Dunedin is situated in the southern region of the South Island, and within the LODE-Zone, yet to be juxtaposed in the context of the Re:LODE project.
Henry Hampton was the sculptor of this memorial. As a creator of public memorials and artist he was active between 1888 and 1927, leaving a legacy of public memorials across the United Kingdom and New Zealand. One of these memorials in the United Kingdom is the Queen Victoria Memorial in Lancaster, Lancashire.
Locally this memorial is known as “King Victoria”, because of the shape of the silhouette against the Western sky at dusk. This gender fluidity is something the sculpture shares with the Victoria monument in Liverpool.
Gender Wars?
Of the fifty three persons depicted upon the plinth of the Queen Victoria Monument only two are women: George Eliot and Florence Nightingale.
If we include Queen Victoria then that makes two more significant Victorian women that this monument represents than Jacob Rees Mogg is able to come up with in his "horrible history", The Victorians: Twelve Titans Who Forged Britain. The ideological "lie" in this book suggests a different play on the use of the verb to forge.
1. make or shape (a metal object) by heating it in a fire or furnace and hammering it.
"he forged a great suit of black armour"
synonyms: hammer out, beat into shape, found, cast, mould, model; More
fashion, form, shape, make, manufacture, produce, turn out;
informalknock together, knock up, knock off
"the smith forged swords and knives"
2. create (something) strong, enduring, or successful.
"the two women forged a close bond"
synonyms: build, build up, construct, form, create, establish, set up, put together
"they forged a partnership with city government"
3. produce a fraudulent copy or imitation of (a document, signature, banknote, or work of art).What kind of "forging" of Britain and its history is going on?
"the signature on the cheque was forged"
synonyms: fake, falsify, counterfeit, copy fraudulently, copy, imitate, reproduce, replicate, simulate; More
informal; pirate
"it took great skill to forge the signature"
fake, faked, false, counterfeit, imitation, reproduction, replica, copied;
sham, bogus, dummy, ersatz, invalid;
informalphoney, dud, pretend, crooked
"he was charged with passing forged banknotes"
antonyms: genuine
The book review by Richard J Evans in the New Statesman says it all. Here are some extracts:
"Much of the blame for what Rees-Mogg sees as our current disdain for the Victorians he lays at the feet of Lytton Strachey, who is denounced in pretty well every chapter for the “sour, long, withdrawing whine” of the debunking biographies in his book Eminent Victorians; his “sneers”, his “horrible and selfish genius”, his “unfairness” and the “disagreeable” nature of his “jeering”. I doubt whether Strachey is much read these days, but Rees-Mogg’s diatribes will, one hopes, send readers rushing to purchase Eminent Victorians and may perhaps lead to something of a revival."
"Strachey included a woman – Florence Nightingale – among the four subjects of Eminent Victorians, but clearly she wasn’t important enough to be covered here."
"What we have instead are politicians, augmented by a handful of other men who contributed in one way or another to the world of politics, whether by providing the interior design for the new Palace of Westminster (Augustus Pugin) or by making explicit the nature and workings of the British constitution (AV Dicey) or by administering and securing the British empire and its dependencies (General Napier, William Sleeman, General Gordon). This is the view from inside the Westminster bubble. The people who matter are prime ministers (four of them in this book) and those who serve them in one way or another.
To name the most glaringly obvious omissions: there are no scientists (not even Darwin), no artists (not even Turner), no engineers (not even Brunel), no trade unionists (not even Robert Owen, or Annie Besant, champion of the striking match-girls of 1888), no educators (not even Thomas Arnold, one of Strachey’s subjects), no sociologists (not even Beatrice Webb), no explorers (not even Livingstone, let alone Isabella Bird), no writers (not even George Eliot, or Charles Dickens, or Anthony Trollope), no poets (not even Alfred Tennyson, not to mention Christina Rossetti), no doctors (not even John Snow, the pioneering researcher into cholera, or Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who opened up the field of medicine to women), and no feminists (not even Millicent Garrett Fawcett, the pioneer of women’s suffrage, or Josephine Butler, despite the fact that as far as more than half the population was concerned, these and other women like them were the real titans who forged modern Britain).
“None of our figures,” Rees-Mogg hardly needs to add, “was a socialist, aiming to cut back prosperity for all in a hopeless quest for a phoney equality,” but then, the working class is entirely absent from this book, except as an object of upper-class philanthropy and the benevolence of politicians. Significant figures of the left, such as the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor, are not mentioned – not even Keir Hardie.
Patriotic, enthusiastic and celebratory, it recalls nothing so much as Henrietta Marshall’s 1905 children’s history of Britain, Our Island Story (though Marshall was a much better writer than Rees-Mogg). This is the kind of history that Michael Gove, as education secretary, wanted to be promoted in the national history curriculum for schools, until he was forced to withdraw his proposals after a deluge of criticism and ridicule from the entire historical profession.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Rees-Mogg’s handling of the British empire. General Gordon “believed that spreading British civilisation… was an intrinsic good in its own right”; Prince Albert had a “global vision… to spread civilisation”; the principles by which the British empire was governed were “founded on morality”. Napier went far beyond the orders he was given when he annexed the Indian province of Sindh, but this was because he felt a “moral imperative” to rescue its inhabitants from the squalor and feudalism under which they languished.
The British administrator William Sleeman devoted himself to eradicating the murderous rituals of the Thuggee cult, whose supposedly organised attacks on travellers are described in obsessive detail. Sleeman meted out “justice rough at the edges” but we should not “smear” him by criticising his actions, even though modern historical scholarship (which Rees-Mogg mentions only to dismiss it without any consideration of the evidence) regards Thuggee as a mythical concept devised by the British Raj to justify the harsh repression of mundane acts of banditry. Along with the abolition of suttee (the Indian practice of widows immolating themselves on the funeral pyres of their late husbands) and the suppression of the slave trade, the campaign against Thuggee demonstrates, in Rees-Mogg’s view, the essential benevolence of Victorian imperialism and the spread of British civilisation to benighted parts of the globe. This kind of colonial nostalgia exerts a baleful influence over the minds of Brexiteers today, who view the prospect of a “global Britain”, illusory though it is, as a kind of resurrection of the imperial glories of the Victorian era.
Naturally, the darker side of British imperialism is glossed over silently or not mentioned at all. Palmerston launched the Opium Wars against China to uphold the sacred principle of free trade with the “vast Asian market”. The wanton destruction of the Old Summer Palace by an Anglo-French expedition near Beijing in 1860 was carried out by the French “indiscriminately and in an undisciplined manner” while the British behaved “coolly” and carried out their orders “systematically”. This was not quite what Gordon, who participated in the three-day orgy of destruction, reported: it was the British, he wrote, who behaved in a “vandal-like manner”, and he complained that the buildings were “so large, and we were so pressed for time, that we could not plunder them carefully”. Still, he said complacently: “We got upwards of £48 apiece prize money… I have done well.”
There is no mention of the catastrophic famines that occurred in India following changes in land use enforced by the British taxation system, with two million deaths in 1860-1, six million in the 1870s and another five million in 1896-97. No mention of the sacking and looting of Benin in 1897. No mention of the “pacification” of Burma in 1886. No mention of the sending of huge numbers of Indians to other parts of the empire towards the end of the century as indentured labourers working under restrictions not dissimilar to those of slavery.
Here, as elsewhere, Rees-Mogg picks out of his source material only those aspects of his subjects’ lives that help him grind his political axe. Peel, for example, is described as a “self-made man”, though a few paragraphs later we are informed that he was “born into a world of considerable wealth”. Peel’s first parliamentary seat, too, was for a “rotten borough”, one in which there were only 24 voters, effectively controlled by his patron, the future Duke of Wellington. Peel, says Rees-Mogg, was concerned to improve the working conditions of the industrial poor, but in this account these were caused by self-interested trade unions that enforced restrictive practices and undermined the free operation of capital (grasping and exploitative capitalist employers were not to blame, then). Peel pushed through the repeal of the Corn Laws “to advance the prosperity of factory workers by offering cheaper bread”, though this was not the real reason at all. Repeal in 1846 was a response to the Irish famine, in which more than a million people died, partly as a result of the restrictions on grain imports caused by the Corn Laws in the first place."
"The Victorians is hopelessly inadequate as history, but it’s also too badly written, too pompous and too cliché-ridden in every sense to serve its real purpose as providing any kind of historical justification for Brexit. What’s most striking about the book is its naivety and simple-mindedness – qualities shared by the Brexiteers in full measure as they declare that nothing could be easier than leaving the European Union. They promise a glorious economic future that is never going to materialise because Britain’s relationship with its major trading partner, the EU, would become dramatically more disadvantageous after Brexit.
This lack of realism is nowhere more evident than in Rees-Mogg’s paean of praise to the constitutional theorist AV Dicey, who advocated the use of referendums as a means of ensuring political stability by providing a “safety net, when the party system could not handle an issue”. The past three years have shown the exact opposite. The 2016 vote has created a situation in which the British political and constitutional system is in meltdown. It is clear that the party system as we have inherited it is completely incapable of handling the issue. Perhaps it’s time to listen to Dicey after all, then, and hold another referendum on Brexit."
Rees Mogg inhabits the ideological bubble of Westminster and also the Old Etonian's sense of entitlement. This enables him, and others, to bolster a false consciousness with a bogus fantasy. This version of history exists in a closed system, a loop shared with those with vested interests concerning existing systems of power and control, as well as a psychological need, to deny both the contemporary and historical realities . But this "bubble" seems to stretch beyond the limits of "soft soap" into a "popular" crisis of identity in European democracies.
Another Old Etonian, the British Prime Minister David Cameron, architect (with George Osbourne) of the 2010 Tory goverment "Austerity" policy, chose the book referenced in the New Statesman book review above, Our Island Story, when asked to select his favourite childhood book in October 2010:
"When I was younger, I particularly enjoyed 'Our Island Story' by Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall [...] It is written in a way that really captured my imagination and which nurtured my interest in the history of our great nation."The Wikipedia article on Our Island Story, classes the book as non fiction! Although it is clearly of its own time, and as it remains now, ideologically driven and a peculiar example of telling history as "the" story that justifies "the way it is", and, for those who need to hear, and give themselves the permission to "keep calm and carry on".
It covers the history of England from the time of the Roman occupation until Queen Victoria's death, using a mixture of traditional history and mythology to explain the story of British history in a way accessible to younger readers.
The book depicts the union of England and Scotland as a desirable and inevitable event, and praises rebels and the collective will of the common people in opposing tyrants, including kings like John and Charles I.
Elizabeth was not fond of spending money. She thought that it was dreadful waste to keep all these soldiers and sailors and ships waiting for an enemy who never came, and she told Lord Howard to pay off his men, and send them to their homes. But Lord Howard refused to obey, and he with his captains and his men held their ships in readiness at Plymouth. Day by day they kept watch, looking always anxiously out to sea, and spending the long, weary hours as best they could.
At last, one sunny day in July, when Drake and some of the other sea captains were playing at bowls, they were interrupted by a cry, "The Spaniards! The Spaniards!" The game was stopped, all eyes were turned towards the Channel. Yes, there at last, far out to sea, the proud Spanish vessels were to be seen. They were distant yet, but a sailor's eye could see that they were mighty and great ships, and the number of them was very large. But the brave English captains were not afraid.
"Come," said Drake, after a few minutes, "there is time to finish the game and to beat the Spaniards too."
'"THERE IS TIME TO FINISH THE GAME AND BEAT THE SPANIARDS TOO," SAID DRAKE.'
So they went back to their play, and when the game was finished they went down to the harbour, got the ships ready, and sailed out to meet and fight the Spaniards.
'nuff said!
Meanwhile . . .
History, fantasy, reality?
The puzzle is why the obvious disaster of a no-deal exit holds an allure for certain politicians and, indeed, some voters. And the answer, I think, lies in a strange but powerful yearning for the privations of Britain’s past. As one senior Tory put it to me recently: “It would be a test. But we can do it. Britain always finds a way.”
This is nostalgia in its most toxic form: the longing for an imagined history that has been filtered through folklore, film and popular culture to exercise an entirely bogus appeal. Incredibly, there are still those who fetishise what they call the “blitz spirit” and fragmented memories of the 1946 Britain Can Make It exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.Them and us?
You might think that there is something pretty shoddy about a craving for collective hardship, at a time when rough sleepers are already dying on the streets and universal credit claimants living in abject poverty. It is an insult, too, to those who involuntarily lived through the hell of the second world war and the sacrifices of its aftermath.
It is becoming ever clearer that Brexit is not about its ostensible subject: Britain’s relationship with the EU. The very word Brexit contains a literally unspoken truth. It does not include or even allude to Europe. It is British exit that is the point, not what it is exiting from. The tautologous slogan Leave Means Leave is similarly (if unintentionally) honest: the meaning is in the leaving, not in what is being left or how.
Paradoxically, this drama of departure has really served only to displace a crisis of belonging. Brexit plays out a conflict between Them and Us, but it is surely obvious after this week that the problem is not with Them on the continent. It’s with the British Us, the unravelling of an imagined community. The visible collapse of the Westminster polity this week may be a result of Brexit, but Brexit itself is the result of the invisible subsidence of the political order over recent decades.The battle for Britain?
It may seem strange to call this slow collapse invisible since so much of it is obvious: the deep uncertainties about the union after the Good Friday agreement of 1998 and the establishment of the Scottish parliament the following year; the consequent rise of English nationalism; the profound regional inequalities within England itself; the generational divergence of values and aspirations; the undermining of the welfare state and its promise of shared citizenship; the contempt for the poor and vulnerable expressed through austerity; the rise of a sensationally self-indulgent and clownish ruling class. But the collective effects of these interrelated developments do seem to have been barely visible within the political mainstream until David Cameron accidentally took the lid off by calling a referendum and asking people to endorse the status quo.
What we see with the lid off and the fog of fantasies at last beginning to dissipate is the truth that Brexit is much less about Britain’s relationship with the EU than it is about Britain’s relationship with itself. It is the projection outwards of an inner turmoil. An archaic political system had carried on even while its foundations in a collective sense of belonging were crumbling. Brexit in one way alone has done a real service: it has forced the old system to play out its death throes in public. The spectacle is ugly, but at least it shows that a fissiparous four-nation state cannot be governed without radical social and constitutional change.
A close look at the facts shows Farage is out to hijack British patriotism: to whip up a politics of division and hate; weaponise it by deploying the language of betrayal and treachery; and target, demonise and blame immigrants, Europeans, Muslims and anyone else who can be labelled “outsiders” or “the other”. Thus redefining our country as intolerant, inward-looking and xenophobic.
While his anti-immigrant views are well known, the full extent of his instinctive prejudice is shocking; from feeling “awkward” sitting on a train next to people not speaking English, to demanding local referendums on new Muslim mosques and, in a direct attack on free speech, proposing to ban university courses in European studies.
A recent video featured him and Trump cheerleader Steve Bannon discussing, apparently with no hint of irony, a worldwide campaign against globalisation, to be waged through foreign funding of nativist movements. Their plan is to destroy any institutions with the words “European” and “global” in their name.
But it is only because they and so many others have chosen to forget the massive carnage of two world wars, caused by uncontrolled European nationalism, that they can even contemplate a return to it.
