The Victorians

by Jacob Rees-Mogg

  The role of Thuggee in the Victorian imagination is a central part of this story not least because the stranglers’ actions played to both of those central and cherished British Victorian virtues, fair play and honour. On the one hand, the Thugs, by ‘ganging up’ on their victims, were unfair. There was nothing manly in this aspect of life’s struggle. Had the British themselves been studied and typified as they did others, their ‘cult of fair play’ would doubtless have been identified as having been gravely transgressed by Thugging. On the other hand, the Thugs were seen as having, however appalling, an honour code of their own. They were, in their own minds, no mere ‘ordinary’ criminals or bandits. As one East India Company magistrate put it, ‘The histories of these men are as romantic as the most ardent lover of Oriental adventures could desire.’

  It would be wrong to say the Thugs filled a want the Victorians barely knew existed. Equally, it would be ahistorical to imagine that the Victorians simply enjoyed tales of Thuggee as we might enjoy a horror film. British Victorians were obviously as aware as British citizens today that casually strangling passers-by was neither honourable nor fair. However, there can be no denying that Thuggee became an irresistible legend of the Empire. It was simply too good a story not to tell. If Thugs were felt to have their own perverted honour which separated them from the lawlessness of dacoits and other bandits, then so much the greater was the achievement in finally putting an end to them. This was where the industry of a Sleeman came in and in large part why his story was instructively told for so long.

  It is significant that one aspect of the Thuggee trials provided a particular point for Victorian Britain. This was the bloodless way the Thugs themselves recounted their crimes. There was no melodrama here, only a litany of unexceptional deeds recounted at steady length. That eminently quotable Victorian Fanny Parkes recorded that it was said of the condemned Thugs, ‘It would be impossible to find in any country a set of men who meet death with more indifference than these wretches; and, had it been in a better cause, they would have excited universal sympathy.’ In comparison to the absence of Victorian fatalism, the very evident fatalism of the East, as manifested in these trials, caused especial shock and moral outrage. Victorian observers watched as the Thugs gave a collective metaphorical shrug. They had no sense of reproach for having Thugged, for was it not provided for? Kali had demanded it. Indeed, it was their failing to observe her precepts by murdering women, for one thing, which occasioned their downfall. Such was their reckoning, as the Victorians looked on agog.

  Sleeman himself cast a cold eye on this cult of Kali, concluding that the murders were not for Kali. The more mundane truth was that Kali was an indispensable tool to the Thugs. She assisted the stranglers as much as did an individual gang member. In this way, Sleeman stepped away from any process of ‘othering’ the Thugs. Their psychology was no different from that of an English murderer. The blame could not be pinned on Kali and on an Oriental mindset, not when the truth was infinitely more recognisable and more horribly mundane.

  The success of Confessions of a Thug was followed by a wave of other creative endeavours. Marie-Joseph ‘Eugène’ Sue’s The Wandering Jew was one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century. In it the Thugs, the ‘Etrangleurs’, became the first characters from the East to be taken out of their own context and placed into a Western novel where they promptly teamed up with the more familiar figures of unscrupulous Jesuits. Later, Wilkie Collins placed a murderous Indian cult in the pages of The Moonstone and a half-century later Mark Twain recalled the story of a movement called the Thuggee, now swept away but capable in their own time of inspiring the greatest fear:

  We understand what Thuggee was, what a bloody terror it was, what a desolating scourge it was. In 1830 the English found this cancerous organisation embedded in the vitals of the empire, doing its devastating work in secrecy, and assisted, protected, sheltered, and hidden by innumerable confederates – big and little native chiefs, customs officers, village officials, and native police, all ready to lie for it, and the mass of the people, through fear, persistently pretending to know nothing about its doings; and this condition of things had existed for generations, and was formidable with the sanctions of age and old custom. If ever there was an unpromising task, if ever there was a hopeless task in the world, surely it was offered here – the task of conquering Thuggee. But that little handful of English officials in India set their sturdy and confident grip upon it, and ripped it out, root and branch!

  Even in our own time, the trace of Thuggee occasionally registers, as in the murderous Indian cults pursuing Harrison Ford through subterranean tunnels in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Let it never be said that Victorian stories have no staying power.

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  In the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle there lies to this day a two-ton piece of carpet, a distinctive memorial to the life and works of William Sleeman. It arrived at Windsor via the Crystal Palace, where it was a prized piece at the Great Exhibition, but it originated at Jubbulpore, where it had been woven at the School of Industry. The school had been established by Sleeman himself, who had set it up to house and confine reformed Thugs. This is an instructive reminder of Sleeman’s method. For those Thugs who were not executed could never again be set free but they must be given something to do for the years of their confinement. Let us not imagine Sleeman, in other words, as anything else but a classic Victorian.

  Sleeman died off the coast of Ceylon, en route to England. He was buried at sea. His life was a vindication of the Empire he served and was spent in service to the peoples who lived in it. Contemporary fashion might sneer at the happy morality tale Victorians fashioned of his life but this sneer stems from a contemporary retreat from sincerity. It speaks volumes about today’s culture, while saying little of note about Sleeman himself. In his vigorous and virtuous Victorian way, he saw the chance to do good by his charges and he seized the chance. He is an example to us and he was certainly an example beloved of the Victorians, precisely because he personified what they wanted to believe was the best of their culture. He encapsulated the highest hope of their moral purpose and through administrative efficacy did good and beneficial work.

  Pugin: The Hand of God

  The life of the Anglo-French Catholic convert, architect and designer Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1 March 1812–14 September 1852) was relatively short but it was full of lasting cultural achievements. The scintillating Gothic interiors of the rebuilt Palace of Westminster are Pugin’s crowning glory and in them along with a range of ecclesiastical and other buildings scattered across the Empire we see a substantial legacy. The greatest of these achievements, however, is that we take Pugin’s legacy so much for granted. The Victorian character of the nation’s landscapes, its built-up spaces, its mindset. This is so ubiquitous that people have almost ceased to be aware of it. Instead, it forms the backdrop, familiar and omnipresent and comforting, to daily life. Yet such a context could not be achieved without much struggle, and no party to that struggle spoke in quite the same idiom as Pugin.

  Pugin was also fated to be what could be called the first ‘eclipsed’ Victorian. Even in his own lifetime, despite this very great architectural and cultural legacy, his people virtually lost sight of his achievement. He was the first victim of the backlash, which began long before the Victorian age itself came to an end, against what Lytton Strachey’s Bloomsbury contemporary Virginia Woolf called the ‘crystal palaces, bassinettes, military helmets, memorial wreaths, trousers, whiskers, wedding cakes’ of the age. This chapter attempts to reassess the legacy left by ‘God’s architect’ and to give him his due.

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  By the age of twenty-one, Augustus Pugin had already lived a lifetime. He had signed up the monarch as a client and been imprisoned, shipwrecked, widowed and become a father. Less than twenty years later he was dead, having by then experienced madness, fame and a reordering of his personal belief system. His Contrasts publication of 1836, written when he was
twenty-four, was regarded as the first true manifesto of architecture. It proclaimed that the discipline was a moral force, to be deployed for the greatest possible good. He died in the knowledge that he had packed four-score years and ten into forty and in the knowledge too that the bulk of his achievement had been squeezed into a mere half-dozen of those years. He was steam-powered, as much of an engine as the age in which he lived.

  The French Revolution was responsible for the presence of Augustus Pugin in the British firmament. His father and namesake, a draughtsman and writer on matters architectural, was born in Paris but around 1798 he departed the revolutionary cauldron of France, bound for London. Here he studied at the Royal Academy Schools and later obtained a position with John Nash, best known for the neoclassical design of Buckingham Palace, Regent Street and the stuccoed terraces surrounding Regent’s Park. This was a design, a philosophy and a way of encapsulating the world that the younger Pugin would utterly reject. In London, too, the senior Pugin met and married Catherine Welby, the Presbyterian daughter of a wealthy Lincolnshire family. Her money enabled the young couple to set up home in Bloomsbury and it was here that their only son was born.

  Catherine was responsible for the young Pugin’s first encounter with Christianity, although it bore little resemblance to the High Catholicism which influenced his work as an architect. He attended Presbyterian services with his mother but he experienced these as cold ceremonies held in austere surroundings. The plainness and, as he felt it, sense of labour which accompanied these services became sources of alienation rather than devotion for the impressionable Pugin. His mother, however, remained the dominant intellectual influence on her beloved son. Sharp, a snob, keen to joke at the expense of others, though less keen to be the butt of jokes herself, Catherine was enamoured of certain causes such as female emancipation and animal welfare, long before they were fashionable. As a result, she cut a distinctive figure in the London of the day.

  The young Pugin was precocious and cossetted. His parents cut into the attic of the house in Bloomsbury, transforming the top floor into a model theatre for him, complete with working scenery. Here, Pugin’s imagination ran riot and no doubt was where his sense of how to handle volume, space and decoration first came to life. He grew up with the notions a child in his circumstances might almost have been expected to have. Like his near contemporary (and fellow Bloomsbury resident) Benjamin Disraeli, he set about fashioning a grand and noble lineage for himself and like Disraeli he had foreign and exotic backdrops on which to draw. In this case, he was able easily enough to imagine the history of a family obliged to flee the persecutions in France.

  When the Napoleonic Wars ended and British visitors were again safely able to go to the Continent, the Pugins visited the basilica at Saint-Denis in the northern part of Paris. Since the tenth century, the church had been the resting place of French kings but on their arrival the family discovered that the royal tombs had been destroyed by the Jacobins, the patrimony of almost a millennium lost in one violent day. For Augustus Pugin, such a sight and such an experience did little to inspire confidence in revolution, ‘reason’ and secularism.

  He attended Christ’s Hospital school in the City of London, though his education was not all it might have been. It seems clear that he was more influenced by his father’s publications and drawings than he was by any tutelage he received. He was, moreover, surrounded by a fragmentary past in a form that might have been designed expressly to set aflame the imagination of an impressionable boy. He could, at that time, with a child’s modest pocket money buy for loose change precious medieval treasures of the type which now form the basis of collections across our foremost museums. For this was an age in which the current attitude to the fragmentary past had not yet evolved. These fragments, disregarded and discarded by Regency Britain in the name of a thrusting modernity, were to be had in abundance from any antiquarian shop. The result was to furnish Pugin with a practical attitude to the relics of history. They could all be seen as eminently serviceable and as an adult he would regard the masses of triple-decker pulpits, sounding boards and other paraphernalia scorned by modernisers as artefacts to be pressed into the service of architect and God.

  The young Pugin was not alone in communing with an imagined past. The first decades of his life, in the age of modernity though they were, also witnessed a rising interest in interpreting and from time to time actually enacting history. This was the age of Romanticism, which reacted sharply to the mechanisation and industrialisation at work on all sides. As the century progressed, so this reaction took a variety of forms. Take the Eglinton Tournament of 1839, in which 100,000 spectators gathered in the pouring rain in Ayrshire to watch enactments of medieval jousts. The knights, by rank, were as real as the horses and the armour, and the underlying idea, a community of bonds and reciprocation, obligations and duties, was real too.

  This pageant was in itself a response to Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, a Romance (1819), which depicted a fanciful, medieval world and became a bestseller. It was also the era of ‘Young England’, a group of youthful Tories at Eton and Cambridge invested in the ideal of a medieval feudal golden age. Disraeli was associated with the group and his novels Sybil and Coningsby set out on the page some of the swirling ideas of these years. Pugin was not to be immune to the power of such ideas and he would do more than anyone else to sculpt such ideas into a form of material reality. As Rosemary Hill notes, he would absorb such ideas of mutuality and reciprocation and turn them into an imagined model society, a ‘coherent Christian civic order in which the poor would be fed, the old cared for, the children taught. As the Victorian age began, it was a compelling thought.’ Such a vision would become central to his life.

  Pugin was absorbing, sponge-like, the swirling currents of his cultural context but he was also learning his trade. Upon leaving school, he began working for his father and he made several more visits to France where he also began to collect commissions. These were for jewellery and furniture which included vast and immovable sideboards for Windsor Castle, which after a long period of neglect and stagnation was being stirred into renewed life by George IV. He went to design sets for the Theatre Royal, later the Royal Opera House, at Covent Garden. Here, he would go on to work high up among the rigging sometimes working late into the evening. He would even spend the night sleeping in an opera box.

  This polymath developed an interest in sailing too. For a brief period, he commandeered a schooner trading between Kent and Flanders. This allowed him to develop an eye for the design prevalent in the Low Countries and to import occasional pieces for his own use. Not that these voyages always went according to plan. In 1830 he was shipwrecked on the Scottish coast near Edinburgh and with this brush with death came a decision to leave the seas and devote himself as much as possible to land-based design. He established a furniture business but this failed too and he spent some time in prison on account of unpaid debts.

  In 1831, at the age of nineteen, he met and married Anne Garnet. Soon his wife was expecting their first child. Alas, in short and tragic order, she was to die in childbirth, although the baby girl survived. Pugin lost both his wife and his parents before he was twenty-one. His second marriage came in 1833, when he married Louisa Button. Their child was Edward Welby Pugin, who also became a noted architect, and moved with them to Salisbury. It was here that Pugin put down significant roots.

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  By now, the neoclassical world epitomised by Nash and his peers was in retreat. The monumental front of Buckingham Palace was impressive, but the palace redesign had been scandalously expensive and the building itself was cordially disliked by its Royal inhabitants. George IV had breathed new life into Windsor Castle but nobody had managed to discover how much the works had cost. Such ruinous expense was, it seemed, of a piece with the period itself, and the Regency, necessitated by a mad king, was raucous and rakish, overrun by licentiousness, in which scant attention was paid to order, morality or higher thinking. As the cities expanded, i
nfernally, many thought, without much in the way of planning, and still less of poetry or beauty on display, so the public’s attitude to its environment began to change too. When the crowds gathered to watch the Eglinton pageantry or read Ivanhoe or Sybil and dreamed of a coherent world, so they began to hunger after a glimpse of this world, of a poem, rendered in bricks and mortar. Pugin would be the man to deliver this world to them.

  The Gothic Revival was a response, in architectural form, to these changing times. Several generations before Pugin, the style had been on the rise in England and later throughout western Europe. It was of a piece with a version of Romanticism which took stock of the world as it was and found it wanting. It manifested in a range of ways. Tentative forms of ornamentation sought to echo the Gothic lines and play of the Middle Ages. Later, a more confident mood began to expand into novel forms of old design. Vernacular Gothic emerged in more humble settings, expansive and expensive forms manifested in such wealthier places as Cambridge, Oxford and European university towns.

  The movement’s philosophical and ecclesiastical context is of importance. As well as being a response to the social and industrial changes, the movement also had deep roots in a religious and liturgical context. Specifically, it mirrored the slowly renewing confidence of Catholicism and of High Anglicanism in eighteenth-century Britain, following the rigours of the Reformation and the wars of the seventeenth century. It would be decades before this confidence was echoed in legislation but times had begun to change. The lush and elaborate symbolism of Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism underpins much of the Gothic Revival and it must also inform any discussion of Pugin’s own vision.