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By the second half of the 19th century,
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the Victorians had built a nation that was the richest and most powerful on Earth.
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Britain's painters celebrated Britain's triumphs.
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And yet, just when the Victorian miracle was at its peak,
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came voices of doubt, of anxiety, and even of protest.
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Science began to gnaw away at religious beliefs...
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..throwing the certainties of the Victorian world into question.
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Now, artists began to talk of waging a war on the machine age,
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and they looked beyond the triumphs of the 19th century for inspiration,
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to intoxicating dreams...
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To sensuality...
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To the imagination...
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To nightmares and madness itself...
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Even to a world beyond the grave.
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And they would open the doors to a new age of uncertainty,
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an uncertainty we still live with today.
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The wilds of Northumberland are a fitting place for a vision of Apocalypse.
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Among these rocks and hillsides grew up an extraordinary painter
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whose mind seethed with troubling visions.
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To John Martin, this craggy, dramatic landscape was the work of a vengeful, violent God,
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a Biblical wilderness in which the relationship between God and man
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was played out over the centuries.
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And John Martin had a warning for his times.
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He'd spent his childhood in the little village of Haydon Bridge.
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Like many Victorian children,
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he was dragged by his mother to church not once, but twice each Sunday.
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It's a pretty austere place, and Isabella Martin's faith matched the bleakness of the building.
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She preached a fierce sermon, that "there was a God to serve
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"and a hell to shun, and that sinners and swearers
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"would burn in hell with the devil and his angels."
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Wild landscape and terrifying religion combined to produce something astonishing.
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As he looked around he saw not glory but catastrophe.
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His pictures prophesied the end of Victorian civilisation.
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John Martin's apocalyptic paintings show the uncontrollable
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power of nature,
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and warn of the fate awaiting the Victorians.
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In The Last Judgement, the world is riven asunder,
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the saved in their Sunday best on one side,
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and the damned on the other.
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A steam train, that symbol of Victorian progress,
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falls flaming into the abyss.
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And in The Great Day Of His Wrath, Martin depicts the fate of humanity.
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Victorian civilisation will be destroyed,
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obliterated by God's fury.
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These may be religious pictures,
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but the religious beliefs of the age were beginning to crumble.
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New questions were being asked which would shake
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the foundations of Victorian certainty.
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All over the country, and here in Pegwell Bay in Kent,
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enthusiastic amateurs
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were spending their weekends fossil hunting at the seaside.
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Armed with hammers and magnifying glasses, they set out to record
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and classify the fossils
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that they found in rocks and stones and cliffs.
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In the process, those hammers were chipping away
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at once rock-solid convictions.
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Until the 1850s most people, if they thought about it all,
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believed that world was around 6,000 years old.
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According to the calculations of a long-dead bishop,
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God created the world on Sunday, October 23rd, 4004 BC.
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But now the fossil hunters, vicars and priests among them,
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were discovering that couldn't possibly be true.
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This is a fantastic fossil. Is it from round here?
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Yes, this is from a local beach here.
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This is only a small proportion of the animal.
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It would've been a much bigger fossil originally,
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maybe even 1.5 metres across.
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We've only got the central portion here.
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Are there still fossils to be found here?
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Yes, it's a very rich location.
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The magic is still here that drew the Victorians down.
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The quality of the fossils that come out is still high.
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- And they're easily removed.
- It is amazingly soft, what is it?
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Well, it's actually plant remains, an algal bloom.
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All this white stuff, even the finest powder.
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So the entire rock face that we're looking at is just one giant fossil.
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So you're a Victorian clergyman, you pick this out of a cliff,
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and you can't reconcile it with the Bible.
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There is no modern equal to the things they were going through
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in terms of trying to square off what they were seeing with their beliefs.
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- It's like a mental nuclear explosion, it was that serious?
- It must have been.
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We have no parallels today to even comprehend what they went through.
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Discoveries are happening all the time.
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So, they were genuinely making new discoveries?
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Yep, indeed.
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Because these cliffs are always eroding back,
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what you're looking at here are very edges of a page of geological time,
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so every now and again a single letter drops off
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and if you're lucky enough to be here to catch that,
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you may end up putting a few of them together into a story.
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And that story told by the rocks was a disquieting one.
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One painting hints at it.
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It looks like just an autumn day at the seaside,
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but it's more than that.
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It shows the family of the artist William Dyce
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on the beach at Pegwell Bay.
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Dyce himself was a keen geologist and astronomer.
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The women comb the beach for fossils.
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How many millions of years had those fossils been there?
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A man cranes his neck towards the sky to get a glimpse of a comet.
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What was our place in the universe?
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The location is significant.
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Here, Christianity first arrived in Britain.
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Now the question was, how long would it last?
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The writer John Ruskin voiced a very Victorian anxiety in 1851...
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"If only the geologists would leave me alone I could do very well.
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"But those dreadful hammers!"
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I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.
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He was right to worry.
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The comforting myths of the Bible were being destroyed by a new belief in science.
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This is one of the grandest of the Victorian cathedrals to science,
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the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
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The whole building is a hymn to scientific endeavour.
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Every column is carved from a different British rock.
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Every capital shows a different plant.
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As for the specimens, they're testament to the Victorian spirit of enquiry.
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It was 19th century scientists who coined the word "dinosaur" in 1842.
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There was nothing new in finding skeletons, of course.
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But when scientists looked closely at the bones, they discovered something more urgent.
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Clues to the staggering age of the world, to how life had developed.
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Bones, in other words, could be very, very worrying things.
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Even human bones.
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In this picture, parts of a skeleton have resurfaced in a graveyard.
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Can the promises of scripture be true
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when this is what we're reduced to?
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Now begins the Age of Doubt, with a capital D.
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The Bible promises eternal life, but she seems not so sure.
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The picture's full of symbolic detail.
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The dead man is named John Faithful.
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On his skull, there's a butterfly, symbol of resurrection.
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The painting posed an uncomfortable question -
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what can we believe any more?
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Well, might they ask.
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Charles Darwin was about to demonstrate the creation myths of the Bible must be nonsense.
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Here at the Oxford Museum of Natural History, religion and science met head on.
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In one corner, Professor TH Huxley, nicknamed "Darwin's bulldog".
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In the other, the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, known as "Soapy Sam".
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They were here to discuss Darwin's electrifying theory that species,
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instead of being individually created by God,
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evolved by natural selection, so-called survival of the fittest.
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The bishop began, he said, "You claim we're descended from apes.
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"In your case, is it on your grandfather's side or your grandmother's side?"
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According to legend, Huxley replied, "I'd rather be descended from an ape than a bishop."
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In later life, the professor could only recall that he had said
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he had no shame in being descended from an ape,
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but he would be ashamed to be associated with someone
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who used his great gifts to obscure a truth.
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It was a stunning moment,
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so stunning that one woman in the audience passed out and had to be carried away.
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The implications of Victorian science proved overwhelming for others too.
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Some of the best artists of the day sought escape elsewhere,
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in a magical past.
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They found a gentler, more romantic world
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in a medieval fantasy of damsels, knights and chivalry,
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as far away as possible from science and industry.
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One story drew them over and over again.
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The Lady of Shalott is the tale of a medieval damsel marooned in a tower,
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and her doomed love for Sir Lancelot.
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She looks out of the window at him and brings a curse upon herself.
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Such pictures seemed to satisfy a hunger in the weary Victorian soul,
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a hunger for the spiritual and the romantic.
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This love affair with all things medieval could be taken to wonderful extremes.
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Cardiff Castle is a whopping great medieval extravaganza built to keep the Victorian world at bay.
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It was dreamt up by two men.
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A wealthy industrialist, the Marquis of Bute,
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and the architect William Burges.
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Now at the time, Lord Bute had a reputation as the richest man in the world,
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so money really was no object.
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Burges' challenge, then, completely to recreate a medieval castle, was the commission of a lifetime.
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Bute and Burges were men with a vision on a truly grand scale, a vision of a world before
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Charles Darwin had asked those awkward questions.
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The place is an absolute labyrinth.
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This room, for example, guarded by the devil to keep the ladies out, is the winter smoking room.
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It's covered in images of animals.
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Even the door handle is a parrot.
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There are animals and birds all over the walls.
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But these aren't animals and birds as seen by 19th century scientists,
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they're as seen by medieval monks.
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In other words, proof of God's creation.
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And this is the small dining room, a mundane name for a room that's anything but mundane.
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Look at the detail - a howler monkey.
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When you want to summon the servants, press the nut in its mouth!
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And here's the riposte to Darwin, a book showing human learning in the hands of two monkeys
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who patently haven't the faintest idea what to do with it.
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So, to you, Mr Darwin.
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And here's a fireplace, built in the shape of the Norman keep in the grounds, and look, inside it,
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William the Conqueror's son held prisoner, as he had been in the real keep.
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No home's complete without one, really.
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But what looks like something from the past, was built on the profits of a very modern world.
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The irony is, of course, that it was all paid for by one of the age's richest industrialists.
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What made this medieval fantasy possible was the toil of Welsh miners.
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One Victorian artist led a call to arms against Victorian values.
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The avowed wish of Edward Burne-Jones
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was to wage a crusade and holy war against the age.
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The more materialistic science becomes, he declared,
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the more angels I shall paint.
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Executing this picture obsessed him all his life.
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Mortally wounded in battle, the dying King Arthur is watched over
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by three queens in the magical Isle of Avalon.
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There, legend had it, that he would sleep until one day,
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in the hour of England's need, he was summoned again.
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It's a strange, melancholy masterpiece.
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The painting's so vast you almost feel you could fall into it.
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But its scale is only part of the secret of its success, I think.
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It has a dreamy, seductive, hypnotic quality, and it sort of makes you
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understand why it was that when Burne-Jones' friends asked during
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the 18 years he spent painting it,
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"What are you doing?" he said, "I'm in Avalon."
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It's rather a nice place to be.
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Towards the end of his life, Burne-Jones wrote,
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"I need nothing but my hands and my brain
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"to fashion a world to live in which nothing can disturb.
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"In my own land I am king."
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But the world Burne-Jones railed against was gaining unstoppable momentum.
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The Victorians had built a nation
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that was striding boldly into the future.
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Machines had brought vast wealth to the country...
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..in factories, in railways, in mines.
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This pumping station was built in 1865
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for the distinctly unglamorous job of pumping the sewage away from London.
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Crossness Pumping Station is Victorian engineering at its most confident.
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No wonder the writer Thomas Carlyle called this time "the age of the machine".
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Man was conquering nature, Britain was conquering the world.
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And yet there were increasing numbers of people who found this
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new power and wealth and knowledge just unsettling.
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And they were willing to turn their back on machines altogether.
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The artist William Morris built a house for himself and his companions
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in what was then a village on the outskirts of London.
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It was intended as an experiment in communal living because Morris
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and his friends had ambitions way beyond art.
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They wanted to pioneer an entire new way of life.
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To do that, they turned their back on traditional Victorian values
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and the fruit of their labours was this, the Red House.
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On a cupboard in the hall, they painted pictures of themselves in medieval dress.
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William Morris and his young wife Jane,
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the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his lover Lizzie Siddal.
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In their ideal world they would make everything themselves.
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They said no to factory-made, mass-produced furniture and wallpaper.
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Instead everything would be crafted by hand, just as in medieval times.
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In this hothouse atmosphere,
241
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the men painted the women over and over again.
242
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But there's something disturbing about these pictures.
243
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They don't quite look like real women.
244
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They're fantasies, with their dreamy expressions,
245
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their soulful eyes...
246
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..and their big, big hair, worn sexily loose.
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00:25:02,320 --> 00:25:06,000
Rossetti's pictures of Lizzie are charged with obsession.
248
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They're images from some feverish, romantic dream.
249
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But the dream ended in nightmare, here in Highgate Cemetery in London.
250
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Lizzie was buried here, in a private part of the cemetery.
251
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Rossetti's relationship with Lizzie Siddal was intense,
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passionate and volatile.
253
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She though suffered from consumption,
254
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and became dependent on the opium-based painkiller, laudanum.
255
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In 1862, two years after they'd been married, she took an overdose.
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Suicide was suspected.
257
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She'd had been suffering from postnatal depression
258
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after giving birth to a stillborn baby.
259
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Her corpse was laid out in an open coffin for seven days,
260
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while Rossetti scanned her body for signs of life.
261
00:26:25,880 --> 00:26:30,440
Inside Lizzie's coffin, entwined in her red hair,
262
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he laid the only complete copy of his poetry.
263
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He pledged the poems would die with her.
264
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But the story doesn't end there. It has a rather grisly postscript.
265
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As the years went by, Rossetti's violent grief subsided
266
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and he began to regret his decision to bury his poetry with his wife.
267
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Seven years after her funeral,
268
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in the middle of the night, her grave was opened.
269
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Rossetti himself couldn't bear to be there,
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00:27:02,400 --> 00:27:05,720
but they told him that her body was perfectly preserved
271
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and that the coffin was filled with her luxuriant copper-red hair which
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impossibly had carried on growing after she'd died.
273
00:27:14,560 --> 00:27:19,600
The manuscript was worm-eaten, but the poetry was intact.
274
00:27:29,480 --> 00:27:33,800
After her death, he worked obsessively on this painting of her.
275
00:27:41,560 --> 00:27:46,400
Lizzie is deep in a trance-like state. She's deathly pale.
276
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Her lips are slightly parted.
277
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Is she breathing or dying?
278
00:27:59,040 --> 00:28:02,960
A strangely-coloured dove carries an opium poppy,
279
00:28:02,960 --> 00:28:06,520
a symbol of her own death by laudanum overdose.
280
00:28:17,240 --> 00:28:20,320
Yet Rossetti's obsession with his dead wife
281
00:28:20,320 --> 00:28:22,720
wasn't so out of step with the times.
282
00:28:25,360 --> 00:28:30,320
The death of Prince Albert in 1861 not only plunged Victoria into mourning,
283
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but set off an almost fanatical obsession with death
284
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which lasted until the end of the century.
285
00:28:42,680 --> 00:28:48,040
As church yards filled up, the Victorians built grand
286
00:28:48,040 --> 00:28:52,920
new cemeteries, extravagant cities of the dead.
287
00:28:52,920 --> 00:28:55,640
Here loved ones lived on...
288
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in grand style.
289
00:29:06,680 --> 00:29:14,240
The cult of mourning may have been born of necessity, but it was also the last gasp of a religious age.
290
00:29:14,240 --> 00:29:16,760
No longer sure of an afterlife,
291
00:29:16,760 --> 00:29:22,760
it's as if the Victorians decided to cling as long as possible to this one.
292
00:29:38,800 --> 00:29:42,760
The uncertainty of what death brings runs right through
293
00:29:42,760 --> 00:29:46,160
the weird paintings of George Frederick Watts.
294
00:29:56,280 --> 00:30:01,600
In this one, Sic Transit or Thus All Things Pass,
295
00:30:01,600 --> 00:30:04,840
a body lies shrouded on a slab.
296
00:30:09,680 --> 00:30:13,960
The anonymous figure is surrounded by worldly possessions,
297
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all now useless.
298
00:30:21,720 --> 00:30:28,320
In Love And Death, love vainly strives to keep death from entering the house of life.
299
00:30:38,800 --> 00:30:41,880
And in Orpheus and Eurydice,
300
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Orpheus clutches at the body of his beloved.
301
00:30:50,000 --> 00:30:53,000
He has led her from the land of the dead,
302
00:30:53,000 --> 00:30:56,840
only to lose her forever by turning back to look at her.
303
00:30:58,360 --> 00:31:01,800
He's been offered what so many Victorians yearned for -
304
00:31:01,800 --> 00:31:05,280
the chance to bring the dead back to life.
305
00:31:06,800 --> 00:31:09,080
But he's failed in the attempt.
306
00:31:12,840 --> 00:31:16,280
Many Victorians clung desperately to the belief
307
00:31:16,280 --> 00:31:18,520
that perhaps death wasn't the end.
308
00:31:18,520 --> 00:31:22,520
Some even tried to enter the no man's land between death and life
309
00:31:22,520 --> 00:31:25,640
and to make contact with the other side.
310
00:31:33,720 --> 00:31:37,720
Into the spiritual void opened up by Victorian science
311
00:31:37,720 --> 00:31:40,120
came a rush of exotic beliefs
312
00:31:40,120 --> 00:31:42,800
and job opportunities for charlatans.
313
00:31:48,640 --> 00:31:55,080
Seances, when mediums allegedly made contact with the dead, became all the rage.
314
00:32:00,640 --> 00:32:03,240
The medium would put their hand on the table.
315
00:32:03,240 --> 00:32:06,040
Before we know it the table starts to levitate.
316
00:32:07,160 --> 00:32:11,360
'Eleanor and Chris Thompson call themselves psychics.
317
00:32:11,360 --> 00:32:17,480
'They certainly have an unusual sideline, an interest in the tricks of the Victorian trade.'
318
00:32:17,480 --> 00:32:20,560
It's quite blatantly obvious here, but there's a pin.
319
00:32:20,560 --> 00:32:23,240
We've left it blatantly obvious that there is a nail.
320
00:32:23,240 --> 00:32:27,120
They would colour that to match the stain of the table so it was not as obvious.
321
00:32:27,120 --> 00:32:29,800
Normally the person that checked out the equipment
322
00:32:29,800 --> 00:32:31,840
would be someone that knew the medium.
323
00:32:31,840 --> 00:32:34,400
- And...
- Secondly, the ring.
324
00:32:34,400 --> 00:32:38,280
The ring would have grooves or be shaped.
325
00:32:38,280 --> 00:32:41,520
Oh, I see. Yes, on the outside it looks like a wedding ring
326
00:32:41,520 --> 00:32:44,200
but on the inside it's got all these hooks.
327
00:32:44,200 --> 00:32:46,880
Because most of this stuff is trickery, isn't it?
328
00:32:46,880 --> 00:32:51,680
Quite a lot of it is, yes, if you go back to Victorian times, especially.
329
00:32:51,680 --> 00:32:54,760
We try and recreate things without the tricks.
330
00:32:54,760 --> 00:32:58,840
You've got some examples of the devices that Victorians used here.
331
00:32:58,840 --> 00:33:03,760
- What's this?
- This is actually a planchette, which is French for little plank.
332
00:33:03,760 --> 00:33:06,200
All you do is put the pencil in, tighten it up,
333
00:33:06,200 --> 00:33:08,720
so you've then got like a three-legged table.
334
00:33:08,720 --> 00:33:11,200
The same sort of table they'd use on the Ouija board.
335
00:33:11,200 --> 00:33:12,640
If one person's doing it,
336
00:33:12,640 --> 00:33:16,800
it wouldn't be too difficult with practice to learn to write messages.
337
00:33:16,800 --> 00:33:20,200
So we're careful to make sure there's more than one person got their fingers on
338
00:33:20,200 --> 00:33:21,920
so it's more difficult to manipulate.
339
00:33:21,920 --> 00:33:27,040
- What interests me about you two is that you know these are tricks.
- Yes.
- Yes.
340
00:33:27,040 --> 00:33:29,920
It's fakery and it's made easier if people have a hunger
341
00:33:29,920 --> 00:33:32,760
- to believe there's something out there.
- A lot easier.
342
00:33:32,760 --> 00:33:35,480
Yet you do genuinely believe there's something out there.
343
00:33:35,480 --> 00:33:38,440
How do you describe yourselves now?
344
00:33:38,440 --> 00:33:40,960
Are you psychics or what?
345
00:33:40,960 --> 00:33:43,360
We believe we've got a gift.
346
00:33:43,360 --> 00:33:46,200
Eleanor, what do you describe yourself as?
347
00:33:46,200 --> 00:33:49,720
Psychic or psychotic, I don't know which. The jury's still out on that one.
348
00:33:49,720 --> 00:33:53,400
Why were the Victorians so interested in the paranormal, do you think?
349
00:33:53,400 --> 00:33:57,680
They were desperate for answers. The church didn't control the country anymore.
350
00:33:57,680 --> 00:34:03,040
You couldn't get punished for things, more mediums were out there, they wanted to find something else.
351
00:34:08,320 --> 00:34:12,480
This need to know what lies the other side of death
352
00:34:12,480 --> 00:34:17,080
is the theme of John Everett Millais' Speak! Speak!
353
00:34:21,320 --> 00:34:25,600
A man starts up in his bed as the ghost of his dead wife,
354
00:34:25,600 --> 00:34:30,240
dressed in her bridal clothes, summons him to join her.
355
00:34:49,000 --> 00:34:51,880
The Victorians loved the supernatural -
356
00:34:51,880 --> 00:34:56,480
ghosts, spirits, apparitions, visitors from the other side.
357
00:34:56,480 --> 00:34:58,920
But most of all, they loved fairies.
358
00:34:58,920 --> 00:35:01,920
And they took their fairies very seriously indeed.
359
00:35:06,600 --> 00:35:11,960
Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was a true believer.
360
00:35:11,960 --> 00:35:15,240
His father was a celebrated fairy painter.
361
00:35:38,560 --> 00:35:42,720
Fascination with fairies allowed people to reconnect with a nature
362
00:35:42,720 --> 00:35:45,520
from which they felt they'd been separated.
363
00:35:47,000 --> 00:35:52,120
But it also fed a deep Victorian hunger to believe there was more to
364
00:35:52,120 --> 00:35:58,760
life than the merely physical, that there was some alternative reality.
365
00:36:06,360 --> 00:36:09,760
But even fairyland had its dark side.
366
00:36:12,040 --> 00:36:15,720
John Anster Fitzgerald's series of nightmare paintings
367
00:36:15,720 --> 00:36:19,960
depict dreamers plagued by hideous goblins.
368
00:36:27,960 --> 00:36:31,360
They hold steaming bowls of toxic liquids.
369
00:36:33,240 --> 00:36:38,480
Half-empty medicine bottles including laudanum lie on bedside tables.
370
00:36:40,040 --> 00:36:44,400
Late Victorian painters were travelling into ever darker regions.
371
00:36:52,840 --> 00:36:58,440
One of them sought in painting a refuge from the torments of his own mind.
372
00:37:03,440 --> 00:37:06,720
It was one of the strangest stories of the Victorian age.
373
00:37:14,800 --> 00:37:19,200
Richard Dadd was a phenomenally successful fairy painter
374
00:37:19,200 --> 00:37:23,200
who was admitted to the Royal Academy at the age of only 20.
375
00:37:23,200 --> 00:37:25,600
But he was highly unstable.
376
00:37:27,400 --> 00:37:32,120
Dadd's fragile mental health collapsed during a trip abroad.
377
00:37:32,120 --> 00:37:35,560
He was seized with an urge to attack the Pope and only
378
00:37:35,560 --> 00:37:39,360
couldn't carry it through because the Pope was so well protected.
379
00:37:39,360 --> 00:37:43,040
His father insisted he was just suffering from sunstroke.
380
00:37:43,040 --> 00:37:47,600
But then, back home, when father and son were walking in the park one day,
381
00:37:47,600 --> 00:37:51,360
Richard Dadd grabbed the knife he had bought especially for the purpose
382
00:37:51,360 --> 00:37:54,720
and slit his father's throat.
383
00:38:07,720 --> 00:38:11,520
He was arrested and found to be suffering from insanity.
384
00:38:22,280 --> 00:38:29,520
In 1864, Richard Dadd was brought here to the new Broadmoor Hospital for the criminally insane.
385
00:38:29,520 --> 00:38:34,680
He passed under this arch on a cart, almost certainly in chains,
386
00:38:34,680 --> 00:38:37,880
and he underwent the admissions process.
387
00:38:46,680 --> 00:38:50,040
Once the mad had been ignored or laughed at.
388
00:38:50,040 --> 00:38:57,040
The Victorians put them in huge new hospitals to be cared for and sometimes cured.
389
00:39:03,360 --> 00:39:06,920
Richard Dadd found a kind of refuge here.
390
00:39:06,920 --> 00:39:11,880
Copies of his paintings still hang on the hospital walls.
391
00:39:11,880 --> 00:39:16,640
He was admitted by the hospital superintendent, Dr William Orange.
392
00:39:19,400 --> 00:39:24,160
This is Dr Orange's initial report of Richard Dadd.
393
00:39:24,160 --> 00:39:28,000
- "Tongue, broad and flabby..."
- "Tongue broad and flabby, pulse regular.
394
00:39:28,000 --> 00:39:29,680
"Heart's action, normal.
395
00:39:29,680 --> 00:39:31,560
"Has never had syphilis.
396
00:39:31,560 --> 00:39:34,480
"Still believes himself to be a marked man
397
00:39:34,480 --> 00:39:37,200
"under the influence of an evil spirit.
398
00:39:37,200 --> 00:39:40,480
"And in explaining his ideas, he becomes very much excited
399
00:39:40,480 --> 00:39:44,960
"and occasionally his eyes have a wild appearance."
400
00:39:44,960 --> 00:39:49,000
We'd probably describe him now as being a paranoid schizophrenic.
401
00:39:49,000 --> 00:39:52,040
Mm. And then this next entry?
402
00:39:52,040 --> 00:39:56,000
"Employs himself generally in painting
403
00:39:56,000 --> 00:40:01,200
"and is at present engaged on a watercolour fairy scene,
404
00:40:01,200 --> 00:40:03,960
"which he is executing with great care."
405
00:40:03,960 --> 00:40:08,240
- Was he encouraged to paint while he was here?
- I think he was encouraged.
406
00:40:08,240 --> 00:40:15,000
I think there was a good tradition in that era of patients being encouraged to be distracted
407
00:40:15,000 --> 00:40:18,080
with activity that maybe suited their personality.
408
00:40:18,080 --> 00:40:24,320
For him, he had always been a fine artist and it seems right that that would be encouraged.
409
00:40:24,320 --> 00:40:26,760
- So it was a sort of therapy?
- I believe so.
410
00:40:26,760 --> 00:40:30,120
In the same way today, we use art and music
411
00:40:30,120 --> 00:40:35,120
and other distractions in therapeutic pursuit in exactly the same way.
412
00:40:44,480 --> 00:40:49,760
Richard Dadd spent the last 22 years of his life here in Broadmoor.
413
00:40:49,760 --> 00:40:53,440
He was incarcerated in one of these rooms
414
00:40:53,440 --> 00:40:56,600
and he was given another one to paint in.
415
00:40:56,600 --> 00:41:00,240
By the latter stages of his life he was pretty much forgotten about,
416
00:41:00,240 --> 00:41:02,960
in fact many people thought he'd died long ago.
417
00:41:02,960 --> 00:41:05,320
But he left behind a body of work
418
00:41:05,320 --> 00:41:08,400
that is astonishing in its intensity.
419
00:41:24,480 --> 00:41:29,640
His most famous picture is a fairy scene depicting...what exactly?
420
00:41:32,880 --> 00:41:37,200
It's a mouse-eye view, seen from ground level through the grass.
421
00:41:40,080 --> 00:41:43,680
A fairy woodman raises his axe to strike a nut.
422
00:41:50,880 --> 00:41:55,560
Around him, strange figures watch or indeed ignore his attempt.
423
00:42:04,560 --> 00:42:08,880
The deranged details of this interior world are unfathomable.
424
00:42:15,200 --> 00:42:18,920
Richard Dadd's were dark and very private visions.
425
00:42:20,880 --> 00:42:25,960
But there was another, more optimistic, dream that chimed with the public mood.
426
00:42:35,320 --> 00:42:39,480
A fantasy of Imperial greatness.
427
00:42:39,480 --> 00:42:43,280
By the second half of Victoria's reign, Britain ruled an empire
428
00:42:43,280 --> 00:42:48,240
four times the size of that of ancient Rome.
429
00:42:57,360 --> 00:43:03,720
In the eyes of many, Victorian Britain rivalled Rome in nobility and sophistication.
430
00:43:09,840 --> 00:43:11,280
Here at the British Museum,
431
00:43:11,280 --> 00:43:17,080
the glories of the classical world had been gathered for them to admire.
432
00:43:21,800 --> 00:43:25,840
The world of ancient Greece and Rome offered the Victorians a mirror
433
00:43:25,840 --> 00:43:28,720
in which they saw themselves reflected back.
434
00:43:28,720 --> 00:43:35,400
But their interpretation of the classical world has a distinctly Victorian twist to it.
435
00:43:42,160 --> 00:43:44,800
This Victorian painting imagines the moment
436
00:43:44,800 --> 00:43:46,800
when a classical Greek sculptor
437
00:43:46,800 --> 00:43:50,200
shows his newly finished work to the public.
438
00:43:50,200 --> 00:43:53,000
They're dressed in classical robes,
439
00:43:53,000 --> 00:43:58,280
of course, but they could easily be Victorian middle-class art-lovers
440
00:43:58,280 --> 00:43:59,760
at a private view.
441
00:44:01,280 --> 00:44:05,880
They stroll around sizing up the work,
442
00:44:05,880 --> 00:44:12,120
with everyone chatting away looking like they're having a thoroughly pleasant and civilised afternoon.
443
00:44:17,400 --> 00:44:24,280
These apparent Romans are really Victorians at ease with themselves, at home...
444
00:44:25,240 --> 00:44:26,960
..in the bath...
445
00:44:29,480 --> 00:44:32,040
..and quite often in nothing at all.
446
00:44:40,120 --> 00:44:47,400
Paintings and sculptures of nudes had fallen from favour in the prudish mid-Victorian years.
447
00:44:47,400 --> 00:44:50,040
But the obsession with the classical past
448
00:44:50,040 --> 00:44:55,160
allowed the naked body to make a triumphant return.
449
00:44:58,280 --> 00:45:01,400
Here's the surgery of the Greek god of medicine.
450
00:45:02,960 --> 00:45:05,440
"Doctor it's my foot!"
451
00:45:05,440 --> 00:45:10,160
His remarkably fit-looking patients have taken the helpful precaution
452
00:45:10,160 --> 00:45:13,520
of stripping off before they queue up for their prescription.
453
00:45:16,960 --> 00:45:20,200
This was the great age of the collector -
454
00:45:20,200 --> 00:45:24,880
men who had made their pile and now wanted to spend some of it on works of art.
455
00:45:24,880 --> 00:45:28,360
What they were after was something with a hint of sophistication.
456
00:45:28,360 --> 00:45:31,760
Anything which had mythical heroes, gods,
457
00:45:31,760 --> 00:45:35,200
goddesses - especially goddesses - would fit the bill perfectly.
458
00:45:48,400 --> 00:45:52,880
The man who built this splendid Victorian house in Bournemouth
459
00:45:52,880 --> 00:45:56,520
was a canny businessman who made his money in property.
460
00:45:59,680 --> 00:46:05,280
Merton Russell-Cotes was a passionate collector of a very particular kind of art.
461
00:46:29,960 --> 00:46:34,240
For Russell-Cotes, it really mattered that any suggestion
462
00:46:34,240 --> 00:46:39,720
of sauciness in his splendid collection be firmly squashed.
463
00:46:39,720 --> 00:46:44,400
So he referred to his nudes as the "human form divine".
464
00:46:44,400 --> 00:46:50,400
In other words, these weren't earthly or fleshy figures, they were god-like.
465
00:46:52,120 --> 00:46:57,160
Defenders of the nude insisted that these painted figures weren't real women.
466
00:46:57,160 --> 00:47:00,560
They represented an ideal.
467
00:47:00,560 --> 00:47:04,800
So a painting of a naked goddess was one thing,
468
00:47:04,800 --> 00:47:10,320
a painting of a naked Mrs Jones from next door would be quite another.
469
00:47:12,000 --> 00:47:16,200
A favourite subject was the classical story of Andromeda
470
00:47:16,200 --> 00:47:17,640
chained to a rock.
471
00:47:19,680 --> 00:47:22,360
Though to our perhaps jaded eyes,
472
00:47:22,360 --> 00:47:26,200
there might seem to be more than a hint of bondage about this picture.
473
00:47:27,760 --> 00:47:33,240
If naked women looked more like classical statues than real people,
474
00:47:33,240 --> 00:47:36,640
polite society could find no fault with them.
475
00:47:36,640 --> 00:47:41,720
The trouble was, how could you be sure that only polite society got to see them?
476
00:47:45,120 --> 00:47:52,000
The common Victorian belief that art was good for you ran into some real problems with these paintings.
477
00:47:52,000 --> 00:47:59,240
"I know only too well how the rough and his female companion behave in front of these pictures,"
478
00:47:59,240 --> 00:48:04,200
complained one critic. "I have seen the gangs of workmen strolling around
479
00:48:04,200 --> 00:48:11,560
"and know that their artistic interest in the studies of the nude is emphatically embarrassing!"
480
00:48:22,760 --> 00:48:26,000
This painting, The Dawn Of Love by William Etty,
481
00:48:26,000 --> 00:48:28,120
shows the goddess of love, Venus,
482
00:48:28,120 --> 00:48:30,200
and her winged messenger Cupid
483
00:48:30,200 --> 00:48:32,840
who seems to be having a bit of a nap on her bed.
484
00:48:32,840 --> 00:48:36,280
Russell-Cotes was very proud of this painting but some members of
485
00:48:36,280 --> 00:48:40,400
the public weren't so sure, and they wrote to the local paper about it.
486
00:48:41,920 --> 00:48:45,400
"In civilised life," wrote an angry gentleman,
487
00:48:45,400 --> 00:48:52,600
"the dawn of love, real love, is seldom heralded in with clothes off!"
488
00:48:52,600 --> 00:48:55,280
That prompted one art-lover to respond,
489
00:48:55,280 --> 00:48:59,600
"Did anyone ever see the dawn of love come into the world with clothes on?"
490
00:49:10,720 --> 00:49:12,240
The Bathers Alarmed.
491
00:49:12,240 --> 00:49:16,920
There's a sense, looking at some of these paintings, that the Victorian interest in sex,
492
00:49:16,920 --> 00:49:20,040
which had hitherto been kept pretty strictly under control,
493
00:49:20,040 --> 00:49:25,960
was now really straining at the leash, and perhaps was about to slip it all together.
494
00:49:38,280 --> 00:49:44,600
As the century approached its end, for some people at least the firm foundations upon which
495
00:49:44,600 --> 00:49:48,760
Victorian society had been built were beginning to crack.
496
00:49:48,760 --> 00:49:56,320
Decades of religious doubt, huge social changes, and a general weariness at stern moral teaching
497
00:49:56,320 --> 00:50:00,080
were changing the way people felt about the old order.
498
00:50:03,600 --> 00:50:08,760
A new group of artists led the charge, producing work that was grotesque,
499
00:50:08,760 --> 00:50:11,920
provocative, decadent.
500
00:50:13,440 --> 00:50:19,200
The new generation used to meet here in the ornate rooms and bar of the Cafe Royal.
501
00:50:19,200 --> 00:50:24,160
Men like Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, their lovers male and female,
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00:50:24,160 --> 00:50:29,360
loved everything that was exotic, shocking or scandalous.
503
00:50:33,160 --> 00:50:36,840
What the so-called Decadents adored about the Cafe Royal
504
00:50:36,840 --> 00:50:41,320
was its exaggerated, almost absurd, air of luxury.
505
00:50:44,200 --> 00:50:51,320
About as far from the stifling conventions of the Victorian home as it was possible to get.
506
00:50:56,320 --> 00:51:00,040
"If you want to see the English people at their most English",
507
00:51:00,040 --> 00:51:02,840
said one writer, "go to the Cafe Royal,
508
00:51:02,840 --> 00:51:06,640
"where they're trying their hardest to be French."
509
00:51:11,160 --> 00:51:14,800
At the heart of this group of artists was the young Aubrey Beardsley.
510
00:51:14,800 --> 00:51:20,120
His illustrations for Oscar Wilde's play Salome, and his erotic drawings,
511
00:51:20,120 --> 00:51:26,160
are as unsettling, as modern and as shocking as they must have seemed a hundred years ago.
512
00:51:29,360 --> 00:51:35,200
Like other Victorians who had fallen out of love with corsets and moral homilies,
513
00:51:35,200 --> 00:51:41,800
Beardsley created another world quite different from that of the respectable middle class.
514
00:52:06,960 --> 00:52:11,040
His pictures were deliberately designed to disturb.
515
00:52:16,680 --> 00:52:18,200
Depraved...
516
00:52:21,200 --> 00:52:22,720
..macabre...
517
00:52:26,320 --> 00:52:29,040
..sinister...
518
00:52:29,040 --> 00:52:31,480
That was what some people said of them,
519
00:52:31,480 --> 00:52:38,240
reflected too in the group's drink of choice, the notoriously potent absinthe.
520
00:52:41,080 --> 00:52:43,280
So what's all the paraphernalia, then?
521
00:52:43,280 --> 00:52:44,840
Well, what we have here
522
00:52:44,840 --> 00:52:48,480
is a traditional absinthe glass.
523
00:52:48,480 --> 00:52:51,560
As you'll see there's a clearly sort of demarcated area
524
00:52:51,560 --> 00:52:52,920
for the absinthe dose.
525
00:52:52,920 --> 00:52:57,040
This is typical of absinthe, that you use a sort of drug-like term -
526
00:52:57,040 --> 00:52:59,560
dose - that's been used for a century.
527
00:52:59,560 --> 00:53:02,480
You wouldn't really say a dose of gin or a dose of whisky.
528
00:53:02,480 --> 00:53:04,760
You place a perforated spoon like this.
529
00:53:04,760 --> 00:53:07,680
It's got a little notch to grip the edge of the glass.
530
00:53:07,680 --> 00:53:11,600
You put a sugar cube on the spoon like that.
531
00:53:11,600 --> 00:53:14,360
The iced water drips
532
00:53:14,360 --> 00:53:18,440
over the sugar cube and it dissolves the sugar cube slowly,.
533
00:53:18,440 --> 00:53:23,360
As the water reaches the absinthe, or mixes with the absinthe,
534
00:53:23,360 --> 00:53:25,480
you'll see it starts to change colour.
535
00:53:25,480 --> 00:53:28,120
It's a sort of opalescent, milky kind of colour.
536
00:53:28,120 --> 00:53:31,320
There are little swirls happening there that you can see now.
537
00:53:31,320 --> 00:53:33,680
Its popular image is
538
00:53:33,680 --> 00:53:38,400
almost as a narcotic, something that really does your brain in.
539
00:53:38,400 --> 00:53:44,240
Essentially, by far the most dangerous thing in absinthe is the alcohol.
540
00:53:52,520 --> 00:53:55,920
It is... I'm rather lost for words.
541
00:53:55,920 --> 00:53:59,000
- There are all sorts of different tastes in there.
- Exactly.
542
00:53:59,000 --> 00:54:01,280
All sorts of different tastes.
543
00:54:01,280 --> 00:54:04,520
- I shouldn't care to spend the evening on it.
- I don't know!
544
00:54:04,520 --> 00:54:07,520
- I'd much rather have a whisky.
- DAVID LAUGHS
545
00:54:21,200 --> 00:54:25,640
The last decade of the century came to be known as the naughty '90s.
546
00:54:28,080 --> 00:54:31,800
If duty and morality had been the watchwords of Victorian Britain
547
00:54:31,800 --> 00:54:34,360
at its height, now others could be added.
548
00:54:35,840 --> 00:54:39,320
Freedom and fun.
549
00:54:39,320 --> 00:54:43,480
What had happened was that ordinary people, in this case middle-class
550
00:54:43,480 --> 00:54:47,920
ordinary people, could now enjoy the fruits of their labours.
551
00:54:47,920 --> 00:54:51,040
They could take pleasure seriously.
552
00:54:59,840 --> 00:55:04,400
All that invention and industry had brought wealth and leisure.
553
00:55:04,400 --> 00:55:09,440
Enjoying yourself was no longer just for the toffs.
554
00:55:13,920 --> 00:55:21,200
The values which had made Victorian Britain great and grand were slowly but surely being laid aside.
555
00:55:32,840 --> 00:55:37,440
When Victoria died after 63 years on the throne,
556
00:55:37,440 --> 00:55:43,640
film cameras were there to record her funeral on 2nd February, 1901.
557
00:56:07,040 --> 00:56:11,160
The coming of cinema spelled the end for the sort of story-telling pictures
558
00:56:11,160 --> 00:56:14,240
that Victorian artists had painted for so long.
559
00:56:14,240 --> 00:56:17,680
But the legacy of those pictures is astonishing.
560
00:56:21,000 --> 00:56:25,560
They had charted the explosion of the great cities
561
00:56:25,560 --> 00:56:28,360
and how the Victorians had transformed them
562
00:56:28,360 --> 00:56:30,120
and learned to love them.
563
00:56:37,440 --> 00:56:41,760
They had painted the Victorian dream of home sweet home.
564
00:56:44,320 --> 00:56:46,680
And the dangers that menaced it.
565
00:56:50,000 --> 00:56:53,440
They'd created hymns to the labour and ingenuity
566
00:56:53,440 --> 00:56:56,400
that made Britain the workshop of the globe.
567
00:56:58,680 --> 00:57:03,480
Acted as cheerleaders for the Empire as Britain conquered the world.
568
00:57:07,280 --> 00:57:11,520
And as compassionate witnesses to the hardships of the workers
569
00:57:11,520 --> 00:57:14,000
whose labour had made Britain rich.
570
00:57:16,920 --> 00:57:22,240
They had pushed at the boundaries of Victorian conformity
571
00:57:22,240 --> 00:57:27,480
and provided comfort for the troubled Victorian soul.
572
00:57:31,560 --> 00:57:36,640
Their pictures of the most dramatic, feverish time in our history
573
00:57:36,640 --> 00:57:39,200
were the cinema of their day.
574
00:57:39,200 --> 00:57:41,800
And they're still all around us.
575
00:57:41,800 --> 00:57:45,800
They're hanging on a wall near you.
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00:58:12,840 --> 00:58:15,880
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd.
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00:58:15,880 --> 00:58:18,920
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk
53686
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