A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (7 page)

A modern biographer, Giles St Aubyn, has written that: ‘Never before had an English sovereign proved so assiduous a correspondent, or so dedicated a bureaucrat. During the course of her reign she wrote, on average, two and a half thousand words a day.’ He cites as example the fact that during the Tel-el-Kebir crisis in 1882 she wrote to the Secretary of War seventeen times in a twenty-four-hour period.
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Laurence Housman summed up the Queen as having: ‘a wonderful, contradictious character – not highly intellectual, but highly intelligent, narrow in its opinions and prejudices, yet extraordinarily shrewd and sensible in its use of a long experience and a retentive memory, obstinate and self-willed, but to the guiding star of her life devoted, and wholly adoring.’
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Throughout the three decades between the nadir of her fortunes in 1871 and her death, Victoria’s popularity increased. In the sixties she had been consumed with self-pity at her loss, had expected soon to die and had threatened to abdicate. Now her gifts of tireless energy and sense of duty were coming back into play. Her long years of service had, of course, caused her to be seen as a national treasure, and this feeling became especially acute when, on 23 September 1896, she overtook George III as the longest-reigning monarch in British history. Her subjects realized how extraordinary it was that, through
all the upheavals of the past decades, this same small woman had overseen the fortunes of the nation and the Empire. Though memory of her less admirable forebears had faded, the example of her eldest son, who was involved in recurrent scandals (it was widely said that ‘God will not permit such an evil man to become King’), gave rise to a feeling that Britain was fortunate to have a moderate and moral ruler, whose reign would be looked back upon with affection when less worthy sovereigns had taken her place.

As the ebullient, noisy patriotism known as ‘new imperialism’ or ‘jingoism’ became, increasingly, the dominant national mood in the 1890s, the Queen was swept along on the tide of popular feeling, and she came largely to share these sentiments. In her latter years she became almost obsessively interested in things Indian. She was no longer merely a symbol of Britain but of a vast, wealthy and powerful Empire, the existence of which was not simply taken for granted but celebrated as parallel with the glories of Ancient Rome. Though she had, since the days of Disraeli’s premiership, come increasingly to embrace the outlook of imperialism, she took a view of her subject peoples that was not widely shared at the time and which would fit well with current political correctness. She was to describe ‘Her very strong feeling (and she has few stronger) that the natives and coloured races should be treated with every kindness and affection, as brothers, not – as, alas! Englishmen too often do – as totally different beings to ourselves, fit only to be crushed and shot down!’
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Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 was a major event, but by the time her Diamond Jubilee was marked ten years later, imperial pride had been brought to fever pitch and imperial pomp – in the form of contingents of colonial troops and of visiting Indian princelings – made this single day, 22 June 1897, a celebration of everything that Britain had achieved in the nineteenth century.

The sun was to set with remarkable swiftness on this splendour. Within two years Britain was involved in an expensive and humiliating war in South Africa. It would last until 1902, and Victoria would therefore not live to see the end of it. Despite dimming eyesight and rapidly failing health – she found it necessary to be pushed in what she called a ‘rolling chair’ – she rediscovered some aspects of the role she had adopted in the Crimean conflict, that of war leader. As then, she made herself responsible for aspects of her soldiers’ welfare, knitting garments (‘The Queen,’ wrote one observer, ‘turns out khaki comforters as if her life depended on it),
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and had 100,000 tins of chocolate despatched to the seat of war. She pored over casualty lists and – unusually for that era – felt genuine concern for the black South Africans caught up in the conflict. She visited military hospitals – as she had done almost half a century earlier – and said: ‘I like to think I am doing something for my soldiers, although it is so little.’
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Her statement to Arthur Balfour, after the British defeats of ‘Black Week’ in December 1899, that ‘Please understand that there is no one depressed in this house. We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist’
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was worthy of Winston Churchill. Her last official action, a few days before her death, was to receive Lord Roberts, who commanded her forces in South Africa, for a private visit at Osborne.

Victoria died there on 22 January 1901, aged eighty-one. Her body had simply worn out. She suffered from rheumatism and was almost blind, but like her husband forty years earlier her condition was made worse by stress and depression. The war, with its reverses and blunders and disappointments, grieved her, as did the loss of so many young men. Her second son, Prince Alfred, also died during 1900 and her eldest daughter, Vicky, whose life in Germany had been one of frustration and misery, was terminally ill with cancer. The
Queen had a stroke, possibly two, and sank gradually into unconsciousness while members of her family – including Kaiser Wilhelm, who hurried from Berlin to be at her bedside – were summoned. Her subjects gathered outside telegraph offices and at strategic places, such as London’s Mansion House, for the news that the Victorian era had ended. It came just after half-past six in the evening.

There was, of course, a widespread sense that an era was over. Typical of the outpourings was this one in the
Daily Telegraph
lamenting that:

The golden reign has closed. The supreme woman of the world, best of the good, is gone. The Victorian age is over. Never, never was loss like this, so inward and profound that only the slow years can reveal its true reality. The Queen is dead.
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Laurence Housman was a writer of a later generation, who produced in 1934 a dramatization of her life,
Victoria Regina
. Though he was often guilty of artistic licence, his observations on the Queen were valid. He wrote:

By no act of her own, but merely by the course of events, the virtue of age, and the glamour of a long reign with the splendid finish of a double jubilee, she became the tutelary deity of the whole nation, and died in an odour of sanctity unapproached by any previous British monarch since the Norman conquest.
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He added:

Queen Victoria, in her capacity as reigning sovereign, lived too long. Yet though she outstayed posterity’s welcome from a political point of view, from the human she remains extraordinarily interesting and attractive.

The majority of Queen Victoria’s subjects were poor. Though her realm saw a vast increase in wealth during the course of her reign, with the already-comfortable becoming better off and social mobility greater than it had ever been – the middle class quintupled in size – this still left many millions who were impoverished, barely able to earn a living or destitute.

The problem of mass poverty was exacerbated by the steady increase in numbers of people (the population of London, for instance, increased fourfold between 1800 and 1900; Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Birmingham all doubled in size during the century’s first decades) and the strain this put on resources. The supply of housing could not keep up with the demand, and led to intense overcrowding in the cities, which in turn brought higher mortality from disease. Funding from
charities and from local authorities had to be stretched further. The workhouses that provided relief for the homeless and workless might be overwhelmed if there were a succession of bad harvests or some equivalent disaster. The sheer scale of the task faced by those who wished to help the poor was unprecedented in history, and there was no single body – governmental, religious or social – whose responsibility it was to address these issues.

Most town-dwellers of the labouring class lived in lodging-houses, crammed together in rooms without privacy, or in rooms or cellars of larger houses, often built around a court, in which whole families – together with their own lodgers – might occupy a single room. One such place was described by a Dr Lethaby, the compiler of a report on living conditions for the Commissioner of Sewers in London. He spoke of:

The too frequent occurrence of necessitous overcrowding, where the husband, the wife, and young family of four or five children are cramped into a miserably small and ill-conditioned room . . . there are numerous instances where adults of both sexes, belonging to different families, are lodged in the same room, regardless of all the common decencies of life, and where from three to five adults, men and women, besides a train or two of children, are accustomed to herd together like brute beasts or savages. I have seen grown persons of both sexes sleeping in common with their parents, brothers and sisters, and cousins, and even the casual acquaintance of a day’s tramp, occupying the same bed of filthy rags or straw; a woman suffering in travail, in the midst of males and females of different families; where birth and death go hand in hand; where the child but newly born, the patient cast down with fever, and the corpse waiting for interment, have no separation from each other, or from the rest of the inmates.

He gave an example, in case it should be thought that he was exaggerating:

I visited the back room on the ground floor of No 5. I found it occupied by one man, two women, and two children; and in it was the dead body of a poor girl who had died in childbirth a few days before. The body was stretched out on the bare floor, without shroud or coffin. There it lay in the midst of the living.
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Though the doctor, and those who commissioned his report, may have been shocked by these conditions, there was nothing in the least unusual about them, for millions lived this way. The rooms he described would have had no furniture, the inhabitants sleeping on straw and rags, which might not necessarily be uncomfortable (the Russian tsar, Nicholas I, chose to sleep the same way!) but which was a breeding-ground for lice and other vermin. There would be no running water, as a consequence of which neither bodies nor clothing could be kept clean. There would be no means of removing sewage, with the result that the bodily waste of a building’s inmates would be left in corners and on staircases. Even to those who knew no other way of life these must have seemed difficult circumstances. It was some compensation that they would be off the premises for much of the twenty-four hours, at work or in the streets. In homes where no one possessed cooking skills, and where there were in any case few facilities, there would be no incentive even for the womenfolk to stay indoors.

The homes of the poor often occupied the centre of cities, while the better off moved to the edges or to the burgeoning suburbs. In central London the great rookeries – as slum districts were then known – around Drury Lane, Seven Dials and Westminster Abbey were so complex, and so dangerous to
outsiders, that even in daytime the police did not venture into them except in numbers. When large building projects, such as the creation of Victoria Street in Westminster or Holborn Viaduct, were undertaken, scores of homes were demolished – without any attempt at rehousing their occupants – and thousands left to crowd into tenements elsewhere. Proud attempts at civic improvement could exacerbate the problem.

It would be a mistake to imagine that the Victorians were complacent about conditions like these. For a host of reasons there was considerable anxiety regarding the rookeries. There were innumerable visits, numerous reports, frequent meetings of committees and commissions, and several schemes for alleviation of overcrowding. One motive was the danger from illness, for there were outbreaks of cholera in the forties and fifties – a disease previously not known in Britain, and therefore a symptom of a worsening situation. Another reason was fear, on the part of the property-owning classes, of social unrest. The thirties and forties were decades of serious depression and disturbance. In neighbouring countries there were outbreaks of revolution (France experienced these in 1830 and 1848). The broad mass of the poor was regarded as a potential threat to order, and it was in the interests of the state to see that they were not driven to extremism. More significantly, there was a realization that industrialization had created intolerable conditions and that these must be improved. One of the many attractive qualities of comfortably-off Victorians was their sincere concern for the unfortunate. There was a genuine desire, in an age that saw itself as enlightened and progressive, to better the lot of the destitute. Prominent among those concerned with the problem of housing the poor was Prince
Albert, who designed a set of ‘model dwellings’ that were exhibited at the Great Exhibition (an example of this is preserved). Another was George Peabody, an American philanthropist who in 1862 donated a sum of money large enough to build eight entire housing estates during the following two decades. Though these may strike modern observers as having a barrack-like austerity, they were a very considerable step forward in urban planning, and the original buildings – estates can be seen near Covent Garden and Westminster Abbey, among other places – are still doing duty today. His efforts were, of course, welcomed by the Government (both official and public opinion favoured private enterprise as a means of solving social ills); the Queen offered him a knighthood, though he was unable to accept it without giving up his United States citizenship, something he was unwilling to do.

For those who were destitute, and who lacked the means even to rent bed space on a floor, there were the streets. Today we are used to seeing people sleeping rough in the streets of cities, but there are comparatively few of them. In the nineteenth century there were thousands, just as – in an age when poverty was greater than we can comprehend – there were thousands, not dozens, of beggars. At dusk in London the benches on the Embankment began to fill with rough-sleepers, while Hyde Park, Green Park and St James’ Park housed swarms of them. Naturally it was easier to live in the open during summer, and each autumn numbers of homeless – most commonly the elderly – committed suicide to avoid the rigours of winter. Many others in any case died from exposure, their bodies found huddled in doorways by patrolling policemen.