The March of Empire and the Victorian Conscience
Look around you and see what is the characteristic of your country and of your generation at this moment. What a yearning, what an expectation, amid infinite falsehoods and confusions, of some nobler, more chivalrous, more god-like state! Your very costermonger trolls out his belief that “there’s a good time coming,” and the hearts of gamins, as well as millenarians, answer, “True!”… And for flesh, what new materials are springing up among you every month… railroads, electric telegraphs… chemical agriculture, a matchless school of inductive science, and equally matchless school of naturalist painters—and all this in the very workshop of the world!
—Charles Kingsley, Yeast, 1851
There it stood—unreal, yet true—the unbelievable, the mighty structure of steel and glass, spreading its gigantic majesty over Hyde Park: England’s Great Exhibition Hall, soon to be named Crystal Palace. On May 1, 1851 it was officially opened by the Queen, the Prince Consort in attendance. Actually it was the latter’s project brought to life; he had fostered it, helped in its planning and in its fulfilment. Its creation was the work of that fabulous gardener’s son, Joseph Paxton. Two thousand feet long, four hundred feet wide, sixty-six high—glass, buttressed by iron, many of its parts prefabricated! Prophecy and fortress of reassurance and pride, its transepts rose over one hundred feet. The architects had taken care to protect the ecological beauties of Hyde Park, for the building enclosed its finest elms.
What was probably the first World’s Fair brought together thirteen thousand exhibitors from many parts of the world, with their numerous products—handicrafts as well as machinery. One half of the exhibits were of England’s or her colonies’ manufacture; among foreigners, French and German products stood out. Here was the world’s plenty—reaping machines from America, the Jacquard loom, the electric telegraph, agricultural implements—a physical compendium of modern technology. And not least, the building itself, another superb example of modern architecture—a fit monitory counterpart and answer to the prevailing taste for Gothic architecture,
so graceful, so delicate, so airy, that its translucent beauty remains graven on my memory, wrote Lord Redesdale… No mere human hand and hammers and builders’ tools could have wrought such a miracle.1
Not even Coleridge’s “magic dome,” that fantasy that his Kubla Khan had raised, could compete with this tribute to the modern spirit…
Thomas Babington Macaulay rejoiced,
… A most gorgeous sight; vast, graceful; beyond the dreams of Arabian romances…2
And lest all this seem of the ancient past, the modern reader will rejoice to learn that the refreshments, including non-alcoholic beverages (de rigueur, of course) were provided by the firm of Schweppes…
That such a vast enterprise should have been completed within six months was merely another mark of England’s prepotency, underlined by the exhibition of her steam engines—“the trophies of her bloodless war.”
It was, of course, particularly fitting that the ceremonies and visits to Crystal Palace be accompanied by due thanks to the Lord Almighty in various houses of worship, not excluding St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey. Thus was the Holy Gospel joined to those other no less sacred ones, the gospels of work, of peace, and Free Trade… a tribute to the “working bees of the world’s hive.” And the six million visitors who streamed into those magnificent halls might have been reassured by the words of the very eminent William Whewell, D.D., Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, who proclaimed that
… Here, the man who is powerful in the weapons of peace, capital and machinery, uses them to give comfort and enjoyment to the public whose servant he is, and thus becomes rich while he enriches others with his goods…3
If anything else were needed to underline the “grandeur” and meaning of the Crystal Palace, it was there too—if not immediately in Hyde Park, then in the north of England. What was symbol here was reality there: the vast factories and mines, with their chimneys belching black smoke, with their machines roaring, with their thousands of men, women, and children, underground and above ground, laboring like “bees”—sweating, panting, scurrying to affirm England’s greatness…
England’s most popular poet—a master of catchy jingles—Martin Tupper, exulted:
We travel quicker now than Isthmians might,
In books we quaff the veriest Hebe’s chalice;
All wonders of the world gladden the sight
In that world’s wonder-house, the Crystal Palace;
And everywhere is Might enslaved to Right.
Queen Victoria rejoiced:
This day is one of the greatest & most glorious of our lives, with which, to my pride and joy the name of my dearly beloved Albert is forever associated! It is a day which makes my heart swell with thankfulness.4
Prince Albert too was happy, for he saw in the Crystal Palace and the attendant ceremonies a celebration of Peace, all signs pointing to the eventual realization of the “unity of mankind.”
Was the nightmare of the “Hungry ’40s” done with once and for all? Were the terror and panic of 1848 and 1849, the contagion of the revolutions on the Continent, and the fright at the Chartist uprising and demonstrations of 1848 exorcised, never to return? Was the marriage of Order and Change to be realized?
So it seemed. For Britain was entering upon a period of prosperity unprecedented in her history. Yet amid all the Hosannahs to Peace and Progress and Wealth, there were mingled expressions of concern, such as that of Prince Albert himself:
We are entering upon most dangerous times in which Military Despotism and Red Republicanism will for some time be the only Powers on the Continent, to both of which the Constitutional Monarch of England will be equally hateful. That the calm influence of our institutions, however, should succeed in assuaging the contest abroad must be the anxious wish of every Englishman.5
* * *
The greatest and most highly civilized people that ever the world saw, have spread their dominion over every quarter of the globe…, have created a maritime power which would annihilate in a quarter of an hour the navies of Tyre, Athens, Carthage, Venice, and Genoa together, have carried the science of healing, the means of locomotion and correspondence, every mechanical art, every manufacture, every thing that promotes the convenience of life, to a perfection which our ancestors would have thought magical….The history of England is emphatically the history of progress…”
—T. B. Macaulay, “Sir James Mackintosh,” 1835
It was no secret: God was English. Else why should He have showered so many of his benefactions upon Britain? Did He not, in Carlyle’s words, appear to have conferred upon that land the “grand industrial task of conquering some half or more of the Terraqueous Planet for the use of man”? And did we not have the Rev. Charles Kingsley’s word, that
as it has pleased God that… the father of inductive science, Bacon Lord Verulam, should have been an Englishman, so it has pleased Him, that we, Lord Bacon’s countrymen, should improve that precious heirloom of science, inventing, producing, exporting, importing, till it seems as if the whole human race, and every land from the equator to the pole must henceforth bear the indelible impress and sign manual of English science…6
And for reassurance, there is Lord Shaftesbury’s affirmation that “the safety of the English people is the special care of Providence”?7
There could be no doubt: Great Britain was the European power of indisputable preeminence. Her imperial sway extended to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and India. She was first in world commerce and industry. And between 1849 and 1870 she enjoyed almost uninterrupted prosperity. Until 1870 she was unrivaled as a world power. Was it any wonder she could boast dazzling statistics such as the growth of population in her industrial cities, where between 1801 and 1850 Manchester showed an increase of roughly 400%; Leeds and Sheffield, 300%; Bradford, 900%, and so on?… In 1850 her coal output was 56 million tons a year; pig iron 2 million tons. In her close to two thousand cotton factories there were over three hundred thousand workers. There were five thousand miles of railroads. And she possessed 60% of the world’s ocean tonnage.8
The market value of British exports quadrupled between 1842 and 1870; and the gross national income, over half a billion pounds in 1851, was to be doubled by 1881.9 By 1871 close to five hundred thousand worked in cotton mills…
World’s workshop, banker, shipbuilder, clearing house… such triumphs rejoiced the heart of manufacturer, banker, and shipbuilder. Nor were the Tory landowners any the less content. “At the beginning of the Victorian era, no aristocratic landowner possessed less than 10,000 acres; by 1883 twenty-eight noblemen owned estates of 100,000 acres each.”10
If God, who had so favored that country, was English, surely he was a Protestant God, not the Roman One. So once again hear the Rev. Charles Kingsley, bitter anti-Papist, fervent in his adoration of England’s progress:
When your party compare sneeringly Romish Sanctity and English Civilization, I say, “Take you the Sanctity, and give me Civilization!… Give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning jenny and the railroad, Cunard’s liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some point at least, in harmony with the universe, and that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchist and destroying Devil, and therefore must be the Ordering and Creating God.”11
And other equally pious souls would echo their, “He hath not done so with any people.”12
All evidence proved it, all voices proclaimed it. Thomas Babington Macaulay, the most persuasive and eloquent of the moderate liberals, enshrined it in his brilliant History of England, seeing in his age the fulfilment of the promise announced in the English “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. As Carlyle’s French Revolution had been the voice of warning, so Macaulay’s was the voice of gratulation. We have had our Revolution. Period. Only ours is a conservative Revolution, and Whiggism is its highest manifestation. The Reform of 1832 proved the triumph of a “liberal” conservatism, giving the vote to those who most deserved it—the middle classes.13
From the seats of the mighty, Lord Palmerston affirmed it:
We have shown the example of a nation in which every class of society accepts with cheerfulness that lot which Providence has assigned to it, while at the same time each individual of each class is constantly trying to raise himself in the social scale—not by injustice and wrong, not by violence and illegality—but by persevering good conduct, and by the steady and energetic exertion of the moral and intellectual faculties with which the Creator has endowed him.14
The Gospel of Work assumed a new authority and fervor. Carlyle had cried, “Produce! Produce!” and from his Italian retreats, Robert Browning was communicating a message direct from Heaven, “All service ranks the same with God.” And in England, Samuel Smiles had composed that new bible, Self-Help….
The Irish Famine and the hunger of the 1840s had in 1846 forced a repeal of the Corn Laws which had so favored the landowner; and bread was now cheaper. Peel’s wish that “we must make this country a cheap country for living,” was more hopeful than realizable at the moment,15 but there was cause for contentment now. In the marketplaces, the exchanges, and the manor houses of landlord and manufacturer an inaudible Requiem was celebrated, and the Revolution that had threatened in 1848 was, so it seemed, quietly buried. The lips whispered, “Requiescat,” anxiety added, “Nec resurgat!”
It was not only the Tory landlord of Tennyson’s poem “Walking to the Mail” that was frightened, recalling past lower-class uprisings:
I once was near him, when his bailiff brought
A Chartist pike. You should have seen him wince
As from a venomous thing: he thought himself
A mark for all, and shuddered, lest a cry
Should break his sleep by night, and his nice eyes Should see the raw mechanic’s bloody thumbs
Sweat on his blazon’d chairs; but, sir, you know
That these two parties still divide the world—
Of those that want, and those that have: and still
The same old sore breaks out from age to age
With much the same result…
Even the formidable Duke of Wellington, England’s staunchest Tory and hero, could not forbear certain doubts. Shortly before his death in 1852 he attended “a social gathering at which a local clergyman led the assembly in this traditional song: ‘God bless the squire and all his relations—And keep us poor people in our proper stations’.” “‘By all means,’ murmured the old warrior under his breath, ‘if it can be done’.”16
* * *
High hopes that burned like Stars sublime
Go down i’ the Heaven of Freedom,
And true hearts perish in the time
We bitterliest need ’em;
But never sit we down and say
There’s nothing left but sorrow;
We walk the Wilderness To-day,
The Promised Land To-morrow.
So wrote the Chartist poet Gerald Massey after the defeat of the great Chartist demonstration of April 10, 1848.17
It was a day that few of the thousands who flocked to the Crystal Palace in 1851 and 1852 were likely to forget—some with relief at the outcome, others with deep regret or even heartbreak. It was the last echo of the vast revolutionary wave that had swept over their limited world, the closing act of a great drama. For the Chartists it was a shattering tragedy.
For April 10 and the Great Charter were but the culmination of a seething anger that had been gathering during the “Hungry ’40s”—a reflection of the Great Famine, of the disenchantment of the lower classes with the Reform Act of 1832 and its betrayals—a “reform” that had benefited them not at all, but which had merely strengthened their masters, the manufacturing class; disenchantment with the minimal fruits of the Corn Law repeal; a reaction to the poor crops and hunger. Finding new life, Chartism once more renewed its agitation for parliamentary reform and universal franchise. An explosive Ireland contributed both a partial leadership and additional momentum to the movement.
It needed but the news from Paris to bring about an eruption…
Louis-Philippe’s abdication and the proclamation of a French republic—such was the word that was brought to a meeting of the Fraternal Democrats at the “White Hart” tavern in Drury Lane:
The effect was electrical. Frenchmen, Germans, Poles, Magyars sprang to their feet, embraced, shouted, and gesticulated in the wildest enthusiasm. Snatches of oratory were delivered in excited tones, and flags were caught from walls, to be waved exultantly, amidst cries of “Hoch! Eljen! Vive la République!” Then the doors were opened, and the whole assemblage… with linked arms and colours flying, marched to the meeting place of the Westminster Chartists in Dean Street, Soho. There another enthusiastic fraternization took place, and great was the clinking of glasses that night in and around Soho and Leicester Square.18
The illustrious Duke of Wellington had been advising intense preparation for a war with France; the income tax was raised from 7d. to one shilling in the pound to defray the expenses of preparedness; while the royal house was welcoming the escaped Louis-Philippe, who, as the scarcely pseudonymous “Mr. Smith,” touched the soil of England with the words: “I have always felt pleasure in coming to England. Thank God I am in England once more.”19
Unfortunately for him, it was not to be the short visit he had anticipated. He could not know, of course, that his royal successor Louis-Napoleon, then also in England, was waiting to fill the empty throne of France…
While delegations of liberal and radical Englishmen and Irishmen went to Paris to hail the Provisional Government of France, serious riots broke out in many parts of England and Scotland—Manchester, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and elsewhere. London witnessed a demonstration that drew over 15,000. In Glasgow the cry resounded, “Bread or Revolution!” And Chartist posters proclaimed, “The Republic for France and Chartism for England.” In Paris, international solidarity was celebrated by the representatives of many nations, its extent perhaps symbolized by the friendly exchange between the Chartist leader, George Julian Harney, and the Russian Mikhail Bakunin.
April was the month of decision. Under the veteran leadership of such men as Harney, Bronterre O’Brien, Feargus O’Connor and Ernest Jones, a national convention launched the Third Petition, with millions of signatories. It was to be presented to Parliament on April 10, and a mass meeting was planned for Kennington Common, to be followed by a procession to Westminster. Once more the Charter called for universal manhood suffrage, annual Parliaments, equal electoral districts, the removal of property qualifications for members of Parliament, and payment to them.
Almost as if it welcomed the confrontation, the Government proceeded to act so as to quell and destroy the movement, prevent the procession, and demonstrate who was master of England.
Never before had internationalism seemed so greatly effective; what was happening in the rest of Europe now appeared to bear fruit in England. The dream of an international working-class movement and alliance that had been toasted and launched with the Fraternal Democrats at a November 1847 banquet in the presence of Marx, Engels, Harney, and representatives of other nations, would now be realized, and political reform of a radical nature would be brought to fruition.
And this demonstration—would it be allowed to march on Parliament? Was not that an incitement to Revolution? Of course, the demonstrators were well behaved and good-natured—altogether unarmed and peaceful. But one had to take care. For London (and the rest of Britain) from the tradesman up to the Queen showed alarm. The example of France was ever before them. France appeared to be moving toward socialism; and who could warrant that the infection—like a cholera—would not touch these shores? For it was also notorious that among the leaders of Chartism there were a few who advocated “physical force” should the demonstration fail of persuading the Government. Formerly the allies of the lower orders, the middle classes, having achieved a moderate Reform that favored them, were at one with the Tories (now called Conservatives) in their terror of the masses.
Such, certainly, was the fear expressed by young Matthew Arnold as he watched the heightening of the crisis.
What agitates me, he wrote to his sister… is this, if the new state of things succeeds in France, social changes are inevitable here and elsewhere, for no one looks on seeing his neighbour mending without asking himself if he cannot mend the same way; but without waiting for the result, the spectacle of France is likely to breed great agitation here, and such is the state of our masses that their movements now can only be be brutal, plundering and destroying…. You must by this time begin to see what people mean by placing France politically in the van of Europe; it is the intelligence of their idea-moved masses which makes them, politically, as far superior to the insensible masses of England as to the Russian serfs….20
London was not Paris. And this demonstration was not an uprising. These men and women who came from the industrial regions in the North had no armed civil guard to back them with guns, nor had they arms of their own; there were no barricades to enable them to resist a suppression. They had trudged from afar; many of them came from their domestic hand looms, in a last protest against their displacement by the machine. (By 1854 there would be only about 30,000 of them left of the more than five hundred thousand of fifteen years before.) Yet they were met as if they were a revolutionary army bent on overthrowing the existing régime! Nor had they, like the French, poets, journalists, men and women of note to speak for them—no Lamennais, no George Sand, not even a Lamartine.
And against them ranged the whole force that the Government could muster—the Home Secretary Lord Grey prepared the yeomanry and special constables; troops were concentrated at critical points; the telegraph was seized, and local meetings forbidden in many places. Nine thousand soldiers and marines, four batteries, 150,000 special constables, including none other than Louis-Napoleon himself on horseback! All under the direction of the Iron Duke of Wellington… Indeed “all the King’s horses and all the King’s men” were commandeered to seal off the bridges leading from the south side of the Thames. Though allowing the meeting at Kennington Common, they were there to prevent any movement toward Parliament. In the face of such a show of force, Feargus O’Connor lost heart, cancelled the procession, and agreed to a dispersal of the demonstration. The Petition itself, like a funeral cortège, was brought to Parliament in three carriages, where, as one historian remarked, “the day of terror ended in shouts of laughter that greeted its arrival in the House of Commons.”21 Though the scrutiny of the Petition discovered some falsifications, two million signatures were found to be authentic—no mean number, that!
Yet demonstrations continued in other localities—in Sheffield, in Liverpool, in Dublin—while the Government proceeded to enact legislation such as the repressive “Crown and Government Security Act,” to root out further chances of agitation. The so-called “Gagging Act” followed, with arrests and transportations. Ernest Jones was sentenced along with others to imprisonment, some to transportation for life. But Chartism was defeated as much from within as from without—internecine warfare of the leadership, divided counsels (force or moral suasion? alliance with middle-class radicalism or independent action?). One is reminded of the pregnant words of General Charles Napier on the occasion of another Chartist demonstration in 1842:
Poor people! They will suffer… We have the physical force, not they… What would their 100,000 men do with my hundred rockets wriggling their fiery tails among them, roaring, scorching, tearing, smashing all they came near?22
Ireland was the special victim of English persecution, when her most articulate spokesman in Commons, Smith O’Brien, member for Limerick, was transported to Tasmania.
The French Revolution of 1848 saved the English middle class. The Socialistic pronunciamentos of the victorious French workmen frightened the small middle class of England and disorganized the narrower, but more matter-of-fact movement of the English working class. At the very moment when Chartism was bound to assert itself in its full strength, it collapsed internally before it collapsed externally on the 10 of April, 1848.The action of the working class was thrust into the background. The capitalist class triumphed along the whole line.23
Queen Victoria was relieved. On April 11 she wrote to King Leopold of Belgium:
Thank God, the Chartist meeting & Procession had turned out a complete failure; the loyalty of the people at large has been very striking & their indignation at their peace being interfered with by such wanton and worthless men—immense.24
Yet, for all the setbacks the British working classes suffered in 1848 and 1849, the Charter of 1848 was to triumph in the end, though it would take many years. New ways and methods would have to be found to direct and organize their strength anew, fresh energies to be directed toward the creation of an international working-class movement. Difficult and slow labor! Eventually it was the Communist Manifesto of 1848 that was destined to supersede the Chartist Petition of the same year….
As in the rest of Europe, the collapse of the insurgent movement in England marks the end of an era and the beginning of an altogether different one. In the wake of the European debacles of 1849, numerous refugees sought safety in London. Among them was Karl Marx, who arrived in August 1849, soon followed by Friedrich Engels. It was not these refugees that were on the mind of Queen Victoria when she contemplated
what the new Republic of France was doing to royal and ducal houses as a result of what she called “the great calamity”:
The Queen fears (indeed knows), she wrote, that the poor Duc and Duchesse of Nemours are in sad want of all means; and she knows the poor Duchesse of Orleans is equally so.—It is very lamentable and the Queen feels much for them, for it is a position which, if one reflects on it, requires great courage and resignation to submit to. It would be infamous if the Republic gave them nothing….25
* * *
The spirit of the country is quiet but reasonable, indisposed to sweeping innovations, and equally indisposed to keeping in the old Tory ways, everything which is because it is. The moderate members of both parties represent this spirit fairly. At a recent election a poor voter is reported to have said that both candidates were very nice gentlemen, but that for his part he could not see much difference between them; and this is the simple truth.
—Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, 1867
“Chartism is dead!” the noted philanthropist the Earl of Shaftesbury wrote from Manchester to the liberal manufacturer John Bright in 1851.26 Thus both aristocracy and the well-to-do bourgeoisie expressed their relief over the fact that the danger of “revolution” was over. In another way, the two symbolized the triumph of what was to be called “Victorianism”—the happy union of their two powerful classes and their reassurance that the governance of the British Isles was in secure hands. The term “Victorian” came into being in 1851. The Queen had been on the throne now for fourteen years, and she was to reign till the turn of the century. But the years from 1848 to 1873, the latter the year of a commencing world depression, marked the high point of her sway as sovereign of a dominant world power.
“Victorianism” is not an abstraction. Despite its multifarious facets and aspects, it describes an astounding phenomenon of the century—the penetration, within those twenty years, into British life—spiritual, moral, philosophical, social, political, and cultural—of what may be termed the “bourgeois spirit.”
Such a triumph could not have been achieved save by the reciprocal concessions of the two dominant powers, the landed interests and the “commercial” classes—the latter by their willingness to turn over the reins of government to the former, the aristocracy and the landed gentry; the former by being assured that their property rights in the land and in power, in no way truly infringed by the Reform of 1832, would be secured against the challenges of the “lower” classes. Minor concessions and minor reforms would be granted whenever necessary; and when the threat became more serious, as in the late sixties, even major ones, such as the Reform Bill of 1867 with its radical extension of the franchise. The Chartist defeat of 1848 had temporarily disarmed the working classes; their middle-class allies, whom they had helped achieve the repeal of the Corn Laws and other victories, had now deserted them. In the wake of the disorganization that followed, and while the working-class efforts were being redirected into a strengthening of the trade-union movement, its more advanced and skilled sectors would be wooed as a “labor aristocracy” to become allies rather than enemies, perhaps even appendages of the more liberal elements within the middle classes. Was it not the British statesman John Chamberlain, who shocked Queen Victoria by describing Reform as “the ransom which society must pay for its security”?27
The confidence in the eventual success of such an alliance could not have existed without the major economic phenomenon of the advancing century—namely, the full development of world capitalism, and Britain’s world domination of its markets.
It was not difficult to translate the more prosaic and stark “commercial spirit” into a religious gospel, to speak of its missionary duty to advance world civilization. The extraordinary advances in the sciences and in technology only served to underscore such a credo. Thus Richard Cobden could write,
Commerce is the grand panacea, which like a beneficent medical discovery, will serve to inoculate with the healthy and saving taste for civilization all the nations of the world. Not a bale of merchandise leaves our shores, but it bears the seeds of intelligence and fruitful thought to the members of some less enlightened community; not a merchant visits our seats of manufacturing industry, but he returns to his own country the missionary of freedom, peace, and good government—while our steam boats, that now visit every port of Europe, our miraculous railroads, that are the talk of all nations, are advertisements and vouchers for the value of our enlightened institutions.28
The practice of entrusting the conduct of government to a ruling oligarchy was not peculiar to Britain in the nineteenth century. The bourgeoisie of France was about to do the same in installing a dictatorship under Louis-Napoleon, and in 1870, a united Germany would place itself under the leadership of a Prussian Junker-led autocracy. The British pattern of a cabinet filled by aristocrats prevailed until the end of the century, with only two marked exceptions under Gladstone.
The Victorian alliance of landowner and manufacturer, while not free of restive moments and conflicts, directed its efforts at defining and delimiting the disjunctive forces at work in a highly dynamic society, and at achieving a cohesiveness that would obviate revolutionary movements. It proclaimed the principle of the “reconciliation” of the various interests, while at the same time safeguarding its own. To achieve this, it brought into play various instruments of propaganda and policy, and the organs at its command. Here the vast power that resided in the landowning section was of major influence.
For it must be remembered that of the twenty or so millions that constituted the population of England and Wales, nearly nine million lived on the land. Here the power structure of one section of English society is glaringly revealed. As late as 1875 it was estimated that of the total acreage of England and Wales, more than forty-one per cent was owned by only some 1,700 “great” landlords. The Duke of Sutherland owned close to a million and a half acres; the Marquess of Lansdowne almost 150,000; Sir John Ramsden owned most of Huddersfield; the Marquess of Bute owned Cardiff and Glamorganshire.29
The Reform Bill of 1832 had barely scratched the aristocratic proprietary hold on the House of Commons.
At the core of Parliament of 1865 there was a “cousinhood” of landed families, which included well over half the members. The House of Commons remained very closely attached socially to the House of Lords.30
A contemporary observer and analyst forcefully summed up the nature of landed power:
The Parliamentary frame is kneaded together almost out of one class; it has the strength of a giant and the compactness of a dwarf…. So vast is their traditional power, so broadly does it sit over the land, so deep and ancient are its roots, so multiplied and ramified everywhere are its tendrils, and creepers, and feelers, that the danger is never lest they should have too little, but always lest they should have too much power, and so, even involuntarily, check down the possibilities of new life from below…31
The “cousinhood” of landed families was indeed a close one, as four-fifths of the land belonged to only seven thousand families. Caste distinctions were rigorously observed. The aristocracy of land looked with condescension mingled with contempt on the “money-grubbing” tradesmen and manufacturers. “I don’t like the middle classes,” Lord Melbourne confessed. “The higher and the lower classes, there’s some good in them, but the middle classes are all affectation and conceit and pretense and concealment.”32 And Earl Russell was reported to have shocked upper-class society in 1866 when he invited the distinguished John Bright, a public figure but also a middle-class manufacturer, to dinner!33
But such contempt for the rich but crude middle classes did not keep the aristocratic landowner from lending a willing ear to the lure of land speculation, from investing in urban land-development in London and other cities, or from drawing sizable profits from railroads and mining. Mammon was no longer Mammon when he boasted a coat of arms…
The influence and power of this class were sustained by moral, social, as well as economic pressures. The Established Church was to a great extent its province, for it controlled clerical “patronage.” Bishops were either of aristocratic or gentry background. The landed class controlled the upper echelons of the army, and the colonial empire was its preserve—in James Mill’s words, “a vast system of outdoor relief for the upper classes.”34
Locally, the tenant farmer was at the landlord’s mercy, though, it must be admitted, frequently submitting of his own free will. It was expected that he would send to Parliament the Tory candidate favored by the master; and in persuading him to do so, the local cleric might bring a few urgent words. Separated from the turmoils and conflicts of industrialism, isolated from the violent winds of doctrine that swept the country, little given to reading (assuming he could read), he was all the more ready to accept the word of his betters, as he thought them; looking to them to defend him, when such occasions arose, from the depredations or rick-burnings of the starving agricultural workers.
But no less helpful, and less savoring of pressure, was the British “habit of authority” and the principle of deference. The celebrated statesman George Canning had once stated that if democracy were to arrive in England, it must do so only “inlaid with a Peerage and topped with a Crown.”35 A less gentle critic, George Eliot, spoke of the “safeguard of spontaneous servility.”36 Spontaneous or compelled, it was there, not only in the countryside but also in the city. It was preached; and it was sung to the little ones, as in Miss Humphrey’s Hymns for Little Children, which appeared in 1848:
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.37
It was this attitude that made Richard Cobden explode:
We are a servile, aristocracy-loving, lord-ridden people, who regard the land with as much reverence as we still do the peerage and the baronetage. Not only have not nineteen-twentieth of us any share in the soil, but we have not presumed to think that we are worthy to possess a few acres of mother earth.38
Confirmed in their possession by the law of primogeniture, and in their influence by possession of the clerical offices, frequently assigned to a younger son, and their hold on the two universities and their elite, they could allow a certain upward mobility of the “commercial” class, no less aspiring to rise to a higher station. For degree, rank and caste permeated all of society down to the smallest parish and the lowest orders. It was this element that made Charles Dickens so terribly ashamed of his past in the blacking-shop, and George Meredith conceal for a long time his descent from mastertailors.
As for the poor agricultural laborer, who was without a vote and was preached at in the local church or chapel, adjured to repentance for his sinful life and also promised a piece of restful eternity if he behaved properly—how should he resist the conviction that “the one thing needful in this life is to do our duty in the station we are called to fill”?39
Nor was it surprising that landlord–tenant relations, especially in the North of England, should have retained their semifeudal character, or that at an annual banquet given by the duke of Northumberland in 1859, his assembled dependents should have been singing:
Those relics of the feudal yoke Still in the north remain unbroke: That social yoke, with one accord, That binds the Peasant to his Lord… And liberty, that idle vaunt, Is not the comfort that we want; It only serves to turn the head, But gives to none their daily bread. We want community of feeling, And landlords kindly in their dealing.40
* * *
Miserable children in rags… like young rats, slunk and hid, fed on offal, huddled together for warmth, and were hunted about (look to the rats young and old, all ye Barnacles, for before God they are eating away our foundations, and will bring the roofs on our heads!).
—Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit
If England was now the world’s workshop, banker, broker, shipper and colonial lord, she was no less a laboratory of the social sciences for the rest of the world. Where else could one study, in so concentrated an area, the social conditions of the populations? It was here that foreigners found not only such wonders as displayed in the Crystal Palace, and to the North the boom and bustle and roar of machinery—but also the less to be wondered at, sometimes the less admirable, effects of all this great business. For not very far from the Crystal Palace was Hungerford Market, and here as well as in other parts of London, there stretched a panorama to shock the onlooker and frighten away the queasy.
Almost at the same time as engineers and builders were raising up the mighty steel in Hyde Park, there appeared in the Morning Chronicle a series of descriptive articles on “London Labour and the London Poor,” by the journalist Henry Mayhew.
Sensitive souls were outraged, shocked, and profoundly moved. For what was true of London was no less true of Manchester or Liverpool, and, though more deftly concealed, of the cottages in the agricultural areas.
Do you read the Morning Chronicle? [wrote Douglas Jerrold, father-in-law of Mayhew, and himself a notable journalist and playwright]. Do you devour those marvellous revelations of the inferno of misery, of wretchedness, that is smouldering under our feet? We live in a mockery of Christianity that, with the thought of this hypocrisy, makes me sick. We know nothing of the terrible life that is about us—us, in our smug respectability. To read of the sufferings of one class, and of the avarice, the tyranny, the pocket cannibalism of the other, makes one almost wonder that the world should go on, that the misery and wretchedness of the earth, are not, by an Almighty fiat, ended. And when we see the spires of pleasant churches pointing to Heaven, and are told—paying thousands to Bishops for the glad intelligence—that we are Christians! The cant of this country is enough to poison the atmosphere.41
Yes, it was true, as the French social student Eugène Buret observed in 1840, England was “the prime country for social studies, the country from which we had more to learn than from the whole of the rest of the world.”42
Yes, they could learn much—about the burdens of overpopulation, about the Malthusian theories, about the way poor-relief was administered so as not to hurt the manufacturing interests; about how to obviate threats to the “common weal.”
They could also learn that in the great year 1851 one Englishman out of seven was a pauper. What new dangers might not be lurking in the back streets and alleys of the cities! While celebrating England’s dazzling achievements, another writer, in the year 1851, issued a stern warning:
Sparta had 300,000 slaves to 30,000 freemen; does not our situation in some sort resemble hers?… Already, we have a revolution, slumbering, but gathering power in all our cities, and still we pursue our way with intrepid stupidity, dreaming of Eden in the very midst of a reign of terror.43
An enterprising stranger, or a more intrepid middle-class Londoner, who dared penetrate the purlieus behind the Crystal Palace, say, into some of the markets and less fashionable districts of London, would no doubt have been struck by the mephitic odors that prevailed, as well as by the scavengers who were gathering up decaying shrimp and other castoffs, and by the hundreds of street vendors.
But not all the odors emanated from the streets and alleys. The Thames itself, that noble river, extolled by such Renaissance poets as Edmund Spenser, (“sweet Thames,” he had chanted, “run softly till I end my song”), assailed, if not the ears, certainly the nostrils and tastebuds of Victorian London. As noxious as any pestilence, it strengthened its maleficence with the concurrent emanations of the city’s cesspools and manure heaps, the latter a source of income to the householder as a commodity for the farmer. A modern reader will respond sympathetically to descriptions contained in contemporary medical reports. One such, compiled in 1858, relates,
Never, perhaps, in the annals of mankind has such a thing been known before, as that the whole stream of a large river for a distance of seven miles should be in a state of putrid fermentation. The cause is the hot water acting upon 90 millions of gallons of sewage which discharge themselves daily into the Thames. By sewage must be understood not merely house and land drainage, but also drainage from bone-boilers, soap-boilers, chemical works, breweries, gas factories—the last most filthy of all…44
The so-called drinking water was thus conducted in open channels, and after receiving the bestowals described above, “on their arrival in the metropolis (after a short subsidence in reservoirs, which themselves are not unobjectionable) are distributed, without filtration, to the public.”45
One may very well imagine, without great difficulty, the combined effect of these phenomena upon the household—the poor man’s, with his private dunghill; the rich home, majestically above its own cesspool; the traditional suspicion of fresh air and the preference for closed windows (remember, there was also a tax on windows!). In 1846 there were some two hundred thousand undrained cesspools in London….
Now add to that the overcrowding of the slum areas—“rookeries,” as they were then called—examples of which in London as well as other industrial cities are truly appalling. In Liverpool, for example, in the 1860s, there were over sixty thousand human beings squeezed into every square mile; in Manchester, somewhat earlier, between forty and fifty thousand lived in cellars. “Lived” is scarcely the word: some ten years before Crystal Palace the death rate in the slums was reported as rising to sixty in the thousand. What cholera failed to effect, consumption, typhoid and typhus did, abetting exhaustion and the inadequate diet.46
London became the gauge by which poverty and destitution were measured in other countries. It was not in the spirit of national chauvinism that Flora Tristan, that remarkable Frenchwoman, visited England, and in 1840 published Promenades dans Londres. She was no less harsh and critical in her description of the poor of Paris and Lyons. London, which she called the “monstrous” city, fascinated her. She penetrated into many quarters, the slums inhabited by the Irish and the Jews; those inhabited by the English. She visited prisons. She observed the northern factories and their operatives. She admired the new machinery, but was horrified by the conditions under which human beings were living. She was no less appalled by the extent of prostitution in London, and estimated the number of prostitutes at between eighty and a hundred thousand. A strong defender of woman’s rights, she wrote: “So long as she is subject to the yoke of man or of prejudice, so long as she does not receive a professional training, and is deprived of civil rights, there can be no hope of her becoming ‘moral’.” “In France, and in all other countries that pride themselves on some measure of civility, the being most honored is woman; in England—it is a horse.”47
That which she saw in London in 1839, Mayhew saw in 1850. What she witnessed in the industrial part of England was only in a very small measure different from what other visitors beheld ten or twenty years later.
Conditions in the industrial regions had indeed changed very little. The much-embattled Ten Hours Law, passed in 1847 and more often breached than observed, applied only to the textile industry. The Coal Mines Act of 1842, while it did indeed prohibit the employment of women, permitted the employment of boys over ten. In an occupation which had until the beginning of the century been kept in actual feudal bondage (the colliers and their children were, in Scotland, the property of the coal master), this represented a minor advance. But as late as 1862 a Children’s Employment Commission found children working in various industries at the age of nine, earning between one shilling and eighteen pence a week; in the potteries the age was eight. In the millinery industry in Manchester boys and girls worked between fourteen and fifteen hours a day; in the firebricks industry girls aged twelve worked up to sixteen hours. This was in the Birmingham district. In the Lancashire mills boys could attain at thirteen the status of full-time operatives if approved by a local doctor. For such and others of the factory,
Every morning the factory-bell rings at half-past five o’clock, and work commences at six… Half an hour is allowed for breakfast .. The dinner hour is… curtailed considerably when the Government inspector is thought to be out of the way. The day’s work ceases at six p.m.48
For males, the weekly wage in industry varied from the ten and a half shillings in cotton, up to eighteen shillings in the iron trades. Women received lower wages.
So far as employment of women is concerned, over one million of them were in domestic service. Housemaids earned between ten to fifteen pounds a year and generally worked from six in the morning till ten in the evening.
The plight of the agricultural worker was, if anything, worse. Generally hired as members of a gang under the “gangman,” and moving from place to place, the men, women, boys and girls were subject to double exploitation, on the part of the farmer who hired them as a gang, and the “gangman” who controlled their wages. In addition, they sometimes had to trudge from five to seven miles to work. The brutalizing effect of their life can be gleaned from a Commission Report on the number of pregnancies that occurred, often in the case of girls not older than thirteen. In seasons of good harvest, there was work, and a passable existence. When harvests were bad and bread became dear, they lived next door to starvation. When they rebelled and turned to “rick-burning,” they were brought before the local magistrate, generally a landowner, who had them deported to a penal colony.