Victoria and Her Sisters A History of Britain by Simon Schama


Victoria and Her Sisters

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Spring 1851.

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The word "Victorian" enters the English language

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and a very small woman enters a very big building.

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She's 4'11", yet somehow she fills it.

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The moment, so pregnant for the future, seems holy.

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Victoria is herself flooded with religious awe.

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One felt filled with devotion,

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more so than by any service I have ever heard.

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Neither she nor anyone else has ever seen anything like this building before -

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a greenhouse the size of a palace

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with the difference that this is, from the beginning, a people's palace.

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A popular magazine calls it "the crystal palace".

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Its grandest spaces are filled not with courtiers and flunkeys, but steam pumps and locomotives.

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A huge showcase for Britain's industrial empire.

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Just three years before, in 1848,

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Europe had been torn apart by revolutions.

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The government had feared the same would happen here.

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As it turned out, other countries had war and revolution, we had the Great Exhibition.

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Other countries had barricades, we had the cheerful queue for the turnstiles.

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In an era haunted by fears of overpopulation,

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this was one of the greatest mass movements of people in all of European history.

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Six million came to see the show of shows.

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In 1848, industrial machinery had seemed to be the enemy of ordinary men and women -

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the gaping mechanical jaws into which countless lives were fed,

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to be spat out again as cotton cloth or nails.

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Technology, the prophets of doom had warned, was an engine of inhumanity

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driving working people to desperation or revolt.

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But inside the glittering glasshouse

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someone seemed to have waved a magic wand over the mechanical brutes,

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turning them from ogres to busy, friendly giants

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happy to be gazed at on a family outing...

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not least by the first family of the land, assembled amidst the hardware.

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After all, Papa - Prince Albert - the moving force behind the exhibition,

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was the first prince in European history

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to wear his connection with the world of business as a badge of pride, not shame.

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But what about Mama? As the mother of a rapidly-expanding family, Victoria might've been expected to know

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that if the cult of progress was to make Britain not just a great nation but a good one -

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be a home maker not a home breaker -

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it would fall to our women to see us through the painful change to an industrial society

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safe and sound.

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But, of course, hers was no ordinary family. Despite the family photos, Queen Victoria was not Mrs Average.

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The age which would bear her name would see transformations in the lives of women

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which Victoria could never have imagined in the dazzling springtime of her reign.

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Whether she'd welcome them or even understand them,

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whether they'd sweep past her and her glass palace - that remained to be seen.

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In 1837, when she became queen, Victoria was only 18.

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She was as pure as a rosebud,

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which seemed a welcome change

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from the decidedly impure reigns of her uncles, George IV and William IV,

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addicted to the pleasures of the bed and the table,

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and indifferent to the hardships endured by the mass of their subjects.

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Unlike the uncles,

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Victoria had been brought up a model of virginal moderation and self denial.

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No regency pampering for her.

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At one point she and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, had to move out of Kensington Palace to save money.

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So Victoria's nursery years were spent at bracingly ordinary places

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like Ramsgate and Sidmouth.

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Much later in life, for some reason,

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Queen Victoria looked back on her childhood as a time of sadness and loneliness.

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It's true that, like many middle class and aristocratic children,

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she was subjected to an evangelical regime of prayers and constant self-examination.

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She kept a "behaviour book" full of solemn and self-critical entries.

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This one, for August 1832, reads,

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"Very, very, VERY..." - underlined - "..terribly..." - more underlining - "..naughty."

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But could Christian betterment, the driving force of her generation,

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be taken from SELF-improvement to bettering the life of her people? That was the question.

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On her first excursion through England's heart of industrial darkness,

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the teenage princess would see what she was up against.

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Near Birmingham, she travelled through the landscape of a British Inferno, sooty and sulphurous.

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The men, women, children, country and houses are all black.

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The country is very desolate everywhere.

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There are coals about, and the grass is quite blasted and black.

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I just now see an extraordinary building flaming with fire,

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smoking and burning coal heaps intermingled with wretched huts and carts,

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and little ragged children.

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But the view from the coach was the closest Victoria got

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to the bleak reality of Smokestack Britain.

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In any case, there was something else on HER mind -

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her upcoming date with history.

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All those tombs and crowns and thrones -

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was she ready?

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The moment would arrive all too soon

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in the small hours of June 20th 1837.

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The teenage princess in her nightgown, woken by the arrival of the Lord Chamberlain

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and the Archbishop of Canterbury...

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'..who acquainted me that my poor uncle the King was no more

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'and, consequently, that I am Queen.

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'I am very young, and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced.

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'But I am sure that very few have more real goodwill and more real desire to do what is fit and right

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'than I have.'

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At her coronation on June 28th 1838,

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the young Queen showed what she was made of,

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carrying the immense weight of the robes and regalia with aplomb.

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But she also managed something more important than dignity - a glimpse of humanity.

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When the 87-year-old Lord Rolle tottered as he tried to mount the steps of the throne to do homage,

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Victoria's kind-hearted instinct was to rise and go down the steps to meet him.

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Everyone noticed.

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She was young, but not precocious.

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She knew she needed help, and she was wise enough to ask for it from someone superbly able to give it,

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the Whig Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne.

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He won Victoria's confidence by the simple but inspired tactic of never, ever talking down to her,

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never treating her like a child in need of protection.

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Instead, he treated her like an adult

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sophisticated enough to enjoy his worldly wisdom, his political gossip, and even his off-colour jokes.

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Under his guidance, Victoria's confidence in her public persona blossomed.

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She was, of course, the most desirable catch in Europe.

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Victoria's mother had thrown banquets and balls

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to ensure Victoria met the most eligible princes,

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including her Saxe-Coburg cousins, Ernest and Albert.

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It may well have been her uncle Leopold who, in the spring of 1839,

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first made the suggestion to Victoria that she might like to marry Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg.

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Like all young women, she probably initially found the subject a bit embarrassing,

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but once she got used to it, helped by that handsome or, as she put it, "angelic" German head,

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well, she pretty much ran the show,

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virtually grabbing hold of her curly-haired intended and sprinting for the altar.

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It was Victoria who supplied the ring,

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asked Albert for a lock of his hair,

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and wallowed in the kissing sessions.

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If she sometimes seemed determined to wear the trousers in this marriage,

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there were also other times, especially right after the wedding, when Victoria simply melted away

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into the amazed bliss of conjugal love.

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When day dawned - for we did not sleep much - and I beheld that beautiful, angelic face by my side,

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it was more than I can express.

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He does look so beautiful in his shirt only,

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with his beautiful throat seen.

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Already, the second day since our marriage, his love and gentleness is beyond everything,

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and to kiss that dear, soft cheek,

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to press my lips to his, is heavenly bliss.

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My dearest Albert put on my stockings for me.

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I went in and saw him shave.

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A great delight for me.

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Victoria and Albert's passion for each other was a strictly private matter.

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But for countless numbers of Britons

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in the suffocatingly overcrowded industrial cities like Manchester,

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bedroom privacy was an unimaginable luxury.

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Manchester was the very best and the very worst taken to terrifying extremes,

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a new kind of city in the world,

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the chimneys of industrial suburbs greeting you with columns of smoke.

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200,000 drones packed into the hive

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to make money for the lords of Cottonopolis.

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An American visitor taken to Manchester's black spots saw...

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..Wretched, defrauded,

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oppressed, crushed human nature

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lying in bleeding fragments.

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And thanked God for not having been born poor in England.

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The cotton mills were brutally demanding taskmasters.

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Whole families spent almost all of their working hours tending to the machinery.

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Children were given menial but dangerous jobs

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like scavenging cotton fluff from beneath the moving machinery.

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As bad as all this was, it was even worse when there were no jobs at all.

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In the first years of Victoria's reign, hands were being laid off in tens of thousands.

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It would be a woman, Elizabeth Gaskell, who'd be the whistleblower,

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the first of Victoria's sisters to stick her neck out.

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Amazingly, her blazing protest took the genteel form of a novel.

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But what a book! When "Mary Barton" was published in 1848,

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nobody, not even Charles Dickens, had gone as far as Gaskell

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in looking dead-on at the grim reality of industrial misery.

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The middle-class wife of a Unitarian preacher, Gaskell took herself right into the lower depths of the city,

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to the gin palaces and open sewers,

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dark, reeking alleys where skin-and-bones children played among the rats.

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In Mary Barton, you didn't just see, you HEARD working-class Manchester

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in the pages of literature for the very first time.

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To most of her readers, it must have been a language more foreign than French or German.

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We do not want dainties, we want bellyfuls.

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We do not want their grand houses,

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we want a roof to cover us from the rain, the snow and the storm.

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Aye, and not alone to cover us, but the helpless ones that cling to us in the keen wind

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and ask us with their eyes why we brought them into the world to suffer.

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By the time you'd finished Mary Barton,

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one word, struck like a hammer over and over again, would've lodged in your memory. "Clemmed" - starved.

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You say it, and you call up the entire knife-edge world of struggling to survive

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that Elizabeth Gaskell had created.

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Elizabeth Gaskell believed that honest, graphic social reporting could make a difference.

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She wrote to her cousin...

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My poor Mary Barton is stirring all sorts of angry feelings against me in Manchester.

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But those best acquainted with the way of thinking and feeling among the poor acknowledge its truth,

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which is the acknowledgement I most desire,

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because evils, being once recognised, are halfway on towards their remedy.

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One of Gaskell's fans, the social philosopher Thomas Carlyle,

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thought it was pointless to try and improve a system so fundamentally inhuman as industrialisation.

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Nothing is now done by hand. All is by rule and calculated contrivance.

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On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop to make room for a speedier, inanimate one.

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The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster.

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There is no end to machinery.

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For Carlyle, there was only one route to salvation. Britain must turn aside from the machine

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to summon the spirit of the Christian centuries of the Middle Ages,

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the last time we'd taken it for granted

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that faith was more important than money.

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To bring about this great conversion from Babylon to Jerusalem,

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nothing less would do than a Christian revolution in building.

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And no-one was more convinced of this than the greatest of the Gothic revivalists,

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Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin.

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A new generation of churches would be in the front line in the war to save Victorian souls.

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Pugin was never happy just to sound off.

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He believed, with the fervour of the old faith, that a properly beautified church was the very face of heaven.

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And before he died - brutally early, at the age of 40 - he made sure,

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especially here at the Church of St Giles in Cheadle, Staffordshire,

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to let some people see how gloriously colourful it could be.

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But however spiritually nourishing this might have been,

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it wasn't going to put bread on the tables of the needy millions.

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Victoria's first decade as Queen was also a time of economic hardship for many of her subjects.

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A slump in foreign trade had led to mass lay-offs in the industrial cities.

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Bread was an unaffordable luxury for the unemployed,

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who blamed the Corn Laws for keeping cheap, imported wheat out of Britain.

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Working-class anger and desperation was close to boiling point.

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For middle-class reformers, the answer was easy.

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"All we need to do is to get rid of the Corn Laws and all will be well."

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But the militant spokesmen of the WORKING people weren't convinced.

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They wanted more.

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Only a truly popular government - a democracy, in fact - would do something about THEIR distress.

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They set out their demands in a "people's charter",

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a new Magna Carta for the modern age.

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It demanded the right to vote for all men,

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secret ballots, annual parliaments.

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How to get them? Moral force if we may, physical force if we must.

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In the climate of fear and hatred, people had to decide just where their loyalty lay.

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If you were on the right side of the tracks -

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owner of a cotton mill like this in Aircoats - you'd think the Chartists were just a mob misled by demagogues.

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Besides, who said capitalism was a funfair?

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As long as you kept your hands off the market, well, the market sooner or later would right itself.

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And the poor, the people who worked here, who were hungry now, would feed off the fat of the land tomorrow.

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On April 10th, 1848, a monster Chartist petition

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signed by nearly two million men and women, so huge it needed two hackney cabs to get it to Parliament,

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was brought to London.

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150,000 Chartists with bands, banners and green, red and white rosettes converged on Kennington Common

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for the biggest political rally in British history.

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The Government was ready for them.

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London was turned into a huge armed camp, with mounted guards, guns and even cannon posted

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at critical sites like the Tower of London and the Bank of England.

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Soldiers were posted on the Mall to prevent access to Buckingham Palace.

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The royal family had fled to the Isle of Wight.

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Faced with this immense display of strong-arm force,

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the leader, newspaper owner and MP Fergus O'Connor, had no choice.

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He gave orders that nobody should provoke the troops, however goaded,

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for the result would've been a bloodbath.

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Some of the younger firebrands thought it was a sell-out.

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But what was Fergus O'Connor supposed to do -

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unleash his people's army on the Queen's soldiers only to get them mown down?

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Now, what good would that have done the cause of the working people of Britain?

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And besides, just look at this photograph of the meeting on the common.

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The very first political photograph in our history.

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Not exactly about to storm the barricades, are they?

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It may have ended for the moment -

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the threat of the kind of revolution that had spread through European capitals in 1848 happening here too -

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but the dream of so many working people for somewhere decent to live, enough to eat,

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for a share in the Victorian bonanza, was as urgent as ever.

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If they weren't going to get it by armed revolt, then they would get it in the British way,

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in small but decisive steps, by coming together in self-sufficient communities.

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This is all that survives intact of those little pipe dreams,

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one of the cottages of the Chartist Land Company settlement at Great Dodford in Worcestershire.

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Founded in 1845,

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the Land Company was the brainchild of none other than Fergus O'Connor.

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It bought land, which it divided among its members into smallholdings

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meant to take people out of the industrial slums

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and back to the rural world of their forefathers.

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They'd get a few acres to grow their own food and make a small living.

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"Do or die" was the motto of the incoming settlers to places like Great Dodford,

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and their work was no picnic -

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breaking soil, planting hedges, making roads, with no certain outcome.

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But some were determined to make a go of it, especially Chartist women.

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Ann Wood, who lived in a cottage very much like this one, was just an Edinburgh charlady,

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but one with enough Scottish thrift and determination to save up £150 to put down for a lot at Great Dodford.

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That gave her the pick of the crop,

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and after settling at number 36 along with her two daughters,

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Ann did well enough, at any rate, to lead a long life, dying at 86.

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So when all the sound and fury had ebbed away,

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what seemed to count for most was making a home, not a revolution.

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Prince Albert himself understood this.

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In the year of the Great Exhibition, he commissioned and had built model lodgings for the working class.

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Later, they were rebuilt at Kennington,

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on the very site of the Chartist revolution that wasn't.

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And as the boom years of the 1850s replaced the hungry '40s, Britain had never seemed so middle class,

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starting with the monarchy.

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The thousands of photographic visiting-cards circulating the country

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showed the Queen and Prince Albert, not on their aristocratic high horse,

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but acting out the rituals of middle-class life.

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Respectable, reliable...

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even a little boring.

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Queen Victoria was to have nine children in all.

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And never had Britain had a monarch

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who went to such lengths to advertise her domestic pleasures to the nation.

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The stroll in the park.

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The romp with the children.

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The singsong round the tree at Christmas.

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And on the Isle of Wight, a modest little seaside getaway,

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Osborne House...

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..designed by Albert and relished by Victoria as an idyllic retreat from the pressures of rule.

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It was here, at last, that Albert, who'd been kept from meaningful public work,

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got HIS desk, sitting beside hers,

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from which he could direct his campaign to make industrial Britain a better as well as a richer place.

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To see them together beavering away, you'd suppose it was a perfect partnership.

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But not so perfect that this couple, in every other respect so mutually devoted, were spared all arguments.

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They had their spats just like the rest of us.

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Victoria is too hasty and passionate for me to be able often to speak of my difficulties.

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She will not hear me out, but flies into a rage and overwhelms me

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with reproaches and suspiciousness, want of trust, ambition, envy.

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For her part, too, Victoria wasn't above letting rip when she got too worked up.

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Single people, she'd occasionally let it be known, were often much better off than unhappily married couples

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forced to stay together by convention.

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All marriage is such a lottery.

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The happiness is always an exchange, although it may be a very happy one.

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Still, the poor woman is bodily and morally the husband's slave.

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That always sticks in my throat.

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Astonishingly, this echoed exactly the kind of thing coming from the mouth and the pen

0:29:420:29:49

of two of the most daring critics of the Victorian conventions of marriage -

0:29:490:29:55

John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, husband and wife for seven years,

0:29:550:30:00

tortured lovers in a peculiar, Victorian way for longer,

0:30:000:30:05

joint authors of On The Subjection Of Women.

0:30:050:30:08

This was, don't forget, an age in which a woman's property automatically passed to her husband

0:30:100:30:17

when they got married.

0:30:170:30:19

Husbands had the right to beat their wives, as long as the cane was no thicker than their thumb,

0:30:190:30:27

and to lock them up for refusing sex.

0:30:270:30:30

In 1830, the philosopher John Stuart Mill went to a dinner party

0:30:390:30:45

which changed his life forever.

0:30:450:30:48

He was struck dumb by the vision of a swan throat and dark, enormous eyes.

0:30:480:30:54

They belonged to one Harriet Taylor,

0:30:560:30:59

writer, poet and unhappily married wife.

0:30:590:31:02

Between the soup and the port,

0:31:040:31:07

John and Harriet were swept away by an instantaneous knowledge that they'd found their true soulmates.

0:31:070:31:16

But, being two serious intellectuals,

0:31:170:31:20

Mill and Taylor's forbidden love couldn't just be a selfish private passion(!)

0:31:200:31:26

It had to be thought out loud as a public issue.

0:31:260:31:30

Their situation made only too clear the hypocrisy of the loveless Victorian marriage.

0:31:300:31:37

In some slave codes, the slave could, under certain circumstances of ill-usage,

0:31:390:31:45

legally compel the master to sell him.

0:31:450:31:48

But no amount of ill-usage without adultery super-added will in England free a wife from HER tormentor.

0:31:480:31:56

Surely there had to be another way out than adultery or suffering misery in silence?

0:31:560:32:03

What had to be done was to expose marriages as the property transaction they often were,

0:32:060:32:12

and then use education and law to enlighten and protect women.

0:32:120:32:18

Taylor and Mill would have to wait 19 years for a chance to practise what they preached.

0:32:210:32:28

In 1849, Harriet's unloved husband finally died, freeing the way for her to marry John Stuart Mill.

0:32:320:32:40

But not before he formally renounced ALL the rights the law gave him over his wife's property and person.

0:32:410:32:49

Their happiness was short-lived.

0:32:520:32:56

Harriet Taylor died of TB in November 1858.

0:32:560:33:00

But there would be an epitaph,

0:33:000:33:03

all their ideas poured into On The Subjection Of Women, their book that MILL published in 1869.

0:33:030:33:11

Happy and equal marriages were no longer its only concern.

0:33:120:33:17

Women, who made up almost half the workforce of Britain, should have pay equal to their labour.

0:33:170:33:25

And most breathtakingly of all, they should have the vote.

0:33:250:33:29

It was a book whose ideas gave powerful momentum to the Women's Movement.

0:33:320:33:39

After the Second Reform Act in 1867,

0:33:400:33:42

almost all male householders had the vote,

0:33:420:33:46

which made the fact that female householders hadn't seem glaringly unfair.

0:33:460:33:52

Mill, himself an MP, had tried to argue their case, and even won the support of 73 other MPs.

0:33:520:34:00

The vote was lost, of course,

0:34:000:34:03

but the words had been spoken,

0:34:030:34:05

and they were heard especially loudly in Mrs Gaskell's Manchester.

0:34:050:34:10

The breakthrough had been made.

0:34:100:34:13

a democracy worth the name could not be just for men.

0:34:130:34:18

Queen Victoria may have had her doubts about unhappy marriages,

0:34:220:34:27

but this was a violation of God's ordering of right relations between the sexes.

0:34:270:34:33

She let it be known in no uncertain terms what she thought of...

0:34:330:34:38

..this mad, wicked folly of women's rights with all its attendant horrors,

0:34:380:34:44

on which our poor, feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.

0:34:440:34:52

There WAS fit and proper work for women to do, Victoria allowed,

0:34:530:34:58

but only the kind which used the qualities of tenderness which God had given to their sex.

0:34:580:35:05

Nurses, for example, were rightly called sisters and matrons.

0:35:050:35:10

But was it quite right for the Queen's own nephew to call one of them "Mammy"?

0:35:100:35:17

Florence Nightingale may well have garnered the reputation back in Britain among civilians

0:35:190:35:25

of the Angel of Mercy in the Crimea,

0:35:250:35:28

but the women whom surviving SOLDIERS most adored, for the very good reason that she saw them through the worst,

0:35:280:35:35

was the most forgotten and the most unlikely of Victoria's sisters.

0:35:350:35:40

And her name was Mary Seacole.

0:35:400:35:43

Mary Seacole was West Indian,

0:35:430:35:46

the daughter of a Scotsman and a Jamaican woman.

0:35:460:35:50

Largely self-taught, her Caribbean remedies became famous after they'd been shown to stop violent dysentery

0:35:500:35:57

and to bring yellow fever and cholera victims back from death's door.

0:35:570:36:02

When Britain joined the Crimean War in 1854, she tried to volunteer her services at the front.

0:36:050:36:13

But Mary didn't exactly fit the profile of middle-class nurses.

0:36:150:36:20

She was turned down by the likes of Nurse Nightingale.

0:36:200:36:24

So Mary got herself to the Crimea under her own steam and with her own funds.

0:36:260:36:32

And once she got there, she did something truly extraordinary.

0:36:320:36:37

Mary Seacole built her "British Hotel" right on the front line.

0:36:370:36:42

And it doubled up both as a refectory, feeding the boys about to go into action,

0:36:420:36:48

and a recovery station for the sick and wounded.

0:36:480:36:52

Every morning, she'd make up great vats of nutritious food like rice pudding, saddle up a pair of mules

0:36:550:37:02

and ride into the heart of the action looking for the wounded,

0:37:020:37:06

to whom she'd dole out food, hot tea, medicine

0:37:060:37:11

but, most of all, motherly love.

0:37:110:37:13

Mortars would whizz past the big, old woman trundling along the lines.

0:37:150:37:22

Upon these occasions, those around would cry out, "Lie down, Mother, lie down!"

0:37:220:37:30

And with very undignified and unladylike haste, I had to embrace the earth.

0:37:300:37:37

After the war was over, the soldiers feted her at a charity gala.

0:37:390:37:44

She'd become - briefly - an eminent Victorian.

0:37:450:37:50

Suppose, though, women drawn to help the sick went one stage further and dreamed of being a doctor?

0:37:530:38:01

Now, THAT was a different story.

0:38:010:38:04

In 1860, Elizabeth Garrett enrolled as a surgical nurse at Middlesex Hospital.

0:38:050:38:12

But her sights were set higher.

0:38:120:38:15

In between the swabs and the bedpans she was looking carefully at surgical operations.

0:38:150:38:22

And she was also cutting up body parts in her bedroom.

0:38:220:38:26

This improvised education made her bold enough to take the hospital's medical, not nursing exams.

0:38:280:38:36

And when the time came to publish the results, one E Garrett had come top.

0:38:360:38:41

Ordered to keep the outrage secret, she went public instead.

0:38:430:38:48

Nine years later, the French gave her an MD.

0:38:480:38:52

And in 1874, the first medical college expressly for women was set up in London.

0:38:520:38:59

For Victoria,

0:38:590:39:01

the mere idea of slips of girls looking at, much less cutting up the naked bodies of dead men

0:39:010:39:09

was an unthinkable indecency.

0:39:090:39:11

But no doctor was of any help to her in the greatest crisis of her life.

0:39:120:39:18

For in 1861, the same year Elizabeth Garrett cut her way into medicine,

0:39:190:39:25

Albert contracted typhoid

0:39:250:39:28

which, after a few months of horrifyingly swift deterioration,

0:39:280:39:33

ended in his death in December.

0:39:330:39:37

Everything in those last weeks became suddenly invested with an almost religious significance.

0:39:400:39:47

Here is the last book read to Albert, Scott's Peveril Of The Peak,

0:39:470:39:52

and on the flyleaf the Queen has written,

0:39:520:39:55

"This book was read up to the mark on page 81, to my beloved husband during his fatal illness,

0:39:550:40:02

"and within three days of its terrible termination."

0:40:020:40:07

You turn to page 81, and here's how it reads...

0:40:090:40:13

"He heard the sound of voices, but they ceased to convey any impression to his understanding;

0:40:130:40:20

"and in a few minutes, he was faster asleep than he'd ever been in the whole course of his life."

0:40:200:40:28

Victoria buried her beloved Albert

0:40:300:40:33

in the Italianate mausoleum she built at Frogmore in Windsor Great Park.

0:40:330:40:39

Albert's death threw Victoria into a paroxysm of grief.

0:40:490:40:54

Not for her the stoical acceptance of the inscrutable will of the Almighty.

0:40:540:41:00

She had lost not only her co-ruler but her helpmate. And vanished too was her domestic idyll.

0:41:000:41:07

At the abyss of her misery, she must have thought that all chance of contentment had gone.

0:41:070:41:15

My life as a happy one is ended. The world is gone for me.

0:41:160:41:22

If I must live on, and I will do nothing to make me worse than I am,

0:41:220:41:27

it is henceforth for our poor, fatherless children,

0:41:270:41:32

for my unhappy country which has lost all in losing him.

0:41:320:41:37

Death was an immense presence in Victorian life,

0:41:400:41:45

perhaps because it was the one conquest denied to the soldiers, the engineers, the captains of industry

0:41:450:41:52

who seemed to be able to conquer everything else.

0:41:520:41:57

If they couldn't stop their loved ones from going to their graves,

0:41:570:42:02

they could at least create the illusion, in marble and photographs,

0:42:020:42:07

that they were still alongside those who mourned them.

0:42:070:42:11

This, in her distraught, inconsolable grief, Victoria knew how to do.

0:42:130:42:18

With religious devotion,

0:42:180:42:21

she set out Albert's shaving equipment every morning...

0:42:210:42:25

..and fresh evening clothes and a clean towel every evening.

0:42:270:42:32

Missing his physical presence, she slept with his nightgown by her side.

0:42:330:42:38

The exuberant, headstrong young woman shrank into the hard shell of a forbidding, inconsolable widow

0:42:430:42:51

for whom the least sign of merriment was a betrayal of Albert's sainted memory.

0:42:510:42:58

She seemed, in a way which no-one accustomed to the strong-minded Queen could ever have imagined,

0:42:580:43:06

somehow no longer in charge of either herself or of the country.

0:43:060:43:11

Victoria's sense of moral calling, so strong from the beginning of her reign,

0:43:130:43:19

had become so dependent on Albert the Good's judgement

0:43:190:43:24

that now he was gone, she seemed at a loss about how and where to exercise it.

0:43:240:43:30

It never occurred to her that women alone, either as widows or spinsters,

0:43:300:43:35

might be able to do good by themselves - to make a life, even a career, on their own.

0:43:350:43:42

If she wanted to see how this COULD be done,

0:43:450:43:49

all she needed to do was to take her pony trap a mile or two down the road from Osborne to Freshwater

0:43:490:43:57

to visit someone who, though neither widow nor spinster, was very much her own woman.

0:43:570:44:04

The photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

0:44:060:44:10

Since Victoria was herself an avid collector of photographs,

0:44:110:44:16

she might have been curious about this eccentric, half-French woman's notorious darkroom.

0:44:160:44:23

For Julia Cameron, photography was not just an amateur hobby.

0:44:250:44:31

The poetic lyricism of her photographs disguises the hard need she had to make some money.

0:44:310:44:38

Worse, she seemed, perversely, to glory in the male mess of camera work -

0:44:420:44:48

flouncing around in the converted hen-house that was her studio,

0:44:480:44:53

her dresses and hands stained with black silver nitrate,

0:44:530:44:58

conscripting men and women models like a recruiting sergeant-major

0:44:580:45:02

and bellowing terrifyingly at them if they moved before they were told.

0:45:020:45:07

Needless to say, the men who ran the Royal Photographic Society refused to take her seriously.

0:45:080:45:16

Admiring the enthusiasm of Mrs Cameron,

0:45:160:45:19

the Committee regrets

0:45:190:45:22

they cannot concur with the lavish praise bestowed on her productions by the non-photographic press,

0:45:220:45:29

feeling convinced that she will herself adopt a different mode of representing her poetic ideas

0:45:290:45:36

when she has made herself acquainted with the capabilities of the art.

0:45:360:45:41

What they MEANT, of course, was that a soft woman couldn't be expected to master machinery, chemicals,

0:45:410:45:48

the hard technology of the job, let alone make a career out of it -

0:45:480:45:53

despite Julia's obvious success at both.

0:45:530:45:58

But some of the most powerful and intelligent of the Victorian great'n'good -

0:45:580:46:04

Tennyson, Carlyle,

0:46:040:46:08

and astronomer Sir John Herschel - who HAD obediently posed,

0:46:080:46:13

were not deceived by the poetic light of her work.

0:46:130:46:17

They embraced her as the greatest portraitist of her age.

0:46:170:46:22

Julia's triumph in making a profession as an artist must have been noticed

0:46:270:46:33

by all the young women of the 1870s and 1880s who wanted more for themselves

0:46:330:46:40

than a destiny as wife and mother.

0:46:400:46:43

After Girton College, the first Oxbridge college for women, opened its doors near Cambridge in 1873

0:46:490:46:56

they had, for the first time, somewhere that would educate them -

0:46:560:47:01

liberate them if they chose - from middle-class domesticity.

0:47:010:47:06

But even as they drank in knowledge behind the red walls of Girton,

0:47:070:47:12

some of those young women longed to get beyond the cloister.

0:47:120:47:17

The old ways of "women's useful work", teaching, preaching, nursing, were no longer enough.

0:47:200:47:27

Nor was just being an educated designer of the House Beautiful.

0:47:270:47:33

They were drawn instead, as Elizabeth Gaskell had been a generation earlier,

0:47:340:47:40

to the UGLINESS everywhere in a Britain feeling once more the strain of economic crisis.

0:47:400:47:47

Some even decided to make that new home in the places most shocking to their parents' generation -

0:47:470:47:54

in the slums of the industrial cities -

0:47:540:47:58

to steep themselves in the dirt and anger of their poor, abused sisters...

0:47:580:48:05

..to face up to harsh truths,

0:48:070:48:10

the kind spelled out by the young George Bernard Shaw.

0:48:100:48:15

Your slaves are beyond caring for your cries.

0:48:170:48:21

They breed like rabbits

0:48:210:48:24

and their poverty breeds filth, ugliness, dishonesty, disease, obscenity, drunkenness and murder.

0:48:240:48:32

The bravest of this new generation

0:48:360:48:39

could even face head-on the most unpalatable truths,

0:48:390:48:44

like that link between breeding and destitution.

0:48:440:48:48

Annie Besant was the kind of do-gooder clergyman's wife unthinkable a generation earlier,

0:48:480:48:55

and still unthinkable to the likes of the Queen.

0:48:550:48:59

Annie Besant scandalised the country

0:48:590:49:02

by publishing contraception advice for working people.

0:49:020:49:06

Such impertinence would not go unpunished, however, and Annie found herself the victim of a court order.

0:49:060:49:13

She lost custody of her daughter to her former husband.

0:49:130:49:17

An unforgiving time for women judged as unfit mothers.

0:49:170:49:22

But nothing would stop her crusading.

0:49:220:49:24

Searching around for a woman's cause, Annie found one

0:49:250:49:29

in the teenage match-girls who worked amidst phosphorus fumes for Bryant & May in East London.

0:49:290:49:36

They were paid just between four and ten shillings a week.

0:49:360:49:41

And if they had dirty feet or an untidy bench they were fined,

0:49:410:49:46

taking more money out of their already pathetic wages.

0:49:460:49:50

Most horrifying of all, the girls ran the constant risk of contracting the hideously disfiguring "phossy jaw"

0:49:520:49:59

since Bryant & May persisted in the use of phosphorus, which other match companies had given up.

0:49:590:50:07

At the same time, the company was paying huge dividends to its shareholders,

0:50:070:50:13

a disproportionate number of whom - Annie enjoyed revealing - were the clergy.

0:50:130:50:20

Annie wrote an article about the plight of the match-girls

0:50:200:50:24

for her campaigning newspaper, The Link.

0:50:240:50:27

Together with fellow Socialist campaigner Herbert Burrows, she distributed copies of it

0:50:270:50:34

at the gates of the factory.

0:50:340:50:37

The owners of Bryant & May threatened the girls with instant dismissal

0:50:370:50:41

if they didn't sign a document repudiating the article and the journalists.

0:50:410:50:48

But instead of signing, the girls went en masse to Annie and Burrows with their story. They told her...

0:50:480:50:54

You had spoken up for us. We weren't going back on you.

0:50:540:50:59

A strike committee was formed.

0:50:590:51:02

Besant and Burrows promised to pay the wages of any girls dismissed for their action.

0:51:020:51:09

George Bernard Shaw volunteered as the cashier of the strike fund. 1,400 girls came out.

0:51:090:51:15

The company eventually settled, and Annie Besant and the girls were triumphant.

0:51:150:51:22

Hailed as the working girls' champion,

0:51:220:51:26

she was immediately sought after by all sorts of other women aggrieved at their treatment.

0:51:260:51:32

In 1888, Annie campaigned for election to the Tower Hamlets' School Board

0:51:320:51:39

in a dogcart festooned with red ribbons.

0:51:390:51:43

She won in a landslide victory, polling 15,000 votes.

0:51:430:51:48

Even before they had the vote, women showed they could, and would, win local elections.

0:51:480:51:55

Queen Victoria was not in fact blind

0:52:010:52:04

to the miseries which so appalled the young women social workers of the 1880s and 1890s.

0:52:040:52:12

Shaken by some of the revelations in The Bitter Cry Of Outcast London,

0:52:120:52:18

she actually pressed Gladstone's government to spend more of its time on the problem of housing.

0:52:180:52:23

And her insistence produced a Royal Commission.

0:52:230:52:27

But whether she wanted to see it or COULD have seen it,

0:52:280:52:33

there were, in the warm Jubilee summer of 1887, two Britains.

0:52:330:52:38

Nearly a third of able-bodied men were unemployed.

0:52:380:52:42

Now, thousands of the jobless were also homeless,

0:52:420:52:46

sleeping rough in parks and squares,

0:52:460:52:49

some of them even in open coffins - the undead of Underclass Albion.

0:52:490:52:55

But, of course, the Queen was kept well away from all that.

0:52:580:53:03

What she saw were 30,000 poor schoolchildren in Hyde Park

0:53:030:53:08

who each got a meat pie, a piece of cake and an orange

0:53:080:53:13

to celebrate the great day of her Jubilee.

0:53:130:53:17

The children sang God Save the Queen...somewhat out of tune.

0:53:180:53:24

It was the kind of thing which brought a smile - yes, a smile - on the face of the old Queen.

0:53:260:53:34

It would be like this for the rest of her life -

0:53:370:53:41

the country bathed in summer evening light,

0:53:410:53:45

the faces well-scrubbed and dutiful,

0:53:450:53:48

the old lady at last something like the contented matriarch,

0:53:480:53:53

the grandmother of the Empire - the thrones of Europe filled with her offspring.

0:53:530:54:00

There was, of course, someone missing from this national family photo.

0:54:000:54:05

In the Abbey, amidst all the splendour, Victoria suddenly felt a pang.

0:54:050:54:12

I sat alone - Oh! - without my beloved husband,

0:54:130:54:18

for whom this would have been such a proud day.

0:54:180:54:23

Victoria would have to wait another 14 years, until 1901,

0:54:240:54:29

before she would be reunited with him...

0:54:290:54:33

..to whom the nation and I owe so much.

0:54:330:54:37

Her long-suffering secretary, Frederick Ponsonby,

0:54:380:54:42

said there was nothing Victoria enjoyed so much as arranging funerals.

0:54:420:54:48

And her own was no exception.

0:54:480:54:51

So she ordered a WHITE lying in state and funeral for herself.

0:54:570:55:01

In her hands was a silver crucifix,

0:55:050:55:08

her white dress decorated with cheerful sprays of spring flowers.

0:55:080:55:13

There was a touch of Miss Havisham about this,

0:55:150:55:19

the 80-year-old, flower-bedecked virgin bride.

0:55:190:55:23

But not JILTED by her beloved...

0:55:230:55:26

going to join him.

0:55:260:55:28

When Albert's memorial effigy had been ordered from the sculptor Marochetti in 1862,

0:55:290:55:36

Victoria insisted on hers being made at the same time,

0:55:360:55:41

and with her appearance as it was when he had been taken from her,

0:55:410:55:46

so that they would be reunited - at least in marble - at the same age,

0:55:460:55:51

in the glowing prime of their union.

0:55:510:55:54

The trouble was, no-one could remember where they'd put the statue made 40 years before.

0:55:570:56:04

It had in fact been walled up

0:56:040:56:06

in one of the cavities of a renovated room in Windsor Castle.

0:56:060:56:11

Eventually it was found and laid next to Albert, as per the Queen's orders.

0:56:130:56:18

And there she is, as if the clocks had stopped along with the heart of the Prince Consort.

0:56:180:56:25

But they hadn't, of course. Victoria might lie next to her beloved dressed as a medieval princess,

0:56:260:56:34

but he, of all people, had known it had been PROGRESS which had been the mainspring of her reign.

0:56:340:56:41

Albert had done his best to see that it had been a force for goodness as well as greatness,

0:56:410:56:48

that the surging movement of the machine age would be held in check

0:56:480:56:53

by the moral anchorage of the Victorian home.

0:56:530:56:58

Britain's women - Victoria's sisters and daughters - were all supposed to have been grateful for this,

0:56:590:57:07

to bask in the warmth of the hearth they tended.

0:57:070:57:11

But those cosy fires kindled yearnings that couldn't be contained by a placid domesticity.

0:57:110:57:18

Those little liberators, the cheque book, the latchkey and the bicycle

0:57:180:57:23

beckoned over the doorstep... and into the street.

0:57:230:57:27

And you couldn't tell any longer just how the girls would turn out.

0:57:290:57:34

Riding with the body of the Queen from London to Windsor

0:57:420:57:47

was the widow of one of her Viceroys of India, Lady Lytton.

0:57:470:57:52

Just eight years later,

0:57:520:57:55

HER daughter Constance, imprisoned as a Suffragette,

0:57:550:57:59

would make her statement about the future of women in Britain...

0:57:590:58:05

..by carving, with a piece of broken enamel from a hairpin, the letter V

0:58:070:58:13

into the flesh of her breast.

0:58:130:58:15

But it wasn't V for Victoria.

0:58:200:58:23

It was V for votes.

0:58:230:58:25

Why not join the debate and get involved in British history on the BBC History website?

0:58:320:58:41

You can take your interest further and get to grips with the sources that have shaped history.

0:58:410:58:50

Subtitles by E Kane BBC Broadcast: 2002

0:58:570:59:01

E-mail us at [email protected]

0:59:010:59:05

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