A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain

by Michael Paterson

  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 By the time of her Golden Jubilee, this youthful figure understandably seemed outdated and a new portrait of her, wearing a crown and veil and looking somewhat severe, was struck.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:

  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.6

  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 & answe
rs long delayed. You may appreciate the present rapidity of correspondence, but you will hardly claim that modern style is an improvement.7

  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’.8

  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.’9

  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.10

  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.

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  SYMBOL OF AN AGE

  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.

  The Nation’s Hope

  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.