by Simon Heffer
Disraeli’s novels have little literary merit, though so distinguished a critic as John Holloway wrote that they had ‘a colourful, irresponsible brilliance’.30 They have acquired a currency in political circles because of their espousal by generations of earnest, and not especially analytical, Conservatives, duped by Disraeli just as many of his contemporaries and younger protégés were. He has become a purveyor of metaphors, notably when he sought to describe the divisions of the country in Sybil, published in 1845, in terms that would echo down generations of Tory politicians:
‘Well, society may be in its infancy,’ said Egremont slightly smiling; ‘but, say what you like, our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed.’
‘Which nation?’ asked the younger stranger, ‘for she reigns over two.’
The stranger paused; Egremont was silent, but looked inquiringly.
‘Yes,’ resumed the younger stranger after a moment’s interval. ‘Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.’
‘You speak of –’ said Egremont, hesitatingly.
‘THE RICH AND THE POOR.’31
Disraeli, like others in Young England, may have been influenced by Past and Present: though no proof can be found that he ever read a word of Carlyle. When Egremont, younger son of a dissolute noble family, meets some strangers in the ruins of Marney Abbey, on his brother’s estates, and enters into a discussion with one of them, he is lectured on the superiority of the age when the Abbots of Marney controlled the land compared with the era of the secular, aristocratic landlord. This echoes Carlyle’s interpretation of Jocelin de Brakelond exactly, and Jocelin’s account of the regulation of society by the Abbey of St Edmundsbury. Such is the discontent of the local peasantry with Lord Marney, Egremont’s hard and selfish elder brother, that they have started burning his hayricks.
The stranger tells Egremont:
‘The Monastics could possess no private property; they could save no money; they could bequeath nothing. They lived, received, and expended in common. The monastery too was a proprietor that never died and never wasted. The farmer had a deathless landlord then; not a harsh guardian, or a grinding mortgagee, or a dilatory master in chancery, all was certain; the manor had not to dread a change of lords, or the oaks to tremble at the axe of the squandering heir . . . The monks were in short in every district a point of refuge for all who needed succour, counsel, and protection; a body of individuals having no cares of their own, with wisdom to guide the inexperienced, with wealth to relieve the suffering, and often with power to protect the oppressed.’32
The key point of comparison with the contemporary aristocracy, however, is:
‘The monks were never non-resident. They expended their revenue among those whose labour had produced it. These holy men too built and planted as they did everything else for posterity: their churches were cathedrals; their schools colleges; their halls and libraries the muniment rooms of kingdoms; their woods and waters, their farms and gardens, were laid out and disposed on a scale and in a spirit that are now extinct: they made the country beautiful, and the people proud of their country.’33
Disraeli’s novel is better as a work of propaganda than of literature. Its plot is absurdly contrived, despite its link to fact and its use of characters based on people Disraeli knew. They vary from the shallow to the incredible, with stereotypes of aristocrats whose haughtiness and lack of feeling verge upon the sociopathic, and of the industrial classes who range from the brutish to a domesticated version of the noble savage. Set pieces make the point by portraying extremes: aristocrats slaughtering game by hundreds of head, and the next day sitting on magistrates’ benches imprisoning men for poaching to feed their families. Cobbett, a couple of decades earlier, had made the same point.34 Though Disraeli, by the time of Sybil, was about to break with Young England for reasons of political expediency, homage is still paid to the group’s romantic attitude to the past, when the nobility had yet to become degenerate. The only aristocrat who instinctively shows true regard for the poor (unlike Egremont himself, brought to learn it through his devotion to Sybil) is St Lys, the vicar of the industrial town of Mowbray; but then his antecedents came over with the Conqueror, rather than having bought and wheedled their way into the aristocracy in later times. Sybil herself has a concealed aristocratic lineage, a familiar feature of what Gillian Beer has called ‘wishful Victorian literature’: in other words, when anyone turns up who seems to be from the lower classes and starts to do good, they must (whether we know it or not) be nobility, for blood will out.35 Professor Beer suggests everything changed with Darwin, when everyone realised we all started from the same point.
Disraeli echoes Carlyle’s point that philanthropists should address problems at home before seeking to right the wrongs of the rest of the world. Speaking of how the very poor would be deliberately careless with their children in the hope that they would die and relieve the parents of a burden, he notes that ‘infanticide is practised as extensively and as legally in England, as it is on the banks of the Ganges; a circumstance which apparently has not yet engaged the attention of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.’36 Later, he has a character ask: ‘could they not spare one missionary from Tahiti for their fellow-countrymen at Wodgate?’37 He draws attention to the rapid increases in population, cited by one of the aristocrats as a reason to stop creating employment, as it only encourages breeding. As one character puts it, ‘what are your invasions of the barbarous nations, your Goths and Visigoths, your Lombards and Huns, to our population returns?’38 Census figures show that the population of England rose from 13.8 million in 1831 to 18 million in 1851. In fact, the population would have grown even faster but for the Potato Famine and outbreaks of cholera in 1831 and 1847. The climax of Sybil is the rioting in the north of England in the summer of 1842, an event that allows the martyrdom of Gerard and the demise – ‘literally stoned to death’ – of Lord Marney.39 Marney, who felt his people were well off on 7s a week, had his counterparts in reality.
III
While Peel was trying to hold a line between romantic feudalists such as Disraeli and hard-nosed reactionaries such as Graham, Lord Ashley became the leading advocate for improving the working and social conditions of the lower classes. He was heir to the earldom of Shaftesbury, and a Tory MP. Ashley had become a devout evangelical in the 1830s and had the high mind that went with such a persuasion. He supported missionary societies and movements, not those who took the Gospel to the natives of the colonies, but those who took it to the natives of British slums. He also worked for the conversion of the Jews, and regarded those who wished to introduce Catholic doctrine and practice into the Church of England as profoundly sinister. He attributed his religious devotion not to his parents, whom he seems to have loathed, but to a maidservant in their house. His father, the sixth earl, was so vile that Ashley spent much of his adult life estranged from him and barred from his house. One of Ashley’s friends at Oxford, Henry Fox, described old Lord Shaftesbury as ‘disgusting, and meaner than any wretch in the world.’40 Ashley did not have it so badly as his eldest sister, Charlotte, on whom (as he reported) his father poured ‘malignity and horror’ until his children were old enough to answer him back.41
Ashley was clever – with a first from Christ Church, like Peel and Gladstone. He was well connected with the Whigs, and always on the whiggish, or progressive, end of the Tory spectrum. His uncle, the Duke of Marlborough, got him into parliament for Woodstock in 1826, when he was just twenty-five. His philanthropic urges he attributed to seeing a pauper’s funeral while a Harrow schoolboy, and his motivation was religious, as he demonstrated in the House of Commons in February 1843 when making the case for educat
ing the poor: ‘I know not where to search for these things but in the lessons and practice of the Gospel: true Christianity is essentially favourable to freedom of institutions in Church and State, because it imparts a judgment of your own and another’s rights, a sense of public and private duty, an enlarged philanthropy and self-restraint, unknown to those democracies of former times, which are called, and only called, the polished nations of antiquity.’42 Throughout his life he demonstrated a strong sense of paternalism, and, as with other reformers, one sometimes detects an anxiety in his words and writing about the possible dire consequences of the State not taking measures to improve the lot of the poor.
Rather like Gladstone, the firmness of his cast of mind made him difficult for his political associates to handle. From his earliest days he was driven by a sense of social obligation, yet was a man of certain paradoxes. He profoundly opposed the 1832 Reform Bill and, later, would be a diehard opponent of the secret ballot. Yet among his wide range of good causes he helped drive legislation to protect the mentally ill, and in 1833 became chairman of the Metropolitan Commission in Lunacy. However, during the 1840s his political life would be dedicated to seeking to improve the conditions that industrialisation had created for the urban poor. He was pressed to take on the leadership in the Commons of the campaign to improve conditions in factories and shorten the hours worked there. His desire to limit by law work in factories to ten hours a day became a central cause of his political life. He succeeded in 1833 in influencing the Factory Act, but it fell short of what he and his followers wanted, notably in securing the ten-hour day. It had, though, excluded children under nine from factories, and limited those under thirteen to working nine hours a day. It introduced a regime of inspection, an important ideological step in allowing the State to regulate relations between masters and men.
In April 1840 Ashley backed a law to regulate child chimney-sweeps. There was a widespread view that the ‘climbing boys’ were ‘poor little creatures who had nobody to protect them’, and their exploitation would ‘deserve the reprobation of the country’.43 Kingsley described the life of such boys in the opening paragraphs of The Water-Babies, published in 1863:
He could not read nor write, and did not care to do either; and he never washed himself, for there was no water up the court where he lived. He had never been taught to say his prayers. He had never heard of God, or of Christ, except in words which you never have heard, and which it would have been well if he had never heard . . . He cried when he had to climb the dark flues, rubbing his poor knees and elbows raw; and when the soot got into his eyes, which it did every day in the week; and when his master beat him, which he did every day in the week; and when he had not enough to eat, which he did every day in the week likewise.44
Ashley felt that ‘the condition of [factory] children, was tenfold better than that of the chimney sweepers’, and yet Parliament had striven to improve the lot of the former, but done nothing for the latter. Ashley said the use of small boys for this purpose ‘had led to more misery and more degradation than prevailed in any other Christian country.’45 He argued that all but one in 2,000 chimneys could be swept mechanically. He told the Commons in June 1840 that he knew of one case where a boy of four-and-a-half, and another where a boy of six, were climbing up chimneys: and ‘the fact, also, that twenty-three climbing boys were now confined for various offences in Newgate, was sufficient to prove the bad moral effects of the system.’46
The trade was regulated, but in certain cities the regulations were ignored, and suffering continued for another twenty or thirty years until the practice was outlawed effectively. Reforming factory practices in the teeth of the vested interests of the new middle classes who owned them would be a different matter. He vividly outlined their abuses in an article in the Quarterly Review of December 1840 on the subject of infant labour, noting a pamphlet written by Leonard Horner, the Inspector of Factories, and the minutes of evidence given to the Select Committee on the regulation of mills and factories. Horner had commented that the 1833 Factory Act had achieved certain ends, but there was room for improvement, and the law was defective and required amendment to improve it. It was argued that further regulation would not be commercially damaging, since the restrictions placed by the Act had not caused a single mill to go slow or shut for so much as a day for want of hands. Ashley was as concerned, though, about the condition in which children lived when not working in squalid factories or mills. He called ‘the crowded lanes and courts of the larger towns’, with their ‘damp and unhealthy substrata’, their lack of drainage and their ‘frail tenements’ the ‘charnel-houses of our race’ and ‘lairs of filth and disorder’.47
These conditions destroyed souls as well as bodies. After toiling for sixteen or seventeen hours a day, teenagers would emerge ‘enfeebled in health, and exasperated in spirit’, made by the State ‘pigmies in strength, and heathens in religion’. He listed the heavy work they did in factories, forges, foundries and mills. What especially angered him was that children so often worked providing luxuries, not necessities – or as he put it, ‘on show, on feasts, and a multiplied wardrobe.’ The factory inspectorate had found lace factories in Nottingham where the working day was twenty hours, from 4 a.m. until midnight. Some children aged between ten and fifteen worked through the night, being allowed to leave between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. the next day. Mills closed early, at 8 p.m., on Saturdays by working through the night on Fridays. Some mills had a shift system, so children only had to work ten hours at a time, but two or three times a week they would work the whole twenty. And as the 1833 Act did not apply to lace mills, the law could not prevent this. An inspector, questioned by the Select Committee, admitted the regime was ‘injurious to health and morals’.48 Ashley was contemptuous of this: ‘All this for that indispensable demand of our shivering nature – a cheap lace trimming!’49
Things were as bad in silk works. ‘Ten hours of labour, in each day, are assigned to children of tender years, of eight, seven and even of six – mostly girls – and so small, as we learn from the inspectors, that they are not unfrequently placed on stools before they can reach their work.’ This was, in his view, a ‘system of domestic slavery’. Prussia, he noted, had banned children under sixteen from working more than ten hours a day. Would England follow? It was important, he stressed, that paternalism, imposed by Parliament, regulated the matter: for ‘the two great demons in morals and politics, Socialism and Chartism, are stalking through the land; yet they are but symptoms of an universal disease, spread throughout vast masses of the people, who, so far from concurring in the status quo, suppose that anything must be better than their present condition.’50
He continued: ‘Our system begets the vast and inflammable mass which lies waiting, day by day, for the spark to explode it into mischief.’ It was a system where men would ‘exact the maximum of toil for the minimum of wages . . . No wonder that thousands of hearts should be against a system which establishes the relations, without calling forth the mutual sympathies, of master and servant, landlord and tenant, employer and employed.’51 The human relations that had held society together had been corrupted and were almost destroyed. Whatever the political implications of the treatment of the poor, it was an offence against God and the scriptures, which this evangelical concluded by quoting: ‘Break off our sins by righteousness, and our iniquities by showing mercy to the poor, if it may be a lengthening of our tranquillity.’
Ashley’s relations with Peel and Graham, as leaders of his party, can partly be explained by class differences, as can his strong dislike of the industrialists’ attitude to their workers and the misery he felt they were causing. That class viewed him with equal incomprehension and distaste, and they fought each other bitterly. Peel and Graham were almost, but not quite, two peas from the same pod. Peel’s father, the first baronet, was a Lancashire calico manufacturer who bought land and became an MP. Graham, four years younger than Peel, was also the son of a first baronet from the north-west who, li
ke Peel’s father, had been an adherent of the Duke of Portland. As a Whig until 1835 he had helped with the drafting of the Reform Bill, but entertained great fears about social upheaval. From then on he became a quite hard-bitten reactionary, taking the side of the ruling class in all its arguments against organised labour and the poor.
It was hardly surprising, therefore, that Ashley’s commitment to the ten-hours principle ensured he never held office again. Peel wanted him to join his ministry in August 1841 in a junior post in the Royal Household: Ashley, however, said he could not unless Peel would promise to support all his proposals on factory reform. He had already written, in June 1841, to operatives in the West Riding promising to refuse office that would limit his activities on their behalf, something Norman Gash, Peel’s biographer, calls ‘emotional and irrational’.52 It was, however, a view hardened by a tour he had made, days before Peel’s offer, of factories in Manchester, Bolton, Ashton, Huddersfield and Leeds. Some cotton masters then announced that they would on principle oppose any measure that Ashley sought to introduce, which forced his hand about taking office: he felt sure Peel would submit to the wishes of the capitalist interest, and that therefore his conscience would drive him out of office within months.