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Spring 1851.

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The word "Victorian" enters the English language

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and a very small woman enters a very big building.

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She's 4'11", yet somehow she fills it.

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The moment, so pregnant for the future, seems holy.

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Victoria is herself flooded with religious awe.

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One felt filled with devotion,

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more so than by any service I have ever heard.

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Neither she nor anyone else has ever seen anything like this building before -

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a greenhouse the size of a palace

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with the difference that this is, from the beginning, a people's palace.

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A popular magazine calls it "the crystal palace".

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Its grandest spaces are filled not with courtiers and flunkeys, but steam pumps and locomotives.

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A huge showcase for Britain's industrial empire.

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Just three years before, in 1848,

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Europe had been torn apart by revolutions.

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The government had feared the same would happen here.

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As it turned out, other countries had war and revolution, we had the Great Exhibition.

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Other countries had barricades, we had the cheerful queue for the turnstiles.

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In an era haunted by fears of overpopulation,

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this was one of the greatest mass movements of people in all of European history.

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Six million came to see the show of shows.

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In 1848, industrial machinery had seemed to be the enemy of ordinary men and women -

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the gaping mechanical jaws into which countless lives were fed,

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to be spat out again as cotton cloth or nails.

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Technology, the prophets of doom had warned, was an engine of inhumanity

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driving working people to desperation or revolt.

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But inside the glittering glasshouse

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someone seemed to have waved a magic wand over the mechanical brutes,

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turning them from ogres to busy, friendly giants

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happy to be gazed at on a family outing...

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not least by the first family of the land, assembled amidst the hardware.

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After all, Papa - Prince Albert - the moving force behind the exhibition,

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was the first prince in European history

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to wear his connection with the world of business as a badge of pride, not shame.

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But what about Mama? As the mother of a rapidly-expanding family, Victoria might've been expected to know

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that if the cult of progress was to make Britain not just a great nation but a good one -

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be a home maker not a home breaker -

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it would fall to our women to see us through the painful change to an industrial society

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safe and sound.

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But, of course, hers was no ordinary family. Despite the family photos, Queen Victoria was not Mrs Average.

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The age which would bear her name would see transformations in the lives of women

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which Victoria could never have imagined in the dazzling springtime of her reign.

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Whether she'd welcome them or even understand them,

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whether they'd sweep past her and her glass palace - that remained to be seen.

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In 1837, when she became queen, Victoria was only 18.

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She was as pure as a rosebud,

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which seemed a welcome change

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from the decidedly impure reigns of her uncles, George IV and William IV,

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addicted to the pleasures of the bed and the table,

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and indifferent to the hardships endured by the mass of their subjects.

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Unlike the uncles,

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Victoria had been brought up a model of virginal moderation and self denial.

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No regency pampering for her.

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At one point she and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, had to move out of Kensington Palace to save money.

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So Victoria's nursery years were spent at bracingly ordinary places

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like Ramsgate and Sidmouth.

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Much later in life, for some reason,

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Queen Victoria looked back on her childhood as a time of sadness and loneliness.

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It's true that, like many middle class and aristocratic children,

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she was subjected to an evangelical regime of prayers and constant self-examination.

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She kept a "behaviour book" full of solemn and self-critical entries.

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This one, for August 1832, reads,

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"Very, very, VERY..." - underlined - "..terribly..." - more underlining - "..naughty."

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But could Christian betterment, the driving force of her generation,

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be taken from SELF-improvement to bettering the life of her people? That was the question.

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On her first excursion through England's heart of industrial darkness,

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the teenage princess would see what she was up against.

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Near Birmingham, she travelled through the landscape of a British Inferno, sooty and sulphurous.

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The men, women, children, country and houses are all black.

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The country is very desolate everywhere.

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There are coals about, and the grass is quite blasted and black.

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I just now see an extraordinary building flaming with fire,

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smoking and burning coal heaps intermingled with wretched huts and carts,

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and little ragged children.

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But the view from the coach was the closest Victoria got

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to the bleak reality of Smokestack Britain.

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In any case, there was something else on HER mind -

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her upcoming date with history.

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All those tombs and crowns and thrones -

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was she ready?

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The moment would arrive all too soon

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in the small hours of June 20th 1837.

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The teenage princess in her nightgown, woken by the arrival of the Lord Chamberlain

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and the Archbishop of Canterbury...

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'..who acquainted me that my poor uncle the King was no more

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'and, consequently, that I am Queen.

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'I am very young, and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced.

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'But I am sure that very few have more real goodwill and more real desire to do what is fit and right

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'than I have.'

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At her coronation on June 28th 1838,

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the young Queen showed what she was made of,

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carrying the immense weight of the robes and regalia with aplomb.

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But she also managed something more important than dignity - a glimpse of humanity.

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When the 87-year-old Lord Rolle tottered as he tried to mount the steps of the throne to do homage,

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Victoria's kind-hearted instinct was to rise and go down the steps to meet him.

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Everyone noticed.

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She was young, but not precocious.

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She knew she needed help, and she was wise enough to ask for it from someone superbly able to give it,

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the Whig Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne.

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He won Victoria's confidence by the simple but inspired tactic of never, ever talking down to her,

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never treating her like a child in need of protection.

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Instead, he treated her like an adult

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sophisticated enough to enjoy his worldly wisdom, his political gossip, and even his off-colour jokes.

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Under his guidance, Victoria's confidence in her public persona blossomed.

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She was, of course, the most desirable catch in Europe.

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Victoria's mother had thrown banquets and balls

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to ensure Victoria met the most eligible princes,

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including her Saxe-Coburg cousins, Ernest and Albert.

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It may well have been her uncle Leopold who, in the spring of 1839,

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first made the suggestion to Victoria that she might like to marry Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg.

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Like all young women, she probably initially found the subject a bit embarrassing,

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but once she got used to it, helped by that handsome or, as she put it, "angelic" German head,

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well, she pretty much ran the show,

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virtually grabbing hold of her curly-haired intended and sprinting for the altar.

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It was Victoria who supplied the ring,

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asked Albert for a lock of his hair,

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and wallowed in the kissing sessions.

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If she sometimes seemed determined to wear the trousers in this marriage,

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there were also other times, especially right after the wedding, when Victoria simply melted away

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into the amazed bliss of conjugal love.

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When day dawned - for we did not sleep much - and I beheld that beautiful, angelic face by my side,

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it was more than I can express.

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He does look so beautiful in his shirt only,

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with his beautiful throat seen.

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Already, the second day since our marriage, his love and gentleness is beyond everything,

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and to kiss that dear, soft cheek,

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to press my lips to his, is heavenly bliss.

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My dearest Albert put on my stockings for me.

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I went in and saw him shave.

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A great delight for me.

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Victoria and Albert's passion for each other was a strictly private matter.

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But for countless numbers of Britons

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in the suffocatingly overcrowded industrial cities like Manchester,

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bedroom privacy was an unimaginable luxury.

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Manchester was the very best and the very worst taken to terrifying extremes,

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a new kind of city in the world,

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the chimneys of industrial suburbs greeting you with columns of smoke.

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200,000 drones packed into the hive

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to make money for the lords of Cottonopolis.

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An American visitor taken to Manchester's black spots saw...

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..Wretched, defrauded,

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oppressed, crushed human nature

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lying in bleeding fragments.

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And thanked God for not having been born poor in England.

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The cotton mills were brutally demanding taskmasters.

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Whole families spent almost all of their working hours tending to the machinery.

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Children were given menial but dangerous jobs

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like scavenging cotton fluff from beneath the moving machinery.

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As bad as all this was, it was even worse when there were no jobs at all.

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In the first years of Victoria's reign, hands were being laid off in tens of thousands.

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It would be a woman, Elizabeth Gaskell, who'd be the whistleblower,

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the first of Victoria's sisters to stick her neck out.

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Amazingly, her blazing protest took the genteel form of a novel.

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But what a book! When "Mary Barton" was published in 1848,

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nobody, not even Charles Dickens, had gone as far as Gaskell

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in looking dead-on at the grim reality of industrial misery.

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The middle-class wife of a Unitarian preacher, Gaskell took herself right into the lower depths of the city,

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to the gin palaces and open sewers,

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dark, reeking alleys where skin-and-bones children played among the rats.

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In Mary Barton, you didn't just see, you HEARD working-class Manchester

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in the pages of literature for the very first time.

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To most of her readers, it must have been a language more foreign than French or German.

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We do not want dainties, we want bellyfuls.

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We do not want their grand houses,

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we want a roof to cover us from the rain, the snow and the storm.

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Aye, and not alone to cover us, but the helpless ones that cling to us in the keen wind

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and ask us with their eyes why we brought them into the world to suffer.

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By the time you'd finished Mary Barton,

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one word, struck like a hammer over and over again, would've lodged in your memory. "Clemmed" - starved.

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You say it, and you call up the entire knife-edge world of struggling to survive

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that Elizabeth Gaskell had created.

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Elizabeth Gaskell believed that honest, graphic social reporting could make a difference.

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She wrote to her cousin...

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My poor Mary Barton is stirring all sorts of angry feelings against me in Manchester.

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But those best acquainted with the way of thinking and feeling among the poor acknowledge its truth,

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which is the acknowledgement I most desire,

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because evils, being once recognised, are halfway on towards their remedy.

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One of Gaskell's fans, the social philosopher Thomas Carlyle,

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thought it was pointless to try and improve a system so fundamentally inhuman as industrialisation.

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Nothing is now done by hand. All is by rule and calculated contrivance.

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On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop to make room for a speedier, inanimate one.

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The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster.

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There is no end to machinery.

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For Carlyle, there was only one route to salvation. Britain must turn aside from the machine

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to summon the spirit of the Christian centuries of the Middle Ages,

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the last time we'd taken it for granted

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that faith was more important than money.

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To bring about this great conversion from Babylon to Jerusalem,

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nothing less would do than a Christian revolution in building.

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And no-one was more convinced of this than the greatest of the Gothic revivalists,

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Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin.

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A new generation of churches would be in the front line in the war to save Victorian souls.

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Pugin was never happy just to sound off.

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He believed, with the fervour of the old faith, that a properly beautified church was the very face of heaven.

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And before he died - brutally early, at the age of 40 - he made sure,

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especially here at the Church of St Giles in Cheadle, Staffordshire,

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to let some people see how gloriously colourful it could be.

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But however spiritually nourishing this might have been,

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it wasn't going to put bread on the tables of the needy millions.

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Victoria's first decade as Queen was also a time of economic hardship for many of her subjects.

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A slump in foreign trade had led to mass lay-offs in the industrial cities.

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Bread was an unaffordable luxury for the unemployed,

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who blamed the Corn Laws for keeping cheap, imported wheat out of Britain.

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Working-class anger and desperation was close to boiling point.

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For middle-class reformers, the answer was easy.

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"All we need to do is to get rid of the Corn Laws and all will be well."

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But the militant spokesmen of the WORKING people weren't convinced.

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They wanted more.

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Only a truly popular government - a democracy, in fact - would do something about THEIR distress.

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They set out their demands in a "people's charter",

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a new Magna Carta for the modern age.

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It demanded the right to vote for all men,

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secret ballots, annual parliaments.

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How to get them? Moral force if we may, physical force if we must.

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In the climate of fear and hatred, people had to decide just where their loyalty lay.

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If you were on the right side of the tracks -

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owner of a cotton mill like this in Aircoats - you'd think the Chartists were just a mob misled by demagogues.

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Besides, who said capitalism was a funfair?

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As long as you kept your hands off the market, well, the market sooner or later would right itself.

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And the poor, the people who worked here, who were hungry now, would feed off the fat of the land tomorrow.

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On April 10th, 1848, a monster Chartist petition

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signed by nearly two million men and women, so huge it needed two hackney cabs to get it to Parliament,

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was brought to London.

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150,000 Chartists with bands, banners and green, red and white rosettes converged on Kennington Common

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for the biggest political rally in British history.

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The Government was ready for them.

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London was turned into a huge armed camp, with mounted guards, guns and even cannon posted

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at critical sites like the Tower of London and the Bank of England.

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Soldiers were posted on the Mall to prevent access to Buckingham Palace.

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The royal family had fled to the Isle of Wight.

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Faced with this immense display of strong-arm force,

233
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the leader, newspaper owner and MP Fergus O'Connor, had no choice.

234
00:23:04,080 --> 00:23:09,000
He gave orders that nobody should provoke the troops, however goaded,

235
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for the result would've been a bloodbath.

236
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Some of the younger firebrands thought it was a sell-out.

237
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But what was Fergus O'Connor supposed to do -

238
00:23:20,880 --> 00:23:26,960
unleash his people's army on the Queen's soldiers only to get them mown down?

239
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Now, what good would that have done the cause of the working people of Britain?

240
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And besides, just look at this photograph of the meeting on the common.

241
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The very first political photograph in our history.

242
00:23:44,320 --> 00:23:49,360
Not exactly about to storm the barricades, are they?

243
00:23:54,360 --> 00:23:57,280
It may have ended for the moment -

244
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the threat of the kind of revolution that had spread through European capitals in 1848 happening here too -

245
00:24:04,320 --> 00:24:11,040
but the dream of so many working people for somewhere decent to live, enough to eat,

246
00:24:11,040 --> 00:24:15,680
for a share in the Victorian bonanza, was as urgent as ever.

247
00:24:15,680 --> 00:24:22,520
If they weren't going to get it by armed revolt, then they would get it in the British way,

248
00:24:22,520 --> 00:24:29,360
in small but decisive steps, by coming together in self-sufficient communities.

249
00:24:32,040 --> 00:24:37,000
This is all that survives intact of those little pipe dreams,

250
00:24:37,000 --> 00:24:43,800
one of the cottages of the Chartist Land Company settlement at Great Dodford in Worcestershire.

251
00:24:43,800 --> 00:24:46,560
Founded in 1845,

252
00:24:46,560 --> 00:24:52,440
the Land Company was the brainchild of none other than Fergus O'Connor.

253
00:24:52,440 --> 00:24:57,480
It bought land, which it divided among its members into smallholdings

254
00:24:57,480 --> 00:25:02,120
meant to take people out of the industrial slums

255
00:25:02,120 --> 00:25:06,760
and back to the rural world of their forefathers.

256
00:25:06,760 --> 00:25:11,800
They'd get a few acres to grow their own food and make a small living.

257
00:25:11,800 --> 00:25:18,640
"Do or die" was the motto of the incoming settlers to places like Great Dodford,

258
00:25:18,640 --> 00:25:21,160
and their work was no picnic -

259
00:25:21,160 --> 00:25:27,200
breaking soil, planting hedges, making roads, with no certain outcome.

260
00:25:30,440 --> 00:25:36,720
But some were determined to make a go of it, especially Chartist women.

261
00:25:36,720 --> 00:25:44,240
Ann Wood, who lived in a cottage very much like this one, was just an Edinburgh charlady,

262
00:25:44,240 --> 00:25:51,840
but one with enough Scottish thrift and determination to save up 150 pounds to put down for a lot at Great Dodford.

263
00:25:51,840 --> 00:25:54,760
That gave her the pick of the crop,

264
00:25:54,760 --> 00:26:00,280
and after settling at number 36 along with her two daughters,

265
00:26:00,280 --> 00:26:06,120
Ann did well enough, at any rate, to lead a long life, dying at 86.

266
00:26:07,120 --> 00:26:11,640
So when all the sound and fury had ebbed away,

267
00:26:11,640 --> 00:26:16,840
what seemed to count for most was making a home, not a revolution.

268
00:26:16,840 --> 00:26:20,400
Prince Albert himself understood this.

269
00:26:20,400 --> 00:26:27,480
In the year of the Great Exhibition, he commissioned and had built model lodgings for the working class.

270
00:26:27,480 --> 00:26:30,760
Later, they were rebuilt at Kennington,

271
00:26:30,760 --> 00:26:35,800
on the very site of the Chartist revolution that wasn't.

272
00:26:35,800 --> 00:26:43,320
And as the boom years of the 1850s replaced the hungry '40s, Britain had never seemed so middle class,

273
00:26:43,320 --> 00:26:45,880
starting with the monarchy.

274
00:26:45,880 --> 00:26:52,200
The thousands of photographic visiting-cards circulating the country

275
00:26:52,200 --> 00:26:57,720
showed the Queen and Prince Albert, not on their aristocratic high horse,

276
00:26:57,720 --> 00:27:02,440
but acting out the rituals of middle-class life.

277
00:27:02,440 --> 00:27:05,280
Respectable, reliable...

278
00:27:05,280 --> 00:27:07,800
even a little boring.

279
00:27:08,800 --> 00:27:13,080
Queen Victoria was to have nine children in all.

280
00:27:13,080 --> 00:27:15,920
And never had Britain had a monarch

281
00:27:15,920 --> 00:27:20,960
who went to such lengths to advertise her domestic pleasures to the nation.

282
00:27:24,160 --> 00:27:27,000
The stroll in the park.

283
00:27:28,640 --> 00:27:31,680
The romp with the children.

284
00:27:34,560 --> 00:27:38,600
The singsong round the tree at Christmas.

285
00:27:44,760 --> 00:27:49,600
And on the Isle of Wight, a modest little seaside getaway,

286
00:27:49,600 --> 00:27:51,960
Osborne House...

287
00:27:53,000 --> 00:28:00,520
..designed by Albert and relished by Victoria as an idyllic retreat from the pressures of rule.

288
00:28:08,160 --> 00:28:15,360
It was here, at last, that Albert, who'd been kept from meaningful public work,

289
00:28:15,360 --> 00:28:18,000
got HIS desk, sitting beside hers,

290
00:28:18,000 --> 00:28:25,040
from which he could direct his campaign to make industrial Britain a better as well as a richer place.

291
00:28:25,040 --> 00:28:32,400
To see them together beavering away, you'd suppose it was a perfect partnership.

292
00:28:33,680 --> 00:28:41,240
But not so perfect that this couple, in every other respect so mutually devoted, were spared all arguments.

293
00:28:41,240 --> 00:28:46,120
They had their spats just like the rest of us.

294
00:28:48,000 --> 00:28:55,120
Victoria is too hasty and passionate for me to be able often to speak of my difficulties.

295
00:28:55,120 --> 00:29:00,320
She will not hear me out, but flies into a rage and overwhelms me

296
00:29:00,320 --> 00:29:05,640
with reproaches and suspiciousness, want of trust, ambition, envy.

297
00:29:05,640 --> 00:29:11,840
For her part, too, Victoria wasn't above letting rip when she got too worked up.

298
00:29:11,840 --> 00:29:19,920
Single people, she'd occasionally let it be known, were often much better off than unhappily married couples

299
00:29:19,920 --> 00:29:23,680
forced to stay together by convention.

300
00:29:24,680 --> 00:29:27,280
All marriage is such a lottery.

301
00:29:27,280 --> 00:29:32,520
The happiness is always an exchange, although it may be a very happy one.

302
00:29:32,880 --> 00:29:38,080
Still, the poor woman is bodily and morally the husband's slave.

303
00:29:38,080 --> 00:29:41,120
That always sticks in my throat.

304
00:29:42,920 --> 00:29:49,400
Astonishingly, this echoed exactly the kind of thing coming from the mouth and the pen

305
00:29:49,400 --> 00:29:55,720
of two of the most daring critics of the Victorian conventions of marriage -

306
00:29:55,720 --> 00:30:00,760
John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, husband and wife for seven years,

307
00:30:00,760 --> 00:30:05,400
tortured lovers in a peculiar, Victorian way for longer,

308
00:30:05,400 --> 00:30:08,560
joint authors of On The Subjection Of Women.

309
00:30:10,920 --> 00:30:17,360
This was, don't forget, an age in which a woman's property automatically passed to her husband

310
00:30:17,360 --> 00:30:19,880
when they got married.

311
00:30:19,880 --> 00:30:27,000
Husbands had the right to beat their wives, as long as the cane was no thicker than their thumb,

312
00:30:27,000 --> 00:30:30,040
and to lock them up for refusing sex.

313
00:30:39,640 --> 00:30:45,680
In 1830, the philosopher John Stuart Mill went to a dinner party

314
00:30:45,680 --> 00:30:48,600
which changed his life forever.

315
00:30:48,600 --> 00:30:54,800
He was struck dumb by the vision of a swan throat and dark, enormous eyes.

316
00:30:56,040 --> 00:30:59,080
They belonged to one Harriet Taylor,

317
00:30:59,080 --> 00:31:02,520
writer, poet and unhappily married wife.

318
00:31:04,680 --> 00:31:07,720
Between the soup and the port,

319
00:31:07,720 --> 00:31:16,000
John and Harriet were swept away by an instantaneous knowledge that they'd found their true soulmates.

320
00:31:17,640 --> 00:31:20,280
But, being two serious intellectuals,

321
00:31:20,280 --> 00:31:26,320
Mill and Taylor's forbidden love couldn't just be a selfish private passion(!)

322
00:31:26,320 --> 00:31:30,840
It had to be thought out loud as a public issue.

323
00:31:30,840 --> 00:31:37,880
Their situation made only too clear the hypocrisy of the loveless Victorian marriage.

324
00:31:39,160 --> 00:31:45,000
In some slave codes, the slave could, under certain circumstances of ill-usage,

325
00:31:45,000 --> 00:31:48,640
legally compel the master to sell him.

326
00:31:48,640 --> 00:31:56,280
But no amount of ill-usage without adultery super-added will in England free a wife from HER tormentor.

327
00:31:56,280 --> 00:32:03,600
Surely there had to be another way out than adultery or suffering misery in silence?

328
00:32:06,000 --> 00:32:12,480
What had to be done was to expose marriages as the property transaction they often were,

329
00:32:12,480 --> 00:32:18,520
and then use education and law to enlighten and protect women.

330
00:32:21,800 --> 00:32:28,840
Taylor and Mill would have to wait 19 years for a chance to practise what they preached.

331
00:32:32,160 --> 00:32:40,200
In 1849, Harriet's unloved husband finally died, freeing the way for her to marry John Stuart Mill.

332
00:32:41,520 --> 00:32:49,160
But not before he formally renounced ALL the rights the law gave him over his wife's property and person.

333
00:32:52,560 --> 00:32:56,120
Their happiness was short-lived.

334
00:32:56,120 --> 00:33:00,480
Harriet Taylor died of TB in November 1858.

335
00:33:00,480 --> 00:33:03,520
But there would be an epitaph,

336
00:33:03,520 --> 00:33:11,400
all their ideas poured into On The Subjection Of Women, their book that MILL published in 1869.

337
00:33:12,880 --> 00:33:17,920
Happy and equal marriages were no longer its only concern.

338
00:33:17,920 --> 00:33:25,040
Women, who made up almost half the workforce of Britain, should have pay equal to their labour.

339
00:33:25,040 --> 00:33:29,680
And most breathtakingly of all, they should have the vote.

340
00:33:32,400 --> 00:33:39,040
It was a book whose ideas gave powerful momentum to the Women's Movement.

341
00:33:40,080 --> 00:33:42,880
After the Second Reform Act in 1867,

342
00:33:42,880 --> 00:33:46,920
almost all male householders had the vote,

343
00:33:46,920 --> 00:33:52,960
which made the fact that female householders hadn't seem glaringly unfair.

344
00:33:52,960 --> 00:34:00,280
Mill, himself an MP, had tried to argue their case, and even won the support of 73 other MPs.

345
00:34:00,280 --> 00:34:03,120
The vote was lost, of course,

346
00:34:03,120 --> 00:34:05,960
but the words had been spoken,

347
00:34:05,960 --> 00:34:10,720
and they were heard especially loudly in Mrs Gaskell's Manchester.

348
00:34:10,720 --> 00:34:13,240
The breakthrough had been made.

349
00:34:13,240 --> 00:34:18,000
a democracy worth the name could not be just for men.

350
00:34:22,240 --> 00:34:27,280
Queen Victoria may have had her doubts about unhappy marriages,

351
00:34:27,280 --> 00:34:33,480
but this was a violation of God's ordering of right relations between the sexes.

352
00:34:33,480 --> 00:34:38,520
She let it be known in no uncertain terms what she thought of...

353
00:34:38,520 --> 00:34:44,560
..this mad, wicked folly of women's rights with all its attendant horrors,

354
00:34:44,560 --> 00:34:52,080
on which our poor, feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.

355
00:34:53,200 --> 00:34:58,840
There WAS fit and proper work for women to do, Victoria allowed,

356
00:34:58,840 --> 00:35:05,880
but only the kind which used the qualities of tenderness which God had given to their sex.

357
00:35:05,880 --> 00:35:10,920
Nurses, for example, were rightly called sisters and matrons.

358
00:35:10,920 --> 00:35:17,960
But was it quite right for the Queen's own nephew to call one of them "Mammy"?

359
00:35:19,440 --> 00:35:25,880
Florence Nightingale may well have garnered the reputation back in Britain among civilians

360
00:35:25,880 --> 00:35:28,520
of the Angel of Mercy in the Crimea,

361
00:35:28,520 --> 00:35:35,080
but the women whom surviving SOLDIERS most adored, for the very good reason that she saw them through the worst,

362
00:35:35,080 --> 00:35:40,120
was the most forgotten and the most unlikely of Victoria's sisters.

363
00:35:40,120 --> 00:35:43,240
And her name was Mary Seacole.

364
00:35:43,240 --> 00:35:46,280
Mary Seacole was West Indian,

365
00:35:46,280 --> 00:35:50,120
the daughter of a Scotsman and a Jamaican woman.

366
00:35:50,120 --> 00:35:57,560
Largely self-taught, her Caribbean remedies became famous after they'd been shown to stop violent dysentery

367
00:35:57,560 --> 00:36:02,400
and to bring yellow fever and cholera victims back from death's door.

368
00:36:05,880 --> 00:36:13,400
When Britain joined the Crimean War in 1854, she tried to volunteer her services at the front.

369
00:36:15,760 --> 00:36:20,400
But Mary didn't exactly fit the profile of middle-class nurses.

370
00:36:20,400 --> 00:36:24,960
She was turned down by the likes of Nurse Nightingale.

371
00:36:26,000 --> 00:36:32,120
So Mary got herself to the Crimea under her own steam and with her own funds.

372
00:36:32,120 --> 00:36:37,000
And once she got there, she did something truly extraordinary.

373
00:36:37,000 --> 00:36:42,040
Mary Seacole built her "British Hotel" right on the front line.

374
00:36:42,040 --> 00:36:48,600
And it doubled up both as a refectory, feeding the boys about to go into action,

375
00:36:48,600 --> 00:36:52,680
and a recovery station for the sick and wounded.

376
00:36:55,040 --> 00:37:02,360
Every morning, she'd make up great vats of nutritious food like rice pudding, saddle up a pair of mules

377
00:37:02,360 --> 00:37:06,560
and ride into the heart of the action looking for the wounded,

378
00:37:06,560 --> 00:37:11,000
to whom she'd dole out food, hot tea, medicine

379
00:37:11,000 --> 00:37:13,840
but, most of all, motherly love.

380
00:37:15,800 --> 00:37:22,920
Mortars would whizz past the big, old woman trundling along the lines.

381
00:37:22,920 --> 00:37:30,400
Upon these occasions, those around would cry out, "Lie down, Mother, lie down!"

382
00:37:30,400 --> 00:37:37,240
And with very undignified and unladylike haste, I had to embrace the earth.

383
00:37:39,280 --> 00:37:44,320
After the war was over, the soldiers feted her at a charity gala.

384
00:37:45,600 --> 00:37:50,120
She'd become - briefly - an eminent Victorian.

385
00:37:53,640 --> 00:38:01,040
Suppose, though, women drawn to help the sick went one stage further and dreamed of being a doctor?

386
00:38:01,040 --> 00:38:04,080
Now, THAT was a different story.

387
00:38:05,760 --> 00:38:12,800
In 1860, Elizabeth Garrett enrolled as a surgical nurse at Middlesex Hospital.

388
00:38:12,800 --> 00:38:15,440
But her sights were set higher.

389
00:38:15,440 --> 00:38:22,280
In between the swabs and the bedpans she was looking carefully at surgical operations.

390
00:38:22,280 --> 00:38:26,920
And she was also cutting up body parts in her bedroom.

391
00:38:28,720 --> 00:38:36,120
This improvised education made her bold enough to take the hospital's medical, not nursing exams.

392
00:38:36,120 --> 00:38:41,680
And when the time came to publish the results, one E Garrett had come top.

393
00:38:43,800 --> 00:38:48,720
Ordered to keep the outrage secret, she went public instead.

394
00:38:48,720 --> 00:38:52,760
Nine years later, the French gave her an MD.

395
00:38:52,760 --> 00:38:59,360
And in 1874, the first medical college expressly for women was set up in London.

396
00:38:59,360 --> 00:39:01,760
For Victoria,

397
00:39:01,760 --> 00:39:09,160
the mere idea of slips of girls looking at, much less cutting up the naked bodies of dead men

398
00:39:09,160 --> 00:39:11,760
was an unthinkable indecency.

399
00:39:12,880 --> 00:39:18,480
But no doctor was of any help to her in the greatest crisis of her life.

400
00:39:19,800 --> 00:39:25,440
For in 1861, the same year Elizabeth Garrett cut her way into medicine,

401
00:39:25,440 --> 00:39:28,000
Albert contracted typhoid

402
00:39:28,000 --> 00:39:33,800
which, after a few months of horrifyingly swift deterioration,

403
00:39:33,800 --> 00:39:37,320
ended in his death in December.

404
00:39:40,760 --> 00:39:47,520
Everything in those last weeks became suddenly invested with an almost religious significance.

405
00:39:47,520 --> 00:39:52,280
Here is the last book read to Albert, Scott's Peveril Of The Peak,

406
00:39:52,280 --> 00:39:55,720
and on the flyleaf the Queen has written,

407
00:39:55,720 --> 00:40:02,760
"This book was read up to the mark on page 81, to my beloved husband during his fatal illness,

408
00:40:02,760 --> 00:40:07,400
"and within three days of its terrible termination."

409
00:40:09,400 --> 00:40:13,920
You turn to page 81, and here's how it reads...

410
00:40:13,920 --> 00:40:20,640
"He heard the sound of voices, but they ceased to convey any impression to his understanding;

411
00:40:20,640 --> 00:40:28,200
"and in a few minutes, he was faster asleep than he'd ever been in the whole course of his life."

412
00:40:30,920 --> 00:40:33,560
Victoria buried her beloved Albert

413
00:40:33,560 --> 00:40:39,520
in the Italianate mausoleum she built at Frogmore in Windsor Great Park.

414
00:40:49,280 --> 00:40:54,520
Albert's death threw Victoria into a paroxysm of grief.

415
00:40:54,520 --> 00:41:00,400
Not for her the stoical acceptance of the inscrutable will of the Almighty.

416
00:41:00,400 --> 00:41:07,440
She had lost not only her co-ruler but her helpmate. And vanished too was her domestic idyll.

417
00:41:07,440 --> 00:41:15,080
At the abyss of her misery, she must have thought that all chance of contentment had gone.

418
00:41:16,840 --> 00:41:22,440
My life as a happy one is ended. The world is gone for me.

419
00:41:22,440 --> 00:41:27,560
If I must live on, and I will do nothing to make me worse than I am,

420
00:41:27,560 --> 00:41:32,400
it is henceforth for our poor, fatherless children,

421
00:41:32,400 --> 00:41:37,680
for my unhappy country which has lost all in losing him.

422
00:41:40,920 --> 00:41:45,440
Death was an immense presence in Victorian life,

423
00:41:45,440 --> 00:41:52,840
perhaps because it was the one conquest denied to the soldiers, the engineers, the captains of industry

424
00:41:52,840 --> 00:41:57,720
who seemed to be able to conquer everything else.

425
00:41:57,720 --> 00:42:02,880
If they couldn't stop their loved ones from going to their graves,

426
00:42:02,880 --> 00:42:07,080
they could at least create the illusion, in marble and photographs,

427
00:42:07,080 --> 00:42:11,560
that they were still alongside those who mourned them.

428
00:42:13,560 --> 00:42:18,800
This, in her distraught, inconsolable grief, Victoria knew how to do.

429
00:42:18,800 --> 00:42:21,360
With religious devotion,

430
00:42:21,360 --> 00:42:25,920
she set out Albert's shaving equipment every morning...

431
00:42:27,440 --> 00:42:32,480
..and fresh evening clothes and a clean towel every evening.

432
00:42:33,920 --> 00:42:38,960
Missing his physical presence, she slept with his nightgown by her side.

433
00:42:43,520 --> 00:42:51,360
The exuberant, headstrong young woman shrank into the hard shell of a forbidding, inconsolable widow

434
00:42:51,360 --> 00:42:58,680
for whom the least sign of merriment was a betrayal of Albert's sainted memory.

435
00:42:58,680 --> 00:43:06,480
She seemed, in a way which no-one accustomed to the strong-minded Queen could ever have imagined,

436
00:43:06,480 --> 00:43:11,520
somehow no longer in charge of either herself or of the country.

437
00:43:13,680 --> 00:43:19,720
Victoria's sense of moral calling, so strong from the beginning of her reign,

438
00:43:19,720 --> 00:43:24,240
had become so dependent on Albert the Good's judgement

439
00:43:24,240 --> 00:43:30,120
that now he was gone, she seemed at a loss about how and where to exercise it.

440
00:43:30,120 --> 00:43:35,160
It never occurred to her that women alone, either as widows or spinsters,

441
00:43:35,160 --> 00:43:42,400
might be able to do good by themselves - to make a life, even a career, on their own.

442
00:43:45,160 --> 00:43:49,440
If she wanted to see how this COULD be done,

443
00:43:49,440 --> 00:43:57,000
all she needed to do was to take her pony trap a mile or two down the road from Osborne to Freshwater

444
00:43:57,000 --> 00:44:04,560
to visit someone who, though neither widow nor spinster, was very much her own woman.

445
00:44:06,800 --> 00:44:10,400
The photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

446
00:44:11,400 --> 00:44:16,440
Since Victoria was herself an avid collector of photographs,

447
00:44:16,440 --> 00:44:23,480
she might have been curious about this eccentric, half-French woman's notorious darkroom.

448
00:44:25,960 --> 00:44:31,000
For Julia Cameron, photography was not just an amateur hobby.

449
00:44:31,000 --> 00:44:38,680
The poetic lyricism of her photographs disguises the hard need she had to make some money.

450
00:44:42,160 --> 00:44:48,600
Worse, she seemed, perversely, to glory in the male mess of camera work -

451
00:44:48,600 --> 00:44:53,360
flouncing around in the converted hen-house that was her studio,

452
00:44:53,360 --> 00:44:58,120
her dresses and hands stained with black silver nitrate,

453
00:44:58,120 --> 00:45:02,880
conscripting men and women models like a recruiting sergeant-major

454
00:45:02,880 --> 00:45:07,920
and bellowing terrifyingly at them if they moved before they were told.

455
00:45:08,920 --> 00:45:16,080
Needless to say, the men who ran the Royal Photographic Society refused to take her seriously.

456
00:45:16,080 --> 00:45:19,720
Admiring the enthusiasm of Mrs Cameron,

457
00:45:19,720 --> 00:45:22,240
the Committee regrets

458
00:45:22,240 --> 00:45:29,000
they cannot concur with the lavish praise bestowed on her productions by the non-photographic press,

459
00:45:29,000 --> 00:45:36,040
feeling convinced that she will herself adopt a different mode of representing her poetic ideas

460
00:45:36,040 --> 00:45:41,160
when she has made herself acquainted with the capabilities of the art.

461
00:45:41,160 --> 00:45:48,720
What they MEANT, of course, was that a soft woman couldn't be expected to master machinery, chemicals,

462
00:45:48,760 --> 00:45:53,760
the hard technology of the job, let alone make a career out of it -

463
00:45:53,760 --> 00:45:58,280
despite Julia's obvious success at both.

464
00:45:58,280 --> 00:46:04,320
But some of the most powerful and intelligent of the Victorian great'n'good -

465
00:46:04,320 --> 00:46:08,360
Tennyson, Carlyle,

466
00:46:08,360 --> 00:46:13,400
and astronomer Sir John Herschel - who HAD obediently posed,

467
00:46:13,400 --> 00:46:17,920
were not deceived by the poetic light of her work.

468
00:46:17,920 --> 00:46:22,920
They embraced her as the greatest portraitist of her age.

469
00:46:27,480 --> 00:46:33,560
Julia's triumph in making a profession as an artist must have been noticed

470
00:46:33,560 --> 00:46:40,600
by all the young women of the 1870s and 1880s who wanted more for themselves

471
00:46:40,600 --> 00:46:43,480
than a destiny as wife and mother.

472
00:46:49,520 --> 00:46:56,360
After Girton College, the first Oxbridge college for women, opened its doors near Cambridge in 1873

473
00:46:56,360 --> 00:47:01,280
they had, for the first time, somewhere that would educate them -

474
00:47:01,280 --> 00:47:06,120
liberate them if they chose - from middle-class domesticity.

475
00:47:07,600 --> 00:47:12,640
But even as they drank in knowledge behind the red walls of Girton,

476
00:47:12,640 --> 00:47:17,480
some of those young women longed to get beyond the cloister.

477
00:47:20,480 --> 00:47:27,120
The old ways of "women's useful work", teaching, preaching, nursing, were no longer enough.

478
00:47:27,120 --> 00:47:33,040
Nor was just being an educated designer of the House Beautiful.

479
00:47:34,080 --> 00:47:40,120
They were drawn instead, as Elizabeth Gaskell had been a generation earlier,

480
00:47:40,120 --> 00:47:47,160
to the UGLINESS everywhere in a Britain feeling once more the strain of economic crisis.

481
00:47:47,160 --> 00:47:54,200
Some even decided to make that new home in the places most shocking to their parents' generation -

482
00:47:54,200 --> 00:47:58,040
in the slums of the industrial cities -

483
00:47:58,040 --> 00:48:05,120
to steep themselves in the dirt and anger of their poor, abused sisters...

484
00:48:07,240 --> 00:48:10,080
..to face up to harsh truths,

485
00:48:10,080 --> 00:48:15,000
the kind spelled out by the young George Bernard Shaw.

486
00:48:17,160 --> 00:48:21,320
Your slaves are beyond caring for your cries.

487
00:48:21,320 --> 00:48:24,320
They breed like rabbits

488
00:48:24,320 --> 00:48:32,360
and their poverty breeds filth, ugliness, dishonesty, disease, obscenity, drunkenness and murder.

489
00:48:36,680 --> 00:48:39,520
The bravest of this new generation

490
00:48:39,520 --> 00:48:44,080
could even face head-on the most unpalatable truths,

491
00:48:44,080 --> 00:48:48,640
like that link between breeding and destitution.

492
00:48:48,640 --> 00:48:55,680
Annie Besant was the kind of do-gooder clergyman's wife unthinkable a generation earlier,

493
00:48:55,680 --> 00:48:59,240
and still unthinkable to the likes of the Queen.

494
00:48:59,240 --> 00:49:02,040
Annie Besant scandalised the country

495
00:49:02,040 --> 00:49:06,280
by publishing contraception advice for working people.

496
00:49:06,280 --> 00:49:13,320
Such impertinence would not go unpunished, however, and Annie found herself the victim of a court order.

497
00:49:13,320 --> 00:49:17,760
She lost custody of her daughter to her former husband.

498
00:49:17,760 --> 00:49:22,200
An unforgiving time for women judged as unfit mothers.

499
00:49:22,200 --> 00:49:24,960
But nothing would stop her crusading.

500
00:49:25,960 --> 00:49:29,880
Searching around for a woman's cause, Annie found one

501
00:49:29,880 --> 00:49:36,960
in the teenage match-girls who worked amidst phosphorus fumes for Bryant & May in East London.

502
00:49:36,960 --> 00:49:41,600
They were paid just between four and ten shillings a week.

503
00:49:41,600 --> 00:49:46,240
And if they had dirty feet or an untidy bench they were fined,

504
00:49:46,240 --> 00:49:50,880
taking more money out of their already pathetic wages.

505
00:49:52,480 --> 00:49:59,920
Most horrifying of all, the girls ran the constant risk of contracting the hideously disfiguring "phossy jaw"

506
00:49:59,920 --> 00:50:07,280
since Bryant & May persisted in the use of phosphorus, which other match companies had given up.

507
00:50:07,280 --> 00:50:13,840
At the same time, the company was paying huge dividends to its shareholders,

508
00:50:13,840 --> 00:50:20,200
a disproportionate number of whom - Annie enjoyed revealing - were the clergy.

509
00:50:20,200 --> 00:50:24,720
Annie wrote an article about the plight of the match-girls

510
00:50:24,720 --> 00:50:27,920
for her campaigning newspaper, The Link.

511
00:50:27,920 --> 00:50:34,360
Together with fellow Socialist campaigner Herbert Burrows, she distributed copies of it

512
00:50:34,360 --> 00:50:37,120
at the gates of the factory.

513
00:50:37,120 --> 00:50:41,960
The owners of Bryant & May threatened the girls with instant dismissal

514
00:50:41,960 --> 00:50:48,480
if they didn't sign a document repudiating the article and the journalists.

515
00:50:48,480 --> 00:50:54,760
But instead of signing, the girls went en masse to Annie and Burrows with their story. They told her...

516
00:50:54,760 --> 00:50:59,840
You had spoken up for us. We weren't going back on you.

517
00:50:59,840 --> 00:51:02,480
A strike committee was formed.

518
00:51:02,480 --> 00:51:09,040
Besant and Burrows promised to pay the wages of any girls dismissed for their action.

519
00:51:09,040 --> 00:51:15,880
George Bernard Shaw volunteered as the cashier of the strike fund. 1,400 girls came out.

520
00:51:15,880 --> 00:51:22,440
The company eventually settled, and Annie Besant and the girls were triumphant.

521
00:51:22,440 --> 00:51:26,280
Hailed as the working girls' champion,

522
00:51:26,280 --> 00:51:32,600
she was immediately sought after by all sorts of other women aggrieved at their treatment.

523
00:51:32,600 --> 00:51:39,440
In 1888, Annie campaigned for election to the Tower Hamlets' School Board

524
00:51:39,440 --> 00:51:43,080
in a dogcart festooned with red ribbons.

525
00:51:43,080 --> 00:51:48,120
She won in a landslide victory, polling 15,000 votes.

526
00:51:48,120 --> 00:51:55,520
Even before they had the vote, women showed they could, and would, win local elections.

527
00:52:01,200 --> 00:52:04,240
Queen Victoria was not in fact blind

528
00:52:04,240 --> 00:52:12,080
to the miseries which so appalled the young women social workers of the 1880s and 1890s.

529
00:52:12,080 --> 00:52:18,320
Shaken by some of the revelations in The Bitter Cry Of Outcast London,

530
00:52:18,320 --> 00:52:23,680
she actually pressed Gladstone's government to spend more of its time on the problem of housing.

531
00:52:23,680 --> 00:52:27,720
And her insistence produced a Royal Commission.

532
00:52:28,800 --> 00:52:33,320
But whether she wanted to see it or COULD have seen it,

533
00:52:33,320 --> 00:52:38,160
there were, in the warm Jubilee summer of 1887, two Britains.

534
00:52:38,160 --> 00:52:42,560
Nearly a third of able-bodied men were unemployed.

535
00:52:42,560 --> 00:52:46,880
Now, thousands of the jobless were also homeless,

536
00:52:46,880 --> 00:52:49,560
sleeping rough in parks and squares,

537
00:52:49,560 --> 00:52:55,200
some of them even in open coffins - the undead of Underclass Albion.

538
00:52:58,760 --> 00:53:03,800
But, of course, the Queen was kept well away from all that.

539
00:53:03,800 --> 00:53:08,640
What she saw were 30,000 poor schoolchildren in Hyde Park

540
00:53:08,640 --> 00:53:13,640
who each got a meat pie, a piece of cake and an orange

541
00:53:13,640 --> 00:53:17,440
to celebrate the great day of her Jubilee.

542
00:53:18,520 --> 00:53:24,280
The children sang God Save the Queen...somewhat out of tune.

543
00:53:26,960 --> 00:53:34,000
It was the kind of thing which brought a smile - yes, a smile - on the face of the old Queen.

544
00:53:37,040 --> 00:53:41,560
It would be like this for the rest of her life -

545
00:53:41,560 --> 00:53:45,800
the country bathed in summer evening light,

546
00:53:45,800 --> 00:53:48,320
the faces well-scrubbed and dutiful,

547
00:53:48,320 --> 00:53:53,160
the old lady at last something like the contented matriarch,

548
00:53:53,160 --> 00:54:00,200
the grandmother of the Empire - the thrones of Europe filled with her offspring.

549
00:54:00,200 --> 00:54:05,600
There was, of course, someone missing from this national family photo.

550
00:54:05,600 --> 00:54:12,000
In the Abbey, amidst all the splendour, Victoria suddenly felt a pang.

551
00:54:13,440 --> 00:54:18,640
I sat alone - Oh! - without my beloved husband,

552
00:54:18,640 --> 00:54:23,640
for whom this would have been such a proud day.

553
00:54:24,600 --> 00:54:29,440
Victoria would have to wait another 14 years, until 1901,

554
00:54:29,440 --> 00:54:33,160
before she would be reunited with him...

555
00:54:33,160 --> 00:54:37,600
..to whom the nation and I owe so much.

556
00:54:38,600 --> 00:54:42,960
Her long-suffering secretary, Frederick Ponsonby,

557
00:54:42,960 --> 00:54:48,480
said there was nothing Victoria enjoyed so much as arranging funerals.

558
00:54:48,480 --> 00:54:51,000
And her own was no exception.

559
00:54:57,120 --> 00:55:01,960
So she ordered a WHITE lying in state and funeral for herself.

560
00:55:05,440 --> 00:55:08,480
In her hands was a silver crucifix,

561
00:55:08,480 --> 00:55:13,920
her white dress decorated with cheerful sprays of spring flowers.

562
00:55:15,280 --> 00:55:19,400
There was a touch of Miss Havisham about this,

563
00:55:19,400 --> 00:55:23,800
the 80-year-old, flower-bedecked virgin bride.

564
00:55:23,800 --> 00:55:26,440
But not JILTED by her beloved...

565
00:55:26,440 --> 00:55:28,920
going to join him.

566
00:55:29,920 --> 00:55:36,960
When Albert's memorial effigy had been ordered from the sculptor Marochetti in 1862,

567
00:55:36,960 --> 00:55:41,680
Victoria insisted on hers being made at the same time,

568
00:55:41,680 --> 00:55:46,520
and with her appearance as it was when he had been taken from her,

569
00:55:46,520 --> 00:55:51,320
so that they would be reunited - at least in marble - at the same age,

570
00:55:51,320 --> 00:55:54,360
in the glowing prime of their union.

571
00:55:57,360 --> 00:56:04,400
The trouble was, no-one could remember where they'd put the statue made 40 years before.

572
00:56:04,400 --> 00:56:06,800
It had in fact been walled up

573
00:56:06,800 --> 00:56:11,840
in one of the cavities of a renovated room in Windsor Castle.

574
00:56:13,640 --> 00:56:18,680
Eventually it was found and laid next to Albert, as per the Queen's orders.

575
00:56:18,680 --> 00:56:25,720
And there she is, as if the clocks had stopped along with the heart of the Prince Consort.

576
00:56:26,720 --> 00:56:34,360
But they hadn't, of course. Victoria might lie next to her beloved dressed as a medieval princess,

577
00:56:34,360 --> 00:56:41,560
but he, of all people, had known it had been PROGRESS which had been the mainspring of her reign.

578
00:56:41,560 --> 00:56:48,920
Albert had done his best to see that it had been a force for goodness as well as greatness,

579
00:56:48,920 --> 00:56:53,960
that the surging movement of the machine age would be held in check

580
00:56:53,960 --> 00:56:58,760
by the moral anchorage of the Victorian home.

581
00:56:59,840 --> 00:57:07,080
Britain's women - Victoria's sisters and daughters - were all supposed to have been grateful for this,

582
00:57:07,080 --> 00:57:11,200
to bask in the warmth of the hearth they tended.

583
00:57:11,200 --> 00:57:18,240
But those cosy fires kindled yearnings that couldn't be contained by a placid domesticity.

584
00:57:18,240 --> 00:57:23,000
Those little liberators, the cheque book, the latchkey and the bicycle

585
00:57:23,000 --> 00:57:27,520
beckoned over the doorstep... and into the street.

586
00:57:29,480 --> 00:57:34,720
And you couldn't tell any longer just how the girls would turn out.

587
00:57:42,840 --> 00:57:47,880
Riding with the body of the Queen from London to Windsor

588
00:57:47,880 --> 00:57:52,520
was the widow of one of her Viceroys of India, Lady Lytton.

589
00:57:52,520 --> 00:57:55,040
Just eight years later,

590
00:57:55,040 --> 00:57:59,600
HER daughter Constance, imprisoned as a Suffragette,

591
00:57:59,600 --> 00:58:05,600
would make her statement about the future of women in Britain...

592
00:58:07,640 --> 00:58:13,000
..by carving, with a piece of broken enamel from a hairpin, the letter V

593
00:58:13,000 --> 00:58:15,760
into the flesh of her breast.

594
00:58:20,040 --> 00:58:23,080
But it wasn't V for Victoria.

595
00:58:23,080 --> 00:58:25,920
It was V for votes.

596
00:58:32,840 --> 00:58:41,880
Why not join the debate and get involved in British history on the BBC History website?

597
00:58:41,880 --> 00:58:50,920
You can take your interest further and get to grips with the sources that have shaped history.

598
00:58:57,080 --> 00:59:01,120
Subtitles by E Kane BBC Broadcast: 2002

599
00:59:01,120 --> 00:59:05,160
E-mail us at subtitling@bbc.co.uk