A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain

by Michael Paterson

  The ease of riding in these clothes made a fad of cycling all over again, and this time among a much wider section of the population. Mrs Williamson, commenting on this, makes the point that because the wealthy took it up, bicycling, far from being seen as a socially exclusive practice, was imitated by those lower down in society:

  It might have been always confined to the business of the comparatively few instead of being applied to the many if by some happy chance it had not been taken up by the right people and straightway become the craze of the season.10

  She went on to explain how bicycle use was spreading not only as a hobby but as a means of travelling to work:

  At a comparatively later date, clerks who lived out of London began to appreciate its uses, and after a time women (also engaged on business) were to be seen winding their way from the suburbs to the City. Then the professional men began to use it a little, [though] still the exercise was condemned by the majority as vulgar, [but now] boys in red uniforms, with the name of ‘Gavin’ on their caps, may be seen waiting on the steps of Mayfair and Belgravia mansions to clean the aristocracy’s bicycles.11

  Not everyone approved. In Germany Kaiser Wilhelm did not like to see women on bicycles, and reprimanded the American Ambassador for allowing his daughter to ride one in Berlin’s principal park, the Tiergarten.

  The Modern Bicycle

  What had also made the sport so fashionable had been the arrival, by the nineties, of the ‘safety bicycle’, which set a seal on the popularity of this form of conveyance and marked the completion of the revolution in personal transport. Anyone could now cycle, provided they could master the steering and brakes and the initially difficult feat of balancing on two wheels. Lessons were still necessary and ‘spills’ still common, for it was easy to take a tumble, but the time and effort required to cycle well was much less. The machine was lower than previously and thus simple to mount and dismount. It had a chain-driven rear wheel and was easy to steer. It had effective brakes, and it had a guard over the chain to prevent clothes from catching. Like all technological innovations, once the teething problems of the bicycle had been addressed the wider public took the invention out of the hands of specialists and enthusiasts and made it their own.

  Back on Four Wheels

  Following fast in the wheel tracks of the bicycle came another, even more revolutionary vehicle – the automobile. This too had had a long period of development from crude and impractical prototype to viable machine. Like the bicycle, the first model appeared in France, where an engineer called Cugnot developed a ‘steam car’ in 1769. It was clumsy, noisy and slow-moving, and did not mark the beginning of a new era. The notion of a steam car had, nevertheless, been established, and was next taken up in Britain. Sixty years after Cugnot, in the 1830s, a number of coaches were introduced that were powered by steam boilers. Technically they were successful, and provided regular service in several parts of the country, but their noise, slowness and potential combustability meant that they never challenged the dominance of the horse. In the same decade the railway became the most important form of transport, and interest in road vehicles waned for half a century.

  It was in 1873 that the firm of Leon Bollee began construction of vehicles. Five years later these were displayed at the Universal Exhibition in Paris. In 1885 a wealthy enthusiast, the Comte de Dion, produced another steam vehicle. In 1894 the first actual meeting of automobiles took place. It comprised a trip from Paris to Rouen and back. This was intended to be merely a promenade by the vehicles, but interest in their speed – and in which of them was fastest – gave the event the character of a race. The Dion-Bouton, which had travelled at all of twelve miles an hour, won.

  Enthusiasm for this new machine was at first moderate in the United Kingdom, though there were, as there were in France, wealthy men who were interested in a new sport that involved speed, mild danger and expensive equipment. The Hon. Evelyn Ellis, who had been driving for several years in France, brought a motor car to England in 1895. In the same year another motorist, Sir David Salomons, put on a display of vehicles in Tunbridge Wells that attracted some 10,000 people, including several Members of Parliament – and a further exhibition was held twelve months later, this time at the Imperial Institute, an important London venue. By this time the United Kingdom rights for the Daimler patented machines had been bought by a London financier. When, on 14 November 1896, motor vehicles were allowed by Parliament to run on British roads – without the necessity of a man preceding them with a red flag – there was widespread public interest.

  Some of those who wrote about motoring matters felt that they were on the cusp of a new era in transport, and could see that attitudes might change sooner than people imagined. With what seems from our perspective a certain naivety, one of them stressed the advantages that could be looked for over the horse, and mentions the type of electric-powered vehicle that might once have replaced the petrol engine:

  It is now admitted by most people that the motor-car has passed the limits of mere experiment, and that it has become a practical vehicle. Motoring has already entered, and will in the future enter yet more largely, into our social life, though we may still be far from the time when the horse-drawn vehicle will be a rarity upon country roads and London has begun to save fifty thousand pounds a year now spent in road scavenging.

  The utility of the motor is endless. At whatever distance you may live from your station in the country, the motor is bound to shorten the time occupied on the journey to and fro. Whether you consider the motor from the town or country station point of view, the fact that there are no horses to get tired, and that the motor will run, provided it is efficiently handled, for any hour or all hours during the twenty-four, makes it inevitable that every country house, and nearly every private carriage-owner in London, will have a motor car of some sort in coming years.

  There is probably nothing safer in the streets of London to-day than a well-driven electric carriage; there are no horses to fall down when the streets are slippery, and there is brake power available far in excess of any that can possibly be exercised by the horse with his four iron-shod feet on a treacherous surface.12

  Although the motor car thus arrived in the reign of Victoria, the vehicles were seen – just as earlier the bicycle had been – as a plaything for enthusiasts, who might run races or make experimental journeys over long distances. Not only was the motor car unpleasant – it was noisy, difficult to start and prone to break down – it was also highly expensive and initially beyond the reach even of many ‘carriage folk’. The very fact that motoring was included among the subjects dealt with in the Badminton Library of sporting volumes indicates that the car was not yet considered a serious means of transport. The motoring age was not to begin with Victoria but with Edward VII. The Queen herself – though she never personally encountered one – intensely disliked this new invention, saying to the Master of the Horse: ‘I hope you will never allow one of those horrible machines to be used in my stables. I am told they smell exceedingly nasty, and are shaky and disagreeable conveyances altogether.’13 It would only be when her son was on the throne that the Royal Family – which still led fashion – employed automobiles and thus helped to popularize them. It would indeed be in the Royal Stables that they were kept, and the Master of the Horse who would initially supervise them.

  6

  RELIGION

  An overwhelming difference between the twenty-first century and the nineteenth is the presence of active Christianity in society. It is difficult from a modern perspective to appreciate the importance of this influence, not only on individual thought and behaviour but on social convention, general attitudes, and on parliamentary legislation. Religion mattered to the Victorians in a way that is incomprehensible to many people today.

  Humbug

  The era is perceived, according to stereotype, as one of piety. Churchgoing was commonplace and expected. Family prayers were an equally rigid convention. Missionaries from Britain were s
ent all over the globe to convert the heathen, supported financially by the pennies of spinsters and Sunday School children. Clergymen lived a rarified, Trollopian existence in cathedral closes and country vicarages, preaching soporific sermons and presiding over tea-parties while their curates fluttered the hearts of local young ladies. The Church – principally, of course, the Anglican Church – was an unflinching upholder of the social order and a sort of moral police force for the nation. Church-sponsored charitable organizations were numerous and, pricked in conscience by the poverty surrounding their own comfort, members of middle-class congregations carried out some useful social work, though this is seen as going hand in hand with humbug and hypocrisy.

  Like all stereotypes, this one contains some truth. Observance of the Sabbath was often strict, and was enshrined in law. Clergymen, whether bishops or curates, enjoyed a greater prestige in society than they were later to do. Their opinions, utterances, writings and sermons were respected and heeded and debated, for they were seen as important and well-qualified social commentators whose views carried weight. The Church – not only in its Anglican form but on behalf of Nonconformist and Catholic interests – undertook a huge amount of philanthropic activity that was without precedent in its scope and the zeal of its – largely voluntary – workforce, for the Victorians believed that individuals, rather than the state, should look after society’s needs. Though guilt may have played some part in motivating them, it does not detract from their achievement. Waves of missionaries went from the United Kingdom – more of them than from any other country – to Africa and China, Canada and the South Seas to win souls, though they also devoted considerable energy to work at home in ‘Darkest England’. All the while their efforts were followed with close interest and supported by the prayers of the congregations that sponsored them.

  Storm and Stress

  Any notion of uninterrupted peace within the precincts of churches and cathedrals, however, is a serious misconception. The nineteenth century was, for the Anglican Church, a time of storm and stress, of bitter dispute and almost continuous attack from several quarters – from other denominations, from those who held radical or humanist views, and from those energetic and committed evangelicals within its own ranks who wished to refashion it into a less stagnant and more effective organization. Created by the Tudors as a compromise between religious extremes, the Anglican Church was found to be inadequate in an industrial, materialistic and less deferential age. It was in considerable need of overhaul, but this process had begun, and reform was well under way during the decades before Victoria’s accession. The characteristics of this National Church as they were before the advent of new enthusiasms was summed up by a late Victorian author as:

  Preaching, without passion or excitement, scholarlike, careful, wise . . . Its average was what naturally in England would be the average, in a state of things in which great religious institutions have been for a long time settled and unmolested – kindly, helpful, respectable, sociable persons of good sense and character, workers rather in a fashion of routine which no one thought of breaking; apt to value themselves on their cheerfulness and wit, but often dull and dogmatic and quarrelsome, often insufferably pompous.1

  However agreeable the less pompous and more kindly members of the Church may have been, their indifferent and ineffectual outlook was seen by a new generation as a serious obstacle to necessary progress.

  Passionate Ideals

  As well as those who wished the Church to respond more closely to the needs of society, there was a powerful element that wished it to reform. The most glaring abuse was absenteeism – the holding by a single clergyman of one or more parishes that he seldom visited but from which he received tithes. A parson with several livings could have an extremely comfortable existence, while the services in his various churches were conducted for him by impoverished curates. This practice was gradually brought to an end during Victoria’s reign, but it was only one among several major issues that reformers wished to address. A further movement within its ranks sought to rediscover the beauties of the Church’s early existence, or at least the purity that was perceived as belonging to the ‘Age of Faith’ – the Middle Ages. What this meant was in effect a repudiation of the Reformation, a return to ornament and statuary, ritual and – most controversially – devotion to the Mother of God. To some this was simple heresy, a denial of all that made the English Church distinctive. To others it offered a new dimension of beauty and spirituality – something that had been lacking precisely because of the Reformation.

  The instigators of this tendency were all linked with the University of Oxford. The oldest of them was John Keble (1792–1866), a brilliant Oriel scholar who took orders and published, in 1827, a book of religious verse entitled The Christian Year. It was hugely popular, and so impressively written that he was appointed Professor of Poetry. In 1833 he preached a sermon in the university church that expressed his personal view that Anglicanism should embrace the whole Church, including its Catholic element. What he was saying was, in effect, that it was possible to include Catholic practices without betraying one’s Anglican convictions. He did not aim at a reintroduction of Catholicism, rather the model to which he looked was the Laudian English Church of the seventeenth century. Like others whose thoughts had developed in a similar way, he was also alarmed at the spread of secularism in society. Several of his listeners passionately agreed with him, and between them they formed what became known as the Oxford Movement.

  Ecclesiastical Revolution

  Their outlook attracted another brilliant mind. Edward Pusey (1800–82) was a clergyman and Fellow of Oriel who joined the debate through academic writing and the publishing of tracts in support of Keble’s views, though his influence was so great that those who shared his ideas came to be known as Puseyites. When he was suggested as Regius Professor of Divinity, the unsympathetic Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, ignored his candidacy and appointed a Low Churchman. This was not Pusey’s last rebuff, for he was suspended from preaching a few years later – though he continued to write, and remained a guiding spirit in the Oxford Movement.

  John Henry Newman (1801–90) was another Fellow of Oriel inspired by Keble’s sermon to develop similar views, and he expressed them in an extensive range of tracts. He wrote nineteen of these, and the fact that several other members of the Movement also published pamphlets gave rise to the term ‘Tractarian’ to describe the Catholic tendency within Anglicanism. Newman, a quiet and deeply intellectual figure, found himself so drawn to this that in 1845 he converted to the Roman Catholic Church. He continued to write prolifically – his Apologia pro vita sua of 1864 was regarded as a masterpiece. He founded the Oratory in Birmingham and became the first Rector of the Catholic University of Ireland. He was created a cardinal in 1879 and died in 1890.

  Another convert to Catholicism was Henry Manning (1808–92). The son of a Governor of the Bank of England, and a Prime Minister’s godson, he found his way by an indirect route into Anglican orders. He, like Newman, came to prefer the Roman Catholic Church, and converted in 1851. Less intellectual and more worldly than the members of the Oxford Movement, he became actively involved in work among the poor, and was an ally of – or at least a joint participant in various endeavours with – the Salvation Army and the temperance movement. He subscribed fully, in other words, to the Victorian notions of improving the lot of the poor. He also acted as a mediator in industrial disputes (most memorably the 1889 dock strike), and was a vigorous champion of access to education. His concern for the poor was so marked that critics thought him tainted with socialism, but his response was ‘People call it socialism, I call it Christianity.’ He became Archbishop of Westminster (where there was as yet no cathedral) in 1865, and a cardinal ten years later.

  These men possessed some of the finest minds that nineteenth-century England produced. That they should devote the resources they possessed so completely to the service of Christianity suggests not only the important role that r
eligion played in their era but the need they perceived for change, redefinition and reform.

  Amid the tensions within Anglicanism, the advantage alternated between evangelicals and traditionalists throughout the century. Prime Ministers, who appointed bishops and could thus shape the character of church leadership for decades to come, were often driven by personal beliefs and preferences. Palmerston and Disraeli demonstrated, in their choice among candidates, a distrust of Tractarians that reflected the traditional English suspicion of ceremonious worship. Gladstone, on the other hand, was a Tractarian himself, and showed a corresponding disinclination to appoint evangelicals.

  The Tudor gateway into the Cathedral Close at Canterbury might stand as a metaphor for the position of the Church at this time. It is large, elaborate and impressive, decorated with statuary and coats of arms, and it leads through to a place of peace and privilege. There are massive wooden gates, which still show signs of damage from the mob that tried to break them down during the Reform Bill riots in 1832, so completely was the Church identified with the landed gentry and the old, vested interests. The Church might have seemed secure and complacent, but its influence, its privileges and its possessions were under constant threat.