Victorian Britain

During Queen Victoria’s sixty-four year reign (1837-1901) the British Empire, led by an array of great statesmen and supported by great industrial expansion, grew to a size so vast that “the sun never sets upon it”. This Empire, whose creation began initially from commercial motives, was also added to for strategic and even missionary reasons and eventually comprised about a quarter of the world's population and land surface. Yet only towards the end of the nineteenth century was there any strong public sentiment in favour of it.

Victoria’s long reign saw many changes in British institutions and the British “way of life”. Her practice of insisting on being informed about government policy while remaining politically neutral fixed the position of the Crown in the Constitution. Her rejection of the amusements and life of the aristocracy enabled the common people to identify themselves with this simple wife and widow, which led to a revival of popular support for the monarchy. Above all, her essentially middle-class views and life-style, combined with the rise of the middle classes themselves, led to an affirmation of values - the paternalistic integrity and discipline of the family, the sobriety and puritanism of public life - which in later years came to be known as “Victorian values” to which the Thatcher Government of the 1980s wished to return.

In 1899, a thousand years after Alfred the Great’s death, England was in the grip of Alfred’s mania. Statues were erected, books written and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert has even named their son after the hero-king. But the Victorians were not the originators of the Alfred myth. Nearly every passing century since 899 has seen another accretion to this legend, from the 11^th-century story of the cakes to the 18^th century, when Thomas Arne’s opera, “Alfred: A Masque”, was performed. It is only in our time that Alfred has become the almost exclusive property of historians and schoolchildren.

Alfred saw off a Viking force which threatened to wipe out Anglo-Saxon rule in England. By the time the Vikings turned their attention to Wessex, Alfred’s homeland, while he was still a boy, they gad killed the rulers of two of the three other major kingdoms in 9^th -century England: the King of Northumberland was said to have had his corpse carved into the shape of an eagle, as a sacrifice to Odin. So it seems reasonable to assume that Alfred was fighting for his physical as well as his political survival when, as King, he at last won a convincing victory at Edington in 878.

When the fighting let up, Alfred turned from general to headmaster. His national curriculum consisted of those Latin works “which it is most necessary for men to know”, both religious and secular, translated into English, four of them by Alfred himself. As the youngest of five sons, Alfred can never have expected to inherit the crown of Wessex, despite the indications in the “Chronicle” that he was his father’s favourite. But he took advantage of the bad luck of his older brothers by ensuring that his offspring were more likely to inherit than theirs. Largely as a result of these precautions, it was under the House of Alferd that England was united. This legacy must have played an important part in his appeal to the Victorians, who liked to think tat the center of their Empire had an ancient pedigree. Despite it s remoteness from his own life, the image of Alfred as a survivor of a larger nation than Wessex alone became a key element in the Alfred myth.