Victoria’s Half Century
We are nearing the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign. A London writer, reviewing the changes which have taken place in the period marks these notable points: A strange country was England in those far-off days; there was but little difference between the general state of society under William and the general state of society under George II. If we compared the courts of George IV. and William with the company of a low tap-room, we should not flatter the tap-room. Broad-blown coarseness, rank debauchery, reckless prodigality, were seen at their worst in the abode of English monarchs. A decent woman was out of place amid the stupid horrors of the Pavilion or of Windsor; and we do not wonder at the sedulous care which the Queen’s guardians employed to keep her beyond reach of the prevailing corruption. A man like the Duke of Cumberland would not now be permitted to show his face in public save in the dock; but in those times his peculiar habits were regarded as quite royal and quite natural. Jockeys, blacklegs, gamblers, prize-fighters were esteemed as the natural companions of princes; and when England’s king drove up to the verge of a prize-ring in the company of a burly rough who was about to exchange buffets with another rough, the proceeding was considered as quite manly and orthodox. Imagine the Prince of Wales driving in the park with a champion boxer!
A strange country indeed was England in those times; and to look through the newspapers and memoirs of fifty years ago is an amusement at once instructive and humiliating. The king dines with the premier duke, makes him drunk, and has him carefully driven round the streets, so that the public may see what an intoxicated nobleman is like. The same king pushes a statesman into a pond, and screams with laughter as the drenched victim crawls out. Morning after morning the chief man of the realm visits the boxing-saloon, and learns to batter the faces and ribs of other noble gentlemen. We hear of visits paid by royalty to an obscure Holborn tavern, where, after noisy suppers, the fighting-men were wont to roar their hurricane choruses and talk with many blasphemies of by-gone combats. Think of that succession of ugly and foul sports compared with the peace, the refinement, the gentle and subdued manners of Victoria’s court, and we see how far England has travelled since 1837.
Fifty years ago our myriads of kinsmen across the seas were strangers to us, and the amazing friendship which has sprung up between the subjects of Victoria and the citizens of the vast republic was represented fifty years ago by a kind of sheepish, good-humored ignorance, tempered by jealousy. The smart packets left London and Liverpool to thrash their way across the Atlantic swell, and they were lucky if they managed to complete the voyage in a month—Charles Dickens sailed in a vessel which took twenty-two days for the trip, and she was a steamer, no less! For all practical purposes England and America are now one country. The trifling distance of 3,000 miles across the Atlantic seems hardly worth counting, according to our modern notions; and the American gentleman talks quite easily and naturally about running over to London or Paris to see a series of dramatic performances or an exhibition of pictures. When Victoria began to reign the English people mostly regarded America as a dim region, and the voyage thither was a fearsome understanding.
There is something in the catalogue of mechanical devices which almost affects the mind with fatigue. Fifty years ago the ordinary citizen picked up his ideas of all that was going on in the world from a sorely-taxed news-sheet; and a very blurred idea he managed to get at the best. Poor folk had to do without the luxury of the news, and they were as much circumscribed mentally as though they had been cattle; we remember a village where even in 1852 the common people did not know who the Duke of Wellington was. No such thing as a newspaper had been seen there within the memory of man; only one or two of the natives had seen a railway engine, and nobody in the whole village row had been known to visit a town. But now-a-days the villager has his high-class news-sheet; and he is very much discontented indeed if he does not see the latest intelligence from America, India, Australia, China—everywhere. An American statesman’s conversation of Monday afternoon is reported accurately in the London journals on Tuesday morning; a speech of Mr. Gladstone’s delivered at midnight on one day is summarized in New York and San Francisco the next day; the result of a race run at Epsom is known in Bombay within forty minutes. We use no paradox when we say that every man in the civilized world now lives next door to everybody else; oceans are merely convenient pathways, howling deserts are merely handy places for planting telegraph poles and for swinging wires along which thoughts travel between country and country with the velocity of lightning. We see that the world with its swarming populations is growing more and more like some great organism whereof the nerve-centres are subtly, delicately connected by sensitive nerve-tissues. Even now, using a lady’s thimble, two pieces of metal, and a little acid, we can speak to a friend across the Atlantic gulf, and before ten years are over, a gentleman in London will doubtless be able to sit in his office and hear the actual tones of some speaker in New York.
So much has the magic half century brought about.
If we think of the scientific knowledge possessed by the most intelligent men when the Queen ascended the throne, we can hardly refrain from smiling, for it seems as though we were studying the mental endowment of a race of children. The science of electricity was in its infancy; the laws of force were misunderstood; men did not know what heat really was. They knew next to nothing of the history of the globe, and they accounted for the existence of varying species of plants and animals by means of the most infantine hypotheses. A complete revolution—vital and all-embracing—has altered our modes of thought, so that the man of 1887 can scarcely bring himself to conceive the state of mind which contented the man of 1837. We have dark doubts now, perplexing misgivings, weary uncertainties, painful consciousness of limited powers; but along with these weaknesses we have our share of certainties. Are we happier? Nay, not in mind. A quiet melancholy marks the words of all the men who have thought most deeply and learned most. The wise no longer cry out or complain—they accept life and fate with calm sadness, and perhaps with prayerful resignation. We have learned to know how little we can know, and we see with composure that even the miracles already achieved by the restless mind of man are as nothing.
There is a far better reason than this for the sadness of thinking men. It is that, with all the progress of science, art, and education, poverty, misery, disease, and crime still afflict society as they did in ruder ages, and our progress is onward, but not upward. It is upward progress to which the Journal of Man is devoted.
In the foregoing sketch very little is said of the real progress of the age—the increase of education, the uprising of the people into greater political power and liberty, the prostration of the power of the church, which is destined to disestablishment, and the uprising of spiritual science.
What is there in the reign of Victoria to be celebrated? Was there ever a more perfect specimen of barely respectable commonplace than the reign of Victoria? What generous impulse, or what notable wisdom has she ever shown? What has she done for the relief of Ireland, for the improvement of a society full of pauperism, crime and suffering, or for the prevention of unjust foreign wars? When has she ever given even a respectable gift to any good object from her enormous income? But virtue is not expected in sovereigns; they are expected only to enjoy themselves hugely, to make an ostentatious display, and consume all their benighted subjects give them.
Mrs. Stanton says:—“The two great questions now agitating Great Britain are ‘Coercion for Ireland,’ and the ‘Queen’s Jubilee,’ a tragedy and a comedy in the same hour.”
Speaking of the Queen’s Jubilee she says:
“In this supreme moment of the nation’s political crisis, the Queen and her suite are junketing around in their royal yachts on the coast of France, while proposing to celebrate her year of Jubilee by levying new taxes on her people, in the form of penny and pound contributions to build a monument to Prince Albert. The year of Jubilee! While under the eyes of the Queen her Irish subjects are being evicted from their holdings at the point of the bayonet; their cottages burned to the ground; aged and helpless men and women and newborn children, alike left crouching on the highways, under bridges, hayricks and hedges, crowded into poorhouses, jails and prisons, to expiate their crimes growing out of poverty on the one hand and patriotism on the other.
“A far more fitting way to celebrate the year of Jubilee would be for the Queen to scatter the millions hoarded in her private vaults among her needy subjects, to mitigate, in some measure, the miseries they have endured from generation to generation; to inaugurate some grand improvement in her system of education; to extend still further the civil and political rights of her people; to suggest, perchance, an Inviolable Homestead Bill for Ireland, and to open the prison doors to her noble priests and patriots.
“But instead of such worthy ambitions in the fiftieth year of her reign, what does the Queen propose? With her knowledge and consent, committees of ladies are formed in every county, town and village in all the colonies under her flag, to solicit these penny and pound contributions, to be placed at her disposal.
“Ladies go from house to house, not only to the residences of the rich, but to the cottages of the poor, through all the marts of trade, the fields, the factories, begging pennies for the Queen from servants and day-laborers.”
These forced collections are not entirely for the benefit of the Queen, but are to be appropriated also to a vast variety of local objects and institutions.