10 Things You Should Know about the Victorians

What do we think of when we ponder the Victorian era? I, for one, always think of steam trains, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper, pea-soupers (thick London fog), public libraries, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. These are the first things that come to my mind but of course, that’s only me! Let’s look at ten things to further build our visual picture of the Victorians and the world that they inhabited.

Others might rightly mention Oscar Wilde, the rise of the British Empire, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the typewriter, and the invention of photography. What about Romantic Medievalism, the Suffragette Movement, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Punch Magazine, and the serialization of novels in periodicals? The Victorian era is a huge subject, and trying to write an article that covers so much innovation and creativity is quite daunting. So, I’m going to unashamedly cherry-pick different aspects from the era and round it down to my personal favorite ten things everyone should know about the Victorians (not necessarily in order of importance). Hopefully, it will create a kind of collage that will provide a brief visual impression of what the Victorian experience looked like!

1. Steam Travel—Not Just Puffs of Smoke

The Victorian era saw the rise of steam-powered travel. British engineers had been experimenting with the design of steam locomotives from as early as 1784. However, the first properly working model (the Coalbrookdale Locomotive) was built in 1802 by Richard Trevithick, a mining engineer from Cornwall. Locomotive design focused on industrial application, for example the transportation of coal. It wasn’t until 1925 whereupon locomotive design had evolved sufficiently that the Stockton and Darlington Railway Company brought the world’s first public railway into being. From here sprang a national network of railways. A vision of a country linked by rail that had seemed impossible only a short time ago was suddenly a reality. A growing network of lines meant great opportunities for speedy connectivity, meaning that people, goods, and information could be disseminated more widely than ever before.

The evolution of the steamship was not far behind. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was responsible for 1847’s SS Great Britain, which became the first steamship to cross the Atlantic. John Laird was the first shipbuilder to use iron in hull construction. The SS Archimedes of 1839 was the world’s first steamship to be driven by a screw propeller, the invention of Sir Francis Pettit Smith and John Ericsson. Astonishingly, The Enterprize [sic], a paddle steamer built of wood, was the first steamship to make the journey from England to India as early as 1825.

Turner’s painting above, Rain, Steam and Speed (1844) captures the excitement of the rise of steam power in Victorian Britain. The train seems to cut through the natural landscape like an unwanted and brutal presence, but at the same time, it emerges from it like something newly born, a mark of hope and a sign of the future.

2. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is his most famous work and the drawings created for it are among the most memorable children’s book illustrations of all time. Dodgson outlined his story on a rowing trip in 1862, eventually committing it to paper by 1864. It was published in 1865, with illustrations by Sir John Tenniel (1820-1914), a British illustrator and political cartoonist. Tenniel was selected on the strength of his work for the satirical Punch Magazine. Tenniel worked for Punch for 50 years, yet he is most well known for his Alice illustrations.

The image above shows the Cheshire Cat as originally drawn by Tenniel for publication in 1865. The images were adjusted for a later adaptation of the story, The Nursery Alice, published in 1890 as a shortened version of the full Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and in which Tenniel’s original drawings were enlarged and colorized.

The whole story is set in a dream that little Alice has one summer’s day. However, the symbolism written into it by Dodgson is cause for much debate and a number of theories have arisen as to its meaning, ranging from psychoanalytical interpretations pertaining to sex, through to elaborate ideas that parody the mathematics of the day. What is known for sure is that Dodgson included a lot of personal jokes within the text, had great fun with language, and created some of the weirdest but most endearing characters!

3.Romantic Graham and Victorian Frith

The predominant literary and artistic movement going into the first part of the Victorian era was Romanticism, officially until 1850. The Romantics placed emphasis on the idea that individual subjectivity and the resulting emotional responses, especially extreme ones, could break free of the rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment and could be used as a source of aesthetic experience. They concerned themselves with the pursuit of the sublime and the belief that truth and beauty sustain each other. In the quest for sublimity, it was natural to turn to nature, and to landscapes. The painting above by Peter Graham (1836–1921) dates from 1878, yet it perfectly encapsulates romantic ideals. Atmospheric and brooding, Graham’s landscape is rich with intense emotional response to the mood of his surroundings. Loose brushwork and a powerful focus on light reflect the painter’s appreciation of the sublime found in the landscape of Scotland. The grandeur and purity of nature, as described by Graham, is indisputable.

William Powell Frith (1819–1909), on the other hand, liked to depict everyday Victorian life. He was fond of panoramic scenes full of bustle and activity—my favorite being The Railway Station, 1862. This is the kind of painting that is almost cartoonish—more like something that was destined to be an illustration in a periodical or a snapshot of a scene from a 19th-century novel. Every character is involved in some kind of interaction, from picking up hat boxes and kissing their children to tending their dogs and showing their tickets. Every face has a different expression: concerned, surprised, nonchalant, distracted, even imploring.

The station itself is rendered more like a line drawing that recedes into the distance, which helps to center our attention on the people. Frith pays attention to the details, especially the clothing: the palette he uses is quite muted, but we can see furs, silks, velvet, fringed wool shawls, and a wide variety of hats, among other things. Travelers have dropped items on the floor and baggage has been left unattended while the station employees load luggage onto the train. It’s a wonderful scene showing a moment in daily Victorian life.

Frith wasn’t only busy depicting his fellow Victorians, he was also busy creating them! By his first wife, Isabelle, he managed to bring no less than twelve children into the world whilst at the same time supporting a mistress, Mary, who lived only a mile away and with whom he produced a further seven children. A busy man indeed, and hardly the epitome of British Victorian morality and middle-class respectability that was deemed so important at the time. He did eventually do the right thing: when Isabelle died in 1880 he made an honest woman of Mary by marrying her. Very proper!

4. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was conceived in c. 1848 by artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais. The group, heavily influenced by Romanticism, was known for its interest in revived medievalism, clearly expressed especially in the later paintings of Rossetti. Their use of line, a bright color palette, and attention to detail harked back to 15th-century Italian and Flemish art, perhaps also mimicking the illuminated manuscripts of the Medieval period. The group grew and became highly influential, however, it is Rossetti who is perhaps its most well-known member. After 1856 it was he who continued the more medieval aspects of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic.

In October 1857 Rossetti met Jane Burden, later to become Jane Morris. He asked her to model for the group, who were at the time engaged in the production of murals depicting Arthurian legend. By 1859, Jane had married William Morris, a textile designer and poet, but her relationship with Rossetti as his model and muse continued until Rossetti’s death in 1882.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood helped to usher in the new Aesthetic movement in the later Victorian era, with which the phrase “art for art’s sake” is associated. They believed that the appreciation of beauty could be an end in itself, thus, they rejected utilitarianism, which claimed that all art should have a moral point. Another major exponent of this movement was the writer Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), who believed in the idea that art should be beautiful before it is anything else and should not be fashioned around social or moral influences. He believed in the autonomy of art and its freedom from the constraints of proselytizing.

As an additional, quirky bit of information, Lewis Carroll and Rossetti knew each other. Carroll even photographed Rossetti and his family in the garden at their house in Cheyne Walk, 1863!

5. Sherlock Holmes

The most famous literary detective of all time? If you are British, you certainly know who Sherlock Holmes is to the extent that you might even believe him to have been a historical figure rather than a fictional character. If you are not British you probably still know who Sherlock Holmes is! The Sherlock Holmes stories were created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) and were serialized in The Strand Magazine with illustrations by Sidney Edward Paget (1860–1908).

Paget’s drawings of 211b Baker Street (the fictional home of Holmes and Watson) depicted ideal Victorian domestic life at its most cozy and enchanting, fulfilling contemporary ideas that a safe, comfortable, and righteous home was at the heart of Victorian life. The Baker Street setting, accurately reconstructed in the photograph above, would have been familiar to the readership of Doyle’s stories, who may have owned many similar household furnishings and items themselves.

This familiarity was a kind of shield against the potential violence and disorder of the world beyond the domestic interior and importantly provided an essential foundation for stories such as the Sign of Four (1890) which went far beyond the average Victorian’s comfort zone in terms of the unfamiliar. The concept of “home” represented refuge and safety, protection from physical, emotional, or moral harm—values that were also embedded in the characters of  Holmes and Watson. Paget’s illustrations helped to anchor these characters and their solid, reliable principles firmly in the minds of Victorian readers.

6. The Gothic in Literature and Art

The Gothic in the Victorian Era was replete with strange writing, painting, and illustration. There is a raft of English Gothic literature for example that begins in 1765 with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, followed by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818, and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights in 1847 (the year of Bram Stoker’s birth). The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson was published in 1887 and of course, Dracula by Bram Stoker appeared in 1897. This is to name just a few! Dracula and Frankenstein are perhaps the most ingrained into universal consciousness, having been adapted for film and television more times than one can count.

The Victorians were fascinated by death, decay, and ideas of the supernatural. Therefore, it makes sense that the literature and art of the era reflect this rather morbid interest. Decaying and gloomy locations, shrouded in mystery and riddled with labyrinthine corridors and moldering rooms, provided perfect locations for intensely emotional and often violent stories in which ghosts, ghouls, and vampires were not uncommon. Brutal acts of savagery arising from extreme motives came across more effectively if they were presented in surroundings that mirrored their dark natures.

This painting by Henry Fuseli entitled Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers vividly expresses Gothic sentiments: Macbeth’s anguish is starkly written on his blanched face, Lady Macbeth’s determination is wild and aggressive, and the sordid nature of the murder of a King within the dark walls of their castle is realized in the sheer horror of the scene.

The Gothic isn’t only about the Victorians’ predilection for gory murders and dark deeds! It is also about the imagination and how it can distort reality. In the painting below (also by Fuseli) we see many familiar objects—drapes, a bed, and a sleeping woman. The incubus, however, makes us realize immediately that this scene is not normal. Why is it sitting on the woman? Why is there a horse in the bedroom?! An ordinary and familiar setting has been transformed into the unexpected, creating the context for a nightmarish scene in which the every day has become something otherworldly and at odds with reality. There is an element of supernatural horror, but most of all, there is a sense of the uncanny, or “unheimlich”—that which is familiar but somehow altered and strange.

7. Jack the Ripper—A Morbidly Violent Curiosity

We saw last time that Conan Doyle created a universe in his Sherlock Holmes stories that tallied with the Victorian ideal of moral and material domestic safety and comfort. It was from this platform that Jack the Ripper sprang to infamy, shaking the foundations of the Victorian world in a way that was graphically real and very much removed from fiction.

The Whitechapel Murders occurred between 1888 and 1891 (numbering 11 in total) in an area of London that was notoriously underprivileged and difficult to police. Whether or not all 11 murders were perpetrated by the same killer is contentious, but five of them, known as the ‘Canonical Five’, bear a strikingly similar modus operandi and are considered to be Jack’s work.

Press coverage of the crimes gripped the nation as the investigation unfolded and various theories were explored. Despite the best efforts of the Metropolitan Police Force (established in 1829), and particularly those of  Inspector Frederick Abberline, certainty about the identity of the killer never seemed to be within their grasp. Furthermore, the cases of the Whitechapel Murders remain unsolved to this day.

Many of the press articles contained illustrations that tried to capture the grimness of the crimes. Above is an illustration from the Illustrated Police News that captures the horror of one of the murders very well. The light of the Police Constable’s torch contrasts with dubious-looking dark patches on the ground that could be interpreted as shadow and dress fabric as easily as blood and gore. We already know that the Victorians were avid followers of shadowy mysteries, so it was no wonder that thousands of people followed reports of the Ripper cases almost as though they were installments in a serialized Gothic novel. The combination of the written word with accompanying illustrations was alone very powerful. Factor in the squalid living conditions to be found in the Whitechapel area at the time with the darkness of the streets at night and a thick London fog, and you have the perfect setting for the kinds of events that live in a nation’s psyche for a very long time.

8. Photography and Death

Photography was an up-and-coming technology in the Victorian Era. Pictured below is a photograph taken by Henry Fox Talbot in 1835—a latticed window at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire—and the oldest known photographic negative. Fox Talbot was responsible for great advances in photographic methods, pioneering the salted paper and calotype processes, although he was by no means alone in this field as other advances were being made in Europe at the same time.

The Victorians took to photography with great enthusiasm, especially after it became publicly available. Photography was invaluable during, for example, the Ripper cases where it allowed the police to precisely record crime scenes, dead bodies, and potential suspects.

The possibilities of photography quickly spread beyond the law—quite literally in the case of pornographic images—and were used in a number of other ways by anyone who could lay their hands on a camera. The Victorians, as we know, were morbidly interested in death, but of course, loss and grief were as acutely felt in the 19th century as they are now. With the advent of new photographic technologies and increased access to cameras (or photographers in their studios), it became fashionable to take photographs of deceased loved ones as though they were still among the living. Despite its popularity, this type of photography was still expensive and remained a luxury available only to those who could afford it.

This sounds horrible until one considers that perhaps photography allowed people to come to terms with death, especially when it was personal, and softened the blow by making it appear that the departed was somehow still present. Queen Victoria herself kept a postmortem picture of Albert by her bedside as a memento mori.

9. Zoological Gardens

Before zoological gardens there were menageries: private collections of exotic animals usually kept for the amusement and entertainment of royalty and their courts. Henry I, the son of William the Conqueror, established a menagerie at Woodstock in Oxfordshire which included lions and camels. Louis XIV had a menagerie built at Versailles which was stocked with a large variety of animals including several species of birds and a panther. Over time, however, it became apparent that species need to be studied and preserved in the name of science rather than kept solely for entertainment, and so began a shift from the menagerie to the zoological garden.

The zoological garden at Regent’s Park, also known as London Zoo, was first opened in 1828 to fellows of the Zoological Society of London. Later, in 1847, it was opened to the paying public in order to generate funding. London Zoo is the world’s oldest scientific zoo but there had been a strong interest in the natural world long before the Victorians.

The painting below, while it may not be Victorian itself, resides in the Natural History Museum in London. Although it is from the 17th century, it somehow doesn’t feel out of place in the 19th century when concerns with exploring, documenting, and categorizing the natural world were still strong. Sightings of the dodo had become rarer and rarer during the 17th century and it is likely that it was extinct by 1700. It’s fascinating to imagine what Victorian viewers would have made of this painting, especially if they were familiar with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland!

10. The Victoria & Albert Museum

The Victoria and Albert Museum was founded in 1852 (although at that point it was known as the Museum of Manufactures) and is named after Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert. The original intention was to provide a learning resource following the Great Exhibition of 1851, in which design and manufacturing were showcased. Prince Albert felt that the building of an institution that would champion these areas and push them forward was necessary.

Originally located at Marlborough House in Pall Mall, London, the museum quickly outgrew its site and thus was relocated to South Kensington. It was here in 1899 that the foundation stone of the V&A as we know it today was laid by Queen Victoria in her last public ceremony, and when the name of the museum was officially changed from The South Kensington Museum to The Victoria and Albert Museum. The final words of the Queen’s address from that day were:

I trust that it will remain for ages a monument of discerning liberality and a source of refinement and progress.

Queen Victoria on the Victoria and Albert Museum, 19.05.1899 speech, The London Gazette.

The museum’s vast collection includes over 2 million objects filling 145 different galleries. The V&A was also the first museum to collect photographs as art. The architecture of the Victoria and Albert Museum is art in its own right—even the tea room, known as the Gamble Room, and indeed many of the buildings that comprise the museum are absolutely beautiful!