The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  It would be a mistake to suppose that institutional suffering was confined to the workhouse, or that the poor alone met with cruelty in their childhoods. These were indeed hard times, for none more than the young. Only a short walk from the Eton workhouse where Elizabeth Wyse and her infant suffered so hideously was St Mary’s College, Eton, where a future prime minister in the early 1840s was writing to his father, the 2nd Marquess of Salisbury, of how a boy called Troughton major, drunk on ten pints of beer, had held a lit candle in Robert Cecil’s mouth. ‘I know you do not like complaints,’ the child wrote, ‘and I have tried to suppress them and conceal all this, but you are the only person to whom I can safely confide these things. Really now Eton has become perfectly insupportable.’ He described being regularly kicked and thumped and spat at. ‘They kicked me and pulled my hair and punched me and hit me so hard as ever he could for twenty minutes; and now I am aching in every joint and hardly am able to write this.’ The Marquess did not withdraw his son from the school for another eighteen months, by which time he was in a state of emotional and physical collapse.13

  If this was the fate of an aristocrat, then the son of an archdeacon, James Anthony Froude (1818–94) – destined to become a great historian – suffered as horribly at Westminster School in the early 1830s. ‘The rule in College was that we were to learn by suffering, and I had to crawl to bed with a sore skin …’ This pathetic child – only eleven when he first went to Westminster – was thrashed soundly by his father when he came home for the holidays and it was found that the bullies had stolen his shirts and ruined his few remaining possessions.14

  But if suffering was not the unique preserve of the poor, that was not really the point. What shocked the early Victorians was the disparity between rich and poor, the visible unfairness of it all, made all the more visible in the railway age, when communications between the big manufacturing cities became so easy. In the rural, pre-railway age many of the more prosperous strata could avoid contact with the poor. In the 1840s they became much more visible because there were so many more of them, and the question could be asked, were such gross and obvious unfairnesses avoidable by acts of charity, or were the unfairness and competitiveness actually ineradicable ingredients in the capitalistic success-story in which that society was caught up?

  In Fareham, in Hampshire, the workhouse had a large school; three of its pupils, bastard boys called Withers, Cook and Warren, aged between three and a half and five, were sent for special tuition from Bishop’s Warren. Eight weeks later they were returned, so weakened by diarrhoea and disease that they could barely stand. What had happened? On their arrival at Fareham they had been placed together. One of the disturbed children had wet the bed. Their punishment was a cut of 50 per cent in the weekly food ration of 2 lb 10 oz of bread, 5 oz of mutton, 1 lb potatoes, 3½ oz cheese and 12 oz of pudding. The starvation diet did not cure the bedwetting. The children were then placed in specially designed stocks – imagine being the man who designed children’s stocks! – and made to watch the other children having their meals. Since they now smelt intolerable they were made to sleep in an unheated shed in the yard, in the depth of winter.

  Similar cases were the almost daily diet for readers of The Times. This situation continued for at least the first ten years of the Queen’s reign, until a scandal too far led to the resignation, and eventual abolition, of the Poor Law Commission in London. This was the scandal of the Andover Workhouse.

  Andover, in Hampshire, a small prosperous market town, must, in this period, have looked like a little paradise. The Railway Fever which made each part of Britain quickly accessible, and which connected everywhere easily and efficiently, was only just beginning by Coronation Day,15 when a great feast was held on the Common Acre: roast beef and pudding for all who attended, organized games for 1,000 children, ‘to stamp on the minds of the young and rising generation a lasting impression of being coeval with our youthful, virtuous and beloved Queen Victoria’. Most of England at this date would strike any time-traveller from the twenty-first century as a Garden of Eden into which no serpent had strayed.16 Since almost all common land had been enclosed by the 1830s, with one small area left as the ‘common field’ or village green, the country had the look of a well-tended garden, particularly since, unlike continental countries, England had been almost completely stripped of native woodland; it was a land of copses, parks and plantations, neat hedges and tended fields. From the 1831 census we learn that 961,100 families, or 28 per cent of the entire population, were employed in agriculture. The reality was that at least half the population – small village traders, blacksmiths, carpenters, wheelwrights, cobblers, bricklayers, millers, shopkeepers – were employed in rural communities. At this date many of the industries were essentially rural in base – the coal mines for example were not to be found in the middle of towns but gouging out the hills and fields. ‘The representative Englishman was not yet a townsman, though he soon would be.’17

  This, as we survey the coronation festivities at Andover in 1837, is how it will strike our imaginations – how fast, and how easily, all this innocence and beauty, even in rural Hampshire, would be destroyed by the coming of agricultural machinery, tarmacadamed roads, railways – and eventually the curse of the internal combustion engine, which completed the destruction and ruination of England.

  Yet this Andover, in Jane Austen’s county of Hampshire, is already different from the Andover Miss Austen would have known but a decade before. It possesses its Bastille. This was becoming a necessary weapon in the government’s Malthusian armoury. When the twenty-first-century time-traveller had gasped at the unpolluted beauty of rural England in 1837, he would then have begun to notice the stench of poverty. True, it depended where you went. Cobbett (1763–1835) on his Rural Rides in 1830 found the people of Leicestershire living in mud hovels: a German traveller of 1828 said that ‘outside the northern factory districts and the low quarters of London one seldom sees rags and tatters in England, and seldom broken window panes and neglected cottages’.18 Yet in real terms the agricultural labourers were poor. The Corn Laws, subsidizing the British landowners and imposing tariff on imported grain, did not translate, in years when the price of corn went up, into higher wages for agricultural labourers, though they did push up the price of a loaf of bread. (The price of wheat was measured in quarters, i.e. 8 bushels. In 1835 wheat cost 38s. 1½d., climbing to 81s. 6d. in 1836–9 and fluctuating to 47s. 5d. and 56s. 3d. in 1846.)19 Life in the growing industrial towns of the Midlands and the North was tough in the 1840s, but there was money to be made. (Compare the lucky Northerner in 1847 with his 11s. 6d. per week, well above a subsistence wage, with an agricultural labourer in, say, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire or Suffolk, who might be struggling on less than a subsistence wage – 7s.)20

  So it was that idyllic Andover could have more than its share of paupers coming to the workhouse for assistance. From the very start of the New Poor Laws in 1834 the local chairman of the Board, Charles Dodson, and the pair who ran the workhouse, Mr and Mrs Colin McDougal, applied the screw, the dreaded Prohibitory Order. In this parish all relief of the poor in their own homes was stopped. Single women with bastard children were obliged, if they wished to eat, to wear the yellow stripe of shame sewn across their coarse grey workhouse gown. The boys and men were set to the smelly work of bone-grinding, making fertilizer out of the bones of dead farm animals. They were so hungry they fell to gnawing the rotten bones and putrid horseflesh which came from the slaughterhouse.

  Colin McDougal, the workhouse supervisor, was a rough Scotsman, born in 1793, who had fought at Waterloo and been discharged from the service as a staff sergeant in 1836. He was a drunkard who frequently got into fights with his no less horrible wife. He regularly thrashed children as young as three for messing their beds and he kept his paupers on such short rations that some survived by eating candles. Charles Lewis of Weyhill remembered his children eating the potato peelings thrown out for Mr McDougal’s chickens. The scandal bro
ke in 1845 when Ralph Etwall, the member for Andover, rose in the House of Commons and demanded an inquiry into the administration of the Andover Workhouse, and by implication into the Poor Law Commission. In July 1847 the Commission was finally abolished – and in the very same week John Walter (1776–1847), the editor of The Times who had campaigned so tirelessly against it, also died. Yet, in spite of the shaming of the Poor Law Commission, and the resolution of Parliament to improve conditions in workhouses, these institutions remained grim for many decades to come.

  3

  The Charter

  WITH HUNGER, FILTH, poverty, there came, inexorably, disease. On 7 November 1837 a doctor in the poverty-stricken Limehouse district of London’s East End recorded the case of Ellen Green, aged seven years, of Irish extraction, living with her parents in a miserable apartment, on the second floor of a small house, situated in Well-alley, Ropemaker’s Fields, Limehouse, a low, dirty and very confined situation. In the same room resided her parents, with two more of their children, and another Irish couple, with their only child, an infant at the breast.

  The doctor, Charles Johnston, observed that the squalid apartment abutted on to a pigsty and that the floor was a heap of manure and filth, ‘the joint produce of the house and pigsty’. Little Ellen was attacked with her first fit of vomiting and purging on 26 October; then with cramps in her legs and thighs. Within days her features had shrunk, her eyes sunk deep into the orbits, the conjunctiva had become effused, the lips were blue, the tongue was white. These were the sure signs of cholera, which killed her about a day later.1

  A society’s attitude to disease reveals more than the state of its medical knowledge. Victorian England, destined to become so densely populous, so politically powerful throughout the world, so dirty and so rich, poured much of its paranoia and its ambivalence concerning Mammon-worship into its feelings about cholera. The disease came from India, source of so much British wealth and guilt. It did not break out of the Indian subcontinent until the nineteenth century, the first major pandemic being in 1817. The extent of the outbreak was a direct consequence of trade, of the increase of traffic between European, chiefly British, merchants in Bengal and the armies sent to protect them. In 1817 the Marquess of Hastings’s army, encamped at Bundelkand near Calcutta, lost 5,000 men through cholera. In 1818 it engulfed the whole of the Indian subcontinent. By 1819 it had reached Mauritius, by 1824 it had spread to the whole of South and South-East Asia. By 1829 it was in Afghanistan and Persia. By 1831 it had spread to Moscow, Petersburg, the Baltic ports.2 ‘We have witnessed in our days the birth of a new pestilence which in the short space of fourteen years, has desolated the fairest portions of the globe, and swept off at least fifty millions of our race.’3

  The Privy Council in London immediately addressed itself to the question of whether traded goods could be contagious. Thus, from the beginning, cholera became a metaphor for the contagion of Mammon. The society which based itself entirely on profits from trade would invent arcane hierarchies and etiquettes in which to be ‘in trade’ was to be untouchable. Within the questions about contagious imported goods were also fears of the foreign and the foreigner. It was noted how often cholera outbreaks occurred near docks – as in the case quoted of young Ellen Green, who was, to make matters worse, Irish.

  Thomas Wakley (1795–1862) caustically remarked of the government’s plans to create a cordon sanitaire: ‘Sagacious legislators who cannot prevent the spread of cholera from traversing the ocean, yet can keep it from penetrating a hedge or crossing a field.’

  Wakley is himself a fascinating person, a radical in the Cobbett mould, one of the magnificently angry men of his age. In 1823, when aged twenty-eight, he founded the medical journal The Lancet and was in constant trouble from the London teaching hospitals for exposing their nepotistic organization and for publishing the contents of lectures which the surgeons believed to be their property. He was a coroner who used his position to expose wrongdoing – a good example occurring in 1846. Wakley presided at the inquest over a dead soldier, Frederick John White, who died from the effects of flogging. The verdict, directed by Wakley, caused such a sensation that flogging fell almost at once into disuse. After some failures to get elected, he became the (radical) MP for Finsbury in the first session of Parliament after the fire – 10 January 1835 – and he was outspoken for the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

  But it is chiefly for The Lancet that Wakley will be remembered. It continues to this day as the great journal of medical record. For his contemporaries, however, the medical periodical was a deadly weapon of socio-political observation. The Lancet was persistently attacked by politicians for publicizing cholera. Wakley knew that it suited the authorities to falsify their reports, to prevent panic spreading.4 It was one of the reasons his work as a coroner was so vital – to establish just why people died. The government had no more wish to acknowledge cholera than to recognize that soldiers died of flogging. The 1837 outbreak which killed Ellen Green was in fact quite mild. The Lancet alerted its readers to twenty-one cases of Asiatic cholera on board the seaman’s hospital ship Dreadnought which spread to the adjacent Limehouse. ‘The Bills of Mortality’ – what we should call death certificates – for the period October to December 1837 showed a considerable increase of deaths beyond the norm, but as Wakley bitterly noted, ‘We do not find a single case of cholera mentioned.’

  After 1832, there were to be three major cholera epidemics in Britain: 1848–9, 1853–4 and 1866. The first of these killed 53,000 in England and Wales, 8,000 in Scotland; the next killed 26,000 – but 10,000 in London alone; the 1866 outbreak killed 17,000 – 6,000 in London. It should not be supposed that any British government was so reckless as to use plague as a political weapon. It terrified rich and poor alike, but their responses, not merely in Britain but throughout Europe, revealed the differences in attitude between the classes which were themselves the creation of capitalism. The propertied classes half feared the foreign import of plague which came as the sting in the tail of their new-found wealth. They feared it too as the outward and visible sign of that physical contagion which social division had created in the slums. The poor in most previous ages could perhaps, as the old Tory Sir Walter Scott had urged, be ‘left alone’, un-‘bothered’. In that lost Eden of pre-capitalism, pre-industrial Britain, pre-population explosion, pre-export and import explosion, true Tory innocents, like the poet laureate William Wordsworth (1770–1850), could even find beauty in poverty. Wordsworth’s Old Cumberland Beggar, by exciting charitable impulses in the poor cottagers he visited, spread grace, not disease. (Charles Lamb (1775–1834) had comparable thoughts about the beggars of London in the reign of George IV.) But the poor such as Ellen Green of Limehouse, sharing her tiny living quarters with two families and some pigs, had partly come into existence artificially. Her poverty – so the governing classes of the 1830s and 1840s uneasily began to feel – was their responsibility, in the sense of being both their creation and their duty. The virtuous parliamentarians, journalists, civil servants, wiseacres surveyed the condition of the poor and felt duty-bound to do something; to clean up the poor, to tidy them away, to improve them. These were profoundly un-Tory sentiments and the poor resented them. That is why in so many areas the European poor saw the attempts of doctors to cure cholera as mass murder. In St Petersburg a German doctor was killed and six beaten as they attempted to minister to cholera victims. In Prussia the poor refused even to believe in the existence of cholera; noting that the eruption of disease coincided with the arrival of doctors in their slums they drew the inexorably logical conclusion that doctors had poisoned them.5

  Doctors, like policemen, were seen by the early Victorian poor as representatives of a hated governing class, come to keep the poor from doing what in the circumstances might have seemed reasonable: erupting, rebelling, looting, destroying – not necessarily with any fixed or focused aim in view, but merely as the political equivalent of a scream. The Metropolitan Police Force was established in 1829. Comparabl
e gendarmeries grew up on the continental mainland as a simple response to the population explosion. They had two principal tasks, to protect property (and life), and to curb liberty.6 From its inception, the police force was seen as a Benthamite organ of social control. Radicals such as Edwin Chadwick believed that the consolidation of police forces would actually prevent crime – his Preventive Policing (1829) was received with rapture by his philosophical radical friends, such as James and John Stuart Mill, and was even praised by old Jeremy Bentham himself.7

  Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) looks an unlikely godfather of the British or any state. And when one refers to his looks, these may be verified since, ardent rationalist that he was, he specified that he should not be buried with religious ceremonial but preserved in a glass case, an everlasting reminder to nineteenth-century humankind of the non-resurrection of the body and the life, far from everlasting but terrestrial, fact-based and empirical. There he sits in the hall of University College in Gower Street, in his large wideawake hat, his cutaway coat and nankeen trousers, calling up inevitable comparison with the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow. Whereas the Russians, however, are a devout people, never more so than in their worship of the atheist revolution, and queued religiously to see the remains (or the waxwork) of the author of their political system, the English ignore Bentham. He sits like the waxwork of some eccentric footman, with his long hair sticking from his hat, and 95 per cent of his fellow-countrymen would be unable to tell you who or what he was.