Social History: In the autumn of 1900, just a few short months before the death of the queen, the citizens of Birmingham gathered for an event that seemed to sum up everything that was best about Victorian civic virtue.
The city had commissioned a new work from the nation's greatest composer, Edward Elgar. It was to be a setting of a bestselling poem, 'The Dream of Gerontius', a copy of which had been found in the blood-soaked tunic of that quintessential Victorian martyr, Gordon of Khartoum. The poet was John Henry Newman, the most famous religious figure of the age. International prestige was conferred on the event by the presence of Hans Richter, the celebrated conductor and protégé of Wagner.
In fact the performance was a disaster. Richter had not bothered to learn the score. The chorus master, a devout non-conformist, despised the Catholicism of the work so profoundly that he refused to rehearse the choir. "The whole thing was a nightmare," reported one of Elgar's friends.
The Irish composer, Charles Villiers Stanford, thought he knew why, and it had nothing to do with the poor performance. "It stinks of incense," he spat at Elgar afterwards.
Even a decade ago this vignette would have been taken as another example of the hypocrisy of those smug, pious, insufferable Victorians. Now it seems just another colourful story from a time when nothing was in black and white except the photographs. History bestseller lists show that the Victorians are, improbably, back in fashion.
Tristram Hunt might seem a Johnny-come-lately to this particular Victorian boom. He was, after all, the man who fronted a TV series on the English Civil War (memorably delivering an analysis of Roundhead fashions from a barber's chair). In fact Hunt is a serious historian whose academic work has long been on the Victorian city; this thought- provoking book, Building Jerusalem, is an important contribution to British social history.
Hunt plausibly establishes the Victorian city as an intellectual battleground, ably demonstrating that the fight for ideas can have direct practical results. Early Victorian thinkers hated their cities.
The most famous indictment was Charles Dickens's Hard Times. His fictional city of "Coketown", where everything was designed according to the principle of utility, became a byword for soulless modern urban life. All that mattered there were money and "facts, facts, facts". At the bottom of the heap in Coketowns throughout Britain were impoverished Irish immigrants. "This race must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity," wrote Friedrich Engels in 1845, confidently predicting revolution.
That it did not happen was due in large part to men such as Benjamin Disraeli and his Young Englanders, who looked to the medieval world for inspiration. The initial response of these Romantics to Coketown had been one of horror, but they quickly recognised that there was an ideological battle to be waged in brick and stone. The result was the magnificent Gothic revival that transformed cities and, says Hunt, left "a legacy we still see today in the spires of our churches and the brooding medievalism of our railway stations, town halls and Houses of Parliament". These buildings, squares and monuments became the focus of civic pride, which in turn came to include improving the living conditions of the very poorest in society. Nowhere was this done more successfully than Birmingham, where Joseph Chamberlain turned the city round with his "gas and water socialism". Only when the middle classes abandoned the cities for the suburbs at the end of the 19th century did decline set in.
Today those same cities, most spectacularly Manchester, are in the midst of dynamic urban revival. There are many reasons to celebrate this renewal, not the least of which is that the masses who toiled in "dark, satanic mills" now shop in Selfridges and Harvey Nicks.
Richard Aldous's life of Malcolm Sargent is available in Pimlico paperback.
The Dream of Gerontius will be performed at the National Concert Hall on November 4th to mark the 150th anniversary of the foundation of UCD by John Henry Newman
Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City By Tristram Hunt Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 432pp. £25