Dreams and Nightmares The Victorians

By the second half of the 19th century,

the Victorians had built a nation that was the richest and most powerful on Earth.

Britain's painters celebrated Britain's triumphs.

And yet, just when the Victorian miracle was at its peak,

came voices of doubt, of anxiety, and even of protest.

Science began to gnaw away at religious beliefs...

..throwing the certainties of the Victorian world into question.

Now, artists began to talk of waging a war on the machine age,

and they looked beyond the triumphs of the 19th century for inspiration,

to intoxicating dreams...

To sensuality...

To the imagination...

To nightmares and madness itself...

Even to a world beyond the grave.

And they would open the doors to a new age of uncertainty,

an uncertainty we still live with today.

The wilds of Northumberland are a fitting place for a vision of Apocalypse.

Among these rocks and hillsides grew up an extraordinary painter

whose mind seethed with troubling visions.

To John Martin, this craggy, dramatic landscape was the work of a vengeful, violent God,

a Biblical wilderness in which the relationship between God and man

was played out over the centuries.

And John Martin had a warning for his times.

He'd spent his childhood in the little village of Haydon Bridge.

Like many Victorian children,

he was dragged by his mother to church not once, but twice each Sunday.

It's a pretty austere place, and Isabella Martin's faith matched the bleakness of the building.

She preached a fierce sermon, that "there was a God to serve

"and a hell to shun, and that sinners and swearers

"would burn in hell with the devil and his angels."

Wild landscape and terrifying religion combined to produce something astonishing.

As he looked around he saw not glory but catastrophe.

His pictures prophesied the end of Victorian civilisation.

John Martin's apocalyptic paintings show the uncontrollable

power of nature,

and warn of the fate awaiting the Victorians.

In The Last Judgement, the world is riven asunder,

the saved in their Sunday best on one side,

and the damned on the other.

A steam train, that symbol of Victorian progress,

falls flaming into the abyss.

And in The Great Day Of His Wrath, Martin depicts the fate of humanity.

Victorian civilisation will be destroyed,

obliterated by God's fury.

These may be religious pictures,

but the religious beliefs of the age were beginning to crumble.

New questions were being asked which would shake

the foundations of Victorian certainty.

All over the country, and here in Pegwell Bay in Kent,

enthusiastic amateurs

were spending their weekends fossil hunting at the seaside.

Armed with hammers and magnifying glasses, they set out to record

and classify the fossils

that they found in rocks and stones and cliffs.

In the process, those hammers were chipping away

at once rock-solid convictions.

Until the 1850s most people, if they thought about it all,

believed that world was around 6,000 years old.

According to the calculations of a long-dead bishop,

God created the world on Sunday, October 23rd, 4004 BC.

But now the fossil hunters, vicars and priests among them,

were discovering that couldn't possibly be true.

This is a fantastic fossil. Is it from round here?

Yes, this is from a local beach here.

This is only a small proportion of the animal.

It would've been a much bigger fossil originally,

maybe even 1.5 metres across.

We've only got the central portion here.

Are there still fossils to be found here?

Yes, it's a very rich location.

The magic is still here that drew the Victorians down.

The quality of the fossils that come out is still high.

-And they're easily removed.

-It is amazingly soft, what is it?

Well, it's actually plant remains, an algal bloom.

All this white stuff, even the finest powder.

So the entire rock face that we're looking at is just one giant fossil.

So you're a Victorian clergyman, you pick this out of a cliff,

and you can't reconcile it with the Bible.

There is no modern equal to the things they were going through

in terms of trying to square off what they were seeing with their beliefs.

-It's like a mental nuclear explosion, it was that serious?

-It must have been.

We have no parallels today to even comprehend what they went through.

Discoveries are happening all the time.

So, they were genuinely making new discoveries?

Yep, indeed.

Because these cliffs are always eroding back,

what you're looking at here are very edges of a page of geological time,

so every now and again a single letter drops off

and if you're lucky enough to be here to catch that,

you may end up putting a few of them together into a story.

And that story told by the rocks was a disquieting one.

One painting hints at it.

It looks like just an autumn day at the seaside,

but it's more than that.

It shows the family of the artist William Dyce

on the beach at Pegwell Bay.

Dyce himself was a keen geologist and astronomer.

The women comb the beach for fossils.

How many millions of years had those fossils been there?

A man cranes his neck towards the sky to get a glimpse of a comet.

What was our place in the universe?

The location is significant.

Here, Christianity first arrived in Britain.

Now the question was, how long would it last?

The writer John Ruskin voiced a very Victorian anxiety in 1851...

"If only the geologists would leave me alone I could do very well.

"But those dreadful hammers!"

I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.

He was right to worry.

The comforting myths of the Bible were being destroyed by a new belief in science.

This is one of the grandest of the Victorian cathedrals to science,

the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

The whole building is a hymn to scientific endeavour.

Every column is carved from a different British rock.

Every capital shows a different plant.

As for the specimens, they're testament to the Victorian spirit of enquiry.

It was 19th century scientists who coined the word "dinosaur" in 1842.

There was nothing new in finding skeletons, of course.

But when scientists looked closely at the bones, they discovered something more urgent.

Clues to the staggering age of the world, to how life had developed.

Bones, in other words, could be very, very worrying things.

Even human bones.

In this picture, parts of a skeleton have resurfaced in a graveyard.

Can the promises of scripture be true

when this is what we're reduced to?

Now begins the Age of Doubt, with a capital D.

The Bible promises eternal life, but she seems not so sure.

The picture's full of symbolic detail.

The dead man is named John Faithful.

On his skull, there's a butterfly, symbol of resurrection.

The painting posed an uncomfortable question -

what can we believe any more?

Well, might they ask.

Charles Darwin was about to demonstrate the creation myths of the Bible must be nonsense.

Here at the Oxford Museum of Natural History, religion and science met head on.

In one corner, Professor TH Huxley, nicknamed "Darwin's bulldog".

In the other, the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, known as "Soapy Sam".

They were here to discuss Darwin's electrifying theory that species,

instead of being individually created by God,

evolved by natural selection, so-called survival of the fittest.

The bishop began, he said, "You claim we're descended from apes.

"In your case, is it on your grandfather's side or your grandmother's side?"

According to legend, Huxley replied, "I'd rather be descended from an ape than a bishop."

In later life, the professor could only recall that he had said

he had no shame in being descended from an ape,

but he would be ashamed to be associated with someone

who used his great gifts to obscure a truth.

It was a stunning moment,

so stunning that one woman in the audience passed out and had to be carried away.

The implications of Victorian science proved overwhelming for others too.

Some of the best artists of the day sought escape elsewhere,

in a magical past.

They found a gentler, more romantic world

in a medieval fantasy of damsels, knights and chivalry,

as far away as possible from science and industry.

One story drew them over and over again.

The Lady of Shalott is the tale of a medieval damsel marooned in a tower,

and her doomed love for Sir Lancelot.

She looks out of the window at him and brings a curse upon herself.

Such pictures seemed to satisfy a hunger in the weary Victorian soul,

a hunger for the spiritual and the romantic.

This love affair with all things medieval could be taken to wonderful extremes.

Cardiff Castle is a whopping great medieval extravaganza built to keep the Victorian world at bay.

It was dreamt up by two men.

A wealthy industrialist, the Marquis of Bute,

and the architect William Burges.

Now at the time, Lord Bute had a reputation as the richest man in the world,

so money really was no object.

Burges' challenge, then, completely to recreate a medieval castle, was the commission of a lifetime.

Bute and Burges were men with a vision on a truly grand scale, a vision of a world before

Charles Darwin had asked those awkward questions.

The place is an absolute labyrinth.

This room, for example, guarded by the devil to keep the ladies out, is the winter smoking room.

It's covered in images of animals.

Even the door handle is a parrot.

There are animals and birds all over the walls.

But these aren't animals and birds as seen by 19th century scientists,

they're as seen by medieval monks.

In other words, proof of God's creation.

And this is the small dining room, a mundane name for a room that's anything but mundane.

Look at the detail - a howler monkey.

When you want to summon the servants, press the nut in its mouth!

And here's the riposte to Darwin, a book showing human learning in the hands of two monkeys

who patently haven't the faintest idea what to do with it.

So, to you, Mr Darwin.

And here's a fireplace, built in the shape of the Norman keep in the grounds, and look, inside it,

William the Conqueror's son held prisoner, as he had been in the real keep.

No home's complete without one, really.

But what looks like something from the past, was built on the profits of a very modern world.

The irony is, of course, that it was all paid for by one of the age's richest industrialists.

What made this medieval fantasy possible was the toil of Welsh miners.

One Victorian artist led a call to arms against Victorian values.

The avowed wish of Edward Burne-Jones

was to wage a crusade and holy war against the age.

The more materialistic science becomes, he declared,

the more angels I shall paint.

Executing this picture obsessed him all his life.

Mortally wounded in battle, the dying King Arthur is watched over

by three queens in the magical Isle of Avalon.

There, legend had it, that he would sleep until one day,

in the hour of England's need, he was summoned again.

It's a strange, melancholy masterpiece.

The painting's so vast you almost feel you could fall into it.

But its scale is only part of the secret of its success, I think.

It has a dreamy, seductive, hypnotic quality, and it sort of makes you

understand why it was that when Burne-Jones' friends asked during

the 18 years he spent painting it,

"What are you doing?" he said, "I'm in Avalon."

It's rather a nice place to be.

Towards the end of his life, Burne-Jones wrote,

"I need nothing but my hands and my brain

"to fashion a world to live in which nothing can disturb.

"In my own land I am king."

But the world Burne-Jones railed against was gaining unstoppable momentum.

The Victorians had built a nation

that was striding boldly into the future.

Machines had brought vast wealth to the country...

..in factories, in railways, in mines.

This pumping station was built in 1865

for the distinctly unglamorous job of pumping the sewage away from London.

Crossness Pumping Station is Victorian engineering at its most confident.

No wonder the writer Thomas Carlyle called this time "the age of the machine".

Man was conquering nature, Britain was conquering the world.

And yet there were increasing numbers of people who found this

new power and wealth and knowledge just unsettling.

And they were willing to turn their back on machines altogether.

The artist William Morris built a house for himself and his companions

in what was then a village on the outskirts of London.

It was intended as an experiment in communal living because Morris

and his friends had ambitions way beyond art.

They wanted to pioneer an entire new way of life.

To do that, they turned their back on traditional Victorian values

and the fruit of their labours was this, the Red House.

On a cupboard in the hall, they painted pictures of themselves in medieval dress.

William Morris and his young wife Jane,

the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his lover Lizzie Siddal.

In their ideal world they would make everything themselves.

They said no to factory-made, mass-produced furniture and wallpaper.

Instead everything would be crafted by hand, just as in medieval times.

In this hothouse atmosphere,

the men painted the women over and over again.

But there's something disturbing about these pictures.

They don't quite look like real women.

They're fantasies, with their dreamy expressions,

their soulful eyes...

..and their big, big hair, worn sexily loose.

Rossetti's pictures of Lizzie are charged with obsession.

They're images from some feverish, romantic dream.

But the dream ended in nightmare, here in Highgate Cemetery in London.

Lizzie was buried here, in a private part of the cemetery.

Rossetti's relationship with Lizzie Siddal was intense,

passionate and volatile.

She though suffered from consumption,

and became dependent on the opium-based painkiller, laudanum.

In 1862, two years after they'd been married, she took an overdose.

Suicide was suspected.

She'd had been suffering from postnatal depression

after giving birth to a stillborn baby.

Her corpse was laid out in an open coffin for seven days,

while Rossetti scanned her body for signs of life.

Inside Lizzie's coffin, entwined in her red hair,

he laid the only complete copy of his poetry.

He pledged the poems would die with her.

But the story doesn't end there. It has a rather grisly postscript.

As the years went by, Rossetti's violent grief subsided

and he began to regret his decision to bury his poetry with his wife.

Seven years after her funeral,

in the middle of the night, her grave was opened.

Rossetti himself couldn't bear to be there,

but they told him that her body was perfectly preserved

and that the coffin was filled with her luxuriant copper-red hair which

impossibly had carried on growing after she'd died.

The manuscript was worm-eaten, but the poetry was intact.

After her death, he worked obsessively on this painting of her.

Lizzie is deep in a trance-like state. She's deathly pale.

Her lips are slightly parted.

Is she breathing or dying?

A strangely-coloured dove carries an opium poppy,

a symbol of her own death by laudanum overdose.

Yet Rossetti's obsession with his dead wife

wasn't so out of step with the times.

The death of Prince Albert in 1861 not only plunged Victoria into mourning,

but set off an almost fanatical obsession with death

which lasted until the end of the century.

As church yards filled up, the Victorians built grand

new cemeteries, extravagant cities of the dead.

Here loved ones lived on...

in grand style.

The cult of mourning may have been born of necessity, but it was also the last gasp of a religious age.

No longer sure of an afterlife,

it's as if the Victorians decided to cling as long as possible to this one.

The uncertainty of what death brings runs right through

the weird paintings of George Frederick Watts.

In this one, Sic Transit or Thus All Things Pass,

a body lies shrouded on a slab.

The anonymous figure is surrounded by worldly possessions,

all now useless.

In Love And Death, love vainly strives to keep death from entering the house of life.

And in Orpheus and Eurydice,

Orpheus clutches at the body of his beloved.

He has led her from the land of the dead,

only to lose her forever by turning back to look at her.

He's been offered what so many Victorians yearned for -

the chance to bring the dead back to life.

But he's failed in the attempt.

Many Victorians clung desperately to the belief

that perhaps death wasn't the end.

Some even tried to enter the no man's land between death and life

and to make contact with the other side.

Into the spiritual void opened up by Victorian science

came a rush of exotic beliefs

and job opportunities for charlatans.

Seances, when mediums allegedly made contact with the dead, became all the rage.

The medium would put their hand on the table.

Before we know it the table starts to levitate.

'Eleanor and Chris Thompson call themselves psychics.

'They certainly have an unusual sideline, an interest in the tricks of the Victorian trade.'

It's quite blatantly obvious here, but there's a pin.

We've left it blatantly obvious that there is a nail.

They would colour that to match the stain of the table so it was not as obvious.

Normally the person that checked out the equipment

would be someone that knew the medium.

-And...

-Secondly, the ring.

The ring would have grooves or be shaped.

Oh, I see. Yes, on the outside it looks like a wedding ring

but on the inside it's got all these hooks.

Because most of this stuff is trickery, isn't it?

Quite a lot of it is, yes, if you go back to Victorian times, especially.

We try and recreate things without the tricks.

You've got some examples of the devices that Victorians used here.

-What's this?

-This is actually a planchette, which is French for little plank.

All you do is put the pencil in, tighten it up,

so you've then got like a three-legged table.

The same sort of table they'd use on the Ouija board.

If one person's doing it,

it wouldn't be too difficult with practice to learn to write messages.

So we're careful to make sure there's more than one person got their fingers on

so it's more difficult to manipulate.

-What interests me about you two is that you know these are tricks.

-Yes.

-Yes.

It's fakery and it's made easier if people have a hunger

-to believe there's something out there.

-A lot easier.

Yet you do genuinely believe there's something out there.

How do you describe yourselves now?

Are you psychics or what?

We believe we've got a gift.

Eleanor, what do you describe yourself as?

Psychic or psychotic, I don't know which. The jury's still out on that one.

Why were the Victorians so interested in the paranormal, do you think?

They were desperate for answers. The church didn't control the country anymore.

You couldn't get punished for things, more mediums were out there, they wanted to find something else.

This need to know what lies the other side of death

is the theme of John Everett Millais' Speak! Speak!

A man starts up in his bed as the ghost of his dead wife,

dressed in her bridal clothes, summons him to join her.

The Victorians loved the supernatural -

ghosts, spirits, apparitions, visitors from the other side.

But most of all, they loved fairies.

And they took their fairies very seriously indeed.

Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was a true believer.

His father was a celebrated fairy painter.

Fascination with fairies allowed people to reconnect with a nature

from which they felt they'd been separated.

But it also fed a deep Victorian hunger to believe there was more to

life than the merely physical, that there was some alternative reality.

But even fairyland had its dark side.

John Anster Fitzgerald's series of nightmare paintings

depict dreamers plagued by hideous goblins.

They hold steaming bowls of toxic liquids.

Half-empty medicine bottles including laudanum lie on bedside tables.

Late Victorian painters were travelling into ever darker regions.

One of them sought in painting a refuge from the torments of his own mind.

It was one of the strangest stories of the Victorian age.

Richard Dadd was a phenomenally successful fairy painter

who was admitted to the Royal Academy at the age of only 20.

But he was highly unstable.

Dadd's fragile mental health collapsed during a trip abroad.

He was seized with an urge to attack the Pope and only

couldn't carry it through because the Pope was so well protected.

His father insisted he was just suffering from sunstroke.

But then, back home, when father and son were walking in the park one day,

Richard Dadd grabbed the knife he had bought especially for the purpose

and slit his father's throat.

He was arrested and found to be suffering from insanity.

In 1864, Richard Dadd was brought here to the new Broadmoor Hospital for the criminally insane.

He passed under this arch on a cart, almost certainly in chains,

and he underwent the admissions process.

Once the mad had been ignored or laughed at.

The Victorians put them in huge new hospitals to be cared for and sometimes cured.

Richard Dadd found a kind of refuge here.

Copies of his paintings still hang on the hospital walls.

He was admitted by the hospital superintendent, Dr William Orange.

This is Dr Orange's initial report of Richard Dadd.

-"Tongue, broad and flabby..."

-"Tongue broad and flabby, pulse regular.

"Heart's action, normal.

"Has never had syphilis.

"Still believes himself to be a marked man

"under the influence of an evil spirit.

"And in explaining his ideas, he becomes very much excited

"and occasionally his eyes have a wild appearance."

We'd probably describe him now as being a paranoid schizophrenic.

Mm. And then this next entry?

"Employs himself generally in painting

"and is at present engaged on a watercolour fairy scene,

"which he is executing with great care."

-Was he encouraged to paint while he was here?

-I think he was encouraged.

I think there was a good tradition in that era of patients being encouraged to be distracted

with activity that maybe suited their personality.

For him, he had always been a fine artist and it seems right that that would be encouraged.

-So it was a sort of therapy?

-I believe so.

In the same way today, we use art and music

and other distractions in therapeutic pursuit in exactly the same way.

Richard Dadd spent the last 22 years of his life here in Broadmoor.

He was incarcerated in one of these rooms

and he was given another one to paint in.

By the latter stages of his life he was pretty much forgotten about,

in fact many people thought he'd died long ago.

But he left behind a body of work

that is astonishing in its intensity.

His most famous picture is a fairy scene depicting...what exactly?

It's a mouse-eye view, seen from ground level through the grass.

A fairy woodman raises his axe to strike a nut.

Around him, strange figures watch or indeed ignore his attempt.

The deranged details of this interior world are unfathomable.

Richard Dadd's were dark and very private visions.

But there was another, more optimistic, dream that chimed with the public mood.

A fantasy of Imperial greatness.

By the second half of Victoria's reign, Britain ruled an empire

four times the size of that of ancient Rome.

In the eyes of many, Victorian Britain rivalled Rome in nobility and sophistication.

Here at the British Museum,

the glories of the classical world had been gathered for them to admire.

The world of ancient Greece and Rome offered the Victorians a mirror

in which they saw themselves reflected back.

But their interpretation of the classical world has a distinctly Victorian twist to it.

This Victorian painting imagines the moment

when a classical Greek sculptor

shows his newly finished work to the public.

They're dressed in classical robes,

of course, but they could easily be Victorian middle-class art-lovers

at a private view.

They stroll around sizing up the work,

with everyone chatting away looking like they're having a thoroughly pleasant and civilised afternoon.

These apparent Romans are really Victorians at ease with themselves, at home...

..in the bath...

..and quite often in nothing at all.

Paintings and sculptures of nudes had fallen from favour in the prudish mid-Victorian years.

But the obsession with the classical past

allowed the naked body to make a triumphant return.

Here's the surgery of the Greek god of medicine.

"Doctor it's my foot!"

His remarkably fit-looking patients have taken the helpful precaution

of stripping off before they queue up for their prescription.

This was the great age of the collector -

men who had made their pile and now wanted to spend some of it on works of art.

What they were after was something with a hint of sophistication.

Anything which had mythical heroes, gods,

goddesses - especially goddesses - would fit the bill perfectly.

The man who built this splendid Victorian house in Bournemouth

was a canny businessman who made his money in property.

Merton Russell-Cotes was a passionate collector of a very particular kind of art.

For Russell-Cotes, it really mattered that any suggestion

of sauciness in his splendid collection be firmly squashed.

So he referred to his nudes as the "human form divine".

In other words, these weren't earthly or fleshy figures, they were god-like.

Defenders of the nude insisted that these painted figures weren't real women.

They represented an ideal.

So a painting of a naked goddess was one thing,

a painting of a naked Mrs Jones from next door would be quite another.

A favourite subject was the classical story of Andromeda

chained to a rock.

Though to our perhaps jaded eyes,

there might seem to be more than a hint of bondage about this picture.

If naked women looked more like classical statues than real people,

polite society could find no fault with them.

The trouble was, how could you be sure that only polite society got to see them?

The common Victorian belief that art was good for you ran into some real problems with these paintings.

"I know only too well how the rough and his female companion behave in front of these pictures,"

complained one critic. "I have seen the gangs of workmen strolling around

"and know that their artistic interest in the studies of the nude is emphatically embarrassing!"

This painting, The Dawn Of Love by William Etty,

shows the goddess of love, Venus,

and her winged messenger Cupid

who seems to be having a bit of a nap on her bed.

Russell-Cotes was very proud of this painting but some members of

the public weren't so sure, and they wrote to the local paper about it.

"In civilised life," wrote an angry gentleman,

"the dawn of love, real love, is seldom heralded in with clothes off!"

That prompted one art-lover to respond,

"Did anyone ever see the dawn of love come into the world with clothes on?"

The Bathers Alarmed.

There's a sense, looking at some of these paintings, that the Victorian interest in sex,

which had hitherto been kept pretty strictly under control,

was now really straining at the leash, and perhaps was about to slip it all together.

As the century approached its end, for some people at least the firm foundations upon which

Victorian society had been built were beginning to crack.

Decades of religious doubt, huge social changes, and a general weariness at stern moral teaching

were changing the way people felt about the old order.

A new group of artists led the charge, producing work that was grotesque,

provocative, decadent.

The new generation used to meet here in the ornate rooms and bar of the Cafe Royal.

Men like Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, their lovers male and female,

loved everything that was exotic, shocking or scandalous.

What the so-called Decadents adored about the Cafe Royal

was its exaggerated, almost absurd, air of luxury.

About as far from the stifling conventions of the Victorian home as it was possible to get.

"If you want to see the English people at their most English",

said one writer, "go to the Cafe Royal,

"where they're trying their hardest to be French."

At the heart of this group of artists was the young Aubrey Beardsley.

His illustrations for Oscar Wilde's play Salome, and his erotic drawings,

are as unsettling, as modern and as shocking as they must have seemed a hundred years ago.

Like other Victorians who had fallen out of love with corsets and moral homilies,

Beardsley created another world quite different from that of the respectable middle class.

His pictures were deliberately designed to disturb.

Depraved...

..macabre...

..sinister...

That was what some people said of them,

reflected too in the group's drink of choice, the notoriously potent absinthe.

So what's all the paraphernalia, then?

Well, what we have here

is a traditional absinthe glass.

As you'll see there's a clearly sort of demarcated area

for the absinthe dose.

This is typical of absinthe, that you use a sort of drug-like term -

dose - that's been used for a century.

You wouldn't really say a dose of gin or a dose of whisky.

You place a perforated spoon like this.

It's got a little notch to grip the edge of the glass.

You put a sugar cube on the spoon like that.

The iced water drips

over the sugar cube and it dissolves the sugar cube slowly,.

As the water reaches the absinthe, or mixes with the absinthe,

you'll see it starts to change colour.

It's a sort of opalescent, milky kind of colour.

There are little swirls happening there that you can see now.

Its popular image is

almost as a narcotic, something that really does your brain in.

Essentially, by far the most dangerous thing in absinthe is the alcohol.

It is... I'm rather lost for words.

-There are all sorts of different tastes in there.

-Exactly.

All sorts of different tastes.

-I shouldn't care to spend the evening on it.

-I don't know!

-I'd much rather have a whisky.

-DAVID LAUGHS

The last decade of the century came to be known as the naughty '90s.

If duty and morality had been the watchwords of Victorian Britain

at its height, now others could be added.

Freedom and fun.

What had happened was that ordinary people, in this case middle-class

ordinary people, could now enjoy the fruits of their labours.

They could take pleasure seriously.

All that invention and industry had brought wealth and leisure.

Enjoying yourself was no longer just for the toffs.

The values which had made Victorian Britain great and grand were slowly but surely being laid aside.

When Victoria died after 63 years on the throne,

film cameras were there to record her funeral on 2nd February, 1901.

The coming of cinema spelled the end for the sort of story-telling pictures

that Victorian artists had painted for so long.

But the legacy of those pictures is astonishing.

They had charted the explosion of the great cities

and how the Victorians had transformed them

and learned to love them.

They had painted the Victorian dream of home sweet home.

And the dangers that menaced it.

They'd created hymns to the labour and ingenuity

that made Britain the workshop of the globe.

Acted as cheerleaders for the Empire as Britain conquered the world.

And as compassionate witnesses to the hardships of the workers

whose labour had made Britain rich.

They had pushed at the boundaries of Victorian conformity

and provided comfort for the troubled Victorian soul.

Their pictures of the most dramatic, feverish time in our history

were the cinema of their day.

And they're still all around us.

They're hanging on a wall near you.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd.

E-mail [email protected]