A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain Read online

  Michael Paterson is the author of Voices from Dickens’ London (David & Charles, 2006) and of several books on military history. He lives in London.

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  A BRIEF HISTORY OF

  LIFE IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN

  How a Nation Grew into an Empire and the Birth of Modern Society

  MICHAEL PATERSON

  Cover illustrations from the author’s own collection

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2008

  Copyright © Michael Paterson, 2008

  The right of Michael Paterson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication data is available from the British Library

  UK ISBN 978-1-84529-707-7

  eISBN 978-1-47210-767-1

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  First published in the United States in 2008 by

  Running Press Book Publishers

  All rights reserved under the Pan-American

  and International Copyright Conventions

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher.

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  Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing

  US Library of Congress number: 2007941944

  US ISBN 978-0-7624-3518-0

  Running Press Book Publishers

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  Printed and bound in the EU

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 Symbol of an Age

  2 The Masses

  3 What They Ate

  4 Taste

  5 Getting About

  6 Religion

  7 Etiquette and Fashion

  8 The Office

  9 Leisure

  10 The Press and Literature

  11 Arms and the World

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Index

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Symbol of an era: Queen Victoria depicted in early middle age by Franz Xavier Winterhalter

  The Diamond Jubilee procession passing the National Gallery, 22 June 1897

  A young woman is assisted in to her crinoline, 1850s

  A girl in typical Victorian dress

  C. T. Studd, as a young man, dressed in an Eton collar

  A Victorian corner grocer’s at Walmer in Kent

  A young servant boy from a fashionable quarter in London

  A nursemaid in the garden with her charges

  An interior view of a typical Victorian home

  Albert Place, Kensington, 1870s

  A gentleman of the 1870s in top hat and sober frock coat

  William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98)

  The Strand in London on a quiet day in the 1890s

  The Crystal Palace at Norwood in the 1860s

  The bill of fare for a private dinner in the 1870s, printed and indented to resemble a plate

  A beach mission at Deal in Kent, 1900

  Literature became a serious industry during Victoria’s reign

  Harrow School football XI

  A roller-skating rink in the 1880s

  A British ’tommy’ as typically drawn for Victorian boys’ magazines

  Family group, outside their bungalow in Ceylon, 1880s

  All illustrations are from the author’s own collection

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to express the utmost gratitude to Leo Hollis at Constable for his unfailing patience; to Christopher Feeney for the forbearance, wisdom and humour he has brought to the daunting task of editing the text, and Jessica Cuthbert-Smith for a similar, equally praiseworthy and equally appreciated forbearance; to my sister Carolyn for marrying someone with an encyclopaedic knowledge of both sport and railways – I have been most fortunate in being able to pester my brother-in-law, Mark Rowland-Jones, with questions on these subjects at all hours of the day and night. As usual my debt is immense to Sandy Malcolm for his computing expertise. Lastly, I thank my wife Sarah, whose support has been, as always, invaluable.

  To Malcolm Brown

  Few are privileged to have a kinder friend

  INTRODUCTION: ‘A GRAND TRIUMPHAL MARCH’ – THE VICTORIAN ERA

  When she came to the throne coaches still ran; men wore stocks, shaved their upper lips, ate oysters out of barrels. Women said ‘La!,’ and owned no property. Wellnigh two generations had slipped by – of steamboats, railways, telegraphs, telephones, bicycles, electric light, and now these motor cars. Morals had changed, manners had changed. The middle class [had been] buttressed, chiselled, polished, till it was almost indistinguishable from the nobility. [It was] an era that had canonised hypocrisy, so that to seem respectable was to be.

  Soames Forsyte, a character in John Galsworthy’s

  The Forsyte Saga, reflects on Victoria’s reign
r />   in a chapter entitled ‘The Passing of an Age’.1

  Of all the commemorative publications that covered newsagents’ stalls in June 1897, none was more lavish than the Diamond Jubilee number of the Illustrated London News. An expensive, self-conscious heirloom, it was expected to be treasured for generations to come. The text was bordered in gold, and the colourful and sophisticated chromo-litho illustrations – nowadays almost invariably separated and framed – still attract admiring glances at antique fairs. Among the pictures of the Royal Family, of leading politicians, literary and military heroes and of significant events, space was also devoted to the progress made during the Queen’s reign. Gaslight was contrasted with electricity, the sailing vessel with the steamship, the stage-coach with the railway train, bicycle and automobile.

  The point was well made. The previous sixty years had been a breathtaking era of change, an unrelenting rush of new technology, new knowledge, new opportunities, new wealth, new politics and new attitudes. Not since the Civil War two and a half centuries earlier had society altered so greatly in so short a time. Never before had the mechanics of living – the ways in which people travelled, communicated, shopped, dealt with sickness, preserved food – undergone such revolutions. To those who originally turned those pages, the lace caps and cutaway coats of the early Victorians, like their conveyances, their manners and their outlook, would have seemed absurdly quaint and distant, evoking the same mixed reactions – impatience, nostalgic longing for a simpler world, amusement (‘How could they wear those clothes?’) – as the 1890s do now.

  The accompanying words, a summing-up of the state of the nation and Empire from an end-of-the-century perspective, were written by the novelist Sir Walter Besant. Born the year before the Queen’s accession, and much concerned with social improvements – he was a well-known philanthropist – Besant saw his lifetime as a period of consistent and welcome progress. He commented:

  To us, who find it difficult to stand outside and consider events in their true proportion, the period seems like a grand triumphal march. To those of us who can remember English life as it was in the forties, the changes are nothing short of a transformation. And no one regrets the change. During this long period there has arisen in the national mind such a spirit of enterprise, endeavour and achievement as has no parallel in our history except in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Now, as then, people have been restless: this restlessness has shown itself in colonisation, in emigration, in research, in discovery, in invention – in changes of every kind.2

  He could not have known that he was capturing the essence of Britain at the high-water mark of its national greatness, and that by the time the Queen died, a few weeks into the year 1901, many of her subjects would consider their country to be in decay. This decline – chiefly caused by the loss of Britain’s leading role, as her rivals caught up in wealth and power – would be political and economic, and would of course make no difference to the country’s cultural, sporting or scientific achievements. Nevertheless with the passing of the 1890s it was obvious that not just a century but an era had ended, and that Britain could not hope to have such a favoured position in the next one.

  With this hindsight any number of later commentators, and writers of memoirs, have referred to the Victorian era, or some part of it, with unabashed sentimentality as a ‘golden age’, or a ‘golden calm’, an ‘Indian summer’ or a ‘long afternoon’. It is inaccurate, and misleading, to think of this or any other period in such terms. The Victorian world was not in any sense golden or summery. Epochs only gain allure when seen in retrospect, once their problems are solved or forgotten or – as in the case of Ireland – passed on so that they then belong to another generation. Any age is filled with tension, uncertainty and despair.

  Nevertheless while conservatives lamented the erosion of traditional values or practices, to progressive Victorians such as Besant it seemed that there was a golden age, not in the past but in the future. Theirs was an era of technological breakthrough and ever-increasing confidence, in which the efforts of the present were visibly making a better world for their successors. Meanwhile, for all the Victorians’ perceived complacency, no set of practices or assumptions could expect to be left unquestioned, for everything was open to debate, modification, improvement.

  Science was solving medical problems, making childbirth easier, infant mortality lower, life expectancy longer; the temperance movement was combating the scourge of drunkenness; people like Besant were successfully awakening the public conscience to social evils; education was becoming universal and providing opportunities for self-improvement, and a great deal of practical help – most of it the result of private charity and enterprise rather than governmental intervention – was being given to the unfortunate, for this was the age of Dr Barnardo and of William Booth’s Salvation Army. Many of the savageries that had been unquestioned in earlier generations were being abolished or ameliorated – public executions, animal-baiting, the transportation of convicts, the flogging of soldiers and sailors. Within the sixty-four years between 1837 and 1901 spanned by Victoria’s reign – three distinct generations – the British developed into a gentler, more generous, more civilized people than their uncouth Georgian grandfathers had been (by the fifties animal-baiting had been banned; in the following decade transportation and public hangings ceased; and flogging was abolished under Army reforms that began in the seventies). It is in the nature of all ages to disdain – and react against – their immediate predecessors. The Victorians hated the moral laxity of the Georgians as much as they found their architecture and their manners and their ideas passé. The sheer scale of Victorian buildings, ships, bridges or railway networks made everything that had gone before seem small and parochial by comparison. There were of course some setbacks – the disastrous collapse in 1879 of the new railway bridge across the Tay destroyed faith in the invincibility of progress – but there remained a belief that all difficulties could be overcome. Whatever the setbacks, the achievements of former ages were dwarfed by those of the present.

  This spirit was already apparent in the early years of the reign, for the adjective ‘Victorian’ had distinct meaning from the time it first came to be self-consciously applied to the Queen’s subjects. It meant belonging to an exciting new generation and a new world. As one historian has remarked, the 1840s were proving to be a time of intense self-scrutiny; newspapers and journals were calling their era ‘Victorian’, and the term was being associated with ‘decency, modernity, a humane and progressive spirit and mechanical advance. To be “Victorian” was to be up to date.’3 One of the features of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations was the Victorian Era Exhibition, at which her people could look back at the achievements of their own and their parents’ generations. By any measure, they were entitled to feel that the Victorian world had lived up to its initial promise, for in every field it was an age in which giants had roamed the earth. The literature of Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, the Brontës, Lewis Carroll, Conan Doyle; the theatre of Kean and Macready, Irving and Ellen Terry; the scientific discoveries of Lister and Faraday; the explorations of Livingstone, Burton and Speke. It almost seemed as if the British Isles might sink under the weight of contemporary genius.

  It was reasonable to expect that this process, continuing in the decades to come, would bring about a better society. A character in George Gissing’s 1894 novel In the Year of Jubilee had remarked of the Queen’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations that: ‘It’s to celebrate the fiftieth year of the reign of Queen Victoria – yes, but at the same time, and far more, it’s to celebrate the completion of fifty years of Progress. Compare England now, compare the world, with what it was in 1837. It takes one’s breath away!’4 A commentator who looked at the Queen’s reign from the perspective of the 1920s, W. R. Inge, paid tribute to the sense of confident optimism that had guided so much of Victorian achievement: ‘The nineteenth century has been called the age of hope, and perhaps only a superstitious belief in the auto
matic progress of humanity could have carried our fathers and grandfathers through the tremendous difficulties which the rush through the rapids imposed on them.’5

  People could not imagine where science, and human enterprise, would take them next. Exploration was solving the mysteries of the world – it was Britons who found the source of the Nile and the great African falls named after their Queen. Intellectual and doctrinal Rubicons were crossed by the theories of Darwin. Through the innovations of Lister, surgery became safer and easier, and the operating theatre less like a butcher’s shop.

  For all the scientific marvels that the era produced, the two most far-reaching and influential innovations were in transport and literacy. Though the railway had been developed before Victoria’s accession, it was in her reign that it spread through Britain and the world and became an element in daily life. The advent of the bicycle extended the possibilities for independent travel by enabling even the poor to make journeys cheaply and freely. The Education Act of 1870 (1873 in Scotland), which made basic schooling compulsory, created – within a matter of decades and for the first time in history – a whole population that could read. The implications for literature and the press and for higher education were immense. Both the advent of personal mobility and of access to news and literature changed people’s expectations for ever. These things created the world in which we ourselves live.

  In more specific respects the world of the Victorians bears a striking resemblance to our own. Like Besant and his contemporaries, the present generation of Britons is ruled by a popular and respected female sovereign who has been on the throne for so long that no one under sixty has known another. Like the Victorians we are constantly in thrall to innovation and to new technology, taking for granted things that only a decade ago seemed like scientific fantasy. The possibility of cloning humans, or carrying a computer in one’s pocket, were matched in the nineteenth century by the marvels of having one’s image captured through photography or of preserving one’s voice by use of the phonograph (it still seems a miracle that we can listen to Tennyson reading his ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’). Our generation’s fixation with the mobile phone is in some ways an echo of Victorian reverence for its first ancestor, patented in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell.