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Documentary, The Victorians Part: 3
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00:00Victorian Britain was the most powerful nation on earth.
00:13And Victorian painters caught the spirit of this great national journey.
00:21They may not be fashionable now, but these pictures show us how the Victorians saw themselves.
00:28They celebrated Britain's great achievements.
00:32As the first industrial power bursting with technological invention.
00:42As a commercial superpower reveling in enormous wealth.
00:49As the mightiest naval and military force the world had ever seen.
00:54Ruling an empire four times greater than that of ancient Rome.
01:03Britain's enormous strength abroad triggered huge social change at home.
01:10As power began to shift away from the aristocracy towards ordinary people.
01:15The Victorians were acutely conscious of Britain's position in the world indeed.
01:29Many of them came to believe it was their destiny to rule it.
01:34As one of the greatest of the empire builders put it.
01:36Remember you are an Englishman and consequently have won first prize in the lottery of life.
01:44They believed theirs was the greatest civilization in history and that it would last forever.
01:49I will last forever.
01:50I will last forever.
01:56On May 1st, 1851, an extraordinary event took place in Hyde Park,
02:25London from the earth rose a vast glittering crystal palace made of glass
02:42and cast-iron it housed the great exhibition and it took the world's breath
02:49away
03:05Queen Victoria called the opening ceremony the greatest day in our history
03:16in the space of only five months six million people that is twice the total population of
03:22London at the time visited the great exhibition what was it they were so excited about well in a
03:31nutshell it was nothing less than a great national beauty pageant showing off Britain and her
03:36achievements to the world British painters proudly show British products as by far the
03:45most impressive things on display cotton spinning machines steam hammers locomotives telegraphs
03:53steam turbines printing machines and scientific instruments the message was loud and clear
04:02Britain had the means the energy the technology to bend anything to her will
04:15not all the exhibits would change the world quite so dramatically Queen Victoria was especially taken
04:23with a bed that automatically tipped you into the bath first thing in the morning for the busy doctor
04:29there was a one-piece suit when you got those sudden call-outs in the middle of the night and any woman
04:34might be taken with the corset that opened instantaneously in the event of emergency although mercifully the
04:43emergency remained unspecified even at the time the great exhibition was recognized as a turning point the moment when Britain
04:55looked about her and realized the extent of her own power
04:59one picture captured the significance of that day in France Winterhalter's the 1st of May 1851 the old Duke of
05:13Wellington the Victor of Waterloo offers a gift to the baby son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert
05:20Albert but what's Albert looking at he's less interested in the hero of the past than in the symbol of the future rising
05:32behind him the Crystal Palace here lies Britain's destiny how had this happened as if to remind the millions of visitors just
05:46inside the entrance to the exhibition was a gigantic example of what underpinned Britain's extraordinary power a
05:5324 tonne lump of coal
06:08it was coal that had fired Britain's Industrial Revolution transforming the country into the first and greatest
06:16industrialized nation in the world
06:22and the heartbeat of the revolution was here in Sheffield
06:26Sheffield was steel city at the time of the great exhibition it manufactured half the total quantity of steel produced in the entire world
06:37annual steel production grew from 50,000 tons in 1850 to 5 million tons in 1900
06:55the sheer energy of Victorian Britain is summed up in the advice of one of Dickens's characters Mr. Panks in Little Dorrit
07:13keep always at it and I'll keep you always at it and you keep somebody else always at it that is the whole duty of man in a commercial country
07:23Victorian painters knew what made a commercial country rich the title of this picture says it all
07:47the wealth of England
07:50it's a depiction of the revolutionary new process that converted tons of iron into steel at an unprecedented speed
08:08this painting is proudly subtitled in the 19th century the Northumbrian show the world what can be done with iron and coal
08:16the scene is the factory shed of Robert Stevenson and company in Newcastle Britain's first and foremost steam engine manufacturer
08:27Stevenson's high-level railway bridges in the background
08:36a coal barge passes by on the river
08:39on the docks a deal is struck between two businessmen
08:46in the foreground a smartly dressed little girl is holding a school arithmetic book
08:52at the bottom right is a blueprint for a steam engine
08:58family life commerce industry education Victorian values run throughout this terrific picture
09:11the steam train was one of the greatest industrial inventions and it was revolutionizing the British way of life
09:30Queen Victoria and Prince Albert first tried out this new machine in 1842 what she made of it we don't know but Prince Albert's reaction is recorded
09:47not so fast next time mister conductor if you please
09:53early passengers were often unnerved by this utterly new experience
10:00one woman recall being in a carriage with an elderly gentleman who clearly had no idea how to behave on a train
10:06he kept dancing around jumping up and down to stick his head out of the window
10:11gabbling on about the extraordinary light this strange man was the artist JMW Turner
10:21Turner recorded his excitement in his painting rain steam and speed
10:26the picture shows the newly opened Great Western Railway
10:33the train engine hurtles across a bridge at great speed
10:37it's thrilling it's wonderful
10:40the sheer power of this brand new machine bursts out of the canvas
10:47what do you like about it what's your joy man driving it
11:01it's like riding on a dinosaur
11:03right
11:04it is honestly it's the newest thing that you can get to a dinosaur
11:08in the fun place
11:10I get the tire of this you can't explain it
11:13it's just pudgy
11:15it's alive
11:18why are they so much more romantic or interesting than other kinds of locos
11:22because you like women
11:24go on
11:25the fickle are like women
11:27are they?
11:28no it's completely predictable isn't it
11:29treat them right otherwise they bite you
11:32they do
11:38oh wait
11:39hey
11:41stupid
11:42me
11:44I've always wanted to be a train driver
11:46it's great
11:54rail travel changed everything
11:56for the first time people who might never have left their hometown could cross Britain
12:03or take a day trip to the seaside.
12:09The railway carriage thrust people of all backgrounds
12:13up against each other for the first time.
12:17It was a place of chance encounters
12:20and all that meant to young lovers.
12:25This picture caused outrage
12:27with its frank portrait of a young couple
12:29talking to each other in an altogether
12:31much too familiar fashion.
12:33How shocking.
12:37The artist was forced to repaint it
12:39moving the girl to a corner
12:41while her father chats to the young man.
12:43Far more acceptable.
12:50Britain went railway mad.
12:52Laying track, building engines, making fortunes.
12:58Britain built railways all over the world.
13:04From France, Italy and Belgium, to Russia, India and Argentina.
13:10On British tracks, British goods sped around the world.
13:14One writer saw in the new railways a vision of the future.
13:20Coal, he said.
13:22The stored-up sunlight of a million years
13:26is the grand engine.
13:28Liberty lights the fire.
13:30Civilisation is the engine pulling the whole world with it.
13:36The money made by industry created a whole new class of the world.
13:54Men whose power would come to challenge the old aristocracy.
14:10This house in Northumberland is called Cragside.
14:12It was built by one of the new rich, the industrialist William Armstrong.
14:26Born the son of a merchant in Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
14:31Armstrong was a classic Victorian, both inventor and entrepreneur.
14:36His factory on the banks of the Tyne became Britain's largest manufacturer of guns and warships.
14:52With the profits of war, Armstrong built his very own stately home.
14:58From the outside, it looks like a grand, old, ancestral house.
15:11But the interior was another story.
15:17Inside the house was a technological marvel.
15:23Hydraulic power from reservoirs on the estate provided the house with central heating.
15:27With fire alarms.
15:30An electric gong.
15:32A Turkish bath.
15:35An automatic turn spit.
15:37A dishwasher.
15:39And a passenger lift.
15:41It was the first house in Britain to be lit by electric light.
15:45The first in the world to use hydroelectricity.
15:48You can see why they called it the palace of a modern magician.
15:52Cragside was Armstrong's shop window, a giant advertisement for his armaments business.
16:05The world's leaders came here to buy, including the King of Siam and generals from China.
16:11Part of the trappings of the stately home lifestyle was an art collection.
16:22But whereas old fashioned aristos went for the kind of things they'd seen on their travels, like Italian or Dutch old masters, William Armstrong bought the work of living British artists, often local.
16:36There are no flies on any self-made men.
16:41And Victorian industrialists preferred to buy their paintings from living artists.
16:46That way they got over the danger of buying a supposed old master, which had actually been knocked up in somebody's garden shed.
16:52Despite having made much of his fortune from devising ever more sophisticated ways of killing people, Armstrong was as sentimental as anybody else.
17:00He preferred paintings of children and animals.
17:03And this painting here, for example, features his favourite dog, Silky, in a painting titled Faithful Unto Death, next to the dead shepherd who's died in the snow.
17:13Silky is also in this painting over here, herding a flock of sheep.
17:19And down here, Silky alone in all his glory.
17:23It's the sort of stuff that gives chocolate boxes a bad name, really.
17:35Armstrong's success propelled him, like many of the newly rich, into the House of Lords.
17:41In 1887, he became Baron Armstrong.
17:45He commissioned a portrait of himself at Cragside, the ever faithful Silky sitting at his feet.
17:55The painting is deliberately modest.
17:58Here I am, it says, an ordinary bloke in slippers catching up on the news.
18:03And it wasn't blue blood that got me this rather nice house.
18:08Armstrong's peerage was one of about 200 created in the late 19th century, mainly for industrialists and for men who'd done well in trades like brewing.
18:22The toffs sneered at first.
18:24They called them the beerage.
18:26But soon they had to bend to the rising might of industrial Britain.
18:31Armstrong would test his guns in the grounds, enthusiastically firing rounds off into the valleys surrounding Cragside.
18:49The invention that made him a legend in the arms business was the Armstrong gun.
19:01It's been called the first modern weapon.
19:05And the only working Armstrong gun in the UK is here at Fort Nelson on the south coast.
19:13Now, the gun itself, this Armstrong gun, what was it that was revolutionary about it?
19:29It was a huge improvement on any of the existing service ordnance.
19:33It was a breech loader.
19:34That means that you don't have to put a cannonball or something down from the other end.
19:37That's right.
19:38From the gunner's point of view, it was quite good because you could get yourself into a case mate like this.
19:41You were a lot more protected. You didn't have to go around the front of the gun.
19:44This was a rifle gun. So it had a system of grooves running down the barrel.
19:48It fired an elongated shell.
19:50And this, of course, meant that you could fire a shell a lot further and also a lot more accurately than the old smoothbore cannonball.
19:58Can I have a go?
20:00Certainly.
20:01Even with earplugs in, that's a heck of a bang, isn't it?
20:14Very good fun.
20:16I suppose one shouldn't say that, really.
20:20William Armstrong developed his gun as a response to one of the great military disasters of the Victorian age.
20:34The Crimean War was Britain's first major conflict in nearly 40 years.
20:39A confused, bloody, drawn-out confrontation to keep the Russians away from the Mediterranean.
20:48But the failings of the British military threatened Britain's position as a world power.
20:56The war showed up terrible deficiencies in the army.
20:59The men were badly fed, badly equipped, and if the enemy didn't kill them, then their military hospitals probably would.
21:07But the most serious problem of all was one that was both deadly and invisible.
21:13It was the question of class.
21:31Ordinary soldiers generally came from the poorest parts of British society.
21:36Usually illiterate, they often joined as a last resort to avoid the workhouse or prison, though living conditions weren't much better.
21:47The Duke of Wellington called them the scum of the earth, and they were treated accordingly.
21:52Their rations were sparse and monotonous, a bit of bread, a bit of meat, a bit of rum.
21:57They could be crammed in 20 at a time to sleep in a tiny room, and floggings were routine.
22:04For the vast majority, there was no prospect of a way out through promotion.
22:13Their commanders, on the other hand, usually came from the very top drawer of society.
22:20They had to.
22:21Officers paid money for their positions, and they didn't come cheap.
22:26As the finery in this painting shows, the army had become the plaything of the aristocracy.
22:34The officers spent as much time fox hunting on their estates, yachting at cows, or going to bulls in London, as they did drilling their men.
22:45The Duke of Cambridge summed it up pretty well when he said the British officer should be a gentleman first and an officer second.
22:52The Crimea's most infamous gentleman officer came from here, Dean Park, ancestral home of James Thomas Brudenell, the 7th Earl of Cardigan.
23:03Cardigan. Cardigan had bought his lieutenant colonel C for 40,000 pounds, a mere three million in today's money.
23:12Lord Cardigan was well known in Britain and for all the wrong reasons. A notorious womanizer. He was called the homicidal earl for his twin hobbies of duelling with fellow officers and flogging his men.
23:26When he left his stately home here to go to the opera, he was routinely booed. And when he got to the Crimea, he acted more like a holiday maker than a soldier.
23:46He stayed on his yacht, he drank champagne, and he enjoyed some rather wonderful food from his rather wonderful French chef.
24:01It was Cardigan, along with his immediate superiors, Lords Lucan and Raglan, who was responsible for one of the most dreadful calamities in British military history.
24:11The massacre that was the charge of the Light Brigade. It was October 1854.
24:18The charge happened in a valley outside Balaclava. The British were at one end of it, the Russians at the other, and on both sides.
24:27Lord Raglan, the British Army commander, could see from high ground nearby that the Russians had captured and were about to drive off some cannon.
24:36And he wrote an order saying the Light Brigade were to stop them doing so. The order is delivered to Lord Lucan, who's down on the plain.
24:44Lord Lucan can't see the Russians driving off the cannon up here. All he can see is the massed force of Russian guns at the end of the valley.
24:53He knows this order is suicide, but orders are orders and have to be obeyed.
24:59And he tells Lord Cardigan, who's commanding the Light Brigade, that he is to attack the Russian guns down the valley.
25:06Lord Cardigan, who's on his horse rather bizarrely named Ronald, forms up his troops in ranks 100 yards wide and turns them to go down the valley.
25:18Just 600 men charged into the valley against 5,000 Russian soldiers and their artillery.
25:30The result was a massacre that need never have happened, though you wouldn't think so from some of the paintings of the period.
25:41They show courage, daring, gallantry, all the exhilaration of a cavalry charge.
25:50Here's Cardigan on his horse Ronald, looking as dashing as could be.
26:00Back in Britain, it would take a while for the unadulterated folly of the charge to become known.
26:17For now, the public celebrated the outstanding heroism of the Light Brigade.
26:26Lord Cardigan survived the charge, and he returned to England to the sound of bands playing See the Conquering Hero Comes.
26:33He and his horse Ronald, who'd happily also survived the charge, were mobbed by enthusiastic crowds, and Lord Cardigan gave lectures reliving in detail the charge.
26:44The knitted waistcoat that he'd worn in the Crimea to keep himself warm became the must-have fashion accessory of the day, the cardigan.
26:52Is she really? Yes.
26:56The Right Honourable Marion Brudenell now lives at Dean Park.
27:01What's he like to be related to such a notorious figure?
27:04I don't think it makes any difference to us, he's just a famous rather notorious.
27:08And he was notorious, wasn't he? He was, absolutely.
27:11He was a rich, bombastic, arrogant, haughty man, and I think the more money he got, and when he became an Earl, it rather went to his head.
27:25And then the charge of the Light Brigade, in a sense, completely turned around his reputation, didn't it, for a while?
27:30Oh, yes. Yes, for a little while. And so he was changed from a villain to a hero, and Queen Victoria thought he was terrific.
27:38So this is Ronald, is it? Yes, this is the great horse, Ronald, who survived the charge and lived for many years.
27:45And unfortunately, when he did die, they chopped him up. They took off his hooves, and the head and the tail we've got as well.
27:53Seems an awful thing to do with a heroic old horse, but still.
27:56What else would you do with him? Bury it, I suppose.
28:01But Cardigan's standing as a national hero didn't last long.
28:05When soldiers returned home from the Crimea, they told another story of how the High Command had recklessly ordered hundreds of men to gallop into a barrage of cannon fire.
28:19The Times accused Cardigan of the falsification of history, and the supposed heroism of the officer class began to be called into question.
28:30Public sympathy began to turn towards the ordinary soldiers expected to obey the orders of superiors without question.
28:38Without question, weren't they the real heroes?
28:49One artist captured the changing public mood better than any other.
28:55Elizabeth Butler's The Roll Call depicts a sergeant ticking off the names of the ordinary soldiers who'd survived a Crimean battle.
29:03The men are bedraggled and exhausted from fighting.
29:10One of the soldiers lies dead at the feet of his comrades.
29:17As Elizabeth Butler said, I never painted for the glory of war, but to portray its pathos and heroism.
29:30The Roll Call was a sensation.
29:41When it went on show in London, they had to put policemen by it to hold back the crowds.
29:45And then it went on tour.
29:47In Newcastle, men walked around with sandwich boards proclaiming,
29:50the roll call is coming.
29:52And in Liverpool, 20,000 people saw it in the space of only three weeks.
29:57It turned Elizabeth Butler into a star.
30:00But the question on everybody's lips was,
30:03how could this 27-year-old woman have arrived at such a profound understanding of the realities of war?
30:10The answer was that her research was meticulous.
30:19To paint her stark vision of the light brigade returning shattered and traumatised from the apocalypse,
30:26Elizabeth Butler sought out survivors and even employed them as models.
30:31The wild, staring eyes of the central figure are those of a cavalryman who went on to become an actor.
30:43Like the Roll Call, this painting would help convince the authorities of the need for military reform.
30:54The fiasco of the Crimea finished the old way of running the army.
30:58Flogging was abolished, living conditions were improved,
31:02and most importantly, officers could no longer buy their position.
31:06From now on, Britain was to have a professionally run army.
31:11And she was going to need it.
31:17For 200 years, the British had been building the largest empire the world had ever seen.
31:23Under the Victorians, the acquisition of land and wealth around the world
31:28would become more aggressive and ruthless.
31:37They started with India.
31:44But it hadn't always been like this.
31:47The British had once admired Indian culture and customs.
31:50Here in the Cotswolds, an English gentleman was so in love with India
31:56that he constructed an Indian palace of his own.
31:58Season Coat was built in 1807.
32:09With its minarets, dome and mock Hindu temple, this house is an act of homage to India.
32:16But by the 1850s, the Victorians were beginning to impose their own idea of civilisation on India.
32:38They tried to convert Indians to Christianity.
32:48Resentment grew.
32:50Revolt started among the native soldiers serving in the British Army in India.
32:55Things came to a head when the story went about that the cartridges for the new Enfield rifle were coated in a mixture of beef fat and pork fat.
33:06Now, to use the cartridge, you had to bite the end off like this
33:10and tip the gunpowder down the barrel of the gun and then drop the bullet in afterwards.
33:17The fact that the cartridges were coated in fat which came from cows which were sacred to Hindus
33:24or from pigs which were unclean and abhorrent to Muslims wasn't a smart idea at all.
33:28It was seen as an attempt by the British to force Indians to defile their own religions.
33:36The result was rebellion.
33:45When 85 Indian soldiers refused to bite off their cartridges at Meirut on the 9th of May 1857, mutiny broke out.
33:54In one night, over 50 British officers were killed.
33:59The revolts spread across the North West and panic spread throughout white India.
34:05Atrocity stories began to circulate of terrible things done to Europeans.
34:11At Cornpore, 197 women and children were said to have been mutilated and dumped in a well, some of them still breathing.
34:20An officer who came on the scene later described blood on the walls, locks of hair lying about and a single child's shoe.
34:36Victorian artists fanned the flames of Britain's anger and outrage.
34:41In this painting, a group of women clutch their children hiding in a cellar as they await their fate at the hands of bloodthirsty Indians.
34:53In the centre, a mother and daughter are praying.
34:58The mother holds a Bible.
35:02A woman kisses her baby for the last time.
35:06But they're in luck.
35:09Rescue is at hand.
35:11Highland soldiers are descending the steps to the cellar.
35:14One painting more than any other portrayed the mood for vengeance.
35:26An impressively beefy Britannia grabs a Bengal tiger by the throat.
35:35Her sword is drawn back for the kill.
35:40At the bottom of the painting lie a dead woman and child.
35:51Beware, this is what we do when roused, is the message of this picture.
36:00In reality, the violence perpetrated by the British was pretty horrific.
36:08Entire villages were burned down.
36:10Some mutineers were made to lick up the blood of the dead.
36:14Others smeared in pig fat before execution or tied to the mouth of a cannon and blown apart.
36:20So much for the so-called civilising mission.
36:24The mutiny marked a turning point in British attitudes to empire.
36:39The government created the India office in order to take a firmer grip on the subcontinent.
36:48The building, now part of the foreign office, speaks volumes about how the British were coming to see themselves as an imperial nation.
36:56These chaps dressed as Romans are, in fact, British soldiers of the kind who'd helped to colonise India over the years.
37:12It's a way of saying to the world, look, we're serious.
37:16Where once the Roman Empire might have been the greatest on earth, it's now us.
37:20And we have much the same ideals.
37:24Justice, order and military might.
37:33It's an astonishing building, unlike anything else in the world.
37:38This man spends a lot of time here.
37:41So, what do you think the building is trying to say?
37:44I think the building is saying two things.
37:47One, think global.
37:48You can't be in this building without realising that this is a country that does have big maps of the world with us in the middle of it.
37:56And I think, secondly, it's saying that we've got values that we want to try and impart around the world.
38:03Some of them...
38:05It's an explicit comparison with the Roman Empire, isn't it?
38:07It's an explicit comparison with all greats from history throughout.
38:10It's got an image of Britain that is the great reconciler, but also the great purveyor of the best values.
38:18It has no suggestion that interests and values might be different.
38:23Its view of Africa is not the view of Africa that we want to take today.
38:27What's it like when you first turn up for work in a place like this?
38:33It's quite intimidating.
38:35I said on my first week here that I had to pinch myself when I go into my office, and at some level you still feel that.
38:42What's interesting about the other diplomats, kings, presidents who come here, is that they're obviously struck by the grandeur of it, but they really like it.
38:53From here at the India office, Britain was firmly in control of an entire subcontinent.
39:04So it could afford a little indulgence of Indian sensibilities.
39:09At one level that meant a degree of formality, even respect.
39:14This, for example, is the office of the Secretary for India.
39:17It has a fireplace on one wall and another fireplace on the opposite wall.
39:21That was so Indian princes could keep warm in the middle of a British winter.
39:28And there are two doors so that visiting princes of equal rank could enter the room simultaneously without either losing precedence.
39:37But these were just niceties, the outward appearance of a much more marble-hearted attitude to imperial rule.
39:55The Indians called it the knife of sugar.
40:02Kipling described it more forcefully as knuckle-dusters under kid gloves.
40:10Queen Victoria embodied this double attitude as much or more than anybody else.
40:18She was devoted to the idea of having colonial subjects.
40:22She had Indian servants. Indeed, they were her favourite servants.
40:26She tried to learn Hindu scripts, but she was no pacifist.
40:29If we are to remain a first-rate power, she wrote, we must be prepared for wars somewhere or other continually.
40:39And so it turned out.
40:41British troops would fight over the Empire somewhere in the world almost every year for the rest of her reign.
40:47The paintings of the day tell a rather different story.
40:58There are no guns or soldiers in Thomas Jones Barker's The Secret of England's Greatness.
41:04Instead, in the audience chamber of Windsor Castle, Victoria hands a Bible to a grateful prince.
41:17He could be Indian. He could be African.
41:20His clothes look more as if they come from some theatre's props department.
41:27But the Victorians did genuinely believe that England's greatness lay in bestowing Christianity
41:33on what they saw as inferior races.
41:37This is the Albert Memorial completed in 1872, 11 years after the death of the Queen's husband.
42:07By the 1870s, Britain's superiority to the rest of the world had become something of an obsession.
42:20Surrounding the monument are four sculptures representing the four quarters of the globe.
42:29Europe is shown leading the way, riding into a civilised future.
42:35The official guidebook of the time explains that the statue represents the influence Europe has exercised over the other continents.
42:47There are no prizes for guessing where this is going.
42:50The statue representing Asia couldn't be more different to Europe.
43:00Here, a bare-breasted Indian woman sits atop an elephant.
43:05She wears traditional robes.
43:08Beside her are a Chinese man holding a porcelain vase, a Persian poet, and an Arab merchant.
43:16The implication is clear.
43:20Asia is exotic, but not very modern.
43:25She needs to be awakened by Britain.
43:29Africa, too, lives in the past.
43:36The Sphinx identifies Africa as the land of the ancient Egyptians.
43:43The figure of a black man wears tribal costume.
43:47The guidebook tells us that the Negro is representative of the uncivilised races of this continent.
43:57He's listening to the teachings of a female figure typifying European civilisation in allusion to the efforts made by Europe to improve the conditions of these races.
44:08Pretty clear, I think.
44:18There was still a lot of the world left for Britain to conquer.
44:22And conquer she did.
44:23One foreign minister described his government's policy in the 1870s as occupy, fortify, grab, and brag.
44:37By the 1890s, the empire contained 400 million people and covered 11 million square miles.
44:48Britain's tentacles reached around the world.
44:58But the nation's great power would change everything back at home.
45:03The wealth of empire flooded into Britain here in the London docks.
45:20This was the biggest, busiest port in the world.
45:24Every year, three million tons of cargo could arrive in the London docks.
45:33Sugar, coffee, tea, spices, and luxury goods like silk or ivory.
45:41Goods that arrived in the docks ended up in shops like this.
45:45Goods.
45:50Liberties on Regent Street in the capital was opened in 1875 to sell goods imported from the empire,
45:58including fabrics and rugs from the east.
46:06Shops like Liberties catered to the rapidly expanding middle class.
46:10The wealth of empire gave them two things in abundance.
46:15Money and choice.
46:17Unprecedented numbers of people could now shop for more than the bare necessities of life.
46:22The middle classes opened their purses and went shopping mad.
46:30For the first time, it wasn't only the gentry who could buy exotic goods.
46:34The rising middle class could now fill their houses with luxuries once unimaginable.
46:42Shopping became a favourite pastime.
46:45Britain was becoming an enormous shop window.
46:59Advertisements were everywhere.
47:00This scene at a railway station makes you wonder how any Victorian passenger ever found his train.
47:17Over a million advertising handbills were distributed in London in a single year.
47:22What were the most popular themes that advertisers chose to exploit?
47:33I mean, a huge range. Obviously, a lot of sentiments, you know, children.
47:38But also, you know, the great images of the empire at that time.
47:43Troops, the soldiers, the sailors.
47:46You wanted to reflect into your product the great power of the nation.
47:52I mean, here we have Huntley and Palmer's one of the greatest British biscuits of the era.
47:59A worldwide product.
48:01And there you have the scene with the Indian elephants.
48:06Here are people enjoying the biscuits out on safari.
48:11And that gives you the grandeur of this moment.
48:14All over the empire there, drinking tea and having Huntley and Palmer biscuits.
48:21So this is the old Queen Victoria herself being used to advertise.
48:24Yes, you didn't need permission to get Queen Victoria involved.
48:27There was the empire surrounding her, and there are some pools in the background.
48:34So you get this huge fervour, kind of dramatic feel of the whole world gathering towards this one image.
48:41This fragrant queen, eh?
48:42Very much so, yes.
48:47Oil paintings by the leading artists of the day came in handy to advertise goods.
48:52Charles Barber's Girl with Dogs was used to sell sunlight soap.
48:56And most famous of all, John Everett Millet's painting of his grandson called Bubbles was bought by Pears Soap.
49:10Here's the painting.
49:11And here's the ad, complete with painted-in bar of Pears Soap.
49:18But not everyone was having it so good.
49:35Cheap imports from the empire left the poor in the countryside out of work.
49:42And there were large numbers of them.
49:51Increasingly replaced by machinery, agricultural labourers were driven from their homes and forced to tramp the countryside looking for work.
50:00In Hubert Von Herkemer's hard times, a mother and her two children lie collapsed from hunger.
50:09The father's farming implements lie discarded, unused.
50:14This was the fate of farmers and farm labourers right across the country cheap imports did for them.
50:28Some found work in the factories in the cities.
50:30The rest faced a terrible choice, starve or emigrate.
50:38More than five million people left Britain in the second half of the 19th century.
50:44Three million for America.
50:46The rest to the corners of the empire.
50:49This massive social upheaval fascinated Victorian artists.
50:54Here, a poor rural family bid farewell to their relatives.
51:03Two children embrace while the grandfather says goodbye to his grandchildren, probably for the last time.
51:17At the quayside came the final separation.
51:20An old woman sits distraught.
51:27Two lovers say farewell.
51:30And the ship overflows with young men leaving the country.
51:35The couple in Ford Maddox Browns, the last of England, are squeezed into an emigrant ship.
51:46They look more anxious than hopeful.
51:49There's resentment on his face, resignation on hers.
51:54A tiny hand is all we can see of their baby, hidden under the mother's coat.
51:59The young family seems vulnerable, threatened by the grey breakers crashing against the ship.
52:09Their backs are turned to England.
52:12They will never return.
52:13The poor who stayed behind were often left on the scrap heap.
52:30The London docks may have been the gateway to the wealth of empire, but the men who worked here were some of the poorest in Britain.
52:38Gustav Doré's prints of the dock workers brought their predicament alive.
52:46They were paid little and only by the hour.
52:53On average, a docker worked just three hours a day.
52:56Resentment ran high.
53:01But all this was about to change.
53:06On August 12th, 1889, the London dockers fought back.
53:12There was an argument about the pay for unloading a ship here in the West India dock, and it rapidly escalated.
53:18First, the stevedores, the men who loaded the ships, joined the dispute, and after them, engineers, carpenters, and watchmen.
53:28Within a week, 30,000 men were on strike, and the docks were paralysed.
53:33The docker's demands were modest.
53:36Sixpence an hour instead of five, and a guarantee of four hours' work a day.
53:41But the bosses refused.
53:45The strike held.
53:48This was no mean feat.
53:52Striking was rare in Victorian Britain, and trade unions were in their infancy.
53:58For the strikers, the suffering was intense, not only for them, but for their families too.
54:05This confrontation between wealth and labour was a new drama for artists.
54:15The resolution necessary if the strike was to hold meant want and hunger for the docker's families.
54:26The striker crumples his cap in anxiety.
54:29In London, the dock strike took to the streets.
54:37Thousands of dockers and their families marched, carrying huge banners, their children holding signs saying,
54:46Please feed us.
54:48The public and the press began to sympathise.
54:52Donations poured in.
54:54The bosses were under huge pressure to settle, and in the end, they gave in.
55:02It was a historic moment.
55:04The classes had squared up to one another, and the underdogs had won.
55:09Something in Britain had changed for good.
55:13Workers were on the rise, and soon a new society would be forged in which power was shared more fairly.
55:20But there was to be one last flourish of the Victorian age.
55:26In 1897, after 60 years on the throne, Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee.
55:50Led by 50,000 troops, the Queen paraded through the centre of London.
56:00The Daily Mail pronounced that it was entirely fitting that Queen Victoria ended her procession by coming to St Paul's to give thanks to God, because really, God was the only being who was more majestic than she was.
56:14It undoubtedly was a splendid occasion, but for those with eyes to see, Britain's national majesty was already on the way.
56:23Germany and America were beginning to threaten Britain's industrial supremacy.
56:33Her place as the workshop of the world was no longer secure.
56:38The empire was overstretched.
56:46For how long could so few govern so many?
56:53The Victorians had liked to see themselves as ancient Romans, but now they remembered how Rome, too, had fallen.
57:03At home, a social revolution had seen power shift from the aristocracy to the middle class, and now it was shifting again to the workers whose labour had made industrial Britain great.
57:22The people's century was about to begin.
57:52Next time, as the century draws to a close, Victorian artists turn their backs on Victorian values, preferring to create a world of fantasy and magic, sex and death.
58:09Meet the modern day families experiencing firsthand the realities of life in the Victorian slum.
58:22The first episodes available on BBC iPlayer.
58:26Coming up here on BBC for the global impact of the First World War.
58:31Moving up here on BBC.
58:32Over?!
58:34The World War.
58:38The World War.
58:40The World War.
58:42The World War.
58:43The World War.
58:44The World War.
58:49The World War.
58:50The World War.
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58:54Our death was a Solar agesg clarify.
58:55The World War.
58:56The World War.
58:57The World War.
58:58The World War.
58:59The World War.
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