The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  All this should be remembered as a background to Kingsley’s celebrated spat with John Henry Newman. There was a temperamental gulf between them. ‘In him and all that school, there is an element of foppery – even in dress and manner; a fastidious, maundering, die-away effeminacy, which is mistaken for purity and refinement; and I confess myself unable to cope with it.’18 In the course of a review in Macmillan’s Magazine Kingsley threw away the line – he was writing about Froude’s ultra-Protestant History of England – ‘Truth for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not to be; that cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage. Whether his notion be doctrinally correct or not, it is at least historically so.’

  If you go through the works of Newman and watch that serpentine mind wrapping itself around such questions as the credibility of medieval miracles – the flight of the Holy House from Nazareth to Loreto for example – or the legitimacy of persecuting Galileo, you see the force of Kingsley’s straightforwardness. Newman, one suspects, did not really believe in the possibility of Mary and Joseph’s house flying through the air; did not believe it was right to torture Galileo, nor that Galileo’s arguments were wrong. Yet for some perverse reason of party-loyalty he appears to suggest that he does so believe. Unfortunately Kingsley concentrated his fire on one rather harmless sermon of Newman’s – which had been preached when he was an Anglican. Ah ha! said Kingsley – so you were a crypto-papist all along, even when you pretended to be Church of England.

  Newman responded with an intensely personal, not to say egomaniac, account of how his mind had moved from a boyhood evangelical conversion, through High Church Anglicanism, to embracing the Roman Catholic faith.

  It is not pleasant to reveal to high and low, young and old, what has gone on within me from my early years. It is not pleasant to be giving to every shallow or flippant disputant the advantage over me of knowing my most private thoughts, I might even say the intercourse between myself and my Maker.19

  But this of course is what Newman does reveal and give in the Apologia Pro Vita Sua – The Defence of His Own Life – which was dashed off; sometimes he was writing for twenty-two hours at a stretch, often in tears.20 Nearly all Newman’s contemporaries felt he had won the argument. ‘A more opportune Protestant ram for Father Newman’s sacrificial knife could scarcely have been found,’ said the editor of The Spectator. This view has been largely endorsed by the subsequent generations. Newman became, first, a cardinal, then in the eyes of history a great sage of the Church. He was beatified and is due to be canonized as a Catholic saint. As well as a mellifluous spiritual autobiography, his Apologia of 1864 is seen as being a turning-point in the history of English attitudes to Catholicism. It checked anti-Catholic prejudice when literary and political London were forced to admit the sincerity and attempted truthfulness of the celebrated convert.

  How would a reading of the two books, The Water-Babies and the Apologia, strike the dispassionate reader of the twenty-first century? Newman’s book chronicles in obsessive detail the squabbles between High Church and Low Church divines during the 1830s – the occasions when Dr Pusey published a tract on Fasting, and when Newman himself began to read the early Fathers of the Church, and why a cunning comparison between the Donatists – North African heretics of the fourth century – and the Anglicans made by Dr Wiseman in the Dublin Review made Newman begin to doubt the validity of his own Church. Never once in the whole book do we get a sense of the world outside Newman’s college walls – or come to that, outside his own head. It is something of a shock at the end to be told ‘I have never seen Oxford since, excepting its spires as they are seen by the railway.’ The reader is jolted into a recognition that all these intense theological debates happened not in the time of St Augustine, but in the Railway Age. Never once does Newman’s quest for a perfect orthodoxy, a pure belief in the Incarnate God, appear to prompt him to consider that if God took flesh, then this has social implications, that the Church should be engaged with the lives and plight of the poor.

  The Apologia made many readers think more kindly of the Oxford converts to Rome. Within a year of the publication of The Water-Babies, Parliament had banned pushing little boys up chimneys. But Kingsley’s is more than a social gospel. Newman came to believe that there were but two alternatives, the way to Rome and the way to Atheism. Not only does Kingsley’s religion seem altogether more humane: he would seem to be thinking about larger issues. The journey of little Tom the sweep to his watery paradise engages mind as well as heart rather more than the crotchety Oxford don’s – Newman’s – journey from the Oriel Common Room to the Birmingham Oratory. Speaking of Huxley, Darwin and the others, Kingsley wrote to Maurice, ‘They find that now they have got rid of an interfering God – a master-magician, as I call it – they have to choose between the absolute empire of accident, and a living, immanent, ever-working God.’21 To another correspondent, an atheist, he wrote, ‘Whatever doubt or doctrinal Atheism you and your friends may have, don’t fall into moral atheism. Don’t forget the Eternal Goodness, whatever you call it. I call it God.’22

  20

  Goblin Market and the Cause

  ‘ONE OF THE strange things about the Victorians,’ wrote Anthony Powell in his Notebook, ‘was seeing refinement in women, whereas one of the attractions of women is their extreme coarseness.’1 From the scrappy unannotated nature of the great novelist’s cahier it is impossible to know whether this contention was intended to be placed in the mouth of one of the more outrageous characters in A Dance to the Music of Time or whether it was an opinion he held himself. In either event, one senses it might on one level have been an opinion shared by the Hon. Caroline Norton who, in the September 1863 issue of Macmillan’s Magazine, reviewed jointly Coventry Patmore’s verse novel – and hymn to married love – The Angel in the House and Christina Rossetti’s brilliantly hectic verse fairy story Goblin Market. The Angel, it is perhaps unnecessary to remind intelligent readers, is not an idealized picture of woman: it is the Domestic Love which exists between men and women. ‘We rejoice,’ says Mrs Norton, ‘that “the Angel in the House” has come to dwell in the Royal Palace’ – a reference to the recent marriage of the Prince of Wales. ‘Yet that part of a royal destiny, which seems to us so superlatively bright, is within the reach of any man who chooses so to school his passions and affections as to make a sane choice in life.’2

  The words come from painful experience. The granddaughter of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Caroline and her two sisters had taken London Society by storm in 1826. She was married at nineteen to the Hon. Richard Norton and it was an unhappy match – they were extravagant, there were many quarrels, and he beat her. After one particularly bitter row, when Caroline was taking refuge with one of her sisters, Norton took their three children and put them in the charge of one of his cousins, refusing the mother access. It was then that Caroline discovered the status of Englishwomen under the law. Not only, at that date, did any property of a married woman, whether earned or inherited, legally belong to her husband, but so did the children. Richard Norton had the power, without the decree of a court, to forbid his wife ever to see their children again. In 1836 he brought an action against Lord Melbourne – then prime minister. The jury dismissed the case without even retiring, so obvious was it that Norton was acting from pure spite – no serious evidence was produced of an adultery. But it had demonstrated that married women in England in the last year of the reign of William IV had no rights whatever. They were non-people, being the same legal status as American slaves, regardless of social class.

  Because she was educated, and a published author, Caroline Norton was in a position to raise agitation, but not to do much on her own behalf. The bitterest thing about her experience was the separation from her children:

  What I suffered respecting those children Go
d knows, and He only. What I endured and yet lived past – of pain, exasperation, helplessness, and despair … I shall not even try to explain. I believe men have no more notion of what that anguish is than the blind have of colours … I REALLY lost my young children – craved for them, struggled for them, was barred from them, and came too late to see one that died … except in his coffin.

  She found a sympathetic lawyer, Mr Talfourd, who as MP for Reading was prepared to bring in an Infants’ Custody Bill which would prevent other married women suffering comparable horrors. (And he knew many comparable cases.) The British and Foreign Review when it got wind of this called Mrs Norton a ‘she devil’ and a ‘she beast’, and openly libelled her, claiming she was having an affair with Talfourd. In effect it was impossible to libel a married woman, since married women could not sue. In 1839, after much difficulty, the Infants’ Custody Act passed into law; by modern standards it was extraordinarily modest, allowing that a judge in equity might make an order allowing mothers against whom adultery was not proved to have the custody of their children under seven, and access to older children at stated times. Full and equal guardianship of their children was not granted to English women until the Infants’ Custody Act of 1925.3

  In 1855 Caroline Norton was forty-eight years old, and she again entered the lists when Parliament was debating the Divorce Bill. She campaigned, successfully, to get written into the Bill that if a woman was obliged to leave her husband she might resume possession of her own property, or at least of her future inheritance and earnings. She also secured – with Lord St Leonards taking up her points for her in Parliament – the crucial right for a married woman to sue and be sued, and to enter contracts in her own right. In her pamphlet, she apostrophized the reader, ‘Why write? Why struggle? It is the Law! You will do no good! But if everyone lacked courage with that doubt, nothing would ever be achieved in this world. This much I will do, woman though I be. I will put on record what the law for women was in England in the years of civilisation and Christianity, 1855, and the eighteenth year of the reign of a female sovereign!’4

  Yet the modern reader would be surprised to learn that Mrs Norton did not support ‘ill-advised public attempts on the part of a few women to assert their “equality” with “men”’ and she ridiculed the ‘strange and laughable political meetings (sanctioned by a chairwoman) which have taken place in one or two instances’. The original of Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways, Mrs Norton was an independent-minded girl of the Regency who had grown to maturity in very different times. By the time she reviewed The Angel in the House and Goblin Market she was fifty-six and feminism as we might understand the term had begun its history.

  Returning to the nineteenth century in a time-machine, the twenty-first-century traveller would notice immediately dozens of differences between our world and theirs: the smells of horse-dung and straw in the streets, and, even in the grander houses, the sweaty smell of the servants who had no baths – just the kitchen tap, very often; the darkness at night without electricity; the gas-flares against sooty skies; the fatty food and ‘smell of steaks in passageways’; the beautifully made hats, worn by all social classes, and the properly tailored clothes, even on window-cleaners or factory-hands; the continued acceptance of social hierarchy and, with the obvious perky exception, the underlying deference; the racial coherence – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, we recall, found the sight of a slave boy in London exotic – no one in today’s London would find anything odd about seeing a little black boy in the street; the superiority to ours of the postal service – four or five swift deliveries per day – and the splendour – red coats and gold or blue piping – of the postman’s uniform; the excellence of the rail services; the truly terrifying inadequacy of dentistry and medicine – and with these, the toothache, the halitosis; the generalized acceptance of infant mortality, the familiarity of children’s coffins being trundled in glass-sided hearses down cobbled streets; the poverty of the children who survived, the ragamuffins who swept crossings and still, in spite of Lord Shaftesbury’s reforms, continued to work, and run about at large, in the alarming, overcrowded cities – all these things and more would assail the eye, heart and nostril and make us know that the Victorian world was utterly different from our own. But the greatest, and the most extraordinary difference is the difference between women, then and now.

  We can seek all manner of reasons for the existence in the past of ‘patriarchal attitudes’, for the fact that the world was male-dominated and phallocentric. The 1860s were the decade in which these things seriously began to change. One of the things which paradoxically occasioned the change was a step backwards, a further diminution of women’s rights in English law. It is an episode in history which occupies about twenty years, from the 1860s to the 1880s, when there came into effect, and then were abolished, the Contagious Diseases Acts.fn1

  Among the surgical outpatients at Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, one half had venereal disease, mostly the deadly syphilis – at Guy’s it was 43 per cent. At Moorfields Eye Hospital and at the Throat Hospital in Golden Square, one fifth of patients admitted were suffering from venereal or contagious diseases, VD or CD, as they were called.5 That there was a crisis of the greatest magnitude no one could doubt. How the repeal of the CD Acts became enmeshed with the growth of feminism will belong to a later chapter. What is so revealing – and to our eye so extraordinary – is the manner in which these parliamentary acts came into being in the first instance. The Acts were an attempt to apply the continental system of regulated prostitution to British garrison towns, in order to control the spread of disease. It was taken for granted that British soldiers and sailors needed prostitutes. It now became enshrined in British law that women were a source of contamination. No attempt was made to regulate the spread of disease by, for example, penalizing the men who tried to pay for sex. The working-class women whom economic circumstances moved in this direction were, by the standards of their contemporaries, ‘fallen’ women. Their sin was much greater than the man’s.

  The CD Acts meant that any woman found by the police within a certain radius of the garrison areas could be arrested. Quite inevitably, from the first, there were dreadful mistakes made – ‘innocent’ mothers and daughters were rounded up together with prostitutes themselves. Any woman so arrested was deemed by the law ipso facto a common prostitute. The law of habeas corpus had been suspended. If she refused to comply, and to undergo an medical examination, she could be imprisoned indefinitely. The medical examinations were horrific and, literally, intrusive. Josephine Butler, the great opponent of the CD Acts, and the woman who would eventually succeed in her campaign to have them repealed, wrote, ‘By this law, a crime has been created in order that it may be severely punished, but observe, that has been ruled to be a crime in women, which is not to be a crime in men.’6

  In the context of the 1860s the CD Acts were not, by most, seen as an issue of sexual politics so much as of public health. The war on cholera in the earlier decades of the century, and Edwin Chadwick’s attempts to sanitize the towns and clean up the water supplies, were all part of a great Benthamite programme of state-fuelled improvement and control of the expanding populace. As well as the CD Acts the British Parliament brought in the Sanitary Act of 1866, tightening up the 1848 Act on sanitation; and in 1867 the Vaccination Act greatly enlarged the penalties for failure to vaccinate infants and children against smallpox.7 It is easy to see why the British Medical Association was overwhelmingly in favour of the CD Acts. The increase in social status of the doctor, from village sawbones – often the very same person as the barber – to lofty professional, exactly follows the growth of Benthamism from private fad of the Philosophic Radicals in the Regency period to the underlying ideology of the whole Victorian state machine. Doctors were essential officers of control.

  At the same time, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in an age which knew no effective cure for syphilis, with all its debilitating and deadly consequences to the second and
third generation, was a cause for desperate concern. If we criticize the government of Lord John Russell in the 1840s for failing to do enough to fight hunger in Ireland, we should try, perhaps, to understand why the government of Lord Derby twenty years later felt it had a duty to control the spread of a disease which affected – obviously – not merely soldiers, sailors and the women they sought out in garrison towns, but their children; and nor was anyone blind to the fact that middle- and upper-class families were also likely to be infected.fn2

  So monstrous was the phallocentric ideology which so unthinkingly framed the CD Acts in their particular form that the abuses caused by the Acts, and the debates which led to their repeal, worked as a powerful stimulus to the Women’s Movement. The fact remained, however, that a huge population, no more or less chaste than any other generation in human history, was capable, every time nature prompted one of them to sexual intimacy with another, of passing on a condition which would lead first to painful lesions, rashes and enlargement of the lymph nodes; later, in the one third of cases who were unlucky enough, to major disorders of the cardiovascular and central nervous systems – paralysis and insanity.8