I’m rather in awe of Jeremy Paxman. Yes, he’s a sharp investigative journalist, and the grumpy presenter of University Challenge, who seems smarter than most of the students. But he’s also a great factual writer.
I particularly enjoyed his book on the
legacy of the British Empire. Also his elegy on the First World War. If you read them, you’ll find more than one reference surfacing in my earlier posts.
But here, I’m sharing another Paxman book: “The Victorians”. Yes, it’s a history book, originally a TV series, – but with a difference. It explores how Victorian society operated, but through the window of its paintings. What a brilliant idea – look at the paintings, and you’ll glimpse the psychology and culture of the times. Here’s a resumé of the book.
The window opens and shuts
This painterly window into British society was only open for a very short time. Up until the tail-end of the 1700s, the major subjects of artists were the rich folk who paid for their paintings. Narrative paintings mainly covered the antics of gods and goddesses, nymphs and dryads, Romans and Greeks. Common folk didn’t feature much.
There were exceptions, of course. Hogarth recorded the darker side of life in the capital, with prints like Beer Street and Gin Lane. (Moral: beer good, gin bad).
Cartoonists like Gilray poked fun at the great and the good. But satirists were more at ease with their engraving tools and pencils, than the whiff of oil paint.
Everything changed with the Victorians. The leisured classes flocked to exhibitions, and bought prints of what they saw. They were fascinated with seeing how their society worked, with each level contributing towards a common goal.
The window closed on this type of painting at the end of Victoria’s reign, for the same reason that video cassettes disappeared into the void. Painting as social commentary was overtaken by new technology, as photography and then cinematography emerged triumphant.
The Madness of Crowds
The Victorians loved a crowd scene. As Paxman remarks, they weren’t terribly interested in the baying mobs that populated bloody battle scenes of old. They went for busy social events, full of people from all levels going about their business. For the first time, paintings depicted the full strata of society. The lower classes were no longer reduced to the roles of servant, nursemaid or peasant.
Look at William Powell Frith’s The Derby Day, 1858.
And you can see it for free – it’s in Tate Britain, with a later version in Manchester Art Gallery. In fact, all the paintings mentioned here are on public display in one gallery or another, and most are free to enter.
There’s a lot going on in this painting. An acrobat waits to do a turn with his young son. But the boy’s distracted by the sumptuous picnic basket laid out before him. On the left, a huckster sets up a gaming table and is busy fleecing likely targets. His latest victim stands despondent, with hands in his empty pockets. A country yokel, dressed in an old-fashioned smock is drawn in, with his anxious sweetheart pulling him away. Society ladies in their carriages flirt with their beaux.
And almost incidentally, in the far right background, you see a pair of jockeys riding their mounts. Interestingly, Frith used the developing (sorry) medium of photography, with images as guides for the composition of his paintings, including this one.
Seasides
Seeing how popular the idea of crowd scenes was, Frith caught the wave. He focused on the emerging popularity of trips to the seaside, with works such as Life at the Seaside: Ramsgate Sands, 1854, Royal Collection.
Others followed his lead, with a bucketful of sandy seaside crowd paintings: Brighton Front, by Solomon; To Brighton and Back by Rossiter; Rhyl Sands by Cox, as examples.
Waiting in line
It wasn’t only the crowd at leisure that attracted painters’ attention. Artists also recorded the bustle of workaday life. For example, look at The General Post Office, One Minute to Six by GE Hicks, 1860, Museum of London.
It faithfully reflects the frustration we’ve all felt, patiently queuing as the minutes to closing time ebb away.
All human life is there – an old man wipes his face in anxiety – will he get to the front of the queue in time? The office boy stands clutching his bundle of business letters with a harried look on his face. And there on the left, a policeman apprehends a thief who’s dipped the pockets of the unsuspecting lady dressed in lilac.
An honest day’s work…
Here’s a painting that combines the Victorians’ love of the communal hubbub, with perhaps the moral value nearest to their hearts – the virtues of an honest day’s work. Ford Maddox Brown’s Work, first version finished 1865, Manchester Art Gallery
shows a hive of social activity. A group of burley workmen toil, digging a tunnel in a road. It’s a real highway too – Heath Street, in Hampstead, London. (Probably the men are working on London’s new sewerage system, implemented in haste, once the link between sanitation and the prevention of typhus and cholera became apparent).
As in Derby Day, all human life is here, from the rich couple riding their hacks in the background, to the poor flower seller on the left, and the ragamuffin children in the foreground. The Victorians never wasted an opportunity to moralise, so there’s the lady in the mauve bonnet on the left trying to give one of the workers an evangelical tract, warning against the perils of drink. The workman on the right is having none of it, and is thirstily quaffing his tankard of beer.
On the far right, you have two intellectuals, observing, but doing no manual work themselves. It’s a rather subversive message from Brown! The man with the wide-brimmed hat was Thomas Carlyle, known as The Sage of Chelsea, arguably one of the most famous philosophers of the period.
Incidentally, he was married – very unhappily – to Jane Carlyle, a writer herself. Both awkward characters, their mutual discontentment and differences were infamous. One wag wrote:
‘It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four’’.
…and a hard day’s toil
Our Victorian forebears weren’t, however, too keen to acknowledge the plight of those outside this rosy-tinted view of social interdependence. Those who couldn’t work, or who couldn’t find work, lived in the shadow of the workhouse. Before Disraeli’s government introduced acts from the 1870s, limiting the hours a person might work, too many laboured into exhaustion or even death.
The artistic fraternity weren’t too keen on depicting the harsher realities of working life: the paying public didn’t like it. Even deliberate paintings of working-class scenes were sanitised; ragamuffins were grubby but never filthy, flower-girls had rosy cheeks and wore pretty bonnets. Children were invariably adorable, chubby little angels, like the portrayal by John Millais of his grandson in Bubbles, 1886, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool. The harsh realities of child-labour were seldom portrayed.
Bubbles
Incidentally, Bubbles became one of the first artworks to be used in commercial advertising. Millais agreed to alter his painting to show a bar of Pears soap in the child’s hands – an outrageous idea for the time. He attracted much criticism, for allegedly prostituting his art for commerce. Perhaps he was just ahead of his time.
There were occasional honourable exceptions to the Victorians’ saccharine views of working class life. The Stonebreaker, by Henry Wallis, 1857, Birmingham Art Gallery,
shows something of the reality. A workman, filthy with the grime from his working day, rests in an exhausted sleep – or death? The question remains unanswered. He’s working as a stone-breaker, so why does he wear a shepherd’s smock? Wallis is alluding to the great rural exodus of unemployed agricultural workers from country to town. Our poor country work-hand is a casualty of the seismic upheavals of the Industrial Revolution.
The Angel in the House
What a pickle the Victorians stewed themselves in, when it came to women! Their polarised view of women as either angels or whores is evident in so many of their paintings. Paxman points out that the queen herself was painted as an exemplar of the perfect middle-class housewife, for example in WIndsor Castle in Modern Times, 1843, by Landseer.
However, far more interesting was the topic of fallen women, and the fates that befell them. Rather unpalatable to modern tastes is the triptych of paintings by Augustus Leopold Egg, called Past and Present, 1858, all at Tate Britain.
In the first, a betrayed husband holds his wife’s compromising correspondence, while she lies at his feet, begging his forgiveness. Their children look on in bewilderment, as their house of cards tumble – what a metaphor!
In the second, five years on, the two daughters gaze sadly at the moon.
In the last, the woman has inevitably met her deserved punishment. Cast out, destitute, and dying under a dark arch, the woman gazes at the same moon as her now-orphaned daughters. The moral of the tale delivered with a sledgehammer blow.
Only a bird in a gilded cage
What’s an even better subject than a fallen woman? Why, a fallen woman who has seen the light! In The Awakening Conscience by Holman Hunt 1853, (Tate Britain, London), a kept woman, sitting on the lap of her protector, suddenly recognises her sin, and sees a path to redemption.
Victorian viewers immediately picked up the clues to her status. The room is too vulgarly furnished to be a decent home in good taste. The decor is far too garish. And most shocking of all – she’s not wearing a wedding ring. To hammer the point home, Hunt piles on the metaphors: a music sheet on the piano of a nostalgic song, a cat under a chair mercilessly teasing a bird, a carelessly flung tapestry unravelling on the floor. The audience would have relished the titillating subject matter, whilst sagely approving the moral message.
If it’s History, it’s art.
The ever-ingenious Victorians found another way to enjoy the titillation of naughty art, whilst maintaining their high moral tone about the role of women. Semi-nudity was acceptable, as long as it was cloaked in antiquity. This escape clause led to a flood of erotic nude art set in historic times. It seems rather comical to our eyes, in its attempt to appear serious in content, rather than prurient.
Here’s a nice example with a nude Lady Godiva, by John Collier, 1898, in the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry (where else?).
The Thin Red Line
To end, we can’t ignore that overriding catalyst of Victorian ambition – The Empire. It was the engine-house that drove a massive expansion of wealth and power. Wealth enjoyed at least, by certain sections of Victoria’s subjects, at home and around the globe. The tale of its impact on the poorer sections of society, both here and in the lands swallowed up by its relentless advance, is for another post.
The victories and defeats in that story of world domination are there in the popular art of the times. Perhaps the Victorians loved the tales of near-defeat more than those of victory. The public certainly loved pictures like The Roll Call, by Lady Butler, 1874, The Royal Collection.
It shows the aftermath of the battle of Inkerman, in the Crimean war, and the ragged, diminished ranks of the exhausted grenadier guards, the sergeant in red taking the register of the survivors. Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler, was one of a very few women painters from the era, and she specialised in military paintings, being a soldier’s wife who followed the flag and her husband around the world.
Victorians lapped up pictures demonstrating what they thought of as typical British traits, such as steadfastness and stoicism under duress. Paintings like Gibbs’ The Thin Red Line showed the two meagre lines of the Sutherland Highlanders taking on the might of the Russian cavalry in the Crimea. Or look at The Campbells are Coming by Goodall, 1857, Sheffield City Art Galleries. It shows the beleaguered inhabitants of the British Residency at Lucknow in India. They’re defending against rebel sepoy soldiers, and trying to hold out until relief troops arrive. Based on an allegedly real incident, corporal’s wife Jessie Brown in the centre can hear the approaching bagpipes of the Campbell Highlanders.
These paintings of imperial derring-do of course portray the Empire from the British perspective. There was very little introspection of how these conflicts might be seen by the sorry recipients of British firepower.
Hiding in plain sight
Perhaps I’ve tempted you to take a trip to one of the free galleries in our big cities, and look at their vast collections of Victoriana with fresh eyes. You’re not just seeing what the artist has put in front of you. If you stand back and consider, you can see the ideas, dreams, the certainties and fears, the prejudices and biases which drove the relentless energies of that enterprising age.
Jeremy Paxman’s book is a really entertaining guide on how to start that journey of looking at Victorian art with a critical eye. Do look out for it – it’s a damn fine read.
