[BITList] Fwd: Surely the Victorians were the greatest of Britons

[John Feltham]

I am but the messenger...

enjoy - or otherwise.

My personal view is that it was the Lunar Men and Women who laid the  
foundations for the "Victorians" to stand on.

See...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Society

and...

http://www.birminghamstories.co.uk/story_page.php?id=11&type=fo&page=1&now=0

and....

http://www.search.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk/engine/resource/exhibition/standard/default.asp?resource=5218



ooroo





Begin forwarded message:



http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article5670578.ece

 From The Times
February 7, 2009
Jeremy Paxman: Surely the Victorians were the greatest of Britons

For decades the Victorians and their art have been dismissed as old- 
fashioned and sentimental. But we are wrong to reject the most dynamic  
chapter of our history?


Jeremy Paxman
In my childhood it was generally agreed that the adjective Victorians  
meant stuffy, buttoned-up, gloomy, cold, mawkish, prudish and  
hypocritical. Victorians wore dark, uncomfortable clothes and had  
dark, uncomfortable values. They inhabited a world of smugness and  
draughty corridors. They shrouded the legs of pianos in case the turn  
of a piece of wood might trigger lascivious thoughts. If you were  
describing where someone lived (and the house where I spent many of my  
early years fits the bill) you might, without thinking about it very  
much, add the extra adjective: he lives in that grim Victorian house  
down the road.

No one disputed your right to make such a value judgment. To our eyes,  
the Victorian house does look grim, Gothic and forbidding, designed  
less to welcome or comfort than to impress. The curious thing about  
this prejudice was that a dislike of the taste of the Victorians ran  
alongside the painful recognition that the country they had created  
had enjoyed a much better standing in the world than the one in which  
the inhabitants of Cold War Britain spent their lives. We were like  
children railing against unfairness, screaming you'll be sorry; it  
strikes me now that so much of this dislike was the consequence of  
this fatuous sense of perceived injustice. The Victorians had made our  
world, but we didn't feel much at home in it. We weren't quite sure  
what the new world would require (we're no more certain now) but we  
were quite confident that, whatever it was, it wouldn't involve the  
moral certainties and Gothic curlicues of the Victorians.

It has been the odd destiny of the Victorians to have created modern  
Britain, only for modern Britain to sneer at them. In reality, of  
course, the reputation of the age rises and falls not on its own  
intrinsic merits but on the tastes and prejudices of the point from  
which it is viewed. Our attitudes have yet to escape the long shadow  
cast by the superiority of the Bloomsbury set. As the cartoonist and  
19th-century enthusiast Osbert Lancaster once observed of the  
Victorians, “In the Twenties they were deemed comic because they were  
good husbands, in the Thirties they were thought shocking because they  
were bad employers.” By the 1960s, they were just an irrelevance.

And so an astonishing world began to vanish. Entire streets of  
terraced houses were bulldozed. Municipal buildings, public bath- 
houses and schools were laid to waste. The General Post Office on St  
Martin's-le-Grand in the City of London, with its thousand radiant gas  
lamps, was demolished as early as 1912. The London Coal Exchange had a  
date with the wrecker's ball in the 1960s, swept away to allow for  
road-widening work in the City. With its central rotunda and towering  
dome, its 40,000-piece wooden floor inlaid in the shape of a mariner's  
compass, its tiers of balconies, dealers' offices, its wind dial to  
determine when the next shipment of coal might arrive, this, surely,  
was a building that might have belonged in Harry Potter's Diagon  
Alley. It was flattened. The same fate befell the grandest monument of  
the railway age, the magnificent classical-revival arch that greeted  
travellers at Euston station. The contractor charged with levelling  
the thing offered to find an alternative site for the arch, but, no,  
the Government decreed it must be destroyed.

The remorseful contractor commissioned a silver model of the arch and  
presented it to the president of the Victorian Society, who remarked  
that the gesture made him feel as if some man had murdered his wife  
and then presented him with her bust. In this sort of atmosphere, the  
best that a conservationist might hope for was mere indifference, of  
the sort that befell the Midland Hotel, the spectacular building  
designed by George Gilbert Scott at St Pancras, with its clock tower,  
turrets, gables and pinnacles: what had once been the grandest hotel  
in the empire subsided over the decades under moss, decay and pigeon  
droppings.

We flatter ourselves that we are less blinded by aesthetic prejudice  
today. The miracles of Victorian engineering - the Clifton and Forth  
Bridges, the Ribblehead Viaduct that carries the Settle to Carlisle  
railway line across the uplands of northern England - are now loved  
and appreciated; and those severe 19th-century houses appear today,  
curiously, a little less severe when advertised on glossy property  
websites (indeed the Midland Hotel is about to reopen after a  
multimillion-pound restoration). Victorian storytelling is, rightly,  
recognised as second-to-none, and the larger-than-life characters  
invented by Dickens, Thackeray and the Brontë sisters provide perfect  
fodder for a succession of screen costume dramas. But the visual art  
of the Victorians has yet to be rescued from indifference. J.M.W.  
Turner may have painted the most popular picture in Britain in 1838  
(The Fighting Temeraire, Tugged to Her Last Berth to be Broken Up,  
according to a 2005 poll by the National Gallery and BBC Radio 4), but  
between him and the Impressionists there is little to trouble the  
senses apart from the Pre-Raphaelites, and they are a decidedly  
acquired taste.

It isn't difficult to see why they should have become so disregarded.  
Britain's second most popular painting, The Hay Wain by John Constable  
(not a Victorian: he died in 1837, the year that she took the throne),  
appeals to a sense of rural stability that feels absent from our  
frantic, deracinated present. The Hay Wain and similar paintings do  
not merely adorn the tops of old-fashioned chocolate boxes, they are  
themselves a kind of comfort food.

Many of the pictures of the Victorians, in contrast, seem like a dose  
of bitter medicine. The painters are clearly on the lecture circuit:  
they are trying To Tell Us Something, and there is an uncomfortable  
sense that they expect us to damn well sit up and pay attention. We  
are not supposed to like many of these paintings very much. In fact,  
F.W. Fairholt's Dictionary of Terms in Art of 1854 tells us that a  
good deal of Victorian art was not much more highly regarded at the  
time in certain circles at any rate. Anecdotal paintings, he notes  
disapprovingly, were “very reprehensible, although the most popular  
among the vulgar-minded patrons of Art”. Today, from a greater  
distance, the military ones appear to glorify battles we know nothing  
of, the moral tales seem to be trying to indoctrinate values we  
discarded long ago, and too many of the remainder appear cloyingly  
sentimental. And we might as well be frank and acknowledge that lots  
of them are simply not very good. But there is another way of looking  
at these pictures. They tell us stories.

After all, Britain may not have experienced the political revolutions  
that swept through much of continental Europe in the middle of the  
19th century, but the long period of Victoria's reign witnessed  
revolutions in virtually every other field; nothing was the same at  
the end of this era as at its beginning. Where people lived, how they  
worked, what they did with their leisure time, even what they believed  
were all transformed, often out of all recognition.

Cities exploded, and with them a sense that this new beast with its  
noise and smoke and crowds wasn't such a nightmare once you had got  
used to it. The frenetic chaos of a site like the General Post Office  
in the City was famous: spectators would gather simply to watch the  
bustle. The unrolling of the railway across the length and breadth of  
the country saw everyone from the lowest-paid to the toff help  
transform sleepy seaside towns into boisterous resorts.”

The artists of the period people like William Frith, Elizabeth Butler,  
Ford Madox Brown and Edwin Landseer - helped the Victorians adjust to  
new realities, taught them to celebrate the places where they were now  
living, provided moral guidance and connected the whirling, noisy  
present to a suddenly distant ancestral past. Often, the stage was set  
for formal presentations of Victorian life: a posed family scene,  
commissioned to show off one's wife and children, a comfortable  
drawing room complete with framed canvases and rosewood furniture, a  
display of material success for the gazing world. Such scenes are two- 
a-penny in Victorian painting. At other times, such painters as Henry  
Alexander Bowler reflected the doubts and fears that modernity was  
increasingly bringing in its wake; others, like Edward Burne-Jones,  
responded to these changes by looking back to a distant and ostensibly  
secure mythical past.

Not all of this art makes for comfortable viewing - for Victorian  
paintings do more than simply provide illustrations of the period. In  
the subjects the artists chose and the messages their patrons wanted  
to see communicated, they tell us about the condition of Victorian  
society. And, patrons or artists - Luke Fildes, for example, whom  
Dickens praised - with finely developed moral and political senses can  
show us how life was, not merely for the statesmen, mill-owners,  
divines and philosophers, but also for ordinary people, and,  
frequently, for those at the bottom of the heap.

Paintings such as Fildes's keenly debated and much reproduced  
Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward (1874) or G.F. Watts's Found  
Drowned (1849-50) (a title taken from the gloomy daily column in the  
The Times which published lists of women, mostly prostitutes, found  
dead in the Thames) were the cinema newsreels or documentaries of  
their day. Like those, they were not a true facsimile of life but a  
doctored version, designed to demonstrate a deeper or broader truth  
that the chance spectacle allowed.

These subjects and concerns, however, were in the minority, for the  
main focus of the contemporary artist was the world of bourgeois  
Britain. In this sense, the art of the period was a faithful  
reflection of Victorian Britain itself, for this was the era in which  
the middle class rose into full cultural and economic dominance. Some  
Victorian artists would become hugely prosperous by feeding the  
market: large fortunes were being accumulated by industrialists and  
traders, large houses were being built to accommodate them - and large  
canvases were needed to decorate their new walls. By the end of the  
century, some paintings were being sold for vast sums of money; even  
the most unlikely subjects could command high prices. So much so that,  
in 1881, The Monarch of the Meadows, a painting of cattle by T.S.  
(“Cow”) Cooper was stolen from the London home of the wealthy glove  
manufacturer who had commissioned it, and ransomed. When Sir Lawrence  
Alma-Tadema was commissioned by a wealthy engineering contractor to  
paint The Roses of Heliogabalus, showing the Roman emperor Elagabalus  
attempting to suffocate his guests by showering them in petals, the  
artist could afford to have fresh roses sent every week from the South  
of France during the four months it took him to paint the canvas.

Before Victoria's reign, metropolitan artists had tended to rub along  
among the artisans of Soho and Tottenham Court Road. As the vast new  
middle-class market gave them the opportunity to become middle class  
themselves, so they began to settle in smarter and more comfortable  
areas of London: Kensington, Holland Park and St John's Wood. Alma- 
Tadema had a house in St John's Wood elaborately decorated in the  
style of a Pompeian villa, dripping with opulence. These artists'  
houses were intended to serve as both studio and home. But they were  
also, frankly, for showing off. Frederic Leighton's house in Holland  
Park, complete with its astonishing Arab Hall, is perhaps the grandest  
of the residences that survive, but many others clustered near by.  
Other artists in the area included George Frederic Watts, the son of a  
poor piano-maker (long maligned as didactic, G.F. Watts recently  
returned to the spotlight thanks to Barack Obama, who includes a  
lengthy tribute to Watts'ss painting The Audacity of Hope in his  
bestseller, Dreams From My Father) and William Holman Hunt, whose  
father had been a warehouseman.

As the public devoured their paintings, so they lapped up anything  
they could learn about the artists who produced them - and many of the  
successful 19th-century painters were happy to oblige, revelling in  
their fame. Nowadays, of course, few of these figures are widely  
known, and this is in itself a reflection of the fact that so many of  
their paintings are largely unappreciated - a sobering thought for any  
popular contemporary artist when we consider that they were viewed by  
vast numbers of people in their day. Leeds, a city of under 400,000  
people in the 1890s, might have 250,000 visitors to its City Art  
Gallery in a single year. The Royal Academy summer exhibitions would  
regularly pull crowds numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

Then there were the vast cultural and industrial exhibitions that were  
such a feature of mid-Victorian life. The most famous of these, of  
course, is the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London's Hyde  
Park, 1851. But perhaps the best example was the Manchester Art  
Treasures Exhibition of 1857, over the space of 142 days, it drew in  
1.3 million visitors from all over the world. So prevalent was the  
belief in the improving power of art that enlightened industrialists  
like the wool magnate Sir Titus Salt chartered special trains to bring  
their workers on all-expenses paid visits to the exhibition. Salt's  
2,500 employees arrived in their Sunday best, accompanied by the works  
band. Great set-pieces of the era like the Manchester Art Treasures  
Exhibition and London's Great Exhibition were all about the power of a  
public view.

Everything was bigger, faster, louder, including the urban crowd. And  
increasingly there was a civic gospel too, explicitly set out by the  
leaders of the new industrial cities of Britain, an almost religious  
belief that, with vision, energy and ratepayers' cash, the Victorian  
city could become the envy of the world. The money was provided,  
helped along by new legislation that enabled taxes to be levied for  
the provision of galleries and museums. Such places were viewed as  
zones of “rational recreation”, designed not merely to aid relaxation  
but to educate, to show that the wealth of Britain was about more than  
dark satanic mills.

If you spare the time to stop and examine the paintings of the time,  
there is no better way of coming to understand what life was like at  
the time when, with the aid of steam power and armed with the Bible,  
the British traversed the globe. As someone who has spent all his  
working life in the business of journalism, I am fascinated with for  
them this reason, they attempted to create a visual record of what  
happened in an era of unprecedented change, to tell stories of a new  
social reality - modern life.

The Victorians by Jeremy Paxman is published on March 26 (Ebury  
Press); his series, The Victorians, starts on BBC One on Feb 15



ooroo

If you don't hear the knock of opportunity - build a door.

Anon.



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/pipermail/bitlist/attachments/20090207/683d85ec/attachment-0001.shtml