Mini-lecture 24: "The Victorian Legacy"

Mini-lecture 24: "The Victorian Legacy"

Scope: This course has moved chronologically through the reign of Queen Victoria. pausing frequently to study such themes as ideas about men and women, servants, leisure, music, art, and architecture. In this final lecture, I will offer a quick overview of the whole period: single out some of its most striking, contradictory, and paradoxical elements, and end with a few general conclusions about the nature of historical study in general and the study of Victorian Britain in particular.

Britain gradually became more of a democracy as it extended the franchise to previously excluded groups by a succession of acts of Parliament. In doing so. it retained its monarchy. whose reputation Queen Victoria herself did much to restore. More striking. Britain managed to forestall revolutionary upheavals, which were common throughout the rest of the developing world. Women were still excluded from the political nation at the century’s end, but the working class’s own party. Labour, had laid the foundations of its massive role in twentieth-century Britain. The empire grew throughout the Victorian era, especially in the 1880s and 1890s. It was widely admired from abroad and gave Britain the appearance of ever-greater power but actually disguised several crucial weaknesses. The worst of these weaknesses, never adequately corrected, was the fact that industry and commerce were low-status occupations compared to the leisured life of the aristocracy. Britain. accordingly, lost its industrial lead to Germany and America and failed to keep pace with accelerating technical changes. As Victoria’s reign ended, Britain faced an unstable world and the prospect of decline.

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Outline

I. Britain gradually moved toward political democracy.

A. Impediments to voting and sitting in Parliament were removed piecemeal.

1. The three Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, and 1884 expanded the franchise.

2. The secret ballot (1872) and the Corrupt Practices Act (1883) diminished opportunities for bribery and intimidation.

3. The political rights gained by Catholics after 1829 and Jews after1858 ended the principle of religious exclusion.

4. After 1888, atheists were also included.

5. Thus, the special privileges attaching to members of the Church of England were gradually dismantled.

B. Democracy faced serious critics, who claimed that popularly elected politicians must pander to their constituencies and are often mediocrities and demagogues.

1. In practice, political life was not debased.

2. Parliament continued to be an arena in which exceptional politicians were far more common than mediocrities.

3. Politicians of lower social origins, now able to sit in Parliament, proved to have minds every bit as brilliant as those of their aristocratic colleagues.

C. Britain, unlike most of the European nations, did not undergo a nineteenth-century revolution or civil war.

D. Queen Victoria restored the monarchy’s reputation and assured it a continued role in the constitution in an age when many European monarchies were coming to an end.

E. By 1901, the Labour Party was joining the political nation, but in a nonrevolutionary way.

1. It, too, was, in many respects, conservative: Labour MPs respected the monarchy as much as anyone else and continued to do so through the twentieth century.

2. Throughout the twentieth century. the Labour Party was ambivalent about its own commitment to socialism; the Trades Union Congress and many Labour MPs had less interest in overthrowing capitalism than in getting a better deal out of it.

F. Politics remained a prestigious and honorable career.

II. The British Empire grew throughout the Victorian era.

A. It was the model for other ambitious nations’ empires.

B. It was comparatively well governed.

1. Despite some brutal military actions, the British colonial administration, once having established power, was relatively fair minded and humane.

2. Victorian British idealism was more than just a cover for comniercial rapacity.

3. The British ended slavery and provided education, sanitation. medicine, and other public health benefits for their colonies.

4. The Indian Congress Party itself depended on Victorian values.

C. The British Empire disguised Britain’s gradual loss of economic leadership.

III. Victorian Britain never overcame crucial weaknesses.

A. It did not sufficiently honor tile businessmen on whose work British greatness was founded.

1. High status required family pedigree and leisure.

2. Social snobbery was persistent and disabling, a recurrent theme in Victorian literature throughout the period.

B. Most people in Britain were poor.

1. Living standards rose very slowly, but from an extremely low starting point.

2. For most people throughout the Victorian period, life was a matter of chronic anxiety.

3. There was no “rags to riches” mythology -- no idealism about class mobility: the poor had no idea that they might aspire to a better life.

4. Trade unions were designed to make the best of the economic status quo by fighting for their working-class members’ pensions. job security, and job safety.

5. Trade unions also impaired British competitiveness by designing rigid demarcation rules and fostering an environment of mutual distrust between workers and management.

C. Britain was unable to use its influence to create international stability: late Victorian rivalry with Gennany was an early portent of the First World War.

IV. History in general, and Victorian history in particular, presents great opportunities and challenges.

A. History requires an imaginative engagement with people whose ideas are distinct from our own.

B. History ought not to be a mere recital of facts.

C. Victorian Britain did, in fact, produce many superb and imaginative historians, such as Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Macaulay.

D. The abundance of materials from the Victorian era is an asset to historians but can also be a problem.

E. Victorian vestiges, literary and material, give everyone the opportunity to delve more deeply into this subject.

Essential Reading:
Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria and Eminent Viciorians.
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, the Heroic, and Hero-worship.

Supplementary Reading:
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Henry James, The Princess Casamassima.

Questions to ConsIder:
1. Could Britain have acted more wisely to protect its best interests in the nineteenth century?
2. Which of Britain’s many achievements in the Victorian era was the most remarkable?