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What did it really mean to be Victorian?
Living through a time of such economic, cultural and technological change was exciting, but it also came with many challenges, as Jamie Camplin explores in his most recent book Being Victorian.
In this episode, Isabel King spoke to Jamie about this great era of innovation and how it continues to affect us today.
So Jamie, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.
We're here to talk about your book, Being Victorian.
Your book covers the entire Victorian period, but it focuses a lot on the decades following 1850.
What made this a watershed moment within the era?
Well, first of all, delighted to be with you.
I'd like to start off with a very simple point.
If we want to get into the heads of people who were living in 1850, it's very important to focus on a simple thing.
They had their present and they had some knowledge of their past.
What they didn't know anything about was the future, though they could make decisions which would affect that future, but they didn't know anything about it.
So when we're trying to evaluate what changed in Victorian times, And even more if we want to consider whether that was a change for the better or not, we need to keep coming back to that simple constraint.
They were living in the present and they had some knowledge of the past.
And that was their reference point.
Now, as it happens, as the 1850s began, they were feeling rather happy and optimistic.
And the reasons for that were really twofold.
I break them down into economic and what I would call cultural reasons.
By then we'd had about 80 years of the industrial revolution.
So we were used to factory production at scale because of the invention of steam transport and steam machines.
We had the railway bringing raw materials to the factory very quickly and the manufactured goods then off to the consumers also very quickly.
They could also go to port very quickly.
Britain had a globally dominant merchant marine as well as a Royal Navy, and it was a natural process therefore, that it would want to send those manufactured goods in ships and boats that it had manufactured itself off around the world.
And in that process, it became the global trading nation.
And, as John Maynard Keynes later said, Britain conducted the international orchestra.
The stock market flourished, and it flourished on the basis of trust and integrity.
And interestingly, a few years ago, when a sentiment analysis algorithm did a vast analysis of Victorian data, it came to the conclusion that in the last 200 years people were happiest at about the time of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1887.
However, there was a very odd thing about this fast-changing society, and that was that it was politically stable.
Hippolyte Taine, who came to study the country in its institutions twice, in 1858 and again in 1871, described French aristocrats as ornamental parasites.
The French aristocrats, at least, that avoided the guillotine.
That wasn't the case with the British aristocrats.
In a sense, they joined in their own demise, or rather they led their own demise because they were still very politically influential.
As to the working classes, the middle classes and the upper classes, were frightened that there might be a revolt.
But in 1848, when the Chartists engaged in a demonstration on Kennington Common, which was to be preceded by a march on Parliament, when the Chief of Police asked the leader of the Chartists, the Fergus O'Connor, to disperse.
He doffed his cap and so they dispersed.
Whereas right across Europe, 1848 was accompanied by violence and regime change.
So you have this very curious it may be unique a situation in which you have fast change, but you have a very stable society.
And you say that they didn't know of the future, they were focusing on the present.
And something you point out in your book is that the Victorians saw the past as slow and the present as fast.
Why do you think they viewed the past as slow?
And do you think we still have this outlook today?
Now, speed was literally visible.
The trains went fast, the steamships went fast.
And now we also had the development of a telegraph network.
That proved very difficult trying to cross the Atlantic, which was quite an engineering feat, so that when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on the 14th of April 1865, it took until the 27th of April the news of that assassination to reach the US legation in London.
That was still much faster than it would have been in the past, because it was brought by steamship rather than by sailing ship.
These things affected warfare.
The Crimean War was not notably a distinguished war from a military point of view by the British.
But what the British did was build a railway to the front.
And even more adventurously, they took a submarine cable from Bulgaria to the front and then linked it up with telegraphs all around Europe.
That was much faster. than anything that's gone before.
And I think it was all summed up rather perfectly by the Times in 1859.
And it wrote an article saying isn't it interesting that when you ask an old person whether they want to go back to their good old days, when they were growing up, they say no, it's improved since then.
Just half a century before, misery and poverty were thought to be just universals, there forever.
Now people were questioning that and beginning to change it.
It still isn't, of course, the speed of today.
We move very, very, very fast.
But it was a dramatic contrast with how it had been just 50 years earlier.
And a massive part of all of these changes was the Victorian idea of progress.
How would you define progress in the Victorian context?
And what's the difference between progress and progress with a capital P?
Well, first of all, the Victorians used a capital P for it.
I've read so many magazines newspapers, books and they're absolutely peppered with the word progress with a capital P.
It's very often accompanied by the word improvement with a capital I, because there were so many improvement schemes to make things better.
I don't think progress means one thing.
It certainly meant economic progress, visible economic progress.
I mean, for example, the past had been very dark.
Candlelight was very dark.
Once you had gaslight and then even more with electricity, suddenly everything became light.
But all these signs of sewerage works being built, Just pavements in cities, the railroads, in the landscape.
A complete transformation of society.
However, there was a second area of progress, and that was towards toleration and free speech.
John Stuart Mill said that it's only by the exchange of adverse reactions opinions, that we can hope to arrive at some semblance of the truth.
And it was a particular kind of tolerant debate.
There was a third aspect of the definition of progress, and that was morality.
And that was the sort of unresolved part of progress, because there was a fierce battle in Victorian times between materialism and morality, and neither side quite one.
That reflects another strange characteristic of Victorian society, which was, I think, perfectly summed up by Herbert Asquith, who came to adulthood in Victorian times but was prime minister shortly after Victoria died for eight years.
And he said revolt was not a Victorian characteristic, but nor was complacency.
They weren't allowed to wax fat, he said, or bask in the sunshine of their prosperity and content, without reproof, exhortation and denunciation.
That's very odd.
You have this deeply optimistic society that's also self-questioning.
So that's an interesting kind of progress.
Something that is very heavily linked to morality was the religious belief of the Victorians.
And they made great strides in science, but this science did not replace religious belief.
Why do you think that there's an assumption that progress meant secularisation?
And how did the Victorians match up scientific advancement with religious belief?
Well, it looked as if science, scientific discovery was going to be a real threat to religion.
I mean, geology alone effectively destroyed religion.
Genesis as a literal truth.
So there was a good deal of panic about that.
I don't actually think there was a huge amount of secularization.
It's more a question of a tolerant society developing.
For the first time, the possibility of not believing was allowed.
But meantime, over time, the churches did adapt to the new scientific knowledge and kept at least a proportion of their adherents.
Many scientists actually were agnostics and atheists.
And TH Huxley, for example, argued that science could be a new basis for morality and we could replace religion.
But what increased the anxiety was that scientists sort of became heroes, early celebrities.
They seemed to be able to work magic and change things.
And people also wanted to understand what that meant and how it came about.
But they became sort of heroes and they were helped in that by being extremely good scientists, communicators.
William Wheel, who was the master of Trinity College, Cambridge for many years, was actually an Anglican priest and a theologian.
But he wrote a giant history of the inductive sciences in many volumes in the 1830s.
That's to say, chemistry, astronomy and mechanics.
He actually was one of the people who encouraged Darwin to go off on the Beagle, despite his theological background.
And Faraday, the inventor of electricity.
He actually studied oratory in order to better become a communicator.
I wouldn't imagine that perhaps with today's scientists.
And T.H.
Huxley, again, was passionate about explaining to working men and to everybody science.
Scientific education.
So the scientists were terrific communicators.
Many of them were losing their faith.
And that seemed like a threat, but I don't think it really was.
Actually, there was an improvement because it became a more tolerant society which you could believe if you wanted to and you didn't have to if you didn't.
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Now somewhere that scientists and inventors alike could share these kind of ideas was at the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Was this simply a celebration of Victorian progress, or was there a deeper meaning behind exhibiting these new discoveries to the wider public?
Well, it certainly was a celebration.
It proclaimed loudly, we are top dogs.
I mean, there were many manufactured goods from other countries, but the British made very sure they were the dominant ones, which also reflected the reality.
But I think there was a symbolic meaning to it all, which was essentially the birth of consumerism.
It wasn't anything like 21st century consumerism, because they didn't have anything like the range of products that we have today.
And also, it remained true that thrift was a certain Victorian virtue.
But it was completely different from anything that had happened before, And it led on to modern shopping and modern advertising.
City streets became full of images for the first time.
And it's not just consumerism.
I think this at least obliquely connects with just the beginnings of leisure.
You get half-day working on Saturday for some workers from the 1850s.
You get the bank holiday in 1871.
You get railway trips to the seaside for the first time.
If you think of Blackpool in 1800, it's just a handful of people and it was only kept going at all by having a cart come from Preston once or twice a week with basic supplies.
Now you could go off on the railway to the seaside.
The lawnmower had been invented, so that made possible modern sport.
The Football League was invented under the Victorians.
So other things I think followed from this great, slightly over-the-top display of Britain's industrial might.
Did a lot of working class people attend the Great Exhibition?
They did because there were committees all over the country to make sure that happened.
Sometimes there was a modest subscription.
Sometimes there was middle class philanthropy.
So we're talking about people who might not have known more than five miles from where they were born.
All their lives shipped off to this wonderland in London.
And even those who weren't formally introduced to it noticed it.
Henry Mayfew writes a novel called 1851 about the whole experience.
And the milk seller in that sort of says I'm the slightest idea what this great exhibition is all about, but I can see that I'm going to sell a whole lot more milk as a result of it.
So it got everyone excited. from all classes.
It wasn't a wholly middle class event.
And alongside these new scientific discoveries and inventions and industrialisation in general, something else that spread quite widely was journalism and literacy rates.
How did this impact public perception of society?
And did it introduce a form of intellectual life for the working classes that they hadn't had prior to this?
Yes, well, I think you first of all have to address quickly the reasons for this.
And they were technological and economic.
Firstly, printing machinery developed very rapidly with the result that costs dropped dramatically.
And economically.
Another thing that helped enormously was that Britain had entered an era of free trade and the taxes on newspapers increased and the taxes on advertising were removed.
So everything became much cheaper.
But at the same time the idea developed not only that knowledge was a good thing for your career, but it could also be fun.
If you read the political tracks of radicals on the continent of Europe during this period, they are as they should be, I suppose deadly serious.
And that was true of Chartist tracks as well.
And yet in the Chartist newspaper the Northern Star, you would find Charlotte Brontë and stories, as well as radical politics.
Reading was thought to be all round a good thing.
And there are multiple examples of working class people in extraordinarily awful conditions teaching themselves to read.
For example, Edwin Waugh, who lived in a cellar from the age of eight, eventually became known as the Lancashire Burns.
And in fact in Lancashire he was probably more famous than Charles Dickens or Richard Collier, a farm labourer who built up over his lifetime a library of 3000 books.
So it was astonishing.
The way to influence society was totally everything.
I mean, for example, if you were an aspirant member of the middle classes.
You could learn in detail how you should behave in society in the new newspapers and consumer magazines.
They were also very politically influential, which was why, for example, the Emperor Napoleon III in France paid large sums of money to get France represented better in certain English newspapers and actually tried to buy into them.
But I think the most important way that it influenced everyone was to prove the utilitarian value of free ideas circulating within a tolerant society.
That was completely new.
There'd never been anything like that in the history of the world.
So there was a lot of positives to this Victorian idea of progress, with the tolerant society and the advancements in science and the medical field.
But something that came from industrialisation was that government structures were overwhelmed and there was really a need for major reform.
What do you think was the most significant change in this respect?
Well, I call it the professionalisation of everything derived from common sense really, and a reaction to fast change.
I mean, the population was about 17 million in 1750.
By the time Queen Victoria died, it was 41 million.
So that created huge challenges for society in the way of housing and infrastructure and so on.
And it was a time when many professional societies were formed or reformed, with memberships and rules and also qualifications.
In fact, the government was in a sense the last to join the party.
What a government consisted of before the Victorians?
Just three things really defending the country from invasion, making sure the country was internally stable and not disorder threatened that way, and then a certain amount of limited taxation for a very unintervening government.
Clearly, that was impractical in this new situation, and it required a great deal of reform.
You can imagine that from the fact that in the Home Office in 1833 there were just 29 officials, in the Treasury there were only 115.
The term civil service was used by Robert Peel earlier in the 19th century, but it was only during the Victorian era that it became to be widely used.
Civil service was reformed and developed and made competitive training introduced and slowly slowly, slowly and not really wanting to, but being forced into it by the situation, the state began to undertake all the functions that we recognise today to get involved in health and education and social legislation, the environment and all the things that we take for granted today.
But once it started, it proceeded very rapidly.
There was an Austro-Hungarian diplomat called Ernst von Plenev who wrote a book called The English Factory Legislation in 1873.
And he suggested that the British government had done more for the working class of its country than any other European nation.
And moreover, you couldn't identify the same hostility that you had in European countries between workers and owners and managers.
And that was a bit of a rose-coloured spectacle view of things, but it's interesting that it was from an outsider.
Everything, it has to be said, was done very imperfectly.
If you want to pick holes in it, you can very easily do it.
It also had to keep on changing and we've gone on tinkering things ever more.
The one thing I would say about the imperfection, whether it was by professional societies or whether it was by the government, is it was a very strong Victorian idea of responsibilities and duties, with the idea earlier that rights are derived from exercising responsibilities and duties.
We're less sure about that because we think rights should be absolute.
Something that links to what you just said about rights and responsibilities is that there was a lot of push for reform in the political arena, for example, extending the franchise.
What challenges came with this reform and what attempts were made to extend the franchise?
Well, Victorians did a very remarkable thing.
If you think how government started, it was basically strong men seizing power and then over the centuries or over the millennia,
The idea of kingship and monarchy developed, or other forms of leadership, all to a varying degree, veering towards absolutism.
Slowly but surely, the Victorians changed all that.
They abolished the rotten boroughs that had enabled a small number of voters to be bribed.
They introduced bribery and corruption acts.
They introduced the secret ballot.
They did extend the franchise with one notable Victorian absence, which is votes for women.
In addition to the franchise, we see the emergence of modern political parties.
Before that there were political parties, but they were such shifting interest groups, changing all the time.
Nevertheless, they were given during the Victorian period, party organisations and membership and structures.
And also, it may sound a strange thing to say, policies.
And as part of that process And as part of the creation of modern parties, the political parties that existed the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party and, soon to be, the Labour Party were recognisable to electorates in a way that they hadn't been before.
You could tell this was a big change, a big, big change from the number of exiles that turned up in the UK.
They came from everywhere.
Mazzini from Italy.
Kossuth from Hungary, Herzen from Russia, August Willicht, direct from the barricades in 1848 from Germany.
Thousands of them, and not just radicals expelled by their government, but also Britain took in the old aristocrats.
We gave a home to Louis Philippe, the last Bourbon king of France, but we also gave a home to the Emperor Napoleon III, the last Bonapartist ruler.
And when the Paris Commune happened in 1871, the Socialist Communards came over to England and England refused to extradite them back to the continent.
Marx lived in Britain for 34 years in exile.
So it was really a very important change, but it was Britain that was taking the lead.
Britain may have been taking the lead in sheltering other people, but a large and difficult legacy of the Victorian period is that of empire.
In fact, in your book, you say that the British were almost predestined imperialists.
Why do you think this is?
I think we must begin with context.
Empires have been endemic in human societies for at least 4000 years. since the Assyrian Empire.
The reason for that is that human beings have always struggled, and still struggle today, to understand how to deal with the conflicting interests of individuals tribes nations, regions and empires.
So Britain didn't invent empire.
But at its greatest height, the British Empire ruled a quarter of the world.
That was just before the First World War, so it certainly does need an explanation.
At first sight, it's really puzzling.
At the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
Britain received colonies from France and the Netherlands as a result of those wars and it gave them back, except for a few naval bases.
Between 1830 and 1845, for example, Britain turned down the chance of ruling Cyprus from the Ottomans three times.
There were colonial societies and people who were pushing it hard until the very end of the century.
That really didn't catch on.
And if you read Hansard during the 19th century, you'll find an awful lot of grumbling.
Do we really want to acquire this territory?
It's just going to mean a lot of trouble, a lot of extra administration and it's going to be very costly.
So why did it happen?
I think the answer follows for me simply from the fact that Britain was, as I've said, the globally dominant trading nation.
And the one thing that trade requires to work well is peace and stability.
So there's constant pressure on the government, given that most of the world was very disorderly, to have a bit of British order.
And that was most easily done in the end by taking over the territory.
Was another motion just aggressive racism?
Well, there were a lot of racists.
It wasn't for the British, mostly like the continental racism of Gobineau with his ideas of Aryan superiority, or the ideas you get about race in Hegel, or you certainly get in Marx.
Marx was a terrific supporter of British rule in India because he thought that the old Asian societies need wiping off the planet.
And it was a necessary stage on the road to the triumph of the proletariat for the British to be doing that for him.
And Thomas Arnold, who was the reforming headmaster of rugby.
When he toyed with the idea of going out to Tasmania in the 1830s he wrote to Sir John Franklin, who was the governor at the time, later to die in the Northwest Passage, that you can make a distinction among human beings of moral kinds.
Some people are better than others, but you must not do it on the grounds of caste or race or the colour of people's skin.
Now, that was very, very unusual in those days.
But it was just a pointer to the future.
Again, you need nuance, I think, if you're going to talk about empire.
When the British sacked the Ashanti capital Kumasi, in the 1870s.
They definitely should not have done that.
Imperialism is always wrong.
And they certainly shouldn't have taken off gold trophies as they did to put them in places like the VA.
But the context for that was that the Ashanti had themselves been African imperialists for at least two centuries before that sacking, making the lives of the other West African tribes frankly hell, carrying them off into slavery with human sacrifice.
In other words, Again, imperialism is endemic in human societies.
Slavery, like empire, has always been endemic.
There were about 45 million slaves in the world in 1804.
Three million of those were in America because of the North Atlantic slave trade.
One of the great things that the First World Anti-Slavery Convention, which took place in London in June 1840, was to show just how global slavery was.
There were the Russian serfs, there were the Polish serfs.
The Middle Eastern trade in slavery, in which Arabs provided African slaves to the Middle Eastern countries, was in some ways the most appalling of all, because the male slaves were very often castrated so they don't even have descendants was Mughal slavery.
There has always been Chinese slavery.
Victorians ended slavery, whatever their ancestors had done.
And since we're talking about Victorians, that's the point I'd like to emphasise.
And they not only ended it, they played a leading role in ending it throughout the world.
They failed, but they tried.
That was Jamie Camplin speaking to Isabel King.
Jamie's new book, which delves deeply into the Victorian period and its many changes, is Being Victorian how it felt then, why it matters now.
