Having It All The Victorians

Victorian Britain was the most powerful nation on earth.

And Victorian painters caught the spirit of this great national journey.

They may not be fashionable now, but these pictures show us how the Victorians saw themselves.

They celebrated Britain's great achievements.

As the first industrial power, bursting with technological invention.

WHISTLE BLOWS

As a commercial superpower,

revelling in enormous wealth.

As the mightiest naval and military force the world had ever seen.

Ruling an Empire four times greater than that of Ancient Rome.

Britain's enormous strength abroad triggered huge social change at home.

As power began to shift away from the aristocracy

towards ordinary people.

The Victorians were acutely conscious of Britain's position in the world.

Indeed, many of them came to believe it was their destiny to rule it.

As one of the greatest of the Empire-builders put it,

"Remember, you are an Englishman, and consequently have won first prize in the lottery of life."

They believed theirs was the greatest civilisation in history, and that it would last forever.

On May 1st 1851, an extraordinary event took place in Hyde Park, London.

From the earth rose a vast, glittering crystal palace,

made of glass and cast iron.

It housed the Great Exhibition, and it took the world's breath away.

Queen Victoria called the opening ceremony "the greatest day in our history."

In the space of only five months, six million people,

that is twice the total population of London at the time,

visited the Great Exhibition.

What was it they were so excited about?

Well, in a nutshell, it was nothing less than a great national beauty pageant,

showing off Britain and her achievements to the world.

British painters proudly show British products

as by far the most impressive things on display.

Cotton-spinning machines, steam hammers, locomotives, telegraphs,

steam turbines, printing machines, and scientific instruments.

The message was loud and clear.

Britain had the means, the energy, the technology, to bend anything to her will.

Not all the exhibits would change the world quite so dramatically.

Queen Victoria was especially taken with a bed that automatically

tipped you into the bath first thing in the morning.

For the busy doctor, there was a one-piece suit

when you got those sudden call-outs in the middle of the night.

And any woman might be taken with the corset that "opened instantaneously

"in the event of emergency,"

Although mercifully, the emergency remained unspecified.

Even at the time, the Great Exhibition was recognised as a turning point,

the moment when Britain looked about her,

and realised the extent of her own power.

One painting captured the significance of that day.

In Franz Winterhalter's The First of May 1851,

the old Duke of Wellington, the victor of Waterloo,

offers a gift to the baby son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

But what's Albert looking at?

He's less interested in the hero of the past than in the symbol

of the future rising behind him, the Crystal Palace.

Here lies Britain's destiny.

How had this happened?

As if to remind the millions of visitors, just inside the entrance to the Exhibition,

was a gigantic example of what underpinned Britain's extraordinary power.

A 24-ton lump of coal.

It was coal that had fired Britain's Industrial Revolution, transforming the country

into the first and greatest industrialised nation in the world.

And the heartbeat of the revolution was here in Sheffield.

Sheffield was Steel City.

At the time of the Great Exhibition, it manufactured

half the total quantity of steel produced in the entire world.

Annual steel production grew from 50,000 tons in 1850,

to five million tons in 1900.

The sheer energy of Victorian Britain is summed up in the advice

of one of Dickens's characters, Mr Panks in Little Dorrit.

"Keep always at it, and I'll keep you always at it.

"And you keep somebody else always at it.

"That is the whole duty of man in a commercial country!"

Victorian painters knew what made a commercial country rich.

The title of this painting says it all -

The Wealth Of England.

It's a depiction of the revolutionary new process

that converted tons of iron into steel at an unprecedented speed.

This painting is proudly subtitled,

"In The 19th Century The Northumbrians Show The World What Can Be Done With Iron And Coal."

The scene is the factory shed of Robert Stephenson and Company

in Newcastle, Britain's first and foremost steam engine manufacturer.

Stephenson's high-level railway bridge is in the background.

A coal barge passes by on the river.

On the docks, a deal is struck between two businessmen.

In the foreground, a smartly dressed little girl is holding a school arithmetic book.

At the bottom right is a blueprint for a steam engine.

Family life.

Commerce. Industry. Education.

Victorian values run throughout this terrific picture.

The steam train was one of the greatest industrial inventions.

And it was revolutionising the British way of life.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert first tried out this new machine in 1842.

What she made of it, we don't know.

But Prince Albert's reaction is recorded.

"Not so fast next time, Mr Conductor, if you please."

Early passengers were often unnerved by this utterly new experience.

One woman recalled being in a carriage with an elderly gentleman

who clearly had no idea how to behave on a train.

He kept dancing around, jumping up and down to stick his head out of the window,

gabbling on about the extraordinary light.

This strange man was the artist JMW Turner.

Turner recorded his excitement in his painting Rain, Steam And Speed.

The picture shows the newly opened Great Western Railway.

The train engine hurtles across a bridge at great speed.

It's thrilling. It's wonderful.

The sheer power of this brand new machine bursts out of the canvas.

What do you like about it? What do you enjoy about driving it?

It's like riding on a dinosaur.

It is, honestly.

It's the nearest thing you can get to a dinosaur that man's made.

I never tire of this. You can't explain it.

It's just magic. It's alive.

-Why are these so much more romantic or interesting than other kinds of locos?

-Because they're like women.

-Go on.

-They're fickle.

-They're like women.

-No they're not, it's completely predictable.

Treat them right, otherwise they'll bite you. They do.

-HE SOUNDS THE WHISTLE

-What fun!

I've always wanted to be a train driver. It's great!

Rail travel changed everything.

For the first time, people who might never have left their home town

could cross Britain or take a day trip to the seaside.

The railway carriage thrust people of all backgrounds up against each other for the first time.

It was a place of chance encounters,

and all that meant to young lovers.

This picture caused outrage with its frank portrait

of a young couple talking to each other

in an all together much too familiar fashion. How shocking!

The artist was forced to repaint it,

moving the girl to a corner while her father chats to the young man.

Far more acceptable!

Britain went railway mad!

Laying track.

Building engines.

Making fortunes.

Britain built railways all over the world.

From France, Italy and Belgium, to Russia, India and Argentina.

On British tracks British goods sped around the world.

One writer saw in the new railways a vision of the future.

"Coal," he said, "the stored up sunlight of a million years is the grand agent.

"Liberty lights the fire...

"..civilisation is the engine, pulling the whole world with it!"

The money made by industry created a whole new class of the wealthy,

men whose power would come to challenge the old aristocracy.

This house in Northumberland is called Cragside.

It was built by one of the "new rich", the industrialist William Armstrong.

Born the son of a merchant in Newcastle upon Tyne,

Armstrong was a classic Victorian, both inventor and entrepreneur.

His factory on the banks of the Tyne became Britain's largest manufacturer of guns and warships.

With the profits of war, Armstrong built his very own stately home.

From the outside, it looks like a grand old ancestral house.

But the interior was another story.

Inside, the house was a technological marvel.

Hydraulic power from reservoirs on the estate provided the house with central heating.

With fire alarms.

An electric gong.

A Turkish bath.

An automatic turnspit.

A dishwasher.

And a passenger lift.

It was the first house in Britain to be lit by electric light,

the first in the world to use hydro-electricity.

You can see why they called it the "palace of a modern magician".

Cragside was Armstrong's shop window, a giant advertisement for his armaments business.

The world's leaders came here to buy, including the King of Siam and generals from China.

Part of the trappings of the stately home lifestyle was an art collection.

But whereas old-fashioned aristos went for the kind of things they'd seen on their travels,

like Italian or Dutch old masters,

William Armstrong bought the work of living British artists, often local.

There are no flies on any self-made men, and Victorian industrialists

preferred to buy their paintings from living artists.

That way they got over the danger of buying a supposed old master

which had actually been knocked up in somebody's garden shed.

Despite having made much of his fortune from devising ever more sophisticated ways of

killing people, Armstrong was as sentimental as anybody else.

He preferred paintings of children and animals.

And this painting here, for example, features his favourite dog, Silky,

in a painting titled, Faithful Unto Death,

next to the dead shepherd, who's died in the snow.

Silky is also in this painting over here,

herding a flock of sheep.

And down here, Silky alone in all his glory.

It's the sort of stuff that gives chocolate boxes a bad name really.

Armstrong's success propelled him, like many of the newly rich, into the House of Lords.

In 1887, he became Baron Armstrong.

He commissioned a portrait of himself at Cragside,

the ever-faithful Silky sitting at his feet.

The painting is deliberately modest.

"Here I am," it says,

"an ordinary bloke in slippers, catching up on the news.

"And it wasn't blue blood that got me this rather nice house."

Armstrong's peerage was one of about 200 created in the late-19th century, mainly for industrialists

and for men who'd done well in trades like brewing.

The toffs sneered at first.

They called them the "beerage".

But soon they had to bend to the rising might of industrial Britain.

GUN SHOTS

Armstrong would test his guns in the grounds,

enthusiastically firing rounds off into the valleys surrounding Cragside.

The invention that made him a legend in the arms business was the Armstrong Gun.

It's been called the first modern weapon.

And the only working Armstrong Gun in the UK is here at Fort Nelson on the South Coast.

LOUD GUN SHOT

Now the gun itself, this Armstrong Gun, what was it that was revolutionary about it?

It was a huge improvement on any of the existing service ordinance.

It was a breech loader.

That means you don't have to put a cannon ball down from the other end?

That's right. From the gunner's point of view it was good because you were a lot more protected.

You didn't have to go to the front of the gun.

This was a rifle gun, so it had a system of grooves

running down the barrel, and it fired an elongated shell.

And this of course meant that you could fire a shell a lot further

and also a lot more accurately than the old smooth ball cannon ball.

-Can I have a go?

-Certainly.

LOUD BANG

Blimey, even with earplugs that's a heck of a bang, isn't it?

-JEREMY LAUGHS

-Good fun!

I suppose one shouldn't say that really.

William Armstrong developed his gun as a response to one of

the great military disasters of the Victorian age.

The Crimean War was Britain's first major conflict in nearly 40 years,

a confused, bloody, drawn-out confrontation to keep the Russians away from the Mediterranean.

But the failings of the British military threatened Britain's position as a world power.

The war showed up terrible deficiencies in the army.

The men were badly fed, badly equipped,

and if the enemy didn't kill them,

then their military hospitals probably would.

But the most serious problem of all was one that was both deadly and invisible.

It was the question of class.

Ordinary soldiers generally came from the poorest parts of British society.

Usually illiterate, they often joined as a last resort to avoid

the workhouse or prison, though living conditions weren't much better.

The Duke of Wellington called them "the scum of the earth", and they were treated accordingly.

Their rations were sparse and monotonous.

A bit of bread, a bit of bread, a bit of rum.

They could be crammed in, 20 at a time, to sleep in a tiny room, and floggings were routine.

For the vast majority, there was no prospect of a way out through promotion.

Their commanders, on the other hand, usually came from the very top drawer of society.

They had to. Officers paid money for their positions, and they didn't come cheap.

As the finery in this painting shows, the army had become the plaything of the aristocracy.

The officers spent as much time fox hunting on their estates,

yachting at Cowes, or going to balls in London as they did drilling their men.

The Duke of Cambridge summed it up pretty well when he said,

"The British officer should be a gentleman first and an officer second."

The Crimea's most infamous gentleman-officer came from here, Deene Park,

ancestral home of James Thomas Brudenell, the 7th Earl of Cardigan.

Cardigan had bought his lieutenant colonelcy for £40,000, a mere £3 million in today's money.

Lord Cardigan was well-known in Britain, and for all the wrong reasons.

A notorious womaniser, he was called the "Homicidal Earl"

for his twin hobbies of duelling with fellow officers, and flogging his men.

When he left his stately home here, to go to the opera, he was routinely booed.

And when he got to the Crimea, he acted more like a holidaymaker than a soldier.

He stayed on his yacht, he drank champagne and he enjoyed

some rather wonderful food from his rather wonderful French chef.

It was Cardigan, along with his immediate superiors, Lords Lucan and Raglan,

who was responsible for one of the most dreadful calamities in British military history.

The massacre that was the Charge of the Light Brigade.

It was October 1854.

The charge happened in a valley outside Balaclava.

The British were at one end of it, the Russians at the other, and on both sides.

Lord Raglan, the British army commander, could see from high ground nearby, that the Russians

had captured and were about to drive off some cannon,

and he wrote an order saying the Light Brigade were to stop them doing so.

The order is delivered to Lord Lucan, who's down on the plane.

Lord Lucan can't see the Russians driving off the cannon up here.

All he can see is the massed force of Russian guns at the end of the valley.

He knows this order is suicide.

But orders are orders and have to be obeyed.

And he tells Lord Cardigan, who's commanding the Light Brigade

that he is to attack the Russian guns down the valley.

Lord Cardigan, who's on his horse, rather bizarrely named Ronald,

forms up his troops in ranks a hundred yards wide, and turns them to go down the valley.

Just 600 men charged into the valley

against 5,000 Russian soldiers and their artillery.

The result was a massacre that need never have happened.

Though you wouldn't think so from some of the paintings of the period.

They show courage, daring, gallantry, all the exhilaration of a cavalry charge.

Here's Cardigan on his horse Ronald looking as dashing as could be.

Back in Britain, it would take a while for the unadulterated folly of the Charge to become known.

For now, the public celebrated the outstanding heroism of the Light Brigade.

Lord Cardigan survived the Charge, and he returned to England

to the sound of bands playing, See! The Conquering Hero Comes.

He, and his horse Ronald, who'd happily also survived the Charge,

were mobbed by enthusiastic crowds, and Lord Cardigan gave lectures, reliving in detail the Charge.

The knitted waistcoat that he'd worn in the Crimea to keep himself warm,

became the must-have fashion accessory of the day.

The cardigan.

The Right Hon Marion Brudenell now lives at Deene Park.

What's it like to be related to such a notorious figure?

I don't think it makes any difference to us.

He's just a famous, rather notorious character.

-And he was notorious, wasn't he?

-He was. Absolutely.

He was a rich, bombastic, arrogant, haughty man.

And I think the more money he got, and when he became an earl it rather went to his head.

The Charge of the Light Brigade in a sense completely turned around

-his reputation, didn't it, for a while?

-Yes, for a little while.

And so he was changed from a villain to a hero.

Queen Victoria thought he was terrific.

So this is Ronald, is it?

Yes, this is the great horse Ronald, who survived the charge and lived for many years.

And unfortunately when he did die, they chopped him up and they took off his hooves,

and the head and the tail we've got as well.

Seems an awful thing to do with a heroic old horse, but still...

-Well, what else would you do with him?

-Bury it, I suppose.

But Cardigan's standing as a national hero didn't last long.

When soldiers returned home from the Crimea, they told another story,

of how the High Command had recklessly ordered hundreds of men

to gallop into a barrage of cannon fire.

The Times accused Cardigan of "the falsification of history".

And the supposed "heroism" of the officer class began to be called into question.

Public sympathy began to turn towards the ordinary soldiers,

expected to obey the orders of superiors without question.

Weren't THEY the real heroes?

One artist captured the changing public mood better than any other.

Elizabeth Butler's The Roll Call

depicts a sergeant ticking off the names of the ordinary soldiers who'd survived a Crimean battle.

The men are bedraggled and exhausted from fighting.

One of the soldiers lies dead at the feet of his comrades.

As Elizabeth Butler said, "I never painted for the glory of war,

"but to portray its pathos and heroism."

The Roll Call was a sensation.

When it went on show in London, they had to put policemen by it

to hold back the crowds. And then it went on tour.

In Newcastle, men walked around with sandwich boards proclaiming, "The Roll Call is coming!"

And in Liverpool, 20,000 people saw it in the space of only three weeks.

It turned Elizabeth Butler into a star.

But the question on everybody's lips was, how could this 27-year-old woman

have arrived at such a profound understanding of the realities of war?

The answer was that her research was meticulous.

To paint her stark vision of the Light Brigade returning

shattered and traumatised from the apocalypse,

Elizabeth Butler sought out survivors

and even employed them as models.

The wild, staring eyes of the central figure

are those of a cavalryman who went on to become an actor.

Like The Roll Call, this painting would help convince the authorities

of the need for military reform.

The fiasco of the Crimea finished the old way of running the army.

Flogging was abolished, living conditions were improved

and, most importantly, officers could no longer buy their position.

From now on, Britain was to have a professionally run army. And she was going to need it.

For 200 years, the British had been building the largest Empire the world had ever seen.

Under the Victorians, the acquisition of land and wealth

around the world would become more aggressive and ruthless.

They started with India.

But it hadn't always been like this.

The British had once admired Indian culture and customs.

Here in the Cotswolds, an English gentleman was so in love with India

that he constructed an Indian palace of his own.

Sezincote was built in 1807.

With its minarets, dome and mock Hindu temple,

this house is an act of homage to India.

But, by the 1850s, the Victorians were beginning to impose

their own idea of civilisation on India.

They tried to convert Indians to Christianity.

Resentment grew.

Revolt started amongst the native soldiers

serving in the British army in India.

Things came to a head when the story went about that the cartridges for

the new Enfield rifle were coated in a mixture of beef fat and pork fat.

Now, to use the cartridge you had to bite the end off like this.

And tip the gunpowder down the barrel of the gun,

and drop the bullet in afterwards.

The fact that the cartridges were coated in fat

which came from cows which were sacred to Hindus,

or from pigs which were unclean and abhorrent to Muslims,

wasn't a smart idea at all.

It was seen as an attempt by the British to force Indians to defile their own religions.

The result was rebellion.

When 85 Indian soldiers refused to bite off their cartridges

at Meerut on 9th May 1857, mutiny broke out.

In one night, over 50 British officers were killed.

The revolt spread across the north west

and panic spread throughout white India.

Atrocity stories began to circulate of terrible things done to Europeans.

At Cawnpore, 197 women and children were said to have been mutilated

and dumped in a well, some of them still breathing.

An officer who came on the scene later described "blood on the walls,

"locks of hair lying about, and a single child's shoe."

Victorian artists fanned the flames of Britain's anger and outrage.

In this painting, a group of women clutch

their children, hiding in a cellar,

as they await their fate at the hands of the bloodthirsty Indians.

In the centre, a mother and daughter are praying.

The mother holds a bible.

A woman kisses her baby for the last time.

But they are in luck.

Rescue is at hand.

Highland soldiers are descending the steps to the cellar.

One painting more than any other portrayed the mood for vengeance.

An impressively beefy Britannia grabs a Bengal tiger by the throat.

Her sword is drawn back for the kill.

At the bottom of the painting lie a dead woman and child.

"Beware, this is what we do when roused,"

is the message of this picture.

In reality, the violence perpetrated by the British was pretty horrific.

Entire villages were burned down.

Some mutineers were made to lick up the blood of the dead.

Others smeared in pig fat before execution,

or tied to the mouth of a cannon and blown apart.

So much for the so-called "civilising mission".

The mutiny marked a turning point in British attitudes to Empire.

The government created the India Office in order to take a firmer grip on the sub-continent.

The building, now part of the Foreign Office, speaks volumes about

how the British were coming to see themselves as an imperial nation.

These chaps dressed as Romans are in fact British

soldiers of the kind who'd helped to colonise India over the years.

It's a way of saying to the world, "Look, we're serious.

"Where once the Roman Empire might have been the greatest on earth, It's now us.

"And we have much the same ideals.

"Justice, order, and military might."

It's an astonishing building, unlike anything else in the world.

This man spends a lot of time here.

So, what do you think the building's trying to say?

I think the building is saying two things. One, think global.

You can't be in this building without realising

that this is a country that does have big maps of the world

with us in the middle of it.

And I think secondly, it's saying that

we've got values we want to try and impart around the world.

It's an explicit comparison with the Roman Empire, isn't it?

It's an explicit comparison with all greats from history throughout.

It's got an image of Britain that is the great reconciler,

but also the great purveyor of the best values.

And it has no suggestion that interests and values might be different.

Its view of Africa is not the view of Africa

that we want to take today.

What's it like when you first turn up for work in a place like this?

It's quite intimidating.

I said on my first week here that I had to pinch myself when I go into my office.

And at some level you still feel that.

What's interesting about the other diplomats, kings, presidents

who come here, is that they're obviously struck by the grandeur of it but they really like it.

From here at the India Office, Britain was firmly in control of an entire sub-continent.

So it could afford a little indulgence of Indian sensibilities.

At one level that meant a degree of formality, even respect.

This, for example, is the office of Secretary for India.

It has a fireplace on one wall, and another fireplace on the opposite wall.

That was so Indian princes could keep warm in the middle of a British winter.

And there are two doors, so that visiting princes of equal rank

could enter the room simultaneously without either losing precedence.

But these were just niceties.

The outward appearance of a much more marble-hearted attitude to imperial rule.

The Indians called it "the knife of sugar".

Kipling described it more forcefully as "knuckle-dusters under kid gloves".

Queen Victoria embodied this double attitude as much, or more, than anybody else.

She was devoted to the idea of having colonial subjects.

She had Indian servants. Indeed, they were her favourite servants.

She tried to learn Hindu scripts.

But she was no pacifist.

"If we are to remain a first-rate power," she wrote,

"We must be prepared for wars somewhere or other continually."

And so it turned out.

British troops would fight over the Empire somewhere in the world

almost every year for the rest of her reign.

The paintings of the day tell a rather different story.

There are no guns or soldiers

in Thomas Jones Barker's The Secret of England's Greatness.

Instead, in the Audience Chamber of Windsor Castle,

Victoria hands a bible to a grateful prince.

He could be Indian, he could be African.

His clothes looked more as if they'd come from some theatre's props department.

But the Victorians did genuinely believe that England's greatness

lay in bestowing Christianity on what they saw as inferior races.

This is the Albert Memorial, completed in 1872,

11 years after the death of the Queen's husband.

By the 1870s, Britain's superiority to the rest of the world

had become something of an obsession.

Surrounding the monument are four sculptures representing the four quarters of the globe.

Europe is shown leading the way, riding into a civilised future.

The official guidebook of the time explains that the statue represents

"the influence Europe has exercised over the other continents".

There are no prizes for guessing where this is going.

The statue representing Asia couldn't be more different to Europe.

Here, a bare-breasted Indian woman sits atop an elephant.

She wears traditional robes.

Beside her are a Chinese man holding a porcelain vase,

a Persian poet, and an Arab merchant.

The implication is clear - Asia is exotic but not very modern.

She needs to be awakened, by Britain.

Africa too lives in the past.

The Sphinx identifies Africa as the land of the Ancient Egyptians.

The figure of a black man wears tribal costume.

The guidebook tells us that the negro is "representative of the uncivilised races of this continent.

"He is listening to the teachings of a female figure, typifying European civilisation,

"in allusion to the efforts made by Europe to improve the condition of these races."

Pretty clear I think.

There was still a lot of the world left for Britain to conquer.

And conquer she did.

One foreign minister described his government's policy in the 1870s

as "occupy, fortify, grab and brag".

By the 1890s, the empire contained 400 million people,

and covered 11 million square miles.

Britain's tentacles reached around the world.

But the nation's great power would change everything back at home.

The wealth of Empire flooded into Britain here in the London docks.

This was the biggest, busiest port in the world.

Every year three million tons of cargo could arrive in the London docks.

Sugar, coffee, tea, spices and luxury goods like silk or ivory.

Goods that arrived in the docks ended up in shops like this.

Liberty's on Regent's Street in the capital was opened in 1875,

to sell goods imported from the Empire,

including fabrics and rugs from the East.

Shops like Liberty's catered to the rapidly expanding middle class.

The wealth of Empire gave them two things in abundance, money and choice.

Unprecedented numbers of people could now shop for more than the bare necessities of life.

The middle classes opened their purses and went shopping mad.

For the first time it wasn't only the gentry who could buy exotic goods.

The rising middle class could now fill their houses with luxuries once unimaginable.

Shopping became a favourite pastime.

Britain was becoming an enormous shop window.

Advertisements were everywhere.

This scene at a railway station

makes you wonder how any Victorian passenger ever found his train.

Over a million advertising handbills were distributed in London in a single year.

What were the most popular themes that advertisers chose to exploit?

A huge range. Obviously, a lot of sentiment,

children. But also the great images of the Empire of that time.

Troops, the soldiers, the sailors.

You wanted to reflect into your product the great power of the nation. I mean,

here we have Huntley and Palmer's,

one of the greatest British biscuits of the era.

A worldwide product.

And there you have the scene with the Indian elephants.

Here are people enjoying the biscuits out on safari.

And that gives you the grandeur of this moment.

All over the Empire they're

drinking tea and having Huntley and Palmer biscuits.

So this is Queen Victoria herself being used to advertise soap.

Yes. You didn't need permission to get Queen Victoria involved.

There was the Empire surrounding her,

and there's St Paul's in the background,

so you get this huge fervour,

a dramatic feel of the whole world gathering towards this one image.

-This fragrant queen!

-Very much so.

Oil paintings by the leading artists of the day

came in handy to advertise goods.

Charles Barber's Girl With Dogs

was used to sell Sunlight soap.

And most famous of all, John Everett Millais'

painting of his grandson, called Bubbles, was bought by Pear's soap.

Here's the painting.

And here's the ad,

complete with painted-in bar of Pear's soap.

But not everyone was having it so good.

Cheap imports from the Empire left the poor in the countryside out of work.

And there were large numbers of them.

Increasingly replaced by machinery, agricultural labourers were driven

from their homes and forced to tramp the countryside looking for work.

In Hubert von Herkomer's Hard Times,

a mother and her two children lie, collapsed from hunger.

The father's farming instruments lie discarded, unused.

This was the fate of farmers and farm labourers right across the country. Cheap imports did for them.

Some found work in the factories in the cities.

The rest faced a terrible choice, starve or emigrate.

More than five million people left Britain in the second half of the 19th century.

Three million for America, the rest to the corners of the Empire.

This massive social upheaval fascinated Victorian artists.

Here, a poor rural family bids farewell to their relatives.

Two children embrace while the grandfather

says goodbye to his grandchildren, probably for the last time.

At the quayside came the final separation.

An old woman sits distraught.

Two lovers say farewell.

And the ship overflows with young men leaving the country.

The couple in Ford Madox Brown's The Last of England

are squeezed into an emigrant ship.

They look more anxious than hopeful.

There's resentment on his face, resignation on hers.

A tiny hand is all we can see of their baby,

hidden under the mother's coat.

The young family seems vulnerable,

threatened by the grey breakers crashing against the ship.

Their backs are turned to England.

They will never return.

The poor who stayed behind were often left on the scrapheap.

The London docks may have been the gateway to the wealth of Empire,

but the men who worked here were some of the poorest in Britain.

Gustave Dore's prints of the dock workers brought their predicament alive.

They were paid little, and only by the hour.

On average, a docker worked just three hours a day.

Resentment ran high.

But all this was about to change.

On August 12th 1889, the London dockers fought back.

There was an argument about the pay for unloading a ship

here in the West India Dock, and it rapidly escalated.

First, the stevedores, the men who loaded the ships, joined the dispute.

And after them, engineers, carpenters and watchmen.

Within a week, 30,000 men were on strike and the docks were paralysed.

The dockers' demands were modest.

Sixpence an hour instead of five, and a guarantee of four hours' work a day.

But the bosses refused.

The strike held.

This was no mean feat. Striking was rare in Victorian Britain.

Trade unions were in their infancy.

For the strikers, the suffering was intense,

not only for them but for their families too.

This confrontation between wealth and labour

was a new drama for artists.

The resolution necessary if the strike was to hold

meant want and hunger for the dockers' families.

The striker crumples his cap in anxiety.

In London, the dock strike took to the streets.

Thousands of dockers and their families marched, carrying huge

banners, their children holding signs saying, "Please feed us".

The public and press began to sympathise.

Donations poured in.

The bosses were under huge pressure to settle and, in the end, they gave in.

It was a historic moment.

The classes had squared up to one other, and the underdogs had won.

Something in Britain had changed for good.

Workers were on the rise.

And soon a new society would be forged in which power was shared more fairly.

But there was to be one last flourish of the Victorian age.

In 1897, after 60 years on the throne,

Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee.

Led by 50,000 troops, the Queen paraded through the centre of London.

The Daily Mail pronounced it was entirely fitting that

Queen Victoria ended her procession by coming to St Paul's to give thanks to God, because really

God was the only being who was more majestic than she was.

It undoubtedly was a splendid occasion.

But for those with eyes to see, Britain's national majesty was already on the wane.

Germany and America were beginning to threaten Britain's industrial supremacy.

Her place as "the workshop of the world" was no longer secure.

The Empire was overstretched.

For how long could so few govern so many?

The Victorians had liked to see themselves as ancient Romans.

But now they remembered how Rome too had fallen.

At home, a social revolution had seen power shift from the aristocracy to the middle class,

and now it was shifting again to the workers,

whose labour had made industrial Britain great.

The people's century was about to begin.

Next time...

As the century draws to a close,

Victorian artists turn their backs on Victorian values,

preferring to create a world of fantasy and magic,

sex and death.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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