The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Even as they read The Pickwick Papers, the first readers could indulge in instant nostalgia. The first railway terminus, Euston, was built in London in the year the book was published. The old era of the stagecoach – each with its name (Defiance, True Blue, Wonder, Tantivy, Star of Brunswick, Isis, Irresistible, Tally Ho, Rocket, Zephyr, Ariel, Emerald, Flower of Kent, Mazeppa) – was to give place to named steam engines, about which in later eras schoolboy enthusiasts would be no less sentimental.

  The nostalgia of Pickwick is a large part of its appeal, and it is one of the most remarkable features of the collective Victorian consciousness. That is, while they were in every sense different from previous generations, and glad to be different, they also hankered after the past. Dickens, when he settled in a large house at Gad’s Hill, had some false book-backs made for a door in his library, simulating a row of bound leather volumes. The titles, still visible today in a room which is a school office (somehow this is appropriate), come under the heading: ‘The Wisdom of our Ancestors – I. Ignorance. II. Superstition. III. The Block. IV. The Stake. V. The Rack. VI. Dirt. VII. Disease.’ Dickens had in common with most of his contemporaries a desire to put the old world of injustice, ignorance and disease behind him. He shared with them, too, however, a sentimentality about the past, a sense that industrialization was wrecking the world. This dichotomy, felt by all readers of Pickwick, is to be one of the defining features of nineteenth-century socio-political debates. It defines John Ruskin, for example, who can be claimed, and justly claimed, as the father of English socialism and the bluest of old Tories.

  There is another obvious feature of Pickwick which makes an appeal to its admirers; and of all the qualities in its author it is perhaps both the strongest and the hardest with which to come to terms. It is benevolence. How can one talk about this quality without smugness, without being saccharine? The Edinburgh Review in 1838, writing of Dickens, said:

  One of the qualities we most admire in him is his comprehensive spirit of humanity. The tendency of his writings is to make us practically benevolent – to excite our sympathy in behalf of the aggrieved and suffering in all classes; and especially in those who are most removed from observation …

  Many of the ‘benevolent’ characters in Dickens will strike some readers as clumsily drawn and manipulative of our tear-ducts. One thinks of the brothers Cheeryble or of Mr Brownlow or Pickwick himself. It was well said that ‘their facile charity forbids censoriousness; they are too busy being happy to think’. Yet each time one reads A Christmas Carol, it works. The ethics of Scrooge (which are the ethics of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, the ethics of the mill-owners and factory-builders who created the wealth of Victorian England) are held in check by a tremendously simplified form of Christian charity.

  Dickens admired and promoted the notion of benevolence, both in his person (for example in his work at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital) and in his writings, to the point where he must be recognized as a hugely benign force in Victorian England. He is both the cause, and a symptom, of a benevolence which is palpable.

  In the pages which follow, we shall read much about the Victorians which makes us feel as harshly about them as Dickens himself did about the Wisdom of our Ancestors. Their failure to better the lives of the urban wage-slaves in factories and mills; their genocidal neglect of the Irish famine; their brutality in India and Africa are not to be overlooked or glossed over. Nor were many of these abuses alleviated until history, as it were, forced them to be: the Empire was taken from the British by the poverty caused by world wars, and socialism of a benign Northern European form was imposed upon them for a corrective five- or ten-year period at the same time and for the same reason. And yet, even in the midst of the abuses, there was a significant number of people behaving benevolently. This seems to occur at all times and in all places throughout the nineteenth century. The landlords in Ireland, even, did not en masse starve and neglect their tenants. Not all mill-owners were monsters. Sanitation and housing was terrible, in many British slums, up to and including the mid-twentieth century. But improvements in general had been made in other areas. And a proper guilt was felt. One must not be smug about these things; for what is being discussed is human misery on an immeasurable scale – in workhouses, factories, slums, colonies, army camps, ships. Yet Dickens, partly because he is so consistently funny a writer, and so unpompous, reminds us of the existence of another Britain, in which the harshness of life is tempered by kindliness. His belief in the power of good-heartedness to triumph over evil is expressed in terms, not of a political programme, but of personality. His world, like the world of Victorian England, is not a Marxian mass: it is a teeming, moving screen of hilarious characters. He was in some senses the least realistic of all great geniuses; more than most writers, he created his own world. Such was his success, however, that we can almost say that the early nineteenth century in England was the England of Dickens. The figures who emerge from its prints and caricatures seem not merely just as odd as anything he created; they seem, rather, as if he did create them, and as if they are speaking lines created for them by him.

  2

  Victoria’s Inheritance

  OLD WILLIAM IV, dropsical, drunken, stupid, died two days after Waterloo Day, on 20 June 1837. He had been visibly sinking for some weeks. The Duke of Wellington, in the previous week, had offered to cancel the annual banquet commemorating the victory on 18 June, twenty-two years earlier, over the French emperor. William IV had robustly insisted that the banquet go ahead. He baffled everyone by exclaiming ‘The Church, The Church!’ just before he died. (He had shown no great interest in the Church when alive.)

  William was the father of ten children by the celebrated comic actress Dorothea Jordan (1762–1816); but none of them were legitimate, so none could inherit the throne. When his niece Princess Charlotte died in 1817 – she was the only legitimate child of the future King George IV – the race had begun to determine which of George III’s surviving children could produce an heir, and so become father of the new dynasty. All the late king’s daughters and daughters-in-law were past the age of childbearing. The three who remained unmarried were William (Duke of Clarence), the Duke of Kent, and the Duke of Cambridge. William’s marriage to Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen produced two infant daughters who survived, and one miscarriage. It was the Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III, who was destined to win ‘Hymen’s War Terrific’ as contemporary gossips termed it.

  He was born in 1767 and for twenty-seven years he had lived as the faithful lover of a Frenchwoman called Madame de St Laurent. They were childless, and there were fears that he was sterile. When he was an elderly fifty with a pot belly and dyed receding hair, Edward, Duke of Kent, married Victoire, Princess of Leiningen, aged thirty-two. A love match it was not, still less a meeting of minds. She spoke no English, he no German. (Queen Victoria spoke no English until she was three.) Victoire was the sister of Leopold, Prince Consort and husband of the late Princess Charlotte, and of Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg, who was the father of her nephew, and future son-in-law, Prince Albert. She was of that small northern Bavarian ducal family, of Coburg, which was destined to sire Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, Queen Isabella of Brazil, King Pedro of Portugal, the last tsar and tsarina of Russia, the kings of Spain, Bulgaria and Prussia.

  There are two well-established medical and genetic facts about the British royal family. One is that George III suffered from porphyria – the almost certain cause of his madness, but whose symptoms included discoloured urine (orangey-dark red), flatulence, colic, itchy skin and constipation. There is no evidence of Queen Victoria having inherited this condition or passed it on to her descendants. The disease is prevalent in the British royal family for many generations and stops with Victoria. (It is a ‘dominant’ gene, so that all those who carry it display its symptoms, however mildly.)

  The second demonstrable genetic fact about Queen Victoria is that she was a carrier for haemophilia. A scroll written by Willi
am Bullock and Paul Fildes and kept at the Royal Society of Medicine in London traces back the medical history of Princess Victoire, Duchess of Kent, through seventeen generations. There are no cases of haemophilia. It is therefore safe to assume that Queen Victoria’s mother was not a carrier.

  Two alternative explanations suggest themselves for the appearance of a haemophilia gene in Queen Victoria’s DNA. Perhaps the gene was newly mutated – the chances of this happening are between 1 in 25,000 and 1 in 100,000 per generation. By far the likelier explanation – particularly when we take into account the complete absence of porphyria in any of her descendants – is that Queen Victoria was not in fact the daughter of the Duke of Kent.

  The Duke of Wellington’s explanation for Queen Victoria’s absolute hatred of her mother’s secretary Sir John Conroy, and of her very tempestuous relationship with her mother, was that he ‘supposed’ Conroy and the Duchess to have been lovers. ‘Victoria had seen her mother and Conroy in some sort of intimate situation. What She had seen She repeated to the Baroness Spaeth and Spaeth not only could not hold her tongue, but … remonstrated with the Duchess on the subject. The consequence was that they [Conroy and Victoire] got rid of Spaeth and,’ continued Wellington, ‘they would have got rid of Lehzen’ – Victoria’s beloved governess – ‘if they had been able.’

  Whether or not Conroy was Queen Victoria’s father, it seems overwhelmingly probable that Victoire, uncertain of her husband’s potency or fertility, took a lover to determine that the Coburg dynasty would eventually take over the throne of England. The failure of her brother Leopold to be the father of a queen of England only increased her own desire to fulfil the same ambition. Had she not done so, the inheritance would have passed to the Duke of Cumberland, widely believed to have fathered an illegitimate child by his own sister (Princess Sophia), and certainly guilty of the attempted rape of Lady Lyndhurst, the wife of the lord chancellor. He eventually became the king of Hanover. Had he inherited the throne of England, it seems unlikely that the constitutional monarchy would have long survived. The complexion of political life in Britain during the nineteenth century would have been, to put it mildly, very different.1

  As it was, William IV’s kingdom passed to his niece Victoria. The Church! The Church! in the person of the tiny figure of Archbishop Howley, clad in a wig, rochet and chimere, knelt early next morning in Kensington Palace to tell an eighteen-year-old girl that she was now the Queen. He was accompanied by the lord chamberlain. The iconic moment had its own personal drama. Victoria who had been brought up as a semi-hermit in the palace, with few friends, was going to display her own capacity for Darwinian survival and Samuel Smilesish Self-Help by effectually dismissing her domineering mother, the Duchess of Kent, and the sinister Sir John Conroy. This pair, who had so long planned to be the powers behind the throne, were banished like demons in a fairy tale. At nine that morning, the Queen received her prime minister, ‘Of COURSE quite ALONE as I shall always do all my Ministers’,2 and there began that intense and mutually enjoyable amitié amoureuse between the tiny, plump, plain girl of eighteen and the languid, handsome fifty-eight-year-old Whig, a relationship likened by Melbourne’s biographer to that sought by ‘other girls … in some sympathetic schoolmaster or kindly clergyman’.3

  At the Privy Council meeting, all the old men who had been governing-England for years, Whig or Tory, were charmed by their new monarch. ‘She not merely filled her chair,’ said the Duke of Wellington, ‘she filled the room.’4

  Charles Greville (1794–1865), the greatest diarist of the age and, as clerk to the Privy Council, afforded a unique opportunity of observing the Queen at first hand, noted, ‘Everything is new and delightful to her. She is surrounded with the most exciting and interesting enjoyments, her occupations, her pleasures, her business, her Court, all present an unceasing round of gratifications.’5

  Delight in her animation was not the same thing as finding her interesting, as the following exchange makes clear.

  Q. Have you been riding today, Mr Greville?

  G. No, Madam, I have not.

  Q. It was a fine day.

  G. Yes, Ma’am, very fine day.

  Q. It was rather cold, though.

  G. (like Polonius) It was rather cold, Madam.

  Q. Your sister, Ly Francis Egerton, rides I think, does not she?

  G. She does ride sometimes, Madam.

  (A pause, when I took the lead though adhering to the same topic.)

  G. Has your Majesty been riding today?

  Q. (with animation) Oh yes, a very long ride.

  G. Has your Majesty got a nice horse?

  Q. O, a very nice horse.

  – gracious smile and inclination of head on part of Queen, profound bow on mine.6

  It is a curious fact that comparable, if not identical, conversations probably still take place between privy councillors and the British head of state in the twenty-first century. Cynical, worldly Lord M. amazed courtiers like Greville by the evident delight with which he gave himself up to his new sovereign lady, playing draughts with her while he explained the Constitution. The man who, within the previous decade, had scandalized London by his very public affair with a married woman, Caroline Norton, and of whom the novelist Emily Eden said, ‘He bewilders me and frightens me and swears too much’,7 seems in the company of the young Queen to have discovered qualities of innocence in himself which he did not know existed.

  Nevertheless, as you read of their conversations, Victoria and her beloved Lord M., the question which comes most often to mind is – why was there no revolution in Britain in the late 1830s and the 1840s? In 1848, the Year of Revolutions on the European continent, crowns and aristocracies were sent packing. How does it come about that Queen Victoria was destined to survive not only the troubles of 1848 but all the subsequent years? When she died, nominal head of the largest, wealthiest and most aggressively powerful empire the world had ever known, her prime minister was the impeccably aristocratic figure of Lord Salisbury (1830–1903). Of all her prime ministers only three were non-aristocratic – Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850), William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98) and Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81). Gladstone was a millionaire, whose father and brother owned vast family estates in Scotland; Disraeli was an aristocrat by adoption. How did they all survive not merely the tumbril and the guillotine but – when it was eventually introduced – the ballot-box? Many readers of these pages, particularly if British, might consider it axiomatic both that Victorian political institutions would adapt themselves to survive, and that they would maintain sufficient popularity not to be exchanged for some thoroughgoing form of democracy. But nothing about political history is contingent. There is an inexorability about events and their consequences.

  ‘Why bother the poor? Leave them alone!’ said Lord M.,8 quoting Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), when his Queen asked him about the desirability of extending education to the poor. This was the man who had personally approved the treatment of ‘the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ – when in spring 1834 some poverty-stricken labourers in Dorset had had the temerity to form themselves into a Friendly Society, and to say that they found it difficult to live on nine shillings a week. With shorn heads and with their hands and legs chained and manacled, George Loveless and his friends were dragged to Dorchester Assizes and condemned under the esoteric Secret Oaths Act for forming a forbidden society. There was talk of trying them for sedition – punishable by death. In the event the six labourers were sentenced to seven years’ transportation.9

  When Queen Victoria asked Lord Melbourne if he could recommend the newly published novel Oliver Twist (serialized 1837–8), which was attracting much fame, he replied that he did not want her to read it. ‘It’s all among workhouses and Coffin Makers and Pickpockets … I don’t like these things; I wish to avoid them; I don’t like them in reality, and therefore I don’t wish to see them represented.’10 This airy unwillingness to confront one of the more displeasing aspects of contemporary existence might have been re
garded as merely self-protective if Lord Melbourne’s remark had been made by any rich nobleman of the period. Coming from the lips, however, of the prime minister who brought in the New Poor Laws of 1834, who was, in direct fact, responsible for the existence of the workhouses in such dimensions and numbers, the words have a chilling amorality.

  The years 1837–44 brought the worst economic depression that had ever afflicted the British people. It is estimated – and we are speaking here of the years before the Irish famine – that more than a million paupers starved from simple lack of employment.11 Many of the nation’s businesses came to a halt. The workhouses whose existence Lord Melbourne found so distressing to contemplate could not conceivably house the influx of paupers. Oliver Twist had inspired shocked and indignant reactions from the public. The Poor Law Amendments initiated by Melbourne’s administration were not popular with the educated middle classes. In particular The Times, which reprinted Oliver Twist, took upon itself to print innumerable horror-stories about life in the workhouses. Between 1839 and 1842 almost every edition of the paper contained some such story. Many of the stories turn out in examination to be either untrue or exaggerated.12 Enough of them sank into the public consciousness for the ostrich attitude of Melbourne to seem unendurable.

  On Christmas Day, 1840, in the Eton workhouse, Elizabeth Wyse, a married woman, was allowed the rare privilege of being allowed to comfort her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter because she had chilblains. (The separation of parents and children in the workhouses was automatic, and one of the things which even in the better-run establishments caused most bitterness.) Mrs Wyse was allowed to sleep with her child for one night, but the director of the workhouse (like many of them a former sergeant-major) refused permission for a second night. When the ex-sergeant-major, Joseph Howe, found Mrs Wyse in the nursery next day, bathing and bandaging her child’s feet, he ordered her to leave the room at once. She refused. He dragged her downstairs, locked her in the workhouse cage, and left her in solitary confinement with no coat, no bedding-straw and no chamber-pot, in 20°F of frost, for twenty-four hours. The following morning she was taken to eat breakfast, which was the remains of cold gruel left by her fellow inmates, and sent back to the cage and told to clean the floor – which was inevitably soiled – but with no utensils to do so.