The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  We should probably conclude if we had seen the original 1851 exhibition through twenty-first-century eyes that none of the exhibits could rival that ‘glittering roof’ itself.

  The original conception of Paxton, so gloriously executed by the firm of Fox, Henderson and Co. of Smethwick, created a building which outsoared the Chatsworth Stove, a magnificent airy structure, entirely of iron and glass, modern, architecturally innovative and without the camp element of pastiche which characterizes almost all other great Victorian buildings. It was the largest greenhouse in the world, incorporating the very trees of Hyde Park. It was the world’s first shopping mall, with tier upon tier of shops selling all manner of wares. It was infinitely adaptable to its purpose, containing an Aladdin’s cave of variety, but it was also something of great beauty and worth in itself. When the exhibition closed on 11 October 1851, the net profit was more than £186,000 – money which was used to buy the plot of land in Kensington in which the permanent collections would be housed, and in which Prince Albert’s memory was immortalized – in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Imperial College of Science and Technology, and the Royal Albert Hall.

  The Palace itself was demolished and re-erected to a slightly different design in Sydenham, South London, where it remained until destroyed by fire in 1936. Incidentally, it was the Sydenham Crystal Palace, and not the one in Hyde Park described as a cucumber frame between two chimneys, which has been seen variously as ‘a monstrous Beaux-Arts ferro-vitreous composition’ and an important pioneering work of proto-modernism.38 Certainly if you see the photographs taken by the modernists Dell and Wainwright in the 1930s of the Crystal Palace you understand why Le Corbusier hailed its ‘triumphant harmony’. The extension which Paxton added, and the two chimneys, make the Sydenham version much less harmonious than the Hyde Park original.

  It would be wrong to think that the Crystal Palace embodied a single monist self-portrait of Victorian England. It was in some ways a glorious fluke, with various types of self-interest and showing-off – by the manufacturers, by Prince Albert, by Paxton – all coming together under Cole’s stage-management. For all the vaunted success of the cheap days, the night-trains from Yorkshire bringing iron-workers and miners, the agricultural labourers depicted staring at the machinery in the Illustrated London News, and Mary Callinan, the old lady who walked from Penzance – aged one hundred in one account, eighty-four in another – clutching her shilling entrance fee, the exhibition could not be said to be an embodiment of social harmony. The very fact that some people went on ‘shilling days’ and others had paid £1 emphasized social difference.39

  Perhaps there were many like Mr and Mrs Sandboys and family, in Henry Mayhew’s novel of the name, who came up for the exhibition but, because of their provincial innocence, and the difficulty of finding their bearings in an overcrowded capital, never actually penetrated the Crystal Palace. (Cursty Sandboys inadvertently gives his shilling ticket to Le Comte de Sanschemin, an unscrupulous Frenchman.) Much the best things about this relentlessly facetious novel are the illustrations by George Cruikshank – such as the frontispiece, ‘All the world going to see the Great Exhibition of 1851’, a globular picture of the nations of the world converging on the Crystal Palace, or the one which shows the boxes at the Royal Opera being used as dormitories (such was the pressure on accommodation), or the double illustration ‘London in 1851’, in which every spare inch of a street scene is populated and crammed, contrasted with ‘Manchester in 1851’, totally deserted save for one old man smoking, and reading his newspaper on the empty street corner.

  Mayhew’s novel captures the Francophobia which was always ready to surface in England during the Victorian period. Franz Winterhalter’s The First of May is a latter-day Adoration Scene, depicting the old Duke of Wellington kneeling before a Holy Family – Albert, Victoria, and Wellington’s infant godson Arthur, future Duke of Connaught. In the background is the Crystal Palace, and some people see this icon as meaning that the old world-view, embodied in the Duke, bows out to the new, embodied in the Prince Consort. The old belligerent attitude to Europe is replaced by international concord based on commerce.

  In spite of his misgivings about the exhibition, Wellington did visit the Crystal Palace for the opening, and went so often that he almost became part of the ‘Shew’.40 To the end of his days he took seriously his duties as warden of the Cinque Ports, the guardian of England against continental invasion. Long after the threat of a French invasion had become, to say the least, unlikely, he had strengthened fortifications on the south coast, and it was apt that he was to die in Walmer Castle, the warden’s official residence. His funeral in London was an emblem of an old England which had vanished. The poet laureate in his eulogy ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ used the funeral as a chance to beg

  O Statesmen, guard us, guard the eye, the soul

  Of Europe, keep our noble England whole,

  And save the one true seed of freedom sown

  Betwixt a people and their ancient throne.41

  In fact, by then, Britain was involved with a French alliance, and not merely an entente with the nation that Wellington had fought so doughtily forty years since, but with a Bonaparte.

  In December 1851, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been, a little shakily, elected as president of the new republic in 1848, staged a coup d’état and established himself as emperor of France. The foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, whose antics over the Don Pacifico affair and many another international incident had been so embarrassing to the government of which he was a part, told the French ambassador of his ‘entire approbation’ of Bonaparte’s action.42 He had not consulted the Queen, or the prime minister, and though he blusteringly claimed that he had only been speaking in a private capacity, such a defence in a foreign secretary was risible. Lord John Russell asked for his resignation. Victoria and Albert were cock-a-hoop. Albert did not believe that British public opinion was pro-Bonapartist and he was probably right – but Palmerston was not long gone from the political scene.43

  When Lord John’s government fell, the Tories came back into office and the Queen asked Lord Derby to form an administration. This was to be the famous ‘Who? Who?’ government, since when the Duke of Wellington was told the names of the new Cabinet, two months before he died, he had responded with those withering monosyllables.44 Hindsight is chiefly interested in the Who Who administration because it contained Disraeli in his first role as chancellor of the Exchequer. Derby’s government did not last the year, however, and by December, Lord Aberdeen had formed his Liberal–Peelite coalition Cabinet – with W.E. Gladstone replacing B. Disraeli as chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord John Russell as foreign secretary and Pam as home secretary. The Queen was not able to dismiss the ‘two dreadful old men’ as easily as she might have hoped. Moreover, though Pam lost control of the Foreign Office for the months of 1852, his policy – an alliance with the new French emperor – was still that of the government. Though the reasonable and unbelligerent figure of Aberdeen was the last man to want to break the forty years of European peace, this was the government which was to lead Britain to war.

  Marx was never more sparklingly satirical than in his analysis of the French coup d’état in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte – ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.’45 (The first ‘18th Brumaire’, according to the French Revolutionary calendar, had been the date when Napoleon I seized power). The coup by the farcical Napoleon was, as Marx said, merely the restoration in the eyes of the bourgeois of ‘Property, family, religion, order’ – you see this obsession in the sweep of Zola’s great novels. It was the alliance of royalists (whatever their sentimental horror of Bonapartism) and the Church which enabled Napoleon III’s coup to succeed, and it was the danger to property which underlay this revolution – the old propertied classes in France under the Bourbons
had been the huge landed classes. But it was capitalism which underwrote the Orleanist monarchy. In a comparable way in England, ‘The Tories … long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church and the beauties of the old English constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.’46

  Prince Albert and Queen Victoria and the Peelites all would have known the truth of that, though they would have hated having it so clearly spelled out for them. The new conservatisms of Disraeli and later of Salisbury, designed to enlist the alliance between the old landed grandees and the emergent petty capitalists of the suburbs, were the most eloquent demonstration of how true Marx’s words were. Moreover, on both sides of the Channel the European ruling classes whose rentier interests created such strange alliances depended not only on knowing their friends but on recognizing, and holding in subjection, the enemy. ‘Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes. But he cannot give to one class without taking from another.’47

  That is why we cannot understand what is taking place on the international stage in the 1850s without seeing what is happening at home. Industrial manufacturing capital, enriching the shareholders of the rentier class, needed an army of near-slaves to keep the ever-expanding industries going. Economic expansionism cannot exist without territorial expansionism. The condition of the urban poor, the problems of the colonies, the changing face of European realpolitik – what A.J.P. Taylor calls ‘the struggle for Mastery in Europe’ – are all part of the same selfish Darwinian struggle. This is why in France old political enemies joined forces behind Napoleon III, and in England governments teetered over trivialities, forming and reforming themselves around coalitions of common interest. Once Chartism had been defeated, the main political groupings – Liberals, Peelites, Tories – were all agreed on the fundamentals of economic policy. No real challenge in the mainstream of parliamentary politics was offered to the Benthamite laissez-faire ideal.

  Given Marx’s continental perspective, it is not surprising that he saw Christianity, or perhaps more accurately the Churches, as instruments of oppression. In the English context, however, there were more complex and interesting developments. The capitalist system, like the Darwinian theory which is its mythopoeic expression, depends upon the assertion rather than the denial of the will. Selfishness is its greatest, perhaps its only virtue. It is not surprising, in the decades in which the states of Northern Europe became reordered to absorb the new economic ethos, that religious belief and adherence should find themselves challenged. At the end of Yeast, Charles Kingsley’s Christian Socialist novel of 1848, the young hero, who has had his eyes opened to the plight of the (rural) poor, comes to London and hears the choir sing the afternoon service in St Paul’s Cathedral.

  Shall I tell you what they are singing? He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away. Is there no life, think you, in these words, spoken here in every afternoon in the name of God?48

  The words are delivered to the hero by a mysterious stranger who adds, ‘No, I dare not despair of you English, as long as I hear your priesthood forced by Providence, even in spite of themselves, thus to speak God’s words about an age in which the condition of the poor, and the rights and duties of man, are becoming the rallying-point for all thought and all organization.’49

  Largely under the influence of F.D. Maurice, professor of theology at King’s College, London, Kingsley espoused the Christian Socialist Movement which, though it lasted only six years as an organization, had a lasting effect on the thinking of many English Christians. Maurice has been called ‘the greatest of all teachers since Augustine … With him it was never an opinion he was offering you; it was the truth of life you were grasping.’51 Every page of Maurice’s theology is informed by the sense that these religious ideas are not esoteric but immediate. The notion that Almighty God took human flesh was difficult enough to believe; but Maurice is one of those rare beings who saw the implications of such a belief outside the purely churchy sphere: ‘The State is as much God’s creation as the Church.’ Newman’s glancing and imaginative mind has much to say on the level of personal belief, and he provides ingenious grounds for accepting the ‘development’ of doctrine. He seldom, if ever, draws any connection between these theological concerns and the real plights and problems of men and women of the nineteenth century. He wrote from the middle of the slums of Birmingham as if he were an Oxford don or – as he fantasized in his boyhood – ‘I thought life might be a dream, or I an Angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow-angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world,’52 whereas Maurice was always engaged with realities external to himself. To this degree, Maurice – the Anglican professor hounded out of his theological chair for ‘heresy’ – was in many ways more ‘Catholic’ than Newman, the Roman convert who was to die a cardinal.

  If Marx was unfair to judge England by continental standards and to see Christianity as propping up the status quo – many Victorian Christians from Ashley to Maurice to Kingsley were inspired by their faith to question the very nature of the Benthamite social structure – he would also have been wrong to suppose that the Victorian establishment – to use an unsatisfactory shorthand word – closed ranks against criticism. One of the reasons perhaps that there never was a Marxian revolution in England was the British capacity for adaptation of its system, based on really acute self-criticism. Ashley was not some fringe character – he was at the very heart of the governing class.

  ‘Have you read “Alton Locke” and “Yeast” by Kingsley?’ The Queen asked her daughter. ‘They are said to be rather strange and show his (supposed) chartist and socialist views.’53 But this did not stop her from asking Kingsley to be tutor to her children. Yes, Marx was right, a hundred per cent right, that capitalism depended on unbridled selfishness. What is missing from his robust and magnificent prose is the sense of quite complicated agonies, apparent in the Victorians’ most widely read philosophers and thinkers – above all Carlyle and Ruskin.

  13

  Marx – Ruskin – Pre-Raphaelites

  TRUE, THE ONLY cohesive opposition to the march of capitalism in the 1840s and 1850s came from communism – or its watered-down equivalents – and Christianity. But – this is one of the central questions facing the men and women of the age – were they believable? Their allure explains how such strange alliances could have been formed against the relentlessness of the factory-owners – a Bible Christian such as Ashley, motivated by reading the Gospels, standing alongside radicals and socialists whose views of other matters he might deplore, in his campaign to limit the hours worked by women and children in the cotton mills. It is a curious fact that the leader of the working men’s cause in the House of Commons, until the Factory Act of 1850 finally did bring in the desired Ten Hours measure, was a high Tory aristocrat who believed in hierarchy, deference and the literal truth of every word of the Bible. His tireless campaigns to set up ragged schools for slum-dwellers, and to prick the conscience of laissez-faire economists, took over a decade. In the first years of Victoria’s reign, the coal flickering cheerfully in your grate would, as like as not, have been dragged through underground tunnels too small for a grown man by child workers as young as six. This was brought to an end in 1844, against the fiercest opposition from the big colliery proprietors, such as Lord Londonderry. It took a further three years to persuade liberals such as Macaulay, Palmerston or Russell so much as to consider limiting the hours worked by women and children to ten hours a day. With their blinkered view of what constituted ‘liberty’ these liberals felt that legislation interfered with the personal freedoms of workers. Most of the child workers in the mills were employed not by the mill-owners themselves but by adult male spinners who subcontracted work. To make laws about such private arrangements was, in Palm
erston’s view, ‘a vicious and wrong principle’.1

  We shall fail to understand the Victorians if we do not take note of the word. Their principles were not ours. Some were candid enough to recognize that the greedy logic of their belief in laissez-faire economics was incompatible with a Christian witness. Others, perhaps a majority in the early to mid-Victorian period, tried to live with a double standard, being perfectly prepared to say that they believed the working classes were made in God’s image and likeness, while treating them with a severity comparable to that of slave-owners in the West Indian plantations.

  Sometimes we can learn more of a past generation by reading the authors who were popular at the time and have now sunk without trace, rather than reperusing the immortals. Harriet Martineau (1802–76) was one of the most highly esteemed journalists of the day, and her weathercock mind gives us the directions in which the mid-Victorian liberal wind was blowing. Born of a long line of (Huguenot) surgeons in Norwich, she was one of the most popular interpreters of the English-speaking nineteenth century to itself. A series of woodenly written short stories illustrative of the political economy of Malthus, James Mill and Ricardo would probably not reach the bestseller lists in the twenty-first century, but in the 1830s they made a very palpable hit, and as she tells us, ‘the stern Benthamites’ thanked her as a safe and faithful expositor of their doctrines. Her Half a Century of the British Empire, begun in 1848, was designed for the educated, self-educated or semi-educated bourgeoisie.