THE VICTORIAN AGE

Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 150, 22 December 1922, Page 18

THE VICTORIAN AGE

FAMILY LIFE IN ITS PRIME.

•Recently Archdeacon Bevan, rector of Chelsea, delivered? a lecture at the Mansion House, Londo/i, on "the "Victorian 'Age," states the' "Daily Telegraph." That ago, said tho Archdeacon, was born

into the world on the wings of a great change, .into an England suffering from She-effects of the.Regency. The nation, tired of a rackety past, suddenly made pp its mind to be chivalrously, worthy of the young "Girl Queen," and seized ,with enthusiasm on the famous resolution which the Royal child had already ■uttered to her governess. "I will be good:" From the first, Queen Victoria took a middle-class view of life. Domesiiciliy. was the..,keyn,ota.,of her.... reign. One:-of the effects'.of tho birth-of-.tho jtfictorian Age^was'th'at' England, awoke-, to a most amazing sense- of ■ its own virtues. It found a. measureless gulfbetween the classes and the masses, but, on the whole, the rich man and his chil'drea were as mindful of the poor fifty years ago as they were- now, when the poor man was thundering at the' gate, and the rich man was selling his castle. :(Laughter.) The conditions of, early [Victorian home life were unusually favourable to the steadying of tho wills of premising children, the development of their; abilities,'the fulfilment 'of their premise. The Victorian home life had a "distinctive gift, the gift of restraint, that, was, the temperate, well-directed use of all gifts. Restraint was not a set of rules imposed by; heavy parents on submissive children; it was the spirit of all the hduehold; it was more of a bond than a. bondage. Those early" Victorian .parents had never heard of eugenics,. or of the continuity of the germ plasm—(laughter)—or of the Montessori system. They had no debating societies for the "study of the child," but they did give any amount of prayer and care to their children. Tho hdme life was not oppressive. It enforced worknjid obedience, but tempered them with holidays. It regarded children not. as young animals, but as .immortal souls. It was ' circumspect, prudent,, and invincibly, ho bad almost said incorrigibly, sans. ■ It. seemed to him that far too much had been made of the. .dullness.and 'pettiness of girls' Jives fifty years.ago. If home had been bo bad as all that, they surely would not have become such adorable wives and mothers. For himself Sunday was always an exceptionally pleasant day, and he found church-going interesting and helpful enough, as young people ■would now were it not for the poisonous fashion that persuaded them to the contrary. There were no week-ends for ordinary folk, no Sunday golf, no bands in the park, no cinemas, .yet ho was convinced there was vastly more quiet enjoyment 'oi~a less artificial kind. Perhaps the real reason was that they knew how to amuse themselves instead of seeking amusement outside. It was impossible to recall all this without the consciousness, of the debt which the nation owed to the personal example of Queen Victoria. There was nothing narrow or little about Prince Albert's outlook on life. His sentiments and public actions were singularly democratic for the time in which ho lived—democratic in the best and truest sense, for he saw jwith the prescient eye what many of our political wiseacres, especially of tho Labour Party, could not see to-day: that'the good of each section of the community was the. good of 'all,, and that one elnsa could not stand apart from the other. Looking back wistfully at the' English countryside of those days, ono fonnrl that in many respects lil'o was simpler,

and we were the poorer for the! lack of tho quaint specimens of manhood and womanhood and tho fine old "incongruities" of which' Cieorge Eliot wrote. Modern England was no longer an old country, but a now one. Between tho old nobility and tho poor there was^a certain sympathy. The humble class appreciated the .fact that their rulers were gentlemen, but they never had any fellow ieeling with a plutocracy. Concluding, the lecturer said there was <-*n idea of progress prevalent in the .Victdriau- Age, ;which had been destroyed by tho war ; , and stag. MSB J?.*Pisd£ d»