The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Cole had first met Prince Albert during his work in the PRO, and it was he who persuaded the organizers of the earlier, smaller exhibitions to have wider ambitions and to enlist a royal patron. He also brought in Thomas Milner Gibson, the Liberal MP from Manchester who had been vice-president of the Board of Trade, Cobden, Scott Russell – a Glaswegian industrial designer and jack of all trades – and Thomas Cubitt, the London property-developer and self-taught architect who had redeveloped Belgravia, rebuilt Buckingham Palace and built Osborne House on the Isle of Wight to Prince Albert’s designs. It was Cole who persuaded the Queen’s husband to appoint a Royal Commission to plan the exhibition – a committee which included the Prince himself (president), the prime minister, Lord John Russell, the leader of the Opposition, Lord Stanley, the former prime minister, Robert Peel, the Duke of Buccleuch, Mr Gladstone, Charles Lyell the geologist, Richard Westmacott the sculptor, and other persons of eminence.

  Cole’s first battle was won – to make the pioneers of industrial design, whose previous exhibitions had felt like muted affairs, feel that they had been adopted by the mainstream of political life to which they contributed so much wealth and energy. The commission, which was formed by 3 January 1850, had just over a year to make the thing a success: to ensure that the exhibits were of sufficiently high quality, to canvass industrial opinion not only all over Britain but all over the world, and to find a design which would house the exhibition and give it identity. There was also a site to be determined, with Regent’s Park, Primrose Hill, Wormwood Scrubs and the Isle of Dogs all canvassed as possibilities.

  The first design for the exhibition halls, submitted by the building committee, who had rejected 233 designs sent in by architects, resembled a brick engine-shed, surmounted with a disproportionate dome, several times larger than that of St Peter’s. The committee clung to the design merely because time was not on their side and – though none of the commissioners liked it – no alternative was available.

  Then transpired one of those happy chances which make one understand why so many Victorians believed in the Whiggish optimism of Macaulay. This really does seem like a society, for all the dreadful sufferings of its underclass, which is powered by ingenuity and luck, a nation with a strong wind behind it soaring from triumph to triumph. It is in such moments of good fortune uniting with sheer cleverness that the fascination of the Victorian period is found. Today we think of England as a place where nothing quite works properly, where great projects are seldom tried, and if attempted take laborious lengths of time to accomplish.

  On 11 June, William Ellis MP, chairman of the Midland Railway, had a meeting at the House of Commons with Joseph Paxton, the landscape-architect of the 6th Duke of Devonshire. Paxton had been much more than that to the (heterosexual) ‘bachelor’ Duke, being in effect the best friend to that ingenious nobleman and the companion of his many schemes of beautification in his Derbyshire palace. Paxton, from his mid-twenties, had demonstrated extraordinary skills not only as a gardener but also as an engineer and architect. The model village of Edensor, the ‘Emperor’ Fountain and the ‘Chatsworth Stove’, a giant conservatory, were only some of the glories this working-class genius achieved for his ducal friend and patron.7 The Stove was the largest glass building in the world. When the Queen and Prince Albert visited Chatsworth in 1843 Paxton and the Duke had lit the huge conservatory with 14,000 lamps – ‘This really is wonderful – astonishing,’ exclaimed the Duke of Wellington, who was one of the illustrious guests.8

  And now, Paxton, in his fiftieth year, after a life of freelance displays of cleverness for a limitlessly rich patron, had become the sort of man who sat on the board of railway companies, and was meeting William Ellis MP at the Commons before they went on to a formal meeting of the Midland Railway. Sitting in the public gallery, Paxton could not hear the debate in progress that afternoon – Ellis complained that the acoustics in Barry’s new chamber were inadequate. The two men fell to discussing other botched jobs, including the designs for the new exhibition hall.

  During the meeting of the Midland Railway company that afternoon, Paxton doodled a better design on his blotter, and later that day he showed it to Ellis. What he had in mind was an even bigger version of the Chatsworth Stove, all glass and cast iron, which could, if required, be dismantled and relocated when the exhibition closed. Ellis gave the piece of blotting paper to Cole, who arranged an audience at once with Prince Albert. Within a week, Fox and Henderson, the Smethwick contracting firm, had costed the design to the nearest pound. On the very day that the building committee published (to general derision) its disastrous plan – the giant domed engine shed – Paxton showed his alternative to Lord Granville, nephew of the Duke of Devonshire, who was able to present the committee with this much more attractive alternative. There were still a number of hurdles to jump. Members of the commission offered to put up money themselves to pay for Paxton’s scheme. Granville and the Radical cabinet minister Henry Labouchere offered £5,000 each and the financier Samuel Morton Peto offered £50,000 – a far cry from the committee of the Millennium Dome in 2000, who were only prepared to spend other people’s money for their unpopular extravaganza. In spite of opposition, the Paxton glasshouse idea was accepted, and work began constructing the space, not in Regent’s Park or the Isle of Dogs, but plumb in the middle of London – Hyde Park. This, said Sir Robert Peel – his last words to the commission on this or any subject – should be the site ‘or none’.9

  The summer of 1850 saw two deaths which not only removed from the scene two of the greatest men of the nineteenth century, but also can be seen as emblematic, closing forever a particular era of human understanding. On 23 April, the Poet Laureate William Wordsworth died aged eighty and was buried three days later in the churchyard at Grasmere. In July, his widow published the autobiographical poem which she entitled The Prelude. Wordsworth had hardly looked at his revisions of the poem for over a decade, and its most memorable passages had been finished in 1805, which was not merely forty-five calendar years away, but separated from the England of Railways and Free Trade, Capitalism and Empire and Religious Doubt by a vast imaginative chasm.

  Robert Browning, as a good young Liberal, had seen Wordsworth as ‘the Lost Leader’ who had left behind the excitement of a revolutionary youth and support for the French Revolution, and become an Anglican Tory who composed ‘ecclesiastical sonnets’. From the perspective of 150 years, though, we can see that the move from ‘left’ to right – fellow-travelling Girondin to supporter of Church and Queen – was not the definitive feature of Wordsworth’s trajectory. It was what remained constant, and not what changed, which strikes a reader of The Prelude today, particularly when we compare the two versions, one completed before the poet’s thirty-fifth birthday in 1805 and the other reworked decades later for posthumous publication.

  Wordsworth’s life-work was to have been a vast philosophical poem called The Recluse. Only the first part got written. The reason his widow gave its title to The Prelude can be inferred from his description of it as ‘The Ante-chapel … to the body of a Gothic Church.’ In effect, it is an autobiography, an account of how Nature became all-in-all to him. As in his other long philosophical work, The Excursion, city life becomes synonymous with corruption. ‘Cities where the human heart is sick’ (XII. 204) are contrasted with those small rural communities where there is still space and time to listen to the dictates of that inner voice which prompts virtue. Apart from its bearing on the question of religious language – Wordsworth saw in Nature ‘the type of a majestic intellect’ (XIV.64) – there is the vital issue of humankind itself. For the generation before Wordsworth’s – that of Samuel Johnson – it was axiomatic that the good life, the civilized life, was to be lived in the civis. But the process of industrialization, and the population explosion which accompanied it, changed not only the face of towns, but the way in which urban humanity viewed itself. By the year that Wordsworth died, half the population of England was urban.10 A hundred miles south
of Wordsworth’s Grasmere, grave Engels could look at Manchester, perched on a hill of clay: ‘single rows of houses or groups of streets stand here and there, like little villages on the naked, not even grass grown, clay soil. The lanes are neither paved nor supplied with sewers, but harbour numerous colonies of swine, penned in small sties or yards, or wandering unrestrained through the neighbourhood.’

  It is a testimony to how far industrialization and urbanization had yet to go that this description of Manchester squalor appears almost bucolic 150 years later to the reader of the twenty-first century. The sheer struggle of city existence, the struggle to avoid disease, to fill the belly, to find somewhere to sleep, removed much chance of freedom in any meaningful sense of the term; and the bourgeoisie, which grew rich on the struggles of those who toiled, were locked in the same relentless process of ‘getting and spending’. Wordsworth challenged Adam Smith’s definition of the ‘Wealth of Nations’,

  having gained

  A more judicious knowledge of the worth

  And dignity of individual man.

  (XIII,79–81)

  With a profound gift of foresight, he saw that the growth of the free market, far from promoting liberty, would in fact enslave. Having established the story of his own individual discovery of freedom and truth by a life communing with Nature, he asks, ‘What one is, Why may not billions be?’ To this question of whether the individual can survive, whether the term indeed possesses any meaning in the capitalist jungle, many of the great minds of the age were to address themselves. The old arguments of Free Will versus Determinism which had concerned theologians could exercise Marx and Darwin in different ways. Those who asserted liberty, as in the days of Theology, did so with an element of defiance. For Mill and the Utilitarians, the concept of liberty had to be worked out within the political framework, but there were always, in the nineteenth century, to be those subversives who could echo Wordsworth’s

  Oh! who is he that hath his whole life long

  Preserved, enlarged this freedom in himself?

  For this alone is genuine liberty …

  (XIV,130)

  This concept, of individualism asserting itself against the world that capitalism brought to birth, would surface in the more interesting nineteenth-century thinkers, ranging from Tolstoy in his Christian anarchist phase (who presumably never read Wordsworth) to Ruskin, who so surprisingly said he found Wordsworth uncongenial.

  In England, the year which opened the sluices was unquestionably 1846, and the most significant brain in which the conversion occurred, from economic protectionism to laissez-faire, was that of Sir Robert Peel. If you take the view that the flood could have been contained, then the repeal of the Corn Laws could still be seen as the end of an old England in which the country would have predominance over the town, and in which some ideal – religious or aristocratic or perhaps both – other than the purely commercial could dictate the nature and structure of society. Most historians would prefer to see the repeal of the Corn Laws as an inevitability, and Peel as a brave, principled man, convinced of the rightness of his course, though it spelled ruin for his party. He accepted no honours, and he declined the Garter,11 even though it could be said that he was the single most important political educator of his age: educator, that is, of the middle classes whom he represented, of his followers in Parliament and, significantly, of the royal family. His was the voice of moderation and common sense, not always qualities which win loud applause in political life. If the death of Wordsworth could be seen as the death of a certain type of sacred individualism, increasingly difficult in a capitalist-industrial maelstrom, the death of Peel seems like the end of a certain type of modesty and reasonableness in public life. One can’t say that, because Peel died, therefore there was a Crimean War; but one can say that there was that costly and futile war because Britain forgot the quiet common sense of Peel.

  Four years before that war, there was an incident which was so typical of Lord Palmerston, the foreign secretary, that it could be a parable designed to explain the phrase ‘gunboat diplomacy’. A Portuguese Jewish moneylender, by name Don Pacifico, living in Athens, had his house pillaged. It happened that he had been born in Gibraltar, so he applied to the British government to intervene on his behalf with the precarious and so recently independent Greece. There is no doubt that the attack on Don Pacifico by an anti-semitic mob was very unpleasant. They manhandled his wife and children, stole his wife’s jewels and set fire to his house. Many of the youths who took part in the riot were well born; one was the son of the minister for war.12

  Failing to get satisfaction from the Greek authorities, Don Pacifico applied to Lord Palmerston, and by January 1850 Palmerston had ordered a blockade of the Greek ports. He did not consult with France or Russia, the other two international custodians of Greek freedom. Nor, when a negotiation with France had been agreed, did Palmerston bother to tell the British minister (ambassador we should say) in Athens. By summer, the French had withdrawn their ambassador from London, but Don Pacifico had in large measure been compensated. The belligerent attitude of Palmerston – by extension and implication, the attitude of Britain itself – was hugely popular with the country at large. When Lord Stanley, soon to inherit the earldom of Derby from his father, moved a parliamentary vote of censure, Palmerston mounted a grand defence in the Commons. Over 2,000 volumes of Foreign Office papers were used in preparing his statement,13 which amounted to a statement of British foreign policy since Canning.

  While we have seen thrones shaken, shattered, levelled, institutions overthrown and destroyed; while in almost every country of Europe the conflict of civil war has deluged the land with blood, from the Adriatic to the Black Sea, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, this country has presented a spectacle honourable to the people of England, and worthy of the admiration of mankind.

  No mention of his Irish tenants, naked and sick, being shipped to Canada out of harm’s way. Rather,

  We have shown that liberty is compatible with order; that individual freedom is reconcilable with obedience to the law …

  And he asked the house to decide,

  whether, as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity when he could say Civis Romanus sum; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong.14

  There can have been few more technicoloured definitions of what a genius of a later generation called ‘the vicarious policemanship which is the strongest emotion of Englishmen towards another man’s muddle’.15

  Nothing could have been more different from the cocksure tones of Lord Palmerston than Sir Robert Peel’s polite common sense. Debating the Don Pacifico affair in the Commons, Peel said, ‘What is this diplomacy? It is a costly engine for maintaining peace. It is a remarkable instrument used by civilized nations for the purpose of preventing war.’16 They were his last words to Parliament. Next day, as he was riding up Constitution Hill, his horse grew restive and he fell. Peel was carried home to his house in Whitehall Gardens, where after three agonizing days, he died.

  The Victorians had invented, and come to inhabit, the newspaper age, in which it is possible to have wildly incompatible opinions displayed with garishly raw emotion. At the very height of Palmerston’s popularity the country also went into deepest mourning for Peel. Naturally, some moderate conservatives were consistent enough to regret the passing of Peel precisely because they deplored the aggression and jingoism of Palmerston’s radical imperialist liberalism (or however you might define his politics). Many, however, perhaps most, of the newspaper-reading public were not concerned with logic. They were perfectly prepared to beat a drum for Palmerston when it excited them, while seeing Peel as the embodiment of quiet English tolerance, common sense, and sound monetary views.

  Alas, great Robert now is dead

  Who modified our Laws,

  Who took the duty off our Bread

 
And gain’d so much applause

  ran one popular street ballad, ‘The Poor Man’s Lamentation for the death of Sir Robert Peel’.17 Another rhymester saw Peel’s two voltes-face, over Catholic Emancipation and over the Corn Laws, as the key factors which had signalled the liberalization of England and averted a continental-style revolution:

  Glory to him who, resolutely great,

  Twice wrecked his Party and twice saved the State;

  Whose well-timed daring kept Victoria’s crown

  Firm in the storm when Europe’s thrones went down.18

  Walter Bagehot was less kind. ‘The word which exactly fits his oratory is – specious. He hardly ever said anything which struck you in a moment to be true; he never uttered a sentence which for a moment anybody could deny to be plausible …’ It is a brilliant, and merciless, analysis. Bagehot traced Peel’s many changes of view – from being a defender of the Peterloo Massacre to being a liberal Tory, from sympathizer with the Orange Lodge to Catholic emancipator, from opponent to advocate of Free Trade. He sees Peel as a weather-vane of middle-class opinion, an able administrator, but fundamentally boring.

  The principal measures required in his age were ‘repeals’. From changing circumstances, the old legislation would no longer suit a changed community; and there was a clamour, first for the repeal of one important Act, and then of another. This was suitable to the genius of Peel.19