Gladstone, who succeeded him in 1880, was seventy at that point – and eighty-two by the time he was elected for the fourth time in 1892. Queen Victoria was dismayed at the prospect of her precious empire being at the mercy of the ‘shaking hand of an old, wild and incomprehensible man’. But then she had always disliked Gladstone, once complaining of the esteemed orator: ‘He always addresses me as if I were a public meeting.’
Queen Victoria had to get along with ten British prime ministers during her reign, which gives you a sense of just how much change she witnessed.
The nineteenth century was a time of massive expansion, especially for London. The capital’s population rose from 960,000 in 1801, when the first national census was taken, to nearly 6.6 million by 1901 – roughly the same as the combined populations of Paris, Berlin, Vienna and St Petersburg.1 Cities swelled because of migration from rural areas: the aftershocks of 1873’s agricultural depression, triggered by a collapse in grain prices, didn’t ease until the 1890s.
Immigration was also a factor in this urban drift. Jews fled the pogroms in Eastern Europe and Irish Catholics escaped from poverty and famine. In 1765, the Morning Gazette estimated there were 30,000 black servants in the country.2 After slavery’s abolition the numbers fell dramatically, though there would still have been a significant black presence in ports like Cardiff, Liverpool and Grimsby, as well as London, where, according to Peter Ackroyd, most former slaves and their offspring were absorbed into society’s underclass as beggars and crossings-sweepers and became ‘almost invisible’.3
This might be overstating it. You don’t have to look far to find examples of visible black Victorian Britons,4 but history books tend to have less to say about the women than the men. Or perhaps there were just fewer of them. Nurse-cum-hotelier Mary Seacole is now as well known among primary school children as her supposed rival Florence Nightingale (in fact, the two were on friendly terms), and was in many respects as effective a nurse on the killing fields of the Crimea. The African-American actor and playwright Ira Aldridge moved to London and had two daughters, Luranah and Amanda, who both became opera singers.5 Laura Bowman, the African-American star of the musical In Dahomey – so popular it was performed at Buckingham Palace on 27 June 1903 – settled in Wimbledon with her common-law husband and performing partner Pete Hampton. Jane Roberts, a former slave who also moved to London from America and lived in a quiet street off Battersea Park, died in 1914, aged ninety-five. She’s buried in Streatham cemetery: plot 252, class H, block F.6 Caroline Barbour-James and her five children moved from Guyana to west London in 1905. Upright Christians, they were always so smart and clean that local working-class youths thought they were millionaires.7
There was a fuss when the most recent BBC adaptation of E. M. Forster’s Howards End gave the Schlegel siblings a black maid. It was anachronistic, some said. Political correctness gone mad. But as Jeffrey Green’s fascinating Black Edwardians: Black People in Britain 1901–1914 shows, there were plenty of women of African descent in domestic service in Britain at this time, for example Ann Styles, a freed slave from Jamaica who moved to London in around 1840 with the white family she worked for. She continued in their service all her working life. Green’s own grandmother, Martha Louisa Vass, worked as a maid for a suffragette. Vass worked every day, often late into the night when the woman gave dinner parties. Every other Sunday she was allowed the afternoon off.
And then there’s Sara Forbes Bonetta, who deserves to be far better known. In 1850, at the age of around eight, Bonetta was delivered by a Captain Frederick E. Forbes to Queen Victoria as a ‘gift’ from King Ghezo of Dahomey, in what is now Benin in West Africa. Forbes named her after his ship, the HMS Bonetta, which had been patrolling the area with orders to intercept and destroy any slaving vessels.
Forbes worried about the ‘burden’ of bringing a child back on the ship but concluded he had no choice as Sara was now the property of the crown. He saw for the girl a future as a missionary and wrote her a glowing character reference:
For her age, supposed to be eight years, she is a perfect genius; she now speaks English well, and has a great talent for music. She has won the affections with but few exceptions, of all who have known her; by her docile and amiable conduct, which nothing can exceed. She is far in advance of any white child of her age, in aptness of learning, and strength of mind and affection … Her mind has received a moral and religious impression and she was baptised according to the rites of the Protestant Church.8
When Sara finally met Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle the queen was delighted with her, agreeing with Forbes that she was ‘sharp and intelligent’. ‘Sally’, as Victoria called her, became the queen’s goddaughter and for the next year was raised by the Forbes family like any other upper-middle-class English child. She visited the royal household several times and struck up a friendship with Princess Alice, Victoria and Albert’s second daughter, who was a similar age.
In 1851, however, Sara developed a persistent cough. Victoria’s doctors concluded that Britain’s wet climate was bad for Sara’s health and she was sent back to Africa to be educated at missionary school. But she was unhappy there and a few years later, when Sara was twelve, Victoria gave her permission to return to Britain.
She attended the wedding of Victoria, the Princess Royal, and in August 1862 was herself married at St Nicholas’ Church in Brighton to a Yoruba businessman, Captain James Pinson Labulo Davies. The couple returned to West Africa, where Sara gave birth to a daughter, named – you guessed it – Victoria. The queen became her godmother too, and when Sara brought the baby to meet her namesake, Victoria observed: ‘Saw Sally, now Mrs Davies, & her dear little child, far blacker than herself … a lively intelligent child with big melancholy eyes.’ Sara went on to have two more children. But she developed tuberculosis and died in 1880, the year our imaginary time-traveller arrives in Britain.
Sara Forbes Bonetta is fascinating because, simply by existing and behaving as she did, she debunked contemporary theories about race which held that anyone who wasn’t Anglo-Saxon was an example of a lower evolutionary form. John Beddoe, author of The Races of Britain (1862) and President of the Anthropological Institute 1889–1891, believed ‘Africanoids’ were related to Cromagnon man. But remember Captain Forbes’ extraordinary assessment: ‘She is far in advance of any white child of her age …’
It’s a shame neither Bonetta nor Seacole, who died in 1881, lived to see the new age that was dawning. Everywhere there was evidence of a rupture with the past, with everything known and familiar. The telegraph network made it possible to communicate quickly and reliably over huge distances. The first petrol-driven internal combustion engine was constructed in 1884 by Edward Butler. By the 1880s most new houses would have come with gas pipes and lamps as standard. Not surprisingly, the pace of development left many struggling to keep up.
Foremost among those left behind were the poor. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 meant that if you wanted help, you had to go to the workhouse to get it, with all the hardship that entailed. Disease, starvation and overcrowding were still widespread, though by the 1880s the middle classes had acquired a greater capacity to be shocked and/or titillated by them: books and pamphlets such as Andrew Mearns’ The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883) and George R. Sims’ How The Poor Live (1883) found a ready readership.
To a significant degree, the job of sorting this mess out fell into the laps of women, as if women alone had the necessary resources to make a difference. In most cases these sorter-out women were upper middle class. The respectable helped the ‘lowly’ – until the battle for suffrage turned serious, at which point factory workers and MPs’ wives suddenly found themselves members of the same team.
The virtuous militancy that had powered protest groups like the Chartists – who wanted greater political representation for the working classes – was still in the air in the 1870s and 1880s. But increasingly it was being harnessed by women like the social reformers Clementina Black; Rachel and Margaret McMillan; Beatrice Webb; and Lydia Becker, who founded the first national suffrage campaign group, the National Society for Women’s Suffrage (NSWS), in 1867. It was hearing Lydia speak at a NSWS meeting in 1872 which radicalised a young Emmeline Pankhurst.
What these women had