The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  ‘And what is hell? Can you tell me that?’

  ‘A pit full of fire.’

  ‘And should you like to fall into that pit and to be burning there for ever?’

  ‘No sir.’

  ‘What must you do to avoid it?’

  I deliberated a moment; my answer when it did come, was objectionable: ‘I must keep in good health and not die.’29

  Maria and Elizabeth Brontë both died – aged less than twelve – because of fever contracted at the school. Emily Brontë’s health was immeasurably weakened by the place – she died aged less than thirty, as did her sister Anne. ‘Lowood’ was no less severe, indeed sadistic, in atmosphere when Dorothea Beale went there as principal, and she left after a disagreement with the governors in her first year.30 In 1858, against a list of fifty rival candidates, she was chosen as the principal of a newly established school – Cheltenham Ladies’ College. It was one of the first schools in England for children of either sex to offer what in modern terms would be seen as a rounded education, teaching mathematics and science, art and history, as well as languages. It remained, until the twentieth century, a school for Ladies. Whereas Miss Buss’s schools in London were open to the daughters of respectable merchants, businessmen or traders, Cheltenham waited until the 1920s before opening its door to such, and throughout Miss Beale’s lifetime (she died in 1906) only offered its considerable intellectual resources to the daughters of gentlefolk or the professional classes.

  The Victorians invented school as a social instrument which moved forward the potentiality of the bourgeois revolution while it retained old hierarchies, and invented new ones. The freshly founded public schools – Bradfield, 1850; Cheltenham, 1841; Clifton, 1862; Dover, 1871, Glenalmond, 1841; Lancing, 1848; Malvern, 1865; Marlborough, 1843; Rossall, 1844; et al.31 – all sprang ready formed with the bogus school slang, arcane brand-new traditions and firm hierarchies. Their ethos both enshrined and evangelized the combination of individualism with the crushing of self by institutionalism which is so distinctive and paradoxical a feature of the Victorian experience.

  Tom Brown arrives at Rugby a free spirit, a child of the pre-industrialized English countryside. He could, for all the difference it makes, be an Elizabethan or an eighteenth-century child. He is confronted by the rough world of school – both the admirable ‘hearty’ Brooke and the bullies, Flashman and Speedicut. It is often supposed that the morality of the novel derives from the pure athleticism of these earlier chapters, and that Hughes was advocating a philistine pursuit of games and hero-worship. The book is deeper than that.

  In 1858 The Times confessed that it was an ‘unsolved problem’ how a public school education tamed uncivilized boys and ‘how the licence of unbridled speech is softened into courtesy, how lawlessness becomes discipline, how false morality gives place to a sound and manly sense of right, and all this within two or three years, with little external assistance, and without any strong religious impressions’. It concluded that ‘Parents may well abstain from looking too closely into the process and content themselves with the result.’32

  Dr Arnold had encapsulated his ideal ‘to form Christian men, for Christian boys I can scarcely hope to make; I mean that, from the natural imperfect state of boyhood, they are not susceptible of Christian principles in their full development upon their practice, and I suspect that a low standard of morals in many respects must be tolerated amongst them, as it was on a larger scale in what I consider the boyhood of the human race’.33

  Hughes depicts in Tom Brown’s Schooldays how this transformation took place. It has been skilfully pointed out that many of the jolly boyish reminiscences in the first part of the story – the football game, the bullying, the birds-nesting and so on – were in fact derived by Hughes from the written recollections of other old Rugbeians; the apparently unrealistic second half in which Tom experiences a spiritual renewal through his friendship with little Arthur (and Arthur’s near-death experience) is all purely autobiographical. The crucial thing is that Tom has become institutionalized. He has become a team player. This is of vital significance to Hughes the socialist. At the last cricket match, a master remarks that it is ‘a noble game’.

  ‘Isn’t it? But it’s more than a game. It’s an institution,’ said Tom.

  ‘Yes,’ said Arthur, ‘the birthright of British boys old and young, as habeas corpus and trial by jury are of British men.’

  ‘The discipline and reliance on one another which it teaches is so valuable I think,’ went on the master, ‘it ought to be such an unselfish game. It merges the individual in the eleven, he doesn’t play that he may win, but that his side may.’34

  The thought is further advanced that ‘Perhaps ours’ – i.e. the world of the public school – ‘is the only little corner of the British Empire which is thoroughly wisely and strongly governed just now.’34

  ‘The world of school’ in other words – to use the subtitle of another famous story (St Winifred’s, or, the World of School, by Dean Farrar) – was seen as a microcosm of the political world and as a preparation for it. That is why failure to conform to the conventions of school is seen as so anarchic; and why expressions of individualism are seen as so potentially damaging. This socio-political attitude colours what might be considered a prudish Victorian attitude to masturbation. Eric, or, Little by Little has been described as ‘the kind of book Dr Arnold might have written had he taken to drink’.35

  The ‘little by little’ is the gradual slither of Farrar’s eponymous hero from small sins to great. He begins by laughing when a grasshopper gets into a lady’s hat in church – for which he receives a flogging from the headmaster, Dr Rowlands. Before long, he is indulging in far worse sins than laughing in church. At first, the filthy talk in dormitory No. 7 shocked Eric ‘beyond bound or measure’. Dark though it was, he felt himself blushing scarlet to the roots of his hair, and then growing pale again, while a hot dew was left upon his forehead. Ball was the speaker … Farrar himself apostrophizes: ‘Now, Eric, now or never! Life and death, ruin and salvation, corruption and purity, are perhaps in the balance together, and the scale of your destiny may hang on a single word of yours. Speak out, boy!’

  But Eric is silent, and after half an hour ‘in an agony of struggle with himself’ he falls. Farrar never spells out the precise nature of Eric’s sin but a sermon by Dr Rowlands on Kibroth-Hathaavah (in the book of Numbers) makes it abundantly clear what is meant. Kibroth-Hathaavah is the burial ground of those who have lusted.

  Kibroth-Hathaavah! Many and many a young Englishman had perished there! Many and many a happy English boy, the jewel of his mother’s heart – brave and beautiful and strong – lies buried there. Very pale their shadows rise before us – the shadows of our young brothers who have sinned and suffered. From the sea and the sod, from foreign graves and English churchyards, they start up and throng around us in the paleness of their fall. May every schoolboy who reads this page be warned by the warning of their wasted hands from that burning marle of passion where they found nothing but shame and ruin, polluted affections and an early grave.

  Masturbation, in Farrar’s story, leads inexorably to death. One of the most painful aspects of the Ruskin–Effie Gray divorce is the possibility that she revealed that he masturbated while sharing the non-consummated marital bed with her. He wrote to his friend Mrs Cowper, ‘Her words are fearful – I can only imagine one meaning to them – which I will meet at once – come of it what may. Have I not often told you that I was another Rousseau?’ – i.e. a masturbator – ‘except in this – that the end of my life will be the best – has been – already – not best only – but redeemed from the evil that was its death.’36

  The school story was one of the most distinctive of Victorian contributions to literature. There are no Elizabethan or Jacobean tragedies about school. Novels about school did not come from the pens of Richardson or Fielding. Yet Jane Eyre’s experiences at Lowood, Nicholas Nickleby’s at Dotheboys Hall, remain some of the most v
ivid experiences in our reading of nineteenth-century fiction. School, as well as being for Dr Arnold and his followers an archetype of society, becomes too a paradigm of the inner life, the waking nightmare that we will be snatched from the emotional comforts of home and thrust into the hardship, the psychological and physical torture, of a single-sex institutionalized existence. No wonder, for pupils and teachers alike, this should prove so endlessly addictive a theme. Tom Brown’s Schooldays was published in April 1857, and by November of that year it had gone through five editions, selling 11,000 copies.37 Twenty-eight thousand copies had sold by the end of 1862. Altogether fifty-two editions were printed by Macmillan before 1892. Eric sold comparably well. It, and Farrar’s other stories, St Winifred’s, or, the World of School and Julian Home, the continuation of the hero’s education at Cambridge, seem so unrealistic to us as an attempted portrait of the speech or thought-processes of actual schoolboys that we blink in amazement in recalling that Farrar was in fact a teacher – first as a master at the newly founded Marlborough College, then at Harrow – where he was appointed in 1855. (After teaching at Harrow he became, first master of Marlborough, then dean of Canterbury.) Eric, St Winifred’s and Julian Home were all composed while Farrar was a Harrow master and all, as it happens, date from one of the most extraordinary periods in that school’s history.

  While Farrar was penning his distinctive fables about the perils of onanism, the school in which he was actually teaching was a hotbed of homosexual bullying, where every pretty boy was given a girl’s name and faced the possibility either of being labelled public property – in which case he was frequently compelled into (often public) acts of incredible obscenity – or of being taken over and becoming the exclusive ‘bitch’ of an older boy. If Farrar turned a blind eye to this – and he eventually became a housemaster at Harrow – was he also unaware of the personal tragedy engulfing the headmaster himself?

  Charles John Vaughan was a pupil of Arnold’s at Rugby, a contemporary of Arthur Stanley’s, whose sister Catherine he married in 1850. He had a brilliant career at Cambridge, was elected to a fellowship of Trinity, was ordained, and became headmaster of Harrow aged twenty-eight. From 1844 to 1859 he was one of the most revered teachers in England. He had arrived to find Harrow demoralized and depopulated. He increased the numbers of boys from 60 in 1844 to over 200 within two years. ‘No headmaster, Arnold excepted, gathered round him a more gifted band of scholars or colleagues.’38 Yet, at the age of forty-three, he suddenly resigned his headmastership. Those were the days in which a headmaster of a great public school – who would invariably be in holy orders – could expect rich preferment in the Church. (Two of Queen Victoria’s archbishops of Canterbury, Temple and Tait, had been headmasters of Rugby.) Accordingly, Palmerston, the Old Harrovian prime minister, offered Vaughan the bishopric of Rochester. Vaughan accepted but then, as the mysterious entry puts it in the Dictionary of National Biography, ‘a day or two later, probably after a severe struggle with his ambition, the acceptance was withdrawn’. No one who had seen the mere surface brilliance of Vaughan’s career could understand why he did not want to be a bishop. He worked for years as the vicar of the poor Northern parish of Doncaster, and ended his days in the comparative obscurity of the deanery of Llandaff. ‘He left,’ concludes the DNB, ‘a strict injunction that no life of him should be published.’

  It was only in the twentieth century that Vaughan’s pathetic secret was revealed. In 1851 one of the boys at Harrow was John Addington Symonds, destined to be one of the century’s most articulate (if secret) homosexuals, but in boyhood terrified of his sexuality and loathing the atmosphere of school. In 1851 another boy, a lively, good-looking youth called Alfred Pretor, informed him in a letter that he was having an affair with the saintly Dr Vaughan. He was horrified, and remembered the manner in which Vaughan used to stroke his thigh when he, Symonds, read his essays to the headmaster.

  Symonds kept his secret for eight years. Then, when he had escaped ‘Dr Vaughan’s malign influence’ as he saw it, and he was an Oxford undergraduate, he blurted out the whole story while on a reading party. His confidant was the professor of Latin, who, when he had read Pretor’s letter, told Symonds he must inform his father. Dr Symonds wrote to Vaughan assuring him that there would be no exposure on condition that he resigned at once. Vaughan went down to Clifton to plead with Dr Symonds, followed a few days later by his wife, who flung herself on her knees, weeping and begging for pity. Dr Symonds was adamant: Vaughan must go. It was further a condition laid down by the Symondses that if Vaughan ever attempted to accept senior office in the Church, he would be exposed and ruined. The secret was kept from public knowledge until Phyllis Grosskurth published her biography of John Addington Symonds in 1964: a good example of the brilliance with which the Victorian public-school classes, if we may call them that, could close ranks and look after their own.

  Farrar’s novels exude unwholesome sexual feeling like tightly lidded pressure-cookers giving off steam. The secret life of Vaughan hints at the extraordinary emotional atmosphere of these enclosed and (save for the presence of the occasional matron or housemaster’s wife) single-sex establishments.

  Combined with the differing degrees of homo-eroticism, which was in almost all cases covert, or actually in those pre-Freudian times unrecognized or only half-recognized, was found the wholehearted acceptance of canings and floggings, notionally as punishment, but manifestly a form of tormented emotional release. The 1860s which saw such a flowering of popularity of school stories were also the decade when Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads first shocked and delighted the world. The published work – so shocking in its overt atheism, so luxuriantly decadent, and for English readers who had not read Baudelaire so completely novel – hinted, with its invocations to ‘Our Lady of Pain’, at a sadistic interest which is rampant in the poet’s secret and pornographic outpourings, in such works as The Pearl and The Whippingham Papers. Swinburne’s overwhelming obsession with flagellation appears to be a compulsive repetition, in the very core of his erotic being and imagination, of the especially violent corporal punishment at the Eton of his day.39 Eton made a speciality of public floggings – or ‘executions’ as they were called – and it is impossible not to suppose that these occasions made a profound impression on Swinburne’s febrile imagination. Flogging and caning were much discussed at the time of the Clarendon Commission. The most learned monograph on the subject of nineteenth-century flagellation opines that the following anonymous letter, printed in The Morning Post, was probably the poet:

  I can vouch that, from the earliest days to the days of the immortal Keate [a notorious flogging headmaster of Eton, 1809–34], and thence to those of the present headmaster, they have one and all, appealed to the very seat of honour. ‘Experientia docet’. And, mark me, flogging, used with sound judgement, is the only fundamental principle upon which our large schools can be properly conducted. I am all the better for it and am, therefore, ONE WHO HAS BEEN WELL SWISHED.

  The popularity – overt – of school stories and – covert – of flagellant pornography, sado-masochistic prostitution and its twilight psychological hinterlands are all tokens of how potent the boarding-school experience was, for generations of English boys. You see how firmly it was embedded in the consciousness of the next generation in Henry Newbolt’s (1862–1938) anthology piece ‘Vitai Lampada’, in which memories of the breathless hush in the Close at Clifton are carried into the Imperial Wars.

  The sand of the desert is sodden red –

  Red with the wreck of a square that broke; –

  The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,

  And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.

  The river of death has brimmed his banks,

  And England’s far, and Honour a name,

  But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:

  ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’

  Newbolt, like Hughes, was a man of the left, who saw in the team-spirit of public
schoolboys on the cricket pitch a useful paradigm of the cooperative unselfishness of an ideal society.

  The games ethos affected not merely the men, but their wives. Arthur Stanley showed no aptitude for cricket when he was a boy; indeed, when at Rugby, he rather disliked the game. Yet when he was installed as the dean of Westminster, all this was forgotten. The boys of the Abbey choir-school were entertained to a cricket-tea by Dean Stanley and Lady Augusta and politely wrote to thank for it. Clearly neither Stanley nor his wife had stayed to watch the close of play, but this did not prevent Lady Augusta from seeing the games afternoon as an admirable excuse for a sermon. ‘My dear Boys,’ she wrote:

  I am much pleased to have the ‘score’ and to see how the game went & that though you had had so little practise [sic], you had not forgotten your cricket – It made the Dean & me very happy to see you enjoying yourselves and to learn by the nice letters I have received, that you continued to do so.

  We love dearly to see you happy and joyous & making the most of the opportunities given you, both for work and relaxation – I am sure you all feel the delight of exercising the bodily strength & skill & activity which Cricket calls into play – but I am no less sure that you will learn day by day, if you apply yourselves, the truth of the lesson that this teaches us, namely that our happiness in life consists in the right exercise of all the faculties Our Heavenly Father has in His goodness given us …

  On she bores, concluding after several pages,

  I am sure that you will all strive, down to the youngest among you, to make the Dean happy by shewing that not only in the Cricket field but in Church – in yr Houses – in School & at play – the ‘score’ may be such as to gladden the hearts of those who desire your good.40

  It is so easy to mock this, so hard to recapture a world where grownups took children and childhood so passionately seriously that they could see in an afternoon of cricket, interrupted by lemonade and buns, an occasion for recalling the essentially moral texture of existence itself.