Victorians

In his long life (1809-1892) Alfred, Lord Tennyson not only became the symbol of Victorian poetry, he knew most of the poets personally. He was twenty-eight when Queen Victoria took the throne, and he died in the fifty-fourth year of her reign. In that time he saw the British Empire expand to become the greatest power in the world. The mechanical loom and the steam engine, superior mining techniques, steel manufacturing, and railroads gave England enormous new production capacity by which it was transformed from an agrarian economy to an industrial titan.

The Royal Navy kept the peace, India was annexed, and great wealth followed. But the shift from farms to factories left millions of people out of work. The guilds that once controlled the crafts gave way to open unregulated trade and the country fell into the invisible hands of capitalism.

As the destitute flocked to the cities competing for jobs, wages were driven down and working conditions deteriorated further. In 1848, in the midst of widespread poverty, it was necessary to pass laws prohibiting mills from working children more than nine hours a day (plus two hours a day for education). When people complained about the way they were being treated, their rights to free assembly and free speech were curtailed.

Only rich men could vote, and with no public sanitation, education, hospitals, welfare, or workers' rights, life in England became mired in poverty and disease. Two hundred fifty tons of raw sewage was dumped into the Thames every day. Cesspools overflowed when it rained, and London was awash with typhus and diphtheria. Disease was so prevalent in London that people were dying faster than they were being born. Coal smoke and dim streetlights turned the night into a jungle, and the veneer of Victorian “morality” became dangerously thin. In 1859 Darwin provided a scientific justification for such greed and callousness. Nature’s golden rule, he said, was survival of the fittest.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Tennyson and the Brownings remained optimistic. But by the second half of Queen Victoria’s reign, Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hardy in their poems, and Charles Dickens in his novels, were painting a darker and more disturbing picture. Others looked away. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote fantasy poetry and traveled abroad a great deal. Rudyard Kipling wrote poems about India, and the darkness deepened. The heavenly countryside praised by the Romantics had disappeared; the once-glorious Empire was growing mean and corrupt. At the end of the century, Alfred Noyes wrote a poem about a beautiful woman and her highwayman who were murdered in the night at the hands of the law.

Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns