A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain

by Michael Paterson

  The chief glory of Blackwell is its décor. There is a riot of carving, depicting roses and rowans. There are friezes in hessian, wallpaper and plaster depicting local plants and birds, and – perhaps most distinctive of all – there are stylized plaster trees. The overall impression is of space and light and a quirkiness of detail that is enchanting.

  The Arts and Crafts style, having originated in Britain, spread to America, Europe and Scandinavia. In return, Britain absorbed from Europe in the final years of the reign the style known as New Art. This had much in common with the work of architects like Baillie Scott, for it represented yet another revolt against Victorian ‘stuffiness’. It was a new and exciting – even decadent and daring – style in the nineties, and though its presence in the United Kingdom was short-lived, it produced in Scotland an architect and designer of international stature. This was Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928), who left a number of both exterior and interior masterpieces. His greatest achievement was Glasgow School of Art (1896–1910) and, though he himself described his buildings, with their liquid lines, as looking like ‘melting butter’, they bear witness to the fact that Britain could, on occasion, match the artistic achievements of Paris and Vienna, a notion that would not have been taken seriously when Victoria was crowned.

  5

  GETTING ABOUT

  Transport Revolution

  ‘When she came to the throne coaches still ran’, as Soames Forsyte observed while watching Victoria’s funeral procession. He might have added that, by the time of her death, motor cars had begun to run. The age of the automobile had not yet fully arrived, and understandably not everyone could see that horse-drawn transport would soon be extinct, or that powered flight was only a few years away. Nevertheless, people can have been in no doubt that further wonders were on the way, and that the fictional creations of Jules Verne or H. G. Wells might have become fact by the time their children were grown up. Perhaps nothing suggests the extent of the change in British life during her reign more tellingly than this revolution in transport. Its impact on the Victorian experience cannot be overestimated, for it affected virtually every one of the Queen’s subjects, enabling the mass of the population for the first time in history to travel swiftly beyond the distance they could walk.

  In 1897 Walter Besant once again summed up the advances of the previous six decades for the Illustrated London News:

  Steam and electricity have conquered time and space to a greater extent during the last sixty years than all the preceding six hundred years witnessed. Think of the ocean greyhounds of today, capable of crossing the Atlantic in less than five and a half days. The broad Atlantic has, indeed, become a mere pond.

  The very streets bear evidence to the presence of the god of Speed. What would Dr Johnson think if he strolled down Fleet Street to-day, with its network of telephone and telegraph wires above, that make it the very cradle of the world; with its endless stream of hansoms and ’buses and bicycles; with its future procession of motor cars? Is there anything more insistent on the progress of the reign than that?1

  These changes altered for ever the familiar patterns of settlement and movement, making it possible to see other places, to attend events in far-off towns or districts, to work at some distance from home, meet people from other areas – perhaps even court someone whose home was scores of miles away. It was not, of course, only land travel that became easier and cheaper. The increased speed and relative safety of journeying by sea made it possible for millions to cross the oceans, as emigrants or tourists or business travellers. It was in this era that ‘package tourism’ was born. Efficient railway travel made it possible for armies of middle-class Britons to see the vistas and monuments that had previously been accessible only to the wealthy or intrepid. Rome, which in the days of the Grand Tour had taken months to reach by carriage over mountains and bad roads, was by the 1870s accessible in about sixty hours from London. Thomas Cook, whose travel agency pioneered the concept of mass tourism, brought so many British visitors to Egypt that the Nile was flippantly dubbed ‘Cook’s Canal’. In this we can see a striking parallel between the world of the later Victorians and our own, for this democratization of travel was very similar to the budget airlines and other cut-price arrangements that are familiar today. As with the changes in our time, the public was quick to make use of these new conveniences and – within a remarkably short time – to take them for granted.

  The End of the Coaching Age

  It is true, though somewhat misleading, to say that stage-coaches still ran at the time of Victoria’s accession, for the age of steam had by then arrived and they had been supplanted by the railway on some routes. They were, in 1837, already therefore a symbol not of the present but of the past. The railway age had begun as long ago as the reign of George III.

  The mail coach did not have a long pedigree. This system for carrying passengers and mail had been organized only in 1784. It had, however, very quickly become the most efficiently run transport network in Europe, and was something of a marvel to foreign visitors. Mail coaches ran from the General Post Office close to St Paul’s cathedral in London, departing every evening for destinations all over the British Isles. The service began to decline as the railways provided increasingly efficient competition, and with the massive surge in railway building during the 1840s and 50s, the coach was effectively doomed as a major form of transport.

  Mail coaches were extremely elegant. They were painted in a maroon and black livery and sported the royal coat of arms on their sides. Their wheels were scarlet, and their numerous brass and leather accoutrements were always polished and gleaming before they set off. They often had names that suggested either the sleekness of a racehorse, the glories of British arms or the cities that they served – Flyer, Meteor, Wellington, Waterloo, Bristol, Manchester. They could carry only a few passengers – six inside and up to a further six or eight on the roof, next to the driver and guard. The interior contained two horsehair seats that faced each other, and straw would be put on the floor to warm the passengers’ feet, for the vehicles were unheated. Those travelling outside, who had to be sufficiently agile to reach the roof by a series of iron rungs, naturally fared badly. They had no protection from the elements except whatever rugs, hats or umbrellas they brought with them. Luggage was carried in a ‘boot’, or stowed on the roof next to the passengers, who might therefore share their journey with baskets of live animals (before the advent of refrigeration, food had to travel fresh, which meant live). There was little privacy. Cooped up inside, or squeezed together outside, for long hours or even days at a time, passengers would know each other very well by the time they reached their destination.

  Coach travel reached a peak of speed and efficiency in the early nineteenth century thanks to the improvement in roads. Road-building techniques had vastly improved through the efforts of two men – Thomas Telford, who devised the right combination of layered gravel and stones to create a permanent stable roadbed, and John Macadam, who invented a process for coating the surface to protect it from pot-holes and mud. A series of toll-houses at which travellers had to stop and pay provided funds for the upkeep of these highways, which were equivalent to – and as innovatory as – the motorway-building of the mid-twentieth century. The principal beneficiaries were the coaches, which could travel faster and therefore run more reliably to a timetable. By the twenties, the journey from London to Holyhead, to take one example, had been reduced from twenty-four and a half hours to sixteen and a quarter hours. Long-distance travel became less of an ordeal and, with more coaches operating, it also became cheaper. In the 1820s fares were fixed at £2 for an outside journey and £4 to travel inside. To contemporaries it seemed as if a transport revolution were already taking place, and that ‘distance had been annihilated’ – a phrase that would be reused with the advent of railway, steamship, automobile and air travel. Within two decades those who had admired the speed of road transport would find opportunities for travel that would make these at
tainments seem unremarkable indeed.

  En Route

  Though the coaches were seen as the epitome of speed, they could travel no faster than fifteen or sixteen miles an hour, which before the railway age was thought to be the most that the human frame could stand. A journey of more than a few score miles would therefore involve overnight stops, and to cater for passengers there was a network of coaching inns, some of which had been accommodating travellers since the days of medieval pilgrimages. In a city such as York, which dealt with a vast amount of coach traffic, these would be very substantial establishments, with several floors of bedrooms, large communal dining- and coffee-rooms, and the necessary stabling, hay stores and carriage houses. They were a prominent part of the community, an important provider of local employment and a source – because of the traffic that passed through them – of news from the outside world. The mere sight of an approaching mail coach would suggest the glamour of speed, the excitement of far-off places and the prospect of interesting tidings, for they brought the newspapers. It is worth emphasizing, however, that although anyone could look at a mail coach, the majority of people could not afford to ride in one. The cost of transport in these vehicles was such that many, in the course of a lifetime, never used them. Others might take a coach only in exceptional circumstances, such as for an annual visit to a large city.

  It was during the forties that the competition between train and coach became most acute, for the ‘railway mania’ in the middle years of that decade began to cover the landscape, and major cities, market towns and even villages increasingly became linked by the ‘permanent way’.

  The Train Arrives

  One aspect of the railway age that became apparent within a matter of years was the decline of the coaching inn. In towns that were not on an important line, or where the local authorities resisted the blandishments of the railway builders, coaching inns ceased to be hubs of news and traffic and became mere local taverns. This could also be seen in London, where a number of famous establishments had hosted travellers before their journeys to all parts of the kingdom. South of the Thames, in Borough High Street and its surroundings, important coaching inns had included the Tabard, from which Chaucer’s pilgrims had set off for Canterbury, and the White Hart, scene of Mr Pickwick’s meeting with Sam Weller. London’s first railway, arriving at the end of the thirties, ran through precisely this area. By the mid-century the inns were either gone altogether or were surviving only as public houses. A later, sentimental desire to preserve some of these obsolete premises for posterity came in time to save only one of them – the George. Much photographed today, its surviving galleries are a reminder of the Pickwickian travellers who, for a few years after the start of Victoria’s reign, were roused at dawn to gulp down coffee and cold meat breakfasts while their luggage was loaded and the horses put in the shafts for a long and uncomfortable journey.

  By the end of the reign, this simpler world had attracted a good deal of nostalgia. Prints and paintings depicted the sad ruins of once-proud vehicles, forgotten in barns, covered with straw or used as hen houses. In fact, however, coaches did not become extinct. They continued to run in areas where there was no railway access, and within towns provided a service from hotels and coaching inns to the stations – carrying out the same work that was by this time being done by buses. Even at the end of the century, the coach did not quite disappear, for, when it was realized that these noble vehicles were really on their way to oblivion, they began to enjoy a revival in popularity. Sentimental attachment was combined with pleasure in racing or driving them, and coaching clubs became a noticeable feature of upper-class Victorian leisure. It is difficult to identify the precise moment that coaches ceased to be a form of public transport and became a private hobby, for the two functions overlapped. The clubs held runs across country, often departing from the same inns from which in earlier generations the mails and passengers had been carried, and thus momentarily reviving past glories. They might set out to break records over a set distance – or simply to have a pleasant day in the country. Since their roofs were ideal places on which to lunch or watch sporting events, they became extremely popular at race meetings, and continued to appear at the Eton and Harrow cricket match until the mid-1980s. The stage-coach, in other words, was quickly superseded by the railway, but never went away.

  On Rails

  The steam locomotive had first been publicly demonstrated in London by a Cornishman, Richard Trevithick, in 1808 – though five years earlier he had already used a steam engine to pull colliery wagons along a tracked route in Wales. His machine, called the ‘Catch Me Who Can’, had been driven round a circular set of tracks. While this may have been an entertaining novelty for those who saw it, there was no immediate progress in the development of passenger rail travel, though an increasing number of steam locomotives were in use in the north (one estimate is that more than ninety were in service by the mid-twenties). A railway was established between Stockton and Darlington in 1825, and four years later a trial was held, at Rainhill in Liverpool, to establish the fastest and most efficient between several types of engine, the winner being George Stephenson’s Rocket. In 1830 a railway was opened between Liverpool and Manchester, and in 1837 between London and Birmingham, with the capital’s first terminus opening at Euston. A few years previously the Great Western Railway, essentially the personal creation of its brilliant chief engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, had been established in the West Country. It was to be the largest of what would ultimately be hundreds of railway companies that began to sprout throughout the country (by the time the railways were consolidated into four major companies in 1921, there were more than two hundred and forty).

  Most locomotives ran – following Stephenson’s example – on rails that were a standard width apart: 4 feet 8½ inches. This was more or less exactly the width that horse-drawn wagons had been since the time of the Romans. Only Brunel’s Great Western differed from this. GWR trains ran on a broadgauge track whose width was 7 feet ¼ inch, and they continued to do so until compelled by parliamentary legislation to convert to standard gauge in 1892, at which time armies of workmen descended on the tracks, lifted the rails and carried out the entire operaton in a single weekend.

  Railways made an immense difference to the landscape. They cut across obstacles of whatever kind – ploughing through hills and woods, hurdling rivers, cutting swathes through towns and cities. There was frequently opposition from landowners, though this was rarely effectual. In many cases compulsory purchase was possible, in other instances persuasion was sufficient (townspeople could see the benefits to local trade, estate owners with coal or cattle to sell knew they could move commodities more easily). In some cases it was necessary to divert the line to avoid trespassing on sacred ground. At Cambridge the railway station is a brisk quarter of an hour’s walk from the town centre, and when a line was built from Slough to Windsor, it had to make a wide loop to avoid crossing ‘the playing fields of Eton’. Sometimes powerful local interests could do the opposite – summoning a railway link rather than keeping it at a distance: at Alnwick, a branch line and a station were built for the convenience of the Duke of Northumberland, whose castle was in the town. Every year there were more miles of track: 97 in 1830, 969 in 1839, 1,775 in 1841, 9,446 in 1861. By the first years of the twentieth century there would be more than 19,000.

  As routes opened up, and it was realized that travel by train was not injurious to health, the railways began to do an unprecedented amount of business in transporting people. To begin with it was a thrill to be able to travel at thirty miles an hour – twice the speed, after all, of a coach. As they became widespread, the railways became cheap. In 1844 a Railway Act, as well as laying down obligatory minimum standards of safety and service, established third-class fares at a penny a mile, and sixteen years later workmen’s fares were introduced. By the time the novelty had worn off, the convenience of rail travel had won over the public. In the year 1851, 19 million passengers travelle
d by train.

  As the network spread, the railways became an increasingly popular investment. It seemed as if every town in Britain wanted to be on at least a branch line. Railway companies, and shares, proliferated, and a particular peak of hysteria was reached in the mid-forties. To the public, it seemed that investment in these was a sure-fire way to make money, for this new form of transport clearly represented the future. The network could surely only continue to grow, the companies to multiply. The newspapers whipped up a storm of public interest with saturation coverage and advertisements. Interest rates at this time were low, and people were encouraged to invest at once – to catch the moment – while there were shares to be had. It was a rush of enthusiasm something like the buy-to-let property boom of a later generation, and it similarly encouraged those who were not habitual speculators and who had little capital. It was characterized by the number of small shareholders, and many middle-class families committed the whole of their meagre resources.

  The result could have been predicted, except that mercifully there was no swift crash. Many schemes had been fraudulent, while other companies had simply been thwarted in their efforts to build. Interest rates went up again, and thousands of shareholders lost their investments; those of most modest means were, as always, the hardest hit. The Railway Age was not without birth pangs.