The Victorians

by Jacob Rees-Mogg

  In his interview with Stead, Gordon declaimed that the crisis was:

  entirely attributable to a single cause, and that is, the grossest misgovernment … The [Madhist] movement is not religious but an outbreak of despair … the natives [had] a right to exist. I waged war against the Turks and Circassians, who had harried the population. I had taught them something of the meaning of liberty and justice, and accustomed them to a higher ideal of government than that with which they had previously been acquainted.

  If the rebellion were not ended by force, Gordon said, Egypt itself would soon be under threat, not least from within: ‘In all the cities of Egypt, it will be felt that what the Mahdi has done they may do; and as he has driven out the intruder, they may do the same.’ British solutions to foreign problems were what Gordon offered and the public loved him.

  Gordon’s words caused a sensation in Britain and created a chorus of voices demanding that Gordon himself be sent to the Sudan once more. Gladstone was furious. Although he had counselled intervention on behalf of the Bulgarian Christians, he was not minded to intervene everywhere and he and his government suspected (wrongly) that Gordon was a mere figurehead in a larger campaign focused on intervention and a display of British imperial might.

  Yet Gladstone was barely in control of the situation and, realising this, he resolved on a limited mission to the Sudan. Gordon would go there and report but the evacuation of British and Egyptian personnel would continue as planned. Gordon departed in January 1884 and he left grave misgivings in his wake. To send such an independent-minded individual into such a difficult and complicated situation was not, many in government felt, a wise move. The British administrator in Cairo, Evelyn Baring, added cautiously that, ‘A man who habitually consults the Prophet Isaiah when he is in a difficulty is not apt to obey the orders of anyone.’

  Two more differing Britons abroad as Gordon and Baring it would be hard to identify. Baring was worldly, cynical, reserved and hidebound, while Gordon was a Victorian sensation precisely because he was none of those things. Moreover, he despised what he saw as Baring’s extravagant Court in Cairo. Baring, he thought, spent his time featherbedding on the back of native toil. Baring for his part saw Gordon as reckless, self-indulgent and terminally short-sighted. Gordon viewed Baring as the servant of the Egyptian government and the bondholders to whom they were indebted, while Baring knew that Gordon was proclaiming a tiresome truth in calling himself the champion of the landless peasantry of both Egypt and the Sudan.

  In Baring’s conception of things, however, what the same peasants needed was better government, not a knight errant. Thus it was with understandable misgivings that he contemplated Gordon’s progress south along the Nile. Yet Baring’s hands were tied. When he wrote his memoirs more than two decades later, he recalled his sincere view that ‘during this stage of national hysteria [criticism of Gordon] would have been regarded with a dislike somewhat akin to that which is felt for one who is heard talking flippantly in public of the truths of the Christian religion’.

  Gordon arrived at Khartoum on 18 February and at once began the task of evacuating the women and children of the city, plus the sick and wounded, north to Egypt. He declared he would not abandon Khartoum to its fate and instead began preparations for a siege, this despite Gladstone’s telegrammed instruction merely to organise and report on evacuations. Telegrams – public telegrams – flew back and forth between Khartoum and London. Gordon requested reinforcements, the government refused to send them and tempers frayed in the course of this most dangerous game of brinkmanship. Gordon admitted his insubordination. He had, after all, no right to remain in Khartoum when his orders were to leave with as many people as he could. For their part, Gladstone and his ministers knew that they dare not publicly dismiss the popular Gordon and knew too that their ‘strategy’ was distinctly threadbare. In short, nobody in government knew what to do to rescue the situation and nobody bore responsibility for sending Gordon in the first place.

  Khartoum was formally besieged on 18 March 1884. The telegraph lines were cut in April but Nile steamers continued to come and go unimpeded until September. In August, the Cabinet overrode the Prime Minister’s objections and voted to send a relief force to Khartoum but the force took much time to be assembled. By the end of the year, the people of Khartoum were starving and on 26 January 1885, as the British relief force made its way south along the Nile, the final Mahdi assault on the city began. When the British forces arrived on 28 January, they found the city occupied and Gordon dead. It is estimated that some 10,000 people died in the course of the assault.

  *

  In the aftermath of Gordon’s death, the Queen wrote to Augusta:

  How shall I attempt to express what I feel? To think of your dear, noble, heroic Brother, who served his Country and his Queen so truly, so heroically, with a self-sacrifice so edifying to the World, not having been rescued. That the promises of support were not fulfilled – which I so frequently and constantly pressed on those who asked him to go – is to me grief inexpressible! Indeed, it has made me ill.

  When we contemplate the Victorian era, the Queen herself is not always to be seen. However, Victoria was both a shrewd and a passionate participant in her age and now the Queen raged on the subject of British humiliation and dishonour and the lack of spirit that had seen Gordon exposed to his fate. As for her view of Gladstone, whom she regarded as the author of this national humiliation, ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, ‘for a Palmerston or Beaconsfield [Disraeli] to be here now.’ In the aftermath of Gordon’s death, her messages to Gladstone became a drumbeat, inviting the Prime Minister to take responsibility and resign. To which, evasively and self-justifyingly, Gladstone could only reply, ‘The Prime Minister is not altogether able to follow the conclusion which Your Majesty has been pleased thus to announce.’

  It is certainly the case that his sanctification by Victoria is a key part of the Gordon legend. His own Sovereign loved him, her embrace crowning the man that the press had already presented to the public as a hero. Indeed, the news of Gordon’s death provoked one of the most constitutionally interesting moments of Victoria’s reign. She telegraphed en clair, that is, publicly, so that all who saw the message as it was relayed along the line would know the Queen’s words and might leak them, as they duly did, to Gladstone and his senior ministers, ‘To think that all this might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too frightful.’

  Victoria’s rage, combined with public dismay at what was regarded as official failure to protect Gordon, badly damaged Gladstone’s reputation. To be fair, it is worth noting that although there is a feeling that the relief force failed ‘for the want of a nail’, there is another assessment to be made. Gordon never had the tools to do the job. Always before Khartoum he magically contrived for this not to matter but now, quite simply, his luck ran out. The legend of the siege, embracing the courage, privation, resolution, improvisation, heroism, charity and chivalry of the defenders, is all true. In the matter of military common sense or good political stewardship, however, the fact is that the Barings of this world were right and Gordon was wrong. In short, it was Gordon’s own fault that he found himself trapped in Khartoum. The story endures. When the city fell and he died, whether by gunshot or spear or in another manner, still we see him standing at the top of the stairs shouting, ‘Strike! Strike hard!’ That was both what he would have wanted and what the British public required of their hero for whom they erected statues across the Empire in honour. Unfortunately, in logical terms, Gordon of Khartoum ought not to have been in Khartoum at all.

  The Madhi died in his bed five months after Gordon. His brutal regime endured another thirteen years and many died during this time, before Lord Kitchener put an end to it in 1898 and caused Khartoum to be rebuilt in the shape of the Union flag. The Sudan was better governed than before. It is most unlikely that this would have happened had Gordon not ignored his orders but nonetheless he did ignore them. As for the outpour
ing of grief for Gordon’s death, this was the penultimate pinnacle of Victorian mourning, prefiguring that which occurred for the Queen herself, sixteen years later.

  Charles Gordon could have died in battle many times before Khartoum. Such an end would have earned him a memorial: a plaque, a verse, a footnote of Empire, a grateful memory of one illustriously lost so far from home. Instead he died the most famous man in the world. Punch’s immortal ‘TOO LATE!’, Britannia, weeping, made up for the fact that the week before the magazine had roared, ‘AT LAST!’, having erroneously thought that the long, long siege at Khartoum had been successfully lifted.

  This was the stuff of Gordon’s life, legend and celebrity, bureaucratic incomprehension and far-distant virtue. Those who praised at home were not aware, perhaps, of his actual opinions of the Empire which he served. They did not know that, in his opinion, those over which the Empire ruled would probably be better off ruling themselves, that all humanity was equal before the Lord. Those who praised him were praising a hero, not a man. Nor was his fame sustained. Strachey and others saw to that.

  Although Gordon’s life ended heroically, although his death was avenged, although these ingredients make his life instantly irresistible as a fable, in the face of all this it is worth remembering what he himself thought. In his Khartoum journals, kept at the end in pencil scribble on scrap paper as his palace held out against the Mahdi’s hordes, Gordon reflected, ‘The fact is if one analyses human glory, it is composed of 9/10 twaddle, perhaps 99/100 twaddle.’ Much scepticism of Gordon was expressed by his own peers, by his British peers at any rate, so it is useful to remember that Gordon could be sceptical too, of glory and heroism, and that he had a firmer grip on himself and his deeds than had many of his contemporaries.

  And as with ethnicity, so with class. In marked contrast to so many other Victorians, Gordon was entirely free from class distinction on any subject. Nor was this some mere form of Victorian eccentricity. Instead, it was something greater, a fact which can be in little doubt when we consider again the wellspring of his humility. That he fined junior officers a shilling every time they called him ‘Sir’ may have rankled with some but it was no affectation, nor a Victorian, immodest self-effacement. This was a man who could refuse an invitation to dine with the Prince of Wales because he wanted to go to bed early and who could muse of a levée at St James’s Palace that the uniforms and the decorations were ‘a mass of glitter, to be worms in thirty years’ time’. He had little regard for this material life at all. As he remarked to his Ulster hostess in a distant Chinese province, ‘You have no conception how I yearn for the future life, how I groan over the tugging of a corrupt body after me.’

  It is important to understand that this was not fatalism, as some might have it today. It was ardent hope, hungry for what was sure to come. Take that anecdotal indignation at the body to which Gordon was confined. Immediately thereafter, he regaled his hostess with a series of yarns about the hapless captain of the Macau packet. Gordon was not, as the secular mind of today might have it, morbid. Rather, he was keen and attentive to what his faith taught and what he saw his life as living out.

  As for the doubting and resentment which was begun by Strachey and which has ever carried on with its sour, long, withdrawing whine, Gordon’s self-loathing was entirely justified, for he lived in the sure expectation of righteous death and life eternal thereafter. Moreover, Gordon himself was never a Strachey-like scold. A man who could say of himself, ‘I knew if I was chief I would never employ myself, for I am incorrigible’ is a man that we should love and honour for ever. Being the wrong man to send on the wrong mission at the wrong time when everyone knew it was wrong in no way lessens the life he lived in anticipation of his end.

  As for the end to which Gordon himself should always be put, it is simply this: to maintain and honour him on the pedestal he occupies. He was brave, faithful and heroic.

  Dicey: Call of Duty

  Of all the eminent Victorians profiled in this book, Albert Venn Dicey (4 February 1835–7 April 1922) is perhaps the least well known today. Among the colourful and intriguing soldiers, architects, politicians and more, a constitutional theorist does not perhaps stand out. In addition, few prominent Victorians have been hammered by posterity as consistently as Dicey. Like Pugin and others, his legacy was rejected and his ideas debunked comprehensively by the next generation. Speaking for Bloomsbury, Lytton Strachey dismissed Dicey in acidic terms as representative of the ‘Eminent Victorians’ and Strachey was not delivering a compliment. Such has been the sustained criticism of Dicey that it has taken time and patience for a general reassessment of him to be glimpsed.

  Yet it is not truly possible to understand the Victorian era in these islands without also understanding Dicey. As a philosopher of the British Constitution, as a unionist at a time when the Union was questioned explicitly and repeatedly, as an ardent but questioning Liberal, as an upholder of the sacred principle of legal impartiality, in all these areas Dicey’s work, writing, thinking and judgement have stood the test of time.

  However, Dicey regarded himself as a failure. He was a major figure within the cloisters of Oxford but he failed to become a lion of the Bar and this in turn meant no smooth progression to a political career, no elevation to a higher court, no opportunity to influence and affect the living laws of England. The climate of the time meant that anyone who pursued a legal career was regarded as being second-rate, at a time when the Classics attracted the brightest and best.

  An ostensible catalogue of failure, yet what a legacy, all sustained by a sense of duty that was deeply Victorian. He did what he was called to do, for his community and for his expansive sense of nation. The sneers of Strachey and others were born out a reaction against this Victorian dutifulness, out of a feeling that he and his contemporaries could simply never live up to what had been done for them and accomplished before their arrival on the scene.

  *

  Albert Venn Dicey was born near Lutterworth in Leicestershire. His father was Thomas Dicey, who had enjoyed an illustrious spell as a prize-winning undergraduate at Cambridge, before forging a career as proprietor of the Northampton Mercury and Chairman of the Midland Railway, at a time of unparalleled growth in the railway sector. His elder brother, Edward, would establish a distinguished reputation as a writer and journalist. His uncle was John Venn, of Venn diagram fame, who was not only a noted mathematician but also descended from a long line of religious evangelicals. This is an ingredient in the mix which perhaps accounts for the fervency of Dicey’s own philosophy and beliefs. Interestingly, given the unsparing and disapproving interest that Bloomsbury later took in his career and legacy, Albert Dicey was related to the Stephen family via his mother Mary. Dicey was a cousin of Leslie Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, and of the judge and lawyer James Fitzjames Stephen.

  The young Dicey was almost certainly mildly disabled. He was certainly never fully fit. His childhood – he was educated at home as his parents entertained ‘grave suspicions’ of the public schools – was bookish and quiet. As John Venn later put it to him, ‘As a boy I had not your sense of proportion or of historic dignity.’ Historic dignity sounds like a childhood of dreams and in later life Dicey would look back with gratitude at the stable infancy that life had afforded him. Dicey was the focus of his mother’s loving instruction and he was fortunate that she had the gifts gently to draw out the best from her son.

  From his father, meanwhile, he gained another gift, an allegiance to classical liberalism, an ideal from which he never wavered. He admired and respected his father, his ideals, integrity and industry, and we can readily see that Thomas Dicey was the sort of sturdy, upright individual the Lytton Stracheys of this world would so obviously resent. Dicey’s failure to rebel against his parents was a shocking state of affairs to them. With reverence for his father came a sense of duty which likewise never left the younger Dicey. The household gods were the very ideals that were argued over on the floor of the Hou
se of Commons at this time in British parliamentary history. Devotion to free trade, reform without revolution and an affirmation of the free exchange of ideas, for Dicey these were and would remain the supreme virtues.

  In spite of the strong current of evangelism that ran through the wider clan, Dicey would not grow up to be a devout Christian. Instead he practised a species of Victorian humanism that we might best call secular evangelism, devoted to reason and its many merits. He quietly distrusted religious enthusiasm of any stripe, even to the point of possessing a marked element of anticlericalism distinctly alien in the accommodating English tradition in which he had grown up. Yet he had no divisive urges, even in defence of his own rationalist beliefs. A most important tenet of Victorian culture was its openness to new ideas. Some Victorians accepted a plurality that a more intolerant age would find difficult and Dicey was an exemplar of this expansive attitude.

  Dicey therefore was a child and man for whom reason could address and resolve the problems of society. His faith was the intellect and his disapproval was restricted to those who persecuted the beliefs of others. Thus he was able to address and focus on the issues of the day. For example, Catholics being spurned or marginalised, whether in England or in Ireland, was wrong. There was never to be any ‘side’ to Dicey and this produced a lifelong commitment to doing ‘useful work’. This would be its own reward.

  Late in life he was able to encapsulate his creed. In a letter in 1900 to his great American contemporary and friend Oliver Wendell Holmes, Dicey wrote: ‘We must find satisfaction in making the best or the most out of whatever work one has in hand, and that one’s appropriate work is the free development of such faculties as one may happen to possess.’