by A. N. Wilson
The brand-new throne designed by Augustus Welby Pugin for the chamber of the House of Lords provided the Age of Railways and Reform with a piece of instant history, rather in the manner that the nouveaux-riches elevated by capitalism could buy themselves pedigrees and titles.
Landseer’s Windsor Castle in Modern Times presents two young lovers, Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, looking forward to the new era. The Prince was destined not to survive middle age.
The catastrophe of the British retreat from Kabul, in which all 16,000 British and Indian troops (save one) were slaughtered, gets regularly forgotten. Lady Butler’s painting of the sole survivor, an army doctor, arriving in Jalalabad serves as an iconic reminder of the likely consequences of foreign intervention in Afghanistan.
Two of the most celebrated paintings by William Holman Hunt bristle with ironies, conscious and unconscious.
In The Awakening Conscience the model, Hunt’s sometime mistress, looks rather less conscience-stricken than the subject-matter demands.
Hunt shared the religious doubts of his contemporaries, but his Light of the World became the most popular icon of faith. The figure of Jesus is modelled on two women, Christina Rossetti and her sister-in-law, the artist Elizabeth Siddal.
Relations between France and England were always ambivalent. Napoleon III, as he was to become, took Queen Victoria to visit the tomb of the great Emperor at Les Invalides on her visit to Paris in 1855. When, in 1870, he was exiled to England, and Paris suffered bombardment and starvation at the hands of the Prussians, the Queen was delighted. ‘Surely that Sodom and Gomorrah as Papa called it deserves to be crushed,’ she crowed to her daughter, the Crown Princess of Prussia.
When Ford Madox Brown saw navvies digging in Hampstead, he thought they were bringing a new water supply. In fact they were digging drains, an even more vital necessity in disease-ridden, stinking London. The result was Work, a symbolic painting in which Christian Socialist F.D. Maurice stands beside Thomas Carlyle (in a hat) in the foreground, prophets looking at the toilers.
Cardinal Manning’s intervention in the Great Dock Strike of 1889 continued the tradition of enlightened alliance between workers and middle-class sympathizers. The splendid banner in his honour was made by the Amalgamated Society of Watermen and Lightermen, Greenwich.
The little boy in Rossetti’s The Beloved was a slave, spotted by the artist with his American owner in the doorway of a London hotel. Rossetti felt largely untouched by the American Civil War which waged while he laboured on this carefully allegorical work.
General Gordon, evangelical Christian and military hero, came to be an emblem of the virtuous Briton, bringing enlightenment to Africa and Asia, whether they wanted it or not. His death was seen as a martyrdom, as this famous picture would suggest.
The death of Prince Albert removed an incomparably intelligent and astute figure from royal and public life. In the household of the Queen, his cult became something akin to an alternative religion.
The condition of society, for all its prosperity and progressivism, filled many intelligent observers with disquiet.
Karl Marx, long exiled in London, foresaw the self-destruction of capitalism, which may yet come to pass. Seen here with his daughter Jenny.
Annie Besant was at first a liberal radical, then a socialist, then a Theosophist.
Her defection from radicalism distressed the secular campaigner Charles Bradlaugh, who was repeatedly excluded from the parliament to which he had been elected for refusing to swear an oath to a God in whom he did not believe.
John Ruskin, perhaps a greater prophet than them all, tried to rescue England’s soul from the assaults of industrialization, and fell prey to ‘the storm clouds of the 19th century’.
W.E. Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, the two giants of mid-Victorian political life, embodied two different views of civilization. Disraeli, a brilliant novelist, offered popular Conservatism to a wider electorate. Gladstone’s earnest desire to improve the human race made him popular with Nonconformist Northern grocers.
At Rorke’s Drift, 103 white men resisted a huge Zulu army. The survivors are photographed here.
‘A very remarkable people, the Zulus,’ quipped Disraeli. (He regarded the Zulu War of 1879 as a catastrophic mistake.) ‘They defeat our generals; they convert our bishops; they have settled the fate of a great European dynasty.’ This last was a reference to the death of the Prince Imperial of France in the Zulu campaign.
After the slaughter of thousands of Africans, magazine readers at home could comfort themselves with images such as that of Lord William Beresford running a sword into a Zulu.
The engineering achievements of the age are among its lasting monuments – the great Forth Bridge (seen here during construction) being a notable example.
Gilbert and Sullivan were an unlikely alliance, the coarse satires and cruel jokes of the former at first sight an unsuitable vehicle for the lyrical musicality of one who wanted to write great oratorios. The Savoy Operas, however, held up an hilarious mirror to the age and remain one of its glories. In Patience they guyed Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetes, a decade before the legal system sent Oscar to prison.
The diaries of Arthur J. Munby, minor poet and ecclesiastical civil servant, reveal an obsession with working women. Munby secretly married a domestic servant.
His studies of collier girls remind us of a world far removed from the drawing-rooms of the middle classes.
Thanks to the Pre-Raphaelite painters some of the Victorian faces most familiar to us are not those of male politicians but of modestly born women. Fanny Cornforth, the model for many of them, was really called Sarah Cox.
Elizabeth Siddal, known to us as Millais’s Ophelia and Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, was a good painter in her own right, admired by Ruskin.
Journalism was changing. Information was on sale, like everything else.
W.H. Russell, war correspondent for The Times, reported the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny and the American Civil War. In so doing, he transformed the modern perceptions of warfare.
One of the great pioneers of sensationalist modern journalism was W.T. Stead, whose exposé of child prostitution in London landed him briefly in prison. You can’t put a bad journalist down, however, and even after he perished in the Titanic disaster, Stead made emanations and appearances at spiritualist seances.
William Barnes, the parson-poet, at Winterborne Came Rectory, Dorset, with his family. Although it looks an idyllic scene, the closing decades of the 19th century saw an increase in rural poverty.
Meanwhile the life of the urban poor was scarcely more enviable. This London slum was photographed in 1889.
The education of women was one of the great advances of the age. This picture, however, shows a cheerful male crowd gathering in Cambridge in 1897 when the University rejected the admission of women. Like the dummy female undergraduate on the bicycle, the fate of Cambridge women was in suspense until 1947, when they were at length allowed to take degrees.
Newspaper scandal for the late Victorians was what tragedy was to the ancient Greeks: human misery concocted for spectators. Among the more celebrated victims were Oscar Wilde, seen here, paunchy and seedy after his release from gaol;
Sir Charles Dilke, whose sexual appetites destroyed his political career – pictured here with his loyal wife;
and Charles Stewart Parnell, perhaps the greatest statesman of the age, who came so close to achieving Irish Home Rule, until his affair with Mrs O’Shea was exposed. Irish Peace was thereby scuppered for over a century.
Leisure activities and games began to have mass appeal.
The races were as popular in 1860 as they are today.
The 1897 Cup Final between Aston Villa and Everton at Crystal Palace drew vast crowds.
In India, tennis was as popular with Maharajahs as among the British.
The Queen in old age went very much her own way; to the disquiet of her courtiers she placed implicit trust in a mildly fraudulent character
called Abdul Karim (‘The Munshi’) – ‘Such a very excellent person.’
The Golden and Diamond Jubilees led to a revival of popularity for the monarchy.
The Victorian passion for fancy dress. Here Princess Beatrice poses as ‘India’, attended by her nieces Princess Louise of Wales (holding box) and Princess Alix of Hesse. Around them from left to right are Khairat Ali, Abdul Karim (the Munshi), Mohammed Bukhsh and Abdul Hussain.
At the Devonshire House Ball the Duke of Devonshire (Harty Tarty) dressed as the Emperor Charles V.
Arthur Balfour, future prime minister, standing, came as a Gentleman of Holland, Mrs Grenfell came as Marie de’ Medici and Sir W.V. Harcourt came as his ancestor the Lord Chancellor. The picture nicely demonstrates how the same families held power in England for hundreds of years.
More aristocrats at play. Lord Edward Cecil as a boy with his siblings in Elizabethan dress at Hatfield House. He is a chubby little fellow. He would play a significant role in the Boer War when his father, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, was prime minister.
Lord Edward as a child was considerably plumper than these Boer children, starving in a concentration camp, perhaps the least glorious of all Victorian inventions. Tens of thousands of women and children were moved from Boer farms to camps like these.
Marie Lloyd – toothy, bald but exuding energy and erotic appeal; she was perhaps the greatest of the music hall artistes.
The advent of the motor-car – even with a man with a red flag walking in front – heralded the end of the old world.
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First published by Hutchinson in 2002
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