The problem is not the broken window in the palace. The real problem with the
show's Queen Victoria -- and her series -- is that she never really knows what's going
on. No one will tell her.
"My people love their queen," she says,
because that's what her flatterers tell her. No one, apparently, has pointed
out that the country is experiencing a major recession and that a significant percentage of the population is near starvation. Albert, who seemed to have a surer grip on reality in the
first season, decides he must "find out how these people live" and is
shocked, positively shocked, to discover that poor people are crowded together
in substandard tenements. Though, in the few seconds of screen time they are
given, the 'poor' household rounded up his handlers appears to consist only of people with respectful middle-class manners.
I don't know what
audiences are supposed to make of this disconnect between 'the lives of the
royals' and the realities of life for ordinary people. The problem,
particularly for American audiences, is the series spends much more time on costumes
and royal household snits than on the social, political and economic history of
the times. The angry crowd mobbing the London streets and hooting threateningly at the palace
gates in the last moments of Sunday's Season 3 opening episode
didn't come out of nowhere.
The show does
offer us Albert reading us a sentence or two from Karl Marx, but doesn't connect Marx's theories with the long-brewing popular dissatisfaction with an antiquated political
system that preserved the privileges of birth and wealth while offering no political
representation to the lower classes. In fact, mass movements demanding political reform stretch back to early years of 19th century.
The Chartists,
the name for the movement hounding Victoria's domestic tranquility in episode
one, set in 1848, were successors of an earlier generation's reform movement arising in
the wake of the close of the Napoleonic wars in 1815. With the country's
industrial revolution in full sway, the demobilization of soldiers worsened a
severe manufacturing depression, combined with food prices kept
artificially highly by England's Corn Laws. The Corn Laws protected the wealth
of the country's wealthy landowners by placing high tariffs on imported grain.
A suffering
populace had no one to bring their troubles to in the English government, because ordinary people lacked
both suffrage and parliamentary representation. While industrial growth had created boom cities such as Manchester with tens of thousands of workers, the new cities were governed by ancient institutions such as "lords of the manor" and denied even a single MP (member of parliament). Reformists responded with
mass marches and demonstrations in behalf of the goal of parliamentary reform.
The largest of
these turned into the atrocity known as the
"Peterloo Massacre" in 1819. The
Guardian newspaper's review of Mike Leigh's new film "Peterloo," describes
the massacre this way: "On 16 August 1819, at what we would now
call a pro-democracy demonstration in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, an
excitable band of cavalry and yeomanry – whose commander had airily absented
himself for a day at the races – charged with sabres drawn into a crowd of
100,000 unarmed people, many of whom were unable to escape the enclosed space. The troops killed 18 and injured hundreds more."
In fact the
country's power structure was looking for a violent outcome in order to blame the
victims for the violence, arrest and jail the movement's leaders, and suppress the 'reform'
movement.
Part of
Peterloo's legacy is that it prompted western history's first formulation of
the idea of a popular revolution through mass action civil disobedience,
articulated by the great 19th century poet Percy Shelley's response to the massacre ("The
Mask of Anarchy"):
"Rise like
lions after slumber/ In unvanquishable number" his poem urged. "You
are many/ They are few."
The basic
governmental reforms sought in 1819 did not come about until the First Reform
Act of 1832, which made parliament somewhat more representative of the
country's population and expanded the right to vote from 400,000 to about
650,000 men. That meant about one in five men could vote. Working class regions,
especially the industrial cities in the country's north, remained
under-represented.
The popular desire to achieve universal male suffrage for all classes and make deeper reforms in a governmental system still largely
dominated by a wealthy upper class, with its ancient privileges and disregard
of the 'lower orders,' rose again in the 1840s' to rattle Victoria's cage.
Chartism -- the name comes from their desire for the enactment of a 'charter' (somewhat similar to a Constitutional amendment, in American terms) -- made
a push to establish universal male suffrage and enact some other reforms.
Though inspired in part by the "Revolution of 1848," a
series of revolts that drove European monarchs in France, Austria and other
states off the throne -- events regarded by the English royals as 'family'
tragedies -- Chartists did not seek a revolution. The movement sought changes
to make their country more democratic, the chief of these being universal male
suffrage.
Other demands
included the adoption of a secret ballot to shield voters from political pressures;
the abolition of "property qualification" for MPs so that voters
could have a truly free choice of their representatives; and equalizing constituencies
to secure the same amount of representation for the same number of electors (or
"one man one vote"). These are basic principles in a representative
democracy.
Nevertheless,
frightened by the European mass revolutions that overthrew monarchs, and afraid
that expanding suffrage would weaken their own power, government leaders refused
to accept the Chartists' petition. They rallied a massive show of armed force
that blunted the Chartists' plan for a people's march on Parliament.
I'm probably
giving nothing away in pointing out that Victoria and Albert remain safely on
their royal seats. Season 3, however, seems determined to make much of the
royal household's panicky retreat to an island hideaway on the Isle of Wight.
The Chartists'
key demands were largely enacted, once again a generation later, in the 1867 or
"Second Reform" Act, which gave the vote to "all male heads of
household," significantly expanding suffrage for men. Women's suffrage, of
course, was still a good way off.
I don't know how PBS's
"Victoria" will deal with her country's ongoing social and economic
pressures for political reform. Or whether in-house and bedroom dramas will be
allowed to dominate upcoming episodes.
"Victorian"
England is popularly known as the age of restrictive clothing, repressive
social codes, fear of sexuality, and high mortality rates for children and
women. (Also Imperial expansions, slums at home, the growth of a middle class,
the birth of the realistic, socially conscious novel, Sherlock Holmes,
scientific breakthroughs; the list could go on.)
In other
histories, I have found the period termed "The Age of Reform." But
political reform in 19th century England, as perhaps in all countries, took a
long time in coming.
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