Deary Deary Me! Or just how vile were the Victorians? (J. Plowright)

By John Plowright

Forget about the reform of History curricula for a moment. If you really want to understand and influence the historical outlook of Britain’s youth you should first look at the Horrible Histories franchise.

It would be difficult to underestimate its influence. It began with the best-selling books (with sales now exceeding 20 million copies) and has been followed by a magazine, stage productions, video games, and the enormously successful BBC TV series. Now, with Horrible Histories: The Movie - Rotten Romans (2019), this commercial and pop cultural juggernaut has moved into feature film production.

Without question Horrible Histories in all their forms have been a godsend to parents, pupils and teachers: encouraging reading at a fairly early age, kindling an interest in the subject, imparting some historical knowledge and, last but not least, providing much entertainment.

But how good is the history purveyed by the Horrible Histories and, more particularly, how good is it at shining a light on the darker elements of the past? This last question is particularly pertinent given increasingly vocal concerns about widespread ignorance of Britain’s imperial legacy and the Horrible Histories oft-repeated claim to “tell you all the things that teacher doesn’t tell you.” I will attempt to address these questions by referring purely to the books, all of which are written by Terry Deary and illustrated by Martin Brown, as they represent the foundation on which the whole enterprise is based.

Those wishing to see the Victorians held to account for the suffering they caused will be cheered by the very title of Deary’s 1994 Vile Victorians until, that is, they remember that Deary’s relentless search for the most unappealing aspects of the past and his addiction to alliteration means that most of those he considers historically are presented negatively. Thus Deary’s historical cast includes Angry Aztecs, Beastly Barbarians, Cut-Throat Celts, Nasty Knights & Crazy Crusaders, the ‘Orrible Ottomans, Ruthless Richard & the Useless Yorks, Scary Scots, Terrible Tudors and Slimy Stuarts. Some, for reasons not immediately obvious, fare much better. For example, the fact that their societies were based on slavery does not prevent Deary’s (ancient) Egyptians from being “Awesome” and his (ancient) Greeks “Groovy”.

The vileness which Deary mostly addresses in Vile Victorians comprises the appalling conditions suffered by the working class domestically. For example, eight of the volume’s 128 pages are taken by a story about a very young boy frightened to be working as a ‘trapper’ (operating a trapdoor) in a coal mine, despite the fact that within roughly five years of Victoria ascending the throne the law had been amended to prohibit the employment of such young boys underground. Similarly, the reader is told that being sent up chimneys to clean them “was a popular job for young boys and girls” but there’s no mention of the practice being outlawed in 1875. Not only are there sins of omission but also many serious factual errors. We are told, for example, that Jack the Ripper killed eight women rather than five; that the purpose of the Corn Laws was to keep the price of bread down rather than up; that the Battle of Majuba (which occurred in 1881) took place during the Second Boer War (1899-1901), and that British soldiers were still wearing red uniforms in the latter conflict. Florence Nightingale appears but not Mary Seacole and what Indians increasingly refer to as their First War of Independence, Deary refers to as “the Indian Mutiny”.

His unqualified condemnation of empire is apparent, however, when he states that, “The richer Victorians … robbed poor countries of their historical treasures to fill our museums” and when he writes that:

The vile Victorians set out to conquer the world. When they defeated another country they could take its wealth, and its natural resources (diamonds from South Africa, sugar from the West Indies, cotton from Egypt, tea from India and so on). The Victorians back in England could make even bigger fortunes by trading with the conquered countries.

Deary clearly has no truck with the idea that the Victorians had – even at the level of self-deception – any sense of civilising mission. According to him British imperialism is purely a matter of pounds, shillings and pence, and the relationship with native peoples purely exploitative. Thus the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896 is given a page, chiefly on the strength of its being the world’s shortest war but also to say that after it was over “the British navy hadn’t finished making the locals suffer. They sent a bill to the people of Zanzibar, asking them to pay for the shells used to wreck the place!” Deary evidently doesn’t think it worth mentioning that one of the major reasons for the war was the British desire to eradicate slavery there, which was achieved shortly after the war ended.

(Publisher: Scholastic)

For Deary’s most sustained critique of British imperialism, though, one needs to look to his Barmy British Empire (2002). This is an odd choice of title when Deary could more accurately have it reflect the contents by labelling it The Blameworthy British Empire or The Baleful British Empire or The Brutal British Empire or even The Bloody British Empire. Spreading Christianity is now mentioned but only as a hypocritical cloak for “making masses of money”.

In the light of the toppling of Colston’s statue it’s particularly interesting to note the following passage, which is also reproduced verbatim in his All at Sea (2020):

In 1700 Bristol and Liverpool were small fishing ports. Thanks to the slave trade they grew over the next 100 years and some slave-traders became enormously rich. Many of Bristol and Liverpool’s fine buildings were built with the profits of slavery. As a Bristol historian put it:

‘Every brick in the city of Bristol is cemented with the blood of a slave.’

Deary doesn’t mention the £20 million compensation given to slaveowners but he certainly rams home the message that the ending of slavery within the British Empire should not be a cause of self-congratulation:

The Brits abolished slavery and ever since school history books have been patting the Brits on the back for that! The books sometimes ‘forget’ to mention the millions of miserable slaves that made millions of pounds for brutal Brits in the 200 years before they banned it.

This sentiment is only slightly undermined by the fact that a few pages earlier Deary dated the start of England’s slave trade to 1562, so that by his own reckoning the reference should be to roughly 275 years rather than 200.

As is typical of the Horrible Histories series Barmy British Empire exhibits plenty of other errors, misunderstandings and contradictions. For example, Deary has the British using machine guns against the Sudanese in 1883, when the Maxim gun didn’t appear until the following year, and he refers to Colonel Hugh Rose (the future Baron Strathnairn), as “the British governor” in Beirut, when he was actually head of the diplomatic mission, Lebanon at the time being part of the Ottoman not the British Empire. The date of the Charge of the Light Brigade (not an obvious topic for a history of the British Empire) is given as 1856, not 1854 (something which Vile Victorians at least gets right). The very last page of Barmy British Empire has Deary stating that, “the Indians … celebrated 15 August 1947 and freedom by tearing down the statues of the British Generals and the British rulers that the Brits had erected over the past 200 years.” One might very well imagine that to have been the case but that’s precisely what Deary has done - imagined it, because it simply didn’t happen.

As if the British Empire did not offer up sufficient horrors itself, over six of Barmy British Empire’s 127 pages are devoted to the atrocities committed in King Leopold’s Congo because of the activities there of Henry Morton Stanley, who was born in Wales but who was a naturalised American at the time he acted as Leopold’s agent. Deary makes much of the fact that “Brit history books never go on to tell you what Henry Stanley did” after his meeting with Dr Livingstone but even if true this would hardly be surprising given that Stanley’s work for the Belgian king is only tangentially relevant to the story of British colonial history. But then Deary, whose stock in trade is basically historical torture porn, is always prepared to go out of his way if it means that he can conjure up more scenes of cannibalism or yet another whipping, maiming or beheading.

I began by suggesting that the reader forget about the reform of History curricula for a moment. We should not, however, forget about it for long, as it’s long overdue and in the meantime Deary has performed a public service of sorts in drawing attention to Britain’s involvement in the slave trade and the darker aspects of Britain’s colonial past despite not mentioning the Boer War concentration camps, the Amritsar Massacre, the manner in which the Mau Mau uprising was suppressed and much else besides.

On the other hand, the Horrible Histories are frequently tasteless, impressionistic, inaccurate, and one-dimensional, and all these faults are certainly present to a high degree in Vile Victorians and Barmy British Empire. Whatever your precise stance towards it, you should be able to agree that the history of the British Empire is ultimately no laughing matter, and that it and the children who study it, deserve much better.