Learning Resources

This resource can be used to connect with several parts of the KS3 Curriculum for England and Wales, but particularly the following:

KS3 History – “ideas, political power, industry and empire: Britain, 1745-1901”

KS3 Art and Design – “about the history of art, craft, design and architecture, including periods, styles and major movements from ancient times up to the present day”

Additional connections might also be made to the English curriculum and the Citizenship curriculum, as discussed below.

OBJECTIVES

Students who use this learning resource will be able to:

• Describe British use of soft and hard power, including the role of military and/or police forces, education, and domination over nature, to maintain control over colonies.

• Analyse the role of women in Victorian Britain, what power they exercised and the limits of that power.

• Use primary documents to demonstrate the places and spaces where racially-minoritized people existed in Britain, and understand their role(s) in Victorian society.

• Explain how art and literature can endorse and/or offer alternative models to dominant societal values.

OVERVIEW

Britain in the 19th century was at the height of its imperial power. Although the empire would grow larger (following colonial concessions by Germany after the First World War), it was during Victoria’s reign that British people were most aware of and most connected to the Empire and its colonies. Yet it was also during this time period that scientific racism (through sciences and pseudo-sciences such as anthropology and phrenology) and cultural production around the ‘exotic Other’ heightened and hardened racialised and gendered hierarchies within Britain. Through first looking broadly at policies (official and unwritten) of the British government around race and gender; then at the reaction to British imperial policies within a specific artistic movement (the pre-Raphaelites); and finally at the life and career of a colonial-born, racialised woman working as a model in Britain within that artistic movement (Fanny Eaton), students will gain greater understanding of the power structures and interconnectedness within Britain and the Empire, the cultural movements that sustained and resisted imperial policies, and the lives of individuals materially and emotionally changed and affected by the British Empire.

Lesson 1: The British Empire and colonial ‘others’

Lesson 2: The Angel of the House: Women in Victorian Britain

Lesson 3: Black people in Victorian Britain

Lesson 4: The Pre-Raphaelite rejection of Victorian values

Lesson 4a [art and design]: Portraits of Racially-Minoritized People

Lesson 5: Fanny Eaton as Black Briton, Victorian woman, and pre-Raphaelite model