The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  ‘I never lose an accident,’9 Turner once told his most articulate admirer. This particular accident, this blaze of orange and gold reflected in the inky waters of the Thames at night, must have seemed to Turner like one of his own canvases come to life. The moment when the roof of the House of Lords crashed in was ‘accompanied with an immense volume of flame and smoke’ emitting ‘in every direction billions of sparks and flakes of fire’. It sounded, said an observer, like the report of a piece of heavy ordnance, like an explosion. In all likelihood Turner, who saw visual images as symbols, envisioned the fire as an emblem of the old world being done away with, purged and destroyed.10 In which case he can hardly have been alone. The crowds were mostly silent as they witnessed the spectacle, but when the flames increased one man cheered and was instantly arrested.11

  Lord Melbourne (1779–1848) himself, the prime minister, personally directed the attempts to save Westminster Hall from being engulfed.12 Fire engines were brought inside the Hall in order to play water on the replacement hammerbeam roof which had been added to William Rufus’s original building when Geoffrey Chaucer was the clerk of works. It was the only substantial medieval building in the entire rich complexity to survive the night. St Stephen’s Chapel, where the Commons had sat since 1547, was burnt out, though engravings of the ruin suggest that it could have been saved had the atmosphere of the times been more minded to conserve than to rebuild.13

  For something, unquestionably, more than a collection of much-loved old buildings was ablaze. Britain was changing, and changing more rapidly and more creatively than any other country in the world. Within three years of witnessing the destruction of the Palace of Westminster, the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, was to see the death of the old King William IV (1765–1837) and the accession of Queen Victoria (1819–1901). Melbourne was Queen Victoria’s mentor, her father-figure. Together this somewhat unlikely pair, the world-weary cynical Whig peer and the plain, diminutive, teenaged monarch, gazed forward to a new world more populous, more competitive and more adaptable than the Reverend Thomas Malthus could have envisaged in his worst nightmares. His death in Bath in the very year of the New Poor Laws, and of the Westminster fire, could also be seen as emblematic.

  What Malthus failed to predict, with his arithmetical versus geometric rates, was the colossal growth in wealth in the era which would be known as Victorian. The more people, the more wealth-producers there were. It was an era of paupers, pauperism, famine, disease, certainly. In this, his predictions were more than amply fulfilled in the first decade of the new reign. But it was also an era of prodigious energy, growth and expansion. Foreign observers were astounded to watch Great Britain, in 1830, producing 2,000 tons per working day of iron – that is 650,000–700,000 tons per year.14 By 1855, the figure had risen to 1 million tons of iron per annum. The same sort of figures could be discovered for coal production, for steamships, for machine-produced cotton and woollen goods. Though life was tough in the industrial towns where all this wealth was manufactured, more, numerically, benefited than suffered. Looking back at it all, our hearts are wrung by the plight of those who profited nothing from the grind and struggle of capitalism. The fortunes of the Victorian millionaires, the mill-owners, the mine-owners, the engineers and the speculative builders, were founded on the suffering of others. Nor was this suffering accidental. The struggle, the eternal warfare between the weak and the strong, the inexorable survival of the fittest, seems by this view of things to be a law of Nature, cruelly replacing the older belief that it was love which ruled the sun and other stars.

  To one observer at least – and a highly influential one – it seemed as though this was quite literally the case. While the Houses of Parliament crackled and blazed, in October 1834, HMS Beagle, a ten-gun brig under the command of Captain Robert Fitzroy RN, was sailing towards Tierra del Fuego. Aboard was a naturalist, then aged twenty-five, by the name of Charles Darwin (1809–82). It was during this voyage, when observing the finches of the Galapagos Islands, that Darwin’s mind first directed itself towards the evolution of life on this planet. Many years would elapse before isolated observations coalesced into an overall vision, or a hunch became a theory. That, by his own account, only began to happen after 1838. The crucial moment in his intellectual development, he tells us, occurred not when observing finches, or pigeons, or apes, but when reading Malthus’s Essay on Population. ‘In October 1838,’ Charles Darwin recorded in his Autobiography, ‘that is 15 months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on … it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.’15

  It was at once the most creative and destructive of theories, as the unfolding years would show.

  Darwin’s hour was not yet come. The two writers who stand at the beginning of the Victorian Age like choruses to the drama, one in tragic, the other in comic mask, are Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) and Charles Dickens. Carlyle’s French Revolution, after many adventures (which included the only manuscript of volume 1 being inadvertently burnt by John Stuart Mill’s housemaid), was published in book form for the first time in 1837, the year of the Queen’s accession. It was also the year which saw the final instalment of the serial publication of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.

  When we gasp with astonishment at the undemocratic nature of government (even after the Reform Bill) in the early decades of the nineteenth century; when we deplore the gap between rich and poor; when we survey the Britain of workhouses, of coal mines worked by children, of grinding poverty and even starvation in town and country, it is a striking fact that two of the most distinctive voices of the age, two of the most literate and imaginative, should not have come from privileged backgrounds. Dickens, the son of a government clerk imprisoned in the Marshalsea Prison for debt, had only rudimentary schooling and next to no money when, as a very young man, he began to report parliamentary debates in the Monthly Magazine. By modern standards, the poverty of the Carlyle family in Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, was little above a subsistence level; but by comparison with other Scotch peasants, Carlyle’s parents, enterprising and thrifty, were prosperous, even though their children went barefoot until they began school, and they lived on a diet of oatmeal, milk and potatoes.16 Thanks to the admirable educational system in Scotland by which a clever boy could rise, however poor he was, Carlyle went to Edinburgh University and immersed himself in contemporary European literature, language and philosophy. He was the great interpreter of German poetry and philosophy to the English-speaking world.

  It was to France, however, that he went at the age of twenty-nine on a visit which was of crucial importance. It is difficult to overestimate the extent to which the British, after the defeat of Napoleon, continued to feel paranoia about France. Not only did all the English military, and many of their politicians, continue to believe that the greatest political threat came from France (up to and even during the Crimean War when French and English were supposedly allies); not only did Palmerston and Wellington fear the prospect of French invasion long after the very possibility of such an event had been extinguished; but France was also seen as the very object lesson of what could happen if a society imploded. For Tories of the old school, the lesson was simple enough: start to dabble with religious freethinkers, or to question the aristocratic system, and before long you find a guillotine erected; you find kings having their heads chopped off; you find the Reign of Terror and Robespierre.

  For Carlyle, the story was less simple. The drama of the French Revolution is of electrifying fascination for this Scottish genius of peasant ancestry. Carlyle was one of those who had taken leave of orthodox religious belief, and certainly would never pretend to be a Christian, although he went on reading the
Bible and believing that there was something Providential in the working of history itself.

  We sow what we reap, both as individuals and as societies. This is the simple and compelling message of The French Revolution – though it is also the most exciting and readable work of history (I should say) in the English language. To the French to this day it is largely unknown. But no English-speaker can think of the French Revolution without using Carlyle’s words – ‘seagreen incorruptible’, ‘whiff of grapeshot’. Many, without knowing they have done so, have absorbed his views, even if they have not read his book.

  Carlyle demonstrates clearly and relentlessly how the ancien régime was bound to fall, how the relentlessly selfish aristocrats and royal family could expect nothing less than a destructive apocalypse. But he is no advocate of the Terror, and his seagreen Robespierre is one of the great monsters of literature. Carlyle’s agonies in print were to become the inner torments, political, religious and philosophical, of his generation, which is why he was the greatest of its prophets in the English-speaking world. He could not believe in Christianity, but his was no Voltairean delight at having done away with the old superstitions. He mourned his absent Christ and he trembled for a society with no sense of the awesome, no reverence before the great mysteries. Above all, he feared what would happen in a society which plainly could not sustain (morally or politically) a system of oligarchic privilege but which could so easily slither into something worse – anarchy, mayhem, butchery. The notion that the spiritual and political malaise of his times could be solved by parliamentary reforms, by extending the franchise or by allowing the vote to those living in households worth more than £10 rent – the notion that this could bring the Kingdom of God to Earth was ludicrous to him.

  Carlyle was perhaps one of those thinkers who was strongest when he was accentuating the negative, and weakest when proposing his alternatives. His dissection of the weakness of any alternative to aristocratic government, yet the precariousness of that system itself, made many of his contemporaries shake. Carlyle was not a detached schoolroom historian – he was a great journalist who observed ‘the condition of England’ and saw terrible poverty, injustice, inefficiency and spiritual hunger. He was not optimistic about the prospects of his contemporaries avoiding a revolution even worse than the French. But almost worse than this, in his view, was the horrifying effect on thousands of human lives of the industrial, capitalist revolution which made so many not merely economic slaves but dullards, incapable of seeing the sort of intellectual or spiritual truths which had been clear to his own pre-industrialized, though poverty-stricken, relations and family.

  Carlyle, though a vigorously comic writer, and one of the great wits both on the acerbic page and in his own conversation, had an ultimately tragic vision of life and of the world. It would be hard to conceive of a more different temperament from that which created The Pickwick Papers.

  Few famous novels can have had more desultory origins. A comic draughtsman by the name of Robert Seymour had recently made a success with his Humorous Sketches, mocking the social pretensions of tradesmen who rise in the world. Seymour was an unhappy man, of illegitimate birth and depressive temperament. Riding on the success of the Sketches, he offered to Chapman and Hall, publishers, a series of drawings depicting the adventures of the ‘Nimrod Club’, Cockney sportsmen having absurd adventures. Dickens had already attracted notice with Sketches by Boz, journalistic observations of London life. Hall asked if he could supply some of the same for the adventures of the Nimrod Club. So, at the age of twenty-four, Dickens obliged.

  Between the first and second episode of the book being published, however, melancholy Seymour had gone into his garden in the Liverpool Road, Islington, and shot himself. It is sometimes supposed that he did so because he resented Dickens receiving all the praise for what had been originally his creation. In fact, the first number had very little notice and sold only 400 copies. Seymour’s suicide was prompted by his own mental illness, not Dickens’s success. One of the illustrators who applied for the job in Seymour’s stead was a tall public schoolboy called William Makepeace Thackeray. But the job was given to R.W. Buss, and thereafter writer and draughtsman worked in tandem.

  The story, published between 1836 and 1837 in serial parts, was a rambling picaresque; its first audiences were drawn by a Janus-like double-appeal. On the one hand it celebrates and fantasizes about the holiday-freedoms of the swelling lower middle class from which Dickens himself sprang. In this sense, it is utterly modern. On the other hand it is a nostalgic snapshot, or series of snapshots, of an England which industry and the railways were to change forever.

  Pickwick revealed (and perhaps in some senses created) the existence of a new public. Before it was published, the reading public was divided. Newspapers cost sevenpence. A three-volume novel cost £1. 11s. 6d. Only the substantial middle, upper middle and upper class bought what we should call broadsheet papers or hardback novels. Beneath this class of perhaps 50,000 readers there were those who read popular fiction purveyed not in book form but in cheap periodicals, loose paperbacks sold by travelling salesmen from door to door or at street markets. Ballad-sheets, satires and popular romances would be sold in this way by vendors not unlike Silas Wegg in Our Mutual Friend. Some of Dickens’s contemporaries, such as William Harrison Ainsworth, the popular imitator of Sir Walter Scott, believed that the young journalist was making a grave mistake in writing fiction in this popular form, the loose-covered serial; a form hitherto reserved only for low trash. But within months, the sales of Pickwick had risen to tens of thousands. Hereafter, many of the great novels by Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, George Eliot and others would be published serially in one of the many periodicals of the day.

  Pickwick mania seized first Britain, then abroad. (It was especially popular in Russia.) Pickwick chintzes began to appear in drapers’ shops. Breeches-makers were asked to cut their products to imitate the nether garments of Mr Pickwick’s Sancho Panza, the cockney servant Sam Weller. Mr Tupman, Mr Snodgrass and Mr Winkle, the esteemed members of the Pickwick Club, were all turned into Toby jugs. There were pastries called Pickwicks and sugar confections in the shape of the Fat Boy. Now, such ‘marketing’ tricks are invented by successful publishers to cash in on the popularity of a character in a film or a book. Pickwick mania was spontaneous, and the market tapped by Chapman and Hall – a new market, a new class of people altogether – had partially defined itself by its response to Dickens.

  The political student of The Pickwick Papers would absorb much of the spirit of this important class – the petite bourgeoisie who were, successively, and throughout the period, to support Free Trade, and to cheer when the Corn Laws were abolished because such measures would bring in an era of universal peace; yet they would also cheer eight years later when Britain fought an entirely avoidable war against Russia in the Crimea. They would, like the electors at Muggleton in The Pickwick Papers, ‘have presented at divers times no fewer than one thousand four hundred and twenty petitions against the continuance of negro slavery abroad, and an equal number against any interference with the factory system at home’. Equally, those who cheered Lord Palmerston for the bombardment of Brazilian slave-ports, and who asserted their belief in freeing the negro, would have the most bloodthirsty and vengeful views of how to put down the Indian Mutiny in 1857. Pleased with the extension of the franchise to include £10 householders, this class would support Liberal measures for education in 1870. But they it was who would keep in power the oligarchy, chiefly aristocratic, who controlled the parliamentary system. In so far as they were pro-Reform Bills (both of 1832 and 1867) you could imagine them to be progressive. But they were always anti-socialist, and though they might have been anti the early nineteenth-century Toryism of Lord Liverpool, they loved Disraeli, and they voted Lord Salisbury into office over and over again.

  Part of the difficulty, for a twenty-first-century reader of Victorian life, is how to draw the political map, how to see the world in those i
maginative terms which help to form a political vision. In the terms of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, free enterprise and a belief in the market are ‘right-wing’ beliefs, and the desire to check the voracious energy of pure capitalism seems to us ‘left-wing’. But when, in Little Dorrit, Dickens was to satirize government bureaucracy in the ‘Circumlocution Office’, it was old Tory red tape which he was mocking. Old Tite Barnacle ‘wound and wound folds of white cravat round his neck, as he wound and wound folds of tape and paper round the neck of the country’. That is just the complaint which free-market capitalists made of state socialists in the closing decades of the twentieth century. But in the early to middle years of the nineteenth century a radical liberal like Dickens made the complaint of paternalistic interfering Toryism.

  Pickwick is a free spirit. He is a small-time merchant who has been released from the slavery which oppresses so many of Dickens’s characters in the later books – the high desk, the scratch pen, the factory gate, the suppression of true sentiment (as in Wemmick’s office sentiments, contrasted with the ‘Walworth’ sentiments of his Aged P and home). Pickwick has achieved what all enterprising Victorians aimed for – financial independence. He and his companions set out, in 1827 – ten years before the publication of the book, and the start of the Victorian era – on a series of absurd comic adventures, beginning, significantly enough, where Dickens himself began as a child before the gate slammed on his own personal Eden and his father was ruined: near Rochester.

  Bright and pleasant was the sky, balmy the air, and beautiful the appearance of every object around, as Mr Pickwick leant over the balustrade of Rochester Bridge, contemplating nature and waiting for breakfast … On either side, the banks of the Medway, covered with cornfields and pastures, with here and there a windmill, or a distant church, stretched away as far as the eye could see, presenting a rich and varied landscape, rendered more beautiful by the changing shadows which passed swiftly across it, as the thin and half-formed clouds, skimmed away in the light of the morning sun.