A History of Britain, Volume 3 (30 page)

Other signs of restiveness began to register. A fund was launched to build a memorial hall at Kensington, as close as possible to the site of Albert’s triumph, the Great Exhibition, with yet another monumental statue facing it. But only £60,000 was subscribed of the £120,000 needed, leaving the memorial committee no option but to commission the statue alone in Kensington Gardens. Sir George Gilbert Scott’s Gothic Revival design was to make the massively enthroned figure of the prince, sculpted by Marochetti, the centrepiece of a shrine, with Albert as the gilded relic in a pinnacled ciborium or reliquary, set above a monumental base unhappily compared by its critics to a giant cruet or sugar sifter. The canopied shrine was flanked by the four colossal greater Christian Virtues. Another four statues personified the moral virtues, and eight bronzes the Arts and Sciences whose qualities he had personified and patronized. At the base were emblems of the Four Continents to which the blessings of the Albertian empire had flowed, and above them was a 200-foot frieze featuring 170 of the geniuses of European civilization, so that Albert would keep company with fellow-immortals such as Aristotle, Dante, Shakespeare, Hogarth and Mozart. As the biographer Lytton Strachey perceptively remarked in
Queen Victoria
(1921), this massive embalming of the sainted prince did some disservice to the complicated, open-minded and unquestionably gifted man who had acted, in effect, as the first presidential figure of modern British society.

But for Victoria he had become not the entrepreneur of modern knowledge so much as the Perfect Christian Chevalier. Devotion to His Way of Doing Things bade her rise every morning, punctually at 7.30, then tunnel her way through state papers and dispatches (as He had done). When a prime minister like Lord Derby or Lord John Russell presumed to suggest an end to the official period of mourning, or even that the queen might perhaps consider resuming her constitutional duty to open parliament, Victoria responded with a mixture of self-pity and outrage that anyone could be so heartless as to inflict further stab-wounds on ‘a poor weak woman shattered by grief and anxiety’. After a decent interval, Victoria’s total disappearance from the public eye began to provoke irreverent comment in the press and to nourish the most sustained British flirtation with republicanism since the Civil War of the 17th century. It was especially serious during the passage of the Reform Bills of 1866 and 1867, when radicalism had its head of wind, and the Tory leader Benjamin Disraeli, in particular, needed the solidity of the monarchy to assuage fears that he was going down a road whose outcome no one could predict. In 1866, despite protesting to the prime minister Lord Russell her abhorrence of being subjected to a spectacle whereby people could witness ‘a poor broken-hearted widow, nervous and shrinking, dragged from deep mourning’, Victoria did finally consent to open parliament, but so grudgingly that the occasion probably alienated more of her subjects than it won over. As a condition of her appearance the queen had stipulated no state coach, no procession, no robes and especially no speech from the throne. Instead, the Lord Chancellor read the address while Victoria sat in deep gloom in her widow’s cap and mourning black. She was not eager to repeat even this gesture. The next June, when Victoria again failed to open parliament, a famous cartoon appeared in the satirical journal
The Tomahawk
, showing a throne draped by an enormous shroud bearing the legend: ‘Where is Britannia?’ Earlier, someone had put a satirical poster against the railings of Buckingham Palace announcing: ‘These commanding premises … to be let or sold in consequence of the late occupant’s declining business.’

Any attempts to persuade Victoria to emerge from this politically damaging seclusion bounced off the immovable guardianship of the one man whom the queen seemed to be able to lean on in her unrelenting grief: the Balmoral ghillie John Brown. The fact that he had been Albert’s personal favourite naturally recommended him to Victoria, for whom he became an indispensable and ubiquitous presence, and to whom she allowed liberties unthinkable in her secretaries, children or ministers. To their horror and embarrassment Brown would address her as ‘wummun’,
comment
on her dress, tell her what was the best plan for the day and always protect her against the importunate demands of the rest of the world. In return she created the special position of ‘Her Majesty’s Servant’. Brown organized her daily pony-trap rides and the Scottish dances at Balmoral, and was not always sober when he did so.

It would take the near fatal illness of the Prince of Wales in 1871, combined with another narrow escape from assassination (Brown personally caught the culprit), to shock Victoria out of this deep, self-willed isolation. When Disraeli proposed a day of national thanksgiving for Bertie’s recovery, complete with a service in St Paul’s Cathedral (not least because the republican movement was at its height), Victoria relented. She was rewarded with huge crowds. In the same year, the completed Albert Memorial was finally unveiled in Kensington Gardens. (A joint-stock company would later build the Royal Albert Hall.) Three years later, in 1874, Disraeli finally managed to give Victoria a renewed sense of her own independent authority with the passing of the Royal Titles Bill that made her Queen–Empress of India.

But as far as the queen herself was concerned, she never swerved from the vow she had taken after Albert’s death that ‘
his
wishes,
his
plans,
his
views about
every
thing are to be my law’. This, indeed, was what she supposed was the right and proper duty of widows, just as during the life of a marriage the whole duty of wives was to dissolve their own wills into that of the domestic household. Widows like Margaret Oliphant, who of necessity turned to popular novel-writing (she published a hundred of them before she died), were objects of pity rather than admiration. For how could a commercial career ever be thought compatible with the ordained role of women to preserve the sanctity of the home from the beastly masculine jungle of the capitalist marketplace? This, at any rate, was the message delivered by the holy trinity of works dedicated to the destiny of womanhood, and all published at the time of Victoria’s bereavement: Coventry Patmore’s long verse effusion ‘The Angel in the House’ (1854); Ruskin’s ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’, one of the two lectures delivered in Manchester in 1865, and subsequently published as
Sesame and Lilies
; and not least Mrs Isabella Beeton’s
Book of Household Management
(1861). All three were extraordinary best-sellers.
Sesame and Lilies
sold 160,000 in its first edition, not least because it became a standard fixture on prizegiving days at girls’ schools, but it was overshadowed by Mrs Beeton’s book, which sold two million copies before 1870. None of these books, however, portrayed domestic women in a state of perpetual submission. Ruskin especially was at pains to reject the ‘foolish error’ that woman was only ‘the shadow and attendant image of her lord’.
In
fact the popularity of these works owed a lot to the delivery of messages that credited women with a great deal of power – and power of a more concrete kind than that attributable to romantic seduction.

Coventry Patmore and Mrs Beeton were the complementary book-ends of the cult of hearth and home, the poet lyricizing the transcendent mystery of wifeliness, the
Book of Household Management
providing over 1000 pages of instruction on how the ‘shrine’ was actually to be kept spotless. If one was a kind of liturgy for the high priestesses of the home, the other was an exhaustive manual for domestic command and control. The very first paragraph of Isabella Beeton’s truly astonishing book says it all: ‘As with the commander of an army or the leader of any enterprise, so is it with the mistress of a house.’ Ruskin’s stance was more complicated. As his title implied, his essay–lecture added to the metaphors of priestess and general that of the ‘queen’. Her sovereignty was not just a matter of making sure the pillows were plumped and the roast cooked on time. To her fell the exalted responsibility of protecting society against the corrosions of acquisitive capitalism. The illiberalism of the home was its defence against the vulgar battering ram of the marketplace; the guarantee that inside the front door, at least, values other than those of competitive individualism would prevail – those of a ‘Place of Peace, the shelter not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt and division’.

Ruskin’s personal qualifications for making these prescriptions, had they been known, would not have done much for his credibility. His marriage, to Effie Gray, had been an unconsummated fiasco. He had written
Sesame and Lilies
while hypnotically spellbound by his own spotless lily, the adolescent Rose La Touche, to whom he acted as tutor and mentor before deluding himself that she ought to be his wife. Rose fled in horror from the proposal, triggering first in her, and then in the spurned Ruskin, an almost equally violent mental collapse. The crisis had been brought about by Ruskin’s apparently reckless change of role from trusted tutor, moral and intellectual guardian to would-be lover and husband. Ruskin failed to see this disaster in the making precisely because, as ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ made clear, he imagined that through intense reading women would actually be liberated from unattractively vapid servility to their husbands (and from the worthless chatter of fashion) and would instead be converted into their equals. Art, philosophy and morals would be ventilated over the breakfast marmalade.

But unlike some of the more conventional Victorian legislators of domestic virtue, Ruskin did not, in fact, insist that women belonged
only
at home. ‘A man has a personal work or duty, which is the expansion of the other, relating to his home and a public work or duty relating to the
state.
So a woman has a personal work or duty relating to her own home and a public work or duty which is also the expansion of that.’ What had he in mind by that? Anything, in fact, that would help
others
out in the world, especially out in the world of the poor, make their own homes: ‘what the woman is to be within her gates as the centre of order, the balm of distress and the mirror of beauty; that she is also to be without her gates where order is more difficult, distress more imminent, loveliness more rare.’ The commercial success of
Sesame and Lilies
enabled Ruskin to help young women philanthropists and reformers like Octavia Hill to be ‘angels
outside
the house’ in just this way. Hill was the granddaughter of the social reformer Rowland Hill, and Ruskin had met her when she was just 15. Although she was single and obviously committed to a career other than that of wife and mother (at least until she was 40), Ruskin saw Octavia as a home-maker for others, if not for herself. It was his money that enabled her Charity Organisation Society to buy up its first London tenements and convert them into ‘improved’ lodgings for working-class families. But Octavia’s aim was to remodel the tenants as well as their buildings. When her volunteers came to collect the rent they arrived bearing a stack of forms on which the residents were required to make a report of their weekly conduct. ‘Persons of drunken, immoral or idle habits cannot expect to be assisted’ [with a charity allowance] unless they can satisfy the committee that they are really trying to reform.’ Incorrigible delinquents and recidivists would be removed as morally infectious. For Ruskin, this was a perfect instance of the benevolent exercise of ‘queenly’ power to make domestic peace where before there had been only dirt and clamour. A den of beasts would be turned into the abode of beauty and faith.

Suppose, however, that a happily married middle-class Victorian woman would actually dare to import into her home some business that more properly belonged to the world? Could that enterprise, especially if it came with the trappings of art, be reconciled with domesticity, or would it inevitably pollute the sanctity of what Ruskin had called ‘the vestal temple’? All that Victoria had to do to test the issue would have been to drive her pony trap a few miles down the Freshwater road on the Isle of Wight, past the house of her Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to ‘Dimbola’, the enlarged pair of cottages that, from 1863, were the studio as well as the residence of the greatest of all the Victorian photo-portraitists, Julia Margaret Cameron.

The case was complicated by the fact that photography in the 1860s was very much divided between genteel amateurs practising their art, and professionals turning out travel views, pictures of literary and military
celebrities,
police and medical documentation, and, for a more arcane but lucrative market, pornography. The considerable expenses of equipment and processing (not least the chemically reduced silver nitrate needed to sensitize glass plates and gold bullion for toning) confined the hobby to the upper middle class and Victorian gentry, who often worked out of studios and darkrooms in their own houses. The greatest of Cameron’s immediate predecessors, Clementina, Lady Hawarden (whose startlingly unconventional and sensually loaded talent was cut brutally short at the age of 42), was herself from an Irish aristocratic family. She used her house at Dundram as one of her first studios, but when she and her husband moved to South Kensington, a stone’s throw from the site of the Great Exhibition, she was able to annex part of the apartment for her photography – and use her own daughters, each of them on the verge (or over it) of sexual maturity – as models. In other words, for all her dazzling originality Lady Hawarden presented no problem and no challenge to the authority of the lords of the new art, the award of the Photographic Society. She exhibited – just three times, in 1865–6 at the London print sellers P. & D. Colnaghi’s, in 1866–7 at the French Gallery, London, and in 1867–8 at the German Gallery, London – and was awarded a silver medal for her work and showered with richly merited praise.

Julia Margaret Cameron was an altogether different kettle of fish. Her background was respectably, even reassuringly, colonial. As Julia Pattle she was one of seven children born to a French mother and British-Indian father. The Pattle girls, however, became famous in India as eccentric beauties, who favoured brilliant Indian silks and shawls rather than the decently demure Victorian dress expected of the memsahibs. ‘To see one of this sisterhood float into a room with sweeping robes and falling folds’, wrote one of their admirers, ‘was almost an event in itelf and not to be forgotten. They did not in the least trouble themselves about public opinion.’ In 1838, at the age of 23, Julia made a serious marriage – to Charles Hay Cameron, a classical scholar (Eton and Oxford) who had aspired to be professor of moral philosophy at London University but had been turned down for not being in holy orders. Cameron had gone on to an eminent career as a member of the Governor-General’s Council and law commissioner for Ceylon (Sri Lanka), where he had extensive plantations.