Eternity work
Nothing in these days was left untouched by religious controversy. Religion was the air that the ‘respectable’ breathed. The religion of the day was in itself neither hot nor cold. Some parts were boiling while others were lukewarm. There was a Low Church of Evangelicals and Dissenters, and there was a High Church that moved towards Catholic ritual. There was also a Broad Church, Whig in its theology, that embraced a nationally based religion. Out of these great movements of faith came sects and groups that put their faith in general providence or special providence, in atonement or in hellfire. Calvinists, Methodists, Quakers, Arminians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Baptists were all part of an informal ‘Evangelical Alliance’ that looked for points of contact with the Anglicans. There was among them a general and discernible movement towards piety and righteousness. But that was only to be expected. Eight out of nine of a Cambridge crew, having won the Oxford and Cambridge boat race on the Thames, went on to the East End for their missionary work. Among the Anglicans of the ‘Established Church’ there was not so much enthusiasm. They worshipped that which was customary and respectable, and perhaps looked with more horror on a poor man than an evil man. As Samuel Butler wrote of a rural congregation in The Way of All Flesh (1903), set in 1834: they were ‘tolerators, if not lovers, of all that was familiar, haters of all that was unfamiliar; they would have been equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practised’. They were decent, undiscerning people.
A report by the census-takers of 1851 remarked that ‘working men, it is contended, cannot enter our religious structures without having impressed upon their notice some memento of their inferiority. The existence of pews, and the position of the free seats, are, it is said, sufficient to deter them from our churches.’ As for the indigent poor and those close to absolute poverty, no one really expected them to attend church or chapel. They would probably have been ejected if they attempted to do so. One costermonger admitted to Henry Mayhew, the social inquirer, that ‘the costers somehow mix up being religious with being respectable, and so they have a queer sort of feeling about it. It’s a mystery to them.’
What really interested observers was the fact that many of the ‘respectable’ classes had no faith at all. They were armoured with scepticism against the arguments of priests and preachers. Many of them did not know what to believe – if anything. The French historian Hippolyte Taine remarked that the average Englishman or Englishwoman believed in God, the Trinity and Hell, ‘although without fervour’. And that was the key. It was not a secular nation. It was an indifferent one. Hellfire preachers were regarded as a novelty and a spectator sport, even though they had many spirited followers. Ecstasies and faintings, so popular in the eighteenth century, were no longer the English style. The only source of communal passion now came in the form of hymns. The deathly hush of the English Sunday, denounced by Dickens among others, was a clear sign that the Church bred no passion and no enthusiasm. There was no sense of a popular faith which could still be found, for example, in Russia or America. There was instead an irritable dissatisfaction with the tenets of established faith; in particular the belief in hell was under siege. It became possible to be less dogmatic and less specific, with certain doctrines silently dropped. There still remained regional differences, however, that had been maintained since the seventeenth century; Anglicanism lay in the south-east of the country, for example, and Primitive Methodism in the south-west and north-west.
Lord Liverpool himself was of a ‘methodistical’ temper, and in 1812 had been instrumental in passing an act for the further toleration of Dissenters. William Cobbett, in his Rural Rides (1830), described them as ‘a bawling, canting crew’ and ‘roving fanatics’, but they had already become a large part of the congregation of England, from the Quakers to the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, all of whom held themselves apart from the Church of England. They in turn were prohibited from attending Oxford or Cambridge universities and were obliged to be married in chapels or buried in graveyards under the auspices of Anglican clergymen.
The largest religious group, after the orthodox, was that alliance between Evangelicals and utilitarians which did much to shape the temper of the age. The passion for moral reform was deep within both of them, with the belief in reason and the faith in renewal as the twin paths to enlightenment. To study and to labour, to preach and to denounce idleness and luxury; these were the twin elements of secular belief and religious faith which changed the nature of English sensibility. The Evangelicals practised the strictest interpretation of Scripture, a good companion to the ‘felicific calculus’ of the utilitarians who sought the greatest good for the greatest number. They shared pragmatism and dogmatism in equal measure, and were the moral agents for social as well as religious reform. ‘It is’, according to one of their number ‘eternity work’. But they were also zealous to redeem the time. A deluge of pamphlets and periodicals, concerned with self-improvement and practical morality, was aimed at anyone who could read.
Providence, progress and civilization were parts of God’s law. The Evangelicals preached individual regeneration, and the utilitarians promoted the doctrine of self-help. Their first success was the introduction of the treadmill into the regime of prisons, and by the 1830s their convictions had become public policy. Not all they preached was dour; the Evangelicals campaigned vigorously against the slave trade while the utilitarians attacked the Corn Laws and other obstacles to free trade. They demanded reform, and their joined forces helped to dissolve the politics of the 1820s. They drew in people who were on the brink of industrial change. George Eliot wrote that ‘the real drama of Evangelicalism – and it has abundance of fine drama for anyone who has genius enough to discern and reproduce it – lies among the middle and lower classes’. These were the classes who changed Britain utterly.
Charles Babbage, a Londoner born in Walworth in 1791, was one of the greatest inventors and analysts of the nineteenth century who fully fashioned what he called the ‘difference engine’ and the ‘analytical engine’, which are the direct predecessors of the digital computer. They were elaborate affairs of punched cards and dials which few people ever understood or now understand. Curiously enough, given his reputation as a reactionary force, the duke of Wellington seemed implicitly to realize the potential of the machines.
From the age of seventeen Babbage became obsessed with algebra; what made these figures live? He was so confident of his abilities with numbers that he dreamed of creating them in a mathematical process. He recollected that: ‘The first idea which I remember of the possibility of calculating tables occurred either in the year 1820 or 1821 … I expressed to my friend the wish that we could calculate by steam …’ This was in part a metaphor, since in a different account he recalled: ‘I am thinking that all these tables [pointing to the logarithms] might be calculated by machinery.’ Steam, engines and machinery were all part of the cloud of knowing. After he sketched some designs he fell ill with a nervous complaint. He had envisaged an engine for making mathematical tables which presaged a new world of machine tools and engineering techniques. It was so far ahead of other calculating tools that for his contemporaries it was equivalent to putting a television set in the hands of monkeys.
It was called the ‘difference engine’ because it computed tables of numbers by the method of finite differences. But then within a short time he began work on what became known as the ‘analytical engine’, which was essentially an automatic calculator. It worked like a cotton mill; the materials, the numbers, were kept in a storehouse apart from the mechanism until they were processed in the mill. Each part was designed to carry out its function, such as addition and multiplication, while being connected with every other part. He described it as an engine ‘eating its own tail’. He wrote that ‘the whole of arithmetic now appeared within the grasp of mechanism’. These reflections might have come from another world, and were ignored until the middle of the twentieth century. They have been described as ‘one of the great intellectual achievements in the history of mankind’. Few people in England showed the slightest interest.
The engine was out of its time. Its technology was too advanced to be understood adequately. It was the most ingenious and complex machine ever built, but it had leaped across a historical period which had yet to be assimilated. We cannot be sure how many other devices or inventions have fallen through the cracks of time. A replica of the ‘analytical engine mill’ is exhibited in the Science Museum of London and still resembles some strange god hauled from an unknown cave. Somehow it still remains out of time. There is also another survivor. Half the brain of Charles Babbage is preserved in the Hunterian Museum, with the other half in the Science Museum.
The fact that the name of Babbage is still not as well known as the poets and novelists of the period is testimony to the fact that the Victorian intelligentsia did not take kindly to applied science. One who persisted through the sheer weight of his genius was Jeremy Bentham. He may properly be described as the ‘pan-progenitor’ (to adapt one of his neologisms) of utilitarians and the felicific calculus. Although he began his work and his investigations in the eighteenth century, he is best seen in the context of the succeeding century. He was another great London visionary, born in Spitalfields in 1748, a practical genius who may be placed beside Babbage himself. Bentham was not widely known in his own lifetime, despite the plaudits that have been heaped on him ever since. He and Babbage can still be hailed as prophets without honour.
Bentham propounded in all his work for reform the simple belief in ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, a radical maxim that propelled him through the thorny ways of legal reform, prison reform and Poor Law reform. If he had been a Christian, he might have taken as his motto Luke 3:5 – the crooked ways will be made straight, and the rough ways smooth. He was in part responsible for the working of the Reform Act of 1832, which led the way to adult male suffrage, and propounded the notion that ‘every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty’. The pursuit of rational solutions by means of rational methods was the greatest problem of the age. It was the music of the machine, of competition and progress. To be or not to be was no longer the question. That had become, does it work?
Bentham also helped to establish the Mechanics’ Institutes, which became one of the self-proclaimed glories of the Victorian Age. They were a venue not only for mechanics but for clerks or apprentices or shopkeepers who had been stirred by glimpses of the world of knowledge before and, so far, beyond them. The Institutes in fact became the venue of the middle classes, always aspiring, rather than the manual labourers for whom they were originally intended. Nevertheless, many of the most interesting biographies and fictions of the period are concerned with the arduous and sometimes painful exercise of self-education in the face of difficulties. There were some who got up before dawn to study by candlelight, those who read by the light of a tavern fire, those who would walk thirteen miles for a bookshop, even those who paid a penny to read the newspaper in the local alehouse.
The nineteenth century was not necessarily an ally to religion, therefore, as later pages will show. The growing regard for science as a mode of knowledge was not helpful for those who fostered religious truth, and the increasing indifference to religion itself was one of the first signs of what would become a more secular society. The Christian faith became more fractured and uncertain. The drama of evolution superseded that of redemption, and it became clear that the scientific model offered more insights into the practical business of life than any pamphlet by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) is as quintessentially Victorian as the Great Exhibition or the Albert Hall. Its thesis is based upon the twin imperatives of struggle and competition, and in the consequent race of life the ‘northern forms were enabled to beat the less powerful southern forms’. There is nothing here of atonement, redemption or grace. It is a dark world indeed, dominated by the necessity of labour and the appetite for power, in which combat and slaughter are the principal components. To see Victorian civilization from the vantage point of Charles Darwin is to see it more clearly. He had also adopted Malthus’s doctrine that populations grow faster than their means of subsistence, and are thus doomed to extinction. This also is a key to Victorian melancholy, which was perhaps as influential as Victorian optimism.
It is of no surprise that the study of the gospels was losing ground to the investigation of stratigraphic geology. It is perhaps no more wonderful that the domain of science remained largely in the hands of Nonconformists rather than Anglicans. Geology had become the most popular of the sciences, and its adherents felt free to speculate upon the spans of millions of years. But the most significant aspect of geology in the nineteenth century lay in the fact that these adherents were amateurs drawn to the study through sheer intellectual curiosity. It was a topic for curates. The most prominent of the amateurs, however, was Mary Anning of Lyme Regis, born in 1799. Her father was a cabinetmaker but he soon began to neglect his occupation for the sake of fossil hunting. Lyme was the perfect location. The crumbling of the region’s cliffs had already begun in earnest and the fossils embedded therein were ripe for plucking. From an early age Mary Anning accompanied her father on fossil expeditions and it can only be assumed that his advice and her experience gave her an otherwise preternatural skill in recognizing and identifying the remains of previously unknown species. She was, according to a childhood friend, ‘a spirited young person of independent character who did not much care for undue politeness or pretence’. This bravura was generally laid to the fact that at the age of fifteen months she survived a great lightning strike which killed three people; she had been a sickly infant, as were so many of the babies of Lyme, but from that time forward she was spirited and adventurous.
Her pursuit survived her father’s death, which may even have quickened her search for what were known variously as Cupid’s wings, ladies’ fingers and devil’s toenails. Some of these she sold to visitors near the coach stop at the Blue Cups Inn in Lyme. It was not unusual for her to charge half a crown for an ammonite laid on a cloth with others on a table. Her first great success, however, came in the summer of 1811 when her younger brother, Joseph, came across the outlines of a strangely shaped head. It was embedded in a geological formation known as the Blue Lias, consisting of limestone and shale. He had no time to dig out the rest of the fossil, and the task fell to Mary. It took her a year of painstaking digging and excavating what seemed to some to be a large crocodile. But as she pieced it together, bone by bone, she eventually reconstructed a creature more than 17 feet long. It was to be called ichthyosaurus. From that time forward she became a geological celebrity. John Murray, a fellow enthusiast, noted: ‘I once gladly availed myself of a geological excursion and was not a little surprised at her geological tact and acumen. A single glance at the edge of a fossil peeping from the Blue Lias revealed to her the nature of the fossil and its name and character were instantly announced.’
It was believed astonishing that ‘this poor ignorant girl’ could talk with professors and other eminent geologists on their own terms and with equal knowledge. Yet she was not mentioned in lectures and she was not invited to colloquia. She was only a female. She wrote to a friend, Anna Maria Pinney, that ‘the world has used me so unkindly, I fear it has made me suspicious of all mankind. I hope you will pardon me, although I do not deserve it. How I envy you your daily visits to the museum!’ Pinney herself wrote of her that ‘men of learning have sucked her brains and made a great deal by publishing works of which she furnished the contents while she derived none of the advantages’.
In pursuit of the light of the early decades of the nineteenth century, therefore, the student could look in vain at John Henry Newman’s tracts or Charles Spurgeon’s gospel missions in Southwark. He or she might look instead at Humphry Davy and the beginning of electrochemistry, at John Dalton and the atomic hypothesis, Michael Faraday or Thomas Young. Religion was not of course altogether neglected. Books such as Henry Brougham’s Discourse on the Objects, Advantages and Pleasures of Science (1826), published by the Society for the Diffusion of Intellect, were seen as an advantageous branch of natural theology. Charles Lyell in Principles of Geology (1830–33) declared that ‘we discover everywhere the clear proofs of a Creative Intelligence, and of His foresight, wisdom and power’. Shorn of Darwin’s savage vision, this was better than a sermon in St Paul’s Cathedral.