Teacher of the Queen

Most people, I imagine, will have seen Mrs Brown, the movie with Judi Dench and Billy Connolly, which details the close relationship between Queen Victoria and John Brown, the favourite Highland servant of Prince Albert. Victoria, in a mood of prolonged and morbid depression after he husband’s death, took comfort in Brown’s reassuring presence. Less well know is that when Brown died in his turn the aging queen found a substitute in another menial. His name was Abdul Karim, better known as the Munshi, or teacher.

Karim arrived from India in 1887, aged twenty-four, and soon acquired the kind of dominance over the royal household previously enjoyed by John Brown, another source of discomfort and annoyance to Bertie, the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII. He initially came as an Indian waiter, one of two selected to serve the Victoria during her Golden Jubilee, but the year after she appointed him “Munshi and Indian Clerk to the Queen Empress at a salary of 12 pounds per month.” In this particular capacity he began to teach the Queen Urdu, as well as introducing curry into the royal menus.

From this point his influence grew and grew. He was the subject of special favours, even being in attendance when the Queen met with foreign monarchs and prime ministers. The relationship has been given fresh significance by the discovery of a new archive of letters and photographs, as well as the Munshi’s own handwritten journal, as The Daily Telegraph reported recently.

The bond between the two was so close that it incited gossip at the time, especially after the Queen spent a night with the Munshi at Glassalt Shiel, the isolated Scottish cottage by Loch Muick that she had once shared with Brown and had not visited since his death in 1883. But the journal records a purely platonic relationship, not at all surprising considering the Queen’s age and the Munshi’s youth. At the time she insisted that all criticism of her Indian servant was based on jealousy and racial prejudice.

In retrospect it does appear unseemly for Victoria to have advanced two servants in such a fashion, a fashion that was bound to cause resentment within the royal household and speculation in the wider world beyond. But, looking at the situation with very modern eyes, it seems to me that both Brown and the Munshi filled a deep void in Victoria’s emotional life that opened after the death of Albert, a void the could not be filled by her immediate family, with whom she was always cold and formal, especially not by her wayward eldest son, whom she held partly responsible for the death of her beloved husband. The Munshi was no more than a surrogate.

Victorian Crime

There is a huge literature on this fascinating subject, from an analysis of statistical trends to the examination of individual cases, too much to detail here. What I will say is that crime, as we understand it today, might even be said to be the creation of the Victorian age. Literacy had created the demand for a popular press; and the press fed on the public's taste for crime, particularly in its more lurid forms.

Let's take one case where Victorian perceptions shaped, and continue to shape, how one particular case has been projected and understood: namely the Whitechapel Murders of 1888. Here we are in the realm of Jack the Ripper. He was a 'gentleman', was he not, one who may even have come all the way down to the slums from the palaces of royalty? Well, in fact, we know virtually nothing about the Ripper, because he was never caught. But the journalists of the day were quite happy to fulfil the popular prejudice, no doubt stimulated by the publication two years previously of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, that the Ripper was a 'toff', who got his 'pleasures' slumming in London's seedy east end.

'Mugging' was also the creation of the Victorian age, or at least the popular anxiety associated with the crime is. It began with the 'garrotting panic' of 1862. Assailants would attack a victim from the back, half-throttle and then rob him. The technique itself had been learned from the practice in convict ships, where it was used in restraining prisoners. The panic began when an MP was attacked in this fashion after leaving a late sitting in the Commons. Soon the press was full of adverts for 'anti-garrotte collars' for gentlemen!

The next big concern was over the nature of criminality itself. Most law-breakers, of course, were from the urban poor, the seedbed of the new 'criminal classes'. An explanation was required, beyond mere poverty of course, and was readily supplied by the likes of Edwin Chadwick, the Poor Law reformer, who believed criminality was the response of the idle and the feckless, tempted by easy returns as an alternative to honest labour. Temperance reformers placed the blame on alcohol, just as reformers in education blamed ignorance and lack of opportunity. For the evangelists, it was all due to the abandonment of the standards set by religion. With the growth of popular forms of Social Darwinism heredity became a factor; and by the end of the century the notion of the habitual criminal, tainted by birth and background, was gaining ascendency over the notions of morality and idleness. From this management and control became the dominant elements of law-enforcement; and so it remains today