1 - A Royal Thanksgiving: Disease and the Victorian Social Body

Summary

On a bright and sunny February day in 1872, Britons and foreigners alike, rich and poor, packed the troop-lined London streets. Buckingham Palace to St. Paul’s Cathedral was awash with people jostling to catch a glimpse of a carriage whose occupants included Queen Victoria and her son, the thirty-year-old heir to the throne, Prince Albert Edward (later Edward VII). The occasion was one of the most grandiose public spectacles of the nineteenth century, providing a model for Queen Victoria’s 1887 Golden and 1897 Diamond Jubilees. But whereas the latter two events marked continued rule and expanding empire, the 1872 outpouring of British nationalism was a celebration of restored health. It was a victory, popular rhetoric pronounced, against one of the Victorian period’s most feared infectious diseases. Queen Victoria had declared the date, February 27, as a National Thanksgiving—to celebrate the recovery of her son after his prolonged bout with typhoid fever. The event was, the Illustrated London News remarked, “an occasion for the grandest outburst of unanimous popular emotion witnessed here since the age of the Tudors.” The Thanksgiving was an extravagant celebration. It was a promise of the future of the monarchy, no doubt, but also spoke to the health of a nation. The public spectacle, in other words, was not only a physical and spatial coming together but also a sentimental cultural gathering. At no other point in nineteenth-century British history had a disease, “a most insidious, treacherous, and threatening disorder,” left such an indelible mark on British national identity.

The 1872 Thanksgiving provides a vivid lens through which to view the broader contemporary discourse on typhoid fever. Such a focus affords a unique opportunity to investigate the history of infectious disease, one that illuminates the connections between the personal, clinical, and cultural realms of sickness. The first half of the chapter focuses on the prince’s sickness, his recovery, and the February Thanksgiving. The events are a powerful example of how a private sickbed became popularized and commodified by a new English middle-class culture. The public nature of the sickness, furthermore, wrought object lessons for how the nation should grieve but also how it should celebrate recovery from disease.