A History of Britain by Simon Schama: Episode 13 - Victoria and Her Sisters
Simon Schama journeys through 5,000 years of life in the British Isles.
She began the century that bears her name a princess and ended it as an empress. Queen Victoria ruled one of the most powerful empires in world history during a century of staggering change - for both good and bad. But it was Victorian women who were at the forefront of the fight against its excesses and inequalities, who campaigned for the rights for ordinary people in marriage, education, medicine and the vote.
Watch Complete Series:
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She began the century that bears her name a princess and ended it as an empress. Queen Victoria ruled one of the most powerful empires in world history during a century of staggering change - for both good and bad. But it was Victorian women who were at the forefront of the fight against its excesses and inequalities, who campaigned for the rights for ordinary people in marriage, education, medicine and the vote.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
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TVTranscript
00:00Spring, 1851. The word Victorian enters the English language, and a very small woman enters
00:23a very big building. She's four foot eleven, yet somehow she fills it. The moment so pregnant
00:34for the future seems holy. Victoria is herself flooded with religious awe. One felt filled
00:44with devotion, more so than by any service I have ever heard. Neither she nor anyone
00:52else has ever seen anything like this building before. A greenhouse the size of a palace,
00:59with the difference that this is, from the beginning, a people's palace. A popular magazine
01:06calls it the Crystal Palace. Its grander spaces are filled not with courtiers and flunkies,
01:13steam pumps and locomotives. A huge showcase for Britain's industrial empire. Just three
01:21years before, in 1848, Europe had been torn apart by revolutions. The government had feared
01:28the same would happen here. As it turned out, other countries had war and revolution. We had
01:38the Great Exhibition. Other countries had barricades. We had the cheerful queue for
01:45turnstiles. In an era haunted by fears of overpopulation, this was one of the greatest
01:52mass movements of people in all of European history. Six million came to see the show of shows.
02:00In 1848, industrial machinery had seemed to be the enemy of ordinary men and women. The
02:10gaping mechanical jaws into which countless lives were fed, to be spat out again as cotton
02:17cloth or nails. Technology, the prophets of doom had warned, was an engine of inhumanity,
02:24driving working people to desperation or revolt. But inside the glittering glass house, someone
02:33seemed to have waved a magic wand over the mechanical brutes, turning them from ogres
02:38to busy, friendly giants, happy to be gazed at on a family outing. Not least,
02:46by the first family of the land, assembled amidst the hardware. After all, Papa, Prince Albert,
02:55the moving force behind the exhibition, was the first prince in European history to wear
03:01his connection with the world of business as a badge of pride, not shame.
03:09But what about Mama? As the mother of a rapidly expanding family, Victoria might have been
03:16expected to know that if the cult of progress was to make Britain not just a great nation,
03:22but a good one, be a homemaker, not a homebreaker, it would fall to our women to see us through the
03:29painful change to an industrial society, safe and sound.
03:38But of course, hers was no ordinary family, and despite the family photos,
03:48Queen Victoria was not exactly Mrs Average. The age which would bear her name would see
03:54transformations in the lives of women which Victoria could never have imagined in the
03:59dazzling springtime of her reign. Whether she'd welcome them, whether she'd even understand them,
04:04whether they'd sweep right past her and her glass palace, well, that remained to be seen.
05:05In 1837, when she became queen, Victoria was only 18.
05:14She was as pure as a rosebud, which seemed a welcome change from the decidedly impure reigns
05:21of her uncles George IV and William IV, addicted to the pleasures of the bed and the table,
05:29and indifferent to the hardships endured by the mass of their subjects.
05:39Unlike the uncles, Victoria had been brought up a model of virginal moderation and self-denial.
05:47No regency pampering for her. At one point, she and her mother, the Duchess of Kent,
05:54were forced to move out of Kensington Palace to save money.
06:00So, Victoria's nursery years were spent at bracingly ordinary places, like Ramsgate and Sidmouth.
06:12Much later in life, for some reason, Queen Victoria looked back on her childhood as a time
06:17of sadness and loneliness. Well, it's true that, like many middle-class and aristocratic children,
06:24she was subjected to an evangelical regime of prayers and constant self-examination.
06:32She kept a behaviour book full of solemn and self-critical entries. This one, for August 1832,
06:40reads, very, very, very underlined, terribly, more underlining, naughty.
06:48But could Christian betterment, the driving force of her generation,
06:53be taken from self-improvement to bettering the life of her people? That was the question.
07:04On her first excursion through England's heart of industrial darkness,
07:09the teenage princess would see what she was up against.
07:12Near Birmingham, she travelled through the landscape of a British inferno, sooty and sulphurous.
07:20The men, women, children, country and houses are all black. The country is very desolate everywhere.
07:29There are coals about and the grass is quite blasted and black. I just now see an extraordinary
07:37building flaming with fire. Smoking and burning coal heaps intermingled with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children.
07:53But the view from the coach was the closest Victoria got to the bleak reality of smokestack Britain.
08:03In any case, there was something else on her mind.
08:06Her upcoming date with history. All those tombs and crowns and thrones. Was she ready?
08:18The moment would arrive all too soon in the small hours of June the 20th, 1837, the teenage princess
08:27in her nightgown, woken by the arrival of the Lord Chamberlain and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
08:34Who acquainted me that my poor uncle, the King, was no more and consequently that I am Queen.
08:42I am very young and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced.
08:48But I am sure that very few have more real goodwill and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.
08:59At her coronation on June the 28th, 1838, the young Queen showed what she was made of.
09:12Carrying the immense weight of the robes and regalia with aplomb. But she also managed
09:19something more important than dignity. A glimpse of humanity. When the 87-year-old Lord Roll
09:28tottered as he tried to mount the steps of the throne to do homage, Victoria's kind-hearted
09:35instinct was to rise and go down the steps to meet him. Everyone noticed.
09:43She was young, but not precocious. She knew she needed help and she was wise enough to ask for it
09:50from someone superbly able to give it. The Whig Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne.
10:01He won Victoria's confidence by the simple but inspired tactic of never, ever talking down to her.
10:08Never treating her like a child in need of protection. Instead, he treated her like an adult.
10:13Sophisticated enough to enjoy his worldly wisdom, his political gossip, and even his off-coloured jokes.
10:23Under his guidance, Victoria's confidence in her public persona blossomed.
10:30And she was, of course, the most desirable catch in Europe.
10:38Victoria's mother had thrown banquets and balls to ensure Victoria met the most eligible princes.
10:47Including her Saxe-Coburg cousins, Ernest and Albert.
10:53It may well have been her uncle Leopold, who in the spring of 1839 first made the suggestion to Victoria
11:07that she might like to marry Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg. And like all young women, she probably
11:13initially found the subject a bit embarrassing. But once she got used to it, helped by that handsome,
11:20or as she put it, angelic German head, well, she pretty much ran the show, virtually
11:26grabbing hold of her curly-haired intended and sprinting for the altar.
11:35It was Victoria who supplied the ring, asked Albert for a lock of his hair,
11:41and wallowed in the kissing sessions.
11:44But if she sometimes seemed determined to wear the trousers in this marriage, there were also other
11:50times, especially right after the wedding, when Victoria simply melted away into the amazed bliss
11:57of conjugal love.
12:02When day dawned, for we did not sleep much, and I beheld that beautiful angelic face by my side,
12:10it was more than I can express. He does look so beautiful in his shirt only, with his beautiful throat seen.
12:20Already the second day since our marriage, his love and gentleness is beyond everything.
12:28And to kiss that dear soft cheek, to press my lips to his, is heavenly bliss.
12:36My dearest Albert put on my stockings for me. I went in and saw him shave.
12:44A great delight for me.
12:50Victoria and Albert's passion for each other was a strictly private matter.
12:56But for countless numbers of Britons, in the suffocatingly overcrowded industrial cities like Manchester,
13:02bedroom privacy was an unimaginable luxury.
13:08Manchester was the very best, and the very worst, taken to terrifying extremes.
13:14A new kind of city in the world.
13:16The chimneys of industrial suburbs greeting you with columns of smoke.
13:20200,000 drones packed into the hive to make money for the lords of Cottonopolis.
13:30An American visitor, taken to Manchester's black spots,
13:34saw a new kind of city.
13:36Wretched, defrauded, oppressed, crushed human nature,
13:42lying in bleeding fragments.
13:46And thank God for not having been born poor in England.
13:52The cotton mills were brutally demanding taskmasters.
14:00Whole families spent almost all of their working hours tending to the machines.
14:08They were forced to work on the machines themselves.
14:12Children were given menial, but dangerous jobs,
14:16like scavenging cotton fluff from beneath the moving machinery.
14:24As bad as it was, it was a good time.
14:28Children were given menial, but dangerous jobs,
14:32like scavenging cotton fluff from beneath the moving machinery.
14:42As bad as all this was, it was even worse when there were no jobs at all.
14:48In the first years of Victoria's reign, hands were being laid off in tens of thousands.
14:54It would be a woman, Elizabeth Gaskell, who would be the whistleblower,
14:59the first of Victoria's sisters to stick her neck out.
15:03Amazingly, her blazing protest took the genteel form of a novel.
15:09But what a book.
15:11When Mary Barton was published in 1848,
15:14nobody, not even Charles Dickens, had gone as far as Gaskell
15:19in looking dead-on at the grim reality of industrial misery.
15:29The middle-class wife of a Unitarian preacher,
15:32Gaskell took herself right into the lower depths of the city,
15:36to the gin palaces and open sewers,
15:39dark, reeking alleys,
15:41where skin-and-bones children played among the rats.
15:45In Mary Barton, you didn't just see, you heard working-class Manchester
15:50in the pages of literature for the very first time.
15:54To most of her readers,
15:56it must have been a language more foreign than French or German.
16:07We do not want dainties.
16:09We want bellyfuls.
16:11We do not want their grand houses.
16:13We want a roof to cover us from the rain and the snow and the storm.
16:20Aye, and not alone to cover us,
16:23but the helpless ones that cling to us in the keen wind
16:27and ask us with their eyes
16:29why we brought them into the world to suffer.
16:34By the time you'd finished Mary Barton,
16:36one word, struck like a hammer over and over again,
16:40would have lodged in your memory.
16:42That word was clemmed, starved.
16:45You say it and you call up the entire knife-edge world
16:49of struggling to survive that Elizabeth Gaskell had created.
16:53Elizabeth Gaskell believed
16:55that honest, graphic social reporting could make a difference.
17:00She wrote to her cousin...
17:02My poor Mary Barton is stirring up
17:04all sorts of angry feelings against me in Manchester.
17:09But those best acquainted with the way of thinking and feeling
17:12among the people of Manchester
17:14will never be able to understand it.
17:16One of Gaskell's fans,
17:18the social philosopher Thomas Carlyle,
17:21thought it was pointless to try and improve a system
17:24so fundamentally inhuman as industrialisation.
17:28He said,
17:30if we can't change the system,
17:32we can't change the world.
17:34He said,
17:36if we can't change the world,
17:38we can't change the world.
17:40He said,
17:42if we can't change the world,
17:44we can't change the world.
17:50Every day,
17:51Gaskell settles down to a new way of thinking
17:54and tries to make the system
17:56as fundamentally inhuman as industrialisation.
18:03Nothing is now done by hand.
18:05All is by rule and calculated contrivance.
18:07On every hand,
18:09the living artisan is driven from his workshop
18:12There is no end to machine.
18:25For Carlyle, there was only one route to salvation.
18:29Britain must turn aside from the machine
18:32and summon up the spirit of the Christian centuries of the Middle Ages.
18:37The last time, we'd taken it for granted
18:40that faith was more important than money.
18:46To bring about this great conversion from Babylon to Jerusalem,
18:50nothing less would do than a Christian revolution in building.
18:55And no-one was more convinced of this
18:58than the greatest of the Gothic revivalists,
19:01Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin.
19:05A new generation of churches would be in the front line
19:09in the war to save Victorian souls.
19:14Pugin was never happy just to sound off, though.
19:18He believed, with all the fervour of the old faith,
19:21that a properly beautified church was the very face of heaven.
19:29And before he died, brutally early, at the age of 40,
19:33he made sure, especially here at the Church of St Giles in Cheadle, Staffordshire,
19:39to let some people see how gloriously colourful it could be.
19:53But however spiritually nourishing this might have been,
19:56it wasn't going to put bread on the tables of the needy millions.
20:01Victoria's first decade as Queen
20:03was also a time of economic hardship for many of her subjects.
20:08A slump in foreign trade had led to mass layoffs in the industrial cities.
20:13Bread was an unaffordable luxury for the unemployed,
20:17who blamed the Corn Laws for keeping cheap imported wheat out of Britain.
20:23Working-class anger and desperation was close to boiling point.
20:29For middle-class reformers, the answer was easy.
20:32All we need to do is to get rid of the Corn Laws and all will be well.
20:39But the militant spokesmen of the working people weren't convinced.
20:43They wanted more.
20:45Only a truly popular government, a democracy, in fact,
20:49would do something about their distress.
20:54They set out their demands in a People's Charter,
20:57a new Magna Carta for the modern age.
21:01It demanded the right to vote for all men,
21:05secret ballots, annual parliaments.
21:10How to get them?
21:12Moral force if we may, physical force if we must.
21:20In a climate of fear and hatred,
21:22people had to decide just where their loyalty lay.
21:26If you were on the right side of the tracks,
21:28if you owned one of the great cotton-spinning mills,
21:31like this one in Ancoats,
21:33you would think the Chartists were just a mob misled by demagogues.
21:37Besides, whoever said capitalism was a funfair?
21:41As long as you kept your hands off the market,
21:44well, the market sooner or later would right itself.
21:47And the poor, the people who worked here, who are hungry now,
21:52would be feeding off the fat of the land tomorrow.
21:57On April 10th, 1848, a monster Chartist petition,
22:03signed by nearly two million men and women,
22:06so huge it would take two hackney cabs to get it to Parliament,
22:10was brought to London.
22:14Around 150,000 Chartists, with bans and banners
22:18and green, red and white rosettes,
22:21converged on Kennington Common
22:23for the biggest political rally in British history.
22:29The government was ready for them.
22:32London was turned into a huge armed camp,
22:35with mounted guards, guns and even cannon posted at critical sites
22:40like the Tower of London and the Bank of England.
22:43Soldiers were posted on the Mall to prevent access to Buckingham Palace,
22:48but the royal family had fled to the Isle of Wight.
22:52Faced with this immense display of strong-armed force,
22:56the leader, newspaper owner and MP Fergus O'Connor,
23:00was left with no choice.
23:02He gave orders that nobody should provoke the troops, however goaded,
23:07for the result would have been a bloodbath.
23:10Some of the younger firebrands thought it was a sell-out.
23:14But then what was Fergus O'Connor supposed to have done?
23:17Unleashed his People's Army on the soldiers of the Queen
23:21only to get them mown down?
23:23Now, what good would that have done
23:25because of the working people of Britain?
23:30And besides, just look at this photograph of the meeting on the Common.
23:36The very first political photograph in our history.
23:40Not exactly about storm the barricades, are they?
23:50It may have ended, for the moment,
23:52the threat of the kind of revolution
23:54that had spread through European capitals in 1848 happening here too.
23:59But the dream of so many working people,
24:02for some way or another,
24:05was as urgent as ever.
24:07If they weren't going to get it by armed revolt,
24:10then they would get it in the British way,
24:13in small but decisive steps,
24:16by coming together in self-sufficient communities.
24:23This is a photograph of the meeting on the Common.
24:26It's the first of its kind in the history of Britain.
24:31This is all that survives intact of those little pipe dreams.
24:36One of the cottages of the Chartist Land Company settlement
24:40at Great Doddford in Worcestershire.
24:45Founded in 1845,
24:47the Land Company was the brainchild of none other than Fergus O'Connor.
24:52It bought land, which it divided among its members,
24:56into small holdings,
24:58meant to take people out of the industrial slums
25:01and back to the rural world of their forefathers.
25:07They get a few acres to grow their own food and make a small living.
25:14Do or die was the motto of the incoming settlers
25:17to places like Great Doddford,
25:19and their work was no picnic,
25:21breaking soil, planting hedges, making roads,
25:25with no certain outcome.
25:28But some of them were determined to make a go of it,
25:32especially Chartist women.
25:34Anne Wood, for example, who lived in a cottage very much like this one,
25:39was just an Edinburgh charlady,
25:41but one with enough Scottish thrift and determination
25:44to save up £150 to put down for a lot at Great Doddford.
25:50That gave her the pick of the crop,
25:53and after settling at number 36, along with her two daughters,
25:57Anne did well enough, at any rate,
26:00to lead a long life, dying at 86.
26:06So when all the sound and fury had ebbed away,
26:09what seemed to count for most was making a home, not a revolution.
26:15Prince Albert himself understood this.
26:18In the year of the Great Exhibition,
26:20he commissioned and had built model lodgings for the working class.
26:24Later, they were rebuilt at Kennington,
26:27on the very site of the Chartist revolution that wasn't.
26:32And as the boom years of the 1850s replaced the hungry 40s,
26:37Britain had never seemed so middle class,
26:41starting with the monarchy.
26:44The thousands of photographic visiting cards circulating the country
26:48showed the Queen and Prince Albert,
26:50not on their aristocratic high horse,
26:53but acting out the rituals of middle-class life.
26:57Respectable, reliable, even a little boring.
27:04Queen Victoria was to have nine children in all,
27:07and she was to be the first of nine.
27:10Queen Victoria was to have nine children in all,
27:13and never had Britain had a monarch who went to such lengths
27:17to advertise her domestic pleasures to the nation.
27:25The stroll in the park.
27:30The romp with the children.
27:35The sing-song round the tree at Christmas.
27:41And on the Isle of Wight, a modest little seaside getaway,
27:46Osborne House.
27:50Designed by Albert and relished by Victoria
27:53as an idyllic retreat from the pressures of rule.
28:04It was here at Osborne House
28:07It was here, at last,
28:09that Albert, who'd been kept from meaningful public work,
28:13got his desk, sitting beside hers,
28:16from which he could direct his campaign
28:19to make industrial Britain a better as well as a richer place.
28:26To see them together, beavering away,
28:29you'd suppose it was a perfect partnership.
28:32But not so perfect that this couple, in every other respect,
28:36so mutually devoted, were spared all arguments.
28:40They had their spats, just like the rest of us.
28:46Victoria is too hasty and passionate
28:49for me to be able often to speak of my difficulties.
28:54She will not hear me out, but flies into a rage
28:57and overwhelms me with reproaches and suspiciousness,
29:00want of trust, ambition, envy.
29:05For her part, too,
29:07Victoria wasn't above letting rip when she got too worked up.
29:11Single people, she'd occasionally let it be known,
29:15were often much better off than unhappily married couples,
29:19forced to stay together by convention.
29:24All marriage is such a lottery.
29:27The happiness is always an exchange,
29:30although it may be a very happy one.
29:32Still, the poor woman is bodily and morally the husband's slave.
29:39That always sticks in my throat.
29:44Astonishingly, this echoed exactly the kind of thing
29:47coming from the mouth and the pen
29:49of two of the most daring critics
29:51of the Victorian conventions of marriage,
29:54John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor.
29:57Husband and wife for seven years,
29:59tortured lovers in a peculiar Victorian way for a lot longer,
30:03and the joint authors of On the Subjection of Women.
30:10This was, don't forget, an age in which a woman's property
30:14automatically passed to her husband when they got married.
30:18Husbands had the right to beat their wives
30:22as long as the cane was no thicker than their thumb,
30:25and to lock them up for refusing sex.
30:39In 1830, the philosopher John Stuart Mill went to a dinner party
30:44which changed his life forever.
30:47He was struck dumb by the vision of a swan throat
30:51and dark, enormous eyes.
30:54They belonged to one Harriet Taylor,
30:57writer, poet and unhappily married wife.
31:04Between the soup and the port,
31:06John and Harriet were swept away by an instantaneous knowledge
31:10that they'd found their true soulmates.
31:14But being two serious intellectuals,
31:17Mill and Taylor's forbidden love
31:19couldn't just be a selfish private passion.
31:22It had to be thought out loud as a public issue.
31:27Their situation made only too clear
31:30the hypocrisy of the loveless Victorian marriage.
31:36In some slave codes, the slave could,
31:39under certain circumstances of ill usage,
31:42legally compel the master to sell him.
31:45But no amount of ill usage without adultery superadded
31:49will in England free a wife from her tormentor.
31:54Surely, there had to be another way out than adultery
31:58or suffering misery in silence.
32:03What had to be done was to expose the master
32:06What had to be done was to expose marriages
32:09as the property transaction they often were
32:13and then use education and law to enlighten and protect women.
32:22Taylor and Mill would have to wait 19 years
32:25for a chance to practise what they preached.
32:28In 1849, Harriet's unloved husband finally died,
32:33freeing the way for her to marry John Stuart Mill.
32:38But not before he formally renounced all the rights
32:42the law gave him over his wife's property and person.
32:50Their happiness was short-lived.
32:53Harriet Taylor died of TB,
32:55in November 1858.
32:57But there would be an epitaph.
33:00All their ideas poured into On The Subjection Of Women,
33:05their book that Mill published in 1869.
33:12Happy and equal marriages were no longer its only concern.
33:16Women who made up almost half the workforce of Britain
33:20should have pay equal to their husbands.
33:23And most breathtakingly of all, they should have the vote.
33:29It was a book whose ideals gave powerful momentum
33:33to the women's movement.
33:37After the Second Reform Act in 1867,
33:41almost all male householders had the vote,
33:44which made the fact that female householders hadn't
33:48seem glaringly unfair.
33:50Mill, himself an MP, had tried to argue their case
33:54and even won the support of 73 other MPs.
33:59The vote was lost, of course, but the words had been spoken,
34:03and they were heard especially loudly in Mrs Gatskill's Manchester.
34:08The breakthrough had been made.
34:10A democracy worth the name could not be just for men.
34:15Queen Victoria may have had her doubts about unhappy marriages,
34:19but this was a violation of God's ordering of right relations
34:23between the sexes.
34:25She let it be known, in no uncertain terms,
34:28what she thought of.
34:30This mad, wicked folly of women's rights,
34:33with all its attendant horrors,
34:35is a disgrace to the world.
34:37It is a disgrace to the world.
34:39It is a disgrace to the world.
34:41This mad, wicked folly of women's rights,
34:44with all its attendant horrors,
34:46on which her poor, feeble sex is bent,
34:49forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.
34:57There was fit and proper work for women to do, Victoria allowed,
35:01but only the kind which used the qualities of tenderness
35:05which God had given to their sex.
35:08These women were rightly called sisters and matrons.
35:13But was it quite right for the Queen's own nephew
35:17to call one of them Mammy?
35:21Florence Nightingale may well have garnered the reputation,
35:25back in Britain among civilians,
35:27as the Angel of Mercy in the Crimea,
35:30but the woman whom surviving soldiers most adored,
35:33and for the very good reason that she saw them through the worst,
35:37the most forgotten and the most unlikely of Victoria's sisters.
35:41And her name was Mary Seacole.
35:46Mary Seacole was West Indian,
35:49the daughter of a Scotsman and a Jamaican woman.
35:52Largely self-taught, her Caribbean remedies became famous
35:56after they had been shown to stop violent dysentery
35:59and to bring yellow fever and cholera victims back from death's door.
36:07When Britain joined the Crimean War in 1854,
36:11she tried to volunteer her services at the front.
36:16But Mary didn't exactly fit the profile of middle-class nurses.
36:21She was turned down by the likes of Nurse Nightingale.
36:27So Mary got herself to the Crimea,
36:30under her own steam and with her own funds,
36:33and once she got there, she did something truly extraordinary.
36:39Mary Seacole built her British hotel right on the front line,
36:44and it doubled up, both as a refectory,
36:47feeding the boys about to go into action,
36:50and a recovery station for the sick and wounded.
36:55Every morning, she'd make up great vats of nutritious food,
36:59like rice pudding,
37:01saddle up a pair of mules and ride into the heart of the action,
37:05looking for the wounded,
37:07to whom she'd dole out food, hot tea, medicine,
37:11but most of all, motherly love.
37:18Mortars would whiz past the big old woman,
37:21trundling along the lines.
37:25Upon these occasions, those around would cry out,
37:28lie down, mother, lie down!
37:32And with very undignified and unladylike haste,
37:35I had to embrace the earth.
37:39After the war was over, the soldiers feted her at a charity gala.
37:46She'd become, briefly, an eminent Victorian.
37:54Suppose, though, women drawn to help the sick
37:57went one stage further and dreamed of being a doctor.
38:01Now, that was a different story.
38:07In 1860, Elizabeth Garrett enrolled as a surgical nurse
38:11at Middlesex Hospital, but her sights were set higher.
38:16In between the swabs and the bedpans,
38:18she was looking carefully at surgical operations,
38:22and she was also cutting up body parts in her bedroom.
38:28This improvised education made her bold enough
38:32to take the hospital's medical, not nursing, exams.
38:36And when the time came to publish the results,
38:39one E. Garrett had come top.
38:44Ordered to keep the outrage secret, she went public instead.
38:49Nine years later, the French gave her an MD,
38:53and in 1874, the first medical college expressly for women
38:58was set up in London.
39:02For Victoria, the mere idea of slips of girls looking at,
39:07much less cutting up, the naked bodies of dead men
39:10was an unthinkable indecency.
39:14But no doctor was of any help to her
39:17in the greatest crisis of her life.
39:20For in 1861, the same year that Elizabeth Garrett
39:25cut her way into medicine, Albert contracted typhoid,
39:30which, after a few months of horrifyingly swift deterioration,
39:35ended in his death in December.
39:42Everything in those last weeks became suddenly invested
39:45with an almost religious significance.
39:48Here, for example, is the last book read to Albert,
39:51Scott's Peverell of the Peak,
39:53and On the Flyleaf the Queen Has Written.
39:56This book was read up to the mark on page 81
40:00to my beloved husband during his fatal illness
40:04and within three days of its terrible termination.
40:10You turn to page 81, and here's how it reads.
40:14He heard the sound of voices,
40:16but they ceased to convey any impression to his understanding.
40:20And in a few minutes, he was faster asleep
40:23than he'd ever been in the whole course of his life.
40:31Victoria buried her beloved Albert in the Italian up mausoleum
40:36she built here at Frogmore in Windsor Great Park.
40:45Albert's death threw Victoria into a paroxysm of grief.
40:51Not for her, the hysterical acceptance
40:54of the inscrutable will of the Almighty.
40:57She had lost not only her co-ruler, but her helpmate,
41:01and vanished too was her domestic idol.
41:05At the abyss of her misery, she must have thought
41:08that all chance of contentment was lost.
41:12All chance of contentment had gone.
41:18My life as a happy one is ended.
41:21The world is gone for me.
41:24If I must live on, and I will do nothing to make me worse than I am,
41:29it is henceforth for our poor fatherless children,
41:33for my unhappy country, which has lost all in losing him.
41:43Death was an immense presence in Victorian life.
41:48Perhaps because it was the one conquest denied to the soldiers
41:53and the engineers and the captains of industry
41:56who seemed to be able to conquer everything else.
42:00If they couldn't stop their loved ones from going to their graves,
42:04they could at least create the illusion in marble and photographs
42:08that they were still alongside those who mourned them.
42:13This, in her distraught, inconsolable grief,
42:17Victoria knew how to do.
42:21With religious devotion,
42:23she set out Albert's shaving equipment every morning...
42:28..and fresh evening clothes and a clean towel every evening.
42:33Missing his physical presence, she slept with his nightgown by her side.
42:43The exuberant, headstrong young woman
42:46shrank into the hard shell of a forbidding, inconsolable widow,
42:52for whom the least sign of merriment
42:55was a betrayal of Albert's sainted memory.
43:00She seemed, in a way which no-one accustomed to the strong-minded queen
43:05could ever have imagined,
43:07somehow no longer in charge of either herself or the country.
43:13Victoria's sense of moral calling, so strong from the beginning of her reign,
43:19had become so dependent on Albert the Good's judgment
43:23that now that he was gone,
43:25she seemed at a loss about how and where to exercise it.
43:30It never occurred to her that women alone,
43:33either as widows or spinsters,
43:35might be able to do good by themselves,
43:38to make a life, even a career, on their own.
43:47If she wanted to see how this could be done,
43:50all she needed to do was to take her pony trap
43:53a mile or two down the road from Osborne to Freshwater
43:57to visit someone who, though neither widow nor spinster,
44:01was very much her own woman.
44:07The photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.
44:13Since Victoria was herself an avid collector of photographs,
44:17she might have been curious about this eccentric,
44:20half-Frenchwoman's notorious darkroom.
44:26For Julia Cameron, photography was not just an amateur hobby.
44:32The poetic lyricism of her photographs disguises
44:36the hard need she had to make some money.
44:39Worse, she seemed, perversely,
44:42to glory in the male mess of camerawork.
44:47Flouncing around in a converted henhouse that was her studio,
44:51her dresses and hands stained with black silver nitrate,
44:55conscripting men and women models like a recruiting sergeant major
44:59and bellowing terrifyingly at them if they moved before they were told.
45:04Needless to say, the men who ran the Royal Photographic Society
45:08refused to take her seriously.
45:12Admiring the enthusiasm of Mrs Cameron,
45:15the committee regrets that they cannot concur
45:18with the lavish praise which has been bestowed on her productions
45:22by the non-photographic press,
45:24feeling convinced that she will herself adopt
45:27an entirely different mode of representing herself.
45:30What they meant, of course, was that a soft woman
45:34couldn't be expected to master machinery, chemicals,
45:38the hard technology of the job,
45:41let alone make a professional career out of it,
45:44despite Julia's obvious success at both.
45:49But some of the men who had the chance to work with her
45:52were not the only ones.
45:55But some of the most powerful and intelligent
45:58of the Victorian great and good,
46:00Tennyson,
46:02Carlisle
46:05and the astronomer Sir John Herschel,
46:08who had obediently posed,
46:10were not deceived by the poetic light of her work.
46:15They embraced her as the greatest portraitist of her age.
46:20Julia's triumph in making a profession as an artist
46:24must have been noticed by all the young women of the 1870s and 1880s
46:29who wanted more for themselves than just a destiny as wife and mother.
46:50After Girton College, the first Uxbridge college for women,
46:54opened its doors near Cambridge in 1873.
46:58They had, for the first time, somewhere that would educate them,
47:02liberate them, if they chose, from middle-class domesticity.
47:09But even as they drank in knowledge behind the red walls of Girton,
47:13some of those young women longed to get beyond the cloister.
47:20The old ways of women's useful work,
47:23teaching, preaching, nursing, were no longer enough,
47:27nor was just being an educated designer of the house beautiful.
47:34They were drawn instead,
47:36as Elizabeth Gaskell had been a generation earlier,
47:39to the ugliness everywhere in a Britain
47:42feeling once more the strain of economic crisis.
47:47Some of them even decided to make that new home
47:51in the places most shocking to their parents' generation,
47:55in the slums of the industrial cities,
47:59to steep themselves in the dirt and anger of their poor, abused sisters.
48:07To face up to harsh truths,
48:10the kind spelled out by the young George Bernard Shaw.
48:17Your slaves are beyond caring for your cries.
48:22They breed like rabbits,
48:24and their poverty breeds filth, ugliness, dishonesty,
48:28disease, obscenity, drunkenness and murder.
48:36The bravest of this new generation
48:39could even face head-on the most unpalatable truths,
48:44like that link between breeding and destitution.
48:49Annie Besant was the kind of do-gooder clergyman's wife
48:53unthinkable a generation earlier,
48:56and still unthinkable to the likes of the Queen.
48:59Annie Besant had scandalised the country
49:02by publishing contraception advice for working people.
49:06Such impertinence would not go unpunished, however,
49:10and Annie found herself the victim of a court order.
49:13She lost custody of her daughter to her former husband,
49:17an unforgiving time for women judged as unfit mothers.
49:22But nothing would stop her crusading.
49:27Searching round for a woman's cause,
49:29Annie found one in the teenage matchgirls
49:32who worked amidst phosphorus fumes for Bryant and May in East London.
49:37They were paid just between four and ten shillings a week,
49:41and if they had dirty feet or an untidy bench,
49:44they were fined taking more money out of their already pathetic wages.
49:51Most horrifying of all, the girls ran the constant risk
49:55of contracting the hideously disfiguring fossy jaw,
50:00since Bryant and May persisted in the use of phosphorus,
50:04which other match companies had given up.
50:09At the same time, the company was paying huge dividends
50:12to its shareholders, a disproportionate number of whom,
50:16Annie enjoyed revealing, were the clergy.
50:21Annie wrote an article about the plight of the matchgirls
50:24for her campaigning newspaper, The Link,
50:27and together with fellow socialist campaigner Herbert Burroughs,
50:32she distributed copies of it at the gates of the factory.
50:36The owners of Bryant and May threatened the girls
50:39with instant dismissal if they didn't sign a document
50:43repudiating the article and the journalists.
50:47But instead of signing,
50:49the girls went en masse to Annie and Burroughs with their story.
50:53They told her...
50:55You had spoken up for us. We weren't going back on you.
51:00A strike committee was formed.
51:02Besant and Burroughs promised to pay the wages
51:05of any girls dismissed for their action.
51:08George Bernard Shaw volunteered as the cashier of the strike fund.
51:121,400 girls came out.
51:15The company eventually settled and Annie Besant and the girls
51:19were triumphant.
51:23She was hailed as the working girls champion
51:26and was immediately sought after
51:28by all sorts of other women aggrieved at their treatment.
51:34In 1888, Annie campaigned for election
51:37to the Tower Hamlets school board
51:40in a dog cart festooned with red ribbons.
51:43She won in a landslide victory, polling 15,000 votes.
51:49Even before they had the vote,
51:51women showed they could and would win local elections.
52:01Queen Victoria was not, in fact, blind to the miseries
52:05which so appalled the young women social workers
52:08of the 1880s and 1890s.
52:12Shaken by some of the revelations in the bitter cry of outcast London,
52:18she actually pressed Gladstone's government
52:21to spend more of its time on the problem of housing
52:24and her insistence produced a royal commission.
52:30But whether she wanted to see it or could have seen it,
52:33there were, in the warm Jubilee summer of 1887, two Britons.
52:39Nearly a third of able-bodied men were unemployed.
52:43Now, thousands of the jobless were also homeless,
52:47sleeping rough in parks and squares,
52:50some of them even in open coffins, the undead of underclass Albion.
52:59But, of course, the Queen was kept well away from all that.
53:04What she saw were 30,000 poor schoolchildren in Hyde Park
53:09who each got a meat pie, a piece of cake and an orange
53:14to celebrate the great day of her Jubilee.
53:19The children sang God Save The Queen, somewhat out of tune.
53:27It was the kind of thing which brought a smile, yes, a smile,
53:31on the face of the old Queen.
53:38It would be like this for the rest of her life,
53:41the country bathed in summer evening light,
53:44the faces well scrubbed and dutiful.
53:48The old lady, at last, something like the contented matriarch,
53:53the grandmother of the empire,
53:56the thrones of Europe filled with her offspring.
54:01There was, of course, someone missing from this national family photo.
54:06In the abbey, amidst all the splendour,
54:09Victoria suddenly felt a pang.
54:13I sat alone, oh...
54:17..without my beloved husband,
54:19for whom this would have been such a proud day.
54:24Victoria would have to wait another 14 years, until 1901,
54:29before she would be reunited with him.
54:34To whom the nation and I owe so much.
54:39Her long-suffering secretary, Frederick Ponsonby,
54:43said there was nothing Victoria enjoyed so much as arranging funerals,
54:48and her own was no exception.
54:57So she ordered a white lying in state and funeral for herself.
55:04In her hands was a silver crucifix,
55:08her white dress decorated with cheerful sprays of spring flowers.
55:16There was a touch of Miss Havisham about this,
55:19the 80-year-old flower-bedecked virgin bride,
55:23but not jilted by her beloved...
55:26..going to join him.
55:28When Albert's memorial effigy had been ordered
55:31from the sculptor Marichetti in 1862,
55:34Victoria insisted on hers being made at the same time,
55:39and with her appearance as it was when he had been taken from her,
55:43so that they would be reunited, at least in marble,
55:47at the same age, in the glowing prime of their union.
55:53The trouble was, no-one could remember
55:56where they'd put the statue made 40 years before.
55:59It had, in fact, been walled up
56:02in one of the cavities of a renovated room in Windsor Castle.
56:08Eventually, it was found,
56:10and laid next to Albert as per the Queen's orders.
56:14And there she is, as if the clocks had stopped.
56:18But they hadn't, of course.
56:20Victoria might lie next to her beloved,
56:23dressed as a medieval princess,
56:25but he, of all people, had known it had been progress
56:29which had been the mainspring of her reign.
56:33Albert had done his best to see that it had been a fortune
56:37for Victoria to be reunited with her beloved.
56:40And that it had been the mainspring of her reign.
56:44Albert had done his best to see that it had been a force for goodness
56:49as well as greatness,
56:51that the surging movement of the Machine Age
56:54would be held in check by the moral anchorage of the Victorian home.
57:02The women of Britain, Victoria's sisters and daughters,
57:06were all supposed to have been grateful for this,
57:09and for the hearth they tended.
57:11But those cosy fires kindled yearnings
57:14that couldn't be contained by a placid domesticity.
57:18Those little liberators, the checkbook, the latchkey and the bicycle,
57:24beckoned over the doorstep and into the street.
57:31And you couldn't tell any longer just how the girls would turn out.
57:40MUSIC CONTINUES
57:46Riding with the body of the Queen from London to Windsor
57:50was the widow of one of her viceroys of India, Lady Lytton.
57:55Just eight years later, her daughter Constance,
57:59in prison as a suffragette,
58:01would make her statement about the future of women in Britain.
58:06By carving with a piece of broken enamel from a hairpin...
58:12..the letter V into the flesh of her breast.
58:19But it wasn't V for Victoria.
58:23It was V for votes.
58:35MUSIC CONTINUES
59:05MUSIC CONCLUDES