Table of Contents
Every period of history may be interpreted in various ways, and the richer it is in event or thought the more numerous will be the interpretations. Early Victorian history might be read as the formation in the thirties of a Marxian bourgeoisie which never came into existence, the re-emergence in the forties of a more ancient tradition, a sense of the past and a sense of social coherence, which never fulfilled its promise, and a compromise between the two which possessed no ultimate principle of stability.[23] But we must all the time remember that the Victorian age is only the island counterpart of a secular movement, as significant as the turn from the Greek middle ages in the time of Socrates or the Latin middle ages at the Renaissance. Twice the European mind had been carried to the verge, and twice it had been baffled. In the nineteenth century it won the top and saw stretching before it that endless new world which Bacon had sighted, or imagined, where nothing need remain unknown, and for everything that is known there is something that can be done; the world of organized thought where even modern scientific man was only the rudiments of what man might be. But European currents have a way of changing their direction when they touch our shores: it was so with the Renaissance, it was so with the Reformation. We borrowed our Party names from France and Spain; only Radical is all our own.[24] But the Conservative Party is a far more vital element in the State than a Parti Conservateur, and Continental Liberalism had little to teach a people who counted their freedom not by revolutions but by dynasties. ‘You see,’ said Mackintosh, when the latest French pamphlet on Liberty was exhibited for his admiration, ‘in England we take all that for granted.’ Of Continental Socialism we may say we gave as good as we took, and the Nationalism, which was to glorify the heroisms and to poison the conflicts of a century, made little appeal to a race which had no memories of foreign oppression to brood over, and is always more disposed to grudge the cost of its victories than to spend fresh money in avenging its defeats. On the other hand, the special and domestic preoccupations which give the European movement its English colour, being of a kind which our peculiar and isolated history had engendered, the call of the sea, the constant embarrassment of English policy by Irish agitation, the persistence of the religious interest into a secularist age, aristocracy into a commercial age, and monarchy into a radical age, cannot be expounded in European terms.
To all these themes, the ground-tone was given by the growth of population, the result of many combining tendencies, humanitarian and scientific, which since the middle of the eighteenth century had operated with ever-increasing force.[25] In 1730 it seems that of every four children born in London three failed to reach their fifth birthday. A hundred years of improvement had almost reversed the proportion.[26] Life was safer and longer, and every census was swelled by the numbers of babies who now grew up, young people who now lived into manhood, old people who lingered on the earth which a hundred years before they would have quitted in middle life. But if the process was a just ground for pride, the results could not be contemplated without deep apprehension, and the gravity of the problem was at once demonstrated and accentuated by the state of Ireland, from which, crossing St. George’s Channel at deck cargo rates, the starving Papists swarmed by thousands to gather the harvest in English fields or fill the slums of English towns. Those who traced them home, in books, or by the new tourist route to Killarney, and heard or saw for themselves the worse-than-animal wretchedness of a people withal so intelligent and so chaste, might well ask themselves what relief was in prospect unless Nature intervened and ordained depopulation on a scale from which Cromwell might have shrunk, and whether the misery of Ireland was not a foreshadowing of the doom of England herself.[27]
The only visible relief was by way of emigration, and already some minds had been fired by the thought of the great spaces waiting to be peopled or, with an even larger sweep of the imagination, by the picture of a vast Eastern Empire ruled from Australia. But the English of 1830, with six generations of the Law of Settlement behind them, were not easily up-rooted, and, publicly, the only restraint that could be recommended was late marriage and the abolition of those provisions of the Poor Law which set a premium on reckless unions. There was much active, if furtive, discussion of birth-control in Radical circles: John Mill was once in trouble for poking pamphlets down area railings; and one writer proposed that instruction in the subject should be included in the rules of all Trade Unions.[28] But contraception did not seriously affect the birth-rate until, in the seventies, it returned from America, to which it had been carried by the younger Owen. Malthus had raised a spectre which could be neither ignored nor laid.
More immediately significant than the growth of population was its aggregation in great towns. Down to the French Wars the moral habit of society was definitely patrician and rural, and had still much of the ease, the tolerance, and the humour which belongs to a life lived in security and not divorced from nature. What differences existed in the lives and outlook of a gentleman, a yeoman, and a cottager were mitigated by their common subjection to the ebb and flow of the world, the seasons, and the hours. In correspondence with its traditional structure, the traditional culture and morality of England were based on the patriarchal village family of all degrees: the father worked, the mother saw to the house, the food, and the clothes; from the parents the children learnt the crafts and industries necessary for their livelihood, and on Sundays they went together, great and small, to worship in the village church. To this picture English sentiment clung, as Roman sentiment saw in the Sabine farm the home of virtue and national greatness. It inspired our poetry; it controlled our art; for long it obstructed, perhaps it still obstructs, the formation of a true philosophy of urban life.
But all the while Industrialism had been coming over England like a climatic change; the French wars masked the consequences till they became almost unmanageable. It is possible to imagine, with Robert Owen, an orderly evolution of the rural village into the industrial township, given the conditions which he enjoyed at New Lanark, a limited size and a resident, paternal employer. Belper under the Strutts, Bolton under the Ashworths, the cosy houses and flourishing gardens of South Hetton, to which foreign visitors were carried with special pride, the playing fields of Price’s Candle Works, the Lancashire village where Coningsby met Edith, all have some affinity with the Owenite Utopia, bold peasants, rosy children, smoking joints, games on the green; Merrie England, in a word, engaged in a flourishing export trade in coal and cotton.[29] But any possibility of a general development along these lines had already been lost in the change-over from water to steam power, in the consequent growth of the great urban aggregates, and the visible splitting of society, for which the Enclosures had created a rural precedent, into possessors and proletariat. The employers were moving into the country; their officials followed them into the suburbs; the better workmen lived in the better streets; the mixed multitude of labour, native or Irish, was huddled in slums and cellars, sometimes newly run up by speculative builders, sometimes, like the labyrinth round Soho and Seven Dials, deserted tenements of the upper classes. In a well-managed village with a responsible landlord and an active parson, with allotments for the men and a school for the children, the old institutions and restraints might still hold good; in a neglected village, and in that increasing part of the population which now lived in great towns, they were perishing. Off work, the men could only lounge and drink; the girls learnt neither to cook nor to sew. Lying outside the orbit of the old ruling class, neglected by their natural leaders, the industrial territories were growing up as best they might, undrained, unpoliced, ungoverned, and unschooled.
Yet the physical separation was not so complete that the world beyond the pale could be ignored, and the Evangelical ascesis was imposed on a generation to which the spectacle of bodily existence was at once obtrusive and abhorrent. Physically, the national type was changing; the ruddy, careless Englishman of the eighteenth century, turbulent but placable, as ready with his friendship as his fists, seemed to be making way for a pallid, sullen stock, twisted in mind and body. And if the eye which ranged with such complacency over the palaces of Regent’s Park, the thronging masts of wide-wayed Liverpool, the roaring looms of hundred-gated Leeds, descended to a closer view, of Finsbury, say, or Ancoats, it would have observed that the breeding ground of the new race was such that in truth it could breed nothing else. The life within the factory or the mine was doubtless rigorous, and to children often cruel, but the human frame is immensely resilient, and with such care as many good employers took, the working hours of a labourer’s life were probably his happiest. But the imagination can hardly apprehend the horror in which thousands of families a hundred years ago were born, dragged out their ghastly lives, and died: the drinking water brown with faecal particles, the corpses kept unburied for a fortnight in a festering London August; mortified limbs quivering with maggots; courts where not a weed would grow, and sleeping-dens afloat with sewage.[30]
And while the new proletariat was falling below the median line of improving decency on one side, the middle classes were rising above it on the other, becoming progressively more regular, more sober, more clean in body, more delicate in speech. But not only were the middle classes drawing apart from the poor, each stratum, in a steady competition, was drawing away from the stratum next below, accentuating its newly acquired refinements, and enforcing them with censorious vigilance. The capriciousness, the over-emphasis, of Victorian propriety betrays its source. When we have set aside all that England shared with New England, all that nineteenth-century England had in common with nineteenth-century France[31] and Germany, and all that the England of Victoria had in common with the England of George III[32] and Edward VIII, there remains this peculiar element, what Clough called ‘an almost animal sensibility of conscience’, this super-morality of the nerves and the senses, of bodily repulsion and social alarm.
Cleanliness is next to godliness. The Victorian insistence, whenever the poor are the topic, on neatness, tidiness, the well-brushed frock and the well-swept room, is significant. ‘The English’, Treitschke once told a class at Berlin, ‘think Soap is Civilization.’ Neatness is the outward sign of a conscious Respectability, and Respectability is the name of that common level of behaviour which all families ought to reach and on which they can meet without disgust. The Respectable man in every class is one whose ways bear looking into, who need not slink or hide or keep his door barred against visitors, the parson, or the dun, who lives in the eye of his neighbours and can count on the approval of the great and the obedience of the humble. ‘The middle classes know’, Lord Shaftesbury once said, ‘that the safety of their lives and property depends upon their having round them a peaceful, happy, and moral population.’ To induce, therefore, some modicum of cleanliness and foresight, to find some substitute for savage sport and savage drinking, to attract the children to school and the parents to church, to awaken some slight interest in books and the world beyond the end of the street, on such limited, necessary ends as these was bent that enormous apparatus of early Victorian philanthropy: of individual effort by squires and parsons and their wives and daughters,[33] of organized effort by Hospital Committees, City Missions, Savings Banks, Mechanics’ Institutes, and Dispensaries, by institutions of every creed and size and object, from the Coal Club, the Blanket Club, and the Ladies’ Child Bed Linen Club up to the great societies for the diffusion of useful knowledge, religious knowledge, education, and temperance, and the provision of additional Curates. Respectability was at once a select status and a universal motive. Like Roman citizenship, it could be indefinitely extended, and every extension fortified the State.
| [23] | The three phases are conveniently marked by Miss Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy, Coningsby, and Bagehot’s English Constitution. |
| [24] | Possibly Communism, which is claimed, as a colloquial inspiration, for Mr. Barmby of Hanwell. He must be distinguished from Mr. Baume, who planned a Communist University at Colney Hatch. |
| [25] | It was a European phenomenon. The French death-rate seems to have fallen from 39 to 29 between 1780 and 1820. |
| [26] | This in London over all. The infantile mortality about 1840 was—upper classes 1/10; middle classes 1/6; lower classes 1/4. In Manchester and Leeds the mortality under 5 was about 57/100. |
| [27] | Down to the French wars England had been on balance a wheat-exporting country. After Waterloo it was plain that the balance had been reversed and that foreign wheat, though there were still years when the import only amounted to a few days’ consumption, was normally required to make good the English harvest. The sliding scale of 1828 was contrived to steady home prices, and therefore rents, while admitting foreign supplies as they were needed: in theory the Radicals preferred Free Trade, in theory the Whigs were for a fixed duty; but in the early thirties the issue was not raised, the schism between the commercial and landed interests was latent and speculative. |
| [28] | Wade in his History of the Middle Classes (if indeed I have correctly interpreted his mysterious hintings). Place gave instruction at Charing Cross; Mrs. Grote, I suspect, more than instruction to her village neighbours. Croker’s attack on Miss Martineau was quite unpardonable, but it is fairly clear that Miss Martineau did not know what she was talking about. |
| [29] | I have read an Owenite fancy of the thirties in which the world is organized as a federation of Garden Cities. One episode is the return of a delegation, clad in chitons, from Bavaria, where, if I remember right, they have been showing their German brethren how to lay a drain. |
| [30] | The following figures tell their own tale:Expectation of Life at BirthBathRutlandWilts.DerbyTruroLeedsManchesterLiverpoolGentlefolk.5552504940453835Traders & Farmers.3741483833272022Labourers.2538332128191715In London the mortality was twice as great in the East End as in the West. In adjacent streets it varied from 38 to 12. |
| [31] | Much nonsense about ‘the Victorians’ is dissipated by the reflection that it was the French Government that prosecuted Madame Bovary. |
| [32] | In 1804 Crabb Robinson wrote from Germany: ‘To express what we should call Puritanism in language, and excess of delicacy in matters of physical love, the word Engländerei has been coined.’ |
| [33] | As early as the twenties, the young lady in the country was expected to do her district-visiting seriously, with a register and account book. It is, I think, true to say that the pruriency which we find so offensive in Victorian morals (the Blush-to-the-Cheek-of-the-Young-Person business) is mainly an urban, and therefore middle-class, characteristic. There could not have been much about the ‘facts of life’ that a country girl who taught in school and visited in cottages did not know. |
