Victorian Pictures

"Great events make me quiet and calm; it is only trifles that irritate my nerves." Queen Victoria

The Victorian period is one of the most clearly defined of British history - the reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901 is the longest of any British monarch (so far!). It followed the Georgian period (usually taken to include the reign of William IV) and was itself followed by the Edwardian. The Queen/ Empress restored the domestic reputation of the British Royal Family, which had been rather sullied by the end of the Georgian dynasty. This era saw the height of the Industrial Revolution and the climax of the expansion of the British Empire. These led to a peak of British self-confidence that was not dented until the horrors of the Great War; and this self-confidence shines through in the Victorian pictures in our collection.

The Industrial Revolution had started in the late 18th Century but really got up a head of steam (ho ho!) in the Victorian era. The rapid development of the railway system facilitated rapid industrial growth and the migration of a substantial part of the rural population to the cities. To give some idea of population changes during the period 1837 to 1901, the population of Great Britain and Ireland rose from 27 million to 41 million. That of London rose from two million to six-and-a-half million. Glasgow's population grew from under 300,000 to 900,000. Cardiff's grew from a tiny 10,000 to 160,000 - an increase of 1,500%!

Advances in technology and materials science were exploited by great engineers (of whom Isambard Kingdom Brunel must surely be the greatest) to create previously unimaginable constructions (such as the Clifton Suspension Bridge - completed 1864) and revolutionary developments in transport (like the Great Eastern - launched in 1858). Steam propulsion was in its infancy in 1837, but by 1901 the internal combustion engine had emerged to herald the beginning of the age of hegemony of the motor car. Britain's world-leading industrial capabilities and the reach of the Empire were celebrated by the Great Exhibition in 1851, under the patronage of Prince Albert and held in the Crystal Palace which was initially erected in Hyde Park.

The Victorian advance of science is illustrated as well as anywhere by a subject dear to Lord Price's heart: the reproduction of pictures and images as prints, posters and photographs. The first photographic processes were developed in the 1820s and 1830s, and chromolithography, which allowed for the mass printing of colour pictures, was invented, coincidentally, in 1837. Advances in volume printing allowed for the first mass publication of illustrated magazines, such as the Illustrated London News (1844) and the Graphic in England, and the emergence of popular comics and colour magazines, such as Truth in America. Printing of photographs advanced in both quantity and quality and were even printed in magazines by the end of the century. Colour prints were popularised by such publishers as the American house of Currier & Ives, and by the 1890s large sized advertising posters could be printed which attracted the best French Art Nouveau graphic artists (such as Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Jules Cheret and Alphonse Mucha) and which were produced and collected in their thousands.

The broader sciences saw similar progress. Charles Darwin published 'On the Origin of Species' in 1859 (by the by, he did not coin the phrase 'survival of the fittest' - that was his contemporary Herbert Spencer in 1864). Michael Faraday did his later work on electricity and magnetism. James Clerk Maxwell wrote his seminal work on electromagnetic waves. Towards the end of the period (in 1897) JJ Thomson discovered the electron.

Sports saw rapid development, as increasing wealth meant increasing leisure time, and the games that Britain gave to the world developed from a diversion for the rich into sports of mass participation (and spectating thereof) and even to sustaining a professional base in football (soccer), rugby and cricket. The latter sports were a demonstration of the unity of the Empire as advances in sea travel enabled sides to tour between Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Mother Country.

But beside this prosperity and progress there lurked a number of problems facing the the famous Victorian politicians - Peel, Gladstone, Disraeli, Palmerston, Salisbury and their ilk. The limitations of voting qualification prompted the Reform Acts which widened the suffrage (though not yet to women). At the start of Victoria's reign there were just 800,000 people entitled to vote; when she died this had risen to six million. The wider rights of women, particularly married women, were scandalously limited and the abject poverty, exploitation and near-slavery of the working classes spurred the establishment of the Labour movement. By 1901 there were 1,300 unions with over two million members. It's no coincidence (and a tribute to Britain's comparatively liberal acceptance of European immigrants) that Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital in London.

Internationally and domestically the Irish problem (the problem being that some people wanted Ireland in the Union while a number of others didn't) remained unresolved. The Crimean War exposed woeful inadequacies in the British Army and how it cared for its wounded, prompting Florence Nightingale's famous nursing exploits. Britain's military might was utilised to extend and protect the Empire, but not always quite in the best tradition of English 'fair play'. In South Africa the Boer War was still unresolved as Victoria's reign came to a close: not Britain's finest hour.

But perhaps the dimension of the Victorian era with which the modern observer struggles most is its hypocrisy. It was a society that purported to have strict moral values (the sight of an ankle was scandalous) while prostitution, destitution, crime and exploitation were commonplace. It sought to impose tight Christian behaviour on the working classes whilst the Prince of Wales was debauching for England.

"We have long passed the Victorian era, when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby." W Somerset Maugham