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Customs A Victorian gentleman, Arthur J Munby (1829-1910), takes Hannah Cullwick to the Haymarket Theatre in London. When they meet outside, they pretend not to know each other and enter by a side door that takes them up to the gallery. The reason for this secrecy is the difference in class of these two people. Munby is a solicitor, working for the Ecclesiastical Commission, and is embraced by respectable society. Hannah is a servant. He writes, 'I love her, then, because she is not like her own class after all, but like mine.' In fact, as his diaries reveal, he is obsessed with working-class women. His hobby is photographing them in their everyday clothes and recording their lives. Then, after 18 years of courtship, Arthur and Hannah are married – in secret. Victorian society is like a theatre. Outside, the streets smell of horse manure and the air is full of soot; inside the respectable bask in a gas-lit glow of prosperity. Society is rigidly stratified: the queen and aristocracy sit in sumptuous comfort in the royal box, the upper classes next to them. In the dress circle and front stalls are the solid middle classes, while the lower middle classes of aspiring clerks and traders sit at the back of the stalls or second circle. To complete the segregation, the working class, who enter by a separate entrance, sit in the gallery and have the worst view of the show. On the public stage, life is more gaudy and better reported then ever before. While the corridors smell of fatty cooked meats and unwashed servants, everyone in the audience wears well-tailored clothes and the women have beautifully made headgear. Men wear hats and, despite the ubiquity of black suits, often sport colourful waistcoats. All classes are affected by bad breath because of poor dentistry; high infant mortality makes little coffins a familiar sight and poverty means there's no shortage of beggars. Meanwhile, the sound of distant wars rumbles like thunder over the horizon. Royalty Victoria's modest habits make her a very middle-class monarch, although she makes occasional appearances in royal gear – such as during her Diamond Jubilee in 1897 (the 'apogee of empire') – which satisfy the public's appetite for spectacle. In 1876, she is made empress of India, a fabulous title invented by the prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, redolent of the pomp and circumstance of Britain's imperial glory. By contrast, her son Edward, Prince of Wales, is a hedonist, with friends such as Sir Thomas Lipton (1850-1931), who has made a fortune from groceries. Still, as Walter Bagehot (1826-77) writes in The English Constitution (1867), the Brits 'defer to what we may call the theatrical show of society and the climax of the play is the queen'. The aristocracy Perhaps surprisingly, the aristocracy is a friend of commerce: most banks and insurance companies have lords on their boards to add a touch of class. The strength of the aristocracy is its flexibility and its ability to absorb new blood – and new money – into its ranks. Between 1886 and 1914, some 200 new peerages are created. Bankers such as the Rothschilds and the Barings become peers, as do industrialists such as Guinness (beer), Armstrong (engineering) and Hardy (iron). W H Smith makes a fortune from selling newspapers at railway stations and becomes a lord. Aristocrats also make astute marriages: in 1895, the 9th duke of Marlborough marries American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt (her father gives the duke $2.5 million). The aristocrats also head Britain's social life. On their country estates, they go hunting, shooting and fishing. Their grand London homes, open during the 'season', are mind-bogglingly palatial. Often inspired by Italian Renaissance architecture, they boast huge columns and grand staircases, decorated with masses of gold, marble and crystal. Dazzling lights illuminate this wonderland; tables groan with mountains of flowers and sweetmeats. The ostentatious houses of the rich are temples that flaunt wealth. Showy display is everything. To protect all this, Robert Peel's police force make sure that poor people are not allowed into Piccadilly or Pall Mall. The middle class In 1850, the middle class is a fairly small group of professionals, factory owners, businessmen, merchants and bankers. There is a deep gulf between this group and the working classes. As Mrs Isabella Beeton's 1861 Book of Household Management shows, you need lots of servants to prepare lavish meals, clean houses heated by filthy coal and generally work with few labour-saving devices. Over the next 50 years, the middle class not only expands very rapidly, it also splits into two different layers. • The upper middle class This is divided between professionals and industrialists. The professionals – doctors, lawyers, clergy and top civil servants – are educated at public school and university. They live in suburban villas and their ethos is hard work and no play. By contrast, the industrialists usually send their children to be 'educated' in the family firm, or train them to become engineers, although some now prefer public schools. A few end up working in banking rather than running factories. Others go abroad and run the empire. Some old aristocrats fear the 'monarchy of the middle classes', but in practice, they tame 'trade' by marrying into it. • The lower middle class After the 1850s, the bosses of industry are less likely to be self-made men who pass on the business to their families, and more likely to be part of the new class of professional managers. As government passes more laws, civil servants – working in both central and local government – multiply. The growth of shopping offers women more chances of employment. In London, especially, there comes into being a whole army of city clerks, who are trained at the new polytechnics, read the Daily Mail, founded in 1896 by the Harmsworth brothers, and commute to work by train and the newer tube, which links central London to the even newer suburbs where the clerks live in neat terraced houses. The working classes • high-paid labour • regular standard earners • small regular earners • intermittent earners • casual earners • 'the lowest class' (see The poor below). Regular standard earners make up the largest group (more than the total of the other five categories combined). These are the people who benefit most from the booming Victorian economy – their wages rise. From 1860 to 1900, the real wages of the employed working classes almost double. At the same time, they have fewer kids – thus defeating all the pessimistic predictions of the Malthusians. The combination of more money and smaller families means that the respectable working classes have more time for leisure (see Customs below). The poor Some of these people are unemployed, some are criminals, all live a precarious existence. Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851-62) is crammed with examples of poor people begging, hawking all manner of goods or even collecting and selling dog droppings. In his novel Bleak House (1853), Charles Dickens portrays Jo the ragged crossing-sweeper, a familiar figure in Victorian cities. Many have no pleasures except for drink. By 1889, Charles Booth is arguing that the poor are a menace: 'Their life is the life of savages.' Many end up in the workhouse. Rural poverty is even worse. Poor crofters in the Scottish Highlands try to survive on as little as £8 a year. On the great farms of southern England, most workers have to join a gang, led by a task-master. Child labour and poverty are common. Women are forced to give their children opium so they won't make any noise while their mothers labour in the fields. When times are bad and work runs out – as it does when the importing of cheap wheat (following the repeal of the Corn Laws) and of cheap wool destroys traditional agriculture in the 1880s – these people have no choice. They must leave the land and migrate to the booming cities or starve. By 1901, the number of men working on farms has dropped by a third. Customs Holidays In 1841, Thomas Cook, founder of the huge travel agency, shows his mettle by arguing that 'We must have railways for the millions.' Three years later, the first day-excursion train runs from London to Brighton. In 1871, the Bank Holiday Act creates official holidays. By the 1880s, these new holidays are occasions to visit the growing seaside resorts of Blackpool, Morecambe and Southend. But while the working classes modestly paddle in bathing huts, the liberal middle classes in the 1890s take to energetic rambling and healthy cycling – on the new contraptions designed by Edward Butler – around the countryside. Shopping In the London suburbs, these new department stores – often modelled on Paris prototypes – cater for the new middle classes. One example is Barker's in Kensington. In the centre of town, huge flagships such as Harrods change the shopping habits of millions. Others pioneer chains of stores. By 1900, Jesse Boot, the Nottingham purveyor of medicaments, owns 181 local shops, and J Sainsbury has 47 provision stores. Sports In 1859, the football's rules are formalised, and the Football Association is set up in 1863. Some football teams have religious origins – for instance, Aston Villa Wesleyan Chapel. By the late 1870s, a ground such as Bramhall Lane in Sheffield draws crowds of 10,000. Yet football remains a sport played by men and watched by men. More idiosyncratically English is cricket, organised into a county championship from 1873. Its superhero is W G Grace, an autocratic Gloucester doctor who sets batting and bowling records. Grace's beard causes him to be confused with the prime minister Lord Salisbury – to the latter's advantage. This is also the era of middle-class sports. The rules of lawn tennis are formalised in 1874, and golfing clubs are set up in the latter part of the century. Christmas But it is the Christmas stories of Charles Dickens, particularly A Christmas Carol (1843), that rekindle the joy of the season. He becomes a major populariser of the modern idea of the holiday as a season of good cheer, charity and present-giving. Dickens's name becomes so synonymous with Christmas that when a London costermonger's girl hears of his death in 1870, she asks, 'Mr Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?' Cigarettes In 1861, John Theodoridi, a Greek captain, opens a cigarette shop in London's Leicester Square, and by 1865, four others follow suit. By 1883, the Bristol firm of W D & H O Wills put production on an industrial footing. Their machine, imported from the United States, makes about 200 cigarettes a minute. In the 1880s, a price war leads to the first penny cigarettes, with Wild Woodbine leading the field. Between 1860 and 1900, Britain's tobacco consumption rises by about 5% each year. The dangers of tobacco are soon recognised: surgeon Arthur E J Longhurst even attributes the decline of the Ottoman empire to the habit. Others note that smoking damages teeth, lungs and stomach – and morals. Women are not allowed to smoke. In respectable households, men at first have to smoke outdoors, but by the 1880s, smoking rooms are created in large houses and in London clubs. Smoking compartments appear on trains. Funerals Mourning has two stages: deep, or full, mourning and half-mourning. Each stage has its own rules and customs. When someone dies, all members of the household, including servants, adopt deep mourning. Curtains are drawn and clocks stopped. Mirrors are covered and the body is watched over until burial. Indeed, the prevalence of grave robbers prompts many to hire guards to watch the graves of their loved ones. Certain images symbolise death: draped urns, broken columns, weeping willows appear on tombstones, portraits and embroidered samplers. As the example of Queen Victoria shows, bereavement touches virtually every aspect of Victorian life, lending a sombre hue to the brightest day. But funerals are also being reformed. As well as the new public cemeteries at Kensal Green (1831), Norwood (1837) and Highgate (1839), the idea of cremation is pioneered by Sir Henry Thompson (1820-1904) in the face of stiff opposition from the religious establishment, which argues that burning bodies prevents their resurrection. A surgeon at University College Hospital, Thompson is a rationalist, but his campaign takes 11 years to succeed. The first cremation is carried out by the Cremation Society at Woking in 1885. |
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