by James Grant
THE ONE-MAN-BAND PHASE of the Economist had ended in the late 1840s. In David Mitchell Aird, the paper had found a printer, manager, and occasional financial correspondent. In Herbert Spencer, the future author of Social Statics, it had had, for a time, a copyeditor. The anarchist Thomas Hodgskin was a regular contributor of fluent articles about politics, pauperism, economics, and capital punishment, which he abhorred. A kind of anarcho-socialist, Hodgskin propounded the doctrine that labor, and labor alone, was the true source of economic value. Such was his influence on socialist thought that Beatrice and Sidney Webb characterized Karl Marx as Hodgskin’s “illustrious disciple.”
William Rathbone Greg was another steady contributor to Wilson’s pages. Born in 1809, the youngest son of a wealthy Cheshire mill owner, Greg set up in business with his father’s help. The business failed and Greg turned his full attention to writing. He saw the world largely as James Wilson did, not least in his belief in free trade. His essay “Agriculture and the Corn Laws” won a prize from the Anti-Corn Law League in 1842. To support his wife and four children, Greg sold freelance articles to the North British Review, the Westminster Review, and the Edinburgh Review. In the early 1850s, he added the Economist to his string of journalistic outlets.
Greg was soon on more than professional terms with the Wilsons. In Julia, Wilson’s twenty-year-old daughter, whom he met in 1852, Greg found his soul mate, though he was married and twenty-three years her senior. Greg’s first marriage ended in 1873 with the death of his wife, who had long been insane. He and Julia married in 1874. Their only child, Walter Wilson Greg, born in 1875, was groomed by his parents for the editorship of the Economist but instead became a distinguished Shakespearean scholar.
Greg had a long nose, wide mouth, and close-set eyes. In a picture snapped during the phase of his life in which he encountered Julia, he leans on a cabinet with his right elbow as his left elbow juts akimbo. His mustache nearly connects with his lush side whiskers. He looks steadily into the camera, as if to affirm the judgment of a contemporary about his emphatic contributions to the discussions at the Political Economy Club, to which he belonged.¶
Richard Holt Hutton, editor from 1857, likewise had a network of correspondents. Wilson himself wrote leaders in his not-abundant spare time—he was, of course, a member of Parliament and a Treasury official, besides, as well as a contributor to the Manchester Guardian—but not even this Hercules of labor could find the hours to write and electioneer simultaneously. In the final two weeks of April 1859, Wilson was called home to his parliamentary constituency to fight a contested by-election. He addressed an SOS to Bagehot: “Hutton will have to draw from all quarters this week and next. I cannot do anything for him. See what you can.” Bagehot answered the call with a comment on the outbreak of war between France and Austria. The news had panicked the City and astounded Bagehot—he had never before seen a political event have such a violent financial effect. “It is like the panic the week we were engaged,” he reminisced to Eliza.9
It could not have been lost on Wilson that Hutton cared little about money, banking, investing, or business. Nor did Hutton’s discursive writing come close to achieving what Wilson meant by a “business style.” On Saturday morning, the City men who subscribed to the Economist were likely to open the paper to discover reviews of, say, a new edition of the letters of the eighteenth-century English art historian Horace Walpole, or of a work entitled Travels in Eastern Africa; with a Narrative of a Residence in Mozambique, or of a collection of the Biographies of Lord Macaulay Contributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Hutton did not publish such material to the exclusion of business and financial news, or of the essential supporting statistics, the presentation of which the Economist pioneered. Nor did Wilson, no reader of books himself, object to book reviews per se. His daughters Eliza* and—especially—Julia were among the contributors of unsigned reviews to the family paper. Still, there was a great deal of material that a City stockbroker might have judged extraneous. Hutton’s bookishness made him a more likely candidate for the editorship of a literary journal than a financial one.10
Bagehot’s mind afforded him polymathic scope—not that he was alone, or even so very unusual, in the wide range of his interests. For many accomplished Victorians, curiosity seemed unbounded. As the engineer Brunel built railways, bridges, and ships, so did the statesman Gladstone translate Horace and Homer (in 1886, he was reading the Iliad for what he suspected was the thirty-fifth time), publish substantial works on religion and Neapolitan politics, and, while commissioner-extraordinary in the British protectorate of the Ionian Islands, address the Ionian assembly in classical Greek.† Linguists and amateur classicists were common in Bagehot’s circle of friends. The parliamentarian Robert Lowe was more than proficient in Sanskrit, and Sir George Lewis was the author of Survey of the Astronomy of the Ancients. The banker John Lubbock wrote prolifically on archeology and evolutionary theory. Henry Herbert, 4th Earl of Carnarvon, was a Fellow of the Royal Society.
In 1859, Bagehot turned his attention—that part of it not occupied by the gold controversy, Stuckey’s, the Economist, and Eliza—to John Milton. The newlywed banker was giving full vent to his literary avocation. His essay on Sir Walter Scott and the Waverley novels had appeared in the National Review in 1858, followed by another on Charles Dickens. Now, in the July 1859 issue of the National Review, came a study of the author of Paradise Lost. The Milton essay was, ostensibly, a review article, though the publication of the works under review seemed more pretext than catalyst. Bagehot pays his respects to the distinguished authors of the Milton-themed works under his consideration—David Masson, a professor at University College, and Thomas Keightley, a scholar of folklore—but he no more defers to them on Milton than he had to Chevalier on gold. “No one can wish to speak with censure of a book on which so much genuine labor has been expended,” writes the amateur critic of the 780-page opening volume of Masson’s projected three-volume work, The Life of John Milton, “and yet we are bound, as true critics, to say that we think it has been composed upon a principle that is utterly erroneous.” Not an academic, Bagehot was likewise not a pedant. He goes on to complain about the biographers who shrink before their scholarly critics: leave something—anything—out of the narrative, and the professors will abuse you for it. So Masson leaves nothing out, Bagehot writes, “in the production of a work at once overgrown and incomplete.” One trouble with the encyclopedic approach to biography in this case is that Milton was a writing man: nothing much happened to him. His wife left him, only to return to him, years later, with the in-laws in tow. It was a happy reconciliation and, from Milton’s side, a generous one. Otherwise, events were few and far between, a fact that removes the need for the kind of context with which Masson pads his pages: “A life of poetic retirement requires but little reference to anything except itself. In a biography of Mr. Tennyson, we should not expect to hear of the Reform Bill, or the Corn Laws.”11
Thus disposing of Masson and all but ignoring Keightley, Bagehot proceeds to develop his own ideas on the poet and his works. Like Samuel Johnson before him, he concludes that Milton’s “isolated and austere mind”12 left him ignorant of the hubbub, the people, and the mores of the everyday life that swirled about him. Bagehot describes Milton, the ascetic; Milton, the author of a tract on divorce whose attitude is entirely and unapologetically pro-husband; Milton, the Puritan political partisan (without reference to the poet’s magnificent defense of free speech, Aeropagitica, a curious omission for a writer and publisher); and, of course, the author of Paradise Lost.
The words that Bagehot expended recording Milton’s height offer a window into the tempo of Victorian life and letters. The poet was neither short nor tall—that is the spare fact—but Bagehot does not simply assert it. He devotes most of a deep paragraph to quoting Milton, who seemed a little defensive on the subject, and the antiquary John Aubrey, Milton’s contemporary, to establish the none-too-arresting datum that the great man was of middling s
tature. Nothing indicates that either Bagehot or his readers were in a hurry to move on to more substantive topics.
The next paragraph reveals something about the critic. Bagehot was given to frank appraisals of the personal appearance of people whom he encountered.‡ Here is what he had to say about Milton’s reputed looks: “We are far from accusing Milton of personal vanity. His character was too enormous . . . for a fault so petty. But a little tinge of excessive self-respect will cling to those who can admire themselves. Ugly men are and ought to be ashamed of their existence. Milton was not so.”13
Bagehot draws a breath—perhaps, after those last jarring sentences, the reader, too, needs a pause—before taking up Paradise Lost. “No book, perhaps, which has ever been written is more difficult to criticize.”14 Milton’s purpose was nothing less than to plumb the mystery of man’s place in the universe.
Yet Bagehot stands unbowed before the masterwork. He enumerates its defects, the first being its foundation “on a political transaction.” This undertaking assumes the form of the meeting of angels which God has called to announce his decision to appoint “My only Son” to sit at his right hand. “This act of patronage was not popular at court,” Bagehot dryly comments; “and why should it have been? The religious sense is against it. The worship which sinful men owe to God is not transferable to lieutenants and vicegerents.”
Which brings Bagehot to Milton’s “great error”: the poet makes Satan appear “interesting.” Quoting Coleridge, Bagehot compares Milton’s Satan to an Englishman’s idea of Napoleon I. You may not root for Napoleon, Bagehot allows, but you are fascinated by him; so with Satan in books 1 and 2 of Milton’s epic. You know that Satan will be vanquished, but you have no affinity with the “insipid” angels who oppose him. It therefore happens that “our sympathies, our fancy,” are on the side of the devil.15
Satan’s assault on God’s first couple seems overwrought, Bagehot continues, unworthy of the power and majesty of the fallen angel: “Two beings just created, without experience, without guile, without knowledge of good and evil, are expected to contend with a being on the delineation of whose powers every resource of art and imagination, every subtle suggestion, every emphatic simile, has been lavished.” Why, Bagehot remarks, “It is as if an army should invest a cottage.”
Bagehot, never overawed by reputation, does at last give Milton his due. Every one of the poet’s lines, he writes, “excites the idea of indefinite power.”16
BAGEHOT WAS RIGHT ABOUT Dr. Beveridge of Edinburgh: his phrenological rubbing was all for naught. Eliza continued to suffer debilitating headaches. When stricken, which her diaries suggest was about once a week, she would spend most of the day in bed. Eye strain likewise troubled her. When she wanted to know what was in The Times, a servant read her the paper.
The Bagehots lived a pleasantly itinerant life. Residing at Clevedon, they made frequent visits to her parents’ houses in London and in Claverton. After the wedding, at Langport, they submitted to the ancient ceremony called “sitting up,” in which the bride surrenders herself to the inspection of her husband’s friends and family.17 Of an evening, or on Sunday, Bagehot might read aloud: the poems of Shelley or Matthew Arnold, the Psalms, Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet, or Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” There were houseguests—her sisters, Mr. Greg—and they would play billiards or whist.
In February 1860, Bagehot and Eliza, along with Greg and Julia, took a holiday in Paris. It wasn’t very successful, “at least to us soberer ones,” Greg advised Eliza’s sister Matilda. “It produced an enormous crop of bonnets and dresses—with which our room was absolutely strewn—but not much else—except that I had the stomach-ache en perpetuité, Emilie a sore throat and Julia influenza and measles.” Greg’s travelogue continued:
You never saw such people as Walter and Eliza for appetite and unpunctuality. They grubbed at 9, at 11, at 2, sometimes at 5, always at 6 and usually again at 11 or 12, with a snack in the interstices. The sofas and floor presented a most distracting chaos of newspapers, old and new, chocolate, gloves (—generally odd ones—) tea cups, lemonade, pats of butter, statistical returns and Blue books, physic bottles, fragments of bread, half-eaten pears, and the like . . .
Punctilious and unpunctual, Bagehot was a member of the first generation of English railway commuters. He would catch the 9:26 a.m. from Clevedon to Bristol to oversee the local Stuckey’s branch. If London-bound, he would ride the Great Western express to Paddington. A late riser, he would sometimes, as the Victorians put it, “lose his train.” Whichever train that happened to be was likely a spartan affair, though wondrous to those who had previously known only horse-drawn conveyances. Absent were heat, artificial light, food, beverages, lavatories. Passengers furnished their own refreshment and illumination. When the temperature dropped, they rented foot-warmers.
In his absence, Eliza paid endless rounds of social calls. She planned and executed dinner parties, attended to the servants, inventoried the linen, and doted on her husband’s writing. She earned no money but ably helped to spend it—within a year of their marriage she calculated that they were spending at the rate of £1,400 a year while Bagehot was earning around £1,000 a year.18 Just how Mr. and Mrs. Bagehot squared this particular circle is unrecorded.
Like many a young bride, Eliza discovered that it was useful to prompt her husband to do the things that he otherwise might have left undone. Thus, she wrote to him concerning the need for ponies to pull the phaeton: “I should be very pleased if you went and bought a pair of cobs tomorrow in your off-hand way.” And, she adds, concerning a date she had planned for him at the photographer’s, “Please go tomorrow at 11 (222 Regent St) and ask to sit with Mr. Scott. Remember to wear a blue tie and brush your hair with care, please, love.”19
•••
JAMES WILSON WAS MUCH in demand in 1859 within the Liberal government of Lord Palmerston. First came an offer to assume the vice presidency of the Board of Trade. He accepted, and was also made a Privy Counsellor. This last distinction required a visit to Windsor Castle on June 18 to kneel on a stool before Queen Victoria, extend his right hand toward her, palm up, take her hand lightly in his, and brush his lips against it—“kissing hands,” the ceremony is called.20 A more dazzling invitation followed ten days later:21 Would the newly-minted vice president care to take up the duties of the Financial Membership of the Supreme Council at Calcutta—functionally, to become the chancellor of the exchequer of India? He would serve for five years.
Wilson liked his life the way it was. He could occupy a safe parliamentary seat for as long as he cared to have it. He enjoyed “the best society in London,” as he described it—because it was the most intelligent—and the love of his large family. All of this he would have to abandon. Then again, India promised adventure and fame. Wilson had served as secretary to the India Board of Control and headed the development of the Indian railway system;22 well aware of the defects of Indian finance, he had been of the view that nothing short of an emergency would present the opportunity to fix them. With the 1857–58 uprising against the rule of the British East India Company, India had its emergency.23
Bagehot was the family member with whom Wilson was most eager to discuss his future, and when the decision to go was firm and final, it was his son-in-law with whom Wilson stayed up late one night to review the details of his will. On the day before his departure, Wilson dashed off a note to Sir George Cornewall Lewis: “My friend Bagehot has undertaken a sort of general superintendence of the Economist and Hutton remains Editor under him. Will you kindly allow Bagehot to call upon you occasionally?”24
There were eighteen for dinner at Southampton on October 19, the eve of the final leave-taking. Accompanying Wilson to India were his wife, his daughter Sophia and her husband, the Indian civil servant William Halsey, and two unmarried daughters, Matilda and Zenobia, or Zoe. Eliza, Julia, and Emilie would stay behind. On the twentieth, the family and its well-wishers went together to say their goodbyes aboard t
he India-bound ship the Pera, moored three miles offshore. Emilie took her leave of her mother and sisters. Then she turned to her father:
In an outburst of affection for him I threw my arms round his neck and kissed him; he did not respond, but stood quite still and looked beyond and away. A curious pained expression passed over his face . . . The thought perhaps that in a few weeks, half the world would be between him and his three children had struck his mind with painful vividness.
As Eliza paid endless rounds of social calls, Bagehot embarked on a whirl of professional ones. No small part of his superintendence of the Economist was searching for news to put in it. To this end, he traipsed from office to office and informant to informant, with Gladstone and Sir G. C. Lewis among his sources. To Zoe, by now in Calcutta, Bagehot described the life of a news supplicant:
The great change of late to me is that having the Economist to look after. I come to London and call on public characters and sit (like Jet) with my mouth open hearing what they say. I do not say much myself, though I think if I was fifty and a cabinet minister, would not I talk platitudes?
Wilson and Bagehot wrote to each other almost every day. The son-in-law kept his father-in-law (“Dear Mr. Wilson”) posted on political, financial, and journalistic developments at home. One such bulletin briefed the Economist’s absent proprietor about the launch of a new financial publication, the Money Market Review, whose maiden issue had alluded to a certain unnamed “journal of respectability” paying more attention to literature and politics than to business. Bagehot advised Wilson not to worry, “dull and feeble” as the upstart was. Ever inclined to take the gloomy side of an argument, said Bagehot, he was, with respect to the standing of the Economist in the suddenly growing market for financial and business news, decidedly “cheerful.”25