The Victorians
Page 1
Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by A.N. Wilson
Title Page
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Preface
Part I: Early Victorian
1 The Little Old Woman Britannia
2 Victoria’s Inheritance
3 The Charter
4 Typhoon Coming On
5 The Age of Peel
6 Famine in Ireland
7 The Victorians in Italy
8 Doubt
9 Mesmerism
10 John Stuart Mill’s Boiled Egg
11 The Failed Revolution
Part II: The Eighteen-Fifties
12 The Great Exhibition
13 Marx – Ruskin – Pre-Raphaelites
14 The Crimean War
15 India 1857–9
16 Clinging to Life
Part III: The Eighteen-Sixties
17 The Beloved – Uncle Tom – and Governor Eyre
18 The World of School
19 Charles Kingsley and The Water-Babies
20 Goblin Market and the Cause
21 Wonderland
22 Some Deaths
Part IV: The Eighteen-Seventies
23 Gladstone’s First Premiership
24 The Side of the Angels
25 The End of Lord Beaconsfield
26 The Devils – Wagner – Dostoyevsky – Gilbert and Sullivan
27 Country Parishes – Kilvert – Barnes – Hardy
Part V: The Eighteen-Eighties
28 A Crazy Decade
29 The Plight of the Poor
30 The Rise of Parnell
31 The Fourth Estate – Gordon of Khartoum – The Maiden Tribute of Babylon
32 Politics of the Late 1880s
33 Into Africa
34 Kipling’s India
35 Jubilee – and the Munshi
36 The Dock Strike
37 The Scarlet Thread of Murder
38 The Fall of Parnell
Part VI: The Eighteen-Nineties
39 The Victorian Way of Death
40 Appearance and Reality
41 Utopia: The Decline of the Aristocracy
42 The Boer War
43 Vale
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Picture Section
Copyright
About the Book
The Victorians has been widely acclaimed as the classic single-volume history of the Victorian era. A.N. Wilson presents his magnificent portrait of the age alongside many enthralling images of the 19th-century lives that he pieced together – telling a story that is still unfinished in our own day.
About the Author
A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he has held a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He has written lives of Sir Walter Scott (John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Tolstoy (Whitbread Award for Biography), C.S. Lewis and Hilaire Belloc. His novels include The Healing Art (Somerset Maugham Award), Wise Virgin (W H Smith Award), The Sweets of Pimlico (John Llewellyn Rhys Prize) and the five books in the Lampitt Chronicles. In 1992 he caused a sensation with his bestselling Jesus and this he followed up with his equally controversial Paul. His latest book, Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her, was published by Hutchinson in 2003. He lives in North London.
Also by A.N. Wilson
NON-FICTION
The Laird of Abbotsford
The Life of John Milton
Hilaire Belloc
How Can We Know?
Penfriends From Porlock
Tolstoy
C.S. Lewis: A Biography
Jesus
The Rise and Fall of the House of Windsor
Paul
God’s Funeral
Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her
FICTION
The Sweets of Pimlico
Unguarded Hours
Kindly Light
The Healing Art
Who Was Oswald Fish?
Wise Virgin
Scandal
Gentlemen in England
Love Unknown
Stray
The Vicar of Sorrows
Dream Children
The Lampitt Chronicles:
Incline Our Hearts
A Bottle in the Smoke
Daughters of Albion
Hearing Voices
A Watch in the Night
THE VICTORIANS
A.N. WILSON
List of illustrations
1. Steam locomotive (© Lambert/Hulton Archive)
2. Tennyson (Portrait of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92) (b/w photo) by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79) Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library)
3. Chartist riots (Chartists Attack on the Westgate Hotel, Newport, November 4th 1840, 1893 (litho) by James Flewitt Mullock (1818–92) Newport Museum and Art Gallery, South Wales/Bridgeman Art Library)
4. Ireland in desolation (© Hulton Archive)
5. Prince Albert and Queen Victoria (The Royal Archives © HM Queen Elizabeth II/Roger Fenton)
6. Osborne House
7. Osborne House (entrance hall)
8. Crimean War Cookhouse (© Hulton Archive)
9. Florence Nightingale (© Hulton Archive)
10. Mary Seacole (© Hulton Archive)
11. Darwin (© Hulton Archive)
12. Zoo man and monkey (By permission of the Zoological Society)
13. Am I a Man and a Brother? (© Hulton Archive)
14. Dickens and child (© Hulton Archive)
15. Alice Liddell (© Hulton Archive)
16. The Chatsworth Stove (By permission of the Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth House)
17. Crystal Palace (By permission of The Architect’s Journal)
18. State Opening of Parliament, 1851 (Palace of Westminster Collection)
19. The Royal Throne in the House of Lords (Palace of Westminster Collection)
20. Windsor Castle in Modern Times (The Royal Collection © HM Queen Elizabeth II)
21. The Remnants of an Army (The Remnants of an Army by Lady Elizabeth Butler (1846–1933) © Courtesy of the artist’s estate/Bridgeman Art Library)
22. The Light of the World (The Light of the World by William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) Keble College, Oxford, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)
23. The Awakening Conscience (© Tate, London)
24. Queen Victoria at the Tomb of Napoleon (The Royal Collection © HM Queen Elizabeth II)
25. Work (Work, 1863 (oil on canvas) by Ford Madox Brown (1821–93) Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery/Bridgeman Art Library)
26. Cardinal Manning banner (By permission of the People’s History Museum, Manchester)
27. The Beloved (© Tate, London)
28. General Gordon’s Last Stand (General Gordon’s Last Stand (oil on canvas) by George William Joy (1844–1925) Leeds Museums and Galleries (City Art Gallery) U.K./Bridgeman Art Library)
29. Princesses in mourning (The Royal Collection © HM Queen Elizabeth II/William Bambridge)
30. Karl and Eleanor Marx (© Hulton Archive)
31. Annie Besant (© Hulton Archive)
32. Charles Bradlaugh (© Hulton Archive)
33. John Ruskin (Portrait of John Ruskin (1819–1960) by Elliott & Fry, London, 1865 (albumen print) Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library)
34. Benjamin Disraeli (©Hulton Archive)
35. W.E. Gladstone (© Hulton Archive)
36. Survivors of Rorke’s Drift (© Hulton Archive)
37. Zulus (© Hulton Archive)
38. Lord William Beresford killing a Zulu (© Hulton Archive)
39. The Forth Bridge (© Hulton Arch
ive)
40. Patience (© Hulton Archive)
41. Collier girls by Munby (By permission of Trinity College, Cambridge)
42. Collier girl by Munby (By permission of Trinity College, Cambridge)
43. Fanny Cornforth (Fanny Cornforth: Study for ‘Found’, c.1859–61 (pen & ink on paper) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82) Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery/Bridgeman Art Library)
44. Elizabeth Siddal
45. Newspaper vendors (Newspaper Vendors, Ludgate Circus, 1893 (b&w photo) by Paul Martin (1864–1944) Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library)
46. W.H. Russell (© Hulton Archive)
47. W.T. Stead emanating behind the head of an archdeacon (By permission of The British Library)
48. The Rev. William Barnes and family (By permission of the Dorset County Museum)
49. London slum (© Hulton Archive)
50. Women suspended (© The Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge)
51. Oscar Wilde (© Hulton Archive)
52. Sir Charles Dilke (© Hulton Archive)
53. Charles Stewart Parnell (© Hulton Archive)
54. Races (© Hulton Archive)
55. Cup final (© Hulton Archive)
56. Indian tennis party (© Hulton Archive)
57. Jubilee (© Hulton Archive)
58. The Queen and the Munshi (The Royal Archives © HM Queen Elizabeth II/Robert Milne)
59. Princess Beatrice as ‘India’ (The Royal Archives © HM Queen Elizabeth II/G.W. Wilson)
60. Devonshire House Ball: Harty Tarty (By permission of the Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth House)
61. Devonshire House Ball: Arthur Balfour et al. (By permission of the Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth House)
62. The Cecils as Elizabethan children (© The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House)
63. Starving children in concentration camp (By permission of the Boer War Museum, Bloemfontein)
64. Marie Lloyd (© Hulton Archive)
65. The motor-car (© Hulton Archive)
Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be glad to make good in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.
Acknowledgements
Peter Ackroyd, Berry Chevasco and David Newsome read the book in its entirety in typescript and offered invaluable suggestions. I am so grateful to them for spotting howlers and for making suggestions. Rosemary Ashton read the 1850s chapters in the middle of a very busy academic term. John Grigg, a hero as well as a friend to me, who had helped with earlier books, offered to read the typescript. Alas, before he was able to accomplish that task, mortal illness overtook him. I owe so much to his encouragement and to conversations over the years. All those interested in Victorian and twentieth-century political history are the poorer for his death, not least because it occurred before he had finished his life’s work, the monumental biography of David Lloyd George. To all these I render hearty thanks.
It is impossible to finish a large task such as this without realizing how lucky I have been in my teachers, my family and friends. One does not wish to imitate an Oscar speech by thanking everyone from Momma to the hypnotherapist, but a book such as this grows, not just from a few years of intensive research, but also from a lifetime spent in the company of people who are interested in the subject. Thanks to those unnamed teachers, domestic companions, family, friends who over many years educated me and continue to do so.
Thanks, too, to Max Hastings and Lawrence James, who at different stages made helpful suggestions for further reading, especially in the sphere of military and colonial history.
My mesmeric neighbour Jonathan Miller told me much about mesmerism, the history of Victorian medicine and much else, as well as sharing some of the insights of his late mother Betty Miller, that inspired interpreter of nineteenth-century literature and life.
The ‘onlie begetter’ of the book was Gillon Aitken. I owe him so much, not merely for encouraging me to start the project, but for his friendship throughout. Sue Freestone, Starling Lawrence and Steve Cox were patient midwives – Steve Cox being the most punctilious of editors, and a fund of prodigious and miscellaneous knowledge. Jill Hamilton did much useful copying for me at the Society of Psychical Research, and amused me with talk of Arthur Balfour. James Nightingale helped the book through its final journey to publication and Douglas Matthews made the index.
I began a conversation about Ruskin with Tanya Ledger – now Harrod – about thirty years ago and it seems, very enjoyably to me, to have been going on ever since. Tony Quinton, in moving house and reducing his library, filled my house with such treasures as the Complete Works of Carlyle and the College Sermons of Benjamin Jowett, and my mind with many stimulating thoughts. John Martin Robinson’s conversations about the nineteenth-century Church, the aristocracy and the politics of age were always stimulating.
Ruth Guilding, whom I first met in Princess Beatrice’s bedroom at Osborne House, where she was the curator, gave invaluable help with the picture research, as well as many insights, over the years, into the Victorian Age.
The staff of the London Library, the British Library and the Bodleian Library – especially in the New Bodleian and in Duke Humphrey’s Library – were patient with an amateur researcher whose inquiries must often have seemed foolish, and brought manuscripts ‘up’ with astounding speed. The staff of the Manuscript Room in the British Library were similarly solicitous. For many months, though, it was the Humanities One Reading Room in the British Library which seemed like home. The friendliness and helpfulness of the staff in this stupendously well-run library are a very bright light in life. There is an anecdote on Chapter 14 which those editing the typescript found puzzling. Lord Ashley – best known to us as the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury – who campaigned so tirelessly for improving the lot of factory children, and poor children everywhere, wanted to enlist the help of the foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston – his mother-in-law’s husband. Ashley organized a visit to Palmerston’s palatial house in Carlton Gardens by a delegation of trade union leaders, Surely, said Palmerston with his breezy optimism, conditions in the factories had improved immeasurably since the early reforms? Had not the advent of machinery made things much easier for factory workers? The union leaders pushed together two heavy armchairs and asked the Foreign Secretary if he would care to trundle them round his drawing room. He was out of puff after a couple of circumambulations of the room. The children in British factories, he was told, have to push machinery of comparable weight for the equivalent of thirty miles each day. Desk editors have special minds. ‘What sort of machines are these?’ asked Steve Cox. I don’t know, I am afraid. But I often thought of these trundling Victorian factory workers as, a little guiltily, I ordered up yet more books in ‘Humanities One’. A smiling staff heaved and carried literally hundreds of books to the Issue Desk for me. The British Library is the glory of our nation; the staff are its glory. Though we, the readers, enjoy all the seemingly magic computerized catalogues and comfortable reading rooms, the books do still have to be lifted and heaved and wheeled.
The heroine of my tale, though, is Amy Boyle, who typed the whole thing up from my handwritten version; then retyped; and then cheerfully typed again, before at last – mystery of mysteries – she put it on to disk.
Preface
The Victorians are still with us. This is not a whimsical statement, intended to suggest that the shades of the Prince Consort or Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Dan Leno are still to be discovered floating in the night air if we empathize sufficiently with their memory or purpose. Rather, the Victorians are still with us because the world they created is still here, though changed. Theirs was the period of the most radical transformation ever seen by the world. Before them major industrialization was confined to a few towns in Britain. After them, the whole world was covered with railways and factories; and the unstoppable rise and spread of technology would continue into the age of Silicon Valley. Before them, the world
was a small world of nation states. East was East and West was West. Large tracts of the world, especially in Africa, were unmapped. After them, the ‘Dark Continent’ had been penetrated by European powers: the destiny of Africa had changed; India, parcelled out in the eighteenth century between the East India Company and its own native princes, had become the linchpin of a huge British Empire – stretching throughout Asia, Australasia, Canada. Before the Victorians, democracy was the dream of a few political theorists. After them, it became the inevitable political goal towards which all Europeans and subsequently the rest of the world strove.
The Victorian era felt like a time of peace for almost everyone in Britain. Yet for the planet as a whole, because of the Victorians, it was in fact a time of almost perpetual minor warfare. Old empires and nations, most notably the Ottoman Empire, crumbled before the technological and economic giants of modern Europe, most notably France, Germany and Britain. Thereafter, their struggle for dominance and mastery led very nearly to their mutual destruction in two world wars during the twentieth century. And yet, when the dust and rubble of battle had subsided, when the twentieth-century experiments in European dictatorship and Marxist communism had been tried and discarded, when the Berlin Wall had been demolished and a new world order proclaimed with the United States as the dominant superpower, the Victorian world, with its problems, was still there. The Balkans were still the area of Europe where trouble could flare into conflict and conflict into war – and this after the Crimean War, the ‘Bulgarian Atrocities’, the decline of the Sick Man of Europe, the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo. We are still in some ways facing the same world there as Disraeli and Gladstone faced; we puzzle over the same problems of whether or not the richer countries of the world can or should helpfully intervene in Serbia, Hercegovina, Croatia. Gladstone in young middle age felt it to be his mission to pacify Ireland. Had he and Charles Stewart Parnell succeeded in persuading the electorate to allow Irish Home Rule before the scandal of Parnell’s involvement in a divorce case, British history would have been very different. But we have just been living through nearly half a century in which all the problems faced by the Irish and the British in relation to one another are still alive; many of the Victorian questions in Ireland still require an answer, in spite of the collapse of landlordism, the Ascendancy and the Union.