FEAST OF VICTORIANA
Michael Vestey
There’s nothing like an anniversary
to bring out the best in Radio Four, as we’ve been
hearing for the past week. To mark Queen Victoria’s
death on 22 January, 1901 the network broadcast several
programmes about her life and times with a splendid raid
on the BBC archives for Queen Victoria, an hour-long account
of her thoughts, feelings and 64-year reign, presented
by the historian Amanda Foreman (Saturday). Some listeners
dislike the BBC putting out anniversary programmes but
for me it’s an opportunity to hear items of history
that might not normally make it to the airwaves.
We’ve even heard Queen Victoria’s voice recorded
at Balmoral in 1888 though no amount of twiddling with
the tone button on my radio could make her words comprehensible
above the hiss. I think I caught, "The answer is ...." But
that’s about all. Nevertheless it was her voice and
for a moment it bridged the enormous chasm between her
age and our own. The more I hear and learn of the Victorian
age the more fascinated I become by it.
Although I read Elizabeth Longford’s brilliant two-volume
biography of Victoria when it was published some ten years
ago, there is much that I have forgotten; that the queen
was, for example, a very fine writer as we could hear from
the extracts from her diaries, principally chronicling
her feelings but also her thoughts on her prime ministers.
Inevitably, listening to this programme made me think of
similarities and contracts with today and particularly
how we lack the bold certainties and confidence of the
Victorian era and what great decline our political classes
have hastened since then.
Foreman related how Victoria was thrilled by the Great
Exhibition of 1851, Joseph Paxton’s beautiful Crystal
Palace in Hyde Park, later Upper Norwood where tragically
it burnt down in 1936. This was Prince Albert’s project
and was a huge success, fusing the dynamic entrepreneurial
skills and invention of the Victorians with the achievements
of Empire.
And then I thought of Tony Blair’s Dome and literally
cringed with embarrassment by the radio at how mediocre
our rulers have become. If only, I thought, today’s
consort Prince Philip and the various royal organisers
of events and pageants had been in charge of marking the
millennium we would not have seen such a fiasco.
With history teaching in decline in state schools it was
also a pleasure to hear other programmes that would not
normally have been broadcast, among them Ian Hislop’s
series this week, A Revolution in Five Acts, looking
at Acts of Parliament that helped shape Victorian society,
not always for the better. His first programme, Speed:
the Railway Act of 1844 (Monday), discussed the railway
mania of the 1840s and how Gladstone sought to control
the burgeoning railway system. It was largely a failure
though he did succeed in improving railway travel for working
men who had to travel third class in open-topped carriages
before legislation ended that. Yes, there’s been
a feast of Victoriana on Radio Four this week.
It was sad, after hearing the news of his death, to realise
that I won’t hear Auberon Waugh on the radio again
mischievously saying what has now become the unsayable
or railing against modern poetry, art or youth culture.
Whenever he appeared on Today to prick some smelly little
orthodoxy, as Orwell put it, it immediately gave a lift
to the programme, particularly if you agreed with his view
but didn’t often hear it expressed on the radio.
So it was gratifying to read Polly Toynbee’s essay
of hatred for Waugh in the Guardian barely before his coffin
had been ordered. It made me realise that Waugh was even
more right about most things than I have previously imagined.
What she stands for is everything that has enfeebled our
country since the dynamic Victorian age: excessive state
interference, the collective over the individual, egalitarianism
in schools, the tyranny of the favoured minorities, political
correctness in most of its manifestations, to mention just
a few.
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