The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Wordy, authoritative, cliché-ridden, Miss Martineau had the know-all tone which so often wins journalism wide readership and short-term respect. Like many of her modern equivalents, she had all the right views – that is the views espoused by the metropolitan intelligentsia. She was a keen abolitionist – of slavery – but saw no reason why this concern for her oppressed fellow humans in American plantations should lead her to comparable feelings of compassion for English factory-workers. In 1855 she penned The Factory Controversy – A Warning Against Meddling Legislation. Factory inspectors in 1853 had drawn the attention of the secretary of state to the ‘enormous amount of accidents’ in British factories, but clever journalist that she was, Martineau knew how to turn an obvious truth – that, in spite of the best endeavours of Ashley and others, the conditions in factories were still fairly appalling – into something absurd:

  The whole number of accidents from machinery, in three years, was reported to be 11,716 of which 3,434 were of a serious character. The serious are all that require any serious notice, as the others are of so slight a nature that they would not be noticed anywhere but in a special registration like that provided by The Factory Act. For instance, 700 are cases of cut fingers. Any worker who rubs off a bit of skin from finger or thumb, or sustains the slightest cut which interferes with the spinning process for a single day, has the injury registered under the Act.2

  Martineau, a lifetime professional invalid, wrote whole books about her hypochondriacal conditions. Her journalism describes her sickroom languor – ‘O what a heavenly solace to the soul is free sympathy in its hour of need!’3 But she can confidently dismiss the conclusions of factory inspectors, and claim that what they call serious injuries are no more than a bit of skin rubbed off someone’s thumb. Likewise, as her belief in religion faded away, she became an enthusiast for mesmerism, believing that her hysterical conditions, rendering her immobile for months on end, had been cured by mesmeric trances. Mobile once more, she could tour America and Ireland, and send back precisely the dispatches the comfortable middle classes wanted to read. Touring Ireland in 1852, she found an island populated by stage Irishmen, tipsy, idle, dirty and inefficient. The chief problems of the place were a want of capital and an excess of religion.4 No one would make that complaint of the England which Miss Martineau represented, prosperous, intelligent and callous.

  Turn to the chapter in Capital entitled ‘The Working Day’ – eighty of the finest pages ever written by Marx or anyone else on the plight of nineteenth-century factory workers – and a very different picture emerges. There we read that although the three Factory Acts of 1833, 1844 and 1847 restricted the working hours of women and children in some circumstances, the liberal capitalists in the House of Commons had, with the passing of each act, clawed back some ‘concession’ in return. So, for example, when the ‘relay system’ was regulated in 1844 – making it impossible for factory-owners to work a child from 5 a.m. until noon and then again at 1 p.m. as if this second stint of work constituted a new ‘shift’ – the Lower House ‘reduced the minimum age at which the exploitation of children could begin from 9 to 8, this being done to ensure that capital could have “the additional supply of children” which capitalists are by human and divine laws entitled to demand’.5 The various factory acts never changed the basic notion that males over the age of eighteen should work a fifteen-hour day from 5.30 a.m. to 8.30 p.m. Marx, reading through the small print of the 1844 act, was also able to remind his readers that though the law now forbade the employment of children after 1 p.m. who had been employed before noon, a child of eight, beginning now at noon, might be worked from 12 to 1 – one hour; from 2 to 4 – two hours; and from 5 to 8.30 in the evening – in all the legal six and a half hours – in order to make their work simultaneous with the adult workers. So the spirit of the act which desired the protection of children being kept at factories all afternoon and all evening was defied by its letter.6

  The accumulation of evidence from factory inspectors adduced in Marx’s chapter makes the protestations of Martineau and her readers seem as ridiculous as they are offensive. We read the testimony of doctors and factory inspectors who have examined potters, manufacturers of lucifer matches, railwaymen, brick-makers … Whatever the category of worker examined, the same story is told: the exploitation of workers to the point where the urban proletariat of Victorian England have become stunted in growth and subject to a whole range of debilitating illnesses, all of which are a direct consequence of their being overworked. The doctor in the North Staffordshire Infirmary, having enumerated the pneumonia, phthisis, bronchitis and asthma, as well as disorders of kidney and stomach, to which his ‘ill-shaped and frequently ill-formed’ patients were subject, summed up the causes of these complaints in two words – ‘long hours’. The match-manufacturers of Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, Norwich, Newcastle and Glasgow all suffer from ‘phossy jaw’ – half the workers are under thirteen.7 Wallpaper manufacturers suffered from comparable chemical poisonings. The hours worked by a London baker must have made the (usually adulterated) bread roll dry in anyone’s mouth if he had read Capital over his breakfast. Taking his information from the reports delivered to Parliament – the ‘Blue Books’ – Marx reminds Londoners of what someone else endured to put bread on their table.

  The London journeyman baker’s work began at 11 p.m., when he made the dough, a laborious task lasting half to three-quarters of an hour. Then he lay down on the kneading board, with a sack for a mattress, and slept for a couple of hours. Then followed five hours of hard, rapid work, kneading, moulding and preparing loaves and rolls. Temperatures in the bakehouse were as high as 90°. When the bread was baked it had to be delivered, and a high proportion of journeymen bakers undertook this work as well, wheeling handcarts or carrying baskets of bread to shops and houses – work which lasted until 1 or 6 p.m. depending on demand. During the London ‘season’, when bread was required in larger quantities in the evenings, the work of the bakeries was continuous. London bakers, statistics showed, seldom lived beyond the age of forty-two.

  Henry Mayhew noted that as the wages of a trade went down, so the labourers extended

  their hours of work to the utmost possible limits. ‘My employer’ I was told by a journeyman tailor working for a large West-end show shop, ‘reduces my wages by one-third, and the consequence is, I put in two stitches where I used to give three.’ ‘I must work from six to eight and later,’ said a Pembroke table-maker to me, ‘to get 18 s now for my labour where I used to get 54 s a week – that’s just a third. I could in old times give my children good schooling and good meals. Now children have to be put to work very young. I have four sons working for me at present.’8

  And simplest and most life-threatening of all the hazards facing the urban Victorians was the sheer squalor resultant from their failure to understand that cholera, typhoid and typhus fever were water-borne.

  The stench of London and its waters was remarked by all writers of the period. When the Queen and Prince Albert attempted a short pleasure cruise on the Thames in 1858 they were forced to turn back to land after a few minutes, the odours were so terrible. (That year of drought, Parliament had to rise early because of the smell becoming unendurable on the terraces outside the Palace of Westminster.)9

  Mayhew’s description of Jacob’s Island, Bermondsey in South London, conveys the flavour of the mid-nineteenth-century Thames even more vividly than Our Mutual Friend, that murky river-novel:

  As we passed along the reeking banks of the sewer [i.e. the tidal ditch] the sun shone upon a narrow slip of water. In the bright light it appeared the colour of strong green tea, and positively looked as solid as black marble in the shadow – indeed, it was more like watery mud than muddy water, and yet we were assured this was the only water which the wretched inhabitants had to drink. As we gazed in horror at it, we saw drains and sewers emptying their filthy contents into it; we saw a whole tier of doorless privies in the open road, open to men and women
, built over it; we heard bucket after bucket of filth splash into it … we asked if they did drink the water? The answer was, They were obliged to drink the ditch, without it, they could beg a pailful or thieve a pailful of water.10

  The chief propagandist for proper drainage in Victorian cities was Edwin Chadwick, who drew public attention to the filthy conditions in the large manufacturing towns. But the great scientific demonstration of the fact that disease was water-borne was made (against the fiercest opposition) by Dr John Snow. (He was also the genius who improved the use of chloroform during childbirth pioneered by James Young Simpson, and acted as a merciful anaesthetist to the Queen.)

  Throughout the nineteenth century, as epidemic followed epidemic, there was heated debate about whether cholera was contagious.11 Generally speaking, the contagionists were viewed by contemporaries as archaic, even antisocial. The anti-contagionists – modern, bourgeois, mercantile – were reluctant to admit the possibility – as we observed in the last chapter – that trade and traffic could spread pollution, disease, death.

  Snow demonstrated his findings in his book On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, published in 1849. The crucial example of the contagionist vs. anti-contagionist argument was an outbreak of cholera in Albion Terrace, Wandsworth Road, South London in that year. Cholera extended to all the houses in which the water was tainted. Numbers 1–17 Albion Terrace were supplied with water from a copious spring in the road in front of the terrace, the water of which was conducted by a brick barrel-drain between Nos. 7 and 8 and then flowed right and left to supply tanks in the ground behind each house. Snow followed the stoneware pipes and the leaden pipes to the pump in each back kitchen; then he followed the drains from the privy to the cesspool behind each house. Behind Nos. 1 and 7 the cesspools were quite full and the overflow drain from that at No. 1 was choked up. Behind No. 7 was a pipe for bringing surplus water from the tanks, communicating with a drain from the cesspool. All seventeen houses found the water disagreeable to drink. During the heavy rains of 2 August 1849, a drain burst at No. 8 and overflowed the kitchens.

  Two days after the drain burst, there was the first outbreak of cholera, which was fatal in fourteen hours. At No. 8, a lady had choleraic diarrhoea, but recovered. The old lady at No. 6 died on 4 August. The lady at No. 3 by now suffered from diarrhoea – she was dead by 6 August. There were three or four other cases in the terrace, all fatal. More than half the inhabitants of the part of the terrace in which cholera prevailed were attacked by it, and upwards of half the cases were fatal.

  The doctor giving evidence to the General Board of Health, Dr Milroy, was an anti-contagionist. He attributed the mortality in Albion Terrace to three causes – an open sewer in Battersea Fields, 400 feet to the north of the terrace; odour from the sinks at the back of the houses; and an accumulation of rubbish in the cellar at No. 13. Milroy believed that cholera was caused by ‘miasma’. He did not explain why hundreds of houses near the stinking sewer of Battersea Fields did not develop cholera; nor did the disease break out in the thousands of households where the kitchens flooded after rainstorms. The crucial fact was the connecting water-pipes between the houses.

  The majority of the medical profession refused to accept Snow’s findings. It was not until the cholera microbe was isolated and identified by Koch in 1883 that Snow’s brilliant hunch – turning to circumstantial deduction – was proved.12 Snow tried – and Chadwick too – to spread the gospel of cleanliness as a guard against waterborne disease: the creation of good drains; lodging houses for vagrants; public washhouses; quarantine for local visitors. The coal miners were the group who suffered more from cholera than any other – Snow urged that their work conditions be divided into four-hour shifts so that they did not need to use the coal pits as privies. In parts of London where the classes washed their hands – Belgravia – the rate of death by cholera was 28 in 10,000, compared with 186 per 10,000 in poorer districts. But, of course, such measures could not be introduced without control, and – as in the case of the Irish famine – the true laissez-faire liberal would, quite literally, prefer death to state interference. The lampoon in Punch in 1852 was only an inch away from reality:

  It is with pride, therefore, I repeat, that whatever may be the case in the country (where I regret to see the hateful Public Health Act seems to be extending its ravages), in London we are enjoying the enormous privilege of self-government, and that if the epidemic cholera should visit us again, we may confidently show him to his old haunts of 1832 and 1849, and so convince him that, in this free country, he, too, is at liberty ‘TO DO WHAT HE LIKES WITH HIS OWN’.

  Sewage and drainage provided the inspiration for one of Victorian art’s most self-conscious efforts to make a social comment in paint: Work by Ford Madox Brown, a canvas begun in 1852 to celebrate the Public Health Acts inspired by Chadwick’s campaigns, was not completed until 1863 – and not exhibited until 1865.13 The idea came to the artist when he saw men digging in Heath Street, halfway up the Mount in Hampstead.14 He painted it under the mistaken impression that they were constructing a fresh water supply, whereas they were in fact constructing new sewage pipes. The picture, a punctiliously executed and still recognizable London view in a blaze of summer sunshine, is heavy with symbolism. Poor ragged children, characters from Mayhew, scrabble in the dirt in the foreground; behind them loll the rich, their superfluity of wealth depicted by the groaning tray of the pastry-cook. To the left, posters on the wall suggest means of improvement for the working classes – ‘The Working Men’s College’, the inspiration of F.D. Maurice, who stands to the extreme right of the picture, his gentle intelligent face curiously reposeful compared with the contemptuous tormented figure at his side, his teeth orange with tobacco smoke, his Diogenes-contempt for Benthamite society apparent in his grin. This is Thomas Carlyle. In the background of the picture are men carrying election posters for Bobus, the imaginary Benthamite parliamentary candidate lampooned in Carlyle’s Past and Present. Carlyle’s pessimism about Parliament and democratic processes had now become absolute. ‘What can the incorruptiblest Bobuses elect if it be not some Bobissimus, should they find such?’ – by which he means that the Victorian concept of an ‘aristocracy of Talent’, if guided solely by ‘Midas-eared philosophies’ of money-love, will only result in a society which is spiritually rotten and dead.15

  Past and Present is in part an essay about the medieval chronicles of St Edmundsbury Abbey in Suffolk and in part a rant against the times. Is it possible to recapture the noble spirit of the Middle Ages without their unbelievable superstitions? ‘Awake, ye noble workers, warriors in the one true war,’ says Carlyle.16 He looks to a time when ‘the Inventive Genius of England, with the whir of its bobbins and billy-rollers shoved somewhat into the background of the brain, will contrive and devise, not cheaper produce exclusively, but fairer distribution of the produce at its present cheapness!’17 He condemns utterly both the Mammon of the capitalists and the false idols of Christian revivalists – Puseyites, Catholics and others. The ‘elect’ in Carlyle’s heaven are those who see life’s earnestness.

  Not a May-game is this man’s life; but a battle and a march, a warfare with principalities and powers. No idle promenade through fragrant orange-groves and green flowery spaces, waited on by the choral Muses and the rosy Hours; it is a stern pilgrimage through burning sandy solitudes, through regions of thick-ribbed ice. He walks among men; loves men, with inexpressible soft pity, – as they cannot love him.18

  Carlyle’s search was for just that dignity and individualism which, we suggested, was Wordsworth’s human legacy in The Prelude. His belief that the human race – and the British in particular – had gone astray at the time of the Industrial Revolution was widely shared, and his vision of a medieval world in which pure workers look to a hero as their leader – in the case of this book the incorrupt Abbot Samson – has many resonances. ‘There is no longer any God for us!’ he bleakly exclaims, but the truths embodied in the old Gothic ruins we see at St Edmu
ndsbury would still have the power to revivify society.19

  Much of this pattern of thought finds its echo in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – who were young enough to be Carlyle’s sons. The ‘brotherhood’ began in 1848 at 83 Gower Street, when a group of art students vowed ‘to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues’. Of the original seven, three members of the PRB – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, aged twenty, John Everett Millais, aged nineteen, and William Holman Hunt, aged twenty-one – went on to be famous artists. Other painters whom we think of as ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ – such as Ford Madox Brown himself – never in fact joined the Brotherhood, which was never a very tightly knit guild, and which dissolved with the years.

  One sees the way in which these young painters set out to criticize the spirit of the age if one considers two of the most celebrated paintings of William Holman Hunt, companion pieces executed within two or three years of one another. The Light of the World was the most popular of all Victorian paintings. Engraved by W.H. Simmons and W. Ridgway, copied three times by Hunt himself, and photographically reproduced, it was an icon of faith in a time of doubt, the image of Christ which has hung in a thousand churches and chapels, and on millions of bedroom walls. (In 1905–7 the copy now hanging in Keble College, Oxford, toured the colonies and was viewed by hundreds of thousands who flocked to see it as a sacred object.)

  The original models for the figure of Jesus were Christina Rossetti, pious poetess, sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and a whey-faced young woman, herself a painter of some ability, called Elizabeth Siddal.20 Her family had an ironmongering business in Southwark and, like her sister, she originally worked in dressmaking and millinery. She probably began to work as an artist’s model because she herself aspired to be a painter. She both modelled and studied in Newman Street, just north of Oxford Street, where there were drawing schools and where both Ford Madox Brown and Rossetti had studios. To say that there were few opportunities of self-improvement for young female milliners in nineteenth-century London is an understatement. Possibly the first time we see her in a painting of note is in Hunt’s British Family succouring a Christian from the persecution of Druids. In 1852 she posed in a bath for John Everett Millais as Ophelia, her father taking strong exception, since she might have died of hypothermia. Her face is one of the most haunting of nineteenth-century England. She was a tall woman, in an age which praised the petite. Her lower lip tucked beneath the upper ‘as if it strove to kiss itself’ – the words are Rossetti’s, destined to fall in love with her and, years later when love had faded, to marry her. She had translucent skin, freckles, and abundant red hair.