Victorian Miscellanea

Victoria: The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire (Julia Baird 2016) contains some interesting miscellaneous facts.

We might have avoided World War I if Kaiser Wilhelm‘s dad hadn’t died of cancer at 56. Wilhelm was Victoria’s grandson. His mom was Princess Victoria, referred to as “Pussy” in her youth.

Wilhelm was a proud, often cruel, and talentless man who harbored a particular kind of hatred for his mother. The painful breech birth Vicky had suffered meant he had to be wrenched from her womb, causing partial paralysis of his left arm due to nerve damage (this is now known as Erb’s palsy). This made his left arm fifteen centimeters shorter than his right, something he tried to disguise for years by resting it on swords or other props. The medical establishment was ill equipped to deal with such a disability, which was considered shameful at the time. The treatments used to try to repair his arm were horrific. One such treatment, first applied when he was a few months old, was “animal baths.” Twice a week, a hare was killed and sliced open; Wilhelm’s limp arm was slid inside the still-warm body in the hope that some of its life force would magically transfer to the baby boy. Willy was also jolted with electric shocks and strapped into a metal contraption that forced his head upright. He blamed his mother for his shame, and for his years of unsuccessful, painful treatments: he would never forgive her.

As a militaristic conservative who favored state rule, Wilhelm believed he was the true patriot in his family. He “fancied himself of enormous importance,” Vicky told her mother. He thought he was more Prussian than his progressive father, Fritz, and was a great admirer of Bismarck and all things associated with “despotism and Police State.” Victoria was so irritated by her twenty-eight-year-old grandson’s haughtiness that she did not want to invite him to her Golden Jubilee.

From England, Victoria regarded his scheming with irritation. Even Chancellor Bismarck recognized Willy was too immature to rule, that he was impetuous, “susceptible to flattery and could plunge Germany into war without foreseeing or wishing it.” It turned out to be a matter of character, though, not maturity, for this was precisely what happened years later, when Wilhelm’s eagerness for war would far outstrip his competence at waging it.

What would have happened if Fritz’s cancerous throat had not prematurely ended his life? Germany would have been under the rule of a liberal, compassionate emperor, a leader who wanted to improve the lives of the working class and who especially despised the anti-Semitic movement. “As a modern civilized man, as a Christian and a gentleman, he found it abhorrent,” wrote Vicky; he tried to counter it where he could. His son Wilhelm was the opposite, stirring up and championing anti-Semitism, writing in 1927 while in exile in the Netherlands that “press, Jews & mosquitos…are a nuisance that humanity must get rid of in some way or another. I believe the best would be gas?

Christians and Muslims couldn’t agree on what was legitimate in war:

The Turkish atrocities were gruesome. The skulls of Bulgarians were carried on spikes or piled on carts, pregnant women were ripped open and rows of fetuses brandished on bayonets, children sold into slavery and harems, women savagely raped, people locked inside churches and burned alive. “Christian heads,” wrote one correspondent, were “tossed about the market place, like balls from one Turk to another.”

People argued about the relative legal power between men and women:

As the queen jostled for power and demanded to be heard, British women were also growing more restless and began arguing for the right to their own incomes, to divorce on the same terms as men, to protection from violence, and to shared custody of their children. (For most of the century, men were given full custody of children if they divorced or separated from their wives.)

Until 1870 all of the money women earned belonged to their husbands, and until 1882 their property did too, even after a divorce or separation. According to the centuries-old principle of coverture, English law saw a wife not as a separate entity but a “femme covert,” who was under the “protection and influence of her husband, her baron or lord.

The Second Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 established wives as distinct entities—“femme sole”—who could own, inherit, and rent property and represent themselves in a court of law. Gradually women won more rights to care for their children after divorce; from 1886 the welfare of the children could be taken into account when determining if women could have some (limited) custody over their children.

(See the History of Divorce chapter for an interviewee’s explanation that “Originally fathers got custody because they remained responsible for the child’s support.”)

Excited by CES 2017? A lot changed in the 19th century and during Victoria’s reign (1837-1901):

The world took on a new fascination for Victoria now that she was part of it. In the year she became queen, Charles Dickens began the serialization of Oliver Twist; Caroline Norton published her radical pamphlet arguing that mothers should have some custody of their young children after divorce; and a national antislavery convention was held in America, in which British women were thanked for their support. Inventors patented the electric telegraph, the first daguerreotype was successfully exposed, and the Grand Junction Railway, which ran between Manchester and Birmingham, was completed. The momentum for massive change had begun to gather pace.

Readers: What do you think? Should we date the modern world to 1901, the year Victoria died? We have aviation now, but with a bit of patience it was possible to travel comfortably by train and ship. We have Internet, but they had the telegraph for important messages (and why do we need the unimportant ones?). Is it fair to say that the pace of change has slowed?

More: read Victoria: The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire.