Chapter 18
In This Chapter
● Meeting Queen Victoria and important members of Parliament
● Major events of the era, from the People’s Charter to the Great Exhibition
● Giving the Victorians their due (and telling the truth about piano legs)
Travel back in time to 1837 - that’s the year Victoria came to the throne - and you’re in a costume drama. The men are in breeches, and the ladies are in bonnets, and it looks like the Pickwick Papers. But fast forward to the end of her reign and you get an eerie feeling: This looks like home. Okay, the lighting is gas and horses are still on the streets, but the men wear shirts and ties and jackets and take the train in to work each morning. There’s a telephone on the desk and a secretary working at a typewriter and the messages are arriving by email - well, telegraph, but it’s the same idea. The newspapers are the same - the Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, as well as a large tabloid press - printing the same stories: politics, sex, and scandal. Sound familiar?
Modern times. Our world. The Victorians were the ones who put science and technology on a pedestal to go alongside religion. They invented the city as we know it, with its suburbs and its town hall and its parks and libraries and buses and schools. They invented the seaside and the seaside holiday, and even “the countryside”, at least as somewhere to go and enjoy. Yes, they sent boys up chimneys, but they also stopped sending boys up chimneys, as they also stopped the slave trade and cock fighting. They were full of contradictions, but they made our world, they framed our minds, and ultimately, they made us.
Queen Victoria
Okay first up, the lady who gave her name to these people and the age in which they lived. Queen Victoria. She was only 18 (and still asleep in bed) when she came to the throne and she had a lot to learn. Her reign had a rocky start: Her coronation was a shambles - one lord, nicely called Lord Rolle, tripped on his cloak and literally rolled down the steps of the throne. And Vicky thought that, as queen, she could do as she liked, and she quickly had to learn that she couldn’t.
First, she found to her dismay that she couldn’t keep her Whig Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, when he lost his majority in Parliament. (See Chapter 13 for the origins of the Whigs and Tories). Then she found she couldn’t keep her ladies of the bedchamber, because they were political appointments; when the government changed, they changed, too. Victoria dug her heels in on that one, the result being that the in-coming Tory Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, refused to come in, which left poor old Lord Melbourne struggling on with a wafer-thin majority. In fact, Victoria was losing popularity fast, which was a bad thing to do in the 1830s because monarchs who lost popularity could lose their thrones as well - just ask the French. What saved her was a handsome young cousin who came over from Germany and swept her off her feet. Albert. Very sensible, very practical, very serious, no sense of humour (he liked puns and that was about it), but to Vicky he was a Greek god. With brains.
The Victorians thought Albert was a bit stuffy and more than a bit German, but on the whole they recognised that his heart was in the right place. He came up with the idea for the Great Exhibition, one of the defining events of the century (explained in the later section “Crystal Palace’s Great Exhibition”), and he was an enthusiastic patron of science, technology, and education. The Albert Memorial and the Royal Albert Hall stand in the middle of the museums and institutes he founded in South Kensington. Above all, for a long time, Albert was credited with having kept Queen Victoria on the straight and narrow and drawn her away from her ideas about doing as she liked. More recently, however, historians have tended to view Albert’s role slightly differently. He wanted the monarchy to be above party, but only so that it could play a more active role in politics, not less.
Albert was a great admirer of the Tory leader, Sir Robert Peel, and he told Vicky that next time Sir Robert came into office and wanted to make some changes in her household, she should let him change anything - though maybe not the carpets - but she should keep hold of him. Because if he left office the Whigs would come in and Albert didn’t think much of them. By now Vicky was so completely under Albert’s spell that she took his advice, so when Sir Robert did return to power, this time she didn’t cause any fuss.
Albert never really persuaded Victoria to stay neutral. He wanted the Crown to play an important part in politics, and he died in 1861 while playing a crucial part in keeping Britain out of the American Civil War.
After his death, Victoria was so distraught that she virtually retired from the world and had to be coaxed back into public life by Disraeli. The Queen admired Benjamin Disraeli, who was the leader of the Conservatives, and made no secret of the fact that she loathed his Liberal opponent, the venerable Mr William Gladstone. But although she could drive Gladstone up the wall - and often did - she sometimes helped things to happen even though she had very little power.(To find out more about Disraeli and Gladstone and their famous feud, head to the section “Bill and Ben: The Gladstone and Disraeli show” later in this chapter.)
Queen Victoria’s reign spanned sixty four years, from 1837 to 1901. She had presided over an age when Britain changed almost beyond recognition, and by the time she died most of her subjects could not remember any other monarch.
Prime Ministers and MPs of the Age
The nineteenth century was the great age of Parliament. It produced some great speakers and statesmen, and many dramatic battles were fought out on the green benches of the House of Commons or the scarlet benches of the House of Lords. Here are some of those great Victorian statesmen.
Sir Robert Peel - tragedy of a statesman
Sir Robert Peel, who was Prime Minister twice, 1834-5 and 1841-6 was, quite simply, one of the greatest Prime Ministers of the nineteenth century. As Home Secretary, he created the modern police force, unarmed and in blue so as to be as unlike the army as possible. As Prime Minister, he single-handedly financed Britain’s economic expansion, and he did it by cutting import duties. He also came up with a new tax which he thought would only last a few years, to be called Income Tax. Nice idea; shame about the timescale. But Peel’s career was brought to a sudden end by the Irish Famine.
The Irish Famine
In the 1840s, a million people in Ireland and Scotland starved to death. The disaster began when the European potato crop was destroyed by disease. In most countries, this caused hardship but not famine, but the Irish and the
Highland Scots were kept so poor that potatoes were the only thing they could afford to eat. As famine began to take a hold in Ireland, the authorities’ reaction seemed to make a terrible situation even worse:
● The government provided work, usually road-building, so the people could earn enough money to buy food. Unfortunately, heavy labour is not the best thing to give people already desperately weak from hunger.
● The Church of England set up food stations, but they sometimes tried to force people who came for food, most of whom were Catholic, to agree to become Protestants - they reckoned it was being Catholic which kept them all so poor and backward.
● People in Britain gave thousands of pounds in donations for famine relief, but after a while “compassion fatigue” set in, rather as it still does with big charity appeals today.
What Sir Robert Peel would not do was just to give out free food. He reckoned that would wreck the fragile Irish economy and just produce even worse poverty. When he finally relented and allowed in some emergency supplies of American maize, it turned out to need too much preparation before it could be eaten.
Was the Irish Famine a case of genocide, as some people have said? There’s no evidence to support that idea. Genocide means setting out specifically to exterminate an entire people, like the Nazis’ war on the Jews; the British may have disliked, and they certainly despaired of, the Irish but they did not set out deliberately to kill them. They simply had no idea how to cope with an unprecedented situation. (However, if you do want an example of genocide, look at the case of Tasmania, outlined in Chapter 19.)
Peel forgets to check behind him
Peel calculated, quite rightly, that the trouble in Ireland was not lack of food but lack of money. Therefore, he believed, the best way out of famine would be to free up trade in order to allow more money to circulate in Ireland. In the long term, he was probably right, but the policy wasn’t going to help the Irish who were starving in the fields. In any case, his party wanted nothing to do with it. They liked the old system, which kept the farmers and landowners (who mostly voted Tory) in money. When Peel, who never took too much heed of his own party at the best of times, proposed repealing those great symbols of protection, the Corn Laws (you can find out about these highly controversial measures in Chapter 17), his MPs turned on him. Young Benjamin Disraeli saw a chance to make a name for himself and tore into Peel mercilessly for “betraying” his own party. Peel got the Laws repealed, but his party deserted him, and he had to resign. It was a sad end to a very distinguished career. Peel died in a riding accident shortly afterwards, so he never lived to hear Disraeli and the other rebels a few years later admitting that he had been right all along.
Lord Palmerston - Send a gunboat!
Lord Palmerston was in Parliament from 1806 until his death in 1865 and for most of that time he was a minister. He was Prime Minister twice, 1855-1858 and 1859-1865, but he is best remembered for his energetic approach to the subtleties of international diplomacy. His speciality was to send a small fleet to an opponent’s port (and if it happened to be the capital city, even better) and blow it to pieces. This approach, which became known as “Gunboat diplomacy” worked with the Chinese, the Dutch, and the Egyptians in the 1830s and 1840s. In fact, “Pam”, as he was affectionately nicknamed, only really got into trouble when, as Foreign Secretary in 1850, he tried it on the Greeks.
The Greek government had got into a long and complex legal dispute with a shady character by the name of Don Pacifico, who happened to have been born at Gibraltar, which meant he was technically a British subject. As a British subject, Pacifico claimed protection from the British ambassador. The ambassador got onto London, and the next thing anyone knew, a large British fleet appeared off Athens making an offer on Don Pacifico’s behalf that the Greeks really couldn’t refuse: Give in or we blow your city to pieces.
Trade without frontiers - bread without tears
The Victorians believed in free trade as a way for nations to get on in peace and harmony. Free trade would mean prosperity and freedom and love and peace and universal happiness. You won't be surprised to learn that the people who came up with this were the very manufacturers and industrialists who were making the goods that would be traded. Some of their opponents did point out that the workers didn't seem to be sharing in much of this prosperity and happiness.
The free traders set up a huge lobby group called the Anti-Corn Law League because the best examples of restrictive trade were the laws governing the corn trade. These Corn Laws allowed farmers and landowners to make money by forcing the poor to pay through the nose for bread. So the fate of the Corn Laws became a sort of conflict between industrialists (who didn't want them) and farmers (who did). Thanks to Peel, in 1846 the Corn Laws were repealed, and thanks to Disraeli, Peel was essentially repealed, too. Nevertheless, Peel was right: Free trade did make Britain very rich and very powerful. In the League's home city of Manchester, citizens raised money for statues not to generals, but to the men who led the AntiCorn Law League.
Don't send a gunboat
Palmerston's Pax Britannica idea didn't always work. On one occasion a British sailor called Bowers went ashore in a foreign port and was promptly arrested in flagrant breach of international law. Everyone expected Palmerston to act - send a gunboat! - but this time, he didn't lift a finger. You see, the country was the United States, the port was Charleston, South Carolina, and poor Mr Bowers's "crime" was being black.
Calling in the Royal Navy over a personal legal dispute was a bit much even for the Victorians, and Palmerston had to come and explain himself to the House of Commons. The British, he said, were like the ancient Romans: They were entitled to protection anywhere in the world, and if anyone stood in their way they would have Lord Palmerston to deal with. The public loved it. Britain was to be the world’s policeman, patrolling the seas and keeping the peace, or Pax Britannica.
Bill and Ben: The Gladstone and Disraeli show
The Victorians loved Punch and Judy, and in the 1860s and 1870s they got their very own political knockabout with two political leaders with real star quality. In the blue corner, Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli (Prime Minister 1868 and 1874-1880, a.k.a. Ben, Dizzy, the Earl of Beaconsfield), and in the yellow corner, Liberal leader William Ewart Gladstone (Prime Minister 1868-74, 1880-1884, 1886 and 1892-3, a.k.a. the People’s William, the Grand Old Man, Mr Gladstone, or just That Madman). The two men had been rivals since Peel’s day (see the section “Sir Robert Peel - tragedy of a statesman” earlier in this chapter) and they couldn’t stand each other. Someone asked Disraeli once for the difference between a misfortune and a catastrophe. “If Gladstone fell in the river”, he replied, “that would be a misfortune. If anyone pulled him out, that would be a catastrophe.”
Gladstone believed in God and in sound finance, and he was pretty sure a connection existed between the two. For Gladstone politics was a mission: to bring peace to Ireland or to provide free education for all. If other people didn’t agree with him, it was quite simple: He was right and everyone else was wrong, even when he changed his mind.
Disraeli didn’t do missions. He didn’t even do principles, really. He was a popular novelist living well beyond his means, and he only went into Parliament because MPs couldn’t be imprisoned for debt. He didn’t know much about finance, and his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1850s and 1860s proved it. But he did know about social - and political - climbing. He married a rich heiress, and when he finally became Prime Minister he declared he had “reached the top of the greasy pole”.
Gladstone wanted to give the vote to working people who had earned it, but not to those who hadn’t; Disraeli didn’t really believe in giving the vote to anyone, but in 1867 he did give it to a whole section of the working class so he, instead of Gladstone, could get all the credit. Nor was Disraeli particularly interested in the Empire, but he reckoned there were votes in it and that Gladstone probably disapproved of it (he was right on both counts). So, in 1872 Disraeli suddenly announced that the Empire was good and right and that the Conservative Party would stand up for it through thick and thin. Gladstone went red then purple then red again with rage and frustration at Dizzy’s cheek - but then, that was the idea.
Everyone took sides. Newspapers, cartoonists, and song writers all joined in. In some pubs, you could even get beaten up for supporting the wrong party! Gladstone kept preaching at the Queen, which she couldn’t stand; Disraeli flattered her shamelessly and even managed to get her an exotic new title: Empress of India. She loved it. Mind you, when he lay dying and she sent a message asking if he would care for a visit, he said, “Better not: She’ll only want me to take a message to Albert.”
Troubles at Home and Abroad
Although the Victorians liked to stress how stable Britain was compared with its European neighbours - or the United States - they did have some serious problems to contend with. These were some of the most urgent of them.
The People’s Charter
When Queen Victoria came to the throne, working people did not have the vote. Any of them. Remember that these were the people who did all the work which made Britain the great industrial giant that she was (refer to Chapter 16 for information on the Industrial Revolution). So a group of working people in London got together and decided to do something about it. In 1838 they drew up what they called the People’s Charter (which had a nice ring of Magna Carta about it; see Chapter 9 for info on the Magna Carta) to demand the vote. But not just the vote - the Chartists had thought a bit more deeply than that. They wanted the following:
● The vote: Well, obviously. And some of them even wanted women to have it, too.
● Equal electoral districts: Otherwise, the middle classes could fix the boundaries to their own advantage.
● No property qualification for MPs: At the time, you had to own property - that is, real estate - to become an MP. And since not many workers could afford real estate, not many workers had been able to become MPs.
● Payment for MPs: Without pay, how was a working-class MP to live? At the time, most MPs were against being paid, but more recently, however, they’ve become much more keen on the idea.
● Secret ballot: No more of that getting up in front of a large crowd and declaring your vote in a loud voice - so handy for any local landowner wanting to intimidate his tenants.
● Annual Parliaments: These would have meant an election every year: A bit drastic, but remember that the acid test of democracy is not whether you can vote someone in, but whether you can vote them out. If you get the chance to do it every year, they’ll soon learn who’s boss.
Despite what their opponents said, the Chartists weren’t revolutionaries (though the German political philosopher Karl Marx, founder of communism, who was in London at the time, rather wished they would be!) But if you look again at their six demands you can see a fully working democracy with power in the hands of the people. Maybe the middle classes had a point: The Chartists were more revolutionary than they realised.
Petitioning Parliament
The Chartists got two massive petitions together: the first had over a million signatures, and the second had three million. That took some organising: no computers or databases in the 1840s, remember. But Parliament wouldn’t even look at the petitions. Not surprisingly, there was trouble. The Chartists organised a national strike and a big riot broke out at Newport in Wales. In 1848 they tried again with an even bigger petition. Parliament, more nervous this time because of revolutions on the Continent, called in troops and cautiously agreed to have a look at the petition. Which was fine until they started looking at the signatures and found that, er, some of them were false. Unless, of course, Queen Victoria, the Duke of Wellington, and Mr Punch really had signed it. At least 17 times. The MPs fell about laughing and the Chartists had to creep away.
So, were the Chartists important? Well, if the question is; “Did Parliament grant them their demands immediately?” the answer is no. But if the question is; “Did they have an impact?” the answer is yes. This was a national movement organised by ordinary, often ill-educated working people who managed to run a national newspaper and maintain a vast political campaign, complete with meetings, posters, processions, pamphlets, speakers and petitions. They ran an education scheme, a land scheme, even a teetotal movement. The Chartists created the biggest working-class political movement before the Labour Party.
Labour days?
After all the political shenanigans, how much power actually went to the people? Some of the better educated skilled workers got the vote, mainly thanks to Disraeli (see the earlier section “Bill and Ben: The Gladstone and Disraeli show” for information about him), but most working men - and all women - still did not have the vote by the time the Queen died in 1901.
Workers may not have had the vote, but there were plenty of trade unions that were showing their muscle. There was a long and bitter strike in the London docks in the 1880s, which the strikers won. There was even a strike by the girls who made matches at Bryant and May - striking matches! But even strong trade unions were no substitute for a voice in Parliament. The first “Labour” MP was Keir Hardie, a shrewd Scot who made a point of not wearing the smart top hats and frock coats that other MPs wore. In 1900, the labour movement finally got its own Labour Party. No-one knew if it would last, and no-one predicted that it would go on to become one of the two leading parties in the land, and that it would be solidly entrenched in power in time for the Millennium in 2000.
The Crimean War - not Britain's finest hour
You don’t want to know what this war was about, you really don’t. Officially the Crimean War (1854-6) was about which group of monks should have the keys to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem (I am not kidding) and whether or not the Russians had the right to tell the Turks how to govern their own country (and other peoples’). In reality, the war was about safeguarding the route to India (which was British) which lay through Egypt (which wasn’t) and whether the Russians should be allowed into the Mediterranean and whether Romania and Bulgaria should be free. So the British sent a fleet to the Baltic, found it was nowhere near the Mediterranean or Turkey, had another look at the map, noticed a big Russian port in roughly the right area, and decided to attack it.
Lady and the Lamp
Florence Nightingale is probably the best known Victorian woman - possibly the best-known Victorian - after the Queen herself. Not only did she go out to the Crimea to nurse the soldiers, but she took on the whole bureaucracy of the military high command and won. Soon children were learning stories of the gentle, warmhearted "Lady with the Lamp" going round the wards at night while the soldiers kissed her shadow as she passed. If that's how you imagine her, forget it. Sure, Florence Nightingale took on the doctors, but there was nothing particularly gentle about her. She was a tough cookie, and she got her way by being even hardernosed than they were. She would not listen to people who disagreed with her, and she was quite happy to ignore inconvenient evidence. She refused to believe that bacteria spread disease and insisted that it was carried by miasma in the air. She was a chronic hypochondriac and spent most of the second half of her life propped up in bed. She designed hospitals and other communal buildings, like barracks and prisons, and set herself up as an expert on India, even though she never set foot in the place. You can still find books that claim that every Viceroy of India used to dash round to see her as soon as he was appointed. It's a complete fiction invented by her admirers. She was totally intolerant of anyone she saw as a rival. She got other nurses sent home from the Crimea and only met her match in an equally feisty Catholic Mother Superior. She was very dismissive of "old Mother Seacole", a very popular Jamaican nurse who was actually a great admirer of hers. Florence Nightingale certainly deserves the credit for creating the modern nursing profession, and that's no mean feat. Just be thankful you never had to work with her.
The war was a shambles from start to finish. The British commander, Lord Raglan, kept forgetting that the French were his allies and had to be reminded not to attack them. All the allies had to do was to take the port of Sevastopol. They won every battle, and it still took them almost three years because they could never decide what to do next. This was the war that inspired Tennyson’s famous Charge of the Light Brigade. Five regiments of cavalry found out that if you charge against cannons - especially if they’re on three sides of you - you tend to get blown to pieces. And all because Lord Raglan couldn’t word a message clearly.
A lot of people died in the Crimean War, and most of them died because the people in charge couldn’t organise a day out for an infant’s school. Only two people really emerged with any real credit: Florence Nightingale (read more about her in the sidebar “Lady and the Lamp”) and the Times reporter William Howard Russell who told it to his readers like it was. Because it needed telling.
How Victorian Were the Victorians?
It’s easy to get the wrong idea of the Victorians. We think of them as uptight characters, deeply religious, terrified of sex, and all the time forcing children to work up chimneys. But is that the whole story? Is it part of the story at all?
Here are a few of the more common misconceptions that people tend to have about the Victorians.
Did the upper classes realty have the upper hand?
This might seem the case at first, but it wasn’t really true. True, there were plenty of lords and ladies around, and they lived in those lovely stately homes you can pay to visit, but these houses were hideously expensive to maintain, even in those days, and land didn’t pay the way it used to. The lords who did well were those who moved their money - or married - into industry. In politics, the House of Lords was gradually becoming less important. At the start of the nineteenth century, having a lord as Prime Minister or Foreign Secretary was the norm; by the end of the century, that still happened - Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister four times, for example - but it was becoming more unusual. In fact, the Lords were getting a reputation for being more interested in huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ than in high affairs of state.
Were the Victorians realty so cruel to children?
Small children were certainly employed as chimney sweeps in Victorian England but don’t forget that children had always been expected to work as soon as they were old enough. The lucky ones got apprenticed in a trade, the less lucky ones worked on the farm or helped with the spinning. When new types of work appeared with the development of industry and factories, it seemed perfectly natural to use children for work that adults couldn’t do:
Crawling underneath machinery or sitting in coal mines to open and close the ventilation doors.
The point about the Victorians is not so much that they did this, but that they were the first people to ask whether it was right and to introduce laws saying what you could and could not expect children to do. The Victorians came up with the idea that all children should go to school, and they checked to make sure the schools were up to scratch too. They were the first people to develop a whole school of literature specifically for children - Lewis Carroll’s Alice books are the best known. In many ways you could say that the Victorians invented the idea of childhood as we know it today.
Were they really scared of sex?
Sorry to disappoint you, but contrary to a widespread myth, the Victorians did not cover up curvaceous table legs in case they found them a turn-on, and no, Victorian women did not just lie back and think of England to get them through the unpleasant necessity of having sex with their husbands. All the evidence we have - and we have a lot of it - suggests that the Victorians enjoyed sex every bit as much as we do. It did rest uneasily with their religion and the big emphasis they put on church-going, that is true, but you only have to look at the size of Victorian families to realise that they knew something about the facts of life.
Prostitution and sexually-transmitted diseases were a huge problem in Victorian Britain. The government tore its hair out about the rate of venereal disease in the army and navy and in 1864 introduced the highly controversial Contagious Diseases Acts which gave the police powers to inspect any woman found hanging around near barracks of docks, whether she was a prostitute or not.
All those corsets and stays that Victorian ladies wore were designed to show off the body to maximum erotic effect. Crinolines defined a sort of exclusion zone where men were not permitted, but they often wore them with off-the shoulder tops that encouraged men to have a go. In fact, the Victorians had such an appetite for sex that they were rather amused by people they thought had more hang-ups about it. Like Americans, for example, who they thought were so afraid of sex that they covered up their table and piano legs in case they found them a turn-on. It wasn’t true of the Americans either. (Canadians, maybe . . .)
Were Victorians really so religious?
Clearly Victorians took their religion very seriously. Look at all those churches they built, the hymns they wrote, and the prayer books they carried. Look at the Salvation Army and Barchester Towers and all those missionaries in Africa. If the Victorians weren’t religious, what were they? In 1851 Parliament ordered a religious census of England and Wales and counted everyone who was at Church on a particular Sunday. The figure was so low - over five million people didn’t go - that they never held another one.
Most Victorians believed in the literal truth of the Bible, and churches ran Sunday Schools for children and mission hostels for the poor. Evangelical Christians campaigned against alcohol at home and slavery abroad. The best schools and all the Oxford and Cambridge colleges were run by Anglican clergymen. The Church of England seemed to be almost as important and powerful as Parliament itself. But it wasn’t, for a couple of reasons. First, a lot of other churches were around. Non-conformist chapels were very big, especially in Wales and the north of England, and in 1850 the Catholic Church reestablished its network of bishops and dioceses in England and Wales. A lot of working people went to chapel or to Mass rather than to the Church of England. Second, the belief in science and technology was gaining ground. 1851 was also the year of the Great Exhibition, a celebration of science and technology, and in 1859 Darwin went to press with The Origin of Species. New university colleges were springing up, which weren’t run by the Church of England, and from 1870, a whole network of state schools existed, where you could opt out of Religious Education if you wanted to.
Did the Victorians oppress women?
We tend to think of Victorian Britain as a male-dominated place, where the husband and father (and there’s a really posh word for him - paterfamilias') comes home from his important job in the City, stands warming his coat tails against the fire while his wife sews and says “Yes, dear” and his children are seen and not heard, and after dinner, he retires to his club. And to be fair, that is how the Victorians liked to think of themselves. But relations between men and women were never as simple as that.
Legally, for example, until 1870, a woman’s property became her husband’s as soon as they married, but it is clear from the large number of legal arrangements between husbands and wives that this was more a legal technicality than a fact of everyday life. Nevertheless a huge amount of male prejudice existed, and some women had a massive fight to get accepted into “male” professions. The first women’s colleges at Cambridge opened in 1875, but women were still not allowed to take a full university degree. When Sophia Jex-Blake tried to study medicine at Edinburgh, the professors used every legal trick they could find to stop her, and the students virtually beat her up. Nevertheless Sophia won, and she had a huge amount of support, from both men and women. By the end of the century, young women were working in offices, department stores, and telephone exchanges. They could even vote and be elected in every type of election except for Parliament, and there were plenty of moves to change that, though it would not be until 1918 that most women finally won the Parliamentary vote (see Chapter 20 for more about the long fight for female suffrage).
Things Can Only Get Better
The Victorians believed strongly in progress and that the British were slowly but surely making the world a better place to live in. Some of these improvements came about because of reforms in the number of hours people could work or how low a ship was allowed to be in the water, but much of it was happening through science and technology. And Britain led the way.
Crystal Palace's Great Exhibition
We will never see anything quite like the Great Exhibition of 1851. There have been plenty of international exhibitions since - the Eiffel Tower was left up after the Paris exhibition of 1889 - but they were pale imitations of the original. The Great Exhibition was housed in a magnificent palace of glass, called the Crystal Palace, a huge greenhouse designed by Joseph Paxton, who supervised the gardens at Chatsworth House. The Exhibition was a sort of statement of faith in what mankind could achieve, from heavy industry to the latest gadgets for the home. It was phenomenally popular. People came from all over the country to marvel at the wonders of technology. The Exhibition included stunning displays from all over the world, but over half of the exhibits came from British designers and British engineers. If the Victorians believed in Britain, it’s easy to see why.
Two giants: Brunel and Darwin
If ever a man deserved to be commemorated in the latest technology, it was Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-59). The man was a technological genius. He built the Great Western Railway from London to Bristol and designed every detail, from the bridges and tunnels to the decoration in the stations. He built a great glass cathedral of a station at Paddington and a sort of railway-station-cum-parish-church at the Bristol end. His Clifton Suspension Bridge over the river Avon is still one of the most beautiful sights in England. He designed the Great Britain, the first steam ship to make regular transatlantic crossings, the Great Western, and the vast Great Eastern - a huge monster of a ship, the largest in the world. When his son choked on a coin, he even quickly designed a special choking-child-upside-down-turner-and-coin-extractor machine, and it worked. He didn’t always get his own way. He wanted his trains to run on wider tracks, but the other railway companies defeated him: Every train derailment since is a reminder that he was right.
Novel contemplation
Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Anne Bronte, George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell - shall I go on? Victorians, all of them. But it wasn't just the writers who mattered: it was the readers. The Victorians were obsessive, compulsive readers. Their newspapers and magazines, even the ones for children, were printed in close-typed columns, and people read them through avidly. Ever wondered why Victorian novels are so long? Because they appeared as monthly serials in magazines, and the writers got paid by the yard. The public loved sensation and mystery:
Sherlock Homes and Dracula were both Victorian creations. They loved sentiment and romance - cue Jane Eyre or Tennyson's poems of King Arthur. They read sermons, history, and science, as well as fiction - one British commander was reading Darwin and Trollope inbetween blowing the Chinese Imperial Army to pieces. But above all, the Victorians enjoyed novels with good story-lines, lots of suspense, and strong characters. They've been called the soap operas of their day. They weren't. They were better.
Charles Darwin (1809-82) never intended to become a scientist. He studied theology at Cambridge though he didn’t want to be a priest. He joined HMS Beagle on its round-the-world voyage in 1831 to keep the captain company, and he collected animals and plants as a hobby to pass the time. Only as he was classifying his specimens did he begin to think about the nature of species. It took him years to put his ideas down on paper, and he only finally rushed into print in 1859 because someone else was about to publish a book saying more or less what he was going to say. Even then, most scientists already agreed about evolution: Darwin was merely the first to talk about natural selection, how different species adapt to their environment and only the strongest survive. Darwin had been afraid his ideas would cause a storm, and he was right. The Church was up in arms because, it claimed, Darwin was challenging the story of Creation as told in the Book of Genesis, even though Darwin’s book didn’t actually say anything about the origins of humankind. Church leaders denounced him as the antichrist. “Is it through his grandmother or through his grandfather that Mr Darwin claims descent from a monkey?” asked one bishop in sarcastic mode, but the Church was fighting a losing battle: Opinion in Britain gradually swung behind Darwin.