A familiar tale
STEPHEN BATES considers an evocative history of the Victorian age packed with style, but lacking in new insights
Dominion: The History of England Volume V By Peter Ackroyd Macmillan, 416 pages, £25
Just as it is said that there has been a book published about the American Civil War every day since it ended, surely the same must apply in spades to the Victorian era. The day before the day before yesterday still exercises a compelling fascination for a people and a nation so like ourselves – living in many of the same houses, walking down the same streets – and yet so different. We know a huge amount about the period, and many of us have known, not so long ago, people who were born then. Some of their attitudes about Britain and its rightful place in the world shape our own. But still the period remains elusive, just beyond reach.
The latest addition to the groaning shelves of Victoriana now arrives in the shape of the fifth volume of novelist and historian Peter Ackroyd’s history of England, which starts in the aftermath of the battle of Waterloo in 1815 – okay, a little before the beginning of Victoria’s reign – and ends with her death in 1901.
As you might imagine from Ackroyd, the book is written with a novelist’s sensibility, full of resonant phrases, especially about London, about which the author has written so many books. Here’s his evocative description of an omnibus on London Bridge in the mid-19th century: “All is mist and dust with the cacophony of sounds – the crack of the whip, the snorting of the horses, the cries of the children, the shouting out of destinations.” Queen Victoria, swathed in mourning after Albert’s death, becomes “the chrysalis for a black butterfly”; Lord Liverpool, prime minister from 1812 to 1827, “finally made up his mind and died”.
There are shrewd insights: “The less (Victoria) had to do and the more remote her life became from that of her subjects, the more she was celebrated.” And the occasional prejudice: the French apparently had “hysterics” when they discovered that the Orsini plot to assassinate Napoleon III in 1858 had been hatched in London – as well they might have had.
The author seems more of a fan of that old rogue Disraeli than Gladstone, and the Irish nationalists get short shrift (Charles Parnell is curiously scarcely present). Scotland and Wales don’t get a look in – spoiler alert: it is, after all, a history of England – but then, as the century progresses, neither does the countryside and its rural folk. In such a capacious history it is hard to cavil, but sport, music, the theatre and fashion are scarcely mentioned either.
Ackroyd certainly masters his material, but it has to be said that his determination to cover the ground, especially the politics, becomes a bit of a trudge, for us and, I suspect, maybe also for him: endless parliamentary bills, the church, literature, the music
The Victorian era still exercises a compelling fascination for a people and a nation so like ourselves
hall all get their paragraphs – what Victorians would have called their two ha’penny worth – but often not much more than that. Curiously, the effect is rather flattening: it becomes one damn thing after another, with infrequent pauses to allow a subject to breathe. The Tichborne Claimant however – the butcher who turned up from Australia in 1865 claiming to be the heir to an aristocratic inheritance, provoking a long-running legal case – gets a whole chapter to himself.
The book is also strangely oldfashioned: mainly a political rather than a social or economic history. Had it been published 50 years ago it would not have upended my O-level history syllabus. Although there are recent books in the bibliography, there are also works by GM Young and RCK Ensor – celebrated historians in their day, but writing in the 1930s – and, even further back, GM Trevelyan, whose British History in the 19th Century dates back to 1922. Missing from the list, for instance, is Boyd Hilton’s impressive general history of the early 19th century, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?, published as recently as 2006.
You won’t be buying this Ackroyd work for his original research, but for his style and verve. Who is the book aimed at? Clearly fans of the author will be entranced, but there is a bit of a conundrum: to appreciate the book you need to know something about Victorian England, but if you do, it probably won’t tell you much you don’t already know. Stephen Bates is an author and historian. His books include 1815: Regency Britain in the Year of Waterloo and Two Nations: Britain in 1846 (both Head of Zeus, 2015)
It becomes one damn thing after another, with infrequent pauses to allow a subject to breathe