TELEVISION documentaries on the Victorians return again and again to certain images that have come to define the age for the modern viewer: Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed: The Great Western Railway, the Great Exhibition, the grinding poverty and crowded docks of Doré’s London, the growth of Manchester, or Cottonopolis, Florence Nightingale at Scutari, Mary Kingsley in foreign parts, agricultural machinery driven by steam, William Morris at Kelmscott Manor.
The overall impression is one of energy, human and mechanical; of invention, purpose, and productivity; and, ultimately, of success, albeit at a terrible price. Reform and professionalisation were accompanied by rampant consumerism and the production of more stuff than ever before, turning Britain into a bulging Gamage’s catalogue of objects.
Historians are confronted with vast amounts of data, largely collected by the Victorians themselves and now widely available online. As the complexity of what were, in fact, several distinct periods within the Victorian Age becomes clearer, scholarship tends towards microhistory, in reaction against the generalisations of 20th-century commentators.
Yet some hardy individuals continue to offer surveys: Simon Heffer, for example, in High Minds: The Victorians and the birth of modern Britain (2013); David Cannadine in Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906 (2017); and now Jamie Camplin in Being Victorian.
A historical wunderkind at Cambridge in the mid-1960s, Camplin became editorial director and then managing director at Thames & Hudson, one of the great success stories of post-war publishing. The author of a study on Edwardian plutocrats and a historical novel set in 1914, Camplin now turns to the previous century and asks what it was like to be “Victorian”. He begins with Mallock’s The New Republic (1877), a witty roman-à-clef about a house party attended by famous thinkers of the day.
AlamyMany Happy Returns of the Day by William Powell Frith (1856). A black-and-white reproduction of the painting — “a middle-class home” — appears in Camplin’s book
Twenty-five years earlier, Camplin argues, the idea of progress was largely unquestioned, “except by those found in every generation emotionally attached to the past and unable to remember its faults”. His aim in this nicely illustrated book is to consider how it came about that “a window of optimism perhaps unequalled in the history of the world began to falter,” and to reflect on its consequences for our lives today.
The sub-title is somewhat misleading, as the book is largely about the idea of progress rather than what individuals felt about it, a less accessible subject. “The Idea of Progress had a long intellectual tradition,” Camplin tells us. He wants to convey what Victorians thought they were doing, “did do, and why”.
His most effective technique is to swoop down, like a bird of prey, from the heights of generalisation on to a specific example. In a passage on civic pride’s certainty about progress, he writes: “Behind the ceremony, ‘improvement’ underpinned ‘progress’.”
If you had gone to a meeting of the Commissioners discussing “Bingley improvement” in January 1871, you would have heard their views on the control of gas prices, the authorisation of costs for laying water pipes in Church Street, investigation of problems with cess pools, and insufficient drainage in side streets off Hill Street. Excrement and its disposal were pressing challenges for engineers, as they were for crossing sweepers: Mayhew reported that a single horse deposited 38 lbs of dung every day.
Camplin is a sceptic when it comes to his own deracinated age of tech, with its built-in addictions and narrow focus on a tiny screen. (He prefers Disraeli’s scepticism to Gladstone’s earnestness.) His broad conclusion about our Victorian ancestors, however, is that they made “solid progress” towards democracy, the reform of the operation of the state, the protection of employees and of women within marriage, the regulation of companies, public health, education for all, the reform and expansion of universities, and local government.
The reader will look in vain for much discussion of an aspect of life which shaped the spiritual lives of so many Victorians: their Christian faith. Yes, “the Victorians” got things done, but many of them also said their prayers, and some were interested in the question of the development of doctrine and in the progress of biblical criticism.
Dr Michael Wheeler is a Visiting Professor at the University of Southampton and the author of The Year that Shaped the Victorian Age: Lives, loves and letters of 1845 (Books, 31 March 2023).
Being Victorian: How it felt then, why it matters now
Jamie Camplin
Unicorn £25
(978-1-917458-28-3)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50
