Eminent Victorian

Tuesday, 15th September 2009

It's a long time since I was ten or eleven, so I can't say with any certainty which Victorians I learned about at my primary school. I'm pretty sure that Charles Dickens's must have been mentioned at some point. But Carlyle, Ruskin? No way. As a matter of fact (I'm talking about the late 1960s) I don't think we "did" the Victorians at all. If I had to name one person from that era that children of that age should learn about, I'd say Brunel. Gladstone and the rest can come later.

I can see why my new neighbour, Rod Liddle (welcome aboard) might think Mary Seacole is a symbol of "politically correct stupidity", but I think she's a very astute choice, especially in multiracial London. True, I have no idea how teachers approach the subject - for all I know they may be portraying her as the Angela Davis of the ward rounds. But anyone who actually read her autobiography "Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands", - a compelling and gossipy piece of work which finally came back into circulation in the 1980s - would know that she was a complex, self-willed figure who is, in some ways, more British than the British.

Incidentally, Boris Johnson wrote an fine column about all this some years ago. Eton hadn't taught him about Seacole. It was only when he went to one of his children's school plays that the name first came up:

When the applause had died down, I turned to my neighbour and chuckled sardonically. Hur hur, I said. Mary Seacole, eh? My daughter had briefed me that this "Mary Seacole" was a black nurse who was "just as important as Florence Nightingale", and I wanted to make it clear to my fellow parents that I was not taken in. As far as I could tell, history was being rewritten, for overtly political ends. I mean: Florence Nightingale we all knew. But this "Mary Seacole", I whispered to the Islington mums around me, she's just been invented, hasn't she? It's just political correctness, I said. They want to find a historic British role model for all those black nurses, don't they? Hmmm?
My neighbour looked at me with horror, as if to say, shaddap you Right-wing wacko with your numbingly predictable provocations; and so I contented myself with a last cynical snort, and fell silent. It was only when I got home that I was afflicted by a small pang of conscience, and thought that I had better check; and stone me, there was someone called Mary Seacole; and she was indeed black; and she was very distinguished.

One of these days she'll get the statue she deserves. Singer Willard White and footballer Theo Walcott are doing their bit for the campaign.

[Portrait of Mary Seacole by Albert Challen/National Portrait Gallery/Getty Images]

UPDATE: Rumbold offers a reasoned response over at Pickled Politics.