by Simon Heffer
Yet industrialisation created wealth, stimulated innovation, encouraged education and, above all, pricked the consciences of those enriched by it. An intellectual elite sought to liberate minds from the doctrines of religion, and to drive movements for reform in education, housing, public health, the law and the constitution. The educated classes sought to bring a growing number of the uneducated inside the pale of a common civilisation, one rooted in an understanding of the classical world and, in a more contemporary sense, the benefits of an evolving democracy. Between the censuses of 1841 and 1881 the population of Great Britain and Ireland rose from 27 million to 35 million, despite falling by 3 million in Ireland following the great emigration after the Potato Famine. By 1880 most men had the vote, women were no longer their husbands’ chattels, and school places were provided for all children. Britain was the world’s leading power, and had developed a formidable and distinct contemporary culture along with its prosperity.
But the greatest transformation in those forty or so years was visible all over Britain: whole suburbs of housing, town halls, museums, concert halls, art galleries, schools, colleges, hospitals, libraries, railway stations, market halls and Gothic Revival churches spoke of a country that had with determination, and a sense of common direction, put its new-found wealth to use in improving the lives, the minds and the souls of its people. The pursuit of perfection might have been idealistic, but it did not fail to bring its own, plentiful, harvest. This book will describe this awesome transformation, and will celebrate the men and women who undertook it.
PROLOGUE
DR ARNOLD OF RUGBY
I
A CLIMATE OF prejudice about the Victorians still lingers. It began with a mild moral rebellion in the 1890s, before the old Queen was in her tomb at Frogmore. It was active until the 1960s, when the era was passing out of living memory; and those unborn at the time decided to stop wrecking the legacy of the nineteenth century. The saving of the Midland Hotel at St Pancras Station in London from demolition in 1967 signalled the change of mood. Buildings had been one of the most significant representations of Victorian attitudes and purpose, which was not least why some wished to destroy them. However, as the importance of preserving the visible symbols of an era was recognised, so a new perspective on the intellectual and psychological achievement of the Victorians became necessary. After all, without a sense of moral purpose, and moral leadership, the affluence of the few might well have been destroyed by the revolution of the masses, brought about by a sense of injustice not unlike that felt in France in the 1780s. As it was, a social movement from the 1830s to the 1870s helped manage the final transformation of a feudal nation into an industrial, democratic one: and it did so not least because of the sense of mission many in the upper and upper-middle classes had towards bringing light into the lives of those whom seismic social upheaval had driven towards darkness.
A prevailing theme behind change in the nineteenth century is a religious, or more specifically Christian, motivation of those who inspired, enabled and undertook it. This ethos was promoted most assiduously by the public schools, almost all of whose headmasters were divines. Many took their cue from one man: Dr Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School from 1828 to 1842. Arnold was savaged by Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians for his piety, his perceived priggishness and his earnestness: that Strachey felt he had to attack a man who died only five years into Victoria’s reign as part of his assault on the values of the age betrays what a towering and enduring influence Arnold was. Since Strachey, others have sought to belittle and diminish Arnold. However, in his liberal belief in the expansion of education and his quest for the moral improvement of society, his influence set the tone of the reforming classes of Victorian Britain. He helped renew the idea of a principle of duty by which more fortunate Christians strove to improve the lives of less fortunate ones. His view of life as a constant struggle between good and evil came to be shared by many Victorians, with a conviction that good must triumph.
Although his direct influence was only on his family, the boys he taught and his colleagues, his ethos came to suffuse the public-school system, and went beyond it, for the rest of the nineteenth century. One of his twentieth-century biographers, T. W. Bamford, argued that ‘he is said to have reformed the public schools whereas in fact there is precious little evidence of it’.1 Although he hardly diversified the curriculum at Rugby, he sought to teach the narrow range of subjects more imaginatively. He also established a relationship with his assistant masters like that between university dons, and tried to alter the products of his school: which, in time, changed the products of most leading public schools.
Arnold also played a significant part in changing the climate of the age that followed him, through his high-minded moralism in the collected editions of his sermons and his writings. He was a born journalist, unafraid to disseminate his views – much, on occasion, to the annoyance of Rugby’s governors. His son Matthew inherited this trait. Some he influenced may have been hypocrites, but they were inspired by Arnold’s tone (if not always by his example) to make life better, nobler and less mean. He advanced godliness in a society that would gradually become more secular: but this secularisation came amid vigorous religious debate and dispute, against a backdrop of aggressive church-building – and of taking the Established Church and dissenting congregations into new communities in expanding towns all over Britain.
Arnold’s example did not merely transform public schools, and the grammar schools that imitated them, but inspired others – notably Matthew, and his pupils Arthur Hugh Clough and Arthur Penrhyn Stanley – to seek to raise the moral tone of Britain and make people more Christian: and to cause them to devote themselves to improving the lives of others and the society in which they lived. This was not only about making people more godly and pious, as Dr Arnold had intended: it was about extending the intellectual and material aspects of civilisation. Only if the determination to make life better was rooted in faith, they felt, could improvement be possible. Matthew Arnold argued for the extension of civilisation most powerfully in his 1867 polemic Culture and Anarchy. Its superscription summed up his mood: ‘Estote ergo vos perfecti!’, ‘Be ye perfect!’ The intense commitment by the mid-Victorians to give life a greater nobility of purpose, founded upon a sense of duty, and to pursue perfection can be traced back to Dr Arnold. Inevitably, this mood also gave rise to incidents of extreme hypocrisy – such as when Arnold’s pupil Charles Vaughan resigned as headmaster of Harrow in 1859 because of his homosexual affair with a pupil: but even Vaughan went on to help found University College, Cardiff. The Arnoldian message was never entirely lost on him.
II
Stanley, in writing the life of Arnold, his recently deceased and much-loved mentor, claimed that ‘it will be felt that, not so much amongst his own pupils, nor in the scene of his actual labours, as in every Public School throughout England, is to be sought the chief and enduring monument of Dr Arnold’s head-mastership of Rugby.’2 Almost a century and a half later Stefan Collini wrote that ‘He [Arnold] transformed what had been a fair specimen of the debauched and riotous establishments known as public schools into the character-building, God-fearing, scholarship-winning model for the reform in the 1840s and 1850s of other schools of its type. He thereby had an incalculable influence on world history, indirectly staffing an empire, and helping to shape, perhaps to stifle, the emotional development of a governing class for several generations.’3 These are powerful claims, and given what they imply for Victorian society, require investigation.
Arnold was an early meritocrat. His father was postmaster and customs officer for the Isle of Wight, but died in 1801, when Tom was only six. So tight was money that Tom’s mother took over as postmaster to keep the family solvent. Tom was sent to Warminster School in Wiltshire: which, although not well known, was a high-achieving school academically. However, when Tom was twelve he moved to Winchester. He had shown ability, and his mother wished him to go to university: but so d
ifficult were things financially that that required Tom to attend a school with well-funded university scholarships.
At Winchester he became an accomplished classicist. He also developed a precocious interest in history. He had a strong character and left his mark on any group of which he was a part. He had just the right combination of force of personality and intellect to be a successful headmaster. With this manner came streaks of anger, impatience and determination.
He won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Here, as at school, he was bookish. He became something of a poet, a trait that would be more successfully developed by his eldest son, Matthew. He had hoped to enter the Church, but the period from his graduation as a Master of Arts at Oxford in 1817 until the mid-1820s was one of serious religious doubt for him: although he became a deacon in 1818, he struggled with the Athanasian Creed, the nature of the Trinity and aspects of the Thirty-nine Articles. This doubt was not about the existence of God, or with the nature of Christianity, but was a theological problem with the established interpretation of the tenets of Anglicanism. The Articles had defined Anglicanism after the Reformation as distinct from Roman Catholicism. They had in some respects a doctrinaire medievalism that many modern scholars, including Arnold, struggled with. The rise of Nonconformism, notably Methodism, in the eighteenth century had been largely as a reaction to the prescriptive and inflexible nature of the doctrine contained in the Articles, and this had its effect on a generation of Anglicans determined to analyse and reflect upon what they had been taught. Doubt delayed Arnold’s entry to the priesthood. Instead, he became the partner of John Buckland, his sister’s husband, in a private school at Laleham in Middlesex. He married in 1820, and the first of the Arnolds’ eleven children (nine of whom lived to adulthood) was born the following year.
An expanding family and the low earnings of a schoolmaster caused Arnold to work on literary projects in his spare time, notably ancient history. For all the privations, he enjoyed teaching older boys and brought favoured pupils into his family circle. This would set the tone for Rugby. He sought a more lucrative appointment, and applied to become professor of modern history at the University of London; however, he was offered the headmastership of Rugby School in Warwickshire. Arnold was high-minded; but before that notion about him becomes too distracting, it should be noted that he chose Rugby not because he felt a stronger vocation to teach boys rather than men: it was because it was better paid.
His chances when he submitted his name for consideration were felt not to be high, since others had been in the field longer. He was unknown to most of the twelve trustees – noblemen and gentlemen of Warwickshire – even by name, and he had applied late. However, all his references spoke highly of his suitability and qualifications as a schoolmaster; and one, from the Reverend Edward Hawkins (who within weeks would be elected as a famously obstinate Provost of Oriel) ‘predicted that, if Mr Arnold were elected to the head-mastership of Rugby, he would change the face of education all through the public schools of England.’4 Arnold was elected in December 1827 without even having to submit to an interview, so powerful were the recommendations in his testimonials. He had, nevertheless, felt reluctant to choose Rugby. His religious difficulties had not been entirely resolved, and he felt he would want to take holy orders to be able to administer communion in chapel. However, a way was found for him to interpret the Thirty-nine Articles that removed his problem with them: his ordination followed rapidly. By the time he arrived at the school in August 1828 he was the Reverend Mr Arnold, and his doctorate of divinity came in November.
A second cause for hesitation was that he understood the school to be a moral sink. Lytton Strachey, in his essay on Arnold, famously described the public-school system at the time as ‘anarchy tempered by despotism’.5 Some boys Arnold could bring into line with a birch rod, and neither he nor the school governors had any qualms about his doing so. But he also wished to expel particularly recalcitrant elements, which might affect the school’s reputation and finances; and, also, to remove boys who showed no aptitude for his rigorous teaching methods because of a lack of intellectual curiosity. He was encouraged in this too.
Arnold was conscious that he was assuming a prominent position in a business that had generally sunk in regard and achievement. Many schools were dens of buggery and bullying, with youths out of control. John Bowdler, nephew of the sanitiser of Gibbon and Shakespeare and a comrade of Arnold’s in various theological battles, proclaimed: ‘the public schools are the very seats and nurseries of vice.’6 Arnold himself observed that ‘that is properly a nursery of vice, where a boy unlearns the pure and honest principles which he may have received at home, and gets, in their stead, others which are utterly low, and base, and mischievous; where he loses his modesty, his respect for truth, and his affectionateness, and becomes coarse, and false, and unfeeling.’7
He distinguished between two forms of removal. The first was meant as a public disgrace and was conducted as such; the second was more discreet, with no shame, but merely (as it was argued to the boys concerned and their parents) in their best interests. It was said of Arnold himself that ‘he wakes every morning with an impression that everything is an open question’, and he expected his pupils and his staff to take a similar view.8 Once, after expelling some boys for moral turpitude, Arnold stood before the assembled school and said: ‘It is not necessary that this should be a school of three hundred, or one hundred, or of fifty boys; but it is necessary that it should be a school of Christian gentlemen.’9 He also said: ‘Sending away boys is a necessary and regular part of a good system, not as a punishment to one, but as a protection to others. Undoubtedly it would be a better system if there was no evil; but evil being unavoidable we are not a gaol to keep it in, but a place of education where we must cast it out, to prevent its taint from spreading.’10
This was the sort of ‘evil’ he was determined to vanquish. Sunday after Sunday he would rail against it, each new generation of boys prone to the same pollution, his battle never won. As pupils, Stanley and Charles Vaughan would ‘nudge each other with delight’ when Arnold entered the pulpit to preach: a reaction probably untypical of boys, and indicative of the priggishness Arnold risked inspiring.11 ‘Evil’ was not a term he bandied about casually. He had identified it, and indeed categorised it. He told his boys, in a notable sermon, that there were six sorts of evil, and he listed them: profligacy (or ‘direct sensual wickedness’, of which he gave the example of drunkenness – sexual impropriety was the great unmentionable and, in all his sermons, unmentioned), systematic falsehood, cruelty and bullying, active disobedience, idleness, and the bond of evil, or the way in which boys feel tied to one another by ties of wickedness rather than by ties of good.12 ‘Let these six things exist together,’ Arnold proclaimed, ‘and the profanation of the temple is complete.’ He set a high standard, and very few boys would be equal to it. He also made it clear that it was not just he who was judging and, if necessary, punishing them. God, too, was taking notes.
Yet Arnold was optimistic: ‘Every boy brings some good with him, at least, from home, as well as some evil; and yet you see how very much more catching the evil is than the good, or else you would make one another better by mixing together; and if any single boy did anything wrong, it would be condemned by the general opinion of all the school, just as some wrong things, such as stealing money, for example, are condemned at present.’13 He was ever confronted by boys of whom ‘some are losing their child’s innocence, but none, or very few, are gaining a man’s virtue’.14 His aim was to create a sense of ‘Christian manliness’ in his charges, urgently.15
The standard of educational provision and of conduct elsewhere was not high. In other schools discipline was savage but arbitrary. Sanitary conditions were often disgusting. Not the least of the schools’ problems was that the teaching was so bad. Arnold tolerated none of these things: and it was his ferocity in fighting against them and setting a standard of reforms that helped begin a revoluti
on in education. This revolution spread not least because he sent out men from Rugby to other schools, and other institutions, who took the Arnoldian message of Christianity (developed by the next generation, with its growing interest in sport and team games, into muscular Christianity) with them and who transformed the attitude of the upper and upper-middle classes. He was motivated by disinterest, a quality his eldest son would make a touchstone of successful criticism, and which would motivate many reformers. ‘His consciousness of his own integrity, and his contempt for worldly advantage, sometimes led him to require from others more than might be reasonably expected from them,’ Stanley claimed.16
It was this fanatical (though Dr Arnold would have repudiated such an adjective) determination to make his charges see life as a battleground between good and evil that made him a figure of fun, or obloquy, to critics. A sympathiser, H. F. Lowry, referring to the famous novel by Thomas Hughes, one of Arnold’s pupils, described the caricature: ‘To them [his detractors] he will never be more than the pious Englishman who turned Tom Brown’s fellows into first-rate prigs and made little boys grow old before their years . . . he was, even in his own time, the embodiment of Duty waiting with a birch in hand, haunting their doubtful dreams like a Hebrew prophet, and summoning on their guilty heads the fiery wrath of God.’17
His assistant masters were chosen for their moral and intellectual calibre, and were paid better than previously. Arnold expected complete commitment – too many masters had been clergymen with parishes, sometimes far-flung – and evidence of continued interest in learning. Some of these men became housemasters as Arnold ended the practice of boys lodging at dames’ houses in the town. Those masters who were laymen he urged to become ordained, and came to an arrangement with the diocesan Bishop to facilitate this. In appointing staff, he said that ‘what I want is a man who is a Christian and a gentleman, an active man, and one who has common sense, and understands boys . . . I prefer activity of mind and an interest in his work to high scholarship.’18 On a man’s appointment to the staff, Arnold would write to him that ‘he should be public spirited, liberal, and entering heartily into the interest, honour, and general respectability and distinction of the society which he has joined.’