All these opinions are widely held today, and each has a germ of truth, but not one of them is wholly supportable.  It is true that by today’s standards, Victorians were repressed, but it is far from clear that they were worse off, practically or psychically.  It must have been a pleasure, at least if one were in the right class, to have lived in a world of certainty about proper behavior.  There is lots to be said for civility and modesty, for casting aside these virtues leaves behind a coarser, cruder world.  True, Victorians carried modesty to absurd levels with the bathing machine, but it is possible to go to far in the other direction – visitors to nudist camps readily recognize that most people are more attractive when covered.   

 Supposedly, our Victorian forebears excluded sex from their lives, though this cannot be the whole truth – otherwise they would not be forebears.  But whatever they did, they certainly did not talk endlessly about it in public, which seems to be the modern disposition.  It is hard to imagine a Victorian President Clinton, though we might all rest a little easier if we had one.   

 Queen Victoria lends her name to the modern view of prudery, but it was her husband, Prince Albert, who made a point of straitlaced behavior.  Whether she shared his views is arguable – the current movie Mrs. Brown suggests that she did not – but she recognized the importance of her position and actions in guiding the course of the nation, apparently to a greater extent than her successors at Buckingham Palace.  Of course, Victoria and Albert did not have to contend with a press and television corps single-mindedly pursuing indications of sexual misbehavior and eagerly offering whatever tidbits they find. 

 While he was alive, Prince Albert embodied the rectitude and energy of the nation.  He organized the Great Exhibition of 1851, at which Britain put on show her vast industrial and artistic achievements, an event that foreshadowed the Victoria and Albert Museum, dedicated in 1909.  He died when he was just 42, and the Queen, who was destined to live another 40 years, was devastated.  But, true to tradition, she carried on with a stiff upper lip, indeed a rather prominent upper lip, as photographs of her in her later years attest.  There she appears dour, but as a young woman she looked quite lovely, and she did manage to produce nine children, three of whom became kings.   

She took her responsibilities seriously.  As Queen, she had a whim of iron, reflective of the certainties of the age.  Her instructions to the Earl of Balfour on the eve of the Boer War included the admonition, “We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat.”  Though her guidance was stern, Great Britain flourished.  Perhaps it is so, as Freud hypothesized, that sexuality repressed sublimates to creativity in other realms.  If true, we are all better off for it today, for during the sixty-four years from 1837 to 1901 that define the Victorian era, England and Scotland produced hundreds of women and men whose accomplishments make their names familiar today.     

  But how can a time and place that produced so much writing and painting of enduring beauty, so much original thinking in science and political philosophy, so much inventiveness in industrial processes and ordinary living, so much architecture of grace and nobility be called repressed?  It was the time of poets Elizabeth Barrett, Robert Browning, George Byron, Thomas Hardy, Algernon Swinburne, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and William Wordsworth; of writers Charlotte Bronte, Samuel Butler, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Beatrix Potter, George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells; of painters John Constable and William Orchardson.  It was the age of Thomas Macaulay, Benjamin Disraeli, and William Gladstone. 
 

It was a time of enlightenment.  Smallpox was almost totally eradicated in Britain, thanks to universal vaccination.  Robert Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scouts.  Florence Nightingale convincingly demonstrated the importance of hygienic medical care.  And in the British Museum Karl Marx produced the treatise that would largely determine the course of history in the next century.  During this time were built the Botanical Gardens at Kew, the Houses of  
 

Strikingly absent from these lists are British composers, for there was only one, and he is not usually put in a class with contemporary continental composers like Berlioz, Bizet, Chopin, Mendelsohn, Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, and Wagner.  But Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan was a remarkable composer of songs whose familiarity and singability conceal the wit and inventiveness of their rhythms, modulations, and orchestrations.  It was principally in association with William Schwenk Gilbert that he became known and is remembered today.  His compatriots at the time thought he might be Britain’s answer to the talent of continental composers, but he never rose quite to their heights.  Still, he left behind a legacy of song and melody that cannot be heard without a gladdening of heart, sometimes rising to the heights of the great composers. 
 

 Some of Sullivan’s music is banal, though still wonderfully singable, as in Come, Friends who Plow the Sea, a melody more familiar as Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here.  But some soars.  Twenty Lovesick Maidens We (also in today’s program) is as pretty an opening chorus as can found in all opera.  
 

Sullivan sought other librettists, but never found anyone who provided him with the same inspiration as Gilbert did.  He tried at least many others, finally remarking, “There is no Sullivan without a Gilbert.”  Stimulated by a remark from Queen Victoria, “Mr. Sullivan, you should try an opera,” made in the days when an offhand remark from a queen was a royal command, he made one foray into opera – Ivanhoe.  His effort aroused great hopes, but in the event everyone, including Sullivan, was disappointed. 
 

It is ironic the times of Victoria and Albert should be thought of today as if benighted.  They were different, of course, but looking back more carefully, one sees that they were times of creativity, inventiveness, grace, and humor, without which we should all be impoverished.