All language subtitles for A.History.of.Britain.13of15.Victoria.and.her.Sisters.DivX5-AC3.www.MVGroup.org

Spring 1851. The word "Victorian"
enters the English language

and a very small woman
enters a very big building.

She's four foot eleven,
yet somehow she fills it.

The moment,
so pregnant for the future, seems holy.

Victoria is herself flooded
with religious awe.

One felt filled with devotion,

more so than by any service
I have ever heard.

Neither she nor anyone else

has ever seen anything like this
building before,

a greenhouse the size of a palace,
with the difference that this is,

from the beginning,
a people's palace.

A popular magazine calls it
the Crystal Palace.

Its grandest spaces are filled
not with courtiers and flunkeys,

but steam pumps and locomotives,

a huge showcase for Britain's
industrial empire.

Just three years before, in 1848,

Europe had been torn apart
by revolutions.

The government had feared
the same would happen here.

As it turned out, other countries
had war and revolution,

we had the Great Exhibition.

Other countries had barricades,

we had the cheerful queue
for the turnstiles.

In an era haunted
by fears of overpopulation,

this was one of the greatest
mass movements of people

in all of European history.

Six million came to see
the show of shows.

In 1848, industrial machinery
had seemed to be

the enemy of ordinary men and women,

the gaping mechanical jaws
into which countless lives were fed,

to be spat out again
as cotton cloth or nails.

Technology, the prophets of doom
had warned,

was an engine of inhumanity,

driving working people
to desperation or revolt.

But inside the glittering glasshouse,

someone seemed to have waved
a magic wand over the mechanical brutes,

turning them from ogres
to busy, friendly giants,

happy to be gazed at
on a family outing -

not least by the first family
of the land,

assembled amidst the hardware.

After all, Papa, Prince Albert,
the moving force behind the exhibition,

was the first prince
in European history

to wear his connection
with the world of business

as a badge of pride, not shame.

But what about Mama?

As the mother
of a rapidly expanding family,

Victoria might have been expected
to know that if the cult of progress

was to make Britain not just
a great nation, but a good one,

be a home maker, not a home breaker,

it would fall to our women
to see us through

the painful change
to an industrial society safe and sound.

But, of course,
hers was no ordinary family,

and, despite the family photos,
Queen Victoria was not exactly Mrs Average.

The age which would bear her name

would see transformations
in women's lives

which Victoria
could never have imagined

in the dazzling springtime
of her reign.

Whether she'd welcome them,
whether she'd even understand them,

whether they'd sweep
past her and her glass palace,

well, that remained to be seen.

In 1837, when she became queen,
Victoria was only 18.

She was as pure as a rosebud,
which seemed a welcome change

from the decidedly impure reigns
of her uncles George IV and William IV,

addicted to the pleasures
of the bed and the table,

and indifferent to the hardships
endured by the mass of their subjects.

Unlike the uncles,
Victoria had been brought up

a model of virginal moderation
and self denial.

No Regency pampering for her.

At one point, she and her mother,
the Duchess of Kent,

were forced to move out
of Kensington Palace to save money.

So, Victoria's nursery years
were spent

at bracingly ordinary places
like Ramsgate and Sidmouth.

Much later in life, for some reason,

Victoria looked back on her childhood
as a time of sadness and loneliness.

It's true that, like many middle-class
and aristocratic children,

she was subjected
to an evangelical regime

of prayers
and constant self examination.

She kept a behaviour book,
full of solemn and self-critical entries.

This one, for August 1832, reads:

"Very, very, very" - underlined -
"terribly" - underlined - "naughty".

But could Christian betterment,
the driving force of her generation,

be taken from self improvement
to bettering the life of her people?

That was the question.

On her first excursion
in England's heart of industrial darkness,

the teenage princess
would see what she was up against.

Near Birmingham,
she travelled through

the landscape of a British inferno -
sooty and sulphurous.

The men, women, children,
country and houses are all black.

The country is very desolate
everywhere.

There are coals about and the grass
is quite blasted and black.

I just now see an extraordinary
building flaming with fire,

smoking and burning coal heaps

intermingled with wretched huts
and carts and little ragged children.

But the view from the coach
was the closest Victoria got

to the bleak reality
of smokestack Britain.

In any case, there was
something else on her mind -

her upcoming date with history.

All those tombs, crowns and thrones,
was she ready?

The moment would arrive all too soon,
in the small hours of June 20, 1837,

the teenage princess
in her nightgown,

woken by the arrival
of the Lord Chamberlain

and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Who acquainted me that my poor uncle
the King was no more,

and consequently that I am Queen.

I am very young,
and perhaps in many,

though not in all things,
inexperienced.

But I am sure that very few
have more real goodwill

and more real desire to do
what is fit and right than I have.

At her coronation, on June 28, 1838,

the young queen
showed what she was made of...

carrying the immense weight of
the robes and regalia with aplomb.

But she also managed something
more important than dignity -

a glimpse of humanity.

When the 87-year-old Lord Rolle

tottered as he tried to mount
the steps of the throne to do homage,

Victoria's kind-hearted instinct
was to rise

and go down the steps to meet him.

Everyone noticed.

She was young, but not precocious.

She knew she needed help
and was wise enough to ask for it

from someone
superbly able to give it -

the Whig Prime Minister,
Lord Melbourne.

He won Victoria's confidence
by the simple but inspired tactic

of never, ever talking down to her,

never treating her like a child
in need of protection.

Instead, he treated her
like an adult,

sophisticated enough
to enjoy his worldly wisdom,

his political gossip
and even his off-colour jokes.

Under his guidance,

Victoria's confidence
and her public persona blossomed.

She was, of course,
the most desirable catch in Europe.

Victoria's mother
had thrown banquets and balls

to ensure Victoria
met the most eligible princes...

...including her Saxe-Coburg cousins,
Ernest and Albert.

It may well have been
her uncle Leopold

who, in the spring of 1839,
first made the suggestion to Victoria

that she might like to marry
Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg.

Like all young women,

she probably initially found
the subject a bit embarrassing,

but once she had got used to it,

helped by that handsome,
or as she put it, "angelic German head",

she pretty much ran the show,

virtually grabbing hold
of her curly-haired intended

and sprinting for the altar.

It was Victoria
who supplied the ring...

asked Albert
for a lock of his hair...

and wallowed
in the kissing sessions.

But if she sometimes
seemed determined

to wear the trousers in the marriage,

there were also other times,

especially right after the wedding,
when Victoria simply melted away

into the amazed bliss
of conjugal love.

When day dawned -
for we did not sleep much -

and I beheld that beautiful angelic
face by my side,

it was more than I can express.

He does look so beautiful
in his shirt only,

with his beautiful throat seen.

Already, the second day
since our marriage,

his love and gentleness
is beyond everything,

and to kiss that dear soft cheek,

to press my lips to his,
is heavenly bliss.

My dearest Albert
put on my stockings for me.

I went in and saw him shave.

A great delight for me.

Victoria and Albert's
passion for each other

was a strictly private matter.

But for countless numbers of Britons

in the suffocatingly overcrowded
industrial cities, like Manchester,

bedroom privacy
was an unimaginable luxury.

Manchester was the very best
and the very worst

taken to terrifying extremes;

a new kind of city in the world,

the chimneys of industrial suburbs
greeting you with columns of smoke.

200,000 drones packed into the hive

to make money
for the lords of Cottonopolis.

An American visitor, taken
to Manchester's black spots, saw:

Wretched, defrauded, oppressed,
crushed human nature

lying in bleeding fragments.

And thanked God for not having
been born poor in England.

The cotton mills were brutally
demanding task masters.

Whole families spent almost
all of their working hours

tending to the machinery.

Children were given menial
but dangerous jobs,

like scavenging cotton fluff
from beneath the moving machinery.

As bad as all this was, it was even worse
when there were no jobs at all.

In the first years
of Victoria's reign,

hands were being laid off
in tens of thousands.

It would be a woman,
Elizabeth Gaskell,

who would be the whistle blower,

the first of Victoria's sisters
to stick her neck out.

Amazingly, her blazing protest
took the genteel form of a novel.

But what a book.

When "Mary Barton"
was published in 1848,

nobody, not even Charles Dickens,
had gone as far as Gaskell

in looking dead-on at the grim
reality of industrial misery.

The middle-class wife
of a Unitarian preacher,

Gaskell took herself right
into the lower depths of the city,

to the gin palaces and open sewers,
dark reeking alleys,

where skin-and-bones children
played among the rats.

In "Mary Barton" you didn't just see,
you heard working-class Manchester

in the pages of literature
for the very first time.

To most of her readers,

it must have been a language
more foreign than French or German.

(MAN) We donnot want dainties,
we want bellyfuls.

We donnot want their grand houses,

we want a roof to cover us
from the rain, the snow and the storm.

Ay, and not alone to covers us,

but the helpless ones that cling
to us in the keen wind

and ask us with their eyes

why we brought 'em
into th' world to suffer.

By the time you'd finished
"Mary Barton",

one word, struck like a hammer
over and over again,

would have lodged in your memory.

That word was "clemmed" - starved.

You say it, and you call up
the entire knife-edge world

of struggling to survive
that Elizabeth Gaskell had created.

Elizabeth Gaskell believed
that honest graphic social reporting

could make a difference.

She wrote to her cousin:

My poor "Mary Barton" is stirring
all sorts of angry feelings

against me in Manchester.

But those best acquainted

with the way the poor think and feel
acknowledge its truth,

which is the acknowledgement
I most of all desire,

because evils being once recognised,
are halfway on towards their remedy.

One of Gaskell's fans, the social
philosopher Thomas Carlyle,

thought it was pointless
to try and improve

a system so fundamentally inhuman
as industrialisation.

Nothing is now done by hand.
All is by rule and calculated contrivance.

On every hand, the living artisan
is driven from his workshop

to make room
for a speedier inanimate one.

The shuttle drops
from the fingers of the weaver

and falls into iron fingers
that ply it faster.

There is no end to machinery.

For Carlyle, there was only one route
to salvation:

Britain must turn aside
from the machine, and summon up

the spirit of the Christian centuries
of the Middle Ages,

the last time we'd taken it for granted

that faith was more important than money.

To bring about this great conversion
from Babylon to Jerusalem,

nothing less would do than
a Christian revolution in building.

And no one was more convinced of this

than the greatest
of the Gothic revivalists -

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin.

A new generation of churches
would be in the front line

in the war to save Victorian souls.

Pugin was never happy
just to sound off, though.

He believed, with all the fervour
of the old faith,

that a properly beautified church
was the very face of Heaven.

And before he died, brutally early,
at the age of 40, he made sure,

especially here at the Church
of St Giles in Cheadle, Staffordshire,

to let some people see
how gloriously colourful it could be.

But however spiritually nourishing
this might have been,

it wasn't going to put bread
on the tables of the needy millions.

Victoria's first decade as queen

was also a time of economic hardship
for many of her subjects.

A slump in foreign trade had led
to mass layoffs in industrial cities.

Bread was an unaffordable luxury
for the unemployed,

who blamed the corn laws for keeping
cheap imported wheat out of Britain.

Working-class anger and desperation
was close to boiling point.

For middle-class reformers,
the answer was easy -

all we need to do is get rid
of the corn laws and all will be well.

But the militant spokesmen
of the working people weren't convinced.

They wanted more.

Only a truly popular government,
a democracy in fact,

would do something
about their distress.

They set out their demands
in a people's charter,

a new Magna Carta for the modern age.

It demanded the right to vote
for all men,

secret ballots, annual parliaments.

How to get them? Moral force if we may,
physical force if we must.

In the climate of fear and hatred,

people had to decide
just where their loyalty lay.

If you were on the right side
of the tracks,

if you owned
one of the great spinning mills,

like this one in Ancoats,

you would think the Chartists were
just a mob, misled by demagogues.

Besides, whoever said
capitalism was a funfair?

As long as you kept your hands
off the market,

well, the market, sooner or later,
would right itself.

And the poor, the people
who worked here, who were hungry now,

would be feeding off
the fat of the land tomorrow.

On April 10, 1848,
a monster Chartist petition,

signed by nearly two million
men and women,

so huge it would take two hackney cabs
to get it to parliament,

was brought to London.

Around 150,000 Chartists with banners
and green, red and white rosettes

converged on Kennington Common

for the biggest political rally
in British history.

The government was ready for them.

London was turned into a huge armed
camp, with mounted guards, guns

and even cannon
posted at critical sites

like the Tower of London
and the Bank of England.

Soldiers were posted on The Mall
to prevent access to Buckingham Palace,

but the royal family
had fled to the Isle of Wight.

Faced with this immense display
of strong armed force,

the leader, newspaper owner and MP,
Fergus O'Connor, had no choice.

He gave orders that nobody should
provoke the troops, however goaded,

for the result
would have been a bloodbath.

Some of the younger firebrands
thought it was a sell-out.

But what was Fergus O'Connor
supposed to have done?

Unleashed his people's army
on the queen's soldiers,

only to get them mown down?

And what good would that have done

the cause of the working people
of Britain?

Besides, just look at this photograph
of the meeting on the common.

The very first political photograph
in our history.

Not exactly about to storm
the barricades, are they?

It may have ended for the moment
the threat of the kind of revolution

that had spread through European
capitals in 1848 happening here, too.

But the dream
of so many working people

for somewhere decent to live,
enough to eat,

for a share in the Victorian bonanza,
was as urgent as ever.

If they weren't going to get it
by armed revolt,

they would get it in the British way -
in small but decisive steps,

by coming together
in self-sufficient communities.

This is all that survives intact
of those little pipedreams -

one of the cottages of the Chartist
Land Company settlement

at Great Dodford in Worcestershire.

Founded in 1845, the Land Company

was the brainchild of none other
than Fergus O'Connor.

It bought land, which it divided
among its members into smallholdings,

meant to take people
out of the industrial slums

and back to the rural world
of their forefathers.

They'd get a few acres to grow
their own food and make a small living.

"Do or Die" was the motto
of the incoming settlers

to places like Great Dodford,
and their work was no picnic -

breaking soil, planting hedges,
making roads, with no certain outcome.

But some of them were determined
to make a go of it, especially women.

Ann Wood, for example, who lived
in a cottage very much like this one,

was just an Edinburgh charlady,

but one with enough Scottish thrift
and determination

to save up �150 to put down
for a lot at Great Dodford.

That gave her the pick of the crop.

And, after settling at number 36,
along with her two daughters,

Ann did well enough at any rate
to lead a long life, dying at 86.

So, when all the sound and fury
had ebbed away,

what seemed to count for most
was making a home, not a revolution.

Prince Albert himself
understood this.

In the year of the Great Exhibition,

he commissioned and had built
model lodgings for the working class.

Later they were rebuilt at
Kennington,

on the very site
of the Chartist revolution that wasn't.

And, as the boom years of the 1850s
replaced the hungry 40s,

Britain had never seemed
so middle-class, starting with the monarchy.

The many photographic visiting cards
circulating the country

showed the queen and Prince Albert,
not on their aristocratic high horse,

but acting out the rituals
of middle-class life.

Respectable,
reliable, even a little boring.

Queen Victoria was to have
nine children in all,

and never had Britain had a monarch
who went to such lengths

to advertise her domestic pleasures
to the nation.

The stroll in the park.

The romp with the children.

The sing-song round the tree
at Christmas.

And, on the Isle of Wight, a modest
seaside getaway, Osborne House.

Designed by Albert
and relished by Victoria

as an idyllic retreat
from the pressures of rule.

It was here at last that Albert, who'd been
kept from meaningful public work,

got his desk sitting beside hers,

from which he could direct his campaign

to make industrial Britain
a better as well as a richer place.

To see them together beavering away,

you'd suppose it was
a perfect partnership.

But not so perfect that this couple,

in every other respect so mutually
devoted, were spared all arguments.

They had their spats,
just like the rest of us.

Victoria is too hasty and passionate

for me to be able often
to speak of my difficulties.

She will not hear me out,
but flies into a rage

and overwhelms me
with reproaches and suspiciousness,

want of trust, ambition, envy.

For her part, too,
Victoria wasn't above letting rip

when she got too worked up.

Single people,
she'd occasionally let it be known,

were often much better off
than unhappily married couples,

forced to stay together
by convention.

All marriage is such a lottery.

The happiness is always an exchange,
although it may be a very happy one.

Still the poor woman is bodily
and morally the husband's slave.

That always sticks in my throat.

Astonishingly, this echoed
exactly the kind of thing

coming from the mouth and pen
of two of the most daring critics

of the Victorian conventions
of marriage -

John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor,
husband and wife for seven years,

tortured lovers in a peculiar
Victorian way for a lot longer,

and the joint authors
of "On the Subjection of Women".

This was, don't forget,
an age in which a woman's property

automatically passed to her husband
when they got married.

Husbands had the right
to beat their wives,

as long as the cane was no thicker
than their thumb,

and to lock them up for refusing sex.

In 1830, the philosopher
John Stuart Mill

went to a dinner party
which changed his life forever.

He was struck dumb by the vision
of a swan throat and dark enormous eyes.

They belonged to Harriet Taylor,

writer, poet
and unhappily married wife.

Between the soup and the port,

John and Harriet were swept away
by an instantaneous knowledge

that they'd found
their true soul mates.

But being two serious intellectuals,
Mill and Taylor's forbidden love

couldn't just be
a selfish private passion.

It had to be thought out loud
as a public issue.

Their situation made only too clear

the hypocrisy of the loveless
Victorian marriage.

(MAN) In some slave codes, the slave could,

under certain circumstances
of ill-usage,

legally compel the master
to sell him.

But no amount of ill-usage
without adultery super-added

will, in England, free a wife
from her tormentor.

Surely there was another way out
than adultery

or suffering misery in silence.

What had to be done
was to expose marriages

as the property transaction
they often were,

and then use education and law
to enlighten and protect women.

Taylor and Mill
would have to wait 19 years

for a chance to practise
what they preached.

In 1849, Harriet's unloved husband
finally died,

freeing the way for her
to marry John Stuart Mill.

But not before he formally renounced
all the rights the law gave him

over his wife's property and person.

Their happiness was short-lived.

Harriet Taylor died of TB
in November 1858.

But there would be an epitaph.

All their ideas poured
into "On the Subjection of Women",

their book,
that Mill published in 1869.

Happy and equal marriages
were no longer its only concern.

Women, who made up
half the workforce of Britain,

should have pay equal
to their labour.

And, most breathtakingly of all,
they should have the vote.

It was a book whose ideals

gave powerful momentum
to the Women's Movement.

After the Second Reform Act in 1867,

almost all male householders
had the vote,

which made the fact
that female householders hadn't

seem glaringly unfair.

Mill, himself an MP,
had tried to argue their case,

and even won the support
of 73 other MPs.

The vote was lost, of course,
but the words had been spoken,

and they were heard especially loudly
in Mrs Gaskell's Manchester.

The breakthrough had been made,

a democracy worth the name
could not be just for men.

Queen Victoria may have had her doubts
about unhappy marriages,

but this was a violation
of God's ordering

of right relations between the sexes.

She let it be known in no uncertain
terms what she thought of:

This mad wicked folly
of women's rights,

with all its attendant horrors,
on which our poor feeble sex is bent,

forgetting every sense
of womanly feeling and propriety.

There was fit and proper work
for women to do, Victoria allowed,

but only the kind which used
the qualities of tenderness

which God had given to their sex.

Nurses, for example, were rightly
called sisters and matrons.

But was it quite right
for the queen's own nephew

to call one of them Mammy?

Florence Nightingale may well have
garnered the reputation,

back in Britain, among civilians,
as the Angel of Mercy in the Crimea,

but the woman whom
surviving soldiers most adored,

and for the very good reason
that she saw them through the worst,

was the most forgotten
and the most unlikely of Victoria's sisters.

And her name was Mary Seacole.

Mary Seacole was West Indian,

the daughter of a Scotsman
and a Jamaican woman.

Largely self-taught, her Caribbean
remedies became famous

after they'd been shown
to stop violent dysentery

and to bring yellow fever and cholera
victims back from death's door.

When Britain joined the Crimean War
in 1854,

she tried to volunteer her services
at the front.

But Mary didn't exactly fit
the profile of middle-class nurses.

She was turned down
by the likes of Nurse Nightingale.

So Mary got herself to the Crimea
under her own steam and with her own funds.

And once there, she did
something truly extraordinary.

Mary Seacole built her
"British Hotel" right on the front line,

and it doubled both as a refectory,
feeding the boys going into action,

and a recovery station
for the sick and wounded.

Every morning, she'd make great vats
of nutritious food, like rice pudding,

saddle up a pair of mules
and ride into the heart of the action

looking for wounded, to whom
she'd dole out food, hot tea, medicine,

but most of all, motherly love.

Mortars would whiz past the big old woman
trundling along the lines.

Upon these occasions,
those around would cry out. ;

"Lie down, Mother, lie down!"

And with very undignified
and unladylike haste,

I had to embrace the earth.

After the war was over, the soldiers
f�ted her at a charity gala.

She'd become, briefly,
an "Eminent Victorian".

Suppose, though,
that women drawn to help the sick

went one stage further
and dreamed of being a doctor?

That was a different story.

In 1860, Elizabeth Garrett

enrolled as a surgical nurse
at Middlesex Hospital,

but her sights were set higher.

In between the swabs and the bedpans,

she was looking carefully
at surgical operations,

and she was also cutting up
body parts in her bedroom.

This improvised education
made her bold enough

to take the hospital's medical,
not nursing exams,

and when the time came to publish
the results, one E Garrett had come top.

Ordered to keep the outrage secret,
she went public instead.

Nine years later,
the French gave her an MD.

And in 1874, the first medical
college expressly for women

was set up in London.

For Victoria, the mere idea
of slips of girls looking at,

much less cutting up
the naked bodies of dead men

was an unthinkable indecency.

But no doctor was of any help to her
in the greatest crisis of her life.

For in 1861, the same year

that Elizabeth Garrett
cut her way into medicine,

Albert contracted typhoid,

which, after a few months
of horrifyingly swift deterioration,

ended in his death in December.

Everything in those last weeks

became suddenly invested
with an almost religious significance.

Here, for example,
is the last book read to Albert,

Scott's "Peveril of the Peak",
and on the flyleaf the queen has written:

"This book was read up to the mark
on page 81 to my beloved husband

"during his fatal illness

"and within three days
of its terrible termination."

You turn to page 81
and here's how it reads:

"He heard the sound of voices,

"but they ceased to convey
any impression to his understanding;

"and in a few minutes,
he was faster asleep

"than he'd ever been
in the whole course of his life."

Victoria buried her beloved Albert
in the Italianate mausoleum

she built here at Frogmore
in Windsor Great Park.

Albert's death threw Victoria
into a paroxysm of grief.

Not for her the stoical acceptance
of the inscrutable will of the Almighty.

She had lost not only her co-ruler,
but her helpmate,

and vanished, too,
was her domestic idyll.

At the abyss of her misery,

she must have thought that all chance
of contentment had gone.

My life as a happy one is ended.

The world is gone for me.

If I must live on, and I will do
nothing to make me worse than I am,

it is henceforth
for our poor fatherless children,

for my unhappy country,
which has lost all in losing him.

Death was an immense presence
in Victorian life,

perhaps because
it was the one conquest

denied to the soldiers and engineers
and captains of industry

who seemed to be able
to conquer everything else.

If they couldn't stop their loved
ones from going to their graves,

they could at least create the illusion
in marble and photographs

that they were still alongside
those who mourned them.

This, in her distraught, inconsolable
grief, Victoria knew how to do.

With religious devotion, she set out
Albert's shaving equipment every morning...

and fresh evening clothes
and a clean towel every evening.

Missing his physical presence,

she slept with his nightgown
by her side.

The exuberant headstrong young woman
shrank into the hard shell

of the forbidding inconsolable widow,
for whom the least sign of merriment

was a betrayal
of Albert's sainted memory.

She seemed, in a way which no one
accustomed to the strong-minded queen

could ever have imagined,

somehow no longer in charge
of either herself or of the country.

Victoria's sense of moral calling,

so strong from the beginning
of her reign,

had become so dependent
on Albert the Good's judgement

that now that he was gone,
she seemed at a loss

about how and where to exercise it.

It never occurred to her that women
alone, either as widows or spinsters,

might be able to do good
by themselves,

to make a life, even a career,
on their own.

If she wanted to see
how this could be done,

all she needed to do
was to take her pony trap

a mile or two down the road
from Osborne to Freshwater,

to visit someone who,
though neither widow nor spinster,

was very much her own woman.

The photographer
Julia Margaret Cameron.

Since Victoria was herself
an avid collector of photographs,

she might have been curious

about this eccentric half-French
woman's notorious dark room.

For Julia Cameron, photography
was not just an amateur hobby.

The poetic lyricism
of her photographs

disguises the hard need she had
to make some money.

Worse, she seemed perversely to glory
in the male mess of camera work.

Flouncing around in a converted
hen house that was her studio,

her dresses and hands
stained with black silver nitrate,

conscripting men and women models
like a recruiting sergeant major

and bellowing terrifyingly at them
if they moved before they were told.

Needless to say, the men who ran
the Royal Photographic Society

refused to take her seriously.

Admiring the enthusiasm
of Mrs Cameron,

the Committee regrets they cannot
concur with the lavish praise

which was bestowed on her productions
by the non-photographic press,

feeling convinced
that she will herself adopt

an entirely different mode
of representing her poetic ideas

when she has made herself acquainted
with the capabilities of the art.

What they meant, of course,
was that a soft woman

couldn't be expected
to master machinery, chemicals,

the hard technology of the job,

let alone make
a professional career out of it,

despite Julia's obvious success
at both.

But some of the most powerful
and intelligent of the great and good -

Tennyson...

Carlyle...

and the astronomer Sir John Herschel,
who had obediently posed,

were not deceived
by the poetic light of her work.

They embraced her
as the greatest portraitist of her age.

Julia's triumph in making
a profession as an artist

must have been noticed by all
the young women of the 1870s and '80s

who wanted more for themselves
than just a destiny as wife and mother.

After Girton College,
the first Oxbridge college for women,

opened its doors
near Cambridge in 1873,

they had, for the first time,
somewhere that would educate them,

liberate them, if they chose,
from middle-class domesticity.

But even as they drank in knowledge
behind the red walls of Girton,

some of those young women
longed to get beyond the cloister.

The old ways of women's useful work -
teaching, preaching, nursing -

were no longer enough.

Nor was just being an educated
designer of the House Beautiful.

They were drawn instead,
as Elizabeth Gaskell was a generation earlier,

to the ugliness everywhere

in a Britain feeling once more
the strain of economic crisis.

Some of them even decided
to make that new home

in the places most shocking
to their parents' generation -

in the slums
of the industrial cities,

to steep themselves in the dirt
and anger of their poor abused sisters...

to face up to harsh truths,

the kind spelled out
by the young George Bernard Shaw.

Your slaves are beyond caring
for your cries.

They breed like rabbits and their
poverty breeds filth, ugliness,

dishonesty, disease,
obscenity, drunkenness and murder.

The bravest of this new generation

could even face head-on
the most unpalatable truths,

like that link
between breeding and destitution.

Annie Besant was the kind
of do-gooder clergyman's wife

unthinkable a generation earlier,

and still unthinkable
to the likes of the queen.

Annie Besant
had scandalised the country

by publishing contraception advice
for working people.

Such impertinence
would not go unpunished, however,

and Annie found herself
the victim of a court order.

She lost custody of her daughter
to her former husband,

an unforgiving time for women
judged as unfit mothers.

But nothing would stop her crusading.

Searching round for a woman's cause,

Annie found one
in the teenage match girls

who worked amidst phosphorus fumes
for Bryant and May in East London.

They were paid just between
four and ten shillings a week,

and if they had dirty feet
or an untidy bench they were fined,

taking more money
out of their already pathetic wages.

Most horrifying of all,
the girls ran the constant risk

of contracting the hideously
disfiguring "phossy" jaw,

since Bryant and May persisted
in the use of phosphorus,

which other match companies
had given up.

At the same time, the company

was paying huge dividends
to its shareholders,

a disproportionate number of whom,

Annie enjoyed revealing,
were the clergy.

Annie wrote an article
about the plight of the match girls

for her campaigning newspaper,
The Link.

And together with fellow socialist
campaigner Herbert Burrows,

she distributed copies of it
at the gates of the factory.

The owners of Bryant and May
threatened the girls

with instant dismissal
if they didn't sign a document

repudiating the article
and the journalists.

But, instead of signing,
the girls went en masse

to Annie and Burrows
with their story. They told her:

You had spoken up for us.
We weren't going back on you.

A strike committee was formed.

Besant and Burrows
promised to pay the wages

of any girl
dismissed for their action.

George Bernard Shaw volunteered
as the cashier of the strike fund.

1,400 girls came out.
The company eventually settled

and Annie Besant
and the girls were triumphant.

She was hailed
as the working girls' champion

and was immediately sought after

by all sorts of other women
aggrieved at their treatment.

In 1888,
Annie campaigned for election

to the Tower Hamlets School Board
in a dogcart festooned with red ribbons.

She won, in a landslide victory,
polling 15,000 votes.

Even before they had the vote,

women showed they could,
and would, win local elections.

Queen Victoria was not, in fact,
blind to the miseries

which so appalled the young women
social workers of the 1880s and 1890s.

Shaken by some of the revelations
in "The Bitter Cry of Outcast London",

she actually pressed
Gladstone's government

to spend more of its time
on the problem of housing,

and her insistence
produced a Royal Commission.

But, whether she wanted to see it
or could have seen it,

there were, in the warm Jubilee
summer of 1887, two Britains.

Nearly a third of able-bodied men
were unemployed.

Now, thousands of the jobless
were also homeless,

sleeping rough in parks or squares,
some of them even in open coffins -

the undead of underclass Albion.

But, of course, the queen was kept
well away from all that.

What she saw were 30,000
poor schoolchildren in Hyde Park,

who each got a meat pie,
a piece of cake and an orange

to celebrate the great day
of her Jubilee.

The children sang "God Save
the Queen" somewhat out of tune.

It was the kind of thing
which brought a smile - yes, a smile -

on the face of the old queen.

It would be like this
for the rest of her life -

the country
bathed in summer evening light,

the faces well-scrubbed and dutiful.

The old lady, at last, something
like the contented matriarch,

the grandmother of the Empire,

the thrones of Europe
filled with her offspring.

There was, of course, someone missing
from this national family photo.

In the Abbey,
amidst all the splendour,

Victoria suddenly felt a pang.

I sat alone,
oh, without my beloved husband,

for whom this would have been
such a proud day.

Victoria would have to wait
another 14 years, until 1901,

before she would be
reunited with him:

To whom the nation and I owe so much.

Her long-suffering secretary,
Frederick Ponsonby,

said there was nothing Victoria
enjoyed so much as arranging funerals

and her own was no exception.

She ordered a white lying-in-state
and funeral for herself.

In her hands was a silver crucifix,

her white dress decorated
with cheerful sprays of spring flowers.

There was a touch
of Miss Havisham about this,

the 80-year-old
flower-bedecked virgin bride.

But not jilted by her beloved,
going to join him.

When Albert's memorial effigy
had been ordered

from the sculptor Marochetti in 1862,

Victoria insisted on hers
being made at the same time,

and with her appearance as it was
when he had been taken from her,

so that they would be reunited,
at least in marble, at the same age,

in the glowing prime of their union.

The trouble was,
no one could remember

where they'd put the statue
made 40 years before.

It had, in fact, been walled up

in one of the cavities
of a renovated room in Windsor Castle.

Eventually, it was found
and laid next to Albert

as per the queen's orders.

And there she is,
as if the clocks had stopped

along with the heart
of the Prince Consort.

But they hadn't, of course.

Victoria might lie by her beloved
dressed as a medieval princess,

but he, of all people,
had known it had been progress

which had been
the mainspring of her reign.

Albert had done his best to see

that it had been a force for goodness
as well as greatness,

that the surging movement
of the machine age

would be held in check by the moral
anchorage of the Victorian home.

The women of Britain,
Victoria's sisters and daughters,

were supposed
to be grateful for this,

to bask in the warmth
of the hearth they tended.

But those cosy fires
kindled yearnings

that couldn't be contained
by a placid domesticity.

Those little liberators - the cheque
book, the latchkey and the bicycle -

beckoned over the doorstep
and into the street.

And you couldn't tell any longer
just how the girls would turn out.

Riding with the body of the queen
from London to Windsor

was the widow of one
of her Viceroys of India - Lady Lytton.

Just eight years later,
her daughter, Constance,

in prison as a suffragette,

would make her statement
about the future of women in Britain...

...by carving, with a piece of broken
enamel from a hairpin...

...the letter V into the flesh
of her breast.

But it wasn't V for Victoria.

It was V for Votes.