The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,

  Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street …

  It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest

  God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.

  But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.

  Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.

  The Chartists were occasionally violent – those who favoured O’Connor more than they who read Lovett – but they remained, even when forming themselves into peaceable associations or angry mobs, committed to a belief in an individualism which the growth of industrial cities was itself to undermine. Chartism, says one of its modern historians, ‘needed the small communities, the slack religious and moral supervision, the unpoliced street and meeting place. The control which such communities could exercise over shopkeepers, constables, schoolteachers, local preachers and even Poor Law guardians was greater than anything that could take place in the cities or in the rural villages.’27

  Their real enemy, therefore, were the big capitalists. The Northern Star of 1838 spoke of the Corn Laws (protecting artificially the wealth of the big landed aristocrats) and the horrors of the factory system. ‘All have the same end, viz the making of the working classes beasts of burden – hewers of wood and drawers of water – to the aristocracy, Jewocracy, Millocracy, Shopocracy and every other Ocracy that feeds on human vitals.’28

  Having identified the enemy, it is not surprising to find plenty of Tory–Chartists – such figures as the Nonconformist minister the Reverend J.R. Stephens of Kensal Moor, near Manchester, who saw it as the Englishman’s God-given right ‘to have a good coat and hat, a good roof over his head, a good dinner upon his table’.29

  The possibility, however, of a Tory–Chartist or Tory–Radical alliance was never really a serious one, even though, or perhaps because, it ‘appealed particularly to idealists, romantics, all who harked back to a largely imaginary pre-industrial golden age, all who disliked and feared the harsher manifestations of the industrial revolution and the bleaker aspects of the Utilitarian philosophy expounded by Jeremy Bentham’.30 Throughout the next sixty years we shall see a variety of such idealisms and romanticisms – in the Young England movement, in the Oxford Movement, in the social thinking of John Ruskin (1819–1900), in Pre-Raphaelitism, Gothic Revivalism, William Morris’s (1834–96) News from Nowhere, down to the time of Chesterton himself in the early years of the twentieth century. Some of its manifestations were ‘right’, others ‘left’-wing, others apolitical. Chartism partook of some of this Merrie England idealism, though the experiences of those brave enough to present the Charter as a public petition to Parliament in 1839 were far from merry.

  By the end of 1838 the number of public meetings at which O’Connor had made threats or incitements to physical violence had grown so much that there was no hope of the Commons giving the Charter a fair hearing. On 12 July the Commons refused by 235 to 46 votes to consider the national petition, which contained 1,200,000 signatures. Sir Charles Napier (1782–1853) was appointed by Parliament to command of the North of England. Having toured Nottingham, Leeds, Newcastle and Manchester, he lost no time in assembling the Chartist leaders and telling them that he would ‘maul them with cannon and musketry’ at the first signs of violence.

  The most violent of the outbursts in that eventful and violent year of 1839 – which saw riots in Birmingham, Lovett and O’Connor imprisoned, and the hardening of government hearts against the Charter – came in Newport, South Wales. Several thousand men from the Welsh mining and ironworking valleys marched on the town in an attempt to take it over. The leaders included a linen draper named John Frost, who was a former magistrate and mayor of Newport. The invaders were beaten off by troops firing from the Westgate Hotel, with the loss of at least twenty-two lives, and the dispersal of the workers’ army was followed by a large number of arrests. Frost and other ringleaders were sentenced to death for high treason.31

  No one who read the news from Newport or from Birmingham could doubt the resolve of the propertied classes to protect their own. This would persist, even when Lord Melbourne was voted from office in 1839 – on a matter which also had bearings on the rights of humankind, but which concerned another vital ingredient in the Victorian success story: the colonies.

  4

  Typhoon Coming On

  WHETHER THE BRITISH Empire grew up by accident or design or by the inexorable movement of economic force is one of the questions which the reader of these pages will have decided by the end of the Victorian period. The heyday of Imperial colonization belongs to a later generation than the one we are considering here. At the beginning of the reign the East India Company, rather than the government in Westminster, still took responsibility for the administration of ‘British India’. The huge expanses of Africa which would be painted red on the Imperial map were still uncharted. The attitude in London towards the colonies was both looser and less formal than would be the case at the close of the nineteenth century.

  The importance of Jamaica, the largest island in the British West Indies, was both emblematic and commercial. It had been a British colony since 1655, when the Cromwellian navy, led by Admirals Penn and Venables, had taken the island from the Spanish. Jamaica had a bloody history. Its peaceable native inhabitants, the Arawak Indians, had been systematically annihilated by the conquistadors in 1509. Thereafter, its rich and exotic harvests, primarily of sugar, but also of coffee, cocoa, pimento and ginger, were cultivated by slave labour, imported from West Africa. Thus, from the beginning of British involvement with this Caribbean island it had been a source of wealth purveyed by the hands of the oppressed.

  One fact which united almost all British shades of opinion in the years after the Napoleonic wars was pride in having abolished the slave trade. But although, thanks to the philanthropic enterprise of William Wilberforce and the other campaigners, the trade had been banned in all lands that were co-signatories to the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), the ownership of slaves persisted for another eighteen years in British colonies such as Jamaica. In 1832, when they heard a Reform Bill had been passed in London, the Jamaican slaves believed that they were at last free, and there was a rebellion. Emancipation came two years later.

  Melbourne’s government took a somewhat lazy attitude towards the colonies. When the question of emancipation was debated in the Lords and Commons in 1833 there was not a single member of the Cabinet present for any speeches from the back benches. The Whig government had always felt uneasy about the anomaly of allowing slave ownership to persist after the ban on the trade. It was not persuaded by the arguments of the Tory peer Lord Wynford that the Apostles had recognized slavery, ‘and he presumed they’ – Melbourne’s Cabinet – ‘did not pretend to be better Christians than the Apostles’.1 Slavery had to go. The former under-secretary for the colonies, Lord Howick, made a devastating attack on prevailing conditions on the sugar plantations in Demerara – ‘I firmly believe the well-meant measures which have been adopted for the improvement of the condition of slaves, have not in reality tended to their good, and this belief is not a little increased by the fact that, in no colony is the mortality amongst the slave population so great as in Demerara … Slaves labour only because if they do not do so they are punished. Their stimulus is terror …’

  These remarks so enraged the ambitious Tory MP for Newark, then aged twenty-three, that he rose to make his first major parliamentary speech, rebutting Lord Howick’s charges. The slaves had died in such quantities on his father’s estate of Vreedenhoop because they were ageing naturally. The manager of the estate, a Mr Maclean, was ‘proverbial for humanity’ on the island of Jamaica. There is something quite fascinating in this young man’s speech – for having rejected the charges against the West Indian planters as ‘wholly untenable’, he then admits ‘with shame and pain … that cases of wanton cruelty had occurred’. He even conceded, this pompous youn
g man, that ‘the time has now arrived, when a definite period must be fixed for the extinction of slavery’, but he nevertheless voted against the bill to abolish it.2

  The young man was William Ewart Gladstone, destined to bestride the political century as a Liberal prime minister, but at this stage of his fortunes mocked by Macaulay (1800–59) as a rising hope of the stern and unbending Tories.3 In later life he would repent – ‘I can now see plainly enough,’ he said sixty years later, ‘the sad defects, the real illiberalism of my opinions on that subject. Yet they were not illiberal as compared with the ideas of the times.’4 True, as his loyal biographer Morley recalled, Pitt, Fox, Grenville and Grey had been anxious to abolish the trade in slaves, but rejected any notion of the emancipation of existent slaves. Wilberforce himself discouraged attempts to abolish slavery, rather than its trade. Peel rejected even a ‘gradualist’ approach to the question. But it is not true that the young generation to which Gladstone belonged held such unenlightened views. The truth is that it was wealth generated from the plantations in Demerara which had transformed John Gladstones (sic), son of a Leith corn-chandler and grandson of a small-town miller and trader, into a landed grandee, a great Liverpool merchant, with Scottish estates which placed him on a level with the aristocracy.

  The leisure of William Ewart Gladstone’s learned hours, studying Homer and Dante, the gentility of his marriage to the Welsh gentry family of Glynn, as of his early education at Eton and Christ Church, was all underwritten by the sweat of slaves. And he knew it. The guilty knowledge underlay much of his life, as it did those of so many of his contemporaries, such as the Lascelles family, the future Earls of Harewood, the most successful of the West Indian merchant dynasties. At the huge neo-Norman castle of Penrhyn in North Wales, designed by Thomas Hopper, only a few watercolours of Jamaica give a clue as to the origins of the great wealth that built it – the slave labour and incomes in the West Indies providing money for the self-made Pennant family to acquire vast estates in Wales, where they doubled their fortunes in slate. Few slave-owning families were as honest as Richard Watt, the Liverpool merchant who began to restore Speke Hall in 1795 and who, when he took a coat of arms, included in it three blackamoors, acknowledging the origin of his new-found money and status. (In a comparable way an African head was incorporated into the frieze on the cornice of Liverpool’s town hall.) Most, like the Pennants, Gladstones and Lascelleses, preferred to forget the shameful origin of their fortune.5

  Charles Darwin, by contrast, whose grandfather, Old Wooden Leg Wedgwood, had made his fortune in England mass-producing fine china, came from a different tradition. Wedgwood had been foremost among the abolitionists, coining the legend Am I not a man and a brother? to accompany the medallion of a kneeling slave in chains. It simply wasn’t true, as Gladstone was to aver forty-five years on, that the ‘ideas of the times’ saw nothing wrong with slavery. Old Wooden Leg’s grandson, during the voyage of the Beagle, encountered slave markets in South America. One of the finest passages in the whole of his Voyage is when he reflects on the ship leaving the shores of Brazil, just three years after Gladstone uttered his weasel-words in the Commons:

  I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate … Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal …

  Darwin went on to say that these and similar atrocities took place in a Spanish colony where the slaves were said to be better treated than in Portuguese or English colonies. ‘It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty; but it is a consolation to reflect, that we at least, have made a greater sacrifice, than ever made by any nation, to expiate our sin.’6

  British self-congratulation on the subject was tempered by commercial self-interest. The abolition of slavery had already, even before the emancipation of the Demerara slaves, led to a disparity in world sugar prices. The price of sugar in Great Britain was 7½d. per lb, while Cuban or Brazilian sugar of higher quality, harvested by slaves, sold abroad for 4½d. per lb.7 Logically, a nation which was converting itself to an out-and-out belief in Free Trade should have recognized this as the luck of the draw. The fact that the South Americans were undercutting British planters and traders, however, added a keen edge to the British moral outrage against Brazilian slavers. The foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, who was not noted for his championship of human rights on his own Irish estates for example, had no hesitation in sending British warships into Brazilian ports and flushing out any ships they found being fitted for the slave trade.8 Biffing the Brazilians, damaging their sugar and coffee trade while maintaining a high moral tone, was good for morale.

  These half-civilized governments … all require a dressing down every eight or ten years to keep them in order. Their minds are too shallow to receive any impression that will last longer than some such period and warning is of little use. They care little for words and they must not only see the stick but actually feel it on their shoulders before they yield to that only argument which to them brings conviction, the Argumentum Baculinum.9

  Palmerston, who would become one of Victoria’s prime ministers at the age of seventy, was hugely popular with a certain type of Englishman.10 His swashbuckling, vulgar belief in British intervention in every corner of the globe – now in Egypt, now in China – was largely driven by commerce: ‘The rivalship of European manufacturers is fast excluding our productions from the markets of Europe, and we must unremittingly endeavour to find in other parts of the world new rents for the produce of our industry.’ Expansion abroad, which would turn into the full-scale Imperial expansion seen in the mid-1850s onwards, went hand in hand with the rapid growth of industry at home.

  Meanwhile, disguising beneath a genuine moral self-belief the venality of their commercial interests, the British took on the role of global policemen. The Royal Navy went in pursuit of slave ships partly no doubt with the fervour of moral liberators, partly influenced by the fact that they could earn ‘head money’ for the number of slaves liberated. The slavers in turn could claim insurance for cargo – i.e. slaves – lost at sea, but not for slaves who died on board. It was therefore a common occurrence, if a Royal Navy vessel pursued a slaver, that she would cast her ‘cargo’ into the ocean, still in chains, as a feast for the sharks. Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On, exhibited at the Academy in 1840, depicts just such a gruesome scene. The great sunset blaze reflects on a heaving sea. The writhing forms of slaves in the foreground could be sea-serpents. They are part of the cruelty of nature itself. There is an Homeric pitilessness about the canvas, though the fiery decline of the sun tells its own tale of endings and finishings behind the old masts of the obsolescent sailing ship. ‘I believe,’ wrote John Ruskin, ‘if I were reduced to rest Turner’s immortality upon any single work, I should choose this.’ The sun is going down violently and angrily on the old world. The coming typhoon boils like the rage of Darwin as it contemplates the horror of what the ship, and the sea, contain.11 The picture is in a sense a companion-piece to Turner’s canvas of the burning of the Parliament buildings.

  Florence Nightingale, summing up Palmerston’s foreign policy, was to say, ‘he was a humbug, and he knew it’. What could be described as humbug could also be seen as a more general gift, bestowed on three or four generations of Britons, to be ‘in denial’ as we should say about many an issue where a twenty-first-century observer sees clear cause for moral disapprobation. Societies as well as individuals can b
e Prince Hamlets, incapacitating themselves by self-questioning and honesty about the inconsistencies in their very aim and nature; or they can be thick-skinned, breezy, able to live without too much hesitation or procrastination. It was emblematic that Queen Victoria detested Hamlet.

  Doubts there were aplenty – in individuals, in groups, in society at large – about the Condition of England question (Carlyle’s phrase from Past and Present), about the relations between Britain and the rest of the world, about religion and science, about social justice: but we who live in a fragmented society have become like an individual addicted to psychoanalysis, struggle with our uncertainties, pick at our virtues and vices as if they were scabs. The Victorian capacity not to do this, to live, very often, with double standards, is what makes so many of them – individually and collectively – seem to be humbugs and hypocrites.