A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain

by Michael Paterson

  Only gradually did this format change, but while daily papers remained conservative in their approach, other periodicals broke new ground. There already existed weekly papers – some of them small enough in format to fit in the pocket – and these had engraved illustrations, on their covers and inside. Such decoration was unheard of in national newspapers, but was popular with the public. A young printer, Herbert Ingram, decided to launch a weekly newspaper that would be heavily illustrated with engravings, and in May 1842 the first issue of the Illustrated London News appeared.

  Pictorial Papers

  It was an instant success. Its masthead featured a beautiful and detailed view of the London skyline, and its sixteen pages – all copiously illustrated – dealt with the campaign in Afghanistan, an exploding steamboat in America, a train crash in France, the candidates for the presidential election in the United States and a costume ball at Buckingham Palace. This first issue, costing sixpence, sold 26,000 copies. It marked the beginning of a new era in journalism, for it enabled the pubic to see the news as well as reading it – an impact similar to that of televised news in a later era. The pictures were usually drawn from descriptions of events, and often owed much to the artist’s imagination, but as use of the camera became more widespread, a few subjects – such as machinery at the Great Exhibition – could be engraved from photographs, and the subject could be shown with a good deal of accuracy. The ILN quickly spawned imitators, for there were enough national and world events to fill the pages of rivals.

  Some of the pictures in the ILN were huge. A depiction of a battle, or a royal occasion, could fill the centre-spread, and even more ambitious proportions could be attained by having folding pages. The detail and vividness of these images made them extremely popular, and important events (such as the Duke of Wellington’s funeral in 1852) provided scope for special editions that not only showed the public what happened but provided them with a beautiful keepsake. The large illustrations were – as they were intended to be – hung or pinned on the walls of millions of homes, providing a significant influence on the taste of the broad public. A painting from the Crimean War shows a hut in which officers spent the winter outside Sevastopol. Its wooden walls are entirely covered with engravings taken from illustrated papers. Many of these same pictures, expensively coloured, mounted and framed, can be bought today. They have helped define for us an image of Victorians filling their homes with jingoistic visions of imperial glory. Though pride in these achievements will undoubtedly have played its part, it is worth remembering that such pictures represented state-of-the-art news reporting and a triumph of printing technology.

  Over the following decades – for it was only towards the end of the century that technical advances made possible the inclusion of photographs in papers – these engraved illustrations became almost an industry in themselves. Imagination continued to guide the artists who drew them (after all, one could not depict a fire or an earthquake in some distant country by any other method) but to a surprising extent they were also based on observation. This was especially the case with military campaigns. Throughout the American Civil War, the Zulu War, the Gordon relief expedition and the Boer War, artists accompanied the armies and sketched the fighting. The ‘specials’, as these men were known, travelled the world and were as used to the rigours of campaigning as any veteran soldier. They shared all the dangers of the battlefront, and might even join in the fighting, since they often carried a revolver for protection. The extent to which they saw war ‘from the sharp end’ is witnessed by the case of the most famous of them, Melton Prior. A household name in Victorian Britain, Prior was known to colleagues as ‘the screeching billiard ball’ because of his high-pitched voice and shining, bald pate. During an attack on British troops in the Sudan, their commanding officer yelled at Prior to keep his head down because its gleam was attracting enemy fire!

  The drawings of men like Prior were often made on lightweight paper (for ease of transport) and sent home from the battlefields by whatever means was possible – stuffed in the bags of Army dispatch-riders as far as the nearest town, then brought by railway and steamship back to London. In a matter of days the sketches would be published as engravings. Just as the advent of the telegraph at the time of the Crimean War had made it possible for the British public to read of events over the breakfast table shortly after they happened, so images of great happenings could be examined within a week or ten days. The process by which this was made possible was simple. The artist’s drawings would have been glued on to wooden blocks that would then be cut with engraving tools by teams of specialists. The original would be destroyed but the engraved version could be covered in ink and printed. Though a good deal of spontaneity and freshness was lost – the finished product could be lamentably bad in comparison – the result was still impressive and made a powerful impact.

  As well as serious news magazines of this sort (Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly are other examples), there were others that dealt entirely with crime. Of these the best-known was the Illustrated Police News. This weekly journal, a staple of Victorian barber shops but understandably considered unsuitable for respectable households, was extremely graphic in both its written and drawn depictions of crimes. The issue for 10 June 1882 featured on its cover the ‘Horrible Tragedy at Fulham’, with sketches of ‘Policeman supporting the dying man’, ‘Body shewing stab-wounds’, ‘Jury viewing the body’ and ‘The prisoner, Richard Wells’. In case these details were not enough to tempt purchasers, the cover also showed a young man ‘accidentally hanged at Southwark’ and – less salaciously – a playground accident that befell a young girl: ‘Fatal skipping – Peckham’. With the ‘Whitechapel Murders’ six years later, sales of this magazine reached a zenith.

  By the nineties it was possible to print photographs in magazines. Though this made them somewhat expensive – they sold for shillings rather than pence – it marked the arrival of the modern world in relation to journalism, for photography has dominated the press and periodicals ever since. From the advent of the ILN it had been the case that text had to be shortened and fitted around the illustrations, and as a result both the format and the content of periodicals had changed. News had to be told more concisely, and text had to be more eye-catching because it had to compete for attention.

  Entertaining Papers

  The creation of a vastly expanded reading public through compulsory education also impacted on the presentation of news. The newly literate millions might be able to understand a newspaper, but they did not want to pay to read dry and long-winded articles. They represented a huge market for sales, but to capture it the papers must be made entertaining and readable for those who had a short attention span or limited time. A press like this already existed across the Atlantic, and the same methods began to be copied in Britain. Great issues were presented not in ponderous articles but in short paragraphs designed to be read quickly by people in a hurry. News, instead of mere advertisements, was put on the front page. An important new technique was pioneered in 1884 by the Pall Mall Gazette when it published an interview with General Gordon: thereafter, readers could hear the news from those who actually made it. Journalism ceased to be the aloof, semi-academic discipline it had previously been, but the new brash approach could come close to the opposite extreme: ‘The news tended to be shorter and often trivial, and lacked the guidance necessary to help its readers understand, or even follow it.’1 Cheap (halfpenny) newspapers and evening and Sunday papers, as well as the illustrated weekly papers, all became established during this period. This ‘New Journalism’, consciously modelled on the American press and directed at the lower echelons of the professional class (‘written by office boys for office boys’), could control its readers’ access to world events and thus direct their thoughts and opinions.

  Alfred Harmsworth, the greatest exponent of this New Journalism, launched his Daily Mail in 1896 with the statement – for he had realized that imperial issues were curr
ently attracting immense public interest – that it stood for ‘the power, the supremacy, the greatness of the British Empire’. Harmsworth was a man well suited to the times. Born in 1865, he had been a professional journalist since the age of fifteen, and had become established as a publisher at twenty-two. A man of boundless energy and wide interests, he had quickly developed a firm grasp of ‘popular’ journalism, and used this to telling effect. In 1894, two years before he established the Mail, he acquired the Evening News.

  This was regarded as the beginning of a new era in Fleet Street. The paper’s motto was ‘all the news in the shortest space’, and its approach to news was gossipy, trivial and concise. Harmsworth paid for some of the best available writers to provide leading articles – prepackaged social and political opinions – that were no more than paragraphs in length. He also studied the interests of the reading public and aligned his publications with their needs. Hobbies, in an age of greatly increased leisure, filled numerous pages: reports of sporting fixtures, discussions of new dance crazes, tips on how to play tennis or ride a bicycle or create a floral paradise in your small back garden. His papers specifically targeted women by featuring pages devoted to fashion, household topics or the sports that they now played. There were crosswords and other types of puzzle to beguile odd moments while one waited for a train, and there were competitions that offered prizes. The technical marvels of the day were described and explained– the motor car, the aeroplane, the cinema. The sheer variety of things to read in a newspaper was bewildering, but this was balanced by a perceived trivializing of important issues and the danger of filling the minds of the half-educated with prejudices. In other words, culture, learning and news were being ‘dumbed down’ by a mass media – a charge that is often levelled, and with equal justification, in our own time. As in the present day, each successful newspaper or magazine was soon followed by imitators who borrowed the format and filled their pages with similar contents. By the end of the century, station bookstalls groaned beneath the weight of pictorial weeklies (the Sketch and the Sphere were perhaps the best known), social gossip publications and hobby journals. There were other periodicals devoted simply to providing reading matter. The Strand magazine gained immense popularity by publishing the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. For the seriously thoughtful, Frazer’s Magazine provided quality writing; for the seriously frivolous, Vanity Fair, founded by the colourful soldier, traveller and politician Fred Burnaby, provided diversion. This produced a regular series of humorous portraits of political, social and sporting figures, signed with the pen-names ‘Spy’ and ‘Ape’ that became hugely popular. Many of them still decorate pubs and restaurants today.

  Comic Papers

  As well as producing the illustrated magazine, the Victorian age honed the satirical publication to an edge of excellence. For generations prior to the Queen’s accession, when the monarchy had been scandal ridden and deeply unpopular, there had been satire in both the written word and the ‘public prints’ that was disrespectful and vicious. At the lower end of journalism there were cliquish and muck-raking partisan newspapers that defended particular political viewpoints and vigorously attacked others. In the thirties there were several short-lived magazines that took on the function of poking fun at government and Society: Punchinello, Figaro in London, Punch in London, Charivari.

  In 1841, a group of journalists and authors met at a tavern in Dulwich to establish a more ambitious periodical. Punch – its title indicates that it was heavily indebted to its predecessors – first appeared in July of that year, and was subtitled The London Charivari in recognition of the fact that it was inspired by a French publication. It was the brainchild of several gifted men, Douglas Jerrold, Mark Lemon and Henry Mayhew among others, and in its early years was radical and somewhat scurrilous. It also had something of the cheerful amateurishness of a school magazine, for it was put together by a convivial group of friends, and it must have been enormous fun to produce. It attacked social abuses and unpopular governments at home and abroad (it was several times banned in Continental countries), parodied (very cleverly) literature and the stage and filled gaps between articles with often hideous puns. It was illustrated by line drawings, initially to accompany the text, or decorative head- and tail-pieces. Such light-hearted drawings were called ‘cuts’, but after one of them, depicting an art gallery, was captioned ‘Cartoon’, this term (which in the art world meant a preliminary sketch) became a catch-all term for humorous illustrations. Punch, whose early illustrators included John Leech, the portrayer of Dickens’ Mr Pickwick, gradually acquired a reputation as a showcase for drawings that were beautiful and accomplished as well as funny. It outgrew any notion of being copied from French originals and was itself followed by a number of imitators: Judy, Fun and the curiously named Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday. Punch artists often worked on these other periodicals, whose style and content were at least superficially similar. Between them, they did much to define our impression of nineteenth-century Britain.

  By the end of the sixties, chiefly through the influence of William Makepeace Thackeray, Punch had lost its radicalism and positioned itself where it was to remain until its demise in the 1990s – squarely in the upper bourgeoisie. Cartoons were now the major part of its appeal, and this class looked through it to see reflections of themselves and their world. The drawings of George du Maurier captured it during the seventies and eighties, for his images and captions were often drawn from his own family life. As well as merely providing humour, Punch produced serious, full-page drawings to commemorate specific events. Many of them depicted Britannia, with helmet, sword and shield, reacting to triumphs and disasters abroad – grim faced while slaughtering Indian Mutineers, or weeping above the caption ‘Too Late!’ when Gordon was killed at Khartoum. The most famous of these drawing – Dropping the Pilot – appeared in 1890 and referred to the dismissal of Bismarck as Chancellor by Kaiser Wilhelm II. Together with Du Maurier’s True Humility, with the curate saying of his egg: ‘Parts of it are excellent’, this became the most famous Punch cartoon of all time.

  The artists who drew these images were at the top of their profession at a time when British pen and ink drawing was at its height. John Tenniel – best known as the illustrator of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – was followed by Linley Sambourne, Bernard Partridge, Harry Furniss, Phil May, Edward Tennyson Reed, F. H. Townsend, Dudley Hardy and many others. Though largely forgotten today, the work of these ‘black-and-white men’, as they were known, was instantly recognizable to contemporaries, and each had their admirers.

  Edifying Papers

  Naturally, not all periodicals were trivial. It was entirely in keeping with Victorian earnestness that there should be a wealth of instructive family reading matter, and indeed there were whole publishing houses – the Religious Tract Society, for instance – devoted to this market. Not only was there a demand for light literature that could be read on the Sabbath, there was also a need for wholesome and informative short articles that would fill the minds of the young with useful knowledge, and for innocent games and puzzles that would help to pass the long hours of a rainy afternoon. The publishers’ response was a number of titles – The Quiver, Sunday, Sunday at Home – that admirably fulfilled this role. Though the genre was very much a product of its time, and did not survive the Queen by more than a few decades, it was remembered with affection by many of those who read it.

  Books

  Literature of all kinds was a great deal more widely available to Victorians than it had ever been before, because books had become cheaper and more widespread. A number of technical developments between the twenties and forties had made it possible to typeset, print and bind books more easily, with the result that prices began to fall. Some publishers also issued novels in instalments – Pickwick Papers was a notable example of this. It made sense to publish in this way, for interest in the story built up momentum as the weeks went by and sales increased, while for purchasers the cost of the volume was
spread in a kind of hire-purchase arrangement – but was greater than it would have been had they bought a complete book. The price of books continued to fall throughout the century. The use of inferior, wood-pulp paper from the seventies and the advent of the paperback at about the same time meant that the craftsmanship involved in making a book might now be minimal, if not non-existent.

  This revolution in publishing brought reading, for learning and leisure, within reach of most of the public. One result of this was a great increase in professional writers, as thousands of hacks laboured to satisfy a desire for print that had become insatiable. Whether with established ‘classics’ or lowbrow fiction, the later years of the reign saw a positive deluge of ‘cheap editions’, ‘pocket editions’, ‘abridged editions’ and, perhaps most significant, ‘collected editions’. It became possible to purchase whole collections of poetry, Shakespeare’s plays or the entire output of some other writer, in editions with small type and lightweight paper that were cheap enough to give as school prizes and small enough to carry in an overcoat pocket. By this means traditional literature, as well as new works, could be appreciated by anyone in return for a modest outlay, and great poetry and prose could become familiar to millions. This development of accessible, popular literature did not mean, of course, that all books were of a similarly basic standard, as anyone knows who has seen, for example, the presentation volumes of children’s books illustrated by Arthur Rackham.