Читать книгу Victorian England: Portrait of an Age - G. M. Young - Страница 9

Table of Contents

In 1830 one aspect, and not the least formidable, of the new civilization, was suddenly forced on every mind. For half a generation, the cholera had been wandering at large across Asia and eastern Europe. It spread, in spite of the most active precautions, into Germany; from Hamburg it crossed to Sunderland; in a few weeks it was in London. Measures were hastily improvised to meet a visitation which might, for all that science could tell, be as destructive as the Great Plague. A Central Board of Health was established in London; local boards in the provinces; a day of fasting and humiliation was proclaimed. Of the local boards the most active was in Manchester, and the report of their secretary—it is only thirty pages long—is one of the cardinal documents of Victorian history. For the first time the actual condition of a great urban population was exposed to view. There was no reason to suppose that Manchester was any worse than other towns, and the inevitable conclusion was that an increasing portion of the population of England was living under conditions which were not only a negation of civilized existence, but a menace to civilized society.

Nor, it seemed, was the country-side in better condition. The Labourers’ Rising of 1830 served, like the cholera, to call attention to a problem which without it might have been neglected till it was too late. The land was breaking under the burden of the poor rate, and the administration of the Poor Law was degrading the labourer whom it was designed to support. But the rural problem was simplicity itself compared with the problem of the towns. Let the able-bodied man be given the choice of earning his own living or going into the workhouse, and then, if he still cannot find work on the land, send him to the factory or the colonies. So long as the Poor Law Commissioners were at work in the south, pauperism disappeared as by magic. But, as they moved northwards, unexpected difficulties appeared. ‘We grasped the nettle all right,’ one of them ruefully acknowledged, ‘but it was the wrong nettle.’ Machinery had so reduced the value of labour that at any moment the workman might find himself starving in the midst of a plenty which his own hands had helped to create. But the urban problem could not be solved by marching the unemployed in and out of the workhouse as times were bad or good. That rural England was over-populated, the slow increase, in some counties a decline, through the years of prosperity proved. Industrial England was neither over-populated nor under-populated, but periodically over- and under-employed.

Unemployment was beyond the scope of any ideas which Early Victorian reformers had at their command, largely because they had no word for it.^[34] Their language and their minds were dominated by the Malthusian conception of over-population. Sanitation and education were within their reach. But these are remedies which need time to do their work, and in the interim the catastrophe might have happened. A fermentation unknown to an earlier England was stirring in the commons. Eighteenth-century society was stable, and felt itself to be stable. From the Revolution to the fall of the Bastille, the thought of subversion, of any social crisis more serious than an election riot or a no-popery riot, never entered the mind of Governments. From Waterloo to 1848 it was hardly ever absent. Looking back from the serene and splendid noon of mid-Victorian prosperity, Kingsley wrote of the years when ‘young lads believed (and not so wrongly) that the masses were their natural enemies and that they might have to fight, any year or any day, for the safety of their property and the honour of their sisters’. Young lads will believe anything. But men old enough to remember the French Revolution, or the Committees of Secrecy and the Six Acts of 1819, had their fears, too, when they reflected that as the country became more and more dependent on machines, its stability turned more and more on the subordination and goodwill of the savage masses which tended them.

To fortify the State against these and all other perils by admitting the respectable class as a body to the franchise was the purpose of the Reform Bill. For two years, beginning with the Paris Revolution of July 1830, England lived in a sustained intensity of excitement unknown since 1641. But when the dust had settled down Tories might have asked themselves what they had been afraid of, Radicals what they had been fighting for. Never was a revolution effected with more economy in change. The right of the magnate to appoint the representatives of the lesser boroughs had gone: his influence, if he chose to exercise it with discretion and decorum, was hardly impaired, and it soon appeared that if there was less rioting and less bribery at an election, there was still much bribery, and more intimidation, and election day was still a carnival which usually ended in a fight. Open voting kept the tenant under his landlord’s eye; the tradesman under his customer’s; and in every county the fifty-pound tenants at will, prudently enfranchised by a Tory amendment, made a solid block of dependable voters. The country was satisfied: even the Radicals accepted the Reform Bill as a fair instalment of their demands without pressing to know when the other instalments—the ballot, one man one vote, one vote one value—would be paid.^[35]

The Times celebrates the Queen’s Accession, 21 June 1837

From The Times, 4 December 1845

The reforming impulse of the Whigs was exhausted with the passing of the Municipal Reform Act of 1835. The reorganization of the Judicature which Brougham ought to have effected in 1833 was left for Selborne in 1873. Graham, their best administrator, Stanley their best debater, left them. Lord Grey gave up; Lord Melbourne lounged along. The genial Althorp, who kept the Commons in good temper, was taken from them to the Lords. Harried by the Irish, baited by the Radicals, blocked by the Peers, divided among themselves, equally unable to pass their Bills or balance their budgets, the Whigs sank in public esteem and dragged Parliament with them. Their one admitted success did them as much harm as their numerous failures. They kept Ireland quiet, but their pacts with O’Connell seemed to English opinion a disgraceful subservience to a rebel. They accepted Penny Postage, but on a falling revenue it sent their finance to pieces. Palmerston, marching steadily and buoyantly on a line of his own, brightened their last days with a diplomatic triumph over France and a naval victory over Mehemet Ali, of which, perhaps, in the long run, the most that can be said is that it gave England something to think of beside the misery of 1840. All through the thirties we are aware of a growing disaffection, of which Carlyle and Dickens are mouthpieces, with the delays and irrelevancies^[36] of parliamentary government, which, as the years went on, seemed to be degenerating more and more into an unseemly scuffle between Ins and Outs. The political satire of Dickens is tedious and ignorant. But it registers, what Past and Present conveys more passionately, the disillusionment which followed on the hopes of 1830.

Socially, the first reformed Parliaments were hardly distinguishable from their predecessors. The days of extravagant expenditure, when the poll was open for three weeks and a candidate might spend, as the virtuous and religious Acland did in Devon, £80,000 on four contests, were over and done with. But an election might easily cost a candidate £5,000.^[37] The just influence of landed property was preserved, and the old humanity of the South was still politically ascendant over the new industry of the North. The Whigs had introduced a self-adjusting device into the constitution, but it worked slowly. So late as 1845 three notes of exclamation were required to convey Prince Albert’s amazement at the thought of Cobden in the Cabinet. The Tories had learnt by experience to adopt capacity from whatever quarter it appeared: they admitted Peel, the son of a cotton-spinner; Canning, whose mother was an actress; and Huskisson, whose origin, if possibly more respectable, was even more obscure. The Whigs in exile had drawn closer together and farther from the main stream of English life; they came from the eighteenth century, where privilege was taken for granted, and they brought the eighteenth century with them; and one result of the Reform was to give England, growing more and more resentful of privilege, the most aristocratic Government that any one could remember, and to set the Lords almost in equipoise with the Commons. And all the while, with a suspicious, but obedient, party behind him—150 in ’32, 250 in ’34, 300 in ’37—Peel was biding his time. With the return of the Conservatives in 1841 and the impending grapple of Land and Industry, Parliament recovered its standing as the debating-place of public issues, and, what to the new electorate was even more important, as the guardian of the public purse. The country preferred an Income Tax from Peel to one deficit more from Baring.

Until 1834 the traveller approaching London over Westminster Bridge saw on his left a foreshore where watermen lounged among their boats: behind it a walled garden fronting a low range of red-brick Tudor houses. At the far left the Chapel of St. Stephen projected almost to the water’s edge, and high above all stretched the grey roof of the Hall. The towers of the Abbey were just visible behind. After the fire of 1834 the Commons found room in the old House of Lords, the Peers sat in the Painted Chamber, while the palace of Barry and Pugin was rising to overshadow both Abbey and Hall: the Lords entered their new house in 1847: the Commons in 1852. Business commonly began at four, mornings being kept for Committees, with questions, few, but often involving voluminous reply, and followed by some desultory conversation, and the presentation of petitions. These opportunities for demagogic eloquence, which at one time threatened to overwhelm the House, were cautiously restricted, and finally abolished in 1843. Two nights were reserved for Government business. Lord John Russell tried to get a third and was refused. Party allegiance was loose, party management dexterous and sharp. Private members had more freedom and opportunity than in a modern Parliament, and much legislation was drafted, introduced, and carried from the back benches.^[38] After the first few speeches the audience scattered to dinner and left the bores in possession. From nine the attendance and the excitement increased. There was no eleven o’clock rule, and often the sun was up before the Commons, with parched throats and throbbing heads, escaped to enjoy, if they could, the majestic spectacle of London from the bridges, before the smoke had risen to make every street dark and every face dirty.

The manners of Parliament in the thirties seem to have been the worst on record, and they were not improved when, in 1835, the Whigs, in their brief interval of Opposition, chose to put out a strong Speaker, Manners Sutton, and put in a weak one, Abercromby.^[39] Under his amiable governance, with the windows shut—and the stench of the Thames made it impossible to keep them open—the mooings, cat-calls, and cock-crows, what O’Connell once called the ‘beastly bellowings’, of the faithful Commons, could be heard fifty yards away. The eloquence which could master such an audience was of a new kind. The great rhetorical tradition which begins with Halifax and runs through Pitt to Canning, sent up an expiring flash in Macaulay. The modern manner was less declamatory and more closely reasoned: we might call it more conversational if we remember that conversation still kept some of the amplitude of an earlier day.^[40] Speeches were very long, but the contentions over the currency and the fiscal system had created a new style, of which Huskisson was the first exponent, Peel the most specious master, and which Mr. Gladstone wielded like a Tenth Muse: knowledge of the facts and an apt handling of figures was now the surest proof of capacity, and among the most memorable feats of Victorian oratory are speeches on finance.

In this development Parliament reflected a movement in the national mind. It was the business of the thirties to transfer the treatment of affairs from a polemical to a statistical basis, from Humbug to Humdrum.^[41] In 1830 there were hardly any figures to work on. Even the Census was still far from perfect: in that of 1831 the acreage of England is given twice over, with a discrepancy as large as Berkshire. Imports were still reckoned by Official Values based on the prices of 1690. But statistical inquiry, fostered very largely by the development of the Insurance business, was a passion of the times. The Statistical department of the Board of Trade was founded in 1832; the department of the Registrar-General in 1838; the Royal Statistical Society sprang out of the Cambridge meeting of the British Association in 1833. Two private compilations of the thirties, McCulloch’s Statistical Account of the British Empire^[42] and Porter’s Progress of the Nation, are still the best approach to Victorian history. Then come the great inquiries, by Parliamentary Committees or Royal Commissions, following the Poor Law Commission of 1832. To Sydney Smith it seemed that the world had been saved from the flood to be handed over to barristers of six years’ standing, and a Prussian visitor apprehended that the object of the Whigs was to Germanize England by means of Royal Commissions. In a few years the public mind had been flooded with facts and figures bearing on every branch of the national life, except agriculture: the collection of agricultural statistics was resisted till the sixties. No community in history had ever been submitted to so searching an examination.^[43] Copied or summarized in the Press, the Blue Books created a new attitude to affairs; they provided fresh topics for novelists and fresh themes for poets. Sybil is a Blue Book in fiction; The Cry of the Children a Blue Book in verse. With the parliamentary inquiries must be ranged the local investigations made by individuals, societies, and municipalities. I have spoken of Kay-Shuttleworth’s Report on Manchester. In a few years a score of great towns, Bristol, Westminster, Southwark, Hull, Liverpool, Leeds, had all been put through the same mill and with much the same results.^[44] Douglas Jerrold, who had once produced an unsuccessful play called The Factory Girl, complained that in 1833 no one was thinking about the poor and in 1839 no one was thinking about anything else. But in 1839 the depths had not been sounded.

[34]	It only becomes common in the eighties. Thornton’s (very able) Treatise on Overpopulation (1845) is really an analysis of unemployment.

[35]

The figures of the first registration show how oligarchical the new Constitution was:Counties, England345,000Scotland 33,000.Boroughs „275,000Scotland 31,000.The £10 householder in town was in effect a man with £150 a year and upward: without exaggerating it, as the Tories were inclined to do, one must still remember that Reform did disfranchise a large number of working men. Boroughs of 200 and 300 voters were still common: Thetford had 146. In very general terms one might say that from 1832 to 1867 one man in six had a vote, after 1867 one in three. In the same period over fifty returns were set aside for malpractices. Electorate is a L.V. word: constituency which appeared (colloquially) for the first time in 1830/1 originally meant the whole body of electors: then, a particular body.

[36]

And mysteries. The procedural history of Parliament is a struggle between an old principle (freedom of debate) and a new one (to make a programme and get through it). In the thirties, freedom, exercised through (a) a multitude of formal stages, (b) irrelevant amendments on going into Committee or adjourning, was in the ascendant. The public, intensely interested in Parliament, was in consequence often baffled to know what Parliament was doing or why.

[37]	Bringing voters to the poll (abolished in 1885) was the main item. The commonest malpractice was impersonation. In one borough election in 1838, out of 310 votes given, 109 were challenged on that ground.

[38]

The career of Ewart (son of Mr. Gladstone’s godfather) is typical. He was in Parliament thirty-four years. He carried three important bills (capital punishment, defence of felons, public libraries) besides being very active on free trade, schools of design, and competitive examinations. But he was never in office.

[39]	Lord John Russell urged the view, which fortunately did not become canonical, that the Speaker should always be in sympathy with the majority.

[40]	The Brookfields in the fifties claimed to have introduced the new style of conversation, brisk and allusive. Mrs. Carlyle used to torture London parties with the elaboration of her anecdotes.

[41]

As a symbol of the age, one might cite the Lords’ Report on ‘the expediency of Discontinuing the present Mode of Engrossing Acts of Parliament in Black Letter and substituting a Plain Round Hand’. But until Lord Thring took it in hand, the actual drafting of statutes came far short of these good intentions.

[42]

Which gives more space to Oxford than to Canada. Empire in E.V. English is stylistic for realm, kingdom, and imports no overseas reference. ‘Dog’s Hole Lane has been widened! Main drainage has been installed! Soon X will take her rightful place among the Cities of the Empire!’ I quote from memory from the history of some ‘glad aspiring little burg’.

[43]	The Parliamentary papers were first put on sale in 1835; division lists first published in 1836.

[44]	The impulse came from the Statistical Society of Manchester, which, as a control experiment, also investigated Rutland. Leeds was, I believe, the first municipality to investigate itself.