We're New Victorians

We’re New Victorians

There are strong echoes with the 19th century

by Maria Misra / May 24, 2012 / Leave a comment

Over the last few weeks I have had the fascinating task of helping to select 60 people “whose actions have had a significant impact on lives in these islands and/or given the age its character” for a forthcoming BBC Radio 4 series. Entitled The New Elizabethans, we had, it seemed, been invited to update the story of “Good Queen Bess.” And initially such parallels appeared plausible enough: a 60-year saga of stability emerging from conflict (post-reformation or post-imperial); of elitist culture turning popular (Shakespeare then, the “classless society” now); and of a revivified economy (driven by globalisation in both cases).

But as we chewed over the choices, a very different era came to mind: not so much new Elizabethans, but neo-Victorians, or at least new late Victorians. If there has been a revival in the last 60 years, it has been of the cosmopolitan London-centric entrepôt of the fin de siècle, not of good old “Merrie England.” The era from the 1870-1914 saw finance triumph over industry as the country’s pre-eminent economic interest, setting the scene for the accelerating inequality and plutocracy that would reach its apogee in the finance-led boom of the Edwardian era. It was the age of “Pont Street Dutch”—when the elaborate red-brick baroque mansion-houses so beloved of the current international financial elite mushroomed throughout Mayfair, Kensington and Chelsea.

Mass immigration underpinned the cosmopolitanism of both eras: of Jews from eastern Europe in the 1890s and 1900s and of former imperial citizens since the 1950s. Both proved socially traumatic and produced xenophobic backlashes, though post-1980s Britain has been rather more successful in integrating diverse ethnic groups. That Britain has undeniably benefitted from this openness is proved by the strikingly high proportion of immigrants of all types on the BBC’s list.

The big difference, of course, is empire. The 1880s and 1890s were the high point of imperialist wars, and Rudyard Kipling exhorted his readers to take up the “white man’s burden” to much middle-class acclaim. British soldiers have certainly fought in several post-imperial wars in the last 60 years, from Malaya in the 1950s and Oman in the 1970s to the Falklands in the 1980s and Afghanistan in the 2000s, but these conflicts have had little cultural resonance—remarkably few on our list were soldiers.

Aristocracy, in contrast, has made a dramatic comeback. David Cameron is not quite as grand as Lord Salisbury, but he is still a…

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R_LEYTON
May 25, 2012 at 14:39
“...though post-1980s Britain has been rather more successful in integrating diverse ethnic groups...” There is so much wrong with this that I hardly know where to start. I could point out that the integration of the East European Jews was in fact a huge success story, a model, in fact, of how an immigrant people can adapt and become part of the society they have migrated to. I could also point out that, in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras there was a significant debate about what we would now call multiculturalism among the Jewish communities that rather resembled what is happening now among Muslims in Britain, a debate about to what extent original identities should be retained versus the adoption of ‘British’ social and cultural mores. In the end they hammered out their own compromises and did a pretty good job, retaining what they wanted at the family level and fitting into the mainstream society seamlessly--in fact with a great degree of upward mobility. I could also point out that this assimilation process took at least half a century in a considerably more static society. So when we look at today’s immigrants, and fret about their conflict of allegiances and apartness from the social mainstream (I am not say these things exist, merely that people worry about them), I am tempted to say a) it’s still early days and b) many of the internal tensions in Muslim communities are repeating the pattern of Jewish communities a century ago. Tensions do not betoken an imminent breakdown of relations with the mainstream society. Nor do they mean that things will inevitably change for the worse. They are simply a stage that immigrant communities go through--the Huguenots had similar problems over how much integration was desirable. Yet certainly in both the Huguenot and the Jewish cases the impact on Britain has surely been almost unequivocally beneficial. So has ‘post-1980s Britain has been rather more successful in integrating diverse ethnic groups’? As Zhou En-lai (apocryphally) said ‘it’s too early to tell’--around 2040 we might be able to make a judgment. It certainly is far too early to talk about success already, as if this is something that has been completed, rather than now being negotiated. But what’s that sound I hear? Oh, it’s the mutual backslapping of the liberal left abut how tolerantly multicultural they are, which is bound to lead--in fact has already led--to a more enlightened society than anything by fuddy-duddies in frock coats. I don’t know which is more annoying; the ignorance of historical fact, the naivety about historical process or simply the smugness.