Victoria Died in 1901 and is alive today

Watched "Victoria Died in 1901 and is alive today" by Jonathan Meades last night. Basically, this is a visual lecture, with wonderful visuals (some very surreal) and a superb script (often very funny) by Meades (who writes and presents it); his use of the English language, and turns of phrase are quiet extraordinary. His style is not to argue his case, but simply present it, with a masterfully large vocabulary, and no attempt whatsoever to dumb-down to his audience. Watching Meades is something of a guilty (and addictive) pleasure!

Matthew Sweet, writing in The Independent on BBC's Victoria Week, gave this comment:

Jonathan Meades' film, Victoria Died in 1901 and is Still Alive Today, screened tonight, concludes BBC2's Victorian week. It is the most original and unusual offering in the season, and it will appal those who feel more comfy with Fred Dibnah's boneheaded Royston Vaseyisms. It suggests that the widespread recreational drug use in the Victorian era, coupled with the prevalence of venereal disease, engendered its own school of design - one which forswore the restrained neoclassicism of the Regency for a self-consciously crazy, extravagantly hybridised architectural style. Not everything in it is factually accurate, but Meades is disarmingly brazen about his deployment of a number of Victorian myths: "I didn't believe it for a minute," he says, considering the genital piercing that now bears the Prince Consort's name, "but television can be so witless and formulaic, and when it's not being witless and formulaic it's being boring and worthy. It's as much an exercise in making a show as it is in offering a polemic. I don't know much about history, but I know what I like, and most of what I like is what I make up."

In its linking of architecture with narcosis, Meades's film airs one of those conveniently forgotten aspects of nineteenth-century culture - that the Victorians loved their chemical recreations. Meades reads the influence of laudanum - a cocktail of opium and alcohol - in the work of Victorian architects such as William Burges (who painted his Kensington bedroom green so that when the drug took effect he could imagine he was lying at the bottom of the sea), Frederick Thomas Pilkington (author of the Barclay Memorial Church in Edinburgh, described by a baffled contemporary as "a congregation of elephants, rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses, with their snouts in a manger and their posteriors turned to golf players on the links"), and Samuel Sanders Teulon (who built St Stephen's church in Belsize Park, a neglected blossom of Gothic weirdness).

Laudanum, which is still manufactured for medical use today, wasn't just the tipple of a clique of artsy dopeheads, as it had been in the time of Coleridge and De Quincey (though Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Gladstone, Jane Carlyle and Florence Nightingale all glugged it back with enthusiasm). It was the People's Intoxicant, more freely available in the nineteenth century than packets of Lambert and Butler are today, and consumed with less of a sense of shame. Agricultural workers popped pills in the fields, noisy babies were dosed with it until they shut up. The entire population of Cambridgeshire was considered by many Victorian commentators to be permanently whacked out of its head: "Went into a chemist's shop," recorded a writer on a trip to Wisbech for an 1871 edition of the Medical Times and Gazette, "laid a penny on the counter. The chemist said - `The best?' I nodded. He gave me a pill- box and took up the penny, and so the purchase was completed without my having uttered a syllable. You offer money, and get opium as a matter of course. This may show how familiar the custom is." Genuinely prohibitive anti- drugs legislation was not passed until the First World War, when politicians became jittery about the number of soldiers who were too high to go over the top.

This isn't however, the kind of Victorian story that you hear as often as the usual roster of myths and wilfull distortions. "One of the great points about the highest Victorian age," argues Meades, "was that it was extremely unregulated, it wasn't until later that there was a reaction against sexual and narcotic licence. Had Wilde sued the Marquess of Queensberry a generation earlier, nothing would have happened." It's to be hoped that this point of view will be shared by a few more of the many attempts to characterise the period that will come your way during the course of this year. If not, we will remain content to wrap up the truth in some rhetorical equivalent of chintz, becase we are too scandalised to gaze upon it.

`Victoria Died in 1901 and is Still Alive Today', presented by Jonathan Meades, BBC2