Millennium

by Ian Mortimer

  By 1900 photography had become an essential component of publishing and journalism. The ability to create images that showed the actual scene in front of an observer’s eyes increasingly conferred the obligation to do so. Images of the Crimean War taken by Roger Fenton were engraved for publication in the Illustrated London News in the 1850s. In the following decade, Mathew B. Brady employed a small cohort of photographers to document the American Civil War (1861–5) as it progressed; their work was published in engraved form in Harper’s Weekly. With the images there to tell the story, reporting became more visceral too, describing in detail the scenes of battle. Photography also influenced public awareness of social changes in less violent contexts, such as the disappearing Native American way of life, or the housing conditions of people in slum tenements. Indeed, photography and textual journalism developed a common concern to depict the reality of social inequality and deprivation. Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851) was a detailed textual description of poverty in London, pulling no punches in describing the unsanitary, hard conditions that people endured. John Thomson’s Street Life in London (1878) revealed through images how the less fortunate eked out a living. Thomas Annan’s The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow (1872) recorded the character of the city’s slums before they were pulled down by the city authorities. Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) combined text and images to show what life was like for the poorest inhabitants of New York’s tenements, from hammocks in seven-cent boarding houses to tramps’ sleeping places in basements.

  Thus photography redefined our understanding of evidence and truth. It undermined the authority of the artist, whose storytelling images were appreciably more subjective than a camera. The witnessed moment could now be captured directly and shared amongst millions. Whether or not someone wanted to be in a picture became irrelevant. Crime scenes were photographed to preserve evidence of illegal deeds. Prisons kept images of all those who passed through their gates. ‘WANTED’ posters in towns on the American frontier carried mug shots of fugitives from justice. Police forces kept thousands of photographs of suspects. Before photography, criminals could only be identified by name, sex, eye colour and height, and there was no way of proving that one six-foot-tall middle-aged male with blue-grey eyes and receding brown hair was the same as another. From 1850 photography was also increasingly employed by scientists, especially in astronomy, with nebulae being photographed in 1880 and objects invisible to the naked eye in 1883. By 1900 the transformation was largely complete. A process of determining ‘truth’ that in 1800 had relied wholly on witnesses’ perceptions and narrative skill had been displaced by a system that was predominantly based on objective evidence, thanks in no small part to photography.

  Social reform

  We have touched upon many different sorts of government in the course of this book but with the singular exception of Revolutionary France, they all had one thing in common: they saw it as their duty to protect their citizens from social change. They were conservative. In the years after the French Revolution, they became even more wary of political reform, tending only to allow it in order to preserve as much of the status quo as possible. In November 1830 the British prime minister, Lord Grey, justified presenting the Reform Bill to Parliament with the words: ‘the principle of my reform is to prevent the necessity for revolution . . . The principle on which I mean to act is neither more nor less than that of reforming to preserve, and not to overthrow.’14 When it was finally passed, the Great Reform Act of 1832 only slightly increased the franchise: from 516,000 men of property to 809,000 at a time when the population was 13.3 million.15 It would take a while yet for the advocates of democracy to build up the pressure necessary to broaden access to the parliaments of Europe.

  A major surge came at the end of the 1840s. A famine in 1846, which triggered an international financial crisis, led to widespread calls for reform. The French, who had briefly seen universal male suffrage introduced in the Revolution, now called for it to be reintroduced. When a reformist banquet in Paris was cancelled by the king in February 1848, thousands of protesters poured out on to the streets. The National Guard and the army joined them, and the king fled. A wave of revolutions followed across the whole continent: in Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Rome and many other cities. However, all these uprisings were quashed: it seems that the restoration of universal male suffrage in France was the revolutionaries’ only lasting achievement. The reality was that the professional middle classes who were the strongest advocates for change – lawyers, doctors and bankers – were motivated by self-interest and wary of empowering the masses. They certainly were not prepared to risk the anarchy of outright revolution. Stable monarchies at least guaranteed their continued enjoyment of their hard-won wealth and status.

  In one important sense, however, the revolutions of 1848 did not fail: they served as a powerful reminder to the forces of conservatism throughout Europe that the events of 1789 could be repeated – and not just in France. Every wave of revolution was like a high tide on the beach – leaving a high-water mark to serve as a permanent reminder of what might happen again. Even in Britain, which did not see a revolution in 1848, there was increasing pressure for reform. Foremost among the radical groups was the Chartists, a popular movement that called for the adoption of a people’s charter guaranteeing universal male suffrage. The year 1848 also saw the publication of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which created a new intellectual framework for revolution. It set out in a brief but influential form Marx’s vision of the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat over the course of history, and the process by which a communist state could be established. It promulgated the idea that the worker – not land – was the primary source of wealth, and that therefore the means of production should be collectively owned by the industrial proletariat. After 1848, to many workers, metaphorical Bastilles across Europe began to look vulnerable.

  Notwithstanding the impact of the events of 1848, the greatest strides towards social reform in the first half of the century were not made by revolutionaries but by single-issue campaigners. In England, men like Edwin Chadwick gave themselves over to reforming the living conditions of the poor. Anthony Ashley-Cooper, seventh earl of Shaftesbury, devoted much of his career to improving the care of the mentally ill and the conditions in which women and children were employed in factories and mines. The name of the Irishman Daniel O’Connell will forever be linked to the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, after which Catholics were allowed to sit in Parliament. Unfortunately, there isn’t the space here to describe the many different initiatives to remedy cruelty, neglect and injustice. Therefore, we shall focus on four key aspects of nineteenth-century social reform – slavery, electoral representation, women’s rights and education – which taken together should give an idea of how governments shifted from resisting social change to actively promoting it.

  It is appropriate to deal first with the oldest and biggest social problem of them all: slavery. Enlightenment thinking had showed that slavery and natural rights were wholly at odds with one another. Yet Americans, who had declared in 1776 that they had a right to be freed from service to a foreign government, kept their own people in bondage. In 1780 blacks made up more than 20 per cent of the population of the newly independent United States, the majority of these being slaves. The awkwardness for the government of each state – and the reason for the hypocrisy – was that these slaves were private property, and private property was protected by the American constitution. It was the same contest between property and liberty that had led to slavery continuing in the Middle Ages. The state of Pennsylvania’s proposal to abolish slavery gradually, by liberating the children of slaves, did not satisfy the enlightened thinkers and reformers who demanded an end to human bondage. In any case, only a few states adopted the same strategy; in the southern states of America and on other continents, men and women were only too keen to buy and sell humans. Feelings on t
he issue began to run high. In Britain, the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in 1787. Revolutionary France abolished slavery throughout its dominions in 1794, and despite it being reintroduced by Napoleon in 1802, all the signs were that it would soon be a thing of the past in the West. In 1807 Britain and America both outlawed the trade in slaves, thus bringing 300 years of the transatlantic slave trade to an end. In 1811 Spain abolished slavery throughout its territories. In 1833, after much pressure from William Wilberforce – who had first introduced a bill to abolish the slave trade into the British parliament in 1791 – slavery itself was abolished in all British-ruled lands, with the slaves immediately being set free. Parliament agreed to pay £20 million in compensation to slave owners. In America, the issue of slavery was a major cause of the Civil War in 1861. Following the victory of the North and the re-election of Abraham Lincoln, it was abolished throughout the USA in 1865. Four years later Portugal abolished slavery in all its colonies, thereby ending official endorsement of slavery in the West.

  Electoral representation was the prime goal of middle-class campaigners in most European countries. In Britain, the Great Reform Act of 1832 ended the practice of a few landowners being able to place their men into the House of Commons without significant opposition. And, exactly as Lord Grey had intended, by relaxing the exclusivity of power just a little, the ‘necessity for revolution’ was averted. The Act bought three and a half decades’ grace for the landed gentry, and the other two Acts that followed later in the century provided further extensions. You have to admit that the British landed interest did well in holding on to its political advantages as long as it did. Even after the third Reform Act of 1884, the electorate numbered only about five million men, out of a total population of 24.4 million. Other Western countries strode ahead of Britain in terms of electoral representativeness. By 1820 all white men could vote in America in every state except Rhode Island, Virginia and Louisiana. In 1870 all adult males in America were given the vote, whatever colour they were and whichever state they were from – although it should be noted that in some southern states, intimidation, beatings and other such measures were taken by whites to limit the ability of blacks to cast their votes. As we have already seen, all adult Frenchmen were given the vote again in 1848. By 1900 all adult males in Switzerland, Denmark, Australia, Greece, Spain, Germany, New Zealand and Norway were entitled to vote. Although it was not until the next century that the majority of Western nations adopted a policy of universal male franchise, the writing was on the wall.

  What about votes for women? The first petition for women’s suffrage in Britain was presented to Parliament in 1867; it was turned down. Calls for French women to have the vote were renewed at the same time – with similarly frustrating results. Some countries introduced limited voting for women: Sweden allowed tax-paying single women to vote in municipal elections from 1862. However, it was not until 1893 that a country extended the franchise to all its female nationals: this was New Zealand. South Australia followed in 1894, the rest of Australia in 1902, Finland in 1907 and Norway in 1913. Most European countries did not grant women the vote until after the First World War.

  Why were women such a low priority in nineteenth-century legislators’ eyes? One reason was that governments felt that they had less to fear from women – they knew it was unlikely that hordes of females would man the barricades or that large numbers of men would take to the streets to demand the vote for their wives and daughters. But a much more important reason was the sexism that dominated Western society. Everywhere, women and men started from an unequal legal position. Therefore campaigners on behalf of women’s rights had higher priorities than simply demanding the vote. Women were not allowed to attend university, practise a profession such as law or medicine, or hold public office. In English law – which was also the basis of law in America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – the movable property of married women rightfully belonged to their husbands, including any money they earned. Women had to have their husband’s permission to rent out or sell any houses or land they inherited. They were not allowed to make a will except with their husband’s consent. A wife was not permitted to bring someone into the family home without her husband’s agreement – and yet a husband was entitled to enter the houses of her kin in order to bring her back to the family home if she ran away. A man could legally beat his wife as much as he wanted, as long as he did not kill her. Wives were not allowed to give evidence for or against their husbands in court and could not legally leave their husbands. In remote parts of England, there was an unofficial form of divorce among the common folk that involved a man selling his wife to the highest bidder, normally just for a few pennies or shillings. Quite a few such wife sales are known to have been held in Devon.16 When society believed a man could simply beat and even sell his wife, not having the vote seemed to many women an injustice of secondary importance.

  Consider it from the point of view of Mrs Caroline Norton, née Sheridan, who declared, ‘I do not ask for my rights. I have no rights. I have only wrongs.’17 You might have considered her a lucky girl. She was beautiful, vivacious and had inherited the wit of her grandfather, the famous playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. But her father died in South Africa in 1817, when she was only nine, leaving the family penniless. For the next few years she lived with her mother and two sisters in a ‘grace and favour’ apartment at Hampton Court Palace. When the time came for her to be married, at the age of 21, her lack of dowry meant that her prospects on the marriage market were not good. Thus she accepted the proposal of the only suitor who paid her court: the Honourable George Norton, MP. The marriage was not just a failure, it was a tragedy. Soon after the honeymoon, her slow-witted husband started to hit her when they quarrelled. Their relationship was characterised by hatred and arguments about money. Her husband took their three young children away from her and refused to allow her to see them; one of them died not long afterwards. A small inheritance that came to her on her mother’s death was taken by her husband, as was legally his right. She found refuge in her writing, from which she made a modest income, but this too disappeared into her husband’s pocket. Beaten, publicly humiliated and ostracised, deprived of her children and forced to relinquish the fruits of her labours to the man who was the cause of her unhappiness, she decided to speak out against the system. She published a series of pamphlets on the injustice of removing young children from their mothers and succeeded in forcing Parliament to pass the Custody of Infants Act in 1839, by which mothers were given the right to look after their children until the age of seven. Having won success in this field, she then turned her attention to divorce.

  At the time, the only way to obtain a divorce in England was to secure an annulment in an ecclesiastical court and then to obtain an Act of Parliament dissolving the marriage. It was a hugely expensive process that only the very rich could afford: on average just two divorces per year were granted in England between 1700 and 1857. Not only could the Nortons not afford to get divorced, it was entirely in her husband’s interests not to grant Caroline her freedom. In 1857, partly due to her campaigning, Lord Palmerston pushed through the Matrimonial Causes Act, despite the opposition of the future prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone, and the bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce (son of the anti-slavery campaigner). Henceforth marriage became a secular contract that could be sundered in the divorce court, at reasonable expense.

  The movement to alleviate the suffering of women, which Caroline had helped to start, soon gathered weight. In 1870 Parliament passed the Married Women’s Property Act, which allowed wives to own property in their own right and to keep the wages they were paid. In 1878 Frances Power Cobbe published her seminal article ‘Wife-Torture in England’ in Contemporary Review, in which she related in distressing and graphic detail how working-class men regularly beat their wives, sometimes to death, for the most trivial reasons. It did the trick. The second Matrimonial Causes Act, which allowed women a divorce if their hu
sbands were physically abusive, was passed that same year. By 1900 many of the legal injustices from which Caroline Norton and countless other women had suffered had been swept away.