A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain

by Michael Paterson

  Following her husband’s death, her greatest need had been for a strong male influence, and she had found it, from 1864, in a most unlikely place. John Brown had been one of Albert’s ghillies at Balmoral. A blunt-spoken and uncouth Highlander somewhat given to drink (the Queen’s toleration of this excess in others was further evidence that she was an atypical ‘Victorian’), he was the antithesis of a polished courtier. She had always cherished loyal servants, and Brown was solicitous and efficient. He spoke to her without a hint of deference, lecturing her on her dress and behaviour, and – surrounded as she usually was by flattery – she responded to this treatment. He induced her to take up riding again, and his rough sense of humour made her laugh. He quickly became her confidant, and she created for him the title ‘the Queen’s Highland Servant’. Not the least of his services would be saving the Queen from an attempted assassination. His privileges, and his manner, irritated Victoria’s family and officials, none of whom could criticize him in front of her. He also bemused the public, for he accompanied her everywhere, becoming so much a part of her life that she was nicknamed ‘Mrs Brown’. There were rumours that they were secretly married, though such a thing would have been unthinkable to the Queen.

  The void in her life was filled by busying herself with her family. Her eldest daughter, Vicky, had married Prince Frederick of Prussia in 1858. The Queen had greatly regretted the loss of this personable and intelligent young woman, who was seen as the ablest of her children, and compensated for it with an exhaustive correspondence that often involved writing to her three or four times a day. As her other children began to marry and the number of her grandchildren increased (there were to be thirty altogether) she found herself at the head of an extensive network of dynastic connections that ultimately embraced not only German states but Spain, Sweden, Greece, Russia and Romania. This brought no political power, merely a series of ties of blood and sentiment, but it greatly enhanced Victoria’s status as ‘Grandmother of Europe’.

  ‘The Kindest of Mistresses’

  She developed another valuable friendship. No Prime Minister since Melbourne had endeared himself to Victoria, and one of them – Palmerston – she had clearly hated. Benjamin Disraeli, who briefly became premier in 1868, was a florid and effusive personality, more theatrical than political. His excessive flattery towards the Queen, who described him as ‘full of poetry, romance and chivalry’, was in stark contrast to Brown’s manner, but she again responded with intense loyalty. During his second term in office (1874–80), he successfully coaxed her further into the light of day. Their remarkable rapport owed much to the manner in which he ostentatiously sought her advice and valued her opinions, and to the fact that he treated her as a woman and not as an institution. She admired his wit, his considerate courtesy and his political opinions, for her conservative outlook and that of the Tory party were now in harmony.

  Disraeli was keen to promote the idea of Empire, a subject in which the Queen had previously shown comparatively little interest, but he successfully made her an imperial figurehead – a role that was to become increasingly important in the decades ahead – by persuading Parliament to grant her the style Empress of India. This title, which she adopted as of 1 January 1877, had been considered absurdly pompous and foreign-sounding, both unsuited to and unnecessary for a British monarch. Victoria, however, was delighted, not least because her eldest daughter, married to the Prussian Crown Prince, was expected to become German Empress and would therefore have taken precedence over her. She in turn bestowed a title on Disraeli, creating him Earl of Beaconsfield, and paid him the unprecedented honour of calling upon him at his home. She was deeply grieved by his death in 1880. On his death-bed he was asked if he would welcome a visit from the Queen, but he declined. ‘She would only want me to convey some message to Albert,’ he said.

  With Disraeli’s rival, William Gladstone, the Queen’s relations were somewhat chilly. She felt little empathy with the austere and intellectual Liberal leader, who spoke to her – she famously observed – as if he were addressing a public meeting. She was horrified by his proposals for Irish Home Rule, regarded his party as taking the country to the dogs, openly sided with his opponents and did whatever came within her power to obstruct its policies. The only thing they had in common was an extreme aversion to women’s emancipation, which Victoria referred to as ‘this mad folly’. When in 1885 General Gordon died at Khartoum because Gladstone’s government had dithered and delayed too long before sending a relief expedition, she was incandescent with anger and administered a blistering rebuke: ‘To think all this might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too frightful.’19

  This notwithstanding, the gulf between them – another of the clichés of Victoria’s reign – should not be exaggerated. The Queen was pleasanter in person than her letters to him suggest. Gladstone genuinely regretted that he could not befriend her and, though he sympathized with critics of her reclusive lifestyle and the cost of the Civil List, he refused to attack her in the Commons. When republicanism briefly flourished in 1871, he could – like his successor Blair in 1997 – have destroyed the monarchy had he not chosen to defend it, gaining some unpopularity in his party as a result.

  Though she met, in the course of her life, all sorts and conditions of people from emperors to the Highland tenants at Balmoral, Victoria was never able to rid herself of a painful shyness. She was not gifted at small talk and had difficulty initiating conversations. As a result, some who came in contact with her considered her aloof. As she grew older, she in any case became increasingly averse to new faces – indeed, to any change in her surroundings – and preferred the company of women, unless they were family members or old family friends. When with those who were familiar, she had a surprisingly adroit sense of humour, and loved to be entertained by good conversation. She was even known to laugh at risqué stories, though she preferred that these should not be told in the company of impressionable young court ladies. Her most famous utterance – ‘we are not amused’ – was, unlike many supposed sayings of famous people, entirely authentic, and was doubtless deployed on more than one occasion.

  Yet its implication that she was a priggish and humourless matron is entirely inaccurate, and her journals bear witness that, on many occasions, she was ‘Very Much Amused’ or even ‘Very Much Amused Indeed’. It was known, as one courtier put it, that ‘H.M. don’t like being bored’, and that she expected wit and diversion from those around her. Just as she did not abandon her sense of humour when widowed, so she did not give up other pleasures. As time passed, there were once again dances and concerts and theatrical performances at Windsor and Balmoral. She enjoyed circuses, and saw Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show when it toured England. Victoria possessed a very fine singing voice (she could boast: ‘I was taught to sing by Mendelssohn’) and sometimes surprised those around her by rendering airs from Gilbert and Sullivan. During her annual visits to the south of France she attended the ‘Battle of Flowers’ in Grasse, and entered into the spirit of the event with noticeable enthusiasm. The image of this elderly sovereign pelting the revellers with blooms does not, of course, tally with any notion of a perpetually grieving widow. As one of her companions recalled: ‘The Queen demanded more and more flowers, until at last we had to resort to the trick of having them picked up and brought back from the street below to be flung down again.’20

  The austere image of Victoria hid a lighter side, as well as an intellectual curiosity. She embraced the scientific developments of the age. She had earlier sat for photographs, allowed chloroform to be administered and made extensive use of the telegraph. Now she had electric lighting installed at Osborne, became a habitual user of the telephone, made a gramophone recording (it was sent to the Emperor of Ethiopia, who stood to attention while listening to her message) and took an interest in the early cinema as both subject and spectator. She viewed a film of the Lord Mayor’s Show in 1896, remarking that she found it ‘very tiring for the eyes,
but worth it to have seen such a marvel’.21

  Gladstone’s successor, the patrician Tory Lord Salisbury, observed that if he knew what the Queen thought about an issue, he knew what the middle classes would think. This implies a narrowness of outlook of which she was certainly guilty, yet the painter Landseer was to describe her as having the finest intellect of any woman in Europe, and another observer, Charles Greville, went even further by saying that she had the most interesting mind and character in the world. In spite of this, she was distinctly uncomfortable in the company of intellectuals for, having had a limited education, she felt overawed by the very people – scientists, thinkers, academics – whose company Albert had enjoyed. Her tastes and abilities were more practical. Studying, and advising on, national and international issues was something she did with unflagging determination to the end of her life.

  A modern biographer, Giles St Aubyn, has written that: ‘Never before had an English sovereign proved so assiduous a correspondent, or so dedicated a bureaucrat. During the course of her reign she wrote, on average, two and a half thousand words a day.’ He cites as example the fact that during the Tel-el-Kebir crisis in 1882 she wrote to the Secretary of War seventeen times in a twenty-four-hour period.22 Laurence Housman summed up the Queen as having: ‘a wonderful, contradictious character – not highly intellectual, but highly intelligent, narrow in its opinions and prejudices, yet extraordinarily shrewd and sensible in its use of a long experience and a retentive memory, obstinate and self-willed, but to the guiding star of her life devoted, and wholly adoring.’23

  Mother of the Nation

  Throughout the three decades between the nadir of her fortunes in 1871 and her death, Victoria’s popularity increased. In the sixties she had been consumed with self-pity at her loss, had expected soon to die and had threatened to abdicate. Now her gifts of tireless energy and sense of duty were coming back into play. Her long years of service had, of course, caused her to be seen as a national treasure, and this feeling became especially acute when, on 23 September 1896, she overtook George III as the longest-reigning monarch in British history. Her subjects realized how extraordinary it was that, through all the upheavals of the past decades, this same small woman had overseen the fortunes of the nation and the Empire. Though memory of her less admirable forebears had faded, the example of her eldest son, who was involved in recurrent scandals (it was widely said that ‘God will not permit such an evil man to become King’), gave rise to a feeling that Britain was fortunate to have a moderate and moral ruler, whose reign would be looked back upon with affection when less worthy sovereigns had taken her place.

  As the ebullient, noisy patriotism known as ‘new imperialism’ or ‘jingoism’ became, increasingly, the dominant national mood in the 1890s, the Queen was swept along on the tide of popular feeling, and she came largely to share these sentiments. In her latter years she became almost obsessively interested in things Indian. She was no longer merely a symbol of Britain but of a vast, wealthy and powerful Empire, the existence of which was not simply taken for granted but celebrated as parallel with the glories of Ancient Rome. Though she had, since the days of Disraeli’s premiership, come increasingly to embrace the outlook of imperialism, she took a view of her subject peoples that was not widely shared at the time and which would fit well with current political correctness. She was to describe ‘Her very strong feeling (and she has few stronger) that the natives and coloured races should be treated with every kindness and affection, as brothers, not – as, alas! Englishmen too often do – as totally different beings to ourselves, fit only to be crushed and shot down!’24 Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 was a major event, but by the time her Diamond Jubilee was marked ten years later, imperial pride had been brought to fever pitch and imperial pomp – in the form of contingents of colonial troops and of visiting Indian princelings – made this single day, 22 June 1897, a celebration of everything that Britain had achieved in the nineteenth century.

  The sun was to set with remarkable swiftness on this splendour. Within two years Britain was involved in an expensive and humiliating war in South Africa. It would last until 1902, and Victoria would therefore not live to see the end of it. Despite dimming eyesight and rapidly failing health – she found it necessary to be pushed in what she called a ‘rolling chair’ – she rediscovered some aspects of the role she had adopted in the Crimean conflict, that of war leader. As then, she made herself responsible for aspects of her soldiers’ welfare, knitting garments (‘The Queen,’ wrote one observer, ‘turns out khaki comforters as if her life depended on it),25 and had 100,000 tins of chocolate despatched to the seat of war. She pored over casualty lists and – unusually for that era – felt genuine concern for the black South Africans caught up in the conflict. She visited military hospitals – as she had done almost half a century earlier – and said: ‘I like to think I am doing something for my soldiers, although it is so little.’26 Her statement to Arthur Balfour, after the British defeats of ‘Black Week’ in December 1899, that ‘Please understand that there is no one depressed in this house. We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist’27 was worthy of Winston Churchill. Her last official action, a few days before her death, was to receive Lord Roberts, who commanded her forces in South Africa, for a private visit at Osborne.

  Victoria died there on 22 January 1901, aged eighty-one. Her body had simply worn out. She suffered from rheumatism and was almost blind, but like her husband forty years earlier her condition was made worse by stress and depression. The war, with its reverses and blunders and disappointments, grieved her, as did the loss of so many young men. Her second son, Prince Alfred, also died during 1900 and her eldest daughter, Vicky, whose life in Germany had been one of frustration and misery, was terminally ill with cancer. The Queen had a stroke, possibly two, and sank gradually into unconsciousness while members of her family – including Kaiser Wilhelm, who hurried from Berlin to be at her bedside – were summoned. Her subjects gathered outside telegraph offices and at strategic places, such as London’s Mansion House, for the news that the Victorian era had ended. It came just after half-past six in the evening.

  There was, of course, a widespread sense that an era was over. Typical of the outpourings was this one in the Daily Telegraph lamenting that:

  The golden reign has closed. The supreme woman of the world, best of the good, is gone. The Victorian age is over. Never, never was loss like this, so inward and profound that only the slow years can reveal its true reality. The Queen is dead.28

  Laurence Housman was a writer of a later generation, who produced in 1934 a dramatization of her life, Victoria Regina. Though he was often guilty of artistic licence, his observations on the Queen were valid. He wrote:

  By no act of her own, but merely by the course of events, the virtue of age, and the glamour of a long reign with the splendid finish of a double jubilee, she became the tutelary deity of the whole nation, and died in an odour of sanctity unapproached by any previous British monarch since the Norman conquest.29

  He added:

  Queen Victoria, in her capacity as reigning sovereign, lived too long. Yet though she outstayed posterity’s welcome from a political point of view, from the human she remains extraordinarily interesting and attractive.

  2

  THE MASSES

  The Court of King Cholera

  The majority of Queen Victoria’s subjects were poor. Though her realm saw a vast increase in wealth during the course of her reign, with the already-comfortable becoming better off and social mobility greater than it had ever been – the middle class quintupled in size – this still left many millions who were impoverished, barely able to earn a living or destitute.

  The problem of mass poverty was exacerbated by the steady increase in numbers of people (the population of London, for instance, increased fourfold between 1800 and 1900; Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Birmingham all doubled in size during the century’s first decades) and the strain this
put on resources. The supply of housing could not keep up with the demand, and led to intense overcrowding in the cities, which in turn brought higher mortality from disease. Funding from charities and from local authorities had to be stretched further. The workhouses that provided relief for the homeless and workless might be overwhelmed if there were a succession of bad harvests or some equivalent disaster. The sheer scale of the task faced by those who wished to help the poor was unprecedented in history, and there was no single body – governmental, religious or social – whose responsibility it was to address these issues.

  Most town-dwellers of the labouring class lived in lodging-houses, crammed together in rooms without privacy, or in rooms or cellars of larger houses, often built around a court, in which whole families – together with their own lodgers – might occupy a single room. One such place was described by a Dr Lethaby, the compiler of a report on living conditions for the Commissioner of Sewers in London. He spoke of:

  The too frequent occurrence of necessitous overcrowding, where the husband, the wife, and young family of four or five children are cramped into a miserably small and ill-conditioned room . . . there are numerous instances where adults of both sexes, belonging to different families, are lodged in the same room, regardless of all the common decencies of life, and where from three to five adults, men and women, besides a train or two of children, are accustomed to herd together like brute beasts or savages. I have seen grown persons of both sexes sleeping in common with their parents, brothers and sisters, and cousins, and even the casual acquaintance of a day’s tramp, occupying the same bed of filthy rags or straw; a woman suffering in travail, in the midst of males and females of different families; where birth and death go hand in hand; where the child but newly born, the patient cast down with fever, and the corpse waiting for interment, have no separation from each other, or from the rest of the inmates.