On our recent trip to England, Lizzie and I dashed into the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square. It was close to closing time, so we had only a few minutes to hit the highlights—the Ambassadors, the Turners and Constables, the Air Pump, and of course the Execution of Lady Jane Grey, Queen of England for but nine days and then decapitated when Bloody Mary took the throne. I would not want to say that the last-named is a great painting, but somehow it does capture the imagination—the young girl going to her death because the other side prevailed in the struggle for power.
The next day, with more time and planning, I spent a few hours around the corner, in the National Portrait Gallery. Now, if you visit London, that is something not to be missed. There is a terrific collection of portraits, from about the Tudors on—all of the greats, kings, queens, statesmen, writers, scientists, and others (lots of women, incidentally). And it’s not too big. You can do the whole thing in two or three hours and have a cup of tea too.
One of the oddest exhibits is a life-size statute of Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, dressed as Ancient Britons. He is in a kind of smock-like dress, showing a very nice pair of legs. It is a bit daft, though. Of course, Albert was rather given to cross dressing, and could not wait to get up to Scotland and put on a skirt, fashioned from his own home-made tartan. The laugh is that neither Victoria nor Albert had a drop of British blood in their veins. They were pure Germans all the way.
Not that this stopped them from making their marks all over the Empire in ways that we today think of a quintessentially British. I am at the moment in Victoria, British Columbia, visiting one of my daughters. Like Bergen in Norway and Marseilles in France, it is one of those cities built around an inlet with the sea coming right up to the buildings, which in turn are in a horseshoe around the water. And like Bergen and Marseilles, it is stunningly beautiful.
Around the harbor are grand buildings in that gothic style that we associate with the Victorians, although as it happens the most famous of them all, the Empress Hotel – standing at the head of the harbor and dominating everything—built by the Canadian Pacific as a place to stay before or after going on one of their steam ships, dates from the Edwardian period (it was built between 1904 and 1908).
Also on the harbor, diagonally across from the Empress, are the Parliament Buildings of the Provincial Government (British Columbia)—what Americans would call the Statehouse. In a neo-Baroque style, they were completed in the last decade of the queen’s reign (she died in 1901). Of course they have a statue of her out front. At night, they are lit up with bulbs picking out the contours. I confess I am not quite sure about this. It is all a little bit like the British, working-class, holiday resort of Blackpool. Rather too showy and vulgar for Canada. (You can see that, for all of my pride in my newly acquired American citizenship, 40 years north of the border did rub off some.) There are, thank God, no donkey rides on the beach.
In respects, Victoria reminds me of Melbourne in Australia, perhaps the greatest of all of the Victorian cities. (I am sure that Manchester would have something to say about that.) When I was a kid, 60-plus years ago, we looked down on things Victorian. Lytton Strachey had done his work well, and Britain was in the business of dismantling the Empire, starting with India. One was taught to be forward-looking and to regret the past.
Now we are more distant from the Victorian period, it belongs to history, and like the rest of history can be judged in a more disinterested way. Please don’t think I am just a version of the British historian Niall Ferguson, who seems to think that the whole history of the universe is one of triumph under the Raj and a sad decline since. I’m not. But I do have to say that as I stand out by the harbor, with the Empress behind me and the Parliament buildings to my left, a certain pride in my third nationality does come out. There is much to criticize about the Victorians, but by gum they were (in Canada mainly Scots) men and women of vision, combined with courage and a willingness to work hard and take chances. They really were Menschen.
Don’t take my word for it. Visit Victoria or Melbourne (named after Victoria’s first prime minister) or Manchester, and you tell me what you think.
