The Victorians were obsessed by history. New media made it accessible to all, and they devoured it in novels, biographies, museums, stately homes and antiquities abstracted from Athens, Nineveh and Jerusalem. Above all they thought about past personalities, and what they meant for an age of unsettling progress. Dealing with figures ranging from the Bible, through Alfred the Great and William Conqueror, to Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Oliver Cromwell, this course aims to discover how and why heroes and villains from history were so compelling.
In doing so we will see how history reflected the great themes that preoccupied Victorian thinkers. The growth of parliamentary democracy, Britain’s economic pre-eminence, the development of free speech and the spread of religious toleration, were all matters of national pride, matters for which historians sought to provide explanation. But above all, these histories reminded Victorians of the importance of character and its cultivation. No surprise, then, that each commentator had his or her favourite idols and hate-figures, and that such figures excited such controversy.
History was also big business. Macaulay’s History of England (1848-55) went into numerous editions and brought its author an immense cheque for £20,000 from the grateful publisher. While Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels (1814-31) were all the rage in polite drawing rooms, cheap serial thrillers by W Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton ensured that poorer readers, too, could follow the fashion. The past also infused the visual arts: London art exhibitions, for example, were packed with historical canvases. And if not everyone could afford to buy a painting, advances in printing technology made cheap reprints increasingly available to a mass audience.
The Victorians, in short, lived and breathed the British story. So in aiming to get to grips with how they ‘did’ history, we will need to immerse ourselves in an exciting variety of contemporary sources. Classes will call upon material ranging from scholarly histories to popular pamphlets, novels and children’s books, from paintings and murals to prints, statues and stained glass. In an age of unprecedented progress, as we shall see, the past was seldom far away.
