There was an air of indestructibility to everything he built. ibid.
The launch pad for the biggest, more impressive, most astonishing engineering feat probably ever ... the Great Eastern ... a leviathan. ibid.
Brunel has scripted another East End soap opera ... The launch: thousands came, but the ship was too heavy to budge. Brunel felt publicly humiliated. Finally, they got her to float and the problems really started ... On her maiden voyage there were only thirty-eight passengers ... The leviathan became a transatlantic cable-layer. ibid.
Brunel didn’t even live to see the ship sail. ibid.
Darwin told the world where we had come from but Brunel had done something so much more important: he took us to where we were going. ibid.
He left us ideas, ideas that allow us to control the forces of Nature and change our world. Ideas that will always be with us wherever we go. Tristram Hunt, Great Britons: Isaac Newton, BBC 2002
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. The Victorian age was one of soaring ambition. Technological wonder. And awesome grandeur. As well as ugliness. Squalor. And misery on an unprecedented scale. The Victorians knew life was changing faster than ever before. And they recorded that change in paintings that were the cinema of their day. Jeremy Paxman, The Victorians I: Painting the Town: Their Story in Pictures, BBC 2009
They had invented the modern city. ibid.
At the end of a hard day’s labour a bowl of gruel. ibid.
The Thames became an open sewer. The newspapers dubbed the crisis the Great Stink. ibid.
Six million houses were built during Victoria’s reign. ibid.
The Suburb was a brilliant invention. ibid.
Victoria and Albert’s was a genuine loving marriage. Jeremy Paxman, The Victorians II: Home Sweet Home
Keeping a mistress wasn’t unusual. In William Holman Hunt’s scandalous picture The Awakening Conscious a man canoodles with his mistress in their love nest. ibid.
In London in 1857 it is estimated there is one prostitute for every twenty-five men. And many of their clients were married. Sexually transmitted diseases were rife. ibid.
Sherry, Sir: William Powell Frith. ibid. painting of content servants
There were some whose place would never be comfortable. ibid.
The Governess: Richard Redgrave. ibid. painting of sad servant
An Anxious Hour: Fanny Farmer. ibid. painting of dying child
Young Frederick Asleep at Last: George Elgar Hicks. ibid.
The Doctor: Luke Fildes. ibid. doctor by bed of dying child
Hushed: Frank Holl. ibid.
In reality children had never been more vulnerable. This was the great age of epidemic: tuberculosis, scarlet fever and typhoid killed thousands of children every year. No amount of money or prayer could keep death from the door. ibid.
She was what the Victorians called a baby farmer ... In the case of Amelia Dyer she never kept. Over the space of thirty years she took in more than fifty babies and she killed them all. ibid.
Found Drowned by G F Watts is an almost religion vision of the fallen woman. Stretched out like a martyr to Victorian morality ... Her body is bathed in a warm light. Set against a cold uncaring world. A single light shines down on her ... It’s title was taken from a regular column in The Times newspaper which listed the number of women who had thrown themselves into the Thames. ibid.
The Outcast: Richard Redgrave. ibid.
In Past and Present Augustus Leopold Egg shows a wife prostrated before her husband begging for forgiveness ... In his hand he holds a letter he has intercepted from his wife’s lover. ibid.
Two more paintings accompany the main picture ... The sins of the mother have been visited on the next generation. In the final painting the destitute mother lies huddled alone under an arch cradling the illegitimate child that is the product of her affair. ibid.
For a woman it was all too often a prison. Painters showed the Victorian wife bound by law, by convention, by religious teaching. Even by the clothes she wore. ibid.
May 1st 1851 ... Hyde Park London: From the Earth rose a vast glittering Crystal Palace made of glass and cast iron ... It took the world’s breath away ... One picture captured the significance of that day: The First of May 1851 Franz Winterhalter. Jeremy Paxman, The Victorians III: Having It All
Sheffield was Steel City. At the time of the Great Exhibition it produced half the quantity of steel produced in the entire world ... Five million tons in 1900. ibid.
Industry of the Tyne: William Bell Scott. ibid.
His factory on the Tyne became Britain’s largest manufacturer of guns and warships. With the profits of war Armstrong built his very own stately home ... In 1887 he became Baron Armstrong. ibid.
Just six hundred men charged into the valley against five thousand Russian soldiers and their artillery. ibid.
The Roll Call: Lady Elizabeth Butler. ibid.
One foreign minister described his government’s policy in the 1870s as ‘Fortify Occupy Grab and Brag’. ibid.
Hard Times: Hubert von Herkomer. ibid.
The Emigrants’ Departure: Paul Falconer Poole. ibid.
The Emigrant Ship: C J Staniland. ibid.
The London Docks may have been the gateway to the wealth of empire but the men who worked here were some of the poorest in Britain ... They were paid little and only by the hour. On average a doctor worked three hours a day. Resentment ran high. But all this was about to change. On August 12th 1889 the London dockers fought back ... Within a week 30,000 men were on strike ... For the strikers the suffering was intense; but not only for the dockers, for their families too ... In London the dock strike took to the streets. Thousand of dockers and their families marched carrying huge banners, their children holding signs saying please feed us. ibid.
On Strike: Hubert von Herkomer. ibid.
By the second half of the nineteenth century the Victorians had built a nation that was the richest and most powerful on Earth. Britain’s painters celebrated Britain’s triumphs. And yet just when the Victorian miracle was at its peak came voices of doubt, of anxiety and even of protest. Jeremy Paxman, The Victorians IV: Dreams & Nightmares
Artists began to talk of waging a war on the machine age. ibid.
John Martin: An extraordinary painter whose mind seethed with troubling visions. ibid.
Henry Alexander Bowler: The Doubt: Can These Dry Bones Live? ibid.
One Victorian led a call to arms against Victorian values: Edward Burne-Jones. ibid.
Richard Dadd was a phenomenally successful fairy painter who was admitted to the Royal Academy at the age of only of 20. ibid.
Their pictures of the most dramatic, feverish time in our history were the cimena of our day. ibid.
It was the empire on which the sun never set. Or as some said, on which the blood never dried. At its height Britain ruled over a quarter of the world’s population. Many convinced themselves it was Britain’s destiny to do so. Much of the empire was built on greed and a lust for power. But the British came to believe they had a moral mission too: a mission to civilise the world. Jeremy Paxman, Empire I, BBC 2012
How did such a small country get such a big head? ibid.
India was decisive: it gave Britain the resources, the markets, the manpower and the prestige to build a worldwide empire. ibid.
They paid local soldiers to fight for them. ibid.
This protection racket would be repeated all over India. ibid.
If you look like a ruler, the people will treat you like a ruler ... An enormous bluff. ibid.
Indian troops rose up and killed their own officers. ibid.
After four and a half months British relief forces arrived ... The pretence of British rule had been shattered; the bluff called. ibid.
Egypt was an emergency, an anomaly, and experiment ... They stayed for seventy years. ibid.
Egypt was not a colony, it was a protectorate ... The Suez Canal - it had to be protected. ibid.
Lawrence was just the man to inspire the Arabs into a desert revolt ... Lawrence promised his Arab fighters freedom from foreign rule. ibid.