Over the last few weeks I have had the fascinating task of helping to select 60 people “whose actions have had a significant impact on lives in these islands and/or given the age its character” for a forthcoming BBC Radio 4 series. Entitled The New Elizabethans, we had, it seemed, been invited to update the story of “Good Queen Bess.” And initially such parallels appeared plausible enough: a 60-year saga of stability emerging from conflict (post-reformation or post-imperial); of elitist culture turning popular (Shakespeare then, the “classless society” now); and of a revivified economy (driven by globalisation in both cases).
But as we chewed over the choices, a very different era came to mind: not so much new Elizabethans, but neo-Victorians, or at least new late Victorians. If there has been a revival in the last 60 years, it has been of the cosmopolitan London-centric entrepôt of the fin de siècle, not of good old “Merrie England.” The era from the 1870-1914 saw finance triumph over industry as the country’s pre-eminent economic interest, setting the scene for the accelerating inequality and plutocracy that would reach its apogee in the finance-led boom of the Edwardian era. It was the age of “Pont Street Dutch”—when the elaborate red-brick baroque mansion-houses so beloved of the current international financial elite mushroomed throughout Mayfair, Kensington and Chelsea.
Mass immigration underpinned the cosmopolitanism of both eras: of Jews from eastern Europe in the 1890s and 1900s and of former imperial citizens since the 1950s. Both proved socially traumatic and produced xenophobic backlashes, though post-1980s Britain has been rather more successful in integrating diverse ethnic groups. That Britain has undeniably benefitted from this openness is proved by the strikingly high proportion of immigrants of all types on the BBC’s list.
The big difference, of course, is empire. The 1880s and 1890s were the high point of imperialist wars, and Rudyard Kipling exhorted his readers to take up the “white man’s burden” to much middle-class acclaim. British soldiers have certainly fought in several post-imperial wars in the last 60 years, from Malaya in the 1950s and Oman in the 1970s to the Falklands in the 1980s and Afghanistan in the 2000s, but these conflicts have had little cultural resonance—remarkably few on our list were soldiers.
Aristocracy, in contrast, has made a dramatic comeback. David Cameron is not quite as grand as Lord Salisbury, but he is still a descendant of the county gentry; modern bankers disport themselves on grouse-moors much as their “gentlemanly capitalist” predecessors did; and our appetite for country house dramas seems to be unquenchable.
Neither can international elites get enough of English aristocratic culture—indeed, it is as much part of Britain’s national brand now as it was in the 1890s, something undoubtedly helped by the global popularity of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts. Just as Indian princes and Argentinian ranch-owners dispatched their sons to Eton and Oxford, so now the scions of Russian oligarchs and Chinese party panjandrums descend on England’s playing fields. For hardline “Maoist” Bo Xilai, only Harrow and Oxford University could provide a suitable education for the new vanguard of the Chinese proletariat.
The parallels also extend to popular culture. While Victorian music hall may not have been quite as commercial as today’s TV talent shows, Simon Cowell had his predecessors in the variety impresarios of the late 19th century, and stand-up comics were perennially popular. Satire—something we tend to think of as a post-1960s phenomenon—was always part of Victorian burlesque, as George Leybourne and others gently parodied aristocratic “Champagne Charlies.”
Popular culture since the 1960s, however, has been rather less gentle in its hostility to elites—and this impulse has infused British culture with much of its energy—from Monty Python to Johnny Rotten. It is Britain’s creative industries—music, fashion, advertising and design—that have really excelled in the present age, and they have undoubtedly drawn on reserves of frustrated resentment at our extraordinarily resilient elite with its apparently indestructible “Brideshead” elan.
Victorianism redux appeared most unlikely in 1952 when it seemed that Britain, along with the rest of Europe, would become a land of boffins, bureaucrats, and beer-and-sandwich corporatism. But the collapse of social democracy in the late 1970s allowed Britain’s ingrained commercialism, first nurtured in the age of Good Queen Bess but only fully matured under Victoria, to re-emerge.
So how long will this neo-Victorianism last? Will the “Williamites” of 60 years’ hence still be financiers and gentlemanly capitalists? It would certainly be foolish to rule it out. If George Osborne gets his way, London will become the world centre for renminbi trading, the handmaiden of Chinese capitalists, as it was for Americans and oil sheikhs in our era. It is unclear whether the fabric of British society can survive the resulting inequality and economic instability. But that, of course, is another question.
