David Cannadine’s Victorious Century: A bit too victorious, if you ask me

A couple of months back I bounced a post, pithily entitled Forward!, off Kyle Sammin’s review in the National Review of David Cannadine’s new book, Victorious Century, The United Kingdom 1809-1906. I said at the time “I have read the introduction, and I’m definitely looking forward to the rest. Kyle’s review only encourages my appetite.” After finishing VC, I can only say that my appetite for an intelligent contemporary take on Victorian times is still whetted and still unsatisfied. In brief, Dave’s new book is very largely a disappointment.

Unless I’m deeply out of touch with the rest of America, and on this point at least I don’t think I am, I am significantly better acquainted with England’s fabled Victorian Age than most Yanks, having read the relevant volumes from both the original Oxford History of England (begun in the 1930s but not finished until 1960) and the New Oxford History of England (finished in the early 2000s), three fat volumes in each case.¹ So, clearly, I am a glutton for the times, and, just as clearly, Mr. Cannadine failed to assuage said gluttony.

It was Mr. Cannadine’s preface, I think, that chiefly aroused my interest, providing an entertaining autobiographical reminiscence about growing up in the 1950s in quasi-Victorian Birmingham:

“Much of the Birmingham where I grew up would have been instantly recognizable to Joseph Chamberlain, who had been by turns a reforming mayor, an advanced Liberal, and an assertive imperialist …. This was especially true of the magnificent ensemble of public buildings surrounding the square that bore Chamberlain’s name: the Birmingham and Midland Institute, the Reference Library (where I spent many happy hours), the Town Hall, the Council House and Art Gallery, and Mason College. Corporation Street was very much as Chamberlain had created it, the tramlines remained in many of the cobbled city-centre thoroughfares, and just a short distance away was Edgbaston, a quintessential Victorian suburb, where some of Chamberlain’s descendants still lived. My four grandparents had all been born during the 1880s, and they seemed to me very old, and very Victorian; they invariably dressed in black, as if still in mourning for the Gas-Lit Gloriana who had reigned during their youth.”

Now, of course, all’s changed, and how refreshing would it be, now that the battle’s lost and won (all of them), to take a look back, to deconstruct and reconstruct the past in the light of today?

Cannadine gets a number of things right, noting how Britain won its greatest victory, defeating France as its imperial rival once and for all, almost entirely due to Napoleon’s absurd insistence on conquering not only western and central Europe but eastern Europe, and Russia in particular, as well.² Yet he’s reluctant to paint all of England’s warts—for example, the “Second Battle of Copenhagen”, in 1807, during which British ships pounded the city for three days, destroying most of it and killing 2,000 citizens, more or less to warn the Danish to behave themselves.

Kyle Sammin’s review highlighted Cannadine’s unwillingness to explore the relentlessly expansionary (expansionary and exploitative) nature of the British empire, which I seconded and will second again. In discussing the Boer War, Cannadine does not mention the pledge of Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister, that Britain had no intention of conquering the Boer Republic, a pledge that was violated in the extreme, because Britain swallowed the whole thing. Also unmentioned is the law Britain passed afterwards, making it a felony to teach black Africans to read or write, or learn any skilled trade whatsoever. Black Africans were herded onto tribal “homelands”—land that the white settlers did not want for farming—that were far too crowded to allow the Africans to farm for themselves. The whole point was to force them to work in the gold and diamond mines for starvation wages, and when they still refused to work for the wages the mine owners wanted to pay, starving Chinese peasants were imported instead, herded into work camps and treated as virtual slaves. (Cannadine “explains” that there was a “labor shortage”). I’m sure an Indian reviewer might have a few quibbles as well, regarding Cannadine’s treatment of the Jewel in the Crown.On the other hand, his treatment of Ireland, always a “difficult” question for English historians, is better than most attempts I’ve seen, recognizing that the English never were willing to recognize that “union” for Ireland meant “oppression”.

Cannadine is properly critical of Queen Victoria’s overly imperial ways, criticizing her mistreatment of her bête noire, four-time Liberal prime minister William Gladstone, in particular, but avoids all mention of her most amusing foible, her hidden affair with John Brown, a Scotch “gillie” (“outdoor servant”), who, she convinced herself, was possessed by the spirit of her beloved late husband. Victoria showered gifts and affection on Brown, created medals to be awarded to him, had his portrait painted and statues made. Most of these were destroyed by her son, Edward VII, when he became king, but a life-size statue of Brown remains.³

Cannadine’s biggest fault is that he doesn’t really attempt an overview of his century, opting instead, for the most part, for the standard political narrative. Even though the nineteenth century was the century of the Industrial Revolution, Cannadine offers almost no economic analysis at all, noting that Britain’s head start, along with her command of the sea, allowed her to take her place at the head of the nations but never asking himself why this happened, preferring instead to dwell on the comings and goings at No. 10 Downing Street, as though that explained everything.⁴

I’m afraid that, despite his good intentions, Cannadine’s nostalgia for the world he never really knew gets the better of him. He keeps referring to the British Empire as the largest the world had ever seen, even though the authors of the first Oxford history, who lived when it was the largest, never felt compelled to make that claim. The task of squeezing Britain’s greatest century into a single volume is no easy task, and I’m afraid Mr. Cannadine fell disappointingly short of the mark.

Afterwords
If you read all three nineteenth century volumes of the “New Oxford” you’ll certainly know a lot, at least until you forget most of what you’ve read, as I have. Which, of course, gives me the option of reading them all over again. If you’re really a sucker for old-fashioned narrative history, you might try French historian Eli Halévy’s History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, the first volume, England in 1815, in particular. Also wonderful: Halévy’s The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism.