While the paintings of the British Victorian age may not jump instantly to mind when you consider art history, they reveal a panoram of social scenes. Created in the last decades of the 19th century, the paintings are grandiose in theme and execution and fabulous to look at. One might even say that one or two enormous paintings are Dickens novels on canvas.

The Chrysler’s new exhibition London Calling: Victorian Paintings from the The Royal Holloway Collection features paintings collected by Victorian capitalist Thomas Holloway, who adored these artists. He made his fortune selling Holloway’s Pills, used throughout the British Empire for indigestion. They were also said to cure social ills!

In the early 1880s after becoming successful, Holloway grew interested in art. He rejected the French Impressionists, who were just coming into their own, and instead purchased works by Gainsborough, Constable, and Turner for the art gallery of the Royal Holloway College, which he founded. But this exhibition is all about the successors of those great masters.

The saying goes that behind every successful man there is always a woman telling him he was wrong. Not the case with Jane Driver Holloway. She urged her husband to use his fortune to establish a college for women of the middle and upper middle classes, “because they are the greatest sufferers.” Mid-Victorians believed that there was a surplus population of women who had neither professional nor domestic skills. Key people at Vassar College convinced Holloway that an art gallery would be appropriate at Royal Holloway College. Between 1881 and 1883 Holloway bought 77 paintings, costing £84,000, equivalent to at least $90 million today.

The era of the reign of Queen Victorian (1837-1901) was a time of economic expansion amid abject poverty. While industrialization was taking place throughout Britain, others were homeless and starving. Child labor ran rampant despite the new laws. Three paintings in the exhibition by a group called the Social Realists reflect the new, diverse, urban population.

Sir Samuel Luke Fildes’ (1844-1927) Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward, 1874, could easily be a scene from Charles Dickens’David Copperfield. Here the homeless are lined up at the police station to get a ticket for a bed for the night at one of the casual wards of the workhouses. His characters are victims of “misfortune, crime, sickness, drunkenness or ignorance,” according to art critic Mary Cowling.The painting caused a sensation at the Royal Academy.

William Powell Frith (1819-1909) lumped first-, second-, and third-class passengers together in the enormous waiting room of The Railway Station, 1862, rendering the faces of real men and women. One critic called the monumental painting a historic chronicle of London’s “hideous present,” revealing the ideas and values of Victorian society. And Frank Holl (1845-1888) always sympathized with the needy and the poor. In Newgate: Committed for Trial, 1878, friends and family are visiting the prisoners behind bars as they await trial.

Some of the Victorian paintings in the exhibition are visual costume feasts, but two Millais paintings are not only gorgeous, but also depict tragic events. The Princes in the Tower, 1878, by Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896) shows Edward V, 12, and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York, 10, heirs to the throne. They apprehensively await their death by suffocation. Their uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, aspiring to the throne, had ordered their deaths shortly after King Edward IV had died.

Frith’s Princess Elizabeth in Prison at St. James, 1879, shows the pretty 15-year-old girl in prison shortly before she died there of a fever. The orientalist painting The Babylonian Marriage Market, 1875, by Edwin Longsden Long (1829-1891) depicts 11 exotic girls of ancient Babylon without dowries as they are about to be auctioned off. Landscapes and paintings of rural and peasant life were pleasing to the English, even though they did not make a sociological statement.

An unforgettable image by Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-1873) is philosophically titled Man Proposes, God Disposes, 1864. Carnivorous, tiny-brained polar bears chew on the remains of a failed expedition to the Arctic. The work is a commentary on the helplessness of mankind when removed from civilization.  The critics raved, saying that Landseer had elevated animal painting to a new, epic level.

London Calling: Victorian Paintings from the Royal Holloway Collection will be on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art through January 2, 2011. Call 757-664-6200 or go to www.chrysler.org for more information.

Ginger Levit is a private dealer in fine American and French paintings. She also writes about art and antiques for several publications.