So why are we devoting today’s times2 to what Britain was like 150 years
ago? Well, June 1857 saw the birth of two great Victorian icons. The first,
in a tradesman’s cottage just outside Worcester, was the man whose music
would come to epitomise Victorian England in all its imperial swagger. His
name was Edward Elgar. The other was an institution that epitomises the
indefatigable Victorian drive for knowledge, progress and improvement. It
was the Victoria and Albert Museum, which moved in June 1857 to South
Kensington and so inaugurated “Albertopolis” – Prince Albert’s vision of a
cultural, educational and scientific “city within a city” – 87 acres of it –
that would make London the capital of Western civilisation.
But once you start looking at what else was going on in 1857, a remarkable
paradox strikes you. It was exactly like present-day Britain, and yet
utterly different. In some respects, the preoccupations, problems and
aspirations of the mid-Victorians seem the same as ours. They, too, were
fighting dubious wars in far-off places – the Crimea, India, China. They,
too, were a society riddled with drugs problems, though their sniff of
choice was opium, freely available in dens all over London.
Enjoying one of Britain’s great boom periods, when living standards were
rising for everyone in employment (at least until overspeculation in railway
shares set the stock markets tumbling in the 1860s), they were as obsessed
as we are by fashion, gossip, sex (pornography and prostitution were
endemic) and the latest gadgets. Victoria and Albert led the way in the last
respect, acquiring the must-have luxury of the 1850s: a magical box called a
“camera”.
Consumerism was fast becoming the new religion. Just as well, since Mr
Darwin’s explosive book about the origin of species, about to hit the
bookstands after a 25-year genesis, would drive a large cart through the old
one. In the 20 years after 1850 the number of people employed in shops
increased by 50 per cent. While the rest of Europe was racked by revolution,
and America moved inexorably towards civil war, the British were much more
sensibly preoccupied with choosing wallpapers and newfangled “water closets”
for their increasingly luxurious homes. There was a “never had it so good”
feel. Tennyson, the quintessential mid-Victorian poet, summed it up.
Britain, he wrote, was a place “where Science, Art and Labour have outpour’d
their myriad horns of plenty at our feet”.
Of course, we are talking here about the upper and middle classes (the very
term “middle class”, used to describe the burgeoning bourgeoisie, came into
general use in the 1850s). At the other end of the spectrum, the poverty was
probably worse than anything even Dickens dared describe. The new workhouses
were sadistic places. So were the dark satanic mills, though various Acts of
Parliament had gradually reduced the working-day in factories . . . to 15
hours.
And home life for the poor was even worse. One inspector found five families
living in a single room, without sanitation. “How do you exist?” he asked a
woman. “We did very well until the gentleman in the middle took a lodger,”
she replied. But such extremes of wealth and poverty are not unknown in
present-day London either.
In all these ways, then, 1857 Britain seems a recognisable place. But in one
respect it was totally unlike our own era. The difference can be summed up
in a word: energy – an irresistible, Promethean, all-per-meating and
amazingly ingenious vigour that enabled the Victorians to build, invent,
manufacture, reform – and rule a quarter of the globe – with a flair that
has never been rekindled in this country. Science, technology and commerce
were the new Holy Trinity. “We are capable of doing anything,” Queen
Victoria noted in her diary. And, for a golden decade or three, she seemed
to be right.
That energy manifested itself in a thousand ways. In the speed and audacity
with which Brunel and his rivals covered the country with railways – 6,000
miles of track laid in 20 years, punctuated by cathedral-like stations such
as the newly opened Paddington. In the mind-boggling stamina of the writers
who chronicled this frenetic world – scribes such as Anthony Trollope, who
turned out 47 novels (all penned before breakfast, in order to leave the day
free for him to help to run the Post Office).
In the daring with which explorers such as David Livingstone delved deep into
ter-rains where no European had gone before. In the fervour with which
industrialists turned the North into the “workshop of the world” – by 1857
Manchester alone had 2,500 mills with 500,000 workers. And in the can-do
verve with which life-changing devices were not only invented but applied on
a massive scale. The great leap forward in the 1850s was the telegraph. It
sent news in a flash, and pointed the way to the instant global
communications of the 20th century. No wonder that a Johnny-come-lately
newspaper founded in that decade trendily titled itself The Daily Telegraph.
That energy galvanised social innovations too. In 1857 Manchester’s
mill-owners, stung by jibes that they were interested only in money, backed
a stunning Art Treasures Exhibition for workers. In six months, a million
people saw the art world’s first “blockbuster”. By then, Parliament had
passed laws introducing public parks and lending libraries. Suddenly, the
privileges of the aristocrat had become the birthright of the chimney-sweep.
The first teacher-training colleges came in the 1850s, and that paved the
way for universal elementary education a decade later. Meanwhile, Thomas
Arnold’s Rugby School (fictionalised in Tom Brown’s Schooldays,
the runaway bestseller of 1857) became the model for dozens of new private
schools catering for the scions of the upwardly mobile. That they were rife
with sadism and sodomy seemed to worry pushy Victorian parents not a whit.
The main thing was that their boys were climbing the social ladder. Even The
Times advised parents to “abstain from looking too closely into the process”
of their children’s education, “and content themselves with the result”.
Only in two areasdid this surge of trans-formational energy falter. One was
health – which might seem odd, given that this was the decade in which
Florence Nightingale revolutionised nursing. But the mid-Victorians
crucially failed to realise that it was polluted water-supplies that caused
the terrible killer diseases of the era – typhus, cholera and typhoid. Only
after the Great Stink of 1858 (when the Thames smelt so foul that Parliament
scampered) was the vast sum of £3 million found to enable Bazalgette to
build his mighty underground sewers. It was typhus, incidentally, that
killed Prince Albert in 1861, at the age of 42 – after which, in A. N.
Wilson’s brilliant phrase, “there was no longer an intelligent member of the
Royal Family”.
And the other failure? Women still had a lousy deal in 1857. A married woman’s
role was to be “the angel of the house” – as Coventry Patmore famously put
it in 1854. She wasn’t expected to think, or run a business. Until 1882 she
couldn’t own property. And in bed her duty was to be a passive receptacle.
“The majority of women,” wrote the in-fluential Dr William Acton in 1857,
“are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.” Even the
socially progressive PreRaphaelites, who dominated arty life, loved to paint
naked women in chains.
True, there were slight improvements. Caroline Norton’s campaign won women the
right to sue their adulterous hubbies for divorce, provided that they could
prove he had indulged in bestiality, incest, rape or bigamy. The redoubtable
Frances Mary Buss founded the first truly academic girls’ school – North
London Collegiate – in 1850. And high-flyers like George Eliot, who was
probably Britain’s highest-earning novelist/journalist in her heyday, proved
that determined women could rise (though it probably helped if they called
themselves George). But the campaign for women’s rights gathered steam only
in the 1860s. And it would be another 70 years before the world’s greatest
imperial power treated all women as first-class citizens.
