The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Carlyle’s is a voice which we can hardly understand now. The great novelists of the early to mid-nineteenth century, Dickens and Thackeray, remain freshly alive. They were destined to die before the old Chelsea curmudgeon, much younger as they were.

  Thackeray’s death at the very end of 1863 – he was aged fifty-two – brought an end to a career which in many respects never began. His finest achievements – Vanity fair, Henry Esmond, the first half of Pendennis – are better than anything in Dickens, but it would be paradoxical to consider him, on the whole, the greater writer. He was worn out by journalism, by syphilis, by the need to maintain himself as a gentleman, his beloved daughters as ladies, in difficult domestic circumstances – his wife having for many years been humanely confined as a lunatic. His imagination was not at home in the Age of Equipoise – his best work all depicts the time of the Regency, or even the eighteenth century. Curiously enough, he seems closest to his own age in the pantomime-burlesque written for children, The Rose and the Ring (1855): his old trick of puncturing snobberies and class-obsessions was never more deftly employed than in chronicling the fortunes of Rosalba, first seen as an urchin in the Park, to be condescended to by the odiously bourgeois Princess Angelica, but soon revealed as a princess. The physical unimpressiveness and general dinginess of the British royal family is never actually alluded to, but you feel it constantly hinted at in Thackeray’s satire. Children still find it funny, but it remains one of those many mid-Victorian children’s books which are ultimately written for the amusement of the adults who had to read them aloud.

  Dickens, by contrast, wrote as a child, he understood as a child, he thought as a child: and when he became a man he never put away childish things. It is often suggested that Dickens was restrained by the conventions of his age from writing openly about sex, but this is to beg many questions. You could equally point out that he did not write as Balzac or Zola would have done about money: and there was no Victorian taboo about the open discussion of shillings and pence. He writes about the world as a highly intelligent, profoundly imaginative child would write about it. Balzac would be able to take us through every stage of Mr Dorrit’s ruin, and when the rescue takes place, we should feel that we had had an interview with the Dorrit auditor, the Dorrit family solicitor and the Dorrit banker. But as Dickens tells the story it is a fairy-tale, a romance. Dorrit is in the Marshalsea, unable to clear his debts, and it is the world of the Marshalsea which matters to us more than the exact financial troubles which took him there. We see him through the eyes of Little Dorrit, who was born in the debtor’s prison. Then – hey presto! – Pancks the rent collector exposes the wickedness of Mr Casby, and the lost inheritance of Mr Dorrit is found with the arbitrariness of a story in the Brothers Grimm.

  The events and concerns which a grown-up might consider important – sexual feeling and finance, and politics – do not interest Dickens. Or they interest him only as they have an effect on the lives of children. That is why Great Expectations and David Copperfield, which tell the story of childhood with raw and unforgettable realism, are the finest things he ever wrote. Not to see the merits of Dickens is more than a literary myopia: such an absence of sensibility would suggest a failure to see something about life itself. That is why Dickens occupies a place of all but unique importance in the minds of the English. One of his acutest readers, G.K. Chesterton, was also able to see that in his cast of characters there was something archetypical, if not actually symbolic. ‘The first and last word upon the English democracy is said in Joe Gargery and Trabb’s boy. The actual English populace, as distinct from the French populace or the Scotch or the Irish populace, may be said to lie between those two types. The first is the poor man who does not assert himself at all, and the second is the poor man who asserts himself entirely with the weapon of sarcasm.’8

  There is deep truth here. Marx did not see the truth it contained, which is why he waited in vain for an English revolution. The English rich have never understood the sarcasm of Trabb’s boy and they have taken the silence of Joe Gargery for deference. The middle-class liberals, with their sanitation acts, education acts, board schools and churches, throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, wanted not merely to improve conditions for the poor but to improve the poor. From the beginning of his early Sketches by Boz, through his tales of workhouses, vagrants and petty criminals, Dickens always knew that this was a misguided, not to say odious, ambition. If all Dickens characters possess some of the qualities of pantomime, he allows to all an equal dignity. There was something apt in his dying – that he who had excoriated the early Benthamites and mocked the improving workhouses, and the parish-pump bossiness of early nineteenth-century liberalism, should have died as its second phase – of sanitation and an extended franchise – began.

  He was fifty-eight when he died, at Gad’s Hill in June 1870, worn out by overwork, and by the insanely energetic public readings from the novels with which he had entranced theatre audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

  The funeral was in Westminster Abbey, the national Valhalla. It could have been nowhere else. Dean Stanley read the funeral service from the book of Common Prayer. There was no singing, though the organist played the Dead March from Saul. When reporters arrived at half-past nine to inquire when the ceremonies were to begin, they were informed that they were over: but the dean left the grave open all day – on the edge of Poets’ Corner. All day – Waterloo Day, 1870 – a crowd flowed past and looked down at the coffin. ‘No other Englishman,’ said Walter Bagehot, ‘had attained such a hold on the vast populace.’ They still trudged into the Abbey as the hour of midnight approached. The truth of Bagehot’s words – the importance of Dickens – tells us as much about the English as it does about the novelist himself.

  If you had to seize on one way in which Britain had changed during the 1860s, you could do worse than focus on the theme of public executions. 1868 saw the last of these ghoulish spectacles in England. Was this liberal progress? Or was it part of the mid-Victorian bourgeoisification of life, an indication of prudery, not compassion? What is so interesting is that liberals, who had been in favour of the abolition of capital punishment altogether in the 1840s, had, by and large, changed their minds in the Age of Equipoise. They had decided that for a heinous crime such as murder, execution was permissible so long as it did not happen in public. ‘In the end it was squeamishness, not humanity, that won the day.’9

  Dickens and Thackeray had both been keen abolitionists in the early years of Victoria’s reign. They had both, by chance, been present at a celebrated hanging back in 1840. Courvoisier was a French valet who murdered his aristocratic master Lord William Russell, uncle of Lord John, who as home secretary had presided over the abolition of the old penal code (which had allowed hangings of petty criminals). Thackeray had attended in a light-hearted spirit: he was a twenty-nine-year-old journalist hoping to make a good piece of copy out of the experience. He had been horrified. He watched unblinking until the body dropped. ‘His arms were tied in front of him. He opened his hands in a helpless kind of way, and clasped them once or twice together. He turned his head here and there, and looked about him for an instant with a wild, imploring look. His mouth was contracted into a sort of pitiful smile.’10

  Thackeray ‘came down Snow Hill that morning with a disgust for murder and it was for the murder I saw done … I feel myself ashamed and degraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to that brutal sight; … I pray to Almighty God to cause this disgraceful sin to pass from among us, and to cleanse our land of blood …’fn1

  Charles Dickens shared his brother-novelist’s distaste for public hangings and campaigned against them, writing impassioned articles in the Daily News and letters to The Times.11 At the Courvoisier execution he noted the ‘odious’ levity of the crowds. There was ‘no emotion suitable to the occasion. No sorrow, no salutary terror, no abhorrence, no seriousness; nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes.’ Whe
n he attended the execution outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol of the Mannings, a husband and wife jointly hanged for murder, Dickens wrote that ‘the mirth was not hysterical; the shoutings and fightings were not the efforts of a strained excitement seeking to vent itself in any relief. The whole was unmistakably callous and bad.’12 Yet while deploring the behaviour of the mob – and the crowds were huge: over 20,000 came to see the Mannings hang – Dickens found it hard to keep away from these murderous pieces of street theatre, these festivals of violence. The night before the Mannings were hanged he arranged a supper party at the Piazza Coffee House, Covent Garden, at 11 p.m. and he spent the night wandering the streets among the drunks, the rowdies and the whores. He had hired an apartment overlooking the gallows: ‘We have taken the whole of the roof (and the back kitchen) for the extremely moderate sum of ten guineas or two guineas each.’13 When Mrs Manning finally dropped, he noted her ‘fine shape, so elaborately corseted and artfully dressed, that it was quite unchanged in its trim appearance, as it slowly swung from side to side’.

  Yet in the twenty years which intervened between the death of Mrs Manning and the last public hanging, Dickens had, like John Stuart Mill, abandoned his wish ‘to advocate the total abolition of the Punishment of Death as a general principle, for the advantage of Society, for the prevention of crime’.14

  In 1868, Mill in the Commons opined that ‘when it was shown by clear evidence that a person was guilty of murder with atrocity, it appeared to him that to deprive that criminal of the life which he had forfeited was the most merciful and most proper course to adopt’.15 Of the commission set up to pronounce on the question, only four were in favour of total abolition. The rest wanted the abolition of public executions.

  When Mill spoke of the merciful nature of hanging, he presumably meant that he would rather be hanged than do penal servitude in a Victorian jail. Part of what he meant, though, must have been that to kill murderers, to get them out of the way, was neater, tidier, more efficient. It was the old Benthamite in him speaking. He would have shared the later Dickens’s contempt for the mob enjoying themselves, and supported the removal of the obscene contraption of the gallows behind the prison walls. It was, as the best modern historian of the gallows, V.A.C. Gatrell, has said, an act of ‘social sanitization’. It was more ‘civilized’, hardly more humane, to hang men and women in secret. The middle- and upper-class legislators had not made the law kinder. They had merely demonstrated their contempt for the mob who loved the drama, the obscenity and the sheer cruelty of public hangings. In 1868 the rough world of The Beggar’s Opera, of eighteenth-century gallows humour, of folk festival entwined in law-enforcement, came certainly to an end.

  It is an eloquent fact that the last man to be hanged publicly in England was an Irishman. Gladstone’s mission, when he finally took over leadership of the Liberal Party, and became prime minister in December 1868, was to ‘pacify Ireland’. The Fenian movement – the notion that Ireland could become independent of British rule by violent means – was focused after the close of the American Civil War when many Irish soldiers in the Federal army, supplied with American money, decided to imitate the Polish, or Italian nationalists and stage outrages – first in Canada, then in Britain. As many as 1,200 Fenians assembled at Chester in February 1867.

  Gladstone, anxious to demonstrate that he had outgrown his wrong-headedness at the time of the Maynooth Grant (1845), brought in a Bill to disestablish the Irish Church. Meanwhile, Fenians had been arrested on a number of charges. A policeman in Manchester had been killed. An attempt was made to rescue two Fenian prisoners in Clerkenwell jail, less than a mile from St Paul’s Cathedral, the Bank of England and the Guildhall. A barrel of gunpowder was placed against the outer wall of the prison and blown up. Twelve persons were killed, 120 others injured. Gladstone pressed on urgently with the Irish Land Act (1870), demonstrating a lesson which was eagerly learnt by the Fenian movement: that the English move slowly over Irish affairs when the Irish are at peace, but develop an astonishing capacity to expedite pro-Irish legislation when a few bombs have been exploded, particularly if they have been let off in London.

  The English, for their part, could use the opportunity of the Clerkenwell bombing to demonstrate another sorry pattern of behaviour which, in the course of Anglo-Irish relations, would be repeated for a hundred years: namely the belief that draconian punishment of the bombers and gunmen would cow or silence Ireland rather than dignifying the murderous activities of buccaneers and turning them into political martyrs. Michael Barrett, who had been arrested shortly after the Clerkenwell bombing, demonstrated another fact by the manner of his death: that the Irish ‘issue’ has always been one between the Irish people and, not the English people, but the English governing class who, with their large houses and estates in Ireland, had an interest in the matter which was largely absent in the middle and lower classes in England. Whereas an old-fashioned murderer could attract 30,000 Londoners to stay up all night drinking, the Irish bomber did not draw more than 2,000. Compared with the huge numbers who came to see the executions of the more entertaining murderers, there were few women in the crowd – and almost no middle-aged or old women. The boozy old boilers, the Mrs Gamps and Betsy Prigs whom Dickens love-hated, stayed away, the young and bonnetless girls being clearly Irish, as were a good portion of the crowd.16

  The street preacher who had started to rant at 6 a.m. would, in the case of a regular murderer, have been heckled with blasphemous catcalls. This man was heard in reverent silence – another indication that here was a largely religious, Irish crowd. At half-past seven a bell began to toll for the passing soul and the convict was pinioned in his cell. When he was led out to face the crowd, they were quite unlike the mob described by Dickens and Thackeray. Everything was still, silent. Barrett was calm while Calcraft, the hangman, strapped his legs together. He held the hand of the prison chaplain, the Rev. Dr Hussey, and quietly joined in the prayers being said for his soul. ‘The wretched man did not struggle much. His body slowly swung round once or twice, and then all was over.’ After the silence, the crowd dispersed into the traffic on Ludgate Hill. London resumed its life.

  On the same page, the Annual Register recalls a successful Derby Day for 1868, good weather, and some excitement for the punters. The favourite, Lady Elizabeth (7 to 4 against), came nowhere – she was flagging by the mile post, and the race was won by a horse called Blue Gown.17

  fn1 The death mask of Courvoisier was an ‘attraction’ at Madame Tussaud’s waxworks until the twentieth century.

  PART IV

  The Eighteen-Seventies

  23

  Gladstone’s First Premiership

  IN 1870–1, EUROPE was involved in wars and ideological conflicts of a cataclysmic dimension. Two pairs of immense irreconcilables clashed together: on the one hand, France and Germany; on the other, Catholicism and the new secularism – in particular, atheistic communism. As things played out, these two archetypical, monstrous struggles for power – ideological and territorial – were interwoven with the last vainglorious political posturings of Napoleon III. For he had guaranteed the safety of the pope and the temporal power of the Papacy with French troops which had to be withdrawn when he declared war on Prussia in the summer of 1870. In the space of one year, the ideological map of Europe was changed, and it was to be locked in a geopolitical rivalry, and a war of ideas, unresolved – if ever – until the late twentieth century.

  1870–1 was in the truest sense a European catastrophe. The sheer slaughter was something without parallel – first in the war in which the well-disciplined Prussians inflicted such total defeat on the French at Metz, then in the Paris Commune. (During the Bloody Week of 21–28 May 1871, 25,000 French died at the hands of their own compatriots.) The ominous drama of it all makes almost intolerable reading, since we know what will happen forty, fifty, seventy years later. The victory of Prussia led directly to the creation of a united Germany. The treaty of Versailles of 1871 absorbed the kingdoms of Ba
varia and Württemberg, and the grand-duchy of Baden, the grand-duchy of Hesse and many of the other German states were now incorporated in the Reich, centred on Berlin and recognizing the king of Prussia as their emperor. The king of Prussia – Wilhelm – was proclaimed the Kaiser. Bismarck his chancellor was triumphant. In the Hall of Mirrors, at the Palace of Versailles, the proclamation was made before the devastated government of France – a humiliation which would be revenged in 1919, repeated in 1940 …

  Britain was at best tangentially involved with these conflicts which were to leave everything so changed: Germany united at last under Prussia; the Italians at last a nation, in occupation of the pope’s temporal domains; the pope gamely fighting back with weapons of the Spirit by the declaration of his own infallibility; the Commune in Paris attempting the complete obliteration of the cathedral of Notre Dame – together with the Hôtel de Ville, the Palais de Justice, the Tuileries and a large part of the rue de Rivoli – only themselves to be massacred by the thousand in May; those who survived death being, in prodigious numbers, exiled or condemned to penal servitude.

  By what some would call an irony, Georges Seurat’s huge canvas Bathers at Asnières – 201 x 300 cm – now hangs in the National Gallery in London, far from the Seine-side scene it depicts. Parisian workers loll beside the river enjoying their recreation. In the background a calm factory adds a few puffs of smoke to the grey-blue smudge of sky. Such a scene of peace – painted in 1884 – could be taken for granted if these were Londoners on the banks of the Thames. Few of the English who look at this picture hung in their national collection will realize that the workers are sitting on the site of a battlefield where French blood has been spilt – first by invading German troops, and then in turn by the soldiers of the Versailles government which had abandoned the capital to the hands of the Communards. The peacefulness of Seurat’s scene is worked for – the tranquil semi-naked Parisians are cast in one equal light. There is something both dogged and precarious about this peace.1