The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  The 10th of April appeared to demonstrate that capitalism was so powerful a machine that those who had become its cogs could not imagine things to be otherwise. Systems of universal education – like those of the communists, a Chartist dream – would not in reality come about for generations in Britain, and it is open to question whether the level of political interest required in a working democracy would ever have come to pass, Charter or no Charter. Democracy in the sense understood by O’Connor, Lovett or Ernest Jones has never been tried in Britain.

  The truth is that the numbers supporting the Charter itself had been dwindling for some years before 1848. Region-by-region research shows that in 1,009 areas generally supportive of Chartism in 1839, only 207 had active Chartist organizations in 1848.11 The aims and aspirations of the working people in these districts had been splintered. The government, as a result of pressure from the Tory Lord Ashley, had lately brought in the Ten Hours Act, limiting the hours of work in factories. Conditions in a number of places were improved, not wholly, not as much as people might wish. But they knew they had a government which no longer gave capitalism a totally free rein: children were not sent down the mines any more, mill-owners or factory-masters could not so easily exact slavishly long hours from employees. The slow, creakingly slow, improvement of working conditions could be seen, by optimists, to have begun. Meanwhile, Free Trade had begun to chug into prosperous action. Wages, with profits, were up in most manufacturing areas.

  For some of us, though, the thought that the conditions of the labouring poor in 1848 were not so bad really, the claim that the Ten Hours Act and a few shillings a week destroyed the Chartist ideal, is just a little too smug. The truth is, as Marx saw very clearly, that there is a genuine difference of interest between the workers and the bourgeoisie. Any dissent from such a view – the view of Cobden and similar Manchester liberals that the urban proletariat had much chance to better themselves through evening classes and the like – is a gigantic con. In the years after they wrote the Manifesto, Marx and Engels were astounded to discover the sheer force of the British gendarmerie – Britain armed to the teeth both against the working class and against the Irish. That was the first lesson of 10 April 1848. Second, and more dispiriting, the sheer numbers of the Kleinbürger made any realignment of the political map impossible. The preparedness of Lord John Russell to crush the Chartists by force was very popular indeed.

  We shall see clearly enough in the next decade the kind of people the Victorians en masse were, with their wild enthusiasm for the Crimean War and their violent and vindictive attitude to the Indian Mutiny. There is alas no evidence that a majority, given the chance, would have tried to build a fairer or more equitable society, giving succour to the poor Irish immigrants, the illegitimate waifs and strays in orphanages or workhouses or the mills and factories of the Midlands and the North. This was a ruthless, grabbing, competitive, male-dominated society, stamping on its victims and discarding its weaker members with all the devastating relentlessness of mutant species in Darwin’s vision of Nature itself.

  The presenters of the Petition were allowed into three cabs to cross the river and to present the signatures to the House of Commons. Of the hoped-for signatories, there were only 1,200,000 (less than half of the expected 3 million),12 two-thirds of which were said to be fraudulent. Old Colonel Sibthorp’s name, for example, was found among the forgeries. There is many a true word spoken in jest, however. Though of course the old country diehard had not signed the Petition there was probably some sense (as the career of John Ruskin was to show) in which the defender of the Old Ways, the upholder of Corn Laws and denouncer of railroads, had more in common with many of the Chartists than either the future capitalists or their Marxist opponents. Both were standing for what Marx called the Idiotismus of the rural. Not ‘idiocy’ as plodder Moore and Engels rendered it, but (Marx the Hellenist uses the word Idiotismus in its original Greek sense of the private self) ‘the privatized isolation of rural life’, or, to put it another way, independence.13 Marx and Engels exhorted:

  Proletariat aller Länder vereinigt Euch!

  (Working men of all countries, unite!)

  April 10 demonstrated a slightly more alarming truth. Rather than being seen as a Chartist flop, it should be seen as the united front of the Kleinbürger – the petit-bourgeoisie – with the governing powers, the money powers, the aristocracy.

  From now on, the Victorian story becomes an alarming triumph song, Great Britain growing richer and more powerful by the decade, coarsening in the process, and leaving the historian with a sense that only in its dissentient voices is redemption found.

  PART II

  The Eighteen-Fifties

  12

  The Great Exhibition

  THE STATEMENT THAT Britain ‘survived’ 1848, while the rest of the European continent was convulsed in revolutions (and counterrevolutions), requires at least a footnote, if not a qualification. If we look for signs of revolutionary disturbance only on Kennington Common on 10 April, then we might conclude that Britain had a peaceful year. Radical and Catholic cantons of Switzerland had been waging a civil war throughout 1847 – a war in which Count Metternich would certainly have intervened on behalf of the absolutists had he not been toppled from his position as Austrian chancellor in March 1848. His collapse had been precipitated by the abdication of Louis-Philippe in France – he and his reactionary prime minister took refuge (as did Metternich) in London. In Berlin, Frederick William was forced to accept a constitution and a Liberal government. The poet Lamartine’s manifestos in France were certainly the most ‘left-wing’ of any government of the time, but Palmerston, the dominant political figure of this decade, was canny enough to support them, for precisely the reason that Marx denounced them – because they were in reality a sop to the socialists and they held in check the possibilities of further revolution. In Spain the revolution was resisted, and the British minister was denounced for his liberalism. In Italy, the forces of radicalism saw the chance of throwing off the dominion on the one hand of Austria, and on the other of the Pope. King Ferdinand in Naples offered his subjects a constitution. Hungary was in turmoil – invaded by the Russians. Denmark and Prussia were at odds over the vexed question of Schleswig-Holstein.

  By comparison, the conventional wisdom has suggested, Britain was tranquil. There is some truth in this, of course, else why should it, and how could it, have provided asylum for refugees both from the seats of reaction – Metternich, Guizot – and of revolution – Karl Marx?

  As so often in its history, Britain appeared to be going a way which was very different from that of the rest of Europe. In fact, Britain was not so very different, but it was undergoing its problems, and solving them, very much off home territory, and this is what gives us the sometimes false impression that things were stabler than they truly were. Two factors must be borne in mind. One was the extraordinary rate of imperial expansion abroad which accompanied the growth of the industrial economy at home. This enabled British governments to export many of their political and criminal dissidents where other nations had to look after them on domestic territory. But secondly, when we view the history of the colonies themselves, we remember that things were far from tranquil, either in 1848, or in the decades preceding or succeeding it.

  An extraordinary expansion of British imperialism had marked the first decade of Victoria’s reign. Hong Kong in the Far East – 1843, Labuan in Indonesia – 1846, Natal – 1843, Orange River in South Africa – 1848, Gambia on the West Coast of Africa – 1843. In 1842 the British fought the first of their disastrous Afghan wars, temporarily annexing that unconquerable country. Even the Russians in the twentieth century, or the Americans in the twenty-first, did not experience quite so cruelly the brutal indomitability of the Afghan guerrilla. Sir William Hay Macnaghten, through and through an old India hand, son of an Indian judge and an employee of the East India Company from adolescence, persuaded the governor-general of India, Auckland, that if the British did no
t move into Afghanistan the Russians would threaten British interests in India. There followed a period in which the British (just like the Russians and the Americans in a later age) backed first one and then another bunch of cut-throats who supposedly shared the interests of the foreign occupier. In November 1841, when Macnaghten was on the point of leaving Kabul to take up the governorship of Bombay, his successor, Sir Alexander Burnes, was murdered by a mob. Macnaghten himself was then assassinated by the leader of a rival Afghan faction to the one he had been supporting. The winter had begun. There was no chance of the British troops stationed at Kandahar getting through the snowy mountains to Kabul. After a series of negotiations with Afghan leaders, the British agreed to withdraw from Afghanistan. On 6 January, the entire garrison began the retreat to Jallalabad, with a huge number of Afghan camp-followers (afraid of reprisals from their hostile compatriots) and many British women and children. Akhbar Khan, the new Afghan leader who had arranged for Macnaghten to be killed, would not give any assurance that the retreating forces would be immune from attack, though the women and children were allowed through. Sixteen thousand British troops made their last stand against the Afghans in the pass at Jagdallak. Of this number, only one, Dr Brydon, was allowed to limp his way to Jallalabad to tell the tale. When spring came, the British did send forces to occupy Kabul, but they were not there for long. They did not want to be.

  The only positive result, for them, of the first Afghan war was that the East India Company greatly expanded its forces in North-West India. The conquest of Sind in 1843 was the direct consequence of the Afghan war. The Sikh wars led to the appropriation of the Punjab by 1849, as well as smaller states such as Satara (1848) and Sambalpur (1849). This was less part of some great plan than the need, here and there, to create the conditions of peace in which trade could flourish. Almost all English expansionism in India began like this, the putting down of this or that disturbance leading to the annexations of more and more territory.

  The discontents which other European states experienced at home in 1848 could to a large measure be exported by Britain to the imperial territories. The Whigs knew that the key to retaining the support of the middle classes at home was to avoid tax increases. ‘I believe we must keep our fingers out of the people’s pockets; and try to keep down our expenditure’ was what the chancellor of the Exchequer, Wood, told Grey. It had been Grey’s own mission to save money on imperial troops. In India, this meant pensioning off European troops and having more and more native forces, a policy which many military observers could see to be fraught with hazard.

  Sir Charles Napier is usually seen as one of the less sensitive wielders of military authority in India (‘Were I Emperor of India for twelve years she should be traversed by railways and have her rivers bridged … No Indian Prince should exist’).1 Yet when he was sent to subdue the provinces of Northern India in the early 1840s he could easily foresee the problems which would ensue. He pointed out that the constant changes in the pay of the sepoys (native Indian soldiers) caused deep discontent. He thought the Brahmins and the Rajputs made ‘admirable soldiers’, and on the whole he took a very low view of the European officers in the Indian army, ‘especially those of the higher ranks’.2 He warned from Karachi, in March 1850, that the government could ‘but look with feelings of alarm, upon so large a body of armed, able bodied and mutinous soldiery, clamorous and violent if their … demands are not complied with’.3

  No one in government heeded his warning. The policy of squeezing the colonies to satisfy the middle classes in England was an essential part of Sir Charles Wood’s budgets.4 In India there were two aspects of this policy. One was to ride roughshod over the religious sensibilities of the native regiments if, for example, it came cheaper to disregard caste considerations and transport Brahmin sepoys with those of a lower caste or worse of a different faith altogether. Secondly there was a parsimonious tendency to reduce the sepoys’ pay, which caused simmering resentment, frequent minor mutinies, and was an undoubted factor in provoking the Great Uprising of 1857.

  In other parts of the Empire, the effects of Free Trade reforms caused hardship and near ruin, particularly in those places such as British Guiana and Jamaica whose economy was only just coming to terms with the emancipation of the slaves. Incendiarism and looting were widespread in the West Indian plantations throughout 1848. Similar troubles in Jamaica – there was simply no money to pay public officials – led to a British parliamentary loan being offered – of £100,000. As for Canada, the removal of the Corn Laws in England meant that Canadian wheat farmers no longer had a guaranteed market. The French Canadians in particular took it hard, organizing themselves into armed secret societies, rioting, pelting the governor with rotten eggs and conducting a series of incendiary raids in cities, particularly Toronto. In Ceylon, the attempt to raise a European-style peasant tax in 1848 led to a riot involving 60,000 men, an attack on prisons, with prisoners set free, and planters’ estates being ransacked. At the Cape, the Boer leader Andries Pretorius led a small war against the settlement of British settlers in Natal and the Xhosa and Gaika peoples rebelled against the idea of a British police force being imposed on them. There was also a mutiny of the indigenous Cape Corps regiment.

  In other words, in every corner of the globe the British were experiencing their own version of the 1848 revolutions, and if the dissidents of Canada, the West Indies, the Punjab, the Cape and Ceylon could by magic all have been concentrated on Kennington Common to assist the Chartists we can imagine a very different consequence to 10 April 1848. The problems thus scattered across the globe called for a new, vigorous imperial policy which, after the calamities a decade later in India, they would receive. For the time being, though, they could be dealt with piecemeal.

  And meanwhile, the colonies also supplied Britain with a useful resource, and another explanation for the fact that 1848 was a quieter year for Londoners than it was for Parisians, Berliners or Viennese. Although in 1848 only thirty declaredly political prisoners were transported, there was a huge increase in the numbers, especially from Ireland, who were removed from their native soil and sent to the colonies out of harm’s way. Once again, we sense here a problem deferred rather than solved forever. History does not eliminate grievances; it lays them down like landmines. Irish Fenianism and the Irish Republican movement really began among the exiles. There was a lively Irish radical press in Australia, where the campaign of non-compliance with prison authorities by Irish prisoners came to a head with the rising on the Ballarat goldfield in December 1854. Transportation as a system of punishment was actually well on the way out by then. Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) was set thirty years in the past. By the time the book was published the convict Magwitch would have been an anachronism. By the mid-1840s, only Bermuda, Gibraltar and Norfolk Island retained offshore prisons. But in ’48 the exile of so many potential British dissidents had the effect of extinguishing ‘the embers of insurrection’, in the phrase of a Tasmanian historian.5

  The modern reader, in post-colonial times, is inevitably made uneasy by the knowledge that the liberal state – and for many Europeans, England was the ideal liberal state – was underpinned by oppression and interference by Europeans in so many different quarters of the globe. For self-confident liberals of the time, perspectives were different. The internationalism of the Great Exhibition of 1851 was an outward and visible sign of how readily capitalism could conquer the globe, exporting its modernity to Asia, the Americas, Africa and Australia, and drawing, in turn, all nations to itself under the emblematic hothouse erected for the exotic plant of Free Trade in the very centre of Hyde Park. Not that the ‘Free Trade’ label was always used. The Tory weekly John Bull nicknamed the exhibition ‘The Free Trade Festival’, leading one of the organizers, none other than the apostle of Free Trade himself, Richard Cobden, to suggest avoiding the term, lest it appear the political propaganda exercise it actually was. By the time the leader of the Opposition, Lord Stanley, was selling the idea of the E
xhibition in his Mansion House address, he had judiciously claimed that it would ‘bring into harmonious concord the nations of the world’ and ‘give encouragement … to the industry of all nations’.6

  In fact, as we have already seen, the imposition of Free Trade caused widespread unrest all over the globe, the expansionism which trade both fed and provoked leading to Asian wars. Cobden and Bright’s belief that Free Trade, because it was bound to. transcend national boundaries, would lead ineluctably to the death of war was to be severely challenged during the 1850s, which saw the first major European war for nearly forty years breaking out in 1854. For the optimistic and ingenious organizers of the Great Exhibition, however, ‘the steamship and the railway and the thoughts that shape mankind’ had replaced military conquest as objects worthy of study.

  It was no doubt partly with a feeling of lucky escape – from the revolutions of ’48, from the whole decade which had seen such volatile economic change, such alarming social unease, such disease and such famine, against a background of industrial expansion and invention – that the organizers began to plan the exhibition.

  Unquestionably, the galvanic force behind the whole enterprise, the man without whom it would not have left the ground, was Henry Cole. It was Cole who saw in the exhibitions held by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce (1844) or the Society of Arts (1846) models of a much bigger exhibition, which would both encourage enterprise and invention in the sphere of industrial design and advertise its success. As the pseudonymous Felix Summerly, Cole had designed a china tea service, made by Minton and Co., for the exhibition of 1846. He was the man who had been responsible for making a cataloguing system in the Public Record Office where he worked as a civil servant. With Rowland Hill, he had pioneered the Penny Post in 1838. He had campaigned for a single railway-gauge and for reforms in the patent law. He also invented the Christmas card.