The Victorian Empire and Britain's Maritime World, 1837-1901

The Sea and Global History

M. Taylor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137312662
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica

A wide-ranging new survey of the role of the sea in Britain's global presence in the 19th century. Mostly at peace, but sometimes at war, Britain grew as a maritime empire in the Victorian era. This collection looks at British sea-power as a strategic, moral and cultural force.

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‘Now Is Come a Darker Day’: Britain, Venice and the Meaning of Sea Power

Andrew Lambert

As Victorian Britain assumed the mantle of greatness, a rapidly expanding empire of trade, markets, industry and money, bound together by cutting-edge communications technology, and defended by a uniquely powerful navy, the more reflective analysts and commentators began to draw exemplary parallels with earlier maritime empires. The search for a useful past would dominate the development of naval history and political theory throughout the Queen’s long reign. Nowhere was this process more marked than in British attitudes to Venice, and by mid-century this long defunct Italian republic had assumed a critical place in the intellectual and cultural world of imperial Britain, an ideal case study of the rise and fall of maritime empires. Consequently the Victorians did not have to wait for the American strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan to tell them that sea power was the product of a total national engagement with the ocean.¹ In truth Mahan took his cue from British intellectuals, and his message found an audience already prepared by half a century of high-level analysis.

Long before Mahan began work, the British had listed the sea powers, and drawn suitable lessons and morals from their decline and fall. Nowhere was this process more obvious than in the case of Venice, the ultimate maritime state. However, well into the 1860s the British believed that Venice fell because the state had become tyrannical and immoral. The overthrow of these mythic pasts, slow but certain, forced British analysts to consider a more alarming truth, that Venice’s fall indicated a weakness in sea power itself, that all maritime empires were doomed to be crushed by larger and more populous continental hegemons, that France, Russia or Germany might play the part of Ottoman Turkey, Spain or Republican France in the future fate of the British Empire.

These ideas affected the Victorians at many levels, as Venice loomed ever larger in their world image, and in the minds of their political and cultural leaders. The British elite knew Venice, and everyone came face-to-face with the impact of Venetian architecture on the cityscapes of Victorian Britain.² Each generation created its own Venice, viewed through different eyes. The generation that fought Napoleon, and ran the state for the next five decades, saw an idealised world captured in the Canalettos that hung on their walls, trophies of an earlier generation and the Grand Tour.³ Among the Whig/Liberal elite who emerged after 1815 the dark literary creations of Byron and Shelley, of Samuel Rogers, and the hostile histories produced under Napoleon’s aegis held sway. But by the 1860s a new political generation had emerged, men who had been to Venice, read Ruskin’s visionary tracts, and seen Turner’s alarming canvases. Venice became a critical element of Victorian culture.⁴ The giants of Victorian politics, Gladstone and Disraeli, visited Venice, and responded in distinctive ways. By the 1870s mass tourism and the high road to India meant a steady stream of Britons passed through.

Working to an altogether slower tempo, historians began to recreate the Venetian past, a process consciously configured to meet the needs of the present, and debates about the future. The results were, unsurprisingly, pedestrian. Long after the old Queen died the meaning and message of Venice remained unclear, a past in play.

‘[A] dying Glory smiles’⁵

In the eighteenth century Venice had been a celebrated destination for young gentlemen on the Grand Tour, noted for carnival, courtesans and conspiracies, and while the very literal image of Venice was widely diffused, by considerable British holdings of local art, not least the work of Antonio del Canal (better known as Canaletto), the city state no longer counted for much in European affairs. Amid the chaos and disaster of the French Revolutionary wars the extinction of the Republic in 1797 did not elicit much comment from British statesmen. This was hardly the time for exemplary history lessons, a task that Gibbon’s great book had addressed, and much would be forgotten before peace returned in 1815.

Yet there were deeper currents at work in the rapidly developing national culture. British poets would find new perspectives on the past and new ways to see the future. In 1800 Robert Southey, fresh from a visit to Lisbon, projected ‘a monumental work on the history of Portugal and all her overseas territories [ ... ] as Gibbon had become the historian of Rome. Indeed Portugal would provide a modern example of an Imperial power that had flourished and declined, just as Rome had done.’⁶ It hardly needed to be said that Portugal was a maritime empire. In the event Southey only completed the Brazilian section of his plan, but his approach may have inspired others. The poem ‘On the extinction of the Venetian Republic’, written in 1802 by his friend and neighbour Wordsworth, became a cultural landmark. Although he would not visit the city until 1837, Wordsworth’s 14 lines summed up the romantic response, evoking ‘the gorgeous east’ held ‘in fee’, and ‘the eldest Child of Liberty’, given mortal form, running her natural course:

Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade
Of that which once was great, is passed away.

That this was an imaginary vision, part Canaletto, part a growing disenchantment with revolution, became obvious when Wordsworth reached northern Italy in 1820. He decided against visiting the city. In 1837 the weary travel-worn poet finally spent four days in Venice, but he ‘was not in the mood to appreciate its shimmering waters, palatial buildings and the sharp contrast of shadowed alleyways and brilliant sunlit piazzas’. Complaining of heat and discomfort he left early and never returned.⁷

Wordsworth’s lines inspired a new sensibility. He began the process of recasting Venetian history as an exemplary past, a story with a message, a moral and a purpose. He did not need to see Venice, but his words inspired others to go, and they would find many ways of seeing his imaginary city when they arrived. Poets, artists and prophets wanted to see ahead, to predict and to warn. They would shape the intellectual landscape in which the Victorians came to see their future. British cultural leaders in words and pictures began to mine a new vein of ideas, to see in the fall of Venice a lesson and a warning.

During the Napoleonic wars, Venice had been closed to Britain’s visitors, but was increasingly important as a hostile naval base that had to be watched by the Royal Navy. After Captain Sir William Hoste’s brilliant victory off Lissa in 1811, the Royal Navy took command of the Adriatic, operated off the Dalmatian coast at the heart of the old Venetian empire and blockaded the Lagoon.⁸ In 1815 Britain was content to leave the city of Venice, complete with the important naval arsenal, ships and shipyards on the Lido, in Austrian hands.⁹ Instead the British neutralised the Adriatic by retaining the Ionian Islands, until 1797 Venetian territory, centred around the fortified naval base at Corfu.

Austrian rule provided much needed stability for Venice, but it proved politically repressive and economically devastating. As maritime trade withered, Venice had little option but to become a tourist attraction, cashing in on its past glories for the amusement of rich travellers and dangerous exiles. Few British travellers found anything to complain about; even Lord Byron was left in peace, while others enjoyed the order and the music of Austrian army bands. Instead, under a watchful Habsburg eye, Venice became a city of dreams and decay, the setting for the fourth canto of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Exiled and disgraced, Byron came to Venice as a refuge from the world, the power of his verse only equalled by the scandal of his life, which oozed into every aspect of the vision he created, a crumbling splendour, slowly sliding into the sea, a metaphor he deployed to sum up his own life, and the fate of his homeland. His words, and not a little of his life, would inspire the transformation of Venice in British eyes. Byron lent the city an air of the fabulous, the decadent and the dangerous.

The decadent, crumbling, ruins of past glory that filled Byron’s canto found an echo in Shelley’s contemporary ‘Lines written among the Eugenean Hills’,

Sun-girt city, thou hast been

Ocean’s child, and then his Queen;

Now is come a darker day

And thou soon must be his prey.¹⁰

Inspired by visiting Byron in Venice, and the death of his daughter, Shelley turned the fall of Venice into a metaphor to reflect grief, frustrated political hopes and a moral repulsion prompted by the decadent atmosphere surrounding Byron. Everywhere he looked, Shelley saw the evidence of tyranny and corruption, of brutal Austrian soldiery and debased locals.¹¹ Taken in combination with his radical politics the meaning of his message, delivered from a vantage point sanctified by the literary heroes of the ancient world and the Renaissance, was obvious.

Nor were such reflections restricted to poets. The men who would dominate mid-Victorian politics, Benjamin Disraeli and William Ewart Gladstone, knew Venice and, as might be imagined, maintained very different visions. Obsessed with Byron, and busily retracing his steps, Disraeli arrived in Venice in September 1826, and was at once enchanted.¹² His impressionistic, romantic, orientalist response, gathered over the next five days would last a lifetime. He grasped the unique and the essential with Byronic fervour. With Childe Harold to hand, Disraeli saw Venice as the gateway to the east, or the ‘Levant’, an exotic location associated in his imagination with the original home of his ancestors.¹³ He was among the first to recognise Arab and Islamic ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. ‘Now Is Come a Darker Day’: Britain, Venice and the Meaning of Sea Power
• 2. After Emancipation: Slavery, Freedom and the Victorian Empire
• 3. Cultural, Intellectual and Religious Networks: Britain’s Maritime Exchanges in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
• 4. ‘We Never Make Mistakes’: Constructing the Empire of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company
• 5. Crossing the Seas: Problems and Possibilities for Queen Victoria’s Indian Subjects
• 6. Three Weeks’ Post Apart: British Children Travel the Empire
• 7. Insularity and Empire in the Late Nineteenth Century
• 8. The Victorian Maritime Empire in Its Global Context
• Index