the buildings the Victorians left behind: Credit: Rob Ball/Redferns/ Getty
The Albert Hall is a monument to a worldview and model of civic life that’s been at death’s door for some time. Crowdfunded by a patriotic ruling class committed to public moral improvement and the advance of British imperial interests, it’s quintessentially High Victorian in its history, purpose and execution. And now it looks as though coronavirus may kill it off.
It’s commonplace today to talk disparagingly of ‘Victorian morality’ as uptight and needlessly repressive, and of our modern culture as an improvement. But less well-recognised than Victorian uptightness is the fact that it was a backlash against preceding excess.
In the period leading up to Victoria’s coronation in 1838, the monarchy was associated with sexual licence, showy extravagance and George III’s mental illness. With republicanism sweeping Europe and America, Victoria and her consort Prince Albert sought to avoid the fate of less adaptable royals by reimagining Britain’s monarchy as moral rather than political leaders.
A progressive by the standards of his day, Albert was a natural for the job. He supported contemporary campaigns for education reform and the elimination of slavery, and was a compulsive institution-builder and attender of committees: “a civil servant in a coronet”, as A.N. Wilson put it. He was also key to the 1851 Great Exhibition, which showcased everything the society of the day wished to celebrate — from the stolen treasures of colonialism to Britain’s first public loos.
A number of schemes were proposed to commemorate Albert after he died, including a meeting and concert venue. But the funds were swallowed up by the Albert Memorial. Not to be deterred, the civil servant and inventor Henry Cole, Albert’s chief collaborator in the Great Exhibition, crowdfunded it.
Cole did the rounds among the great and the good. He built up enough momentum to win approval from the Prince of Wales, steamrollered competing architectural designs and pooh-poohed arguments that the hall was, as Lord Derby said,”inconveniently large for the meetings of really scientific societies”. He managed to drive the project through a banking crisis, budget constraints and his own unpopularity to deliver the iconic Kensington venue that’s now about to go bankrupt.
Traces of the patriotic culture of public service, contribution and assembly survived, until last summer, in the Albert Hall itself, via the orgy of flag-waving that is the BBC Proms. But today, a Rule Britannia-singing devotion to British national identity is coded as low-status and backward. After the Brexit referendum, this shift found its way even into the Hall, via the very middle-class turf war over whether the Last Night of the Proms would be a sea of Union Jacks or EU blue-and-gold.
In terms of wealth, the modern equivalent of the Victorian great and good who funded the Albert Hall are hedge fund billionaires and tycoons of industry. Many of these individuals donate to philanthropic projects, and the £12m it cost in today’s money to build the Albert Hall is loose change to the modern mega-rich. But the prospect of such individuals chipping in for an improving public institution with patriotic overtones is slender.
Today’s public-spirited billionaires are more likely to be trying to vaccinate the whole world, while the less altruistic host private seminars on maintaining authority over their mercenaries once money is worthless, or build luxury bunkers in New Zealand.
Further down the elite food chain, the attenuation of national allegiance among transnational elites is typified by the recent appointment of the Remain campaign director and Lib Dem spin doctor Ryan Coetzee, in a £5m contract to whitewash China’s new puppet regime in Hong Kong.
Albert’s own great-great-great-great-grandsons, the Princes William and Harry, encapsulate something of this change. William clings to Albert’s vision for the monarchy, combining personal reserve and apparently picture-perfect family life with a commitment to national duty. His brother is fond of sharing his emotional state with the world, and seems keener to pursue a moral mission at the planetary rather than national scale, via his yet-to-be-launched ‘Archewell’ foundation. His recent pronouncements on the subject of the Commonwealth have mostly been confined to criticising its historic racism.
It’s hard to say whether elite disdain for the fading relics of the British imperial past is a cause or a consequence of Britain’s decline. It may just be a matter of rats leaving a sinking ship: after all, American elites were happy to salute the Stars and Stripes until that flag started to look threadbare. In contrast, China, today’s up-and-coming hegemon, has no qualms about self-aggrandising nationalism.
In any case, Britain in Albert’s day was an imperial behemoth commanding some 20% of global GDP. Today that’s a minnowish 2.2%. The mood of the day is more in tune with defacing monuments than building new ones.
It’s also possible that Britain’s High Victorian self-confidence was just a flash in the pan of British national pessimism. A thousand years ago, the inhabitants of these islands were already muttering gloomily about the passing of empires. In the 10th-century Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer, the poem’s narrator muses about the fleeting nature of all human achievement, as he passes among ‘eald ente geweorc’ – the ancient work of giants.
The Anglo-Saxons built mostly in timber, and with the exception of a few churches none of their structures remains today. The ‘geweorc’ in the peom refers to the ruins left behind by the Romans when they left in 400AD. (One such ‘geweorc’, Hadrian’s Wall, is still standing a thousand years on from The Wanderer.) To the Anglo-Saxons, Roman mosaics, underfloor heating and multi-storey stone buildings must indeed have seemed the work of mysterious giants.
The public culture of 21st-century Britain is as incapable of producing a new Albert Hall as the builders of 10th-century Britain would be of constructing a hypocaust. This was demonstrated by the last serious effort to deliver something of its scale, ambition and identity-defining nature: the Millennium Dome.
Funded by the National Lottery, over budget by £204m (nearly twenty times the total construction cost of the Albert Hall), its exhibition was panned at the time and attracted barely the same visitor numbers as the Great Exhibition despite running for twice as long. Today the Dome lives on as what Lord Derby feared the Albert Hall would become: “a mere place of public amusements, of which monster concerts would be the least objectionable”.
This should surprise no one: by the late 1990s, British culture had already balkanised to the point where the idea of encapsulating our shared values in a unifying exhibition was quite simply unachievable. The leadership team tried to synthesise a common cultural vision, for an individualistic society feeding on the progressive destruction of just that vision. Of course they failed. We couldn’t agree on what we have in common, so what we got – a mixture of corporate-sponsored junk exhibits and vending opportunities in a big tent – was poetically apt.
This doesn’t mean we should pine for the British Empire. The High Victorian era produced as many horrors as it did impressive buildings and scientific advances. But we can surely admire the moral seriousness and mass civic-mindedness that was the best of Albert’s legacy, without shrugging our shoulders at (for example) the starvation of 5.5 million Indian people in the Great Famine of 1876-8. It ought to be possible to convene something like the shared cultural life that animated Victorian Britain, without being obliged to bundle that with sexual prudishness, child labour, or a burning desire to invade other continents, enslave their inhabitants and steal their mineral wealth.
Unfortunately, that’s not where we are. Britain is left with neither the imperial might of Albert’s era, nor its shared cultural life. Instead, we have the buildings the Victorians left behind, squatted by a ruling class that’s happy to trade Victorian treasures while remaining largely indifferent to or actively critical of Albert’s vision of public service and civic participation. An aristocracy more like Harry than William, concerned with only the individual and the largest canvas of all – the planet – but none of the scales in between, whether town, city or nation.
Another great Victorian work, Frankenstein, was inspired by Galvani’s 18th century experiments passing electricity through the legs of a dead frog, making them twitch even though the animal was lifeless. In the last few days, Chancellor Rishi Sunak has announced £1.57bn of funding for heritage and the arts, aimed at getting struggling institutions through the lockdown. We can expect the Albert Hall to receive some of that largesse, but this will no more revive mass-participation civil society than an electrical current can reanimate a dead frog.
For lockdown has accelerated a trend that was already well under way: the death by indifference of anything in civil society that isn’t either for private consumption or amenable to commercial exploitation. And our political leaders are now driving this trend to its conclusion: the more profitless (in a commercial sense) an activity, the more grudging the unlocking. Pubs, shops and building sites all have the green light; children’s playgrounds remain closed.
The only exception has been mass political protest. And this style of cultural and political activism is as polarised between the individual and the crowd, and just as incapable of building intermediate institutions, as the post-democratic elite whose voices are loudest in its support.
The remnants of the worldview, self-confidence and cultural tastes characteristic of Victorian-era bourgeois civil society have been on life support for a long time. Coronavirus was the coup de grace. But rather than using taxpayer money to try and reanimate the corpse, maybe we should learn from the Anglo-Saxons and take the long view. Instead of seeking to imitate the mysterious ‘eald ente’ of 400AD, they let the ruins be, and took a grim comfort in the fleeting nature of all things:
Alas for the bright cup|
Alas for the mailed warrior
Alas for the splendour of the prince
How that time has passed away
Dark under the cover of night
As if it had never been
Living as I do in what feels like the death throes of a civilisation, there’s comfort in knowing that the people who lived after Roman Britain had their own culture and history. Even as the traces of the Roman imperial past through which the Anglo-Saxons wandered crumble into today’s landscape, it’s worth recalling that the Anglo-Saxons themselves, in the end, also had a future.
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SubscribeAn interesting article, but I winced at the claim that Frankenstein was a “Victorian” work. Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818, when George III was still on the throne, and a year before Victoria was born.
An excellent commentary, Mary Harrington. I’d like to add a point:
“The High Victorian era produced as many horrors as it did impressive buildings and scientific advances.”
I don’t think this is fair. The simple fact is that many, many people in Victorian Britain were dirt poor – not just in a relative sense, but actually dirt poor. This cannot be put at the doors of the Victorians who were generating wealth faster than anyone who came before. There is no more absolute poverty in Britain (for the moment) as a result of the industry and commerce that the Victorians started. If you are talking about moral horrors, then I’d say “the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”. We simply cannot judge from a modern perspective.
I beg to differ. The transition from Roman civilisation to Anglo Saxon barbarism was pretty dramatic, particularly if you happened to live in the towns and cities.
Out go the magnificent public baths, the law courts, the underfloor central heating, public entertainment on a grand scale, and above all the sense of security the Pax Romana engendered, in particular the ability to wander around completely unarmed. Whatever this was, it was not transition!
From then on it was one form of brutal thuggery after another, and besides the inconvenience of being caked in body lice, and filth of every description, you had to be armed at all times.
The Normans brought very little new to party, bar some impressive stone buildings, and a poisonous cocktail of extreme savagery and manic piety, all ‘dignified’ as the Feudal system, which was yet another form of “robbery with violence”.
Well put!
Hi Mark – to clear things up for everyone else, I think you replied as I was editing out my first paragraph! I was making the point that most political transitions in Britain have been evolutionary not revolutionary and whilst the political elite may have been killed off, most of the country has carried on the same. But this cultural revolution may turn out to be as destructive to all of us as the Norman Conquest. I also included The Romans to the Anglo-Saxons as an evolutionary hand-over, but that’s just rubbish, it was bloody! Hence the editing out!
Geoff thanks for that. I agree for most of the history of this ” precious stone, set in the silver sea” change has been transitional or relatively peaceful affair, certainly by ‘continental’ standards’.
The exception off course,was Oliver Cromwell & Co. However, as you know, we soon returned to our old habits.
I recently saw something about only 1% of the population being energised by the Glorious Revolution of 1688/9!
Facts wrong I’m afraid. Lazy writing.
The Albert Hall hosts a wide variety of events including tennis, wrestling, the Women’s Institute annual gathering and others, including the Proms ““ or the BBC Proms as we are taught to call it now.
The Last Night, or rather the flag waving second half of the concert on the last night that is broadcast on TV and watched worldwide, is totally unrepresentative of the 80 or so concerts that precede it. Anyone who writes an article on the Royal Albert Hall and the Proms should know this.
Of course the BBC have their woke tentacles all over this 125 year institution and fill the programmes with third rate output from ‘wimmin’ composers and the like. Henry Wood wanted the Last Night to feature only British music, but that of course is a hopelessly outdated and racist view now
Well said, my point exactly. The Last Night is a British Institution, not a platform for some woke inspired globalist jamboree.
T he second half of the last night perhaps but Wood was never a man to let traditions go rusty. British music is probably at it highest point since the beginning of the 16th century and, believe it or not, quite a lot of them are women. (check spelling Bluetit) The current “Master” of the Queen’s music is a woman (and Scottish)
“But we can surely admire the moral seriousness and mass civic-mindedness that was the best of Albert’s legacy, without shrugging our shoulders at (for example) the starvation of 5.5 million Indian people in the Great Famine of 1876-8.”
I firmly agree. It should be possible to feel pride in one’s culture without losing sight of its failures. A little old lady in a church is one of the great aspects of our culture, meek, mild, and harmless- somewhat removed from the spread of pink across the globe.
My local church tried to start a church choir, but the parents disapproved of their children joining. Its membership is still declining, despite its reputation as a traditional church. There are people on this island that are afraid of their own culture, something which terrifies me more than any imperial guilt.
I don’t understand why we throw the baby out with the bathwater. We may have done some bad stuff in India, but what about Salisbury’s attempts to end famine there? Isn’t that a good thing? Why lose faith in our architecture and people and culture just because of what someone did centuries ago?
“It may just be a matter of rats leaving a sinking ship: after all, American elites were happy to salute the Stars and Stripes until that flag started to look threadbare.”
Some of the worst crimes of the empire were perpetuated by liberals that were so choked on their moral self-righteousness that they forgot that leaving certain kingdoms alone to take the best parts of our culture freely would do more good than invading and nannying them endlessly (conservatives occasionally stepped in to limit the damage- see Lord Salisbury after Orissa). Their newfound shame for their action is welcome, but their attempt to drag us all down with them is repugnant and immoral, and I may never forgive them for that.
If they want to atone, they should go abroad and do so (not just slavery either, its always slavery they talk about apologising for, never anything else). They should invest some of their money in non-European businesses like Bengali farming businesses, or help get countries out of China’s debt traps. The rest of us they should leave alone and allow us to rebuild the Christian culture that has been devastated by the europhile liberal secular empire now sweeping the globe.
Really good article.
It should always be remembered that the Anglo Saxon era was not quite as “Dark” as has been portrayed traditionally. As mentioned above, not much was left for archaeologists due to the materials used, and so it was assumed for many years that civilisation went off a cliff edge after the Romans.
In terms of society and law, the Anglo Saxons were quite ahead of their time with ‘Folkright’ and property laws which were the antecedents of Magna Carta and latter laws. Indeed Magna Carta itself was a reassertion of more egalitarian rights (albeit amongst landowners) in reaction to increasing encroachment by the monarchy in the years since 1066.
Furthermore scholars such as Alcuin of York and even King Alfred among others were reading and studying the ancient classics – when it is too often implied that this was not really done until the Renaissance.
Well, Ms Harrington if you really do think you are: “living as I do in what feels like the death throes of a civilisation”, may I suggest a cup of Earl Grey tea and a chocolate biscuit?
Nothing could be further from the truth, and your neurosis is absurd, considering we, in the ‘West’ have never had such a splendid time since the halcyon days of the Pax Romana.
You also deserve a Quadruple Starred First for Wokeness, well done indeed. All this nonsense of the horrors of the High Victorian era, the “burning desire to invade other continents, enslave their inhabitants and steal their mineral wealth”. Where did you learn such tosh? You should get hold of Nigel Biggar, at your Alma Mater to set you straight before, it is too late. Failing that, read up on what the renowned Spanish philosopher, George Santayana said about the British Empire in 1922.
Your choice of ‘The Wanderer’ from the Exeter Book is also a little odd. It’s basically a nostalgic rant by an unemployed Anglo Saxon thug, bemoaning the death of his chief, and his subsequent redundancy from a life of rape and pillage. Might I make the impertinent suggestion that ‘The Ruin’, also from the Exeter Book, would have been more apposite?
However as to your premise that we should not ‘resuscitate’ the Albert Hall, you are correct. For years the ‘Last Night’ has been a national embarrassment, the Brexit hysteria only made it more so. Perhaps it could be adapted for an updated version of the so far fictitious game of ‘Rollerball’?
Brexit is not hysteria, it is an act of national liberation.
Agreed,I was attempting draw attention to the 2018- 2019 Last Nights and the ridiculous flag waving, particularly by the parvenu Remoaners! For whom this had no traditional basis whatsoever.
Ah, I apologise for misreading you. I agree completely!
and look at how the pax Romana ended
“Nothing lasts forever.”
“As to your premise that we should not ‘resuscitate’ the Albert Hall, you are correct.” Please, Mr Corby! The remedy for great institutions that have gone astray is to lead them back to the right path, not to destroy them! Maoism seems to be making a comeback in certain quarters; Tory Leninism certainly won’t solve anything.
Touché Mr Chamberlain. I am not proposing demolition but rather the severing of the umbilical cord of public money that ‘feeds’ such great institutions. Given the current catastrophe that has befallen the public finances, we can no longer afford such largesse.
There is perhaps a solution. In the balmy days of the Roman Empire, the “filthy rich” (FR) were encouraged to fund the building of magnificent public buildings, Theatres, Odeons, Baths, Markets, Libraries and so forth. Their ‘reward’, was to leave a monumental inscription to themselves and their successful careers, whist also achieving a form of ossified immortality.
To take a couple of examples, the Eumachia Building, in the Forum of Pompeii. A huge brick and stone market building, sponsored by a very successful woman, Eumachia, Matron of the Fuller’s Guild, Public Priestess of the Imperial Cult etc. We know all this from the inscription she left behind to remind both the population of Pompeii and us, whose generosity was responsible for this adornment to the beauty of the city.
Similarly in Lepcis Magna one of the largest Theatres in Roman North Africa
(with a seating capacity similar to that of London’s Albert Hall), was the gift of one (H)Annobal Tapapius Rufus, a man who celebrated both his Punic and Roman origin, as is clearly shown by his name. He also rebuilt the beautiful Macellum (market) for good measure.
So now we need to ‘shame’ our FD into funding the glories of Western Civilisation and stop delivering contraceptives, vaccines and countless other idiotic goodies to the third world. Such manic tokenism and virtue signalling is both embarrassing, and futile.
Charity begins at home, as we used to say, before buttered scones and Evensong.
“For years the ‘Last Night’ has been a national embarrassment”
No it hasn’t, it’s simply a party at the end of a (mostly) serious music festival and the format has been replicated across the country on the last night.
Really? I think it has lost its way, particularly since the dreaded BBC got its talons into it.
Unreliable Bluetit puts my objections far better than I.
(See below).
The BBC has been involved in the Proms since the 1920s, without their input the concerts would never have attained their status as one of the finest, if not the finest musical festival in the world. The “last night” has always stood aside from the rest and I would imagine Sir Henry Wood, who was a pioneering figure in promoting classical music, including temporary stuff. It was televised quite early on in the late 1940s with Sir Malcolm Sargeant presiding and he was something of a showman it took a form of its own, rather divorced from the rest of the concerts. But people have always waved flags of many colours as part of the fun. I doubt if many believe the “Britains never never never shall be slaves” or that “Britannia shall rule the waves” or that the Queens empire shall grow “wider still and wider”. The proms anyway were not originally in the Albert Hall, until the 60s the acoustics were awful
They certainly were! I well remember that, especially in some parts of the hall, you could get two concerts for the price of one ” number two following a fraction of a second behind number one. This was especially troublesome with piano music. Readers who were not there might be able to imagine what the opening of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto sounded like under those conditions. I was there, and it lingers as a most unwelcome memory.
I remember my combination of astonishment and relief when I went to a concert just after the installation of the flying saucers in the roof space. I think they were installed in time for the 1969 proms. The saucers were reconfigured in 2001, with results even better than before.
Sorry old chap … it’s an irrelevance to the working people of the UK … it’s been made an institution by the BBC … an arm of the state that most decidedly does not represent the British people
To clear up one point, the Millenium dome was not a failure, in its only year of opening it had more visitors than any other UK attraction (including Alton Towers) most who visited enjoyed it and most would have returned again. The stupidity however was the stipulation that it had to clear its Capital debts in 1 year or be technically bankrupt. And of course O2 bought it for a song and have profited nicely.
You miss, of course the Festival of Britain in 1951. This required little exertion from the Royal Family, was largely a government initiative buttressed by those “experts” who it is now fashionable to detest. It left us with the Festival Hall and happy memories of those who took part, not just on the South Bank but around London and the country. (looking out of my windo I can see the Lansbury Estate which was part of an exhibit of “living architecture” It has weathered well.
The better question to ask though is, if such a venture as the Royal Albert Hall were to be tackled where would the subscribers come from? when Thatcher instituted the era of Tax Breaks for the well off we were promised 4 things. The rich would not demand massive salaries, they would pay their taxes in full, they would invest and they would be as philanthropic as the Victorians. None of these have happened, not only has wealth become much more concentrated in few hands but these hands have little intention of letting go. Having worked in organisations funded by charitable trusts these trusts are dwindling and are not being replaced.
Incidentally the chances of the Royal Albert Hall going bankrupt are less than minimal. With virtually no ground rent and a catalogue of big ticket events, it will easily be restructured.
Oh dear … the nonsense that is spoken … since Thatcher our taxes have gone sky high … and yes the poor pay 50% of their income in tax … we need small govt … low taxes and the ‘state’ to get off the back’s of the people
Thank you, Mary. Now I have some idea what the Beatles were singing about in “A Day in the Life.” It was great to see that you used purchasing power parity (PPP) estimates of GDP to establish that the UK has only 2.2% of the world economy, which is the only measure to use. Your share is what one would get from the IMF real GDP estimates based on PPPs for 2019, so I imagine that’s what you used. I wondered if it made any difference including Syria in the world total, which has been excluded from IMF estimates since 2010 for obvious reasons. I found that it wouldn’t have changed UK’s share at that level of precision, since Syria’s economy is not very large. Even in 2010 Syria was just behind New Zealand in the world rankings. Good for Britain, and somewhat sad for Syria.
Isn’t part of the problem that a patriotism defined by “Rule Britannia” is intrinsically irrelevant and divisive? Don’t we want to cooperate rather than rule over others? The song is still fun to sing but it can’t be the only basis for our patriotism – hence the EU flags as balance.
And the Dome is hardly the only example of contemporary monuments (and is quite a successful music venue these days). The whole of the South Bank has been transformed: Tate Modern, Hayward, Royal Festival Hall, National Theatre, Globe, design museum, etc.