by Simon Heffer
However, because of its style, and what that style came to represent, the memorial was soon an object of disregard and even of obloquy. The cult of the great man passed out of fashion, as did high Victorian taste. When, early in the twentieth century and for much of the next three-quarters of it, Victorian Gothic came to be regarded as overblown, tasteless, arrogant and vulgar, Scott’s memorial was deemed one of the most comical symbols of the genre. At the same time his magnificent Midland Hotel at St Pancras Station, now restored and considered one of the architectural wonders of Britain, was threatened with destruction. The latest edition of The Buildings of England compares Fowke’s Albert Hall favourably with the adjacent shrine, contrasting it with ‘the verbosity of the Albert Memorial opposite’.125 When considering the memorial itself, however, the editors do concede that it is ‘rich, solid, a little pompous, a little vulgar, but full of faith and self-confidence.’ Its recent restoration, with the colossal statue itself gilded once more after the gilt was removed during the Great War for salvage, makes it again a breathtaking spectacle. The earnest ideas of the Prince Consort had fallen so far out of favour by the time of his wife’s death that they made appreciation of his monument impossible for all but those who could make a leap of the imagination. The new regard in which this masterpiece of Scott’s is once more held is nothing to do with the cult of death, but suggests we are, at last, beginning to understand Albert’s sincere and beneficent motivation to make Britain better.
PART III
THE TRANSFORMATION OF BRITAIN
CHAPTER 11
THE LEAP IN THE DARK: REFORM AND THE COMING OF DEMOCRACY
I
JUST AS EDUCATED Victorians had been prevailed upon to take a more enlightened view of the criminal underclass, so too were they asked to engage with the question of what to do to enhance the rights in society of honest and respectable members of the lower orders. As a result of the debate on this question, the quarter-century from 1850 to 1875 saw greater engagement between intellectuals of opposing doctrines than at any time since the 1640s. Carlyle and Mill broadly led the main camps. Carlyle inspired a coterie of reactionaries who (taking their cue from Past and Present) looked back at feudal times as the perfect model for society. He led the charge against the 1867 Reform Act and ridiculed the failed attempt by the Liberals in 1866 to pass such a measure. Mill, by contrast, championed the greater liberty of the individual and, especially, the emancipation of women: and engaged with Gladstone and other leading Liberal politicians on the subject. Among Carlyle’s supporters, men such as Ruskin (in Time and Tide) and James Fitzjames Stephen (in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) argued that only when the working classes had been educated could they be entrusted with the vote. Stephen started out as an admirer of Mill: but when forced to examine the application of the doctrines of On Liberty to reality he began to feel it harboured a utopian impossibility, and posed dangers to society.
However, the reactionaries were increasingly confronted by evidence of the squalor in which the poor were forced to live, either in factual accounts by reformers such as Henry Mayhew, the journalist whose research into the London poor shocked the middle classes, or in a new wave of ‘Condition of England’ novels by writers such as Charles Kingsley in Yeast and Alton Locke. It also became harder to ignore the increasingly angry, organised and large protests of those who wanted the vote. By the time of Carlyle’s death in 1881 the forces of reaction were largely burnt out. Reformers had captured the ear of politicians of both main parties, with much of their programme put into law, or their aspirations enabled by law. The desire for reform seemed unquenchable; and the British constitution, codified unofficially in the late 1860s by Walter Bagehot, was a matter of passionate debate. Meanwhile, attempts to define a coherent national identity as a means of unifying society continued among historians, notably in J. R. Green’s Short History of England and Froude’s History of the Tudors. This was a golden age of history as propaganda – a style developed not just by Macaulay, but by Carlyle too. As education and literacy became more widespread, the effect of the propaganda on the national consciousness became more pronounced. Men – and women – wished to be full participants in the new Britain, not just spectators upon it. Literate Victorians were increasingly given an uplifting idea of themselves, which raised their expectations: not least of the perfectibility of men and society.
II
Between the 1831 census and that of 1861 the population rose from 13.9 million to 20.1 million, the majority of whom now lived in urban areas. By 1861, because of the growth of the cotton trade, 12 per cent of the population lived in Lancashire. Nationally, there had been a disproportionate rise in the number of householders paying £10 or more rent a year, a sign of Britain’s growing prosperity. In 1850 there had been a million paupers, with 110,000 in workhouses. Yet by 1864 the conditions of the urban proletariat appear to have improved markedly. The governor of the Hull Workhouse, John Fountain, writing to Gladstone’s private secretary John Lambert, noted that ‘a workman of the present day in Hull generally resides in a small house outside the Docks, instead of hiring rooms in a large house, as was the case some thirty years ago. This is not altogether a matter of choice, many of the large houses so let off having been pulled down for public improvements’.1
Fountain continued: ‘Families live in a better style than formerly, they keep more company thus causing an increase in the quantity and in most cases a superior quality of provisions is consumed. Respecting dress I may state that a man receiving £90 a year his family dresses much more expensively than formerly [sic], this may be caused partly by his taking excursions and seeing more of the world.’ Fountain set out a table illustrating how the cost of living had risen over thirty years for a man on £90 a year, saying that his rent would have risen from £10 to £15, fuel from £5 to £6, provisions from £40 to £45 and clothing from £15 to £23, leaving precisely £1 a year to play with.2
Such conditions, in an advanced society, could in part be blamed upon the absence of representation in Parliament of the classes that were so used and exploited. By the 1860s there were millions of politically aware men who lacked the vote because they lived in property of insufficient value to qualify them for it. Most freeholders had the vote, if the annual value of the property was above a certain level. Tenants or copyholders – a feudal form of leaseholder – usually did not. There were also areas of the country that had become densely populated during industrialisation but that had scant representation in the Commons, because so few men who lived there qualified for the vote. Reform would also require a redistribution of parliamentary seats, from rural to urban Britain, which would disoblige the landed interest and its influence in the legislature.
It was increasingly hoped that the economic changes over the previous twenty or thirty years had helped persuade those who had previously resisted reform to see the necessity of extending the franchise. After referring, in his preface to Alton Locke, to the Luddites, Captain Swing, Peterloo, rick-burning and riots, Kingsley exclaimed: ‘How changed, thank God! is all this now. Before the influence of religion, both Evangelical and Anglican; before the spread of those liberal principles, founded on common humanity and justice, the triumph of which we owe to the courage and practical good sense of the Whig party; before the example of a Court, virtuous, humane and beneficent; the attitude of the British upper classes has undergone a noble change. There is no aristocracy in the world, and there never has been one, as far as I know, which has so honourably repented, and brought forth fruits meet for repentance; which has so cheerfully asked what its duty was, that it might do it.’3 This was written in 1854, and was a mite optimistic even then. The aristocracy had far to go before conforming with Kingsley’s ideal. So too did those in the middle classes, enfranchised in 1832, who allied their own interests with their betters to the extent of wishing to pull up the ladder behind them. By the mid-1860s, as a result, a confrontation loomed.
There had been four abortive attempts since 1851 to ex
tend the franchise, but none succeeded. Reform’s main proponents were radical thinkers such as Mill, who felt social justice required more men (and, in his case, women) to have the vote, and members of the Liberal middle classes such as John Bright who saw the newly enfranchised as being natural Liberal supporters. There was also an element in the old Whig aristocracy that feared the consequences for the stability of society if the franchise were not extended. Liberal support for Gladstone was more logical, as demonstrated in a speech on his Reform Bill in the Commons in 1866 by Mill, elected for Westminster the previous July. ‘While so many classes, comparatively insignificant in numbers, and not supposed to be freer from class partialities or interests than their neighbours, are represented, some of them, I venture to say, greatly over-represented in this House, there is a class, more numerous than all the others, and therefore, as a mere matter of human feeling, entitled to more consideration—weak as yet, and therefore needing representation the more, but daily becoming stronger, and more capable of making its claims good—and this class is not represented. We claim, then, a large and liberal representation of the working classes, on the Conservative theory of the Constitution.’4
Yet it was not just an idea of justice that Mill used to advocate support for reform. He claimed that, as a result of it, after ‘very few years of a real working class representation . . . there would be in every parish a school rate, and the school doors freely open to all the world; and in one generation from that time England would be an educated nation. Will it ever become so by your present plan, which gives to him that hath, and only to him that hath?’5 That the Liberal (and liberal) ideal of education as part of the pursuit of perfection could be achieved by extension of the franchise was lost on many Conservatives: the one who followed Mill in that Commons debate, Henry Liddell, who would succeed to the earldom of Ravensworth, paid him the backhanded compliment of having delivered ‘the subtle speech of the able logician’ in favour of an ‘insidious Bill’.
Meanwhile, those nervous about reform sought other ways to placate the lower orders. In December 1863 the Marquess Townshend, a Norfolk aristocrat, founded the Universal League for the Material Elevation of the Industrious Classes. Its main purpose was to lower working hours and promote the education of the working classes. However, once Gladstone appeared to be leading the Palmerston administration towards reform – though Palmerston himself remained bitterly opposed – the Universal League threw itself wholly behind that idea. Lord Townshend was alarmed by the rapidity with which the climate had changed, and protested: his followers in the Universal League split from him in February 1865. They founded the Reform League and it was from then that momentum for change really grew.
The first chairman of the League was Edmond Beales, an Old Etonian barrister, radical and peace campaigner. He enlisted a few of his like-minded, well-heeled friends, which lent the movement the respectability for which the Chartists had striven in vain. It also brought in funds. The League not only included politically active members of the working class who had come across from the Universal League, but also members of a radical middle-class group known as the Propagandists, led by John Bedford Leno, a former prominent Chartist and member of the socialist First International, formed by extreme radicals at the time of the Europe-wide upheavals of 1848. The League grew rapidly, through local branches, and thanks to an advertising campaign run by an efficient central organisation. Its programme was helped by three factors in 1865: the return at the election of that year of Liberal MPs committed to its cause; the death of Palmerston; and the readiness of Gladstone, as Leader in the Commons, to take the matter forward (though Gladstone confessed that the news of Palmerston’s demise on 18 October 1865 ‘made me giddy’). Radical support in the Commons for mainstream Liberalism was maintained only by promises to legislate on reform, however much this dismayed some of the old Whigs. By the time Russell, Palmerston’s successor, and Gladstone introduced their Reform Bill in March 1866 a nationwide movement demanded an extension of the franchise.6 Conservative attempts to pretend otherwise were ridiculed by mass demonstrations across the country – Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Leeds, Liverpool and Rochdale, notably – where resolutions of support for Gladstone and his policy were passed.
The great fear of the ruling class – and this sentiment was by no means confined to the Conservative party – was that it would be suicidal for the country and its institutions to extend the vote to people insufficiently educated to know how to use it wisely. It was not merely the supposed stupidity of the working classes that was a problem: it was also their contingent (or so it was imagined) moral failings, notably how their lack of money would render them susceptible to bribery. There was, after all, no secret ballot until 1872. The Liberal party harboured a group of Whiggish anti-reform MPs whom John Bright named ‘the Cave of Adullam’, after the Old Testament fortress where David, anointed as the successor of Saul, sought refuge from him. They were led by Robert Lowe, whose intellect and rhetorical power would make him a much more difficult opponent for the Russell ministry than any Conservative. He based his opposition not on self-interest, as many Conservatives did, but on the view that government by the uneducated must be worse than government by those who knew what they were doing.
Gladstone, however, took a different view. In an undated memorandum he declared: ‘It was an invidious doctrine, that political franchise should not descend to the lowest class of people, with no other incapacity than idiocy, pauperism or crime.’7 He said reform ‘must be antecedent to and not contingent upon the general reformation of the human race.’8 He noted that:
this want of substance and of what is popularly called a stake in the country is far less applicable to the agricultural classes, when well governed: because they migrate less; have more immediate and more stable and more kindly connections with the middle and again with the higher order; are not so subject to sudden reverses in their condition; not so open to that contagious excitement which acts upon large and agglomerated masses . . . But in the case of our manufacturing districts and large towns, where there is much more of a merely pecuniary relation between different classes, where the softening and cementing influences of time are scarcely felt, where hostile combinations among masters or men are not infrequent, where the range of variation in wages, and of consequent elevation and depression of the physical state of the people, is so much greater: in reference to them we are in reason compelled very much to fall back upon considerations of interest and exact as a pledge for the state the possession of some real substance on the part of those who are to elect.9
It soon become clear that some ministers (including Gladstone himself) were opposed to an immediate redistribution of seats, which would reduce the number of MPs in depopulated rural shires in order to increase those sitting for seats in urban Britain. They preferred to wait until the Reform Bill had passed, in the hope of not complicating that.10 This would cause enormous opposition from both sides, as MPs feared a hidden agenda and a redistribution whose radical scope would become apparent only when it was inevitable. Russell and Gladstone proposed a £7 householder franchise, which the government calculated would require an income of 26s a week. This would enfranchise the upper end of the artisan class, who could afford to rent such a property. These proposals would add 400,000 men to the electorate.
The principle was discussed in the Commons in March 1866, its announcement by Gladstone having been ‘very coldly received’.11 The first debate saw a pyrotechnic battle between Lowe and John Bright. Lowe had made a cool but caustic speech about the dangers of giving power to the ignorant. He could not resist goading Bright, who had spoken at Bradford in 1859 about a Reform Bill requiring a redistribution of seats: such as was not in the bill that, nonetheless, had Bright’s support. Bright was taken aback and had forgotten what he had said. Lowe retorted: ‘He has made so many speeches that it is not always easy to distinguish which.’12 He turned on Gladstone and said that ‘if my rt hon friend does succeed in carrying this m
easure through Parliament, when the passions and interests of the day are gone by I do not envy him his retrospect. I covet not a single leaf of the laurels that may encircle his brow. I do not envy him his triumph. His be the glory of carrying it; mine of having to the utmost of my poor ability resisted it.’13
Bright, for his part, quoted back to Lowe a speech he too had made in 1859, promising if elected to support Palmerston’s drive for a Reform Bill. He said Lowe either had a very short memory, or was trifling with the House. Bright then minted the phrase about the Liberals who opposed reform having ‘retired into what may be called [their] political Cave of Adullam’.14 Lowe, the main Adullamite, sat for Calne in Wiltshire, one of the nearest things left to a pocket borough, in the control of the Marquis of Lansdowne. Bright, by contrast, had been returned on a large franchise in Birmingham. He ridiculed Lowe for having been elected for ‘a village somewhere in the west of England’, and added: ‘The right hon Gentleman found on the list of electors of Calne about 174 names, of whom, according to the Blue Book, about seven were working men . . . but the real constituent of the right hon Gentleman is a Member of the other House of Parliament, and could send in his butler or his groom, instead of the right hon Gentleman, to represent the borough.’15 The mood of deep unpleasantness was unequivocally set.
Gladstone moved the second reading of the bill on 12 April 1866, and professed at once that the government wished to avoid giving the measure ‘the character of a party conflict’, or the ‘still more serious mischief’ of a ‘conflict between class and class’.16 On the first Gladstone would be partly right. The bill split the Liberals, a split led by Lowe and his associates. Lowe had already told the House that ‘if you want venality, if you want ignorance, if you want drunkenness, and facility for being intimidated, impulsive, unreflecting and violent people, where do you look for them in the constituencies? Do you go to the top or to the bottom?’17 At another time he had said that ‘nothing can be more manifest, looking to the peculiar nature of the working classes, than in passing a Bill such as is now proposed, you take away the principal power from property and intellect, and give it to the multitude who live on weekly wages.’18 During a riot at an election at Kidderminster in 1857, Lowe received a bad blow on the head from a stone thrown at him. It cut him and fractured his skull, but also shaped his feelings towards the lower classes. He saw little good in them after that.