It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Queen Victoria’s England. On the subject of race and class, Victoria was virtually a radical. She wrote, “that division of classes, is the one thing, … most dangerous and reprehensible.” With the servant, the bluff highlander John Brown, she practiced what she preached.
---The exhibition also includes our well-known painting ‘A Special Pleader’ by Charles Burton Barber alongside works by Frank Holl and John Gregory amongst others. Many of the paintings in this show have their own narratives and reflect aspects of Victorian social history. Other works reveal the interests of Victorian artists in travelling abroad and capturing history and literature in paint.--- Read More:http://www.link4life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=c.showArticle&articleID=275
Melbourne had been a member of Earl Grey’s government that had passed the 1832 Reform Act, but he had privately been against the measure. Melbourne attempted to protect Victoria from the harsh realities of British life and even advised her not to read Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens because it dealt with “paupers, criminals and other unpleasant subjects”. Read More:http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRvictoria.htm
Society was changing. In 1820, the year after she was born, condemned criminals were beheaded after being hanged. The queen had admired Elizabeth Fry’s prison reform work in the 1840’s and the last convict hulk had sailed for the Antipodes in 1858, and the last debtor’s prison closed in the 1860’s. Dickens had helped bang the doors, remembering his own father imprisoned there, and re-creating him in Mr. Micawber. In 1870 the Queen invited Dickens to the palace for a progress report. She wrote:
He is very agreeable with a pleasant voice and manner. He talked of his latest works, of America, the strangeness of the people there, of the division of classes in England, which he hoped would get better in time. He felt sure that it would come gradually. And I earnestly pray that it may.
---Although the quality of Mulready's works as paintings leaves much to be desired, they are important social documents. As art reviewer Keith Roberts has noted, "Children could be used to publicize the iniquities of the social justice system without seeming to attack the social structure; reform might well be achieved by appeals to the conscience through sentiment rather than by reasoned argument and criticism of an overtly political character." This was an approach that Charles Dickens knew well and deployed to devastating effect in his novels.--- Read More:http://victorianpeeper.blogspot.ca/2010/09/more-news-from-art-world.html
Dickens had begun to age noticeably after he and Ellen Ternan were in in the 1865 Staplehurst railway accident. In March, 1870, the ailing Dickens was received by Queen Victoria, who later said, “He had a large, loving mind and the strongest sympathy with the poorer classes.” Dickens last reading was only a few days later. Following this performance he said, “From these garish lights I vanish now forevermore.” Within three months he was dead and laid to rest in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey, near the memorials to Milton, Spenser, Dryden, Chaucer and Shakespeare. Read More:http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/charlesdickens.html
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