Doctor Who and the Victorians

When Doctor Who returned to our screens in 2005, Russell T. Davies was at great pains to show us the whole gamut of time and space in the first three episodes –  Alien invasion and the Doctor’s magical TARDIS!  The distant future, the year five billion and the End of the World!  Then travelling back in time, into history – real history, meeting Charles Dickens in 1869!

Well, if you’re going to travel into history, and show that you’re travelling into history, you’ve got to go for something really properly, iconically, historic, haven’t you?  It’s no coincidence therefore that the TARDIS’ first jaunt back in time since the good Doctor’s  return, was to the Victorian era.

After all, isn’t that what people expected, the Doctor, the perfect English gentleman and Sherlock Holmes of the stars, chasing aliens through foggy, cobbled streets, lined with gas lamps, top hats and horse drawn carriages?

Except... it wasn’t really like that, was it?

Queen Victoria reigned from 20 June 1837 until 22 January 1901, spanning 63 years and 216 days, the longest in British history up to this point, and a period of prosperity and perceived peace for the United Kingdom, despite it actually being at war with one nation or another the whole time, which included the Crimean War (where depsite a weak attempt at lying in The Sea Devils, the Third Doctor did not sustain a leg injury) as well as, towards the end of the 19th century, the Anglo-Zanzibar War and the Boer War.

The population of England almost doubled during her reign, from around 17 million at the beginning of the 1850s to 30.5 million at the time of Victoria’s death in 1901. During this same period, however,  around 15 million emigrants left the U.K. and settled mostly in the United States, Canada, and Australia.  It was still common in this time for criminals to be exiled to Australia, in much the same way as the time-travelling Doctor was committed to Earth in the early part of the Pertwee years, and of course one of Canada’s natives, one Sydney Newman, was rather influential on the good Doctor himself.

The political scene began to shift into a more recognisable shape, with the two parties heading  the House of Commons, the Whigs and the Tories, becoming the Liberals and the Conservatives respectively, around the late 1850s, and including such well known figures as Sir Robert Peel, Lord Palmerston, William Ewart Gladstone, and Benjamin Disraeli.

The Victorian era also saw a Battle of the Styles between the Gothic and the Classical, something later echoed in Doctor Who’s own production as the Gothic Hinchcliffe years gave way to the Classically-influenced Williams tales.

In Victoria’s time, the Gothic Revival in architecture became increasingly significant during the period, with the Gothic style supported by the critic John Ruskin, who argued that it epitomised communal and inclusive social values, as opposed to Classicism, which he considered to epitomise mechanical standardisation.

The middle of the 19th century saw The Great Exhibition of 1851, the first World's Fair, which showcased the greatest innovations of the century, and it’s here that the Doctor attempts to visit to cheer his friends in Time-Flight after the death of Adric at the conclusion of the previous story Earthshock.  The Master has other ideas, though, and denies the TARDIS crew a quick grieve around the Crystal Palace.

The Palace itself, a modular glass and iron structure, was the first of its kind, and has since become considered to be the prototype of Modern architecture, but was condemned by Ruskin as the very model of mechanical dehumanisation in design, so perhaps it’s an odd choice of destination after you’ve just squared off against the ultimate in mechanical dehumanisation – the Cybermen – anyway.

Later the same year, the Cybermen themselves arrived in London (The Next Doctor) to indulge in another Victorian passtime - Child labour, when they enslaved Frederick Lake and the cast of Oliver to help build their Cyber-King.

The era was notorious for the employment of young children in factories and mines, and as chimney sweeps.  Charles Dickens himself (aged 12) worked in a factory with his family in a debtors' prison.
Perhaps not on a par with the Cybermen themselves, but scientific advances during Victoria’s reign were plentiful, with perhaps the most celebrated advance in scientific theory coming with the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

Incidentally, this same year saw the birth of Victoria and Albert's first grandchild, Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, later is born — later Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German Emperor and King of Prussia, who led the German people into the First World War, whose effects the Doctor felt in 1969’s The War Games.
Darwin’s theories on evolution play a central part in 1989’s Ghost Light, wherein the Seventh Doctor and Ace arrive in a macabre Victorian house in 1883, probably around the same time that the Ninth Doctor was posing for a sketch on the picturesque molten slopes of Krakatoa, with the Third also nearby according to a throwaway allusion in 1970’s Inferno.

The classic creepy Victorian house of Ghost Light is filled with not only the trophies of great hunter Redvers Fenn-Cooper, but also an alien menagerie headed by Josiah Smith.  Smith plans to use Fenn-Cooper's invitation to meet Queen Victoria to get close to her so that he can assassinate her and subsequently take control of the British Empire.  Even in this day and age, monsters into racial purity fail when they try to use an invite to the palace to further their own agenda...

The "Crisis of Faith" brought about by Darwin’s theory stated that natural selection and survival of the fittest were the reasons species survived, which called into question Christian beliefs and therefore Victorian values.  People felt the need to find a new system on which to base their values and morality, and combined both their religious beliefs with individual duty - to God, fellow man, social class, neighbour, the poor and the ill.

Victorian morality was characterised  by a set of values preaching (if not always practising) sexual restraint, low tolerance of crime and a strict social code of conduct, and due to the expansion of her Empire, many of Victoria’s values were spread across the world, though in an often self-contradictory way, in that the outward appearance of dignity and restraint went hand in hand with prostitution and child labour.  Social movements arose with the intent of improving the harsh living conditions for those at the sharp end of the rigid class system.

So why is this iconic period of history something we see as such a natural fit for Doctor Who?  Pre-2005, the Doctor hadn’t really had much time for the Victorian era at all, with a mere handful of visits in around 30 years of adventuring.

The First Doctor, admittedly perhaps more of an Edwardian gent, saw all corners of history during his tenure, from Marco Polo’s journey to Cathay to Nero’s burning of Rome and Richard the Lionheart’s Crusade, but apart from a somewhat disastrous pit-stop on the Mary Celeste in 1872 (in 1965’s The Chase), he largely eschewed the British Empire of Victoria’s day, instead spying on Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (The Chase, again) and visiting the OK Coral in Tombstone in 1888.

Perhaps 1964’s The Reign of Terror was inspired by Charles Dickens’ 1859 work A Tale of Two Cities, so maybe we’re seeing the French Revolution through something of a Victorian haze, and although this Doctor might not have influenced Victorian events too much,  it could be the case that at least one Victorian influenced the Doctor’s early travels.

We’ve certainly seen Dickens inspire the Eleventh Doctor on the Victorian-style planet of the Scrooge-like Kazran Sardick, where the Time-Lord rips off wholesale the author’s most infamous work and turns the monster into his very own ghost of Christmas future.

It’s the Second Doctor who first sets a televisual foot on the shores of Victoria’s Blighty, but even then it’s against his will, abducted back through time to 1866 by Edward Waterfield at the behest of the Daleks in 1967’s The Evil of the Daleks (not Abducted by the Daleks – different story altogether.  So I’m told.)

We are introduced to some recognisable Victorian character types, the nervous and tortured Waterfield, the villainous and manipulative Maxtible, the cheerful cockney maid Molly, Maxtible’s cold and haughty daughter Ruth, and the highly strung rake Arthur Terrell to name but a few of the characters that seem to have walked straight out of any number of Dickens novels.

In fact the overwhelming majority of Dickens’ works, including all his novels and the Ninth Doctor’s favourite short story ‘The Signal-Man’, were all published while Victoria was on the throne, so perhaps that’s one reason why we imagine the Christmas card scenes that we do.

Of course, if there’s one character who positively screams Victoriana more than any other, it’s obviously Sherlock Holmes.  Er, except that less than half of Conan Doyle’s famous stories were published during the reign of Queen Vic.  Never mind, though, because not only does Holmes’ shadow loom large over arguably one of the most Victorian of the Doctor’s adventures (The Talons of Weng-Chiang), but he also lends the same plot point to not one but two different Doctor Who stories.

The Adventure of the Norwood Builder, published two years after Victoria’s death, hinges on the conceit of a hidden room whose existence the hero deduces by virtue of one corridor being shorter than another parallel to it, a neat trick that we see not only in The Evil of the Daleks but also in 1979’s City of Death.

This isn’t all the Doctor’s learnt from a Victorian, though.  He tells Polly in 1967’s The Moonbase that he studied medicine in Glasgow in 1888 under Joseph Lister, although he’s often denied since that he’s “that kind of Doctor.”

Joseph Lister introduced antiseptics to Medicine in 1867 in the form of Carbolic acid, and instructed his hospital staff to wear gloves and wash their hands, instruments, and dressings with a phenol solution.  In 1869, while the Ninth Doctor was gadding about Victorian Cardiff with Charles Dickens, Lister invented a machine that would spray carbolic acid in the operating theatre during surgery to sterilise surgical equipment.

While the Doctor was making his studies in Glasgow, in the London of 1888, a very different, somewhat scalier, crime fighter had just found the infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper (found him rather stringy in fact, according to Madame Vestra in A Good Man Goes to War), but despite his previously unexplained disappearance, Jolly Jack’s still the prime suspect when some three years later young women start to diappear in the vicinity of Henry Gordon Jago’s Palace Theatre (The Talons of Weng-Chiang).

Dickens and Conan-Doyle might be authors with an obvious influence on the Doctor, but – if 1985’s Timelash is to be believed – the Doctor himself influenced another writer of the age when he was accompanied to Karfel by a young Herbert George Wells.

We know the Doctor’s no stranger to shameless name-dropping, but these other Victorian-era celebrities, such as Vincent Van Gogh, pale in insignificance to the Empress of India herself, of course.  The Third Doctor once claimed (in The Curse of Peladon) to have attended Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1838, but the Tenth Doctor met HRH herself in 2006’s Tooth and Claw.

So what about Victoria herself?

Well, as any fan of popular time travel show “Doctor Who” knows, Victoria Waterfield was a companion to Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor between 1967 and 1968, orphaned by those nasty Daleks doing away with her Dad, the somewhat hapless Edward Waterfield.

Waterfield and his colleague Theodore Maxtible have polished up some mirrors in a time travel  experiment and inadvertently created a link between Maxtible’s house in 1888 and the Dalek city on Skaro, the crazy fools! The Daleks have abducted Victoria (okay, that one was on purpose) in order to blackmail her father into selling non-antique Victoriana in 1966 to lure the Doctor back in time.

While Waterfield eventually redeems himself by dying to save the Doctor's life, this leaves Victoria a homeless orphan, and she decides to join the Doctor and Jamie McCrimmon on their travels.  She’s a typical, fragile lady of the era she’s named after, frequently screaming when faced with creatures like the Cybermen, Yeti and Ice Warriors.

Nevertheless, she often displays an inner strength, such as caring for Kemel (The Evil of the Daleks) and standing up to Captain Hopper’s sexism (The Tomb of the Cybermen).  She may be young, but she’s not as reckless as her fellow traveller, Jamie, who is very protective towards and fond of Victoria, and is heartbroken when she chooses to leave at the conclusion of the Fury from the Deep, when she decides to leave the TARDIS and settle with the Harris family.

But what’s that, you meant the other Victoria? Oh, okay, then...

Her Majesty encounters the Tenth Doctor and Rose on the Scottish moors in 1879, en route to Balmoral Castle after another failed assassination attempt (the assassins obviously weren’t so deadly in Vic’s day), and they join her in travelling to the Torchwood Estate, a favourite stopover of her late husband Prince Albert, to spend the night.

It’s bad luck that they’ve booked in on the same night as some kung fu monks and a Werewolf, but the father of the estate’s owner, Sir Robert, had conspired with Prince Albert to create a powerful laser using a specially designed telescope and the Queen's Koh-i-Noor diamond.  As a reward for his help, the Queen knights the Doctor but also banishes him from the British Empire, having been shocked by the Doctor’s dangerous and “dark” lifestyle.

She then goes on to create the Torchwood Institute to help defend Britain from further alien attacks, so considering the monarch’s reputation for repression and prudery, not only did she manage to pop out nine sprogs but she also lets Captain Jack Harkness loose on anything with a pulse...

Of course, Victoria herself never actually said “We are not amused”, nor “Elementary, my dear Watson” nor “Beam me up, Scotty” apparently, but it’s nice to imagine she did.