The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Mill, and his influence, speak volumes about nineteenth-century England. Even if you question his influence, you have to recognize that this England of canals, factories and counting-houses was fertile ground for Mill’s ideas in a way that Germany and France and the nascent Italy were not. If we are trying to find an answer to the question of why Britain did not explode into the revolutionary apocalypses envisioned by his friend Carlyle, part of the answer might be found in the philosophy of John Stuart Mill.

  His first important work, A System of Logic, was published in 1843. It is a patient, even a somewhat laborious restating of the empiricist position – though Mill disliked the term empiricist, preferring to call himself an experimentalist. As philosophical works go, it is remarkably accessible to the layman, designedly so, we may safely assume, since Mill’s target was a trend in contemporary academic philosophy which he considered dangerous. His attacks on the ‘intuitionist’ school are of interest not only to philosophers. In A System of Logic his prime target was Whewell, professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, and eventually master of Trinity College. The ‘intuitionist’ view, based on Kant, was that there were some truths too high, or too self-evident, to be examined. Mill, who had attended neither school nor university, saw that in this attitude of mind the ‘intuitionist’ philosophy could be used to justify reaction in politics and superstition in religion. What A System of Logic sets out to demonstrate is that there are not two sorts of truth or two sorts of logic. Ethical truth, for example, should be demonstrable. Airy theological assertions should be verifiable or dismissed as nonsense. Any person should be entitled to ask for reasons why things are as they are. There was an obvious connection between the fact that Oxford and Cambridge were exclusive bastions of privilege, and that the philosophy taught there was a set of truths which had merely to be accepted, unexamined, unquestioned, in the philosophical sense necessary. Mill’s defences of deductive reasoning, and of causality, and, with modifications, of the syllogism in formal logic, are all of a piece with his embracing the progressive ideas of the French thinker Auguste Comte – and with his later championing of Liberty and of Women’s Suffrage.5

  Though the later developments of Comte’s Religion of Humanity caused its detractors to smile (Comte went mad), Mill – its archpriest in England – never lost sight of its central idea: social progress.6 How we think, as societies, and how our great ones think, does have an effect on how we live. Philosophy might be the occupation of a tiny number in any generation. How many, in the 1840s, could have read, as Carlyle had done, the great German metaphysicians – above all, Hegel? In the later years of the century, Hegel would undoubtedly come into his own in England, though in a very anglice form. No one could doubt, however, that there was a difference between life in a country where the statesmen and civil servants, the intellectuals and the progressives, believed themselves caught up in the Hegelian dialectic, and in one where they more modestly believed that, by the benign application of reason to human problems, the greater happiness of the greater number might, patiently and gradually, be achieved.7

  Mill devoted the years of the Irish famine to proposing drastic reforms of Irish land tenure, the establishment of independent peasant properties, answerable to no landlords on reclaimed waste land. He urged that the famine had come about not merely because of the failure of potato crops but because the landlord system reduced the Irish to the condition of paupers. What a pity he was not made the viceroy!

  As far as English politics were concerned, Mill was as radical as it was consistent to be while retaining a firm belief in free market economics.fn1 Under the influence of his beloved Mrs Taylor, whom he eventually married, Mill became his own variety of socialist, convinced that socialism meant, not that all things are held in public ownership, ‘but that production is only carried on upon the common account’ – a logical conclusion in fact from the pursuit of the greater good and the greater happiness. Whether the working class in the 1840s were ready for those autonomous ‘associations’, without which democracy could not seriously flourish, Mill took leave to doubt. Mill believed that only an elite of the working class were ready for such experiments. They were unfit ‘at present for any order of things, which would make any considerable demand on either their intellect or their virtue’.9 Yet he remained an optimist – ‘It is my belief indeed that the general tendency is, and will continue to be, saving occasional and temporary exceptions, one of improvement, a tendency towards a better and happier state.’10 The evidence would suggest that, in spite of the horrors they collectively endured during the first decade of her reign, the majority of Victoria’s subjects would have agreed with Mill. The apocalypse which was about to engulf the European continent, viewed with hope or dread depending on your station in society, did not happen in Victorian Britain. The Chartists caused panic in the ruling powers, but not enough enthusiasm to generate the revolution. It is to that story that we must return.

  fn1 Conrad Russell reminds us, though, of the interesting fact that Mill saw no logical connection between free market liberty and individual liberty. See C.A. Russell (1993).

  11

  The Failed Revolution

  THERE ARE, BROADLY, two responses to the question why there was no revolution in Britain and Ireland in 1848, as there was to be in so many other countries of Europe. The first is to suggest that there would have been some such uprising had not the British state learnt to exercise an iron authority over the masses, by means of law, policing, and military strength. The second is to imply that, hellish as life was for many British and Irish people in the 1840s, it could have been worse, that times of economic hardship were replaced by times of prosperity, and that, quite simply, not enough people would have been found to make a Chartist Parliament, still less a British socialist state, a viable proposition. Some historians, for either of these reasons, dismiss the so-called failure of the Chartist movement as risible, inevitable, insignificant. Yet it wasn’t risible – in its own way, it could be viewed as tragic were it not for the peculiar composition and character of the English nation. Radical thinkers such as Mill were rather dismayed when, after the French plebiscite of 1848, the people of France elected Napoleon III in 1849.1 The truly extraordinary lesson of 1848 in England is that, had the Chartists succeeded, and had their petition become law, with every adult male given the vote by secret ballot, it is perfectly possible that a majority of Englishmen would have voted to retain Queen Victoria as head of state, and Lord John Russell or Lord Stanley as prime minister.

  Recalling those heady days of spring 1848 George Julian Harney (Chartist and deputy editor of The Northern Star) wrote to Friedrich Engels when they were both old men:

  The old time! and this is the 23rd February, and tomorrow is the 24th, when seeing the news placarded at Charing Cross, I ran like a lunatic and pulled the bell at Schappers [a German revolutionary exile] like a bedlamite; at some corner on my way, knocking over an old woman’s apple-basket (or it may have been oranges!) I was going too quick for her gentle cursing.2

  One wonders how gentle the cursing was, and whether this tiny vignette of political fervour does not tell us rather a lot about the state of mind respectively of a political activist and an actual working-class woman. We know that in after years most of the fruit-sellers of London declared themselves to have been in favour of the Charter. But how many would have favoured days of street-fighting upsetting their apple-baskets? This isn’t a frivolous question: it goes to the heart of the story of English leftist politics. It would be an absurdity to say that no English working-class people have ever supported either physical-force Chartism, or communism or other forms of potentially violent revolution in England. Yet it would seem from the evidence as if there had always been working-class English of a different persuasion – either gradualists or conservatives. Things might have been slightly different in Ireland, Wales or Scotland.

  The newspaper placard announced that the French government (the ‘July monarchy’ of Louis-Philippe wi
th his arch-conservative premier the historian Guizot) had been overthrown. A provisional government was set up. On 13 March Metternich, the chancellor of the Austrian empire, was overthrown. A little while before, Harney’s German friends in exile had run off the press at 46, Liverpool Street in London, yards from the epicentre of the capitalist world, an anonymous pamphlet entitled Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei. Its authors were Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx (who had come to London on a visit and met Harney in November 1847). Engels was already living in England – in the unlikely role of a Northern capitalist. (His father had cotton manufactories in Lancashire – like Sir Robert Peel, Engels always spoke English with a pronounced Northern accent.) Marx would come to London as a refugee, his revolutionary journalism having made him an undesirable in Germany. He would never escape it, becoming faute de mieux a Londoner and British Museum habitué, until his death in 1883.

  A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcize this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies …

  The quotation is from the ‘authorized’ English version of 1888, hastily, too hastily, revised by Engels himself, working on the English translation of a loyal plodder called Samuel Moore.3

  There were many who shared the communist view that England would not be immune from the spectre’s power. The ‘physical force’ Chartists, some of whom befriended, others of whom became, communists in late years, were to this extent at one with those – such as Macaulay, the great Whig historian – who saw antagonisms between the classes as absolutely inevitable. ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’ In the mind of Macaulay, for whom the Whig Revolution of 1689 was the high point and defining moment of British history, Chartism was a disastrous idea. He saw the notion of giving the vote to the uneducated and unpropertied classes as a recipe for national suicide.

  Have I any unkind feeling towards these poor people? No more than I have to a sick friend who implores me to give him a glass of water which the physician has forbidden. No more than a humane collector in India has to those poor peasants who in a season of scarcity crowd round the granaries and beg with tears and piteous gestures that the doors may be opened and the rice distributed. I would not give the draught of water, because I know it would be poison. I would not give up the keys of the granary, because I know that, by doing so, I should turn a scarcity into a famine. And in the same way I should not yield to the importunity of multitudes who, exasperated by suffering and blinded by ignorance, demand with wild vehemence the liberty to destroy themselves.4

  When the Chartist riots had broken out in Newport in 1839 Macaulay had seen the spectre – civil war between the propertied and the unpropertied. The result would have been the destruction of property – ‘All the power of imagination fails to paint the horrors of such a contest.’5

  Marx saw the same truth of inevitable strife, and no doubt this inspired the more belligerent Chartists. There is equally no doubt that it scared many of them away from the movement, not because they were cowards, but because as tailors, small traders and craftsmen, even as factory workers, they did not wish to form themselves into a destructive mob. The old woman selling fruit would have supported (if Mayhew is to be believed, as he surely is) the notion of having a say in the way that her country was governed. She would not have seen the need to kick over her basket of apples and oranges in the process.

  Fearing that a violent revolution was on its way, however, the Whig government took no chances, and when it was announced that the Third Chartist Petition would be presented to Parliament on 10 April 1848, both sides saw this as a day of the greatest significance, the day in which it would be determined whether the English revolution could come, or not.

  The wilder radicals like Ernest Jones were optimistic, particularly since the Irish protest movements seemed prepared to join forces with the English working classes.

  Lop-sided thrones are creaking,

  sang Jones in his ‘March of Freedom’, published in The Northern Star,

  For ‘Loyalty’ is dead;

  And common-sense is speaking

  Of honesty instead.

  Why weeps your sorrowing sister [i.e. Ireland]

  Still bleeding, unredressed,

  ’Neath Russell, England’s [Tsar] Nicholas,

  The Poland of the West.

  Cry ‘Liberty to Erin!’

  It is a debt you owe;

  Had ye not armed his hand

  He ne’er had struck a blow …6

  If the insurgents could compare Lord John Russell to a particularly tyrannical Russian emperor – and more, after all, had died in Ireland than had yet died in any Russian famine – the Whig prime minister and his Cabinet could take the compliment, and respond in force. They certainly took no chances. Though there were still Chartists after 10 April 1848, the government did effectively on that date crush Chartism.7

  Military intelligence had told the government that Irish revolutionaries had been to Paris to inspect methods of building barricades in the streets. The Whig government line on the overthrow of Guizot and Louis-Philippe was cautious in the extreme – ‘I can assure the House,’ Russell told Parliament, ‘(indeed I should hardly have thought it necessary to make the declaration) that we have no intention whatever to interfere with the form of government which the French nation may choose to adopt or in any way to meddle with the internal affairs of that country.’ Russell and Palmerston had viewed the departure of the French government with equanimity, but not the method by which it was accomplished.

  The Duke of Wellington was enlisted, less as an actual commander of operations than as an extremely useful piece of popular propaganda. Wellington, obsessed by the possibilities of mob violence, sent a list of proposals to Lord John suggesting provisions which should be made. He was certainly included, though or because a former Tory prime minister, in the discussions of security arrangements, but when he sent in his list of suggestions he found that Sir George Grey and the military secretary, Lord Fitzroy Somerset, had already pursued them. Nevertheless it did not do any harm to allow the potential rebels to believe that they would be fighting, if violence did break out, against the victor of Waterloo.

  What had Grey and Somerset already arranged for 10 April? The royal family had been sent by train to the Isle of Wight. (Waterloo station was closed for hours beforehand and cordoned off by troops.) Wellington was afraid that Osborne House, a holiday palazzo, not a fort, was vulnerable from the Solent if the rebels got hold of a warship: this was the level of paranoia felt by the prevailing powers.

  Mouchards brought word that the common soldiers, chatting to Chartist demonstrators as they began to assemble in London in the few days before the 10th, had promised to fire over the people’s heads in the event of a riot.8 The thought of the military showing class solidarity filled the Whigs with horror, but they could take comfort from the numbers who volunteered as special constables. Altogether, in London alone, Lord Fitzroy Somerset had mobilized 7,122 military, including cavalry; 1,231 military pensioners; 4,000 police, both City and metropolitan, and an astonishing 85,000 special constables. Comparable measures had been taken in all the major British cities.

  The British Museum was barricaded – the director Sir Henry Ellis calculated that if invaded by ‘disaffected persons it would prove to them a fortress capable of holding ten thousand men’. Somerset House in the Strand had a portcullis constructed in its entrance. The Bank of England was parapeted with sandbags, and guns mounted in every aperture. All the prisons were reinforced with heavily armed guards.9 Comparable methods had been taken in Paris and they had not prevented the revolution. The difference between the two countries was that the presence of 100,000 troops outside Paris was resented by the petit-bourgeois downwards. In England, the urban middle and lower-middle class was proportionately far higher and they overwhelmingly supported all these measures. The
sheer number of special constables is eloquent; even if we suppose a high proportion of them were domestic servants, this does not mean they did not prefer the status quo.

  The show of strength undoubtedly had an enormous effect, both to boost the morale of the majority who did not want the Physical Force Chartists and the Irish revolutionaries to succeed, and on the reputation of Britain abroad, as the one nation in Europe which appeared to be immune from serious revolutionary upheaval.

  On 10 April, the National Convention of Chartists assembled at 9 a.m. in John Street, just north of Gray’s Inn, moved down Tottenham Court Road, passed via Holborn to Farringdon Street, crossed Blackfriars Bridge and reached Kennington Common by 11.30, where some 3,000 had congregated. Another contingent had assembled in the East End on Stepney Green, a crowd of some 2,000 with music, flags and an air of jamboree. The largest single group was in Russell Square, Bloomsbury. About 10,000 proceeded from here, down the Walworth Road, and eventually reached Kennington Green. They had hoped for hundreds of thousands: in the event, a mere 20,000 or so appeared, policed by a force nearly five times that number.

  It is the first significant historical event to have been photographed, probably by police spies.10 The daguerreotypes record a scene of drizzly pathos. In the immediate foreground you can see the special officers, mounted on horseback and silk-hatted. Above and beyond the twenty thousand hopeful heads, a factory chimney stretches a defiant arm to the sky. Possibly it is Messrs Farmer’s vitriol works. It seems to say that trade and capital are stronger than human dignity. The banners unfurled in the rain – IRELAND FOR THE IRISH and POLITICS FOR THE PEOPLE – display messages whose hour has not been allowed to come.

  O’Connor addressed the gathering. Many of the historians of the movement blame him for its lack of success, his firebrand dissent from Lovett and the moral force Chartists in the beginning, his essential lack of sympathy with the urban population at the end of the decade since the Charter was composed. The Chartist Land Plan – in which O’Connor tried to establish systems of independent smallholdings on commonly held land – was probably never practicable and was irrelevant to the aspirations of the Alton Lockes who were the movement’s core membership. ‘The Charter was a means to an end – the means was their political rights, and the end was equality’ – as Harney had said at the outset.