The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Nowadays, such views are commonplace, even among the clergy. In the nineteenth century they were as revolutionary as George Eliot’s unorthodox approach to sexual relations. (Escaping her love affair with Chapman, she lived for many years, even though he had a wife still living, with George Henry Lewes, journalist and German scholar, biographer of Goethe.) Attempts to see Christianity itself as based on a factual mistake – the mistake of supposing Christ to be divine – would inevitably provoke stormy reactions from those who believed that Western civilization itself was founded on the divinity of Jesus and the values he gave to the world. When a very mild, indeed quite possibly orthodox book about Jesus was published – Ecce Homo – Ashley decried it as ‘the most pestilential book ever vomited, I think, from the jaws of hell’.36 Great Christian that he was, Ashley’s entire motive for establishing Ragged Schools, rescuing women and children from their servitude in mines and factories, was based on the premise that God Himself had chosen to come to Earth as a poor person of no reputation, thereby not merely redeeming the human race from sin, but teaching it that every child born into the world is made in God’s image and likeness, every child has dignity and worth, and rights. Remove the truth of Christianity and, for a Christian of Ashley’s generation, you have destroyed the very reason for believing in virtue itself. The Benthamite jungle has triumphed.

  Unbelief had been taken for granted among the sophisticated Whiggish upper crust which Lord Ashley knew well and which he found so detestable. The Queen herself had been given in marriage to Prince Albert by the most Whiggish of her uncles, the Duke of Sussex, a bibliophile with a huge collection of bibles. In the margin of his The Book of Common Prayer, this royal duke had drawn a fatal hand, pointing at the Athanasian Creed, with the comment, ‘I don’t believe a word of it.’37

  Ashley’s description of the death of Lord Melbourne (his wife’s uncle) in 1848 prepares us for how horrible the Darwinian vision of humanity was for a Christian man. ‘He died and gave no sign; all without was coldness and indifference; God only can discover what was within. Those who stood around his bed were either ignorant or thoughtless … It was not the death of a heathen; he would have had an image or a ceremony. It was the death of an animal.’38

  The cynicism of an educated or upper-class coterie threatened to become endemic among the middle class, thanks partly to the efforts of unbelievers such as Harriet Martineau and Marian Evans in The Westminster Review. It would be misleading to suggest that in the 1850s ‘atheism was the religion of the suburbs’, as G.K. Chesterton claimed was the case for the next generation. But unbelief was widespread. What is perhaps most striking to the eyes of hindsight about the responses to Evans’s translations of Strauss and Feuerbach is not the hostile reactions of the few but the silent acquiescence of the many. Yet, enough people shared Marx’s view that religion was the opium of the people for conventional believers to be worried. Doubt had been the unspoken secret of sophisticates in the 1820s and 30s, the modish belief of the periodical-reading middle classes in the 1850s. What if it spread to the working classes too? Was not the concept of deference, based on religion, the social glue which held society together? In Catholic France, maybe: in Orthodox Russia, perhaps. The agonized middle-class minds who thought like this (Darwin did – it was one of his chief motives for keeping his evolutionary theories secret so long) had not, as Mayhew had done, gone out and confronted working-class people in England. Had they done so, they would have found religious practice (except among Irish immigrants) all but unknown, and indifference to religious ideas all but total. Dr Pusey was right to say that in ‘the alleys of London … the Gospel is as unknown as in Tibet’.39

  Yet, on the surface of things, at least among the middle classes, Victorian England still looked as though it was a Christian culture. Churches were built, Christian books printed, in abundance. But there were signs of edginess. In academic spheres, both in England and America and on the continent, the obsession continued with Hegel, the ‘true philosopher of the modern consciousness … The crisis that Hegel was striving to describe [was] the crisis of a civilisation that has discovered the God upon whom it depended to be also its own creation.’40 A self-confident religion, such as Judaism in the great Rabbinic age, or Catholicism at the time of the schoolmen, enjoys vigorous debate with itself. It is not timorous. It might take sides, and argue with trenchancy, but it does not need to bully. The Victorian heresy-hunts should have warned those who conducted them that the ground they defended so loudly was sinking sand. Unable to face the arguments of Strauss or Feuerbach head-on, the hardline Orthodox chose to persecute the faithful innovators and original thinkers within their own midst. Two obvious examples spring to mind – those of George MacDonald and F.D. Maurice. Both, interestingly, came unstuck for the same sort of reasons – a refusal to gratify their more vindictive co-religionists by pretending to believe in Hell – and both at about the same period – in the years just before the outbreak of the Crimean War – a war which itself was entangled from the outset with religious fundamentalisms.

  George MacDonald (1824–1905) – the poet and visionary, not the Methodist minister of the same name whose daughters had so remarkable a series of marriages and progenyfn1 – prepared for the Congregational ministry, but his time at the Arundel Congregational Chapel was not a happy one. The congregation offered to lower his salary of £150 (he was by now married) unless he abandoned his declared belief in a future state of ‘probation’ for heathens: it was altogether too merciful, and too much like the Popish Purgatory for the chapel-goers of Arundel. This is the writer whose visionary novel Phantastes (1858) baptized the imagination of C.S. Lewis many decades later. MacDonald went on being a Christian – for twenty-first-century readers he must seem an embarrassingly Christian writer – but for his own flock he was a heretic.41

  Through the influence of F.D. Maurice, MacDonald became a lay member of the Church of England. But Maurice himself was to suffer at the hands of the heresy-hunters. As a professor at King’s College in the Strand, he had pointed out that the Greek word (aiōnios) when applied to punishment, referred to the quality, not the duration. In Theological Essays (1853) he argued that to believe that future punishment would be endless was a superstition. He found himself being fiercely ejected from his professorial chair. Tennyson, who was a friend – Maurice was godfather to the poet’s son Hallam – felt indignant on his behalf. With perhaps semi-consciousness of his own absurdity on this occasion, Tennyson wrote:

  Come, when no graver cares employ,

  Godfather, come and see your boy:

  Your presence will be sun in winter,

  Making the little one leap for joy.

  For, being of that honest few,

  Who give the Fiend himself his due,

  Should eighty-thousand college-councils

  Thunder ‘Anathema’, friend, at you;

  Should all our churchmen foam in spite

  At you, so careful of the right,

  Yet one lay-heart would give you welcome

  (Take it and come) to the Isle of Wight …42

  Only a very edgy Christianity would try to discard two such obviously deep Christians as MacDonald and Maurice: but we watch this tendency of heresy-hunting going on all over the nineteenth century, in Protestant sects, in the Russian Orthodox Church that persecuted Tolstoy, in the Roman Catholic Church that invented the heresy of modernism and denounced almost every development of modern life from railways and electricity to democracy. Nineteenth-century Christianity, unlike its equivalents in the twelfth century, could not adapt or absorb the new ideas. Fundamentalism, as it is now called, was a sure sign of uncertainty within the fold of faith, as well as being a reaction against abandonment of religious belief without its confines.

  And one rather interesting symptom of this ‘fundamentalism’ was a revival of interest in the very sites where the Incarnate God had walked the Earth. Holman Hunt shared some of this fascination and set off for the Holy Land to paint The Scapegoat on 13
January 1854. All his friends tried to discourage him. ‘If you go to the Holy Land now, you will paint things you will be ashamed of in seven years,’ warned Ruskin.43 What began as a sacred pilgrimage swiftly turned, as so much in Hunt’s life did, to unintentional farce.

  Hunt’s passion for authenticity and accuracy demanded that the pure white goat, acquired with some difficulty in Jerusalem, had to be carried with the luggage on the perilous journey southwards to the Dead Sea. Today, tourists whizz through the desert in air-conditioned cars and buses to the shores of the Dead Sea. The former Sodom and Gomorrah, emblems of desolation as those biblical cities of the Plain destroyed by Jehovah in his wrath, are now health spas. For Hunt the journey was perilous. The desert had vultures in the sky, hyenas and bandits in the rocks, poisonous insects flitting through the air. The goat was not made of such strong stuff as Annie Miller (who had taken advantage of Hunt’s absence to return to her old profession in London, forming an affectionate liaison with Lord Ranelagh – a viscount who enjoyed drinking champagne from her slippers at Bertolini’s, a smart restaurant). It was too weak to walk. Exposed all day to the heat while Hunt captured the background – ‘a God-forsaken area of awful and silent solitude, a Dantesque desolation shrouded in mist’ – the unfortunate animal died.44 The next goat had an easier task; Hunt painted it in the garden of his lodgings at Jerusalem, with its hoofs carefully embedded in a tray of Dead Sea salt. The two Scapegoat canvases are not among Hunt’s best work. Rather than being heavy with religious symbolism, they simply look like goats, against somewhat lurid backgrounds reminiscent of the visionary canvases of John Martin. Amusing as it is to contemplate Hunt’s visit to Palestine, it is not chiefly about his interest in the place in the mid-1850s that history is concerned. As Ruskin reminds us, as the painter toiled in the desert of the Dead Sea, the cliffs above Balaclava and Sebastopol were white with tents. The Crimean War had begun.

  *

  Western preoccupation with Jerusalem and the Promised Land showed a mingling of political, religious and colonial interest which in part seems a bizarre reflection of the medieval Crusades, in part a dire harbinger of the still unresolved conflicts of the Middle East. As early as 1841, the Prussian minister Herr Bunsen succeeded in his diplomatic efforts to establish a joint Anglo-German bishopric in Jerusalem. The incumbent was to alternate – a Lutheran followed by an Anglican. If this seemed an attractive idea to the British government – whose head of state after all was the daughter and wife of those who had begun as German Lutherans – it filled the Oxford High Churchmen with theological fury. John Henry Newman gave it as one of his chief reasons for leaving the Church of England and joining that of Rome, this airy assumption by the politicians that a Lutheran ‘bishop’ could possibly be a bishop in the full Catholic and Apostolic sense of that term.45

  Others could see that what was primarily in the minds of the statesman was not the theological definition of ‘valid orders’ so much as staking out territorial possession. If the Ottoman Empire, of which the entire Eastern Mediterranean formed a part, was weak and crumbling, then the Prussians and the English wanted to make it plain that they had a stake in the Holy City, even if nearly all the other bishops in the place – Latin, Greek, Copt, Armenian, Syriac, Maronite – would unquestionably consider the Northern European pretensions to episcopal status as questionable as their political interests. Ever since the ‘Holy Land’ was invented as a pilgrimage-centre by the Empress Helena in the fourth century, it had been the scene of acrimony and violence among the rival religious groups. Indeed a visitor from another culture, or planet, who did not know what the function of the ‘Holy Land’ was, could be forgiven for supposing that it had been devised specifically as a battleground, where worshippers of supposedly the same all-loving deity came to denounce, abuse and murder one another.

  Throughout four centuries, it had been the task of the Ottoman sultans to preside over these unedifying squabbles, and to impose, for the sake of civil order, a culture of mutual tolerance on the inhabitants of their empire. In cities as various as Constantinople itself, Alexandria and Sarajevo, Christians, Jews and Muslims had been taught by their Turkish rulers that where religious difference was in question there really was only one political option: live and let live. Muslims and Jews were nearly always able to accept this, in relation to one another and to the Christians. The followers of Christ, however, while finding it possible to live at peace with their fellow monotheists of the Islamic or Judaic persuasion, could not always resist outbursts of violence against their co-religionists, and the inter-denominational hatred grew hotter, the closer they came to their most sacred shrines.

  An agreement with the Porte (as the Imperial court at Constantinople was known) between the French government and the sultans, signed in 1740, gave the French ‘sovereign authority’ over the Holy Land. For this reason a silver star, adorned with the royal arms of France, was placed over the very spot where Christ had supposedly been born in Bethlehem. This precedent, of Western Roman Catholics, in the person of Franciscan friars, seeing themselves as the natural guardians of the holiest sites in Christendom, was a throwback to the disputes at the time of the Crusades. It did not alter the fact that apart from the shrine-guardians themselves in their humble brown habits, knotted with rope in imitation of Francis of Assisi, almost no Christians in the actual region were Roman Catholic, or even in communion with Rome. The huge majority were members of one or another of the autocephalous Orthodox churches – mainly Greek Orthodox, some Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian and others – or they belonged to one of the other Eastern churches such as the Armenian or Coptic traditions. To all these, the claim of French friars to look after buildings where nearly all the worshippers came from the Christian East was an outrage which mingled political with religious arrogance.

  In 1852, Napoleon III wooed conservative opinion at home by asking for the keys of the church at Bethlehem to be returned to the French clergy. For a quiet life, the Sultan agreed, only to be greeted by protests from the Tsar. It gave Nicholas I the excuse to ask the Porte for certain guarantees, including the assignment to Russia of the general protectorate over Christians in the Turkish Empire.

  There certainly seems a strong element of paradox, if not gross humbug, in an increasingly secular Protestant Britain choosing to involve itself in this dispute. Somehow, however, the British managed to persuade themselves that Russian expansionist ambitions were a direct threat to their interests. It was thought that the passage to India and the other trade routes would be in Russian hands if the Tsar continued to bully the Sultan. ‘When the Czar makes Russian lakes of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, and holds Egypt and Syria, our merchants will rue their blind folly in declining to stop him while it was yet possible,’ opined that newly self-appointed expert on war and foreign affairs, Harriet Martineau, in The Westminster Review, January 1854 – this was supposedly the voice of intelligent liberal opinion. The radical petit-bourgeois Reynolds’ News denounced Prince Albert, whom it believed, rightly, to be urging moderation and negotiation on Lord Aberdeen’s government. Aberdeen himself loathed the idea of war, and yet rumours began to circulate that he had imprisoned Prince Albert in the Tower for high treason while the Cabinet put itself on a war footing.46

  ‘The state of tension is undoubtedly great, and scarcely to be long endured; but I persist in thinking that it cannot end in actual war,’ Aberdeen had written, only in November 1853. ‘War … would not only be an act of insanity, but would be utterly disgraceful to all of us concerned,’47 The Times believed. Yet by Christmas, France and Britain had tied themselves into an alliance with Turkey which made war an inevitability. The Turks had been at war against Russia since October 1853. By the time the Russians sank the Turkish fleet at Sinope – it has been called the Pearl Harbor of the war – British public opinion saw it as a massacre, and the rest – the landing of a huge Anglo-French expeditionary force, headed for the Balkans and the Black Sea – looks like an inevitability.

  fn1 This,
the other George Macdonald, the Wesleyan minister of Wolverhampton, was the father of Alice, who became Rudyard Kipling’s mother; Georgiana, who married Edward Burne-Jones; Agnes, wife of Sir Edward Poynter; and Louisa Baldwin, mother of Stanley Baldwin the prime minister.

  14

  The Crimean War

  M. ALEXIS SOYER, chef de cuisine at the Reform Club in Pall Mall, was far from home. To be precise, he was riding by a new-built road and becoming spattered with mud as he descended from the ‘Genoese heights’, as they were called, to the harbour of the small Crimean port of Balaclava. At the bottom of the ravine, he found his way blocked by French and Sardinian wagons, unloading wine and shipping stores. It was a long while before M. Soyer got through the traffic jam to the Commissariat.

  The reports of the Crimean campaign in The Times by William Howard Russell had been an historical innovation. Never before had the public heard such candid, or such immediate, descriptions of the reality of war, the bungling as well as the heroism, the horrible deaths by disease, as well as the bloody consequences of battle. Russell’s reports of the complete inadequacy of hospital facilities, and the contrast between the woeful British treatment of the sick and wounded and the French military hospitals run by Sisters of Mercy, had prompted Florence Nightingale to pester the Secretary-at-War into allowing young women of good families to go as nurses to Scutari, on the shores of the Bosporus. Russell’s legendary dispatches had also alerted Soyer to the knowledge that allied troops could do with some advice about food and provisions. The daily allowance for each English soldier was 1 lb of meat, 1 lb of bread, coffee, salt and sugar. Each man had to prepare this food himself, usually in difficult and – once the Crimean winter had set in – often in impossible conditions.

  Soyer, as well as being a cook to the famous, and to the greatest of the new Liberal clubs, was also a man who cared for the unfortunate. He had taken soup kitchens to Ireland, where he had pioneered a practical stove – two steam boilers with a removable container on top. At the outbreak of the Crimean War, he saw that his stove would be invaluable as a way of providing hot food for large numbers of men encamped or entrenched in the field. He adapted many of his recipes from a book he had lately prepared to promote cheap and nutritious eating – Shilling Cookery (published 1854). One of his best inventions was a gigantic vegetable cake. Each hundredweight of vegetables was divided as follows – 20 lb carrots, 20 lb turnips, 10 lb parsnips, 15 lb onions, 20 lb cabbage, 10 lb leeks, with a pound of aromatic seasoning, made up of thyme, pepper, bayleaf and cloves, pulverized. This mixture was made into a dried cake of easily divisible portions, each portion steamed into life when needed.