Victorian Britain

V

Population

The question of how many poor there were was an open question until Booth, Rowntree, and others published their research conclusions. There was official evidence, however, throughout the Victorian age concerning how many people there were, although questions beginning with “Why?” were never easy to answer.

Throughout the different phases of the reign there was a continuing increase in the total population. At the decennial census of 1841, the first in the reign and the fifth in what had become a series, the population of England and Wales was just under 16 million (7,778,000 males and 8,137,000 females). By 1871 this had risen to more than 22 million. One out of two Englishmen and Englishwomen was then under the age of 21, a high proportion, and by 1901, total population had reached more than 32 million (15,729,000 males and 16,799,000 females). During the same period the population of Scotland rose from 2,620,000 to 4,472,000. Irish population history was completely different: nearly a million people died of starvation and disease during the “great famine” caused by the potato plague (1845 to 1849), and 1,600,000 emigrated, most of them to the United States between 1847 and 1852. Many moved too to England and Scotland, even before the Famine, settling mainly in the great cities; Engels included them in his account of Manchester.

The increase in total population in England, Wales, and Scotland was associated with a striking increase both in the proportion of people living in towns and cities and in the number of such places. By 1851 there were 28 towns with a population of over 20,000—in 1801, there had been 15—and by 1891, there were 63, many of them on or near to coalfields. Manchester almost doubled in population between 1851 and 1901. There was one completely new town, Middlesbrough, described vividly in the 1860s as “an infant Hercules”. In Scotland, Glasgow emerged as the second city in Britain.

By the late-Victorian years there was some talk not of overpopulation but of underpopulation, and the Registrar General drew attention in 1901 after the Census returns had been collected to the fact that the population increase over the previous decade had been the lowest in the whole century. During the 1870s—and it was not the least interesting aspect of the decade—there had been a fall in the birth rate which had been stable for half a century. The causes are not clear, but they lie in family history and much will never be known. By the end of the Victorian age, the size of families had fallen significantly, middle-class families first, following an earlier rise. In 1851 the average family size was 4.7, roughly the same as it had been in the 17th century, but during the 1860s it rose to 6.2. Only one out of eight families then had one or two children, while one family in six had ten or more. Something is known of the history of contraception, but the fall in family size preceded a widespread use of contraceptives. The Malthusian League (see Thomas Malthus), established in 1877 advocating what later came to be called “birth control”, had strictly limited influence.

It was not surprising that among the scores of Victorian “proverbs”, there was one that ran “children should be seen and not heard”. Yet families might have been bigger still, had it not been for a continuing high rate of infant mortality, which varied significantly from one part of the country and one occupation to another. Urban infant mortality was 30 per cent higher than rural. For reasons that are not clear, total infant mortality soared to a peak of 163 per thousand in 1899 before falling off rapidly in the 20th century.

The cost of bringing up children as against other items in family expenditure (and these were more varied than ever before) may have helped in the late-Victorian reduction of average family size to 4.3. What kept up total population was a steady fall in the death rate, also from the 1870s onwards—from 22 per thousand to 14 per thousand. It has been explained in environmental rather than medical terms. The Victorians created an impressive infrastructure concerned with the supply of fresh water. They were also better fed in dietary terms than their grandfathers were.

Life expectancy for middle-aged women improved in the 1880s and for middle-aged men in the 1890s, but it was not until the 20th century that there was to be a substantial and continuing increase in the number of over-65s, making the 20th century very different from the 19th. It is a misconception, therefore, to think of large numbers of Victorian men as aged “grey beards”. Grandfathers were less in evidence than in the 20th century. Yet some of the most eminent Victorians lived to great ages. Notable among them was John Ruskin, born in the same year as Victoria, 1819, who died two years before her. Cardinal Newman, whose conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845 was one of the great religious events of the Victorian age, was 18 years older than the Queen and lived until 1890. Alfred Lord Tennyson, made Poet Laureate in 1850, was 10 years older than the Queen and lived on until 1892. His funeral in Westminster Abbey was a grand occasion. Gladstone, born in the same year as Tennyson, lived 6 years longer; he had been known for several years as “the Grand Old Man”.

Longevity was not, of course, a quality shared by all the eminent, one of whom among Victorian women pre-eminent, Florence Nightingale, lived from 1820 to 1910. The life expectancy of women was longer than that of men—both rose—although what were euphemistically called “women’s sicknesses” could make long life difficult. Florence Nightingale herself spent much of her life in retirement. Gladstone in his last years was blind and deaf, and the Queen too had much to complain about as she celebrated her Diamond Jubilee.

VI

Family and Society

It is impossible to generalize about family relationships (husbands and wives; parents and children; children and children) except to observe that the legal position of women within the family was unprotected until the passing of Married Women’s Property Acts in 1870 and 1882; that men and women had separate standards of behaviour; and that the first of a chain of Divorce Acts, that of 1857, setting up secular divorce courts, treated men and women differently. The number of divorces remained low throughout the age of Victoria. In the last years of the reign, it was still as low as 0.2 per cent. Illegitimacy rates fell in late-Victorian England. One of the biggest differences between families was the extent of overcrowding. Another was the degree of dependence, if at all, on domestic service. The biggest social divide in the Victorian age was between families with and without domestic service. The numbers of domestic servants exceeded the numbers of textile workers in every census, and between 1851 and 1871 in the mid-Victorian years the number of domestic servants increased by 60 per cent, twice the rate of increase of the population.

For people of all classes, much was made of “the home”, “home, sweet home”. Indeed, G. K. Chesterton, a Roman Catholic convert, who wrote an illuminating book called The Victorian Age, claimed that the Victorians were the first generation “to worship the hearth without the altar”. For middle-class families, domestic economy was the highest form of political economy, the subject of large numbers of books, many of them treatises. For working-class families, there were as many gradations in the social valuations of homes as there were in the social valuations of occupations within the two broad categories, “respectable” and “non respectable”. Yet there was a street life too, and not only for children. The “pub” was often a part of it.

Because within the home women could be idealized and put on a pedestal, there were many “secret lives” for men, who often denied their wives’ sexuality. There was also often a gap between idealization or romance and fact. Prostitution was frequently depicted as “the great social evil”, and the number of prostitutes, difficult to calculate, was always great. “Fallen women” were often treated harshly although, largely because of the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, there was a public debate about whether or not prostitutes should be imprisoned if they failed to submit themselves to medical examination. One of the many remarkable Victorian women campaigners, Josephine Butler, led a difficult but successful campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts. They were suspended in 1883 and repealed in 1886. In between, a Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed in 1884 attempting to suppress brothels, to raise the age of consent for girls to 16 and, slipped in, to introduce severe penalties for male homosexual behaviour. Sex had been a taboo subject for much of the Victorian age. Now there were writers like the physician Havelock Ellis, who specialized in writing about it. His Studies in the Psychology of Sex, the first volume of which appeared in 1897, was to run to seven volumes.

VII

The Royal Family

Among all the families in Britain, the royal family, never fully publicized but always gossiped about, was in a special position. Victoria and Albert were anxious to sustain the proposition that they were heads of a family rather than a Queen and a Consort. In this they were aware of the low reputation of the monarchy when Victoria ascended the throne. The Duke of Cumberland, who became King of Hanover after the separation of Hanover from Britain in 1837, had few friends. William IV had a bevy of children through his mistress. Having stayed in the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, the Queen soon decided that she did not wish to visit it often again.

By the time that Walter Bagehot, editor of The Economist and eminent among the eminent Victorians, wrote his classic text on the British Constitution in 1867, he noted how “we have come to regard the Crown as the head of our morality. We have come to believe that it is natural to have a virtuous sovereign.” It was almost as important a note as his analysis of the “dignified” and “efficient” components in the British Constitution, the monarchy being part of the first. He added nothing, however, about conjugal love, an often unrealized Victorian ideal.

Victoria was not happy about producing nine children. She did not care for babies, as she admitted frankly to her eldest daughter, the Princess Royal, in her remarkably candid letters: she compared them with cabbages. She was determined, however, to bring up her nine children dutifully. Her problems started with her eldest son, the future Edward VII who, because she reigned so long, was Prince of Wales for 60 years. Bereft of Albert’s guidance, which he too had found difficult, she was unable to find him adequate public things to do. Nor could she control gossip about his mistresses, his gambling, and his choice of friends. Edward went his own way, which was difficult for him too, particularly when the Queen withdrew from public view after Albert’s death. He was also aware of the gossip surrounding his mother’s relationship with her Highland servant, John Brown. His own marriage to Alexandra (1863) was not a love match like Victoria and Albert’s.

After the Jubilees, the Queen’s popularity grew, and the size of her family became an asset in itself, however difficult some of the problems she had with particular members of her extended family. A popular newspaper reporting her death in 1901 could write, “The Queen is dead. No language can express the sense of personal loss… Few of us, perhaps, have realized till now how large a part she had in the life of every one of us; how the thread of her life, in binding and strengthening like a golden weft, the warp of the nation’s progress, has touched and brightened the life of each and all of her subjects.”

VIII

Empire

At the end of Victoria’s reign, imperial themes were dominating newspaper headlines. No fewer than 6.5 million sq km (2.5 million sq mi) of her territory, much of it in the tropics, had passed under British control between 1884 and 1896, and far away in Australia, an old continent of settlement, a federation of states was proclaimed in the year of Victoria’s death—with the title, which in the 20th century was to acquire wider significance, of Commonwealth. In one part of empire, however, South Africa, there was war, a protracted war against the Boers (see South African War). It had started in 1899 and was to continue until the year after the Queen’s death. The Peace of Vereeniging was not signed until May 1902. After the jubilees, with all their imperial pageantry, there was little place for pageantry in South Africa. And what was subsequently to be called a guerrilla war was continuing when the Queen died, despite the fall of the Transvaal and the flight of its President, Paul Kruger to Europe after the Boer capital, Pretoria, had been taken by the British in June 1900. No fewer than 432,880 sq km (167,000 sq mi) had been added to the Empire.

They involved more than questions of military efficiency, for in the last years of Victoria's reign there was also a German challenge to Britain's naval strength. From the time of the Napoleonic Wars onwards, the idea of a Pax Britannica, strongly proclaimed in mid-century by Palmerston, was supported less by British soldiers than by the might of the Royal Navy, which would ensure control of the seas. When, after 1890, German naval rearmament, part of a Weltpolitik policy, threatened naval supremacy, there was bound to be a reconsideration not only of naval power but of the basis of British foreign policy. Peel and his ministers in the 1840s had never followed a Palmerstonian policy. Nor did Salisbury, although, for the latter, as for Palmerston, foreign affairs were a matter of special concern. New questions were now posed. Was it possible for Britain to remain isolated in the world when recently acquired German economic power was sustaining an ambitious programme of naval expansion? Significantly, the first break in what was thought of as Britain's splendid “isolation” from Europe was an Anglo-Japanese Treaty in 1902.

By then, it was clear that empire had its “burdens” as well as its “glory”. The poet of empire, Rudyard Kipling, who wrote memorable “barrack room ballads” about British soldiers, never suggested that the British Empire would last for ever: like Nineveh and Tyre, it might pass out of history along with all “the pomp of yesterday”. Disraeli had had no such intimations when he had Victoria proclaimed Empress of India in 1877, twenty years before her Diamond Jubilee. Kipling acquired his experience of empire in British India, as did the young Winston Churchill, who lived long enough to see the British Empire (and other empires) passing into history after World War II. Not surprisingly, he wanted to call it “Empire” rather than “Commonwealth” before and after India became independent in 1947.

Palmerston believed in a pax Britannica, supported less by British soldiers than by the might of the Royal Navy, which would ensure control of the seas, and it was when German naval rearmament, part of a Weltpolitik policy, challenged that might, that British diplomatic isolation in continental Europe ended. Salisbury's main preoccupation, like Palmerston's, had been with foreign affairs. This had never been Peel's approach, however, and significantly it had been Peel's opponent, Disraeli, who had extended the sense of romance in Empire when in 1877 he had Victoria proclaimed Empress of India. It was in British India that the poet Rudyard Kipling acquired his experience of empire, as did the young Winston Churchill. Kipling was the poet of empire, stressing the fact that its responsibilities were burdens and that the duration of empire might not last: like Nineveh and Tyre and “all the pomp of yesterday”, it might pass into history. Churchill, who was to live long enough to see it passing into history, wanted to continue to call it “empire” and not “commonwealth”.

In the course of imperial expansion there were many so-called “little wars”. Britain was not involved in any major European wars, however, during Victoria's reign. Nor was there any form of conscription. Yet attempts were made to spread knowledge of empire through education, beginning in the elementary school and continuing through the universities, particularly Oxford, where a Rhodes Scholarship scheme was founded by Cecil Rhodes, who had made a fortune in the Kimberley diamond fields which provided the name for the Queen’s 60th anniversary. He had served later as Prime Minister of Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896. The scheme was to be highly successful and to bring in Rhodes Scholars from outside as well as inside the Commonwealth. It was an imperial memorial, however, which survived the transformation of Rhodesia, named after Rhodes, into Zimbabwe. Among the Rhodes Scholars’ were some from India, the Victorian “jewel in the Crown”.

IX

Assessment

There can be no easy summary of the events and processes of Victoria’s long reign, but at the end of December 1900, before the Queen died, a British national newspaper, the Daily Mail, asked a number of Victorians, some of whose names have been forgotten, to give “expert opinions” on their century.

Oscar Browning, for a time an unconventional master at Eton, picked out education first. The Education Act of 1870 had been an outstanding achievement, and “the most urgent task for the 20th century—urgent above all other political needs—[was] the continuance of that work by the organisation of secondary education.” (There was to be a new and controversial Act in 1902.)

Arthur Pinero, a fashionable playwright, picked out as his “century’s playwright”; not Oscar Wilde, but the little-remembered dramatist Thomas William Robertson, “a playwright at whom the superior person [a revealing choice of words] is now wont to sneer”. The Victorian age had not been a great age for playwrights. Melodrama had been its main forte, and large sections of the British public never went to the theatre. Nevertheless, President Abraham Lincoln had been at a theatre watching a light-hearted Victorian play on the night in 1865 that he was assassinated. The villains were more prominent than the heroes in Victorian melodrama: on the greater stage, including the imperial stage, there was no room for both.

Poetry, much read, offered a means of escape from the age more than a criticism of it, yet Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning questioned and interpreted their own and older times, inspiring disciples as well as readers. So, too, in a great age of the novel, did George Eliot. One of her remarkable heroines, Dorothea in Middlemarch (published in 1872), was more admired than most living women. The economic basis of literature, fiction and non-fiction, had changed and was still changing as the reign ended. “Bookmanship” was extolled, but there was a mass of “cheap literature”, with Dickens straddling cultural divides. The rise of great publishing houses was accompanied by an expansion of most forms of publishing, with serious authors, like George Gissing, complaining of the commercial pressures on them.

In the visual arts, described briefly in the Daily Mail by Sir W.B. Richmond, a Fellow of the Royal Academy, patronage, largely but not totally abandoned in literature, had been eroded rather than eliminated during the course of the reign, and institutions, old and new, among them the Royal Academy, were necessary intermediaries between artists and their public. So, too, were exhibitions. In music, performance rather than composition was at the centre of the cultural scene, metropolitan and provincial, although Edward Elgar was already composing in the Queen’s reign. His Enigma Variations were written in 1899 and his great oratorio, The Dream of Gerontius, a deeply spiritual work, in 1900.

Richmond selected a short-list of visual artists, among them Joseph Mallord William Turner, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, George Frederick Watts, and Lord Leighton, the first painter to be given a peerage. He noted too how many Victorian paintings had told a story. Yet he left out “the crafts” and William Morris, whose influence on Victorian styles, in several of them, was greater than that of any of his contemporaries. He also left out the Arts and Crafts Movement, which sought, in the wake of Morris, to simplify design and to stimulate workmanship.

Victorian art, like Victorian architecture, went through different phases, while always being influenced by fashion, proclaimed by “taste-makers”. There had been a conflict of styles in early-Victorian Britain between Gothic and Greek, but the middle years of the reign were highly eclectic. All styles were available except an explicitly Victorian style. In late-Victorian England, there was a return to so-called Queen Anne style. There was also a craze for all-things Japanese. Meanwhile, “Victorian things” were making their way around the world. Advertisement was a key to the process.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Richmond began his assessment with the statement that in the Victorian age it was “science” that had “truly made The Mark”, and a backbencher Member of Parliament set the seal on this line of approach, followed by other “experts”: “I should say,’ he summed it all up, “that the most remarkable achievement of this century is the development of all the means of communication between mankind, which I expect [in the 20th century] will be still further immensely developed and extended.”