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41 Articles

From life in London’s East End slums to the politics of the queen’s drawing room, the Victorian age is a rich source of human interest. The Story of the Victorians looks at Britain during the long reign of a formidable queen (1837_1901), a period that saw dramatic events both at home and abroad. The country’s fast-growing industrial economy was spurred on by the meteoric growth of the British empire. We look at how this was created and maintained not just through commerce, but also through a constant series of wars, as well as how it shaped British society. We’ll discover some of the impressive cast of characters whose endeavours still influence British life today, from Florence Nightingale to industrialist William Hesketh Lever and naturalist Charles Darwin. We’ll also take a…

The Victorian era

1837 The death of William IV brings 18-year-old Princess Victoria to the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. She inherits a country scarred by deep social and political divisions, worsened by uneven industrialisation and rapid urban growth. 1839 On 14 June, against a background of intense economic distress, the first great Chartist petition is presented to parliament. It contains almost 1.3 million signatures and demands the six points of the ‘People’s Charter’ be made law. Its rejection prompts the desperate Newport Rising in November, involving thousands of Chartists armed with pikes and muskets. At least 22 are killed and 50 seriously wounded by soldiers stationed in the town. 1842 As distress and Chartist agitation continues, Edwin Chadwick publishes his great Sanitary Report. It reveals the shocking…

The Victorian era

VICTORIA WARRIOR QUEEN

Kensington Palace, London, six in the morning. Princess Victoria is woken by her mother and told that two men are there to see her. She rises quickly, throws a dressing-gown over her nightdress and, with her hair still loose about her shoulders, receives the two visitors in her sitting-room. She recognises them as Lord Conyngham, the portly lord chamberlain, and Dr William Howley, the septuagenarian archbishop of Canterbury. They have come from Windsor Castle and their presence can only mean one thing: her uncle, King William IV, is dead. The king “had expired at 12 minutes past two this morning”, she records later in her journal, “and consequently I am Queen”. Victoria was just 18 when she became Queen on 20 June 1837. At the time, Britain was the world’s…

VICTORIA WARRIOR QUEEN

VICTORIA’S WARS

1839–42 First Afghan War REASON To prevent the Russians from gaining a diplomatic and military foothold in Afghanistan from where they could threaten British India. OUTCOME The withdrawal of all British troops from Afghanistan, but only after General Pollock’s Army of Retribution had avenged the earlier destruction of a British force by retaking Kabul. 1839–42 First Opium (or China) War REASON To prevent the Chinese government from stopping the lucrative opium trade which provided the East India Company with much of its revenue. OUTCOME The Chinese cede Hong Kong to the British and open up four new treaty ports to foreign trade. 1843 Sind War REASON To secure the vital frontier province of Sind and open up the lower Indus river for commercial exploitation. OUTCOME The Indian government annexes Sind.…

VICTORIA’S WARS

Maharaja Duleep Singh 1838–93

In 1837, India, the strategic centre – the ‘jewel in the crown’ – of Britain’s growing global imperial system was still run by a private company and was a patchwork of ad hoc administration. The Honourable East India Company did not control the entire subcontinent; some regions were semi-autonomous princely states, while others were completely independent. The biggest worry was the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab. Its ruler, the great Ranjit Singh, had turned it into a powerful state with a large and well-resourced army, and its proximity to Afghanistan and Russia could have turned it into a mortal threat to British India overnight. Ranjit Singh’s death in 1839 led to instability and two Anglo-Sikh wars which resulted in the Punjab’s complete subjugation. Along with the state, the British took…

Maharaja Duleep Singh 1838–93

8 BIG QUESTIONS

1 What exactly was the British empire? PROFESSOR LINDA COLLEY, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY This seems to be a rudimentary question, but we can lose sight of it. People often make assumptions that they know what the British empire was, when in fact it was an umbrella term that covered a multitude of different types of spaces, different kinds of authority, different kinds of imperial connections. One of the most influential but deceptive forces in shaping people’s attitudes is that famous Victorian map of the world where the parts of the empire were coloured red. That gives a cut-and-dried impression of what the empire was, but what about the informal empire? In many ways, for instance, Argentina was substantially run by the British during the 19th century, but it was not coloured…

8 BIG QUESTIONS

For many, Charles Darwin, the bearded Victorian sage pictured on the ten pound note, was the man who discovered we descend from monkeys. Yet he did no such thing. Writers before Darwin had made connections between humans and apes and monkeys because of our obvious physical similarities. But the theory for which Darwin is so celebrated was not aimed particularly at human ancestry at all. The implications of Darwin’s theory – most famously espoused in 1859 in On the Origin of Species – were so wide-ranging that a concise caricature of what it was all about was probably needed. “Darwin says we come from monkeys” was perhaps an understandable popular shorthand. It at least encapsulates both that species change and that the human species is derived from non-human ancestors. Of…

Darwin: a biography

Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882) was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. His father was the financier and physician Robert Darwin. His mother, Susannah Wedgwood, was the daughter of the famous potter. Darwin went to school at Shrewsbury before studying medicine at Edinburgh between 1825 and 1827. From 1828 and 1831 Darwin was at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a BA degree. Soon after, he was fortunate enough to receive an offer to join the Beagle, a surveying ship, as naturalist during a round-the-world expedition. Darwin returned immensely experienced in geology and zoology. He published numerous works based on the Beagle expedition – well received in the scientific world back in England – including his famous Journal of Researches (Voyage of the HMS Beagle), and specialist works on the geology and zoology…

Darwin: a biography

Myths and Mr Darwin

The number of myths and legends about Charles Darwin and evolution seems to be growing and growing. One of the most common is that it is impossible to believe in God and evolution at the same time. This myth has perhaps been strengthened all the more by the antireligious fervour of outspoken atheists. But the fact is, it is possible to believe in God and evolution. This is as true today as it was in Darwin’s time. Many people wrote to Darwin to ask him this question and he became rather tired of answering it. Yes, he would reply, of course you can believe in both. And to demonstrate this he supplied lists of prominent scientists who did exactly that. Another widespread legend is that Darwin was so afraid of…

THE VICTORIAN WAR ON TERROR

As a train entered London Underground’s Praed Street station on 30 October 1883, a bomb was thrown from a first-class carriage. It exploded as a third-class carriage passed. The driver, Stephen Harris, recalled that every light on the train was extinguished and there was a loud shriek of horror among the passengers. The force of the blast threw the station signalman, Henry Hartrupp, towards a nearby wall. His signal box was shattered by the impact of the explosion. As the foggy dust bellowed out of the tunnel, terrified Metropolitan line commuters stampeded out of the station in hysterical confusion. Station workers ran toward the wrecked carriage as the injured were treated at the station or in the nearby St Mary’s Hospital. Dozens were hurt, with injuries including shock, facial wounds,…

THE VICTORIAN WAR ON TERROR

Who were the Fenians?

Established in 1858 as an international conspiracy among the Irish and Irish diaspora, Fenianism was the most important revolutionary tradition in Ireland. The Fenians sought to establish an Irish republic and rejected the union between Britain and Ireland (which had come into effect in 1801). Fenians were motivated by a belief in the power of violence to coerce the British government to consider Irish independence (which it had so far refused to countenance). In 1867, following a failed uprising in Ireland, they reorganised, and from 1881 to 1885 mounted a bombing campaign in Britain. Known as the Fenian dynamite campaign, it was inspired by advances in science – particularly the invention of dynamite, which was perceived to redress a power imbalance and offer a cheap mode of warfare. The dynamite…

Benjamin Disraeli 1804–81

Like another great reinventor of the Tories, Margaret Thatcher, Disraeli was an outsider. This was a party traditionally led by gentlemen with landed estates and titles, and who had attended a handful of elite schools. Disraeli was a novelist of Jewish descent, with a decent but patchy education and a slightly seedy reputation. The oldest son of the scholarly Isaac D’Israeli was a spirited, conceited young man, given to loud clothes and reckless ventures in business and writing, and who lost huge sums of money which left him in debt for much of his life. Disraeli rejected a legal career in favour of writing, though with little initial success. He famously travelled through Europe and on to Turkey and Egypt in 1830–31. Much is made of his ‘gap year’ visit…

Benjamin Disraeli 1804–81

Victoria and Albert

The marriage of Victoria and Albert is probably one of history’s most written-about royal romances. The focus of numerous films and books, Victoria and Albert are viewed by many historians as the royal couple who helped create the modern, more accessible monarchy we see today. But theirs was not always an easy partnership. Albert, prince of the tiny, impoverished Saxon duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, was Victoria’s cousin and it was the dear wish of their mutual uncle, Leopold, king of the Belgians, and Victoria’s own mother, the Duchess of Kent, that the two would one day wed. However, the couple’s first meeting – during celebrations for Victoria’s 17th birthday – hardly suggested a match made in heaven: Albert found the social whirl of the British court exhausting and fell asleep during…

Victoria and Albert

Was Victorian life really so grim?

The most familiar images of Victorian life are bleak indeed: impoverished children working long hours in factories and mines; blankets of smog suspended above overcrowded cities; frightening workhouses run by cruel governors; violent criminals lurking in the shadows. In black-and-white photos of the period, people both high and low-born are invariably unsmiling – a miserable bunch, surely? There is some truth in this portrayal. The twin processes of industrialisation and urbanisation did force a drop in living standards for some, and the turbulent decade after Queen Victoria came to the throne became known as the ‘Hungry Forties’. These years were punctuated by economic depression leading to social unrest, popular protests and growing fears of revolution. Such impressions can be explained by the collision of three unique processes. The first, combining…

Was Victorian life really so grim?

Samuel Smiles 1812–1904

“The greatest slave is not he who is ruled by a despot, great though that evil be, but he who is in the thrall of his own moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice,” wrote Samuel Smiles in the first chapter of Self-Help. The timeless message of hard work, thrift and self-discipline as the path to improving one’s life was repackaged by Smiles for the Victorian age. Published in 1859, it came out in the same year as another hugely influential work, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species – but sold considerably more copies. Few books are more misunderstood than what’s been called ‘the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism’. To some, it is a manifesto for greed, or a book which equates financial superiority with moral superiority. To critics on the left, Smiles is an advocate…

Samuel Smiles 1812–1904

There is a widespread assumption, shared by popular and academic historians alike, that cohabitation (living together in a relationship without being married) was common among the Victorian poor. The journalist Matthew Sweet suggests in Inventing the Victorians that working-class men and women took an “equivocal and pragmatic approach” to marriage, with many choosing to cohabit out of economic convenience. Others refer darkly to ‘unknown’ numbers of people living in ‘irregular unions’ – the implication being that those numbers, though unknown, must nevertheless have been large. Moving from the belief that the poor did not marry to the observation that the working classes made up the largest section of the population, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that marriage was a minority practice in Victorian England. Of…

Cohabitation and the myth of the ‘common-law marriage’

Recent figures show that three million British couples live together outside marriage, almost 90 per cent of marrying couples have cohabited beforehand, and 47 per cent of children are born outside marriage, the majority to cohabiting couples. All this, however, is historically unprecedented. Given the rudimentary nature and general unpopularity of birth control until recent decades, most stable sexual relationships would in time produce children. As a result, the illegitimacy ratio gives us a good idea of the maximum possible frequency of cohabiting relationships in the population. But in earlier centuries, births outside marriage were relatively rare and cohabitation proportionally even rarer. Fluctuations in the illegitimacy ratio occurred within a small scale: rising from less than two per cent in 1700 to five per cent by 1800, a little under…

William Ewart Gladstone 1809–98

Gladstone’s extra-parliamentary activities are of more interest to many of us nowadays than his political achievements. For much of his adult life he would walk the streets of London seeking out prostitutes in an attempt to reform them. Then, after many of these encounters he would flagellate himself in private as punishment for lustful thoughts. Some biographers also try to read some significance into his recreational tree-felling. It was during just such a deforestation session in 1868 that he was brought the news that he would be asked to form his first government. “My mission is to pacify Ireland,” he told his companion, and resumed chopping. Gladstone’s energetic axe-work was probably nothing more than an eccentric choice of exercise, as he was not much interested in any sport. That said,…

William Ewart Gladstone 1809–98

“The killings had to be coldblooded, the perpetrators calculating monsters”

Kent’s pirate king dies a hero During the 18th century, one surefire way of garnering the acclaim of your fellow countrymen – and, if you were lucky, earning a fast buck – was to carve out for yourself a career in crime. The Georgian public widely hailed those who chose to live outside of the law – smugglers and highwaymen among them – as popular heroes. And if these rebels could create merry hell for the authorities while they were going about their illicit business, then all the better. By the time Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, attitudes to crime were hardening. Yet some lawbreakers were still able to win a place in the public’s affections – and perhaps nowhere is this better illustrated than in the…

“The killings had to be coldblooded, the perpetrators calculating monsters”

Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson 1836–1917

If, as Victoria was crowned, you had suggested that perhaps now women should play a bigger part in wider public life, you would have been regarded as a crank. Yet, by the time of her funeral, the idea that women had a role outside of the home had a growing number of supporters. The Victorian era saw the start of a recognisably modern feminist movement, and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was one of its key figures. One of a number of pioneering women doctors, she was an active women’s suffrage campaigner and, a few years after Victoria’s death, was elected mayor of Aldeburgh, becoming the first female mayor in England. Born into a large, enterprising middleclass family, the young Elizabeth Garrett railed against the limitations of girls’ education and roles in…

Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson 1836–1917

MAN ABOUT THE HOUSE

The Victorian woman is often thought of as an ‘angel in the house’. We know that supervising cooking, cleaning and the daily running of the household was usually a woman’s lot. But what was a man’s role in the home? How did middleclass men and women negotiate decorative decision making? Surprisingly, Victorian men were often enthusiastic decorators, seeking out furniture, selecting colour schemes and even fretting over carpets. In terms of property rights, men in the 19th century wielded considerable control over the furnishing of their homes. Until the reforms of marriage law in 1870 and 1882, a woman’s property became her husband’s on marriage. So, unless specific arrangements were made at the time of marriage, women were financially dependent on their husbands. As a result, men were often the…

MAN ABOUT THE HOUSE

Him vs her: Charles Eastlake’s books reveal the battle of the sexes at home

How 19th-century couples wrangled over furnishings is revealed by the case of Charles and Eliza Eastlake. Charles Eastlake was born in Plymouth in 1836, the son of George Eastlake, an admiralty law agent, and was later articled to the architect Philip Hardwick. He became a leading authority on taste and the author of the highly successful decorative advice manual Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and other Details, published in 1868. Hints was often sceptical about female taste, blaming under-educated women for the follies of mid-Victorian decoration. The book aimed to reform young ladies who “know what they like”. It also railed against the “materfamilias” who was all too easily swayed by the blandishments of salesmen: “The good lady looks from one carpet to another until she is fairly…

Him vs her: Charles Eastlake’s books reveal the battle of the sexes at home

Policing the slums

To be a policeman in Victorian London’s most deprived areas was to be a target for suspicion, resentment and widespread loathing – not to mention a shrewd, dry wit. A local vicar learned as much when talking to an inhabitant of the East End slum of the Old Nichol in the late 1880s. “Oh yes, the Lord is very good,” the elderly resident sardonically revealed. “If He does not come for you Himself, He’ll often send two policemen to fetch you.” Other churchmen, charity workers and teachers agreed that one of the main difficulties they had to overcome when trying to establish relationships with the Old Nichol’s inhabitants was the notion that they were in league with the police. Until Nichol people fully accepted that the Met would not be…

Policing the slums

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE NURSING BY NUMBERS

“Were I a man of wealth, I would see that Florence Nightingale was commemorated not only as the ‘lady of the lamp’ but by the activities of the ‘Passionate Statistician’” This judgment was made by Florence’s friend Karl Pearson (1857–1936), himself a pioneer in the application of statistics to social problems as a professor at University College, London. His view was confirmed by Florence’s cousin Hilary Bonham-Carter, who wrote that: “However exhausted Florence might be, the sight of long columns of figures was perfectly reviving for her”. Florence herself wrote that statistics were “the cipher by which we may read the thoughts of God”. Her precocious interest in the subject, which she mostly taught herself, dismayed her father who considered the subject unfeminine. Florence first applied her mathematical skills when…

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE NURSING BY NUMBERS

A GRAVE DILEMMA

“I am sure the moral sensibilities of many delicate minds must sicken to witness the heaped soil, saturated and blackened with human remains and fragments of the dead…the splash of water is heard from the graves, as the coffins descend, producing a shudder in every mourner.” Reverend John Blackburn’s chilling words appeared in a report on burial practices in towns, prepared by Edwin Chadwick for the home secretary in 1843. Deaths were rising, especially in overcrowded and squalid urban neighbourhoods, where cholera, tuberculosis, diphtheria, smallpox and typhus were major killers. Most of the old burial grounds were full to overflowing, or soon would be. The dense mix of houses, shops, taverns, factories and workplaces around them meant they had no adjacent space for expansion. Some parishes found additional land elsewhere.…

A GRAVE DILEMMA

The glorious dead

Frogmore Royal Mausoleum This is a burial place fit for an empress. When Queen Victoria and Prince Albert planned their own royal mausoleum, they saw to it that no expense was spared: the Italian Romanesque building boasts a richly decorated interior and two granite sarcophagi bearing the queen and prince’s marble effigies. Outside is a royal burial ground with over 30 graves, including those of Victoria’s servant John Brown, the former Edward VIII and his wife, Wallis Simpson. Westminster Abbey The abbey was the burial place of choice for most English and British monarchs from Henry III in 1272 all the way through to George II in 1760. Lying with this long list of royals at the 1,000-year-old site are such luminaries as Charles Dickens, Geoffrey Chaucer, Isaac Newton and…

The glorious dead

Elizabeth Gaskell 1810–65

“How deep might be the romance in the lives of some of those who elbowed me daily in the busy streets of the town in which I resided. I had always felt a deep sympathy with the careworn men, who looked as if doomed to struggle through their lives in strange alternations between work and want.” – preface to Mary Barton Elizabeth Gaskell was one of the finest storytellers of the Victorian era – an immensely versatile writer whose output of novels and short stories ranged from historical dramas and ghost stories to whimsical tales of rural and small town life. There were also more disturbing stories of life among the poor, tales of poverty, illegitimacy and prostitution. Her best-known ‘social’ novels include Mary Barton (1848), Ruth (1853) and North and South (1855). Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was…

Elizabeth Gaskell 1810–65

Shop ’til you drop

Nowadays it is often said by both clergy and members of the general public alike that Christmas is no more than an orgy of consumerism, and that the message of Christmas has been drowned in a frenzy of competitive present-buying and consumption on an almost obscene level. However, this complaint is by no means new. In fact, it stretches back to the last quarter of the 19th century, a time when many of us believe Christmas, infused by the spirit of Dickens, was more homely, wholesome and spiritual. Another much repeated ‘fact’ about Christmas is that it was invented by the Victorians, and Charles Dickens in particular. While there is no doubting the fact that the Victorians, partly inspired by Dickens, were fascinated by the celebration of Christmas, they didn’t…

Shop ’til you drop

Dickens and Christmas

Charles Dickens has had an enormous impact on British culture, but it is his association with Christmas that is most pronounced. Published in 1843, A Christmas Carol was an immediate smash with the public, and quickly spawned a range of ‘pirated’ copies forcing Dickens into a number of legal actions to protect his creation. Even as dour a figure as Thomas Carlyle, the Calvinist historian and philosopher, was moved to throw Christmas dinner parties thanks to the inspiration of Dickens’s tale. The early cinema quickly latched on and no fewer than nine different film versions had been made by 1914. The association of Christmas with Dickens started during his lifetime and gathered pace after his death. “Dickens, it may truly be said, is Christmas,” said the scholar VH Allemandy, in…

Dickens and Christmas

Christmas shopping

The Christmas season in one of the great Victorian department stores such as Whiteley’s of Bayswater or the Glasgow Polytechnic would have been a truly wondrous sight. Store managers took enormous pride in the vivacity of their Christmas displays. Huge Christmas trees often dominated the main entrance hall, strung with bells, candles and flags. The prevalence of the flags of the United Kingdom and the wider British Empire reveal the way Christmas was intimately associated with patriotism – something that was further reflected in the products stocked for Christmas. The toy departments were laden with lead soldiers, toy warships and military uniforms. In 1888, the London store Shoolbred’s displayed “an Egyptian camel corps similar to that which Wolseley used in the Soudan”, while across town Barker & Co were specialising…

Christmas shopping

THE AGE OF OPPORTUNITY

The British industrial revolution stands out as a pivotal moment in human history. But when we think about the men, women and children who, with their strong backs and nimble fingers, did the most to power it, we tend to feel that there is less to celebrate. All of the great Victorian commentators – Engels, Dickens, Blake – painted those industrial times in a very dark hue: they lamented the introduction of new working patterns that compelled men to work at the relentless pace of the machines; children forced into factories and down mines at ever-younger ages; families squeezed into dark, disease-ridden cities; and no future but the workhouse for those who slipped through the net. Their dismal litany echoed through the 20th century as a succession of pioneering social…

THE AGE OF OPPORTUNITY

In their own words

Historians have long known of the existence of working-class autobiographies. A bibliography of 19th-century memoirs compiled in the 1980s listed nearly 800 items, and many more have since come to light. They go under various titles: life histories, autobiographies, memoirs, notes, sketches, recollections and adventures, as well as many other, more idiosyncratic names. The defining feature of each, though, is that writer and subject are one and the same. These are works that we would today recognise as autobiographies, though it’s worth noting that the word ‘autobiography’ only entered the English language in the late 18th/early 19th century, long after the culture of life-writing had taken root. Some of these books are well known, such as the great autobiographies of the Chartist leaders William Lovett, Thomas Cooper and Robert Lowery.…

In their own words

STRIKING A LIGHT

In the summer of 1888, 1,400 workers, mostly young women and girls, walked out of an East End match factory and into the history books. Before their strike, Bryant & May’s match women were dismissed as a “rough set of girls” and the “lowest strata of society”. Yet, during the dispute, questions were asked in parliament, and thundering editorials appeared in The Times. Just holding shares in the firm, which made matches, tarnished the reputations of distinguished politicians and clergymen. The women even earned the dubious accolade of receiving a threatening letter from Jack the Ripper, or someone claiming to be him. The ‘matchgirls’ continue to exert a powerful hold over the public imagination to this day – plays and musicals written about them in the 1960s are still performed.…

STRIKING A LIGHT

The fight for workers’ rights

1788 The first recorded all-female union, of Leicester spinners, numbers some 18,500. 1799–1824 It becomes illegal for working people to ‘combine’ together for better pay and conditions. 1825 After these ‘Combination Acts’ are repealed in 1824, there is a wave of strikes. So the Combinations of Workmen Act is passed in 1825 to reimpose criminal sanctions on workers that combine. 1834 Six men, the so-called ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’, are deported to Australia for joining a union. 1837 The Chartist movement calls for all men to have the vote – but women are still active and influential in the movement. 1848 A Chartist petition presented at a huge demonstration in London is rejected by parliament. The movement begins to decline. 1850–70 ‘New model’ unions from the 1850s to 1870s represent a minority…

William Hesketh Lever 1851–1925

Born into a middle-class background in B Bolton, William Hesketh Lever was given a copy of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help on his 16th birthday and tried to live by its precepts for the rest of his life. He was a staunch Nonconformist churchman chman (Congregationalist), had a powerful sense of social and moral obligation and ended his life as a viscount. Energetic and autocratic, he was the Northern industrialist who slept outdoors in all weather and who would dismiss proposals he disagreed ed with by saying: “Aye, nay, we won’t argue. You’re wrong”. This would seem to make Lever the personification of the Victorian businessman – a bit of a cliché, even. But in other ways he was startlingly modern. As a young man he entered the family grocery business. An…

William Hesketh Lever 1851–1925

SEASIDE LOVE AFFAIR

Summer Saturday mornings came to life early at Blackpool in the late 1870s. Excursion trains would start to arrive from the Lancashire ‘cotton towns’ before breakfast, having started their journeys in the small hours. Crowds of excited trippers, many in their workaday wooden clogs, clattered along the stone setts of the promenade from Central Station to the South Jetty, where a German oompah band played for thunderous dancing on the wooden floor, while Irish Sea paddle-steamers set off for Southport or the Isle of Man. On the way, they could ride on a steam roundabout, or have phrenologists read their character from the ‘bumps’ on their head, in the front gardens of the terraced houses along what was to become the ‘Golden Mile’. Soon the stalls on the beach would…

SEASIDE LOVE AFFAIR

Six holiday hot spots

1 Blackpool The world’s first working-class seaside resort, Blackpool exploded from the 1870s, based on the Lancashire Wakes holidays. The late Victorian winter gardens, tower and Alhambra, three piers, pleasure beach, and the municipal illuminations from 1912, headed a unique line-up of attractions. A national resort by the 1930s, and still hugely popular, it peaked in the 1950s. 2 Bournemouth Originally offering pine-laden air for invalids, Bournemouth grew rapidly after the late arrival of a direct railway in 1870. Its active local authority supported winter gardens and a municipal orchestra, but from Edwardian times it drew more popular crowds to its Undercliff Drive, piers and beaches, especially from the industrial Midlands. 3 Rothesay Paddle-steamers, later supplemented by railway links, fed the Glasgow fair and summer weekend exodus “doon th’ watter”…

Six holiday hot spots

Daniel Gooch 1816–89

Engineering was not glamorous when Victoria came to the throne. Some engineers were well-off, and many were admired, but these were still men who had to work for a living; they had to roll up their sleeves and get dirty. Engineering was a trade, not a profession like the law or the church. But the Victorian era made engineering a glamorous profession whose practitioners could seemingly achieve the impossible. Isambard Kingdom Brunel is probably the best-known Victorian engineer nowadays, but his contemporaries had mixed feelings about him. To many, Brunel was a reckless show-off who squandered investors’ money on grand projects which were often commercial failures. Brunel’s memory overshadows that of his friend Daniel Gooch, one of the most successful, and far less showy, engineers of the period. Without Gooch,…

Daniel Gooch 1816–89

The Chartist movement

Visitors to London on 10 April 1848 would have been taken aback by the sight of more than 20,000 people gathered on Kennington Common. They would have been even more surprised if they’d known that the three horse-drawn cabs wending their way slowly from the massed crowd, in the direction of Westminster, were transporting thousands of pieces of paper that contained the signatures of millions of people demanding a host of democratic rights. This petition, which followed two others – in 1839 and 1842 – was the product of a national reform movement known as Chartism, a political campaign partly borne out of the Great Reform Act of 1832, which had only extended the right to vote to the middle classes. “The run-up to the 1832 act had seen a…

The Chartist movement

CHARTISM: FIVE MORE PLACES TO EXPLORE

1 Newport, South Wales Where Chartists turned to violence Newport was the site of a major Chartist uprising in 1839 which saw at least 22 men die. Sadly, artist Kenneth Budd’s 1978 mural marking the rebellion was destroyed by the council in 2013, but it is possible to see the former Westgate Hotel at the bottom of Stow Hill, the site where the rebellion took place. Newport Museum has an extensive Chartist collection including images, weapons and newspapers from the time. newport.gov.uk 2 Kensal Green Cemetery, London Where Feargus O’Connor was buried Irish-born O’Connor was the Chartist movement’s only MP, and founder of its biggest newspaper, the Northern Star. Dubbed the ‘lion of freedom’, he died in 1855 after suffering a mental breakdown and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery.…

Tristram Hunt on… Traditional values and politics today

“The ideology and ambition of the Victorians seems back in vogue” You cannot escape the Victorians if you work in the House of Commons – which I do as a Labour MP. The Palace of Westminster is a triumph of mid-19th-century self-regard, rebuilt from its medieval origins over a 30 year period from the 1840s. The building’s paintings, statues and busts were commissioned to celebrate “the long and uninterruptedly increasing prosperity of England as the most beautiful phenomenon in the history of mankind,” as historian Henry Hallam had described Britain’s stable polity a few years earlier. From Charles Barry’s architecture to Augustus Pugin’s interiors to Herbert ert Minton’s tiles, all the design bravado and engineering excellence of the Victorians is on display. And it seems ems to affect the politics.…

Tristram Hunt on… Traditional values and politics today

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The TechRadar Camera Buying Guide Magazine (Digital) Subscription March 28th, 2011 Issue

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