Why we can’t escape the Victorians The whole past is not like the recent past

To give but one example, the various Judicature Acts of the 1870s finally united courts of equity with courts of common law, closing the loop on eight centuries of fabulously elaborate organic legal growth. The Victorians also abolished the Court of Chancery, the Exchequer of Pleas, and the Court of the King Before the King Himself, among other colourfully titled courts — all of them over six hundred years old. In other words, even if our legal system has its deepest foundations among castles and crusades, its contemporary structure is Victorian. You might also say something about our educational system: it was in the 19th century that state-funded schools were first established.

Even the monarchy, that supposed link to deep history, is basically a Victorianism. It was Prince Albert who guided Victoria toward creating that famous impression of a family, sitting far above politics, whose appearance was middle class rather than aristocratic, and whose role was to represent not rule. The constitutional monarchy as we have it today, though born of centuries of slow change, reached its final and lasting form under Victoria. We would recognise and understand her as a monarch; less so those irascible Georges who preceded her.

The irony here is that these facts are partly obscured by the Victorians themselves. They had a romantic obsession with the Middle Ages, and did their best to couch everything they did in medievalisms, thus leading us to believe that what they did really was medieval. This is best embodied by the strange but symbolic destruction of the Palace of Westminster by fire in 1834, and its subsequent rebuilding as a phantasmagorical Gothic wonderland. What seems medieval is in fact a thoroughly modern building, one newer than the US Capitol.

Yes, our Late Victorian society is also literal, not merely political. How often do we hear that “Britain’s Victorian prisons” are no longer fit for service? The same could be said of our rail infrastructure and water network. And our mythical London Underground suffers by the very fact of its age, and is thus almost wholly unlike the modern metro systems of the rest of the world, spacious and well ventilated, with automatic barriers separating passengers from the tracks. Meanwhile, the spines of most British towns are still a string of Victorian banks, pubs, bandstands, parks, terraces, and town halls.

Even Britain’s much-vaunted medieval architecture is largely Victorian pastiche; they were just as happy to meddle with the country’s physical as with its constitutional heritage. The most notorious example is probably St Albans Cathedral, the entire west front of which was redesigned to make it “more” Gothic. Dramatic — but unremarkable. To the untrained eye Britain seems filled with Medieval churches; the truth is that half these churches are actually from the 19th century, and the other half were so aggressively “restored” to the point of erasing their real medieval character.

Our self-image as Britons is still partly Victorian too. Perhaps you remember that BBC poll of the 100 Greatest Britons in 2002? About 20 of the finalists could be described as pure Victorians and about a dozen more were born during the Victorian Era. In other words, a full third of Britain’s self-chosen greatest lived during a fraction of its history. We must also remark on the music that is considered most patriotic, and is played most often over teary-eyed montages or at major occasions. “Pomp and Circumstance”? Victorian. “Land of Hope and Glory”? Victorian. “Abide with Me”? Victorian. And just as that hymn is still belted out at every FA Cup Final, so too is football a Victorian invention. The same for rugby and tennis, both codified in the 19th century. Even red post boxes were invented by the Victorians!

Why does this matter? Because it explains the basic truth of modern Britain. The fundamental struggle today — call it a culture war, if you like — is between that society created by the Victorians and the one we would prefer to live in now. We are living in the nation they built, legislatively, politically, morally, artistically, sportingly, architecturally, financially, and are wrangling with their shadows. This fight started in earnest after the Second World War, most obviously signified by the mass demolition of Victorian architecture across Britain. There was also R v Penguin Books Ltd in 1960, regarding the publication of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Penguin’s victory there represented a watershed moment in the gradual (though still incomplete) decline of Victorian morality. The slow death of the suit and tie, which were, as a form of bureaucratic dress, late 19th-century creations, can be seen through this lens. Even the replacement of flowery wallpaper in our homes and pubs by various shades of grey or blue paint is part of this process.

And yet we must come full circle, because the majority of our discomfort with this family inheritance is as old as the inheritance itself; most of our quarrels with the Victorians begin with the Victorians themselves. What might now and pejoratively be called “woke historiography” really goes back 150 years. Bashing the hypocrisy of Victorian morality and lamenting the darknesses of imperialism was the bread and butter of writers such as John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, or William Morris. “Art for art’s sake” — an idea which is more or less the foundation of everything we loosely call “modern art” — was Walter Pater’s rallying cry in 1873. Even environmentalism, usually regarded as a recent development, has its roots in a contemporary reaction against Victorian earth-gobbling industrialism. And, lest we forget, Karl Marx was a resident of Victorian London.

The first problem for any generation is to discern where it stands. Admitting that we’re Late Victorians should help us deal more soberly with our present discontents. To realise, for instance, that the Victorians were concerned about the environment, or their dubious imperial legacy, makes us appreciate these issues are not the exclusive domain of liberals or conservatives — but rather part of our shared inheritance. Understanding this equally allows us to feel less sentimental about discarding what obviously doesn’t work, and helps us see, much more clearly, the things our forebears made that are really worth keeping.

Recency bias means a preference for what is new over what is old, usually as a result of ignorance rather than actual quality. An expanded, or alternative, definition of recency bias should include our tendency to think the whole past is like the recent past. We imagine that all of British history was, culturally, more or less like the Victorian era. This is not so, and it’s only because we are still emerging from the society created by the Victorians that we think this is so. In which case, stepping back, we must recall that Britain has been many different things down the centuries, and we needn’t be too attached to the particular kind of Britain created by the Victorians — or, if we are, we should be honest about why.

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Sheehan Quirke is the miserable johannes factotum behind The Cultural Tutor

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