The Victorian World

Available for 16 days

Marking the 125th anniversary of the death of Queen Victoria, a celebration of her reign with readings by Roger Allam and Janie Dee. Victoria ruled over a Britain that was building an empire abroad and a world-dominating industrial base at home. The products of these were displayed in the spectacular Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition in 1851 organised largely by her Consort, Prince Albert. In her journal The Queen records her pride on visiting it and we hear Felix Mendelssohn’s ‘String Symphony No 10’ which was played there. Mendelssohn was a great friend of the royal couple and Albert himself was something of an amateur composer. We hear a couple of short pieces he composed including one played on the newly invented saxhorn. The Crystal Palace was moved to South London after the Exhibition and became the venue for the renowned Saturday Concerts. Julius Benedict whose ‘Piano Concerto No 2’ starts the programme was a regular conductor there. The intrepid travel writer Mary Kingsley gives us her thoughts from Nigeria on the kind of men needed to build the empire and the actress Fanny Kemble describes her horror at slavery on a Georgian cotton plantation, the source of one of the raw materials which fed the industrial revolution. Along with great riches in Victorian society there was dire poverty and in ‘Oliver Twist’, Charles Dickens’s famous description of a meal in the workhouse contrasts with Mrs Isabella Beeton’s instructions on how to serve dinner in a well-to-do home in her ‘Book of Household Management’. World politics in the nineteenth century did not come without armed conflict and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ celebrates the patriotic sacrifice made by young soldiers in the Crimea while Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major General’ from ‘The Pirates of Penzance’ satirises army leadership. Their operettas attracted audiences from across the social classes in the 1870s and ‘80s and popular song of the time was often drawn directly from opera for instance Michael Balfe’s setting of Tennyson’s ‘Come into the Garden Maud’. The Victorians were greatly taken with matters of the heart, both the familial, which Augusta Webster’s poem ‘Mother and Daughter’ touchingly depicts, and the romantic as expressed in Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ or the extract from Victoria’s diary describing her wedding night with her beloved Albert. Producer: Harry Parker