He gave us eyes to see them
A. N. Wilson
A Hundred Years Ago: Britain in the 1880s in words and photographs Colin Ford and Brian Harrison (Allen Lane/Penguin Books £25)
Mrs Thatcher has been saying a lot lately about the excellence of `Victorian values', believing herself to be their living embodiment. It is hard to im- agine any politician until the present generation courting popularity by such an appeal. But, as she has been swished along between Flood Street and the House of Commons over the last ten years, every other shop front will have told her that the Victorians are modish. If Laura Ashley can cash in on milk-maids' frocks and pinafores, why shotild Margaret Thatcher not espouse laissez-faire economics and gun-boat diplomacy? Such might have been the cynical thoughts of a politician. But of course, Mrs Thatcher is that much more unusual figure, a politician who believes (to judge from her conversations with Sir Laurens Van der Post) in God, Immortality and Duty, those three things about which George Eliot expressed such ambivalent
views as she walked round the garden of Trinity College, Cambridge with F. W. H. Myers.
Penguin Books have seen the same truth as the Prime Minister and have provided us with a lavish album of photographs of the 1880s. I used to think (assuming a strong set of teeth and membership of the right social class) that it would have been Very agreeable to have been born in, say, 1870 and to have died before the first casualty was reported from the Western front in 1914. But it was precisely this generation of people who most hated the 'Victorian values' beloved of Mrs Thatcher. Most people of discern- ment and intelligence during this period had a particular loathing for the times in which they lived. In E. Nesbit's story Harding's Luck, the little boy can choose to live either in the era of progressive capitalism or return to the Past. Of course, he opts to live in the reign of James VI. E. Nesbit's escape route from her own times into the past had been that of the Pre-Raphaelites and the William Morris socialists, just as it was in a different manner for her contemporaries and friends, Percy Dearmer, G. K. Chester-
ton or Hilaire Belloc. Others, belonging to the same generation as Mrs Thatcher's Golden Age, found it so hellish that they gazed forward and constructed glorious Wellsian futures, with poverty and squalor eliminated along lines dictated by Beatrice Webb. Cynics like Lytton Strachey could see perfection neither in the Middle Ages nor in the socialist dawn, but his hatred of his own times was as acute as Belloc's. Strachey chose to spit out inaccurate and mannered versions of the great Victorian biographies, Eminent Victorians, being, in its scabrous distaste for his parents' genera- tion, a written equivalent of Proust's predilection for paying male whores to defile photographs of his mother.
Mr Brian Harrison, author of the present monograph, is certainly no Lytton Strachey. There is no danger that anyone will accuse him of being a mannerist; nor even a stylist; still less will anyone suggest that he has manipulated his sentences in order to amuse. His gauche ramble through the history of the penultimate Victorian decade is so poorly done that even to draw attention to it is embarrassing. It is as though a visiting Australian, hoping for a tour of the sleazier Soho 'clubs' had blundered, hatted and gaseous with lager, into a demure little assembly of the Charlotte Mary Yonge Society.
I do not imply that Mr Harrison is Australian; I use the metaphor merely to suggest that he is out of place. His generalisations are ludicrous. How can they be tested? During the 1880s, we are inform- ed, in a characteristic specimen of Harrisonian prose, 'still the private sector in elementary education remained attractive to the wealthier parent'. Reading this sentence, one feels chasms open at one's feet. Does he suppose that the young children of the upper class received an education in any 'sector' at this date? There were governesses. The middle classes, similarly, would no more have sent their children to a 'board school' than, nowadays, they would export them to work in black 'townships' in South Africa.
It would be cruel to quote too much of Mr Harrison. What moral confusion enabl- ed him to write the sentence, 'menstruation among women, like masturbation among men, was regarded as physically debilitating'. Was regarded by whom? And what makes this regard so distinctive to the 1880s? And are not the two things, though both long words beginning with 'm', rather different? Then again, how odd to gaze back from our age (with its nuclear weapons, jumbo-jets, motor-ways, Spanish hotels and Chinese meals) and say, 'Life was more precarious in the 1880s at all ages and social levels'. It was this 'fact', ap- parently, which led to the 'Victorian' preoc- cupation with death which Mr Harrison (we must assume that he has no imagination or that he is going to live forever) finds ex- traordinary. Apparently a concern with death is 'unfamiliar to our more secular age'.
It is surprising that Mr Harrison thinks our age more secular than the 1880s, since his version of that decade is one in which almost everyone had lost faith in religion. Apparently only a few old fogeys like Dr Pusey and Mr Gladstone still believed in life after death. But that is because Mr Har- rison, who avers that the majority of English people in the 1880s subscribed to a religion called Anglicanism (a word that I am sure most of them never used), obvious- ly has no idea what religion is. His chapter on 'Church and Chapel' is chiefly taken up with accounts of Dr Barnardo, the early socialist organisations and the more despairing passages of Mrs Humphry Ward. The photographs, on the other hand, show us foaming hordes of Salva- tionists at Clanton (whose vicar incidental- ly, though Mr Harrison omits to tell us this, claimed to be God and had a large follow- ing); a Biblical multitude of Baptists watching their minister in a top hat about to immerse one of the faithful in the River Thames; a crowd of children on the sands at Llandudno grinningly confident (to judge from the banner they are waving) that `Christ died for our sins'; and swarms of Irish peasants kneeling in the mud at Knock, hoping for another sighting of Our Lady. (She was also seen, and photograph- ed, on the 30 August 1880 at Llanthony Ab- bey in Wales; but the pictures are not reproduced here, and little was made of the incident at the time; the Roman Catholics were annoyed that she had appeared to Pro- testants).
Nevertheless, it is the photographs which are the glory of this magnificently produced volume. They have been assembled by Colin Ford, first keeper of the National Museum of Photography. Many of the il- lustrations are highly familiar — Frank Meadow Sutcliffe's naked boys bathing in Whitby harbour; Queen Victoria giving her toothy grin from a landau during the Golden Jubilee celebrations (a fantastical bonnet almost coming off the back of her head gives her the appearance of an amiable, half-unfurled Brussels sprout); or J. Thomson's shadowy recruiting sergeants standing outside the 'Mitre and Dove' at Westminster in order to lure young men in- to uniform with the Queen's shilling. Other pictures here reflect an extraordinary grotesquerie: women prisoners in white poke bonnets, walking round the square ex-
ercise yard at Wormwood Scrubs, each clutching a baby in a black bundle; Joseph Merrick, the 'Elephant Man', dressed in his Sunday best after being admitted to the London hospital; a figure of the most hideous deformity which rivals Charles Laughton's Quasimodo: eyes all over the place; huge, slobbering, twisted lips; a serpentine proboscis, worming its way from the middle of his forehead; and, on his lap, one hand which is the paw of a prehistoric monster; and the other, so poignantly, his only 'normal' feature, slender and well- manicured and painfully elegant.
The most obvious fact demonstrated by all the photographs except that of the Elephant Man is that the world has grown infinitely uglier in the last hundred years. Lytton Strachey's generation split their sides laughing at the Jacobethan ex- travagances of late Victorian furniture and architecture. They could not guess that, by comparison with late 20th century artefacts and buildings, the meanest hovel and the most vulgar excess of the Victorians would seem beautiful. 'Grim slums and tenements in Leeds', says the caption to an early photograph in this volume, showing a well- built terraced house for which members of the middle class would now pay £40,000 rather than live in the tower blocks where our modern working class are obliged to reside. 'The Scottish kitchen was plainer, but its kitchen range meant a lot of work', we are joylessly informed. Three Victorian Scots sit in front of this handsome range, looking as happy as the Scotch are ever like- ly to look, and not knowing how lucky they are to have been born before the age of whirring kitchen 'appliances', peninsular units, laminated work-tops or `repro' pine fitted cupboards for which their great grandchildren have been taught to hanker.
When John Betjeman began, 50 years ago, his pose of admiring Victorian railwaY stations, and claimed to find beauty in trams, town-halls and seaside piers which a more fastidious generation would have abominated, he was very understandably held in derision. What man or woman who had seen the apartments of Louis XIV at Versailles would find any beauty at all in Queen Victoria's bedroom in Balmoral (predictably illustrated here with its vile noisy tartans)? The answer to my rhetorical question, probably, is Mr Michael Fagan, and anyone else who has seen the Knightsbridgey 'good taste' with which some interior decorator has inevitably decided to encase our own dear Queen. Bet jeman's early detractors judged the Vic- torians by an appeal to the elegant restraint of the 18th century. They were, initially, too myopic to see that his own very realistic eyes had gazed about at the real world, aati the here and now, and seen how hideous t was growing. Our trains, our railway stations, our buses, our shops, our slums, our factories and our streets are all uglier, even' than the ugly late Victorian artefacts on view in chic volume. And why this should be, so, remai.-0 one of the most profound 01 historical mysteries.
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