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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781409070108
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Published to accompany the BBC television series
The Victorians first broadcast on BBC One in 2009.
Executive producer: Basil Comely
Series producer: Julian Birkett
Editing and additional research: Neil Hegarty
Consultant: Rosemary Barrow
Commissioning editor: Albert DePetrillo
Project editor: Christopher Tinker
Copy-editor: Steve Tribe
Design: O’Leary & Cooper
Picture researcher: Sarah Hopper
Production: David Brimble
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Cover Credits: Front: (top) George Joy, The Bayswater Omnibus, 1895 © Museum of London/The Bridgeman Art Library; (bottom, background) Robert Howlett, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-59) beside the ‘Great Eastern’, c. 1857 Private Collection/The Stapleton Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library; (bottom, foreground) detail from George Elgar Hicks, The General Post Office, One Minute to 6, 1860 © Museum of London/The Bridgeman Art Library. Back: Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler), The Battle of Balaclava in 1854, 1876 © Manchester Art Gallery/The Bridgeman Art Library
First published in 2009 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
A Random House Group Company.
This edition published in 2010.
Copyright © Jeremy Paxman 2009
Jeremy Paxman has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 846 07744 9
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Introduction
ONE
THE MOB IN THE PICTURE GALLERY
TWO
THY LONG DAY’S WORK
THREE
THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE
FOUR
A WORLD OF WEALTH AND POWEr
FIVE
A LAND OF DREAMS
Afterword
Further reading
Notes
Picture Section
Index
Acknowledgements
Picture credits
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
IN MY CHILDHOOD it was generally agreed that the adjective ‘Victorian’ meant stuffy, buttoned-up, gloomy, cold, mawkish, prudish and hypocritical. Victorians wore dark, uncomfortable clothes and had dark, uncomfortable values. They inhabited a world of smugness and draughty corridors. They shrouded the legs of pianos in case the turn of a piece of wood might trigger lascivious thoughts. If you were describing where someone lived (and the house where I spent many of my early years fits the bill) you might, without thinking about it very much, add the extra adjective: ‘He lives in that grim Victorian house down the road.’ No one disputed your right to make such a value judgement. To our eyes, the Victorian house does look grim, gothic and forbidding, designed less to welcome or comfort than to impress.
The curious thing about this prejudice was that a dislike of the taste of the Victorians ran alongside the painful recognition that the country they had created had enjoyed a much better standing in the world than the one in which the inhabitants of Cold War Britain spent their lives. We were like children railing against unfairness, screaming ‘you’ll be sorry’; it strikes me now that so much of this dislike was the consequence of this fatuous sense of perceived injustice. The Victorians had made our world, but we didn’t feel much at home in it. We weren’t quite sure what the new world would require (we’re no more certain now) but we were quite confident that, whatever it was, it wouldn’t involve the moral certainties and gothic curlicues of the Victorians.
It has been the odd destiny of the Victorians to have created modern Britain, only for modern Britain to sneer and spit at them. In reality, of course, the reputation of the age rises and falls not on its own intrinsic merits but on the tastes and prejudices of the point from which it is viewed. Our attitudes have yet to escape the long shadow cast by the superiority of the Bloomsbury set. As the cartoonist and nineteenth-century enthusiast Osbert Lancaster once observed of the Victorians, ‘in the twenties they were deemed comic because they were good husbands, in the thirties they were thought shocking because they were bad employers.’ By the 1960s, they were just an irrelevance.
And so an astonishing world began to vanish. Entire streets of terraced houses were bulldozed. Municipal buildings, public bath-houses and schools were laid to waste. The General Post Office on St Martin’s Le Grand, with its thousand radiant gas lamps, was demolished as early as 1912. The London Coal Exchange had a date with the wrecker’s ball in the 1960s, swept away to allow for road-widening work in the City of London. With its central rotunda and towering dome, its 40,000-piece wooden floor inlaid in the shape of a mariner’s compass, its tiers of balconies, dealers’ offices, its wind dial to determine when the next shipment of coal might arrive, this, surely, was a building that might have belonged in Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley. It was flattened. The same fate befell the grandest monument of the railway age, the magnificent classical-revival arch which greeted travellers at Euston station. The contractor charged with levelling the thing offered to find an alternative site for the arch, but, no, the government decreed it must be destroyed. The remorseful contractor commissioned a silver model of the arch and presented it to the president of the Victorian Society, who remarked that the gesture ‘made him feel as if some man had murdered his wife and then presented him with her bust’.1 The rubble of the arch, meanwhile, was tipped summarily into the bed of the River Lea. In this sort of atmosphere, the best that a conservationist might hope for was mere indifference, of the sort that befell the Midland Hotel, the spectacular building designed by George Gilbert Scott at St Pancras, with its clock tower, turrets, gables and pinnacles: what had once been the grandest hotel in the empire subsided over the decades under moss, decay and pigeon shit.
We flatter ourselves that we are less blinded by aesthetic prejudice today. The miracles of Victorian engineering – the Clifton and Forth Bridges, the Ribblehead Viaduct that carries the Settle to Carlisle railway line across the uplands of northern England, and many others like them – are now loved and appreciated; and those severe nineteenth-century houses appear today, curiously, a little less severe when advertised on glossy property websites. Victorian storytelling is, rightly, recognised as second-to-none, and the larger-than-life characters invented by Dickens, Gaskell, Trollope, Thackeray and the Brontë sisters provide perfect fodder for a succession of screen costume dramas. But the visual art of the Victorians has yet to be rescued from indifference. J.M.W. Turner may have painted the most popular picture in Britain (The Fighting Temeraire, Tugged to Her Last Berth to be Broken Up, 1838 according to a 2005 poll by the National Gallery and BBC Radio 4), but between him and the Impressionists there is little to trouble the senses apart from the Pre-Raphaelites, and they are a decidedly acquired taste. In 1963, for example, you might have bought Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Flaming June for £1,000. The art dealer Jeremy Maas – one of the very few enthusiasts for the period – did so; he was unable to find a single British gallery to take it on and eventually sold the painting to a private collector in Puerto Rico. Greater prosperity, a bigger, worldwide market and a general inflation of art prices means that when a Victorian painting comes on the market today the prices are better. But – the Pre-Raphaelites apart – many pictures of this era are still by no means highly sought-after.
It isn’t difficult to see why they should have become so disregarded. Britain’s second most popular painting, The Hay Wain by John Constable (not a Victorian: he died in 1837, the year that she took the throne), appeals to a sense of rural stability that feels absent from our frantic, deracinated present. The Hay Wain and similar paintings do not merely adorn the tops of old-fashioned chocolate boxes – they are themselves a kind of comfort food. Many of the pictures of the Victorians, in contrast, seem like a dose of bitter medicine. The painters are clearly on the lecture circuit: they are trying To Tell Us Something, and there is an uncomfortable sense that they expect us to damn well sit up and pay attention. We’re much less comfortable being instructed to do that than being invited to wallow comfortably in some fictional bucolic bliss.
So, I know we are not supposed to like many of these paintings very much. In fact, F.W. Fairholt’s Dictionary of Terms in Art of 1854 tells us that a good deal of Victorian art was not much more highly regarded at the time – in certain circles at any rate. Anecdotal paintings, he notes disapprovingly, were ‘very reprehensible, although the most popular among the vulgar-minded patrons of Art’. Today, from a greater distance, the military ones appear to glorify battles we know nothing of, the moral tales seem to be trying to indoctrinate values we discarded long ago, and too many of the remainder appear cloyingly sentimental. And we might as well be frank and acknowledge that lots of them are simply not very good.
But there is another way of looking at these pictures. They tell us stories. As someone who has spent all his working life in the business of journalism, I am fascinated by them for that reason. In the days before the widespread use of photography, some of them were no more than attempts to create a visual record of what happened in an era of unprecedented change. After all, Britain may not have experienced the political revolutions which swept through much of continental Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, but the long period of Victoria’s reign witnessed revolutions in virtually every other field; nothing was the same at the end of this era as at its beginning. Where people lived, how they worked, what they did with their leisure time, even what they believed were all transformed, often out of all recognition. The artists of the period – people like William Frith, Elizabeth Butler, Ford Madox Brown and Edwin Landseer – helped the Victorians adjust to new realities, taught them to celebrate the places where they were now living, provided moral guidance and connected the whirling, noisy present to a suddenly distant ancestral past.
Often, the stage was set for formal presentations of Victorian life: a posed family scene, commissioned to show off one’s wife and children, a comfortable drawing room complete with framed canvases and rosewood furniture, a display of material success for the gazing world. Such scenes are two-a-penny in Victorian painting: William Mulready’s An Interior Including a Portrait of John Sheepshanks at His Residence in Old Bond Street (1832), painted just before Victoria came to the throne, is perfectly representative of the genre. At other times, such artists as Richard Dadd – who wound up in Broadmoor – delved into their imaginations in order to explore other currents at work in Victorian Britain. Such painters as Henry Alexander Bowler reflected the doubts and fears that modernity was increasingly bringing in its wake; others, like Edward Burne-Jones, responded to these tremendous changes by looking back to a distant and ostensibly secure mythical past.
Not all of this art makes for comfortable viewing – for Victorian paintings do more than simply provide illustrations of the period, snapshots before such things were widely available. In the subjects the artists chose and the messages their patrons wanted to see communicated, they tell us about the condition of Victorian society. And, patrons or artists – Luke Fildes, for example, who would go on to become quite wealthy through his painting – with finely developed moral and political senses can show us how life was, not merely for the statesmen, mill-owners, divines and philosophers, but also for ordinary people and, frequently, for those at the bottom of the heap.
These subjects and concerns, however, were in the minority, for the main focus of the contemporary artist was the world of bourgeois Britain. In this sense, the art of the period was a faithful reflection of Victorian Britain itself, for this was the era in which the middle class rose into full cultural and economic dominance. The paintings echo the concerns of this class, its pleasures, its preoccupations, its loves, hatreds and fears. Some Victorian artists would become hugely prosperous by feeding the market: large fortunes were being accumulated by industrialists and traders, large houses were being built to accommodate them – and large canvases were needed to decorate their new walls. The demand was there: fashionable painters certainly had no need to shiver in a garret, unless they especially wanted to do so. Instead, they could watch their trade build up, and in the fullness of time acquire large houses of their own. By the end of the century, some paintings were being sold for vast sums of money; even the most unlikely subjects could command high prices. So much so that, in 1881, The Monarch of the Meadows, a painting of cattle by T.S. (‘Cow’) Cooper was stolen from the London home of the wealthy glove manufacturer who had commissioned it, and ransomed. When Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema was commissioned by a wealthy engineering contractor to paint The Roses of Heliogabalus, showing the Roman emperor Elagabalus attempting to suffocate his guests by showering them in petals, the artist could afford to have fresh roses sent every week from the south of France during the four months it took him to paint the canvas.
Alma-Tademafn1 (the unusual name was Dutch in origin – in art, as in everything else, Victorian Britain was a magnet for economic migrants) was one of many painters who liked to display their success conspicuously. Before Victoria’s reign, metropolitan artists had tended to rub along among the artisans of Soho and Tottenham Court Road. As the vast new middle-class market gave them the opportunity to become middle class themselves, so they began to settle in smarter and more comfortable areas of London: Kensington, Holland Park and St John’s Wood. Alma-Tadema had a house in St John’s Wood elaborately decorated in the style of a Pompeian villa, dripping with opulence. These artists’ houses were intended to serve as both studio and home. But they were also, frankly, for showing off. Frederic Leighton’s house in Holland Park, complete with its astonishing Arab Hall, is perhaps the grandest of the residences which survive, but many others clustered nearby. Other artists in the area included George Frederic Watts, the son of a poor piano-maker; William Holman Hunt, whose father had been a warehouseman; the sculptor Hamo Thornycroft; the illustrator Marcus Stone; and now largely forgotten figures such as the professor of painting at the Royal Academy Val Prinsep and Scottish artist Colin Hunter.
As the public devoured their paintings, so they lapped up anything they could learn about the artists who produced them – and many of the successful nineteenth-century painters were happy to oblige, revelling in their fame. They opened their studios to the public, so their customers might gawk at the scene of a great man’s work. For those who could not get to the artist’s house, there were articles in magazines, and books with titles like Artists at Home (1884). Many of these artists were delighted to pose for photographs, the resulting festival of facial hair showing them in a variety of attitudes, most characteristically ‘at work’ in their studios, perhaps in smoking jacket, palette in hand, perhaps sat in contemplative pose merely thinking Great Thoughts. A few, like the Pre-Raphaelite Henry Holiday, were willing to dress up (he is seen wearing medieval armour and dressed as a bishop). Pictures of others seem merely to be designed to demonstrate the well-fed affluence of men who knew their place in the world. Some calculatedly cultivated an image of slightly eccentric creativity in their photos, notable among them being G.F. Watts, whose well-trimmed beard and skullcap became instantly recognisable to large numbers.
Nowadays, of course, few of these figures are widely known – and this is in itself a reflection of the fact that so many of their paintings are largely unappreciated. The Victorians is an attempt to rediscover the lives of these artists, the work they created, and the society they represented in all its complexity and colour. The pictures herein are the core of the national art collection, commissioned and executed at the very time that city fathers across the land were beginning to build art galleries to show that the wealth of Britain was about more than dark satanic mills. If you spare the time to stop and examine them, there is no better way of coming to understand what life was like at the time when, with the aid of steam power and armed with the Bible, the British traversed the globe.
fn1 Alma-Tadema was in fact christened Lourens Tadema: the canny incorporation of Alma into his surname moved him to the front of art catalogues.
ONE
THE MOB IN THE PICTURE GALLERY