BBC programme shows how the Victorians had more fun than us
To Jeremy Paxman, Victorian houses look grim. Grimness is a leitmotif of his BBC series The Victorians, which starts tomorrow – workhouses, gruel, industrial accidents, slums, the usual suspects of "Dickensian conditions".
But that is all wrong. The Victorians were a fiery bundle of energy – noisy, voracious, partial to bright colours and bad jokes, fit, energetic, sentimental but hardy, unconventional, but addicted to reform and liberty. A popular weekly paper was simply called Fun.
Fond of plum puddings and pantomime, fisticuffs and education, our forebears were the opposite of the dour, bloodless caricatures sketched by the jealous Lytton Strachey 17 years after the end of their era. They had suddenly met things undreamt of before: vast cities, famine, mass production, global wars. But their response was resolute and successful. The Victorian age was not distinguished so much by child labour as by compulsory education; not by industrial accidents but by Factory Acts; not by slums but by suburbs; not by cholera but by sewerage (well in hand before the summer of the Great Stink).
Paxman says that the Victorians lived in fear of the masses. How could they, when they gave them the vote, and walked among them protected only by constables bearing not guns but truncheons? Liberty meant that anyone could buy a revolver or an ounce of opium.
Remember, too, what the masses rioted about. Chartism, the largest populist movement, led to huge demonstrations and monster petitions, not riots. But close the pubs on Sunday afternoons, as was tried in 1855, and rioters crowded Hyde Park. Ten years later, religion provoked riot in the East End: the ignorant fear of Papistry, not the hunger of the poor...
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
But that is all wrong. The Victorians were a fiery bundle of energy – noisy, voracious, partial to bright colours and bad jokes, fit, energetic, sentimental but hardy, unconventional, but addicted to reform and liberty. A popular weekly paper was simply called Fun.
Fond of plum puddings and pantomime, fisticuffs and education, our forebears were the opposite of the dour, bloodless caricatures sketched by the jealous Lytton Strachey 17 years after the end of their era. They had suddenly met things undreamt of before: vast cities, famine, mass production, global wars. But their response was resolute and successful. The Victorian age was not distinguished so much by child labour as by compulsory education; not by industrial accidents but by Factory Acts; not by slums but by suburbs; not by cholera but by sewerage (well in hand before the summer of the Great Stink).
Paxman says that the Victorians lived in fear of the masses. How could they, when they gave them the vote, and walked among them protected only by constables bearing not guns but truncheons? Liberty meant that anyone could buy a revolver or an ounce of opium.
Remember, too, what the masses rioted about. Chartism, the largest populist movement, led to huge demonstrations and monster petitions, not riots. But close the pubs on Sunday afternoons, as was tried in 1855, and rioters crowded Hyde Park. Ten years later, religion provoked riot in the East End: the ignorant fear of Papistry, not the hunger of the poor...