Victoria No Longer Secret

Victoria

The past few days have allowed me to watch two documentaries. One is from the Poetry Anthology series on the Victorian poets. The other is the PBS Empires series documentary on the Victorian Era. Like the other documentaries in this series (Napoleon, Egypt, Rome, Greece, The Kingdom of David, Peter and Paul and the Rise of Christianity, the Medicis) this documentary takes about four hours to pace its way through the key events of Victoria’s reign with a silent backdrop of costumed actors who never talk. It is not terribly exciting but one does get the basic outlines of the significant moments and influences in the reign of England’s Queen Victoria. Among the subjects covered are Industrialization, Prince Albert, the Crystal Palace, the Victorian Family, the Crimean War, the East India Company, the Indian Mutiny, the death of Albert, the journeys and work of David Livingston, the resurgence of interest in King Arthur, the conflicting ideologies of Gladstone and Disraeli, the Suez Canal, the Turkish-Russian War, Charles Gordon in Sudan (Khartoum)  and the Mahdis, Cecil Rhodes and East Africa, the Boer Warand death camps, and the turn of the century.

I suppose what I found most interesting was the ideological battle between Disraeli and Gladstone and the way that the same battle would be reflected in the contests between Theodore Roosevelt and later, William Jennings Bryan. There is a tremendously similar argument going on between pro and anti imperialists in America. I feel like I have a much better sense of chronology between the events that I have long known about but never quite placed.

The documentary on the Victorian era poets was somewhat underwhelming to me. For some reason, Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Swinburn, and Gerard Manly Hopkins all fail to light my fire. Perhaps it has something to do with their seeming devotion to form. Maybe I need to go back further and look at the Romantic poets to find my kindred spirits.