A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain

by Michael Paterson

  While Victoria appreciated Albert’s assistance, it increased his unpopularity in the country at large. In Parliament, the press and the public, there was considerable resentment of his perceived interference in affairs of state. The period between his marriage in 1840 and his death in 1861 has been dubbed ‘the dual monarchy’. He did not lack defenders, however, on the grounds that his advice was given without political bias. Lord Malmesbury wrote that: ‘No sovereign could have at his side a better counsellor, removed as he is from all personal disputes of parties.’15

  He also persuaded Victoria to adopt a more politically neutral stance. In the volatile political climate of the 1840s it was vital that extremes be avoided. Though this period of instability passed without mishap, the lesson was never adequately taken to heart, for throughout her life she would display both personal and political favouritism towards governments and prime ministers. He persuaded her, however, to abandon her reservations regarding Peel and to work with the Tory Government. By doing so she increased public respect, for her Whig loyalties had been much discussed in the press. This show of impartiality would not last, and in the latter part of her reign it would be the Tory party with whose policies and outlook she would openly sympathize.

  Needing privacy for their growing family – for at Windsor the public could come close enough to peer through the castle windows – Victoria and Albert sought homes of their own that were more suited to bringing up children. The result was the creation of two personal retreats. The first was at Osborne on the Isle of Wight, where, between 1845 and 1849, they had an existing house converted into a rambling Italianate villa. Here they spent idyllic summers, though it also provided a refuge when in 1848 a mass demonstration by Chartists made London seem too dangerous.

  Their other sanctuary was at Balmoral in Scotland. In 1842 they had visited the Queen’s northern realm and had fallen in love with the Highlands, which bore a passing resemblance to the Germany of Albert’s youth. They found the local people – forthright in speech and behaviour – a pleasing contrast to the deference and backbiting of London. Between 1853 and 1855, a Scottish baronial castle was built for them. Here they lived, for months at a time, in a world of kilts and pipers and stalking and fishing. As at Osborne, Albert’s influence on the building and its interiors was noticeable. With its tartan wallpaper and deer-antler furniture it was a fantasy almost worthy of the Bavarian king, Ludwig II.

  Such was Victoria’s pleasure in these surroundings that she published two books about her life in Scotland. Leaves from a Journal of Our Life in the Highlands sold well, spawning a sequel – if only because it was unprecedented for a reigning monarch to publish a work about her life (she presented Dickens with a copy of the first book inscribed: ‘From the humblest of writers to one of the greatest.’). The fact that her subjects could read about her summer holidays and family picnics was symptomatic of the monarchy as it had developed under Victoria. Previously, the private life of the Royal Family had been a subject for scurrilous mockery. Depictions of it in popular prints had been disrespectful and often vicious. Now the monarch and her consort were a model of respectability whose example the public were encouraged to follow. The fact that Albert did not gamble, keep a mistress or waste his time in idleness, and that Victoria was a doting wife and mother as well as a queen, meant that their private life fitted – entirely unintentionally – with the ideals of an evangelical element in public opinion that was at its most powerful around the mid-century. Their earnestness, together with a climate of piety, were a marked influence on the Victorian era and have been seen by later generations as defining its character. Pictures, which sold well in cheap coloured editions, showed them enjoying simple pleasures in cosy domestic settings – gathering around a Christmas tree (Albert was credited with introducing this custom to Britain, though in fact it was probably Queen Charlotte, the German wife of George III, who did so) or romping on the carpet. One such image, entitled ‘The Queen and Prince Albert at Home’, shows the Prince on all fours while his children pretend he is a horse.

  Albert and Victoria were untypical parents, as they were atypical of many things that characterized their era. They were not punctilious churchgoers, for instance, and did not believe in the keeping of the Sabbath as rigorously as many of Victoria’s subjects did. Though their children were naturally put in the care of nurses and tutors, they were not in the least neglected, and a great deal of attention was paid to them – especially remarkable considering the commitments of both parents. Their education was meticulously planned, but was not without pleasures. At Osborne they each had garden plots to look after. In the grounds can be seen their toy blockhouse and the miniature Swiss chalet in which they learned housekeeping and entertained their parents to tea. One of its features was a little grocer’s shop called Spratt’s, in which they learned the value of money. The Queen described how, on one occasion she: ‘went with the children – Alice and I driving – to the Swiss Cottage, which was all decked out with flags in honour of [Prince] Alfred’s birthday. A band played and after dinner we danced, with the three boys and three girls and the company, a merry country dance on the terrace.’16 The Queen had no fondness for babies (she thought they looked like ‘frogs’) and found it difficult to talk to her children, of whom she and Albert made considerable demands. Yet their sons and daughters were given a childhood that was often idyllic, and on which in later years they would look back with immense nostalgia.

  Royals in Public

  Two new developments meant that some of this family life could be shared with the public. The first was the railway. A royal train enabled the Queen and her family to travel swiftly all over the realm and permitted vast numbers of people to see them. The other was the invention of photography, which had coincided with the Queen’s accession. In 1841 the first photographic portrait studio opened in London. Albert was photographed the following year and Victoria in 1845. By the 1850s it was possible to make numerous copies of a single photograph, and the result was the carte de visite, a visiting-card-sized image. A widespread and long-lasting fashion developed for collecting pictures of celebrities, and this brought the Queen’s family into the public eye in a way never before possible. Numerous, young and attractive, the Royal Family was an obvious subject for photographs. Before Victoria’s reign, very few people had seen the monarch other than as an image on coins. Now millions of subjects knew what she, her husband, her children and her homes looked like. The clothes they wore could be imitated, and, in two cases, quickly set fashions for children’s dress: the kilts and bonnets worn by the boys were adopted in thousands of middle-class households. The sailor suit made for Bertie in 1846 by a tailor aboard the royal yacht – and recorded in a portrait by Winterhalter – was so enchanting that it was also adapted for girls and set a worldwide trend that lasted until the Second World War (the original is in the National Maritime Museum). The Royal Family had become – to use a modern phrase – accessible. As a result of new technology (the mass-printed illustrated newspaper as well as photography) they became part of everyday life in precisely the way that television documentaries have demystified the Royal Family in our own time. These things made a cult of Victoria and Albert.

  The Queen had a sharp eye for detail and sometimes her foibles took on the nature of commands. When visiting France in 1855, she recorded in her sketchbook the uniforms of the soldiers who lined the route or guarded her residences – these were, after all, the allies of her own troops in the Crimea. She was especially taken with the Zouaves – infantrymen dressed in a North African uniform of turbans, short jackets and immensely baggy trousers. On her return she expressed a desire to see some of her own soldiers outfitted in this manner. Englishmen would have looked ridiculous in such clothing, so War Office officials were obliged to study maps of the Empire in search of somewhere in which it could be introduced. They chose the Caribbean, and it became the distinctive uniform of black troops of the West India Regiment. It was seen in London when a contingent parti
cipated in the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and it is still worn by bandsmen of the Barbados Defence Force.

  A notable characteristic of the Royal Family was its seeming ordinariness. The Queen, when not in robes of state, had a dress-sense that was much commented upon, and not favourably. When she made her visits to France, in 1843 and 1855, the crowds were astonished at her appearance. Charlotte Brontë happened to see her on the former occasion, and described her as ‘a little, stout, vivacious lady, very plainly dressed, not much dignity or pretension about her’.17 On the latter visit the public – accustomed to their own Empress, the statuesque and beautiful Eugénie – were surprised to see Victoria in an unremarkable dress, carrying a large green umbrella and an ugly handbag decorated with a parrot that had been embroidered by one of her children. It was also noticed that she wore rings on every finger and even on both thumbs (though this habit was an attempt to conceal her somewhat unsightly hands rather than to show off wealth or taste in jewellery). She could easily have been mistaken for the wife of a bourgeois Englishman, and this too enabled her subjects to identify with her.

  As well as their irreproachable family life, Victoria and Albert won admiration by their enthusiasm for progress. In an era of self-conscious modernity, they clearly enjoyed and made use of the conveniences and pleasures that technology provided, and whatever was done by the Queen and her family was inevitably going to be emulated by others. They travelled extensively by rail. They became patrons of the Photographic Society. Most significantly, the Queen agreed to have chloroform when giving birth to her eighth child, Prince Leopold, in 1853. At the time this caused considerable controversy. The practice of giving this anaesthetic to women during childbirth had been introduced only in 1847, and its dangers and possible side-effects were not well understood. Attempting to avoid the pain of labour was also seen in devout circles as proof of a lack of trust in the divine will. The Queen ignored these criticisms, and was profoundly grateful for the benefits. As Elizabeth Longford has written, it could be argued that Victoria’s greatest gift to her people ‘was a refusal to accept pain in childbirth as woman’s divinely appointed destiny’.18

  Despite the Royal Family’s perceived goodness and empathy, Albert was still widely disliked. Yet his achievements were considerable. Among other things, he had the Cambridge curriculum modernized, rescuing the university from a state of moribund complacency and putting it on a par with those on the Continent. He guaranteed the success of the Great Exhibition. It was he, as president of the Royal Commission that organized it, who decided on its name and approved the design for the revolutionary glass building that became its symbol. He also defied opposition and had it built in Hyde Park, increasing its accessibility. By insisting that foreign manufactures be displayed beside those of the United Kingdom, he ensured that the exhibition had international, rather than merely national appeal. The resulting success owed more to him than to any other individual, and the considerable profit – £185,437 – was sufficient to purchase 70 acres of nearby land and ultimately to build the great museums that have given the district the nickname ‘Albertopolis’.

  These things were achieved, however, at considerable personal cost. As the 1850s wore on Albert aged prematurely, becoming increasingly stout and bald, and his health was in visible decline. He was worn out with stress and overwork, and with worry. The decade witnessed two outbreaks of conflict: the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny. Both were traumatic for Britain, but Victoria, extremely proud of being ‘a soldier’s daughter’ (the Duke of Kent had been a much-hated Commander-in-Chief), discovered a new role as a symbolic war leader, for she had perhaps seen an opportunity to emulate Queen Elizabeth. Her statement that she had never regretted more that she was a ‘poor woman and not a man’, for she would love to have gone to war herself, has about it a conscious echo of Elizabeth’s speech at Tilbury. The country indulged in a frenzy of war fever and the Queen, showing a pugnacious side of her nature that was at odds with her more customary shyness, was carried away by it. She watched the departure of troops and ships, visited the wounded and knitted woollen garments for the army (but was annoyed to find that the things she had made were distributed among officers rather than given to the common soldiery).

  Albert, a reluctant field marshal with an antipathy to militarism, acted as a restraining influence on his wife’s enthusiasm. Nevertheless his idea for a gallantry medal named after the Queen proved highly popular, and she took great pleasure in awarding the first Victoria Crosses in Hyde Park in June 1857. During the Crimean War, press and public criticism of him had risen to such heights of hysteria and absurdity that eventually a reaction had set in. Since he had not – as anticipated – sided with Russia and had worked tirelessly in support of Britain’s war effort his critics were to a large extent silenced. He would not suffer as greatly at their hands thereafter.

  Four years later, during the final weeks of his life, he also single-handedly prevented hostilities from breaking out between Britain and the United States, which at that time was involved its own civil war. In November 1861 a British mail packet, the SS Trent, was boarded in the Caribbean by US Marines, who apprehended two Confederate commissioners bound for the United Kingdom. Whitehall reacted with outrage, and Palmerston, the combative Prime Minister, drafted an aggressive ultimatum to Washington. Albert, who saw the document before it was sent, rewrote it on his sickbed, toning down its bellicosity and allowing the US government an honourable way out of the crisis by affecting to be convinced that the vessel’s captain had acted on his own initiative and not at the behest of his government.

  Less than a month later he was dead. He died at Windsor on 14 December 1861 of, it was believed, typhoid, though more recent research has suggested that he suffered from cancer of the bowel or stomach. Whatever the immediate medical cause, there can be no doubt that other factors affected him. Abroad, his hopes that a united and liberal Germany would emerge to dominate Europe were being crushed by the rise of an increasingly aggressive Prussia, while at home his eldest son had been involved in a (minor and unimportant) sex scandal while serving in the army in Ireland. He had frankly lost the will to live.

  Only a few months earlier, the Duchess of Kent had died. Mother and daughter had not been close since Victoria’s accession, and the loss was more symbolic than significant. Nevertheless the Queen, who was dependent by nature, felt suddenly and entirely abandoned by this double bereavement. She had a nervous breakdown, and for a time it was believed she had gone insane. She withdrew into mourning, as was expected, but she never came out of it. There is some truth in the perception that she shut herself away for decades afterwards and lived as a sort of Miss Havisham, though this strict purdah lasted only a few years. She famously had Albert’s shaving water brought and his clothes laid out every day as if he were still alive. She also dressed in black for the rest of her life, though by the conventions of the time this was normal. She never changed the style of her dresses from that of the 1860s (only forty-one when Albert died, she immediately looked much older) and created the image of herself in black dress and white cap – ‘the Widow of Windsor’ – that has remained in the public mind ever since. Since her loss was also the nation’s, she expected the public to share, and sympathize with, her grief. She could not understand that by absenting herself from her people she was courting unpopularity.

  The Widow of Windsor

  She continued to participate in the business of government, though, for a time, when the Privy Council met she did not attend in person but sat in an adjoining room, receiving questions and conveying answers through a secretary. She effectively abandoned Buckingham Palace, living at Windsor, Osborne and Balmoral. She became deeply involved in the creation of monuments to her husband, having a mausoleum built for him at Frogmore and an ostentatious memorial unveiled in Hyde Park, as well as the huge concert hall next to it named in his honour. She did not appear on ceremonial occasions and she did not welcome foreign dignitaries (though she did, in the sixties, establi
sh the annual garden parties that have continued to be held). There were no ‘walkabouts’, and it was not expected that the Queen should open Parliament or attend the Trooping the Colour every year. As time passed, resentment grew at her continued absence from public life. In 1864 she resumed travelling in an open carriage, and she opened Parliament (as well as attending a dance at Windsor) two years later. In 1868 she went privately to Switzerland, the first of many European holidays that were to add considerable pleasure to her life, though her loyalties would transfer to the French Riviera. Her seclusion was not as great as is perhaps imagined.

  These forays into the outside world were not enough to convince sections of her people that she was an effective head of state, and republicanism enjoyed a brief vogue. In 1871, after the overthrow of Napoleon III in France, there was growing criticism in Britain of the cost of a large Royal Family with an all-but-invisible head. A pamphlet by G. O. Trevelyan entitled ‘What Does She Do with It?’ estimated that the Queen accumulated £200,000 a year. A speech by Sir Charles Dilke, the MP for Chelsea, received wide applause – and publicity – for suggesting that the monarchy was a ‘cumbersome fiction’ and an unnecessary expense. Though she had no intention of changing her habits, Victoria was greatly upset.

  The Crown was saved by suffering. That summer, the Queen became seriously ill at Balmoral, and before she was fully recovered the Prince of Wales caught typhoid. For a few anxious days, as the tenth anniversary of his father’s death from the same disease approached, he remained in danger. When these twin crises passed, the enthusiasm of her people began to revive. When Victoria and her son drove through London to a thanksgiving service at St Paul’s, she was overwhelmed by the adulation of the crowds. An attempt to assassinate her a few days later added to the wave of public sympathy, and republicanism became a dead letter. Dilke was shouted down in the Commons, and subsequently abandoned his views. A fellow-traveller, Joseph Chamberlain, went on to promote the Queen’s near-apotheosis in the Diamond Jubilee celebrations.