The Victorian World

Martin Hewitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135694593
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

With an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses political history, the history of ideas, cultural history and art history, The Victorian World offers a sweeping survey of the world in the nineteenth century.

This volume offers a fresh evaluation of Britain and its global presence in the years from the 1830s to the 1900s. It brings together scholars from history, literary studies, art history, historical geography, historical sociology, criminology, economics and the history of law, to explore more than 40 themes central to an understanding of the nature of Victorian society and culture, both in Britain and in the rest of the world. Organised around six core themes – the world order, economy and society, politics, knowledge and belief, and culture – The Victorian World offers thematic essays that consider the interplay of domestic and global dynamics in the formation of Victorian orthodoxies. A further section on 'Varieties of Victorianism' offers considerations of the production and reproduction of external versions of Victorian culture, in India, Africa, the United States, the settler colonies and Latin America. These thematic essays are supplemented by a substantial introductory essay, which offers a challenging alternative to traditional interpretations of the chronology and periodisation of the Victorian years.

Lavishly illustrated, vivid and accessible, this volume is invaluable reading for all students and scholars of the nineteenth century.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Victorian milestones

Martin Hewitt

On 22 January 1901 Queen Victoria died. The nation mourned the end of a period in the history of Britain and the world. ‘The queen is dead … and the great Victorian age is at an end … It will mean great changes in the world’ wrote one contemporary diarist (Wilfred Scawen Blunt, quoted in Smith 1964: v); ‘it was as if an essential wheel from the machine of the Empire, and indeed of the world, had slipped from its spindle’ commented E. F. Benson (1930: 336). In sombre tones, editorials in newspapers around the world lamented the Queen’s passing. Publishers rushed to issue nostalgic biographies and surveys of the reign. At a meeting at 10 Downing Street in May the Victoria League was founded to preserve the ideals the Queen was taken to stand for by promoting the idea of empire. A flurry of activity saw statues of Victoria take a prominent place in the public realm of towns and cities across the empire. Not all responses were uncritical (George Bernard Shaw denounced the Queen’s ten-day lying-in state as ‘insanitary’, recommending that she be quickly cremated or given a shallow burial in a perishable coffin [Holroyd 1989: 58]), but throughout the first half of the twentieth century autobiographers and novelists constructed the Queen’s death and state funeral as a moment of crisis and caesura in the narrative of British history. In the Forsyte Saga John Galsworthy conjured the response of the watching crowds: ‘a murmuring groan from all the long line of those who watched. … so unconscious, so primitive, deep and wild … Tribute of an age to its own death. … The Queen was dead, and the air of the greatest city upon earth grey with unshed tears.’ Even his worldly hero Soames saw the event as ‘supremely symbolical, this summing-up of a long rich period’ (Galsworthy 1922: 512, 518).

Although C. F. G. Masterman, in the preface of his The Heart of Empire, noted that even before the Queen’s death, ‘the forces characteristic of that period had become expended, and that new problems were arising with a new age’ (1901: v), the sense of sudden release was palpable. H. G. Wells compared the Queen to ‘a giant paperweight that for half a century sat upon men’s minds’ (Webb 1983: 3). ‘A restraining influence had been removed, which was none the less oppressive because it was largely an affair of sentimental imagination’, one later recollection more temperately suggested (Kellett 1936: 90–91). Such verdicts followed, if they also subverted, a path already well established, not least in the enthusiastic and inevitably uncritical paeans that marked the celebrations of Victoria’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees in 1887 and 1897. For all her periods of public disengagement, her narrow range of experience, her prejudices and political partisanship, Victorian culture celebrated to itself a Queen who, in the popular Tennysonian concept, ‘wrought her people lasting good’ (Ellis 1932: 740). It was no accident that Lytton Strachey’s Bloomsbury counterblast against the Victorians singled out the Queen as an object for his corrosive invective.

Three tropes emerge powerfully from the responses to the Queen’s death: a belief that the reign of Queen Victoria constituted a distinct historical period, a recognition that the Queen was herself an active force in this distinctiveness, and the extent to which this was a global and not merely national, or even imperial, agency. Over the course of the twentieth century all three judgements have been treated in many quarters with scepticism, if not disdain. Historians and literary scholars tend to be suspicious of any periodisation, a position strengthened in recent years by the turn away from master narratives and the search for plurality and complexity. But there has been an especially powerful prejudice against the Victorian as period, perhaps in part because of this sense of monarchical agency. John Lucas, for example, has suggested that ‘There is a strong case for arguing that, except in the most rigorously controlled of contexts, “Victorian” and “Victorianism” are terms we could well do without. They are all too frequently employed in ways that are chronologically indefensible, historically dubious, intellectually confusing, and ideologically unacceptable’ (Lucas 2000: 29). Griselda Pollock has warned of the ‘gendered disability’ that the ‘female naming’ of ‘Victorian’ imposes, making it ‘susceptible to the easy narrative, the anecdotal, the immediate, the decorative, the sentimental, the brightly-coloured and showy, the eclectic’ (Pollock 1993–94: 599). It is a feature of Victorian studies that scholars who identify to a greater or less extent with the field often do so without enthusiasm for the periodisation it implies.

Paradoxically, while unease with Victorian periodisation has flourished, so has recognition of the significance of Victoria in her imperial role. Recent scholarship has affirmed that claims for the importance of Victoria were not simply the product of an unsavoury cultural dependence. John Plunkett has explored the extent to which ‘Victoria inhabited her subjects’ lives to an extraordinary degree’ (Plunkett 2003: 2). This was not merely a question of the pervasive material presence of Victorian iconography: Staffordshire pottery figurines, Victoria parks, halls, baths, hotels, hospitals, universities, stations, even insurance companies, V. R. insignia on postboxes, mayoral chains of office. It was a reflection to the extent to which, notwithstanding her withdrawal after the death of Albert, Victoria was assiduous in her public role, an assiduousness that brought engagement with insight and firmness with important issues of foreign policy, and a general oversight over all elements of government. Opinionated, forthright, stubborn, at times she was writing to Disraeli three or four times a day (Hardie 1935). Significantly, republicanism obtained little purchase within nineteenth-century radicalism, which participated without any great unease in the ceremonial of the loyal subject. As David Cannadine has noted: ‘the British Empire was a royal empire, presided over and unified by a sovereign of global amplitude and semi-divine fullness’ (Cannadine 2001: 102). Victoria’s name ‘was literally everywhere’, in the names of lakes and rivers, towns and cities. Her statue, ‘often in canopied magnificence’ gazed down from Vancouver to Valetta, from Cairo to Canberra. The Daily Graphic summed up the 1897 Diamond Jubilee celebrations as ‘the survey of the Sixty Years Reign and of the microcosm of Empire with which we have filled our streets’ (Judd 1996: 132).

The Jubilee celebrations of 1887 and 1897 played a significant role in cementing understandings of the association of Queen with a distinct historical period. In both years the market was flooded with general surveys of the reign, such as T. H. Ward’s The Reign of Victoria: Fifty Years of Progress (1887) and T. H. S. Escott’s Social Transformations of the Victorian Age (1897). As the titles of many of these texts indicate, despite the accusation of later scholars that, in the words of Lucas, ‘“Victorian” in particular is used to imply a cultural and political homogeneity which, the evidence suggests, never existed’ (Lucas 2000: 29), the contemporary conviction that the Queen’s reign marked a distinct period in British history implied no stability except the consistency of overwhelmingly beneficial transformation. For the Victorians their age was ‘an age of revolution’ (for example Dowden 1888: 159). The celebrations of the period that poured from the press in 1887 and 1897 were united in their sense of the distance travelled since the 1830s. In his response to Tennyson’s gloomy “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After”, for example, Gladstone offered a vigorous defence of the Victorian record. The evils that Tennyson bemoaned might exist, but their prevalence had been greatly reduced: education had been provided, wages increased, philanthropic activity was providing model dwellings, the demoralising abuses of the Poor Law had been swept away, class legislation like the Game Laws repealed, the iniquities of barriers to trade banished, England had led the world in the establishment of cheap communications, religious disabilities removed, the administration reformed, the country’s trade increased fivefold, the manners of the people and their popular pastimes improved (Gladstone 1887). It is this sort of almost forced optimism that Gissing’s Mr Barmby lampooned in In the Year of Jubilee: ‘to celebrate the completion of fifty years of Progress. … Only think what has been done in this half century; only think of it! Compare England now, compare the world with what it was in 1837. It takes away one’s breath!’ (Gissing 1887: 35).

Historians have also questioned the efficacy of the ‘Victorian’ as period by challenging its internal coherence and terminal dates. In the historiography of the first half of the twentieth century, the dominant categories were ‘early’ and ‘late Victorian’, with the break falling conveniently just about halfway through the reign. R. C. K. Ensor, in his volume of the Oxford History of England proceeded confidently from the predicate that ‘round about 1870 occurs a watershed in English life’ (Ensor 1936: 136). G. M. Young, the most influential twentieth-century interpreter of the Victorians, adopted this frame in his Early Victorian England. Significantly, however, Young’s own introductory essay to this volume furnished the bulk of the material for his Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (1936), which treated the post-1870 period as something of an addendum. In the second half of the century this chronological narrowing became a common feature of interpretations of the Victorian. Walter Houghton’s immensely influential Victorian Frame of Mind covered only 1830–70. Thereafter it became commonplace, especially of literary and cultural studies, to conceive of some core nineteenth-century period (most commonly the 50 years from 1830 to 1880) as Victorian, consigning the later years to a (usually ill-defined) transitional or ‘post-Victorian’ period; the approach most recently taken by Philip Davis’ volume on The Victorians in the Oxford English Literary History. During the 1950s the binary divide was generally superseded by the adoption of a three-way division of early, middle and late, which followed a number of works, in particular W. L. Burn’s An Age of Equipoise, which in effect divided the pre-1870 period into ‘early’ and ‘mid-’ Victorian periods, although on occasions the mid-Victorian was pushed into the 1870s. Indeed in recent years the 1870s and early 1880s have become contested terrain, often loosely assimilated into the mid Victorian.

This introductory chapter attempts to provide a sense of the internal structure of the Victorian period, to evaluate the appropriateness of its sub-periodisations; to consider its transitional moments and specific milestones. How far did the beginning and end of Victoria’s reign mark significant watersheds in the history of Britain and her global presence? What was the nature of the transformations effected? To what extent did the intervening period share common characteristics? What were the key moments of change within the period, and what sort of internal periodisation do they create? G. M. Young once recommended the study of a single year as a way to understanding crucial phases of crisis and reorientation, and there are a number of Victorian examples, studies of 1837, 1848, 1850, 1859, 1867, 1884 and 1900. In the discussion that follows most of these years will figure prominently, but usually as part of more extended periods of change. As Carl Dawson has acknowledged, historical processes ‘sprawl in time’ and calendar years are rarely satisfactory (Dawson 1979: xi). The discussion that follows suggests that all these years, with the partial exception of 1859, can be placed within watersheds that help structure the Victorian period, not into the traditional binary or tripartite divisions, but into four distinct phases.

ENTERING THE VICTORIAN AGE

The year 1837 is not a very promising candidate as the threshold of a new era. Richard Stein’s study Victoria’s Year. English Literature and Culture, 1837–1838 demonstrates the presence of many straws in the wind of change, but no coherent or substantial sense of the year as a critical moment. Like many of the hinge years of the period, 1837 was a year of economic bust. Perhaps in part for this reason, Victoria’s accession less than a month after her eighteenth birthday was celebrated in street ballad and periodical squib alike as offering the promise of a new start, a break with Hanover, a ‘spring-like reign’ as Laetitia Landon mused (quoted in Plunkett 2003: 18). The new reign necessitated a general election, which brought one Benjamin Disraeli to the Commons, as well as confirming the growing importance of middle-class radicalism and tightening the screw of party. The Great Western, the biggest ship in the world, was launched on 19 July 1837 (although it did not make its first successful crossing of the Atlantic until April 1838). Captain Alexander Burnes arrived in Kabul to attempt to enter into commercial relations with the ruler, beginning the ‘great game’ in Central Asia. There were rebellions in Canada, while at home a parliamentary enquiry into relations with aboriginal peoples in British settlements was noting that ‘the situation of Great Britain brings her beyond any other power into communication with the uncivilised nations of the earth’ (quoted Darwin 2009: 27). John Pringle Nichol’s Views of the Architecture of the Heavens offered an important early statement of the evolutionary history of the world and the galaxy. Legal reforms abolished the pillory as a punishment, and severely curtailed the scope of the death penalty. A meeting at the British Coffee House, sponsored by the London Working Men’s Association, effectively launched the campaign for the People’s Charter. But portentous as all this might have been, it cannot be said to constitute a move from one era to another.

Nevertheless, in hindsight it is possible to see 1837 as coming towards the end of a number of years of far-reaching reformation, which taken together do – even if largely as a matter of happenstance – constitute a fundamental historical transformation. These changes were innumerable and wide-ranging (Schlicke 2005). Some can be traced to a particular event or instance, though most involved processes of social and cultural modification that unfolded over time. The pace of change was not uniform, although in many cases, as contemporaries remarked, it was remarkably rapid. Sir James Mackintosh, the Whig law reformer, commented that in comparing the decades before 1830 to those immediately after it was as if he had ‘lived in two different countries and conversed with people who spoke different languages’ (quoted in Lester 1995: 40).

The year 1832 is a much better candidate for the opening of the period that was to be named Victorian. Reform agitation and the Swing Riots generated a profound sense of crisis. Admittedly, when it finally emerged, the 1832 Reform Act (and its Scottish equivalent) was a conservative measure, which increased the electorate to only about 20 per cent of the population, and left the new industrial areas very much underrepresented, and the landed elite still dominant. This said, the transformation was still profound, sweeping away key elements of the ancient constitution, and setting a pattern that survived until the final years of Victoria’s reign. Several important recent studies have re-established the extent to which the various reform measures of these years ‘unleashed a wave of political modernisation’ and ‘could scarcely have caused a more drastic alteration in England’s political fabric’ (Phillips and Wetherell 1995: 412, 416). The significance of the developments of the 1830s lies less in the political arithmetic of enfranchisement or even the algebra of party development, than in the emotional and intellectual responses they elicited. Suddenly, the years of Lord Liverpool seemed the remote politics of the past. Many constituencies in Scotland and Wales were transformed from tiny closely managed fiefdoms to larger electorates with a genuine political voice. There was a fundamental broadening of the political nation, especially in the way that the redistribution of seats helped to place the practices and rituals of participative politics at the centre of the public culture of the expanding towns and cities. Hanoverian ‘virtual representation’ was replaced by a franchise based on universal judgements of individual capacity. The 1832 settlement established that the right adjustment of the franchise was a function of personal fitness rather than systemic exigencies, and ensured that for the next 80 years debates over the nature and claims of citizenship would remain at the heart of politics. At the same time, a new ‘two-party polarity was created with remarkable suddenness’ (Clark 1985: 410). The terms ‘Conservative’ and ‘Liberal’ came into common usage for the first time in the decade after 1827, and voting patterns on party lines hardened dramatically in parliament and in the constituencies (Rohan McWilliam’s essay in this volume offers an alternative discussion of the place of party in Victorian politics, but not one that is in fundamental dispute with the argument here).

This redistribution of political power was part of a much wider transformation of cultural geographies occurring in the 1830s, symbolised above all by ‘culture-shaking improvement in communication’ (Robson 1976: 80). The decade brought not just the railways and steamships but paper-making machinery and the rotary steam press, the reformed postal service, wood-cut illustrations and photography, and cable telegraphy. These technologies, and the meanings ascribed to them by contemporaries amazed and sometimes bewildered at the pace and scale of change, helped reorder the landscape, transform personal relationships and reconfigure Britain’s global presence. At the heart of this transformation were the railways. Conventionally the railway age commenced with the opening of the Liverpool to Manchester railway in 1830, although it was not the first railway, or even the first to carry passengers. In 1835 the Quarterly Review was still describing as ‘palpably ridiculous … the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice as fast as stagecoaches’ (quoted in Sanders 1999: 63). Yet within a few short years stage-coaches were already being treated as a symbol of the past. From 1839 to 1841 the nucleus of a national network was established. Steam propulsion on land encouraged steam propulsion on water. Like railways, steamships first began to appear several decades before the accession of Victoria; but here too the 1830s were years of rapid development, stimulated by government mail contracts and by the railways. Steam metaphors became inescapable, and in two memorable images, The Fighting...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Introduction Victorian milestones
• Part I The World Order
• Part II Economy and Society
• Part III Politics
• Part IV Knowledge and Belief
• Part V Culture
• Part VI Varieties of Victorianism
• Index