Fallen Grace - Mary Hooper [91]
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Victoria and Albert
Queen Victoria came to the throne aged 18 in 1837, following the notorious Regency period, during which the royal family had become unpopular. She married her cousin, Albert, in 1840, and though the marriage was stormy, it was genuinely loving and they went on to have nine children. Their union was held in high esteem and the ordinary people of the empire were encouraged to aspire to it.
Some British subjects, however, weren’t keen on Albert, firstly because he was foreign, and secondly because of the influence he and his family had over the queen. Albert was initially constrained by his position as consort (which didn’t involve any official duties), but he soon took responsibility for running the royal household and involved himself in several public causes, including trying to improve the status of the poor. He was also instrumental in organising the Great Exhibition of 1851. The British remained slightly suspicious of Albert, but sincerely mourned him when he died of typhoid, aged 42, in December 1861.
Following his death and Queen Victoria’s edict that the nation make a respectable mourning, London became engulfed in black as, out of respect for the prince, the ordinary man in the street struggled to obey his queen’s wishes and clothe himself and his family for several months at least in the most decent black outfits he could afford. It is said that even London’s railings, painted green before 1861, were painted black after Albert’s death. It is generally agreed that Queen Victoria took her mourning too far by staying away from London and wearing widow’s weeds for the rest of her life. Overwhelmed by Albert’s premature death, she more or less retired from public life and thus become unpopular with her subjects, who felt neglected.
Victoria reigned for 63 years – longer than any British monarch so far – until her death in 1901. During her reign she restored the nation’s respect for the monarchy, became a symbol of the spirit and identity of the nation, and also strived to improve the conditions of the poor by such measures as introducing basic education for all and limiting the working day to ten hours.
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The Victorian Poor
Henry Mayhew, a journalist, interviewed hundreds of ordinary Londoners and published the first volume of London Labour and the London Poor in 1851. This provided first-hand details of what life on the streets was like for those at the very bottom of society.
There were countless ways in which the poor earned money to keep themselves alive, including bird- and dog-duffing (changing the colour of birds and animals by painting them), and placing heavily sedated small animals together in a box as ‘Happy Families’. Children would collect and sell birds’ nests, hunt in sewers for lost objects, collect ‘pure’ (dog dung) for the tanning trade, catch rats for dog-versus-rat fights and sift through muck in rubbish yards – anything to earn a penny or two. There were armies of small boys and girls aged six and upwards selling any small and cheap commodity: watercress, oranges, lemons, sponges, combs, pencils, sealing wax, paper, penknives or matches. Some of these children were sent out by their parents as a way of supplementing their own earnings, but there were also a great many orphans and unwanted children living completely independently of any adult care and struggling mightily to survive.
Some of the details that Mayhew gives are heartbreaking. For example, he tells of the small children whose