War and even beyond. It was the product of centuries of conditioning. In Elizabeth’s reign the Protestant English had seen themselves as a chosen people and their defeat of the Armada as evidence of divine endorsement. They had become the world’s foremost naval power. Over subsequent centuries, numerous victories at sea consolidated a maritime supremacy that came to be taken for granted at home, and which accustomed British subjects to the notion that their government could reach out to the farthest corners of the globe. After the defeat of both France and Spain at Trafalgar in 1805 this confidence increased, for the country’s two traditional enemies, and closest rivals, were now removed from the scene. Neither was ever seriously to menace British coasts, or interests, again, and no other power was to threaten British dominance until the end of the century.

While the Royal Navy saw itself as the world’s only maritime superpower, the Army was also highly regarded. Entirely composed of volunteers, it was far smaller than the great conscript forces with which Napoleon had fought, and its size was to remain a source of derision for Europeans with mass armies at their disposal (Bismarck once sneered that, if the British Army invaded Germany, he would send the Berlin police to arrest them). Nevertheless, it had centuries of success to its credit. In pursuit of Britain’s traditional foreign policy, which was to prevent any one of the European nations
becoming powerful enough to dominate the Continent, it had been victorious against the French and Spanish throughout the eighteenth century as well as against Napoleon, and had suffered defeat only from fellow Britons in America.

The attitude of the British to those near neighbours who had been their recent foes was one of smug superiority (the impertinence and disrespect accorded many native-born French masters at English schools throughout the era was typical). It was taken for granted that most other races were lazy and effete, and that they could not compete either in trade or in arms with Anglo-Saxons. As Pip in Dickens’
Great Expectations
had said of the 1820s: ‘Britons had at that time particularly settled that it was treasonable to doubt our having and our being the best of everything.’
²
This attitude was equally characteristic of the rest of the century.

Among foreigners, those from northern Europe were the most respected by the British. They were similar in race and religion, and the efficiency of Scandinavians, Dutch and, above all, Germans was admired. These countries were trading nations too, though they were too small, or too little industrialized, to pose any significant threat. Germany had many and obvious links with Britain’s Royal Family, and even when in 1871 its disparate states combined to form a powerful nation, Britons saw no cause for alarm. It was only in the last years of Victoria’s reign, when the Kaiser’s navy began a programme of ambitious expansion, that Germany began to replace France as the most likely opponent in a future war.

Britons viewed Latin nations, whether they were southern Europeans or South Americans, as quaintly amusing. These peoples, their enterprise sapped by hot climates and the over-abundance
of nature, were seen as lacking the necessary qualities of discipline and determination to deserve prosperity, for great powers must be able to lead by example. Where such countries had colonial empires – as did the Spanish and Portuguese – their colonies were badly run and in decay. When, in 1898, Spain’s overseas empire was taken over by the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ United States, it was assumed that the territories concerned would now flourish.