Hail Victoria!

Who doesn't have a musty image of the Victorian age? I think of it colored, as in old daguerrotypes, in musty, copper or tin colors, or perhaps the color of faded pink flannel. Corsetted, of course, and otherwise old fashioned. You can imagine my distress recently, when I had a major epiphany that I was a classic, unapologetic and devout Victorian. Hail, Victoria!

When Queen Victoria was crowned, Britain was in the tumultuous throes of the Industrial Revolution. For half a century or more, enormous crowds of farmers, many pushed off their land by "foreclosure" filled the tenements and slums of London and the Midland factory cities. Dark clouds of coal fired smoke smeared everything black. Charles Dickens famously depicted the depths of London's poverty in Oliver Twist "Please, Sir: I want some more". Sir didn't like that at all. Just as our oligarchs balk at taxing. Alas! Victoria!

Of course, the Victoria I hearken to is not that of Oliver and Master Bates; it's the greatest renaissance of English literature perhaps ever: I list a few of the writers (there are more) but only two of the countless scientists who lay the groundwork for another revolution yet to come. Most of these writers were massively popular in their day, and almost all of them fell out of favor. I suspect they've drifted far enough into the past that we can properly assess them now. I have a hunch their stars shall rise. Hail Victoria!

 I have come to realize that Arts and Crafts wasn't about wallpaper and home decoration at all. These two giants of that movement were both deeply immersed in the politics of their age--both fanatical socialists. What they achieved was to forge an Aesthetic, a philosophy effectively that galvanized the taste and judgment of those "in charge" and a significant portion of the intelligentsia so that the British parliament and government were persuaded to enact enormous progressive legislation that transformed an absolute monarchy into a truly representative republic, and an economic system engineered for the aristocracy and privileged wealthy into a Fabian Socialist economic state--the Britain of today (pushed back, alas, by Thacksterism). Hail Victoria!

Arts and Crafts could be described as the last wave of Romanticism: and of course the "English Garden" of today was effectively created by these two great gardeners who essentially invented the perennial border, the rock garden and the wild garden  In whose giant footsteps we all tread to this day...

Hail Victoria!

Today the world is enmired in another revolution, far greater in its impact than the Industrial Revolution: the latest guise of the Anthropocene--"the Age of Information", the Technological revolution--call it by whatever euphemism you choose, is creating tumult that dwarves the devastation of the Industrial Revolution. I could not believe the numbers of tents crowding not just the freeways of Portland, Oregon, but on sidewalks throughout the city, filling all the parks and public spaces--tens of thousands of people who cannot, or will not live in houses. Other cities, including Denver, have this same phenomenon--perhaps not on quite so great a scale. Let's not even begin to enumerate the impact that computers have made on all of us--and the constantly morphing and utterly dis-assembled society we're trying to make sense of.

Arts and Crafts was preempted nearly 200 years ago: we need a new all-encompassing Aesthetic, a moral and political movement that can tame the unwieldy mess technology throws at us, and forge a society as staid, as civilized and as successful as the Victorian...In order to do so, let's look back at what happened in the last 19th Century in England as a model. Hail Victoria!

100 years ago LAST year (we couldn't celebrate it until THIS year) a bevy of people who were born in the Victorian era (many of them in England) founded the first rock garden society in the world in Victoria, British Columbia. (The Vancouver Island Rock and Alpine Garden Society: VIRAGS) I was honored to be invited to speak on behalf of the North American Rock Garden Society at their centenary meeting last Saturday, in Sidney. 

Never have I been more thrilled to go to this magical corner of our continent. Hail Victoria!