The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  The fact that very few Anglicans in history (and few of Queen Victoria’s bishops) seemed to believe in the Catholicism of the Tractarians did not deter the dreamers of Oxford from their determination to make the solidly Protestant Church of England appear like a purified continuation of medieval Catholicism. Lord Blake has likened the Young England movement to the Oxford Movement. It would be even truer to see the matter the other way about and to view the intellectual contortions of Gladstone, Newman, Keble and friends as a form of mental Eglinton Tournament in which young men of the railway age tried to adopt the mentality of medieval monks or the Fathers of the Church in Late Antiquity. Newman was the most eminent of those who eventually found too burdensome the strain of defending the indefensible. He became a Roman Catholic in 1845, during one of those dark autumn rainstorms which had swept across northern Europe for weeks, destroying the crops. While the Irish starved, he worried his mind about Augustine’s controversy in the fourth century with the Donatists. But his Essay on Development had opened doorways into new territories of thought which he was perhaps only half ready or willing to explore.

  fn1 ‘Readers included Queen Victoria, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Abraham Lincoln, William Ewart Gladstone, Arthur Schopenhauer, Francis Newman, John Stuart Mill, William Stanley Jeavons and Florence Nightingale. The co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, began his search for a lawful explanation of species after reading Vestiges in 1845. The book had a profound effect on literature, most notably in the writings of Alfred Tennyson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and George Eliot.’9

  9

  Mesmerism

  MANY IN THE process of observing the Lilliputian antics of the Tractarian controversialists and weighing the awful metaphysical implications of Vestiges had lost faith, partially or totally. Arthur Hugh Clough’s Oxford Letters are only the most articulate, not the least typical, of the time. James Anthony Froude’s novel Nemesis of Faith added insult to injury by having a hero who did not merely lose his faith but became an adulterer. It was burned by the rector of his college, Exeter, and though he was in deacon’s orders (more or less a requisite of the job if you wanted to be an academic in those days) Froude left Oxford, became a disciple of Carlyle’s, married (very happily) and went to live in Wales on not much money. Once Newman had ‘gone over’, Oxford breathed a sigh of relief, feeling it could come to its senses again. The truly distinguished academics on both the ‘arts’ and ‘science’ side produced by that university looked back on the Tractarian episode as an era of anti-intellectual madness, though the presence in their midst of the curmudgeonly Edward Bouverie Pusey was until 1882 a reminder of old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago.

  For most men and women, Tennyson was a surer guide to the crises of the age. He saw that what all this religious controversy threatened to remove (whether the Science vs Religion controversy or the esoteric tournaments played out in the Tracts) was the religion of the inner life. He had this in common with the great hymn-writers of the age, of whom Newman was one. Most Christians have never heard of The Essay in Development, but many have been consoled by ‘Lead Kindly Light’. Even more, perhaps, have found comfort in the last verses of the Reverend H.F. Lyte, the vicar of All Saints’ Church in the Devonshire fishing port of Brixham.1 Ill health made him retire before he was fifty-two. He preached his last sermon after morning service on 4 September 1847 to a church packed with hundreds of fishermen. Then he went back to his parsonage and wrote the verses for which he will always be remembered.

  He was sent abroad to cure his bronchitis and died at Nice in the autumn of 1847. He left behind one of the most haunting lyrics of the nineteenth century – ‘Abide with Me’. Like Tennyson he could have claimed it was the cry of the whole human race. Intelligent people waited anxiously to see whether God Himself was to be withdrawn from the modern scheme of things and if so, how they would survive the bereavement.

  I fear no foe with Thee at hand to bless

  The repeated plea, throughout the hymn, that the Presence will not be removed has an undoubted pathos when we remember the date at which it was written, a time when so many, and with such heavy hearts, were taking leave of God.

  The story of Victorian science is not merely the account of what men and women saw, or thought they saw, when they came to examine the physical universe outside themselves. Vestiges, like Lyell’s Geology before it, surveyed Creation in such materialistic language as to make some question the very existence of a Creator – anyway a Creator with a personality. And where did that leave soul, or humanity? While some investigators formed theories of a greater or lesser convincingness about the age of rocks or the evolution of species, others turned to the phenomenon of humanity itself – the nature of human personality, the question of whether ‘mind’ can be separated from brain, the nature of psychology. These matters cannot be studied in isolation, any more than can the work of the geologists and biologists.

  The phenomenon of phrenology, for example, will seem bizarre to some readers of the twenty-first century, but there were many in its heyday who saw it as a serious science. Its various proponents divided up the skull into areas – twenty-six in one scheme, forty-three or more in another – in which it was purported that organs could be discovered explanatory of human behaviour. Quarrelsome people were found to possess a pronounced ‘organ of combativeness’. The lumps and bumps of the human cranium were seriously supposed to relate to propensities and characteristics such as amativeness, hope, wonder, wit and so on. The fact that no relation between brain functions and cranial formation could be demonstrated did not prevent serious people, many of them scientists, being wholly convinced by it. Phrenological ways of viewing human nature had a profound effect on the development not just of medicine but of anthropology, hence on the growth of imperialism.

  Here, for example, is one phrenologist examining two skulls of American Indians, and comparing them with European craniology.

  The magnanimity displayed by the Indians in their endurance of torture is a well-known characteristic of these tribes …2

  This ‘scientist’ finds ‘firmness’ and ‘secretiveness’ very marked in the native Americans. The phrenological obsession with skulls was to be inherited by anthropologists of later generations. Many were influenced by Charles Caldwell’s book Thoughts on the Unity of the Human Species which asserted, from skull evidence again, that negroes ‘are no more competent to live orderly, prosperously, and happily, in a large and separate community, under a government of laws, prepared and administered by themselves, than is a similar number of buffaloes or beaters’ (emphasis in original).3

  One of the most enthusiastic disciples of phrenology in London was the professor of medicine at University College Hospital, John Elliotson. (He is the pioneer of the widespread use of the stethoscope.)4 He was also to become, notoriously, one of the most vociferous champions of mesmerism, a practice which, like so many others engaging inquiring minds, appeared to its proponents as a science and to its critics (of whom there were plenty in Elliotson’s lifetime) chicanery of the most transparent kind.

  Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), the Austrian medic and sage, had discovered, so he said, that the universe was penetrated and surrounded by a superfine magnetic fluid. By means which seem very close to hypnotism, he was able to put his patients into a trance, and by means of ‘animal magnetism’ to connect them up with the magnetic fluid of the universe. Mesmer’s own demonstrations in pre-revolutionary Paris of his skills had less in common with the laboratory than with the Wizard’s Den or the Masonic rituals of Mozart’s Magic Flute. Heavy carpets, weird astrological wall decorations and mood music played on wind instruments or harmonica all helped to put his patients in a receptive frame of mind, while Mesmer himself wore lilac taffeta robes.5

  Professor Elliotson, when he had become convinced not merely of the truth of the animal magnetism but of his own mesmeric powers, was only marginally less hierophantic when he began his demonstrations in the wards of Unive
rsity College Hospital, Gower Street, in 1837. His success rate was remarkable. Elliotson himself records, among many a comparable case, hysterical epilepsy with spinal affection cured outright by mesmerism; in other epileptic cases, fits much reduced. A mesmeric doctor called William Topham in Nottingham amputated a leg at the thigh of a forty-two-year-old labourer – he felt no pain.6 (There were several cases like this.)

  It is important to realize that much more than auto-suggestion was at work, as far as the mesmerists believed. Nor is it true that only hysterical or functional illnesses could be cured by mesmerism, though the great preponderance of reported cases are of such disorders. At the height of its popularity in the medical profession there were claims that it could cure not only neurasthenic conditions such as asthma but also deafness – ‘Before mesmerism she could not hear the ticking of a watch close to her ears; now she can hear a loud ticking clock at the distance of a second room.’7

  Elliotson, a combative man with a tendency to consider himself hard done by, was eventually hounded out by the medical ‘establishment’. He resigned his chair of medicine and retired an embittered man.8 His career might be seen as no more than a colourful interlude in the history of medicine, but mesmerism was peculiarly in tune with the spirit of the age, one of many forces inclining to suggest to the nineteenth-century mind that there could be naturalistic explanations for phenomena which had hitherto been seen as pure mysteries. The Reverend Chauncy Hare Townshend, Dickens’s friend and a keen defender of Elliotson,9 wrote of non-human creatures being just as good subjects as humans for the gifted mesmerist. Tom tits and nightingales fell into trances and allowed themselves to be tossed about like balls. The mesmeric demonstrations had brought ‘the miraculous to the test of experience’. Townshend made no bones about it: mesmerism explained ‘the apparently supernatural’.

  They were now able to look back at the Age of Miracles, at Christ himself, and see the supposedly implausible stories of pious legend explicable in terms of mesmeric fluid. On the other hand, as has been wisely said, the mesmeric idea encapsulates the ‘classic Victorian triad – will, energy, power’.10 Although the mesmerists claimed to be materialist through and through (and it was possible to practise even on birds or idiot children without their consciously joining their will to that of the mesmerist as he concentrated his energy upon them) it inevitably foreshadows that twentieth-century preoccupation with mind which can be seen in the psychology of Freud and Jung and the literary productions of Joyce and Proust.11

  Townshend seems aware both of the materialistic roots of mesmerism and of its psychological progressivism. He believed that ‘we mesmerists are to science what the Liberals are to politics’. This was in many cases literally true, those who believed in mesmerism being almost invariably keen abolitionists, economic liberals, in favour of ‘progress’. But Townshend had discerned in the middle of this debate a deeper truth about his time, namely that there isn’t such a thing as a bare fact, inseparable from the political, social or philosophical viewpoint of the person presenting it.

  All are crying out, ‘Give us facts – no theories!’ Yet everybody really does theorize for himself. To reason – to deduce is the prerogative of man; and we in truth, take every fact, however mysterious, in connection with a presumed cause. A visible phenomenon forces on us the conviction that there is behind it an adequate agency, even though that agency be occult. Every fact is a theory if we did but know it [my italics]. The fall of the apple includes the system of the Universe.12

  In a specific defence of mesmerism, he had written a most intelligent summary of the 1840s. If every fact was a theory, the fascination of science consisted in its ability to present us with observable, verifiable truths. But could there be a science of human nature, human society? Give us facts! had been the cry of Mr Gradgrind in Dickens’s Hard Times, the embodiment of the Benthamite philosophy. New philosophies were in the air, asking how you knew what was and wasn’t a fact, questioning the sensible utilitarian ethic that the pursuit of the good was to be identified with the pursuit of the greater happiness of all. It was left to the son of Gradgrind, the Saint of Rationalism, to set these things in rational order.

  10

  John Stuart Mill’s Boiled Egg

  SO IT WAS, that throughout this decade, of riots, famine, epidemics; of industrial advancement and economic expansion; of railways and theological controversy; of Dickens-mania and mesmerism; of parliamentary intrigue and social reform; the fragmentation of the Tories and the rising hopes of the Chartists, John Stuart Mill (1806–73) made a daily walk to his office desk in the magnificent Doric building in Leadenhall Street which housed the administrative centre of the East India Company.1 He had been coming to work here since he started as a junior clerk, aged seventeen, in 1823. (Since 1831, from Kensington.) He started on an annual gratuity of £30. His first regular salary was £100 p.a., granted when he was twenty. He rose, in 1856, to be Chief Examiner at £2,000 p.a. We will return, at a later point, to the East India Company and the important part it played in the Victorian story. For the time being, we merely note the thin, serious, sandy-haired figure of Mill, coming to the office day by day. Every morning at 10 a.m. he walked through the huge portico, down a long passage, up two flights of stairs, through a waiting-room where message-boys were brewing tea, down a long gallery filled with clerks, nosing their quills, until he reached the large room where he worked, its three tall windows overlooking a brick courtyard.2

  Beyond, the steeples and spires of the many City churches kept the hours. Money, by a thousand Mr Dombeys, was being made, by investment in domestic industry, by foreign trade, by insurance, by shipping. Here was the epicentre of that rentier world which, by learning to manage money, was building an economy, a political system, an empire of strength and size without parallel in the world.

  Immediately, an office-boy brought in John Stuart Mill’s boiled egg, tea, bread and butter. It was his first refreshment of the day, and he would eat nothing thereafter until he had walked home. (His simple dinner was at 6.)

  Why are we interested in this tall figure, with his ruddy complexion and his black suit? His Indian contemporaries, no doubt, would have been interested in the paperwork which he pushed across his desk between the hours of 10 and 4. There were three divisions in the East India Company – the Secretaries, the Military Secretaries, and the Examiners. The Examiners examined letters coming from India on a wide range of administrative matters and were, effectively, the Indian Civil Service. There is, no doubt, a certain oddity about the affairs of the subcontinent being determined by this array of black-coated clerks perched at their high stools in the City of London.

  For Mill’s European contemporaries, however, and for generations of Indians born after he quitted his office stool, the significance of this man rests less in the work he did for the East India Company than in the thoughts which passed through his head as he walked through St James’s Park, up Fleet Street and past St Paul’s Cathedral; or as he ate his boiled egg to the sound of a hundred scratching quill pens in the offices, a hundred church steeples chiming in the rooftops, beyond.

  Mill got his job in the East India Company from his father, who before him had risen to be Chief Examiner. James Mill had been the most ardent disciple of Jeremy Bentham, the most relentless of the philosophic radicals, the fiercest of the Gradgrinds. The story of John Stuart Mill’s extraordinary boyhood has passed into legend – the absence of any play or playmates, the relentless learning, the accumulation of fact, fact, fact, leading, when he was aged twenty, to the ‘crisis’ in which he appeared to reject his father’s Benthamism. By reading Wordsworth he discovered to his indescribable joy that he was capable of feeling. Mill was an emblematic figure of his age, important for what he stood for – what he was in himself – as well as what he thought and propounded. Bertrand Russell said that ‘throughout the middle portion of the nineteenth century, the influence of the Benthamites on British legislation was astonishingly great, considering their complet
e absence of emotional appeal’,3 a curious remark coming from the godson of J.S. Mill and the grandson of Lord John Russell himself. Bentham’s ideal, as Russell saw, was ‘security not liberty’.4 John Stuart Mill’s task as a political thinker was to discover how to give society liberty without risk to security.

  His influence on the political and social thinking of the succeeding generations was if possible even greater than Bentham’s. He reckoned that he could get through his day’s work in three hours, which perhaps explains how he managed, while being in the ‘full-time’ employ of the East India Company, to turn out so prodigious a body of work. From 1835 he was the editor of The London and Westminster Review, the most influential journalistic mouthpiece of radical politics of the time. More significantly, and more astonishingly when one considers the distractions of regular (if highminded) journalism and the ceaseless flow of those Indian letters passing from IN-tray to OUT-tray, he was the pre-eminent British philosopher of the nineteenth century.