The Victorian Age

Hello and welcome to the podcast English for Life in the UK. This week we're going to focus on the Victorian age. So we're looking again at some British history and this time we're going to look at the period when Queen Victoria was on the throne. She was the British monarch at this time. And I'm joined today by John and Sheena. John, how are you today? I'm very well, Mark. Hello, Sheena. Hello, Mark. Hello, John. Hello, Mark. Hi. How are you, Sheena? I'm fine. Thank you. And it's a lovely sunny day in Calderdale for a change. It is. It is. Definitely the spring is arriving. You can feel it, can't you? The spring's on its way. We're probably going to do an episode about the seasons and the weather in the near future, so you can look out for that one. So we are looking, as I said, at the Victorian age. So Queen Victoria was on the throne from 1837 to 1901, and at that time, and in fact until our present Queen, she was the longest serving monarch that we'd ever had in this country. And that was a period where an awful lot was happening. And we've covered some of those things in other episodes, so I'm going to start with just an overview, and I'm going to link it to some of our other episodes. And then we're going to focus, Sheena's going to talk to us a bit about Queen Victoria herself and her family. And John's going to focus on an event during this period to do with the Irish potato famine and what happened to the Irish people. And John himself has an Irish passport, so he has a particular interest in that subject. So well, last week we were talking about the Industrial Revolution, those of you who listened. And you may recall that at the end of that period, we were already in this Victorian age. And by that time, Britain was known as the workshop of the world. We were producing more goods than anyone else in the world during the middle part of the 19th century. In fact, we actually produced over half of the coal, the iron, and the cotton cloth, produced in the entire world. So here's this little island producing more than anybody else was at that time. And John, last week, talked about the Great Exhibition, which was an exhibition where we showed off some of the things that we were producing in this country. And we were trading with large parts of the rest of the world. It was also a time when the transport systems were developing rapidly and particularly the railways, so that all over this country, but also increasingly as the Victorian age continued elsewhere in the rest of the world, it was railways that were revolutionizing the way in which people and goods could be moved around. And that brings us to a second really key thing about this period, and that was the British Empire. Now we covered that in more detail in episode three of this podcast. So if you want more detail on this, go back and find episode three of season one of the podcast to find much more detail about that. But the key thing is that Britain had gone out and had colonized large parts of the rest of the world. In fact, by the end of the Victorian period, there were 400 million people around the world who were in the British Empire. That means they were ruled by Britain and Queen Victoria was their queen. In fact, a quarter of the world's land surface was in the British Empire at its height. So this development of the British Empire happened particularly under Queen Victoria's rule, and she became in fact the first Empress of India, because India was a key part of our empire. But the empire stretched as far as Australia, large parts of Africa, and as I say, India and what is today also Pakistan and Bangladesh. And of course with that empire, that meant there was quite a lot of movement of people. There were British people who went out and settled in the empire and often lived their whole lives out there, and there are still people who live in other parts of the world whose origins are British from that period, but also people started to come over from the empire and from other countries as well, to actually live in Britain at that time. And you may recall, if you listened last week, that we were talking about the really shameful period of the slave trade. When we get to the Victorian period, we do get the abolition of the slave trade. And whilst Britain should rightly feel responsible for some of the dreadful treatment of slaves and that thousands and thousands of slaves died on the journeys, and then were clearly treated terribly for the rest of their lives, Britain actually was the first country, I think the first country in the world, to abolish slavery officially. And that happened right at the beginning of Victoria's reign. And after that, we did play some role in bringing the slave trade to an end in our region as well. Probably the most famous abolitionist, as they were called, was a man called William Wilberforce, who was from Hull in Yorkshire, and I think we touched briefly the other week on a lot of the organised working class in the cotton industries in the North West and in Yorkshire, were very firmly opposed to slavery and organised support for the abolition movement, so it's something that our region was very involved in. So maybe the third key thing about this period, I would say, was the way in which the idea of democracy developed. So at the early part of Queen Victoria's reign, then it was really only very rich landowners and particularly out in the countryside, who actually had a say in Parliament and what was happening in the government. But it, through different acts of Parliament, particularly in 1832 and 1867, and as a result of struggles and demonstrations and protests by people such as the Chartists, and in the later period, the Suffragettes, we got the expansion of the vote, although it was still, even by the end of the Victorian era, only men who could vote and only men with property that could vote. But it had spread to the towns and the cities. Then at the beginning of the next century, after Victoria died, where there really was an expansion of the vote to the working classes, and eventually to women as well. I believe we did a previous episode on that, didn't we, Mark? Yes, on the history of democracy, that was episode four of season one of the podcast. So again, for those people who want to know more about that development of the vote and the struggles around that, you can find that if you go back to that episode. So Sheena, tell us a little bit about Queen Victoria herself. Yes, Mark. Well, I've always been interested in Queen Victoria because I've seen statues and monuments and lots of lakes and mountains are named after her. So I've tried very hard to find out about Victoria the Woman. I know she was the first monarch that travelled on the railway, which you mentioned. She was the first monarch to live at Buckingham Palace. She was Queen at 18, so a very young Queen. And even though we had a very large British Empire, she was very small in stature. She was somewhere between four foot ten and five foot two, lots of different descriptions of her height. But she was this very tiny person but obviously very, very important. Once she became Queen, she married Albert, her first cousin. And even though it was a very convenient marriage for Europe and for the UK, I think it was a love marriage. I think she definitely was devoted to him. And they had nine children in total and they had seven children in the first ten years of their marriage. So a lot of the time, Victoria was either pregnant or had a lot of childcare to organise, even if she didn't do it personally herself. And Albert played a very important part then in helping to run the country. He was very well educated and very efficient and I think she was very happy that he took a role. Really, he performed and behaved like a king. And I think she was happy with that. Tell us where did Albert come from, Sheena? Well, he was German, he was the Prince of Saxe-Coburg at the time. And why was that significant do you think? I think it was important because Britain as a world empire and German was an evolving powerful country at the time. And even though they were cousins, first cousins, it was still important because of the countries that they represented. And as Sheena has pointed out, the element of dynastic marriages is very important in Queen Victoria's life. Obviously she married Albert, Saxe-Coburg, Gotha and then many of their nine children went on to marry into the royal families right across Europe. So the most famous example of this is the fact that at the outbreak of World War I, Tsar Nicholas of Russia and his wife Alexandra and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany were all the first cousins of King George V of the United Kingdom via Queen Victoria. Also Queen Marie of Romania and Queen Sophia of Greece at the time were cousins to King George V. And this came, this ended up giving Victoria the title of, the unofficial title of the grandmother of Europe. Right, so that makes sense then, why in 1914 they changed their name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor so that their name didn't sound as German. Yeah, because we were at war with the Germans. They didn't want a German sounding surname so they thought Windsor sounded a lot more English. So that's why the current royal family are known as Windsor. Just going back domestically to England and at the time. They were a very popular royal family and the idea of Christmas I think we've mentioned this before on other podcasts as well, that it was a German tradition and it became part of a British tradition as well. So they were a very popular British family and one of the things that's mentioned a lot about that time is the morality of the Victorians and sometimes they're accused of being very prudish in the way they behave. They did things like Shakespeare, some of Shakespeare's stories were cleansed of anything that was remotely rude and the same with quite a few of the other classics. They stopped things in society like bull-baiting and cock-fighting and things like that. So we became a society maybe with that stiff upper lip that people associate with the British even now I think sometimes. Well I think one of the things that it's known for is a very strict code of discipline in the family. The phrase that was often used was children were expected to be seen but not heard. So children had to behave themselves but really weren't expected to have much fun or to actually interrupt anything that the adults were doing. Although to be honest I think that's very much what it was like amongst certain middle classes because actually the children of the working class were actually out working most of the time so that's very much an image I think of the more middle class but certainly that idea of a very strict upbringing for certainly for middle class children I think is typical of the Victorian period. Yes and a lot of people were interested in Victoria's family and especially I think the most important thing that happened was when Albert died. So suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 42 when he had still a young family and a youngish wife he died and there was shock for the Queen and for the country so there was an outpouring of grief towards this family and then I think we remember Victoria dressed in black because she did that for the next 40 years. She never forgot Albert. She slept apparently with an image of Albert next to her at night. His clothes and hot water were prepared every day for 40 years as if he was still alive. Publicly Victoria certainly was mourning the death of Albert but something very curious that I found out was when she died she was buried with her wedding veil in her coffin but she had Albert's dressing gown with her in the coffin and then apparently she left secret instructions to also have a photograph of her Scottish servant John Brown who she had a very close relationship with and also apparently in the coffin was a lock of his hair and it is even said that she asked for his mother's wedding ring to be placed on her finger so maybe there was some secrets to Victoria's family life that we still don't know about. Now John you're going to tell us a bit about what was happening in Ireland at this time and why that's important to this period and indeed to what happened after. The main thing that we're talking about today is a period which is known well known in the Irish language as Angotomor so that's the Gaelic language which is spoken in Ireland. Angotomor means the great hunger so most people when we're looking at history from an English point of view it is known as the Irish potato famine because one of the great reasons for the great hunger and I've been looking at this a little bit like in modern terms we've seen Covid appearing in China and then spreading through the world as people travel across the world there was a thing at this time known as the potato blight which is basically a disease that affects the potato and it destroys the leaves and the potatoes themselves now this had spread from North America it's spread to Europe then through England and into Ireland now it caused a lot of deaths from starvation across Europe across England Scotland but it was particularly severe in Ireland because the word that we would use is for the potato it was the staple crop so vast majority of the people who lived in rural Ireland were dependent on the potato so it was their main source of food and it was also the main source of income so from 1845 this terrible disease takes hold in the crop and in successive years there's a complete failure of the potato crop okay now for anybody who's been to Ireland you watch Ireland on the television if you have a visit there the idea of a famine is it seems hard to comprehend because Ireland is so fertile it's green it's lush it's beautiful there's cows and sheep everywhere productive farms but that's what we saw we saw a famine so the likes of which we might see today in sub-Saharan Africa or in other places we saw a really really dreadful period of hunger and famine one of the reasons that this period of famine has been such a controversial period in history is that it's seen and rightly so has not been only a natural disaster so the famine itself eventually led to the deaths of a million people in Ireland so one in seven of the population and up to two million people left Ireland forever mainly to go to North America many of them came to England Liverpool Glasgow and other places but the real controversy that continues when we're examining this period of history is that the government at the time they didn't offer anywhere near as much assistance as they should have done so initially when the famine first began a chap called Robert Peale was the prime minister very famous for setting up the police force in England that's why we call police bobbies to this day after Robert Peale now he basically did something very important he repealed what we're called the corn laws so he took tariffs off imported food and he did start to import lots of food distributed to the people in Ireland who were starving however he left power he was replaced by a chap called Lord Russell who was at that time the leader of the Whig party who were essentially the forerunners of the modern Liberal party now the ideas that these people held at that time was something that we call laissez-faire so as a French word initially but basically they believed that you should not interfere with the economy so that if people were starving if there were shortages the market economy would find a balance and it would work things out and the government interference in the economy was a bad thing so they effectively left things to their own devices one of the other controversies is that during the period that people were starving Ireland was exporting lots and lots and lots of food so grain and oats, butter, pork, beef were still being exported to the empire and being exported to mainland England as well so really like I said this becomes the key event in terms of modern Irish history hugely important obviously if you speak to somebody from Ireland about the subject they'll be very knowledgeable about it they'll be able to talk to you about it they'll know the history it's kind of being brushed over in terms of the English or the British approach to history as I said a key event in Irish history it basically moving on from the famine we see obviously the huge amount of people who leave Ireland, Ireland to this day in Europe is the only country whose population is smaller now than it was in 1850 so you know you've seen a huge amount of people dying and a huge amount of people leaving it led very importantly basically to the rise of widespread nationalism in Ireland so the idea that Ireland should become an independent country this developed through the later years of Victoria's reign so in the 1870s and 80s we saw what we call the land wars so this was a period of agitation and uprisings led by a group of people called the land league so they were opposed to the Protestant British landlords they were fighting for the Irish peasants the native Irish people to have their own land and to have a political voice and eventually this led on into the early 20th century the rise as to say in Irish nationalism which came to a head during World War I in the rising of 1916 and eventually in 1921 the setting up of the Irish free state an interesting language point during this the later years that we just talked about the land wars so the people who were fighting for their rights and fighting for the land in Ireland they set up a system whereby they would work against the landlords so if a landlord was being particularly cruel to the people or extracting high rents everybody in that area or county would refuse to work for the landlord the first landlord who this system was used against is a man called Charles Boycott so to this day the word in the English language if you boycott something comes from the name of the of the English landlord Herring Island so yeah a very interesting period a very sad period but a period as well that were very influential for the rest of the world so if you look now at the United States the current president of the United States Mr. Biden is of Irish heritage previous presidents people like John F. Kennedy the Kennedy family all from Irish extraction I think some 30 million people the one of the largest ethnic groups in the United States and all across the rest of the world in from Glasgow to Sydney across New Zealand Canada America everywhere you go you will meet people of Irish extraction as you will in Calderdale myself and Sheena who above descended from the Irish people and moved to work in West Yorkshire and one of the things one of the things I've noticed wherever I've been on holiday and I've been lucky enough to travel to a number of countries around the world every major city has an Irish part that's true yeah where you go in the world you'll find a Chinese restaurant and an Irish pub Language support this is the part of the podcast where I talk about a few of the words and phrases used in this episode so today I'm going to start with the idea of dynastic marriages that's something that John mentioned after we've been talking about how so many of Queen Victoria's children married into the royal families of other European countries so a dynasty is a succession of people from the same family who play an important role in this case in the running of a country but it could be in for example the running of a business so dynastic marriages are marriages between families which creates a more powerful set of relationships. Sheena talked about Victorian society the Victorian age as being one that is often seen as prudish to be prudish is to be easily shocked by anything that's rude and particularly by anything related to sex and then Sheena also talked about the idea of Victorian Britain being a time when British people showed a stiff upper lip this is an expression that's been used and is still used today to describe British people it means being determined in the face of difficulties coping well with stressful situations now that's the positive angle on it but it's sometimes used more negatively to suggest people who are a bit distant a bit unemotional that don't really show their feelings and that British people are a bit like that obviously that's a generalisation but it probably does originate from the Victorian period and then after the death of Albert Queen Victoria's husband we said that she went into mourning now mourning is to express sorrow or sad sadness at someone's death and in in many Western societies anyway mourning often is associated with black the colour black and dressing in black which is what Queen Victoria did for the rest of her life after his death. John talked about the tariffs that were introduced on certain goods a tariff is simply a tax a tax on goods coming into or going out of a country and finally John talked about the word boycott and just to explain that in a little bit more detail if you boycott something it means you refuse to have anything to do with it so you could boycott a business or a shop or you could boycott a product because for example you didn't think it was environmentally friendly and John was explaining that boycott was the name of one of the English Protestant landowners who many Irish people refused to have anything to do with that's it for this week thank you for listening we'll be back with you again very soon. Keep listening for further information about the transcript the website and the email address you can find the transcript that's the written version of this episode on our website www.St. Augustine Center Halifax.org.uk and that's where you can also find links to all the other episodes and the transcripts so you can listen and read along at the same time that's also where you can find out how to donate to help our work we are a charity supporting particularly refugees asylum seekers and migrants but also all those in need in our local area and we would welcome your support if you felt able to give it if you follow on the website the links to get involved and donate we also have an email address that's English for life in the UK at gmail.com and we would love to hear from you your thoughts on our podcast and ideas for the future we also have a Twitter account @esolsaint and there is additional material on that site I will spell out all those addresses so the website www.STAUGUSTINESCENTREHALIFAX.org.uk so that's the website the email is English for life in the UK at gmail.com and that's English for spelt F-O-R and finally the Twitter account is at capital E-S-O-L capital S-A-I-N-T