by Simon Heffer
General Johnson, a Tory MP, argued that
no one could deny—nay, not even its supporters—that the law was extremely harsh and cruel in its operation. The boards of guardians themselves in many instances were so convinced of its cruelty that they gave alms themselves from their own pockets to those to whom they were not permitted to afford out-door relief . . . It was impossible that a Christian feeling could consent to throw the whole of the poor into one mass, without distinguishing between the bad and the deserving, without drawing a line between those reduced to poverty by their own intemperance and those who were afflicted by the visitation of the Almighty. Could that law be Christian which would subject those two classes to the same treatment? . . . The principle of the present act made poverty a crime, whilst the law of Elizabeth did no such thing.51
After 1842, the government was badly on the defensive: with intelligent men such as Peel and Gladstone increasingly aware that upholding the status quo in both the Poor Law and the Corn Laws would simply risk insurrection, it was not a matter of whether the ruling class would act, but when. Those with a vision of change were about to have the upper hand.
CHAPTER 2
NOBLESSE OBLIGE: POLITICS AND THE ARISTOCRACY
I
DR ARNOLD, IN his contempt for the Tories’ opposition to reform, and his despair that the newly prosperous middle classes would ever see the evil of their exploitation of the working classes, had written to a brother clergyman in September 1836 that ‘vulgar minds can never understand the duty of reform till it is impressed on them by the argumentum ad ventrem; and the mass of mankind, whether in good coats or in bad, will always be vulgar-minded.’1 Arnold had seen clearly how even well-meaning attempts at improving the condition of the working classes could misfire: he saw the Poor Law Act as ‘a measure in itself wise and just, but which, standing alone, and unaccompanied by others of a milder and more positively improving tendency, wears an air of harshness and will, I fear, embitter the feelings of the poorer classes still more.’2
He shared these opinions, to an extent, with a man who was fast becoming the most prominent commentator of the day: Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle was an exact contemporary of Arnold, being born in 1795: but outlived the Doctor by almost forty years. Like Arnold, he was a serious scholar, a man of immense learning and deep and wide reading. Unlike him, he was the son of an Annandale peasant who, through his family’s industry and sacrifice, was sent to Edinburgh University, often walking there and back at the beginning and end of terms to conserve money. Eventually Carlyle found patrons and broke into the business of writing for reviews. He had also married above his station to the well-to-do Jane Welsh, whose family laughed at Carlyle’s lack of breeding but conceded his astonishing talent.
After several years of subsistence living in the Scottish lowlands, the Carlyles moved to London in 1834. In his love of the sound of his own voice and his almost wilful obscurity, Carlyle seems to have had a version of autism: yet he (and more to the point his wife, with whom he had difficult relations that may well have included the non-consummation of their marriage) became a supreme networker, befriending early on John Stuart Mill, with whose liberal philosophy he would come violently to disagree, and then Dickens. Fame came in 1837 with his History of the French Revolution, a work of scholarship and research, which (not least thanks to Carlyle’s unusual, apostrophising style) at times reads like a screenplay. But for astonishing resolution on Carlyle’s part, the work might never have appeared: for he gave the first volume of the manuscript to Mill to read, and Mill’s housemaid lit the fire with it. Mill compensated Carlyle financially, and Carlyle wrote the book again. Mill also gave Carlyle part of his own collection of works on the revolution to help his research.
Carlyle’s main interest, however, was political rather than historical. He was deeply concerned about how societies worked, or did not work: he saw their coherence as crucial. He had imbibed from history a belief in the rule of an aristocracy, which in return for its status and privileges cared for those over whom it ruled. This attachment to feudalism was romantic in an industrialised society undergoing an explosion in population: but Carlyle would not let such considerations impede him, and he found followers for what even at the time seemed a far-fetched idea.
The social ferment after the 1832 Reform Act electrified Carlyle. He felt he understood why the Act had not solved the problem of social unrest: and he saw the Chartist agitation from 1838 onwards as proof that without a reversion to benign aristocratic rule, and the replacement of the capitalist system, there would be nothing but misery and, in the end, revolution. The Act had extended the franchise, but insufficiently. It retained a too small political class, and excluded many men of intelligence and, more dangerously, political motivation. Carlyle wrote to Mill in the winter of 1838, some months before he began his extended essay called Chartism, to voice his pessimism at what could be done for the social conditions of the people in the face of overwhelming odds. ‘It is a bitter mockery to talk of “improvement” to the men I have known! Ebenezer Elliot is with me; Machinery, and Population increasing 1200 a day, are with me.’3
Writing a year later, on 15 April 1839, to his brother, Carlyle noted how the rest of England looked from his haven in Chelsea: ‘The distress indeed I believe to be great and universal in this land at present; and some are beginning to predict now a second year of dearth, so bleak is our spring hitherto. Many thousands of operatives in the North are getting pikes and pistols – poor wretches, their heart is bitter, their case is hard and hopeless . . . people ought to bundle that can; and leave a Country where blood and confusion seem inevitable before very long.’4
Carlyle saw Chartism as the inevitable result of the abandonment of the responsibilities of the moneyed classes: a view consequent upon his romantic belief in feudalism. Chartism was ‘revenge begotten of ignorance and hunger . . . the material of it exists I believe in the hearts of all our working population.’5 He made these comments in the summer of 1839, after the wave of riots in the industrial north and midlands (Newcastle, Liverpool, Birmingham and Chester) but also in towns such as Devizes, Welshpool and Warwick. ‘Unless gentry, clergy and all manner of washed articulate-speaking men will learn that their position towards the unwashed is contrary to the Law of God, and change it soon, the Law of Man, one has reason to discern, will change it before long, and in no soft manner.’6 He uttered a remarkably accurate prophecy in the same letter, to Thomas Story Spedding, a Cumberland landowner and scholar: ‘The fever-fit of Chartism will pass, and other fever-fits; but the thing it means will not pass, till whatsoever of truth and justice lies in the heart of it has been fulfilled, it cannot pass till then – a long date, I fear.’
Mill and Carlyle would take wildly different views of politics and of the answer to the Condition of England question, and drift apart. In October 1840 Carlyle indicated the direction their quarrel would take. ‘And now when will you write’, he asked Mill, ‘of the New Aristocracy we have to look for? That seems to me the question; all Democracy a mere transitionary preparation for that.’7 Carlyle hoped the newly enfranchised would restore a benign feudalism; Mill, more realistic about industrial progress, the breaking of old communities and social ties, and the growth of prosperity knew democracy was the only bulwark against revolution, and, once installed, would be removed only by force.
Carlyle had Mill to thank for the publication of Chartism. After the Quarterly Review declined to run it, Mill’s own Westminster Review published it at the very end of 1839. Its first chapter is entitled ‘Condition of England Question’ – a phrase that would resonate for decades – and began with the understatement that ‘a feeling very generally exists that the condition and disposition of the Working Classes is a rather ominous matter at present’.8 He derided the notion, put out in the establishment newspapers, that the government had seen off the Chartists: he saw no reason why the agitation should end or, indeed, why it should not get worse. He saw the problem as ‘weighty, deep-rooted, f
ar-extending’.9 He felt the reformed parliament incapable of grasping the difficulty, thinking it obsessed with low politics and questions of personal advancement.
‘The struggle that divides the upper and lower in society over Europe, and more painfully and notably in England than elsewhere . . . will end and adjust itself as all other struggles do and have done, by making the right clear and the might clear,’ he wrote.10 In other words (and Carlyle is not always direct) a strong leader, using coercive force – perhaps such as his hero Cromwell – would be needed to restore order. However, that was but part of it.
Dr Arnold might have made a case for the Poor Law, but Carlyle savaged it. That it was said to be the ‘chief glory’ of the administration ‘betokens, one would imagine, rather a scarcity of glory there.’ He continues: ‘To say to the poor, Ye shall eat the bread of affliction and drink the water of affliction, and be very miserable while here, required not so much a stretch of heroic faculty in any sense, as due toughness of bowels.’11 The poor were like rats who find granaries sealed. They must work or starve: ‘The New Poor-Law is an announcement, sufficiently distinct, that whosoever will not work ought not to live.’12
Carlyle believed men wanted to work: who in feudal times (before the invention of machinery which, he fails to acknowledge, cannot be uninvented) would have been found work. However, in the industrial society, ruled by laissez-faire and the law of supply and demand, there was not always a job to be done. This required more active government – ‘a government of the under classes by the upper on a principle of Let-alone is no longer possible in England in these days . . . The Working Classes cannot any longer go on without government; without being actually guided and governed.’13 Yet neither the Church nor the State seemed to want to educate, or to guide, in this manner, and seemed careless of the sufferings of the lower classes.
He doubted Chartism had the answer. ‘What are all popular commotions and maddest bellowings, from Peterloo to the Place-de-Grève [the square in Paris used for public executions during the revolution] itself? Bellowings, inarticulate cries as of a dumb creature in rage and pain; to the ear of wisdom they are inarticulate prayers: “Guide me, govern me! I am mad and miserable, and cannot guide myself!” Surely of all “rights of man”, this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest.’14 This would be rejected not just by Chartists, whose argument was that they had had enough of being controlled, but also by a hapless governing class, for whom a return to feudalism was impossible. He did, though, inspire some to act more paternalistically, and as such would influence Disraeli, as novelist and politician, and his fellow members of Young England.
Carlyle would find more support in his assertion – and this was Arnold’s point – that instead of a relationship built on governance of the foolish by the wise, the relationship between men was now money. He wrote that in ‘the most perfect feudal time . . . Cash Payment had not then grown to be the universal sole nexus of man to man; it was something other than money that the high then expected from the low, and could not live without getting from the low. Not as buyer and seller alone, of land or what else it might be, but in many senses still as soldier and captain, as clansman and head, as loyal subject and guiding king, was the low related to the high. With the supreme triumph of Cash, a changed time has entered; there must a changed aristocracy enter’.15 But it would not: the landed classes were too busy ‘preserving their Game’.16
II
Three and a half years after Chartism Carlyle published possibly his most rational, compelling and influential work: Past and Present. He wrote it in less than two months, while collecting the letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell, inspired by something he had witnessed in the late summer of 1842 when riding around Huntingdonshire, Cromwell’s county. As he passed the workhouse at St Ives on 7 September he saw ‘sitting on wooden benches, in front of their Bastille and within their ring-wall and its railings, some half-hundred or more of these men. Tall robust figures, young mostly or of middle age; of honest countenance, many of them thoughtful or even intelligent-looking men. They sat there, near by one another; but in a kind of torpor, especially in a silence, which was very striking . . . there was something that reminded me of Dante’s Hell in the look of all this; and I rode swiftly away.’17
He was outraged by this waste of potential; this denial, because of capitalism’s workings, of the ability of a man to fulfil himself through labour. He cast aside his work on Cromwell and proceeded to attack the system. Many of the arguments, and some of the language, are familiar from Chartism. Going beyond that work, however, Carlyle presents his evidence of ‘the most perfect feudal times’: he quotes extensively from the chronicles of Jocelin de Brakelond, a twelfth-century monk from Bury St Edmunds, whose writings had recently been published by the Camden Society. Jocelin described how a medieval society based upon the abbey at Bury provided work and sustenance for the local people. The message is not so much ‘return to this’ as ‘imitate this’: he asks whether some modern equivalent could not be contemplated.
The work is laced with black humour, starting with the grim superscription from Schiller: Ernst ist das Leben, life is earnest. He quotes newspaper accounts of the trials of parents charged with killing their children because they could not feed them, and asks how this could happen in what appeared to him to be a land of plenty. He felt the lower classes were asking their betters: ‘what is it you mean to do with us?’ and hearing no coherent reply.18 They sought ‘a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work’, which he described as ‘the everlasting right of man’, and one that ‘Midas-eared Mammonisms’ had pushed to one side. He had not changed his tune since Chartism: an aristocracy, doing its job properly, was needed to rescue the helpless. However, perhaps it was a subtly different type of aristocracy: ‘We must have more Wisdom to govern us, we must be governed by the Wisest, we must have an Aristocracy of Talent!’19 However, he registered his despair at finding it: for so few people, measuring as they did everything by pounds, shillings and pence, did not know what real talent was. ‘Supply-and-demand, Cash-payment the one nexus of man to man: Free trade, Competition, and Devil take the hindmost, our latest Gospel yet preached,’ as he also put it.20 It was, for good measure, ‘the Gospel of Despair’.21
If men who were workless were desperate, the fate of those with work was little better. Carlyle saw them as dehumanised, their work a ‘tragic spectacle. Men in the rapidest motion and self-motion; restless, with convulsive energy, as if driven by Galvanism, as if possessed by a Devil.’22 He also gave his opinions on liberty, a decade and a half before Mill would write his. There was no consonance of view. ‘Liberty? The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find out the right path, and to walk thereon. To learn, or to be taught, what work he actually was able for; and then by permission, persuasion, and even compulsion, to set about doing of the same.’23 Democracy was not the answer to England’s problems: ‘Democracy, which means despair of finding any Heroes to govern you, and contented putting-up with the want of them.’24
Carlyle’s remedy was that the State, just as it had fighting services, should have other services that both provided work and sought to reassert order. For a man who would be derided posthumously as a fascist, he pre-empted much socialism. His state is not run by commissars, however, but by the old ruling class. He feared society would collapse unless the traditional order began to function again: ‘A High Class without duties to do is like a tree planted on precipices; from the roots of which all the earth has been crumbling.’ As things stood, nobility was becoming a meaningless concept.25 ‘The Working Aristocracy: Mill-owners, Manufacturers, Commanders of Working Men . . . must strike into a new path; must understand that money alone is not the representative either of man’s success in the world, or of man’s duties to man; and reform their own selves from top to bottom, if they wish England reformed. England will not be habita
ble long, unreformed.’26
Carlyle was not a lone voice. In the early 1840s a group of young aristocrats and politicians, which came to be known as the Young England movement, was influenced by Carlyle’s highly unrealistic longing for a pre-industrial society. They also venerated a fantasy medievalism of the type advanced by Sir Walter Scott, and pursued a romantic idea of feudalism. The group was led by Lord John Manners, a younger son of the Duke of Rutland, George Smythe, the son of Lord Strangford, and Alexander Baillie Cochrane, son of an admiral of the fleet. Unlike Carlyle, they were rooted in a sentimental view of the past: for Carlyle the romance of feudalism was precisely because of what he believed to be its practical application to the creation of a happy, ordered society, and sentiment did not come into it. Benjamin Disraeli, dandy and novelist turned Tory politician, evoked the mood in his writings of the early 1840s, such as in his description of the young Coningsby (based on Smythe), having sent his luggage on ahead, walking through the Vale of Belvoir in the summer of 1837 on his way to Beaumanoir – in reality Belvoir Castle, seat of the Mannerses. ‘It was a fragment of one of those vast sylvan tracts wherein Norman kings once hunted and Saxon outlaws plundered . . . sometimes the green earth was thickly studded with groves of huge and vigorous oaks, intersected with those smooth and sunny glades that seem as if they must be cut for dames and knights to saunter in.’27
Lord Blake, in his life of Disraeli, speculated that he espoused this cause purely to keep in with a constituency of glamorous young men in the Commons who comprised the group; and quotes Manners, as wondering whether Disraeli actually believed what he said. He would not be the last Tory to ask that question. Blake himself is not sure.28 The Duke of Rutland regarded Disraeli as a corrupting influence on his son, as did Lord Strangford on his. Rutland stigmatised Disraeli as ‘a designing person’, a view that proved accurate when Disraeli dropped the Young Englanders as soon as they were of no further use to him.29 Disraeli was not from the aristocracy; but he adopted their views and outlook and affected to speak for them in his writings.