Victorian Britain

Course Number 8490—36 lectures (30 minutes/lecture)

Taught by: Professor Patrick N. Allitt—Emory University

Part I

Lecture 1: The Victorian Paradox

Lecture 2: Victoria's Early Reign—1837-1861
Lecture 3: The Industrial Revolution—1750-1830
Lecture 4: Railways and Steamships
Lecture 5: Parliamentary Reform and Chartism
Lecture 6: The Upper- and Middle-Class Woman
Lecture 7: The Working-Class Woman
Lecture 8: The State Church and Evangelical Revival
Lecture 9: The Oxford Movement and Catholicism
Lecture 10: Work and Working-Class Life
Lecture 11: Poverty and the "Hungry Forties"
Lecture 12: Ireland, Famine, and Robert Peel

Part II

Lecture 13: Scotland and Wales

Lecture 14: Progress and Optimism
Lecture 15: China and the Opium War
Lecture 16: The Crimean War, 1854-1856
Lecture 17: The Indian Mutiny, 1857
Lecture 18: Victorian Britain and the American Civil War
Lecture 19: The British in Africa—1840-1880
Lecture 20: Victorian Literature—I
Lecture 21: Art and Music
Lecture 22: Science
Lecture 23: Medicine and Public Health
Lecture 24: Architecture

Part III

Lecture 25: Education

Lecture 26: Trade Unions and the Labour Party
Lecture 27: Crime and Punishment
Lecture 28: Gladstone and Disraeli—1865-1881
Lecture 29: Ireland and Home Rule
Lecture 30: Democracy and Its Discontents
Lecture 31: The British in Africa—1880-1901
Lecture 32: Later Victorian Literature
Lecture 33: Leisure
Lecture 34: Domestic Servants
Lecture 35: Victoria After Albert—1861-1901
Lecture 36: The Victorian Legacy

Studying the Eminent Victorians: Is Ignorance a Historian's Best Friend?

By Professor Patrick Allitt

"History in general, and Victorian history in particular, presents great opportunities and
great challenges It requires an imaginative engagement with people whose ideas are
different from our own, which is, I think, one of the things that makes it highly enjoyable.

"The Victorians are similar enough to us that we can readily share their hopes, dreams and
aspirations, but they're also different enough from us that sometimes they can seem highly
objectionable or just wrong. Yet we must be cautious about judging them too quickly, lest
we limit ourselves to a purely 'exterior' kind of understanding.

"Of course history ought not to be the mere recital of 'the facts.' In studying the Victorian
period, one problem we’ve got is the sheer abundance of materials; there’s so much
available that we can’t possibly use it all; we have to be selective.

"In the preface to his famous book Eminent Victorians (1918), Lytton Strachey argues that
'The history of the Victorian Age' will never be written: we know too much about it. For
ignorance is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies,
which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

"What to do then? Here is Strachey’s description of his own method: 'If he is wise, [a
historian] will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; . . .
he will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a
little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those
far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.'

"This is certainly what Strachey himself did. He didn’t attempt to be comprehensive. In fact,
he didn’t even attempt to be fair-minded. He was prejudiced and biased. He was anti-
Victorian, quite openly. Even so we certainly owe something to Strachey. We can enjoy his
attacks on Florence Nightingale, Cardinal Manning, and even Queen Victoria herself, but
without thinking that he has had the last word. And we certainly still depend on the 'little
bucket' that he talked about.

"With so much to cover in these brief lectures, I have been aware of how useful that
approach can be, and hope I have wielded my 'little bucket' tellingly and well. With so much
by and about the Victorians to read, see, and study, you can always go deeper. If that is
your intention, I hope these lectures will help get you off to a promising start in your
explorations of the Victorians and their world."
Meet the pioneering, paradoxical Britons of the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-
1901).

 Through peaceful and gradual change they built the world’s first industrial
democracy, despite living in a class-bound society whose powerful landed aristocracy
despised business.
 They gloried in a globe-spanning and relatively humanely run empire—even as it
distracted them from underlying economic weaknesses that presaged Britain’s 20th-
century decline.
 They were intensely sentimental yet were capable of ignoring an enormous amount
of extreme squalor and hardship in their midst.
 They used their imperial resources to suppress the slave trade, and abolished slavery
30 years earlier than the U.S. Sometimes zealous for moral and religiously inspired
reforms, they seemed at other times shockingly indifferent to such abuses as child
labor in coalmines and wars to force opium into Chinese markets.
 They were quick to see and exploit the value of new technologies including the steam
engine, cast-iron construction, and gas lighting—yet they lost their economic and
industrial leadership to Germany and America as the 19th century wore on.
 The Victorians not only created great art—especially when it came to literature, the
roll call of genius is very long—but they argued brilliantly and self-consciously about
its meaning and role in ways that give them another claim to originality.
 The Victorians’ achievements in theoretical science were enormous and lasting as
well, with Charles Darwin’s theory of biological evolution heading the list.
 The Victorians created the cityscape of modern Britain—still visible today despite
World War II bombs—often while consciously trying to re-create earlier styles.
Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin’s Gothic Houses of Parliament are the most
famous but hardly the only example of this characteristically Victorian blend of
originality with tradition. If you visit Britain today, says Professor Allitt, you can see
this sensibility at work in the very stones around you, so vast was Victorian influence
on British public and domestic architecture.
 They faced some of the most rapid and sweeping historical and technological shifts
that any human society up to that time had had to deal with—yet they avoided the
massive upheavals that tore at other European and Atlantic societies in their day.
 The Victorians even reformed cricket, turning it from a riotous diversion for hard
drinkers and gamblers into a byword for flannel-clad decency and goodhearted fair
play in a way that crossed class lines and brought together the best features of
democracy and aristocracy. The game, much like baseball, masterfully combines
individual excellence and collective effort. It remains popular today throughout much
of the former British Empire, a lasting gift of the eminent Victorians.

This course of lectures introduces you to the Victorian story with all its strengths and
foibles, and invites you to reflect on its lessons both positive and negative. The basic outline
of the path you’ll follow is chronological, moving from the unexpected ascension to the
throne of the teenaged Princess Victoria in 1837 to her death in 1901.

Along the way, Professor Allitt offers an array of thematic lectures in which he stops to
examine in depth various aspects of Victorian life.
You will learn about the lives of Victorian women of all classes; the situation facing working
people and the rise of trade unionism; Victorian achievements in art, literature,
architecture, and music; what Leonard Woolf called "the seriousness of games" and of
leisure-time activities as windows on Victorian life; the important role played by Christianity
(whether Anglican, Evangelical, Catholic, or Nonconformist) as a force for both principled
adherence to tradition and principled pursuit of change; the influence of science and the
debates over its impact that animated the Victorians; the character of education; the
questions raised by Britain’s rule over its Empire, and especially the difficult "Irish Question"
which for a time paralyzed Parliament; the problems of poverty and crime; the discoveries
of Victorian explorers in Africa; and more.

All in all, you will find it a remarkable tour of a remarkable age. And one of the highlights of
it, as Professor Allitt explains, is something that never happened.

The Dog That Did Not Bark

Arthur Conan-Doyle’s stories about Sherlock Holmes are among the best-loved literary
legacies from the Victorian age. In one of them, "Silver Blaze" (first published in London’s
Strand magazine in December 1892), a crucial piece of evidence is something that did not
happen—what Holmes calls "the curious incident" of the dog that did not bark.

Likewise, Victorian Britain stands out for its remarkable ability to have avoided the violent
mass upheavals that rocked nearly every other Western country during the 19th century. In
Britain there was nothing like the French Revolution, the revolutions of 1848, the Paris
Commune, the Italian and German wars of unification, or the American Civil War.
Understanding how the British and their institutions managed peacefully to accommodate
and manage the currents of change is one of the main learning goals that you will have an
opportunity to pursue by following Professor Allitt’s lectures.

And the change was vast. When Victoria was crowned, only about five percent of the adult
male population could vote, and had to do so publicly. By century’s end, after the great
Reform Bills of 1832, 1867, and 1884, universal manhood suffrage by secret ballot was the
rule; votes for women would follow within a few decades. And with the culmination of the
Industrial Revolution, Britain had gone decisively from being a mostly rural and agricultural
society to being a land of large, industrial cities.

Much of the credit, Professor Allitt argues, goes to able leaders. The first was Victoria
herself, who came to the throne at a time when the reputation of the monarchy was at a
low ebb, thanks to the foibles and derelictions of her predecessors. Her example of probity
and assurance helped make the monarchy a symbol of stability and national unity that
served Britain well. Therefore, the age deserves to be named after her for more than
accidental reasons.

Even more important was the succession of able prime ministers that culminated in William
Gladstone (1809-1898), the great Liberal Party leader, and Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881),
his Conservative antagonist. They dominated the political landscape of Victorian Britain and
played crucial roles in helping Britain absorb and adapt to the massive changes wrought by
the Industrial Revolution and the rise of democracy. Each in his own way was a remarkable
character, and their clashes and collaborations (whether overt or tacit) are justifiably the
stuff of legend. You will meet them both, and discover what makes each one great.

Did You Know? A List of Victorian Firsts

  It was the first society to abolish public executions, in 1868.
 It was the first world power to feature widespread and systematic opposition to
slavery. British efforts to suppress the slave trade and end slavery took strength
from both Enlightenment humanitarianism and evangelical Christian fervor, and were
aided by the power of the Royal Navy and the Empire.
 It built the world’s first railroads in the northern coalfields in the 1830s, the world’s
first steam-powered mills (for textile production using power looms), and the world’s
first iron-hulled ships. (The first was a barge, and onlookers who did not understand
the principles of buoyancy were shocked when it did not sink like a stone, as they
had expected!)
 It created the world’s first public building lit by electric lights (the Savoy Theatre in
London, custom-built for Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta productions in 1885).
 British doctors such as Sir Joseph Lister were early advocates of anesthesia and
sterile procedure, while Florence Nightingale essentially invented modern nursing
during the Crimean War.
 British engineers and architects were the first to build with cast iron and plate glass,
creating such magnificent structures as Scotland’s Firth of Forth railroad bridge (still
standing) and London’s Crystal Palace, designed by Joseph Paxton for the Great
Exhibition of 1851. Many people feared at the time that the glass-and-iron Palace
would collapse in the first high wind; in fact it stood for more than 80 years until fire
destroyed it in the 1930s!

A Chorus of Victorian Voices

One of the joys—and for professional historians, challenges—of studying Victorian history is
the sheer wealth of sources. It was a literate age, and one of the first societies in which
statistics were systematically collected and analyzed, and on which professional journalists
and government officials regularly reported in great detail.

Thus Professor Allitt is able to quote numerous Victorians both high and low, official and
unofficial, to great effect. Queen Victoria herself was a faithful diarist and kept up a huge
and lively correspondence. Among the highlights quoted in these lectures are the 21-year-
old queen’s excited and warmly amorous impressions of her husband-to-be Prince Albert,
her contrasting thoughts about Gladstone and Disraeli, and her touching and revealing letter
of condolence to Mary Todd Lincoln, written only a few years after Victoria herself had been
suddenly and tragically widowed.

Other choice quotations include, among many others:

 Disraeli’s tart opinion of Gladstone, as well as a letter of Disraeli’s to the queen that
stands as a minor masterpiece of artful flattery (no wonder she liked him best);
 Gladstone’s explanation of why he, as a devout Christian, favored the controversial
step of seating an atheist Member of Parliament;
 A clergyman’s hilarious parody of the turgid prose of "social Darwinist" Herbert
Spencer;
 Oscar Wilde’s arch comments on morality and its place—or lack of one—in art;
 Winston Churchill’s description of what he experienced during his participation in the
last full-dress cavalry charge in British military history, at the Battle of Omdurman in
1898;
 Leonard Woolf’s memorable evocation of the beauty and collective grace of
schoolboy cricket practice;
  What contemporary journalists and observers thought of famous Victorian landmarks
such as Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin’s Houses of Parliament and Joseph
Paxton’s Crystal Palace;
 Lewis Carroll’s satire, in Alice in Wonderland (1865), of what he found to be the
dryness of Victorian historical writing;
 Recollections of affairs by the unknown author of My Secret Life, an 11-volume
memoir of one middle-class man’s travels though the sexual underworld of Victorian
times;

 A Lancashire housemaid’s remembrance of what Christmas could be like for

servants;
 A reforming journalist’s heartrending account of hardship and deprivation among
poor children in London;
 An Evangelical reformer’s horrified account of the boisterous, alcohol-soaked
festivities surrounding traditional village holidays.

When Queen Victoria died in 1901, she left behind a nation indelibly marked by the Victorian
legacy, for good and for ill. You close the course with a glimpse at some of these lasting
effects as they mark British life even today.