The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Another way of putting it if one were not, as Morley was, a paid-up Liberal, was that the English at this date took an ambivalent view of the disturbance of ‘the aristocratic settlement’, to use Disraeli’s phrase.21 The English preserved in large measure their ‘aristocratic settlement’ while advancing towards modern democracy. They were not confronted, as the Americans were, with a stark choice, because they did not have slaves, or indeed large numbers of black people, living in their towns and villages. Rossetti’s little black model was an exotic who stood out in a London street, which is how the artist came to spot him.

  At Balmoral in September 1863 there was another instance of how strange a black face could seem to the untravelled:

  Princess Alice has got a black boy here who was given to her, and he produces a great sensation on the Deeside where the people never saw anything of the kind and cannot conceive it. A woman, and an intelligent one, cried out in amazement on seeing him, and said she would certainly have fallen down, but for the Queen’s presence. She said nothing would induce her to wash his clothes as the black would come off! This story the Queen told me in good spirits.22

  The author is Gladstone himself. Black people were people, on the whole, who were abroad. Many Victorians would have shared the kindly minded and in all respects Liberal Thackeray’s view – ‘Sambo is not my man & my brother; the very aspect of his face is grotesque and inferior’ Many, too, if they had visited Virginia as Thackeray did in 1852–3, would have concluded, ‘they are not suffering as you are impassioning yourself for their wrongs as you read Mrs Stowe: they are grinning & joking in the sun’. He wondered how they would survive after abolition, believing that the need to compete with whites in the labour market would lead to ‘the most awful curse and ruin … which fate ever yet sent’ the black man.

  By the cruellest of ironies, these views, which seem so unenlightened to us, were borne out by events in America. The Northern victory which landed Jefferson Davis in jail and in irons led to the destruction of those rich estates and plantations where benign slave-ownership was at least possible. The existence of the Ku Klux Klan would have been unimaginable in the old South. It sprang up, like National Socialism in Germany, in reaction against the sheer lack of magnanimity of the supposedly liberal victor: and as a result of economic hardship. The plight of the poor, white and black, in the Southern states over the next hundred years was unimaginably horrible. As the left-wing black historian W.E.B. Du Bois was to put it in Black Reconstruction, written in 1935, ‘God wept; but that mattered little to an unbelieving age; what mattered most was that the world wept and is still weeping and blind with tears and blood. For there began to rise in America … a new capitalism and a new enslavement of labour.’23

  There were indeed changes in the 1860s. The ‘social revolution’ seen by Morley in America drove the labour force in the same direction in which the British and European labour force had been driven in the earlier decades of industrialization, but with fewer protections and much less willingness on the part of the big capitalists or the governing class to appease its proletariat. The ‘aristocratic settlement’, though as Ashley had seen, totally opposed to the selfish cut and thrust of capitalism, nevertheless provided checks, in England, to an unbridled market economy. If it is true that Christianity and communism provided the only real opposition in dialectical terms to the Market, the existence of an aristocracy provided a background against which pure Darwinian competition was tempered by a notion of noblesse or nouvelle richesse oblige. Not only did many aristocrats remain in positions of real power and influence in the nineteenth century but, with their new-found wealth, many of the new rich chose to live their own versions of an aristocratic life. Of course this involved a system of hierarchy which to modern eyes appears arcane; also, we moderns might bridle at the concept of patronage. But it is no accident that when the British chose formally to dismantle their aristocratic system after the Second World War, they modelled the state, with its system of welfare and patronage, less on the Soviet monolith than on the old-fashioned Christian aristocrat who looked after the poor on his estate from cradle to grave, built them schools and cottages, and provided them with specially created work projects when economic crisis dried up the demand for work in mills, factories or mines. Attlee and Sir Stafford Cripps were more the heirs of the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury than they were of Karl Marx.

  A major crisis in capitalism occurred during the Cotton Famine when many Northern landlords, Gladstone included, devised schemes of work. At a rally in Manchester on 2 December 1862 Derby praised the ‘noble manner, a manner beyond all praise in which this destitution has been borne by the population of this great country’. He gave £5,000 at one time to the relief fund, the largest single subscription, it was said, made by a single Englishman to a public fund for a single purpose or a single time.24 It inspired others to give – altogether Derby was to raise £130,000, and donate £12,000.25 The numbers of those seeking relief rose from half a million in January 1813 to 1,260,000 in 1865. There was, no doubt, practical self-preservation instinct at work here. Derby feared the mob. As the greatest landowner in Lancashire he was always careful to keep quiet about his personal sympathies for the Confederacy, knowing that some of the working classes had sympathies with the ‘democratic’ Northern states.

  Thus – to return for a moment to the little black boy in Rossetti’s The Beloved – we can legitimately find, in the work of this least political of painters, echoes of the socio-political world in which the artist took so little interest. There is, for a start, the object itself, the gilded, framed icon: an erotic or semi-pagan altarpiece intended not for a church but for the house of a financier, a banker, Mr Rae of Merseyside. The picture supposedly illustrates a biblical text – ‘My beloved is mine and I am his: let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth’: but it is designed as a Christmas present for a Victorian capitalist’s wife: it is not merely an exploration through symbol of erotic and spiritual desire, it is also a social status symbol and an expensive object of domestic furniture. Rossetti’s very detachment from the contemporary political debate lends the little black boy, by paradox, a greater eloquence for us than he would have if he had been made to carry a burden of symbolism – such as Wedgwood’s famous ceramic medallion ‘man and a brother’ in chains. Rossetti’s sister Christina and his brother William as well as Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt, Browning – to name a few in his circle – were keen abolitionists. Whistler on the other hand had a brother in the Confederate army, and Ruskin would have followed Carlyle’s line – of which more later. Rossetti chose to remain aloof, laughing when his friends quarrelled about the issue.26

  In a sense, however, the aloofness was its own form of political comment. The British response to the American Civil War struck a liberal like Morley, in retrospect, as astonishing. He might well have echoed The Morning Herald, when the war had been won – ‘We have been false to our principles and neglected an opportunity … we have been guilty of a crime as well as a blunder, and assuredly we or our children will pay for both.’27

  History ridiculed this liberal angst. When it suited the United States to become the close allies of Great Britain, they did so, without too many memories of the ambivalent attitude of Palmerston and Russell to the Civil War.

  What the distance of a century and a half suggests is that the British could afford to shed tears over Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a nursery-book, but perhaps not to inquire too deeply into their own highly ambivalent attitude to the peoples and races of the world whom, by commerce or empire, they had subdued without the means of overt slavery. We have observed how British self-congratulation at having escaped an 1848 revolution needs to be tempered by a recognition of the many areas of conflict in different parts of the globe – Canada, the Caribbean, South Africa, and throughout the Indian subcontinent – where there were disturbances and minor wars every bit as ‘revolutionary’ as what happened in Berlin, Vienna or Paris in 1848. Moreover, post 1857–8 in India, we noted that a cha
nge had come over the British attitude. Those who saw the Indians, with their ancient dynasties and principalities, their culture, languages and religions, as independent beings, to be won over in commercial arrangements by the East India Company, were now heavily outnumbered by those who believed that the Indians were savages who must be subdued – either on Benthamite principles of social economy or for reasons of Christian evangelicalism or through an amalgam of the two. The culture of British imperialism had evolved, and with it, the need for the British to persuade themselves that the white man was superior to the black man.

  Anthony Trollope, for example, visited the West Indies in 1858 and concluded that the ‘liberated’ black workers were unable to reason and that they were innately lazy. ‘To recede from civilization and became again savage – as savage as the laws of the community can permit – has been to his taste. I believe that he would altogether retrograde if left to himself.’28

  A writer who probably had more influence than Trollope, perhaps more than any other, in shaping the way that the British thought about the other people in the world was George Alfred Henty (1832–1902), who began his writing career in the 1860s. Henty – educated at Westminster and Caius, Cambridge, the son of a wealthy stockbroker – had been commissioned in the Purveyor’s Department of the army, and gone to the Crimea during the war. There he had drifted into journalism, sending back reports for the Morning Advertiser and the Morning Post before catching fever and being invalided home. He continued to work in the Purveyor’s Department until the mid-Sixties, when the life of the war correspondent and the writer of boys’ adventure stories seemed overwhelmingly more interesting and better paid. Four generations of British children grew up with Henry’s irresistible stories, beautifully produced, bound and edited, on their shelves.

  The Henty phenomenon – over seventy titles celebrating imperialistic derring-do – really belongs to the 1880s, but deserves a mention here not only because of his radical and political views, but because of the direction taken by his career as a writer. The Henty story, by the time he had got into his stride, followed the formula that a young English lad in his early teens, freed from the shackles of public school or home upbringing by the convenient accident of orphanhood, finds himself caught up in some thrilling historical episode. The temporal sweep is impressive, ranging from Beric at Agincourt to The Briton: a story of the Roman Invasion; but the huge majority are exercises in British imperialist myth-building: By Conduct and Courage, A Story of the Days of Nelson, By Pike and Dyke, By Sheer Pluck, A Tale of the Ashanti War, Condemned as a Nihilist, The Dash for Khartoum, For Name and Fame: or through the Afghan Passes, Jack Archer, A Tale of the Crimea, Through the Sikh War. A Tale of the Punjaub (sic); The Tiger of Mysore, With Buller in Natal, With Kitchener in the Soudan, and so on.

  The stereotypes are not necessarily what a twenty-first-century reader would expect: Henty is keenly Turcophile, for example, and holds in contempt those English in India – whether mercantile or military – who do not trouble to acquaint themselves with Indian languages and culture. This, for many modern readers, will make all the more distressing Henty’s view that ‘the negro is an inferior animal and a lower grade in creation than the white man’.29 It seems strange to think of his books standing on the same nursery-shelves as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but both were staple fare for English children.

  By the standards of a later generation, European childhood, up to the 1860s, was like human life itself, nasty, brutish and short. Not only was infant mortality high. Childhood itself, if we define childhood in modern terms as a time of play, of learning, of innocent idleness and amusement, was virtually non-existent for the majority. Two of the most celebrated early nineteenth-century childhoods are those of Charles Dickens and John Stuart Mill. We tend to think of them as freakish, but really the only thing which was unusual about them was their genius. Millions of children in the nineteenth century had the experience of working in a grown-up world when aged ten. Thousands of middle-class boys like Mill would have been expected to conform in manner and even in dress to the mores of middle-aged parents.

  Childhood as Americans or Europeans of the twenty-first century understand the term is really quite a new phenomenon in human history and began – roughly speaking – in the 1860s. It was the privilege of the ever-expanding middle classes and of the upper classes. The working classes continued to go to labour in factories from an early age – though they might receive some rudimentary study in the afternoons. As soon as may be, they left the parental roof and began themselves to breed. ‘No one who has ever attended the morning service at Manchester Cathedral will forget the ceremony of asking the banns of marriage,’ wrote R. Arthur Arnold in 1864. ‘When the happy couples make their appearance after the third publication it is hoped that they are not so confused as are most of those listeners to this long-drawn string of some hundred names … Boy husband and girl-wife, themselves oftentimes not fully-grown, became the parents of weakly children, specially requiring what they rarely get, a mother’s care.’30

  By contrast, between the dates 1840 and 1870 the average age of gentlemen, aspirant gentlemen and aristocrats for getting married was twenty-nine.31 Arthur Hughes’s painting The Long Engagement depicts an emotional predicament stemming directly from an economic situation. The prosperity which had created the vast bourgeoisie with its gradations from lower to upper middle class had also created a code. You could not marry, and maintain the position in society to which you aspired, until you had a certain amount of money in the bank. This was the age of savings, of investment incomes, of unearned income. Marx was wrong to consider the proletariat to be the equivalent of a slave class. Everyone who could do so aspired to rise from a condition of dependency. In 1861 there were 645 banks and the value of the ordinary deposits was £41,546,475.32 Many of these deposits were extremely modest. The Savings Bank movement initiated in Ruthwell, Dumfries, by the Rev. Henry Duncan in 1810 had blossomed, via Penny Banks, Friendly Societies and such, to the larger Trustee Savings banks; these had been regulated by Act of Parliament in 1863, and in 1861 the Post Office Savings bank had protected the small saver after a number of swindles. The whole system of society began to revolve not simply on how much you earned but on how much you could squirrel away.33 Lord John Russell spent nearly fifteen years campaigning (unsuccessfully as it turned out) for the extension of the franchise on the basis of your possessing £50 on deposit. Those whose good fortune had put them in possession of an appropriate accumulation could afford to marry and to set up an establishment.

  There were innumerable tracts, books, pamphlets and even poems on the theme of ‘prudent marriages and their effects on posterity’ (to quote the title of one such, of 1858).34 In S.W. Partridge’s Upward and Onward, a Thought for the Threshold of Active Life (1851), potential householders were cautioned

  A good house

  Is no unconvertible thing, large rooms,

  Servants, gay drapery, new furniture,

  Nor undesired, nor undesirable.

  But first take counsel of thy income; wait

  Till prudence speak in the affirmative.

  Mrs Warren reckoned in A House and its Furnishings that a six-roomed house could be run if you had an income of £200 p.a. A New System of Practical Domestic Economy estimated that you should set aside 10 per cent of your income on horses or carriages, which would mean you needed £1,000 for a four-wheeler with horses. (The coachman would be paid for out of the 8 per cent you would spend on the wages of male servants.) If you had £600 a year you could keep two horses if your groom doubled as a footman. A gig cost £700: that is, a one-horse carriage – a tilbury or a chaise.

  Running costs broke down as follows:

  This was the great era of ‘carriage folk’. At the beginning of the century, elliptic springs had made this soon-to-be-obsolete mode of transport enjoy a magnificent flowering.36 The berlin, barouche, calèche, coupé, clarence, daumont, landau and phaeton all crowded the streets of London in that supposedly p
rosaic railway age. In 1814, there were 23,000 four-wheeled vehicles in the capital; by 1834, 49,000; by 1864, 102,000, with a further 170,000 two-wheelers.37 This represents a huge social class, as well as huge congestion in the streets; and it is this class, this immensely privileged class, probably more comfortable than any human class who had ever existed on the planet, whose offspring were the first with the leisure and time to have a childhood.

  Everyone who could do so in the 1860s was settling down into domestic life. The Marxes abandoned their cramped flat in Soho and moved to a variety of new-built family-houses in Kentish Town on the edges of Hampstead Heath where, on Sundays, the great economic philosopher would walk with his few surviving children and tell them stories. At the same point in time, Philip Webb was designing the Red House, Abbey Wood, for William Morris, that young idealist-aesthete, destined to become a revolutionary socialist, but not before he had founded his firm, Morris and Co., on the back of the domestic bourgeoisie, hungry for his wallpapers, carpets, curtains and cushion-covers. How wise Disraeli was. ‘It is a privilege,’ he wrote in 1862, ‘to live in this age of brilliant and rapid events. What an error to consider it a utilitarian age! It is one of infinite romance! Thrones tumble down, and crowns are offered, like a fairy tale, and the most powerful people in the world male and female, a few years past, were adventurers, exiles, demireps.fn2 Vive la bagatelle!’38

  Disraeli, as so often, appears to be dabbling in paradox or wit for its own sake, but had actually described what was the case. Capitalism was not just the relentless machine, crushing the wage-slaves at the bottom: it had also created a fantasy-world of rapid social change, leisure, fairy-tale. It is not accidental that the decade of the consolidation of the rentier class, the decade of carriage-folk, of the expansion of the suburbs, the growth of the savings banks, the era of the nouveau-riche business man and the stockbroker, should also have been the golden age of children’s literature. In the Victorian day nursery a picture of the world could emerge, simply from reading the books on offer to a child of that time, which would not differ materially from turning the less interesting pages of Hansard or The Times. Prompted by Disraeli’s insight that 1862 was ‘an age of infinite romance … like a fairy tale’, I want to examine the 1860s through the prism of children’s literature: Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring (1855), Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862), Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863). This era of expanding schools for the middle classes also saw the publication of Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and Eric, or, Little by Little (1858). It also witnessed the prodigious popularity of Hans Christian Andersen, the prolific Louisa May Alcott began to write for children (Little Women), and Alice entered Wonderland in 1865.