The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Gladstone’s poor relations with the Queen coincided, not perhaps altogether accidentally, with a period when the monarchy was markedly unpopular. Although Gladstone was a devout monarchist, and a believer in the Church of England, he could not compete with Disraeli as a royal flatterer. The period of Gladstone’s greatest triumph coincided with the Queen’s decline in public esteem, and she would not have been unaware of this. In 1874, when Gladstone was so unexpectedly defeated, she was able to express relief that ‘It shows that the country is not Radical … what a good sign this large Conservative majority is of the state of the country.’36 ‘How far the monarchy really was in danger in 1868–72 no one can say for certain,’ said Lord Blake in his Romanes lecture, ‘Gladstone, Disraeli and Queen Victoria’. ‘But if it was, much of the credit for removing the danger goes to Disraeli.’ Some of the credit, too, must go to the republicans. Although some of the working classes were Radicals or republicans, most were not. Those who attempted to stir up republican sympathy seemed a little too slick, a little too like metropolitan sophisticates or pushy, rising plutocrats.

  The rich young Radical Sir Charles Dilke (1843–1911), now Liberal MP for Chelsea, was openly republican, as was his fellow Radical Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914), not yet an MP, both destined to be bright stars in the late Victorian political sky. The Queen had been a virtual recluse since being widowed, and refused to perform even simple public duties such as the State Opening of Parliament. She did so in 1871 solely because they were about to debate royal allowances, and then only on four more occasions in the next thirty years. What Does She Do With It? was a popular pamphlet, anonymously published but written by G.O. Trevelyan, another young Radical. (It rightly opined that the Queen was squirrelling away money given to her from the Civil List, amassing a private fortune from public funds, the basis of the colossal personal wealth of the present British royal family.)

  The young Radicals were representative of a widely held and modern view of life. They wanted to be rid of the Queen. They had no time for the Church. (Trevelyan, travelling with Gladstone in 1867, had been disgusted that the Grand Old Man ‘was reading nothing but a silly little Church goody book’.)37 They were unlikely to be impressed either by the Queen or by her heir.

  Bertie had been obliged to appear as a witness in the scandalous Mordaunt divorce case in 1870 – narrowly avoiding being cited as a co-respondent. The Queen asked Gladstone to ‘speak to him’. ‘I cannot help continually revolving the question of the Queen’s invisibility,’ Gladstone told his colonial secretary Lord Granville. Speaking ‘in rude and general terms, the Queen is invisible and the Prince of Wales is not respected’.38 Then in December 1871 Bertie went down with enteric fever. It was approaching the tenth anniversary of his father’s death when he nearly died himself. The illness did something, temporarily, to restore the fortunes of the monarchy in the eyes of Press and public. The Duke of Cambridge approached Gladstone and they arranged for a Thanksgiving Service in St Paul’s Cathedral on 27 February 1872 which made one of those royal spectacles which the British public enjoy. They forgot to invite Bertie’s doctors, causing the more agnostic of them to feel that some of the thanks accorded to the Almighty might more politely have been offered to the medical profession. There was even talk of Professor Tyndall, of University College Hospital, being asked to lecture on ‘The Pointlessness of Prayer’, but nothing came of this suggestion.39

  God and the Queen remained allies, as John Ruskin increasingly came to feel. Ruskin’s visit to Hawarden was organized by Gladstone’s daughter Mary Drew (married to the Rev. Harry Drew). It is instructive, not just because it elicited quotable exchanges between the two great men, which make us smile (they both undoubtedly enjoyed teasing one another), but because each discerned in the other an ambivalence of attitude to their contemporary social and political problems, an ambivalence which was the consequence less of their own divided natures than because the times actually called for ambivalent, not to say contradictory responses.

  Hindsight helps here. Who, reading of the plight of the nineteenth-century poor, could be other than some species of socialist or ‘equalitarian’? Who, witnessing the consequences of the communist experiment in Russia, could not view with dismay the socialist aspirations of the late nineteenth century? For this reason we can empathize with a whole contrariety of Victorian political viewpoints, easily able to understand how, for example, Marx or William Morris on the one hand, Lord Salisbury on the other, could think as they did. But perhaps the most interesting of those who reflected on the nature of society in the 1870s were those like Ruskin and Gladstone who tried to hold these contradistinctions together. Ruskin was both the inspiration of English socialism, the keen supporter of working men’s colleges, the denouncer of the destructive effects of industrialization on the lives of the poor; and, as he described himself in his Praeterita, ‘a violent Tory of the old school – Walter Scott’s school, that is to say, and Homer’s’. The People’s William, particularly when he was daily on his knees in Church, retained an element of an 1830s John Keble Tory in his nature.

  Gladstone genuinely believed that the times were out of joint, and that he had been given a golden chance, with his triumphant election victory of 1868, to bring real changes to pass, changes which would be based on justice and which would make life fairer for more people. He had swallowed his Anglican pride and realized that Ireland would never be pacified so long as the law appeared not to recognize that the majority of the Irish were Catholics. The Irish Church Bill of 1869 disestablished the Anglican Church in Ireland, making it one Christian denomination among others. The Irish Land Act of the following year was a step towards giving Irish peasant farmers freedom and independence. The introduction of the Secret Ballot in 1872 was a protection of the independence and liberty of voters. The civil service was made more open, with the possibility of posts being advertised and competed for by likely candidates.

  Yet all this begged the question of whether the passing of parliamentary Bills was what society needed; whether Liberalism always brought sweetness and light. When he stood as a candidate for the position of rector of Glasgow University against the Radical John Bright, Ruskin asked the students:

  What in the devil’s name have you to do with either Mr D’Israeli or Mr Gladstone? You are students at the University, and have no more business with politics than you have with rat-catching. Had you ever read ten words of mine with understanding you would have known that I care no more either for Mr D’Israeli or Mr Gladstone than for two old bagpipes with the drone going by steam, but that I hate all Liberalism as I do Beelzebub, and that, with Carlyle, I stand, we two alone now in England, for God and the Queen.40

  This was the side which Ruskin acted up when he stayed as Gladstone’s guest – ‘We had a conversation once about Quakers,’ Gladstone recalled, ‘and I remarked how feeble was their theology and how great their social influence. As theologians, they have merely insisted on one or two points of Christian doctrine, but what good work they have achieved socially! – Why, they have reformed prisons, they have abolished slavery, and denounced war.’ To which Ruskin answered, ‘I am really sorry, but I am afraid I don’t think that prisons ought to be reformed, I don’t think slavery ought to have been abolished, and I don’t think war ought to be denounced.’41

  It would be a mistake to treat this remark too seriously, or too unseriously. In fact, Ruskin came away from the visit to Hawarden, ‘almost persuaded to be a Gladstonian’.42 Gladstone for his part discerned in Ruskin’s political views ‘a mixture of virtuous absolutism and Christian socialism. All in his charming and modest manner.’43 Gladstone, addict of parliamentary politics that he was, was by no means a citizen of the secular city. He knew that for many or most people there was a life outside politics, and that politics were meaningless if they did not take account of this fact.

  Nowhere was this more obvious than in the Liberals’ education reform. ‘Amid dire controversies that in all countries surround all ques
tions of the school,’ Morley wrote, ‘some believe the first government of Mr Gladstone in its dealing with education to have achieved its greatest constructive work. Others think that, on the contrary, it threw away a noble chance.’44 The ‘others’ in Morley’s phrase were those secularists like himself who believed that there should have been introduced a system of universal and uniform secular education. Gladstone, partly because he was so preoccupied with Irish questions, partly perhaps because he did not wish to expose the contrast between his private feelings and his public persona as a radical figurehead, remained aloof from much of the parliamentary debate and left the framing of the Education Act to W.E. Forster (1818–86), a Quaker wool merchant who was vice-president of the committee of the privy council for education. Forster was torn between two warring factions. Joseph Chamberlain of Birmingham, R.W. Dale, a Congregational minister, and others formed the National Education League, in favour of freeing schools altogether from denominational association. But there were others, such as H.E. Manning, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Westminster, who could point to the burning churches and lawcourts of Paris, torched by Communards at the very moment Forster’s Education Bill was being discussed, and ask whether secularism always brought enlightenment and peace. Some would see the Forster Education Act as an extension of Benthamite control over the populace, particularly over the masses. Advocates of ‘state education’ like to see 1870 as the beginning of educational opportunities for poor people in Britain, but this is by no means the case. To believe that Forster brought literacy to the working class, for example, is to underestimate people’s capacity to take education into their own hands. Surveys of adult literacy in the early part of Victoria’s reign suggest that, for example, 79 per cent of the Northumberland and Durham miners could read, and about half of them could write. Eighty-seven per cent of children in the Norfolk and Suffolk workhouse in 1838 could read and write. Thanks to the growth in freelance schooling, all privately financed, literacy levels had risen to about 92 per cent in the nation at large by the time of Forster. There was no pressing need for the state to involve itself in education at all. By 1948, 5 per cent of state-educated school leavers were still classified as illiterate.45

  In the end there was a compromise which pleased no one – some schools were Church-run, others not. Complete religious liberty was given to all schools. Specifically denominational teaching was forbidden. Disraeli’s quip was that this created a new ‘sacerdotal class’ of schoolteachers with the duty of interpreting the Bible in any way they pleased, so long as their interpretation was not that of any Church formulary. The Act provided for education to be available for everyone under thirteen – but of course it was years before enough schools were built, or teachers recruited, and secondary education was still limited to the middle and upper classes. The Act did not provide free education: everyone had to pay for a place at one of the ‘board schools’ which it created, unless they could establish their poverty.

  To all the reforms and changes brought in by the Liberals, their changes to the educational system – both at the level of elementary schools and of universities – Gladstone was ambivalent. The Universities Terms Act, 1871, which made it possible to attend Oxford or Cambridge without subscribing to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, had tested Gladstone. The Liberal in him won – and he forced it through Parliament as an act of justice. But the Anglican in him had taken some persuading.

  Jowett, now master of Balliol, maliciously captured something of Gladstone when he wrote to Florence Nightingale, ‘Mr Gladstone … makes no secret of his conversion to disestablishment. Neither did he when I met him about six years ago. But then it became a secret again which no friend of the Ministry was allowed to question.’46

  By 1874 the radical programme of Gladstone’s government had run out of energy, as had Gladstone himself. After a number of setbacks – a defeat in a Commons vote over the Irish universities, a government defeat in a by-election (Stroud) – he declared that he wanted a dissolution of Parliament. As one last fling at popularity, he went to the hustings with the promise to abolish income tax, but the Conservatives won the election with a majority of 83 seats, and Gladstone’s first administration was over. Since he was sixty-five years old, it would have been reasonable to suppose that as well as being his first, it would also be his last. He was able to devote the first year of his retirement as prime minister to the subject which interested him most: religion.

  fn1 Vide infra.

  fn2 He was a grandson of George III, being the only son of the 1st Duke of Cambridge and Augusta Wilhelmina Louisa, daughter of Frederick, landgrave of Hesse-Cassel.

  24

  The Side of the Angels

  ON LOW SUNDAY, 1873, a new curate arrived in Wapping, to serve at the mission church, St Peter’s, London Docks. He was Lincoln Stanhope Wainwright, the son of an old military family (his father was ADC to Lt General Sir Willoughby Cotton), educated at Marlborough and Wadham College, Oxford, and now aged twenty-six. He was to spend the remaining fifty-six years of his life in this slum parish. He never took a holiday. He hardly ever thereafter slept a night out of Wapping. He led a life which, compared with the comfortable world into which he had been born, was one of extraordinary austerity. He slept on a straw mattress in an uncarpeted room. ‘One cannot understand poverty unless one knows what it is to be poor,’ he used to say.1

  His vicar, Charles Lowder, emphasized how very poor the parishioners were:

  There were a large number of small tradespeople, costermongers, persons engaged about the docks, lightermen, watermen, coalwhippers, dock labourers, shipwrights, coopers &c., the poorer of whom in the winter, or when the easterly winds prevented the shipping from getting up Channel, were for weeks, sometimes months, without work, and unable to support their families; their clothes, their furniture, their bedding, all pawned, they lay on bare beds, or on the floor, only kept warm by being huddled together in one closed, unventilated room.2

  Drink was an obvious narcotic to numb the hell of Wapping life. Children grew up with drunken parents, ‘with brothers and sisters already deep in sin, and abroad thieves and prostitutes a little older than themselves’.3 The pubs of the parish doubled as brothels for the sailors – Greeks, Malays, Lascars, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Austrians – who crowded the cobbled streets, and ‘there were frequent fights between foreign and English sailors about the girls with whom they were keeping company’.

  No one who came to this exotic part of London could fail to be impressed by the fact that this squalid, wicked and poverty-stricken square mile yet ‘contains one of the main supplies of London’s wealth and commerce, as well as one of its most curious sights, the London Docks. The extensive basins, in which may be seen the largest ships in the world; the immense warehouses which contain the treasures of every quarter of the globe – wool, cotton, tea, coffee, tobacco, skins, ivory; the miles of vaults filled with wines and spirits; the thousands of persons employed – clerks, customs officers, artisans, labourers, lightermen, and sailors – make the Docks a world of itself, as well as a cosmopolitan rendezvous and emporium.’4

  When Wainwright arrived as Lowder’s curate, he was shown into St Peter’s church and ‘it was far beyond what, ritualist as I was, I had been accustomed to’.5 The first generation of the Oxford Movement or High Church revival – Newman, Pusey, Keble – had been concerned primarily with doctrine: much of that doctrine, such as the impossibility of reducing the number of Anglican bishoprics in Ireland since Anglicanism was the one true Church, now seems esoteric to us. These founding fathers of the Movement would have seemed, to all outward appearances, indistinguishable from Low Churchmen or Broad Churchmen when conducting the liturgy. In the next generation, however, High Churchmen were, very gradually, to adopt customs which came to be known as Ritualist. Instead of standing at the north end of the Communion table, they stood facing east, as a symbol of the fact that the Eucharist was Christ’s banquet to be celebrated in the (New) Jerusa
lem. They lit candles on the Holy Table. Some wore coloured stoles over their surplices. Others wore full Eucharistic vestments. Whether these customs were permissible to the clergy of the Church of England was a matter of dispute, depending on how you interpreted the rubric in the Book of Common Prayer.

  Some would maintain, accurately, that vestments, incense, altar-lights and other elaborations of ritual were practised in the reign of Edward VI. What could not be denied is that in the middle years of Queen Victoria these observances became popular. Samuel Wilberforce visited Manchester and was told in the city that laymen were showing a love of ritual. ‘There is, I believe, in the English mind a great move towards a higher ritual.’ The churches where these rituals were practised tended to be the poorer parishes. The clergy who laid on the incense-drowned, candle-lit ceremonials brought colour, mystery, a sense of the numinous, into the lives of people who had nothing. But moreover, they were visibly men, like Lowder, like Wainwright, like Alexander Heriot Mackonochie at St Alban’s, Holborn, who were themselves prepared to embrace poverty and to fight the poor’s battles for them. They had absorbed the Catholicism of F.D. Maurice, which saw that in order to worship Christ, who became man – and a poor man at that – it was necessary for the Church not merely to preach orthodoxy from its pulpits but to engage with the lives of those most victimized and oppressed by the capitalist experiment: the urban poor.

  No doubt it was this fact which, combined with gut anti-Catholic prejudice, made the ‘Ritualists’ so disturbing a presence for the Victorians. As early as the 1850s at St Barnabas, Pimlico, mobs had burst into the church to protest at the allegedly Romish goings-on, hissing in the aisles and rattling at the chancel gates.6 When Bryan King had introduced Ritualism to the parish of London Docks – St George in the East – there had been similar riots, and again when St Peter’s was established as a mission church in Wapping. Services were regularly interrupted with ‘execrations, hisses, and laughter, the same bursts of groans and howlings, the same stamping of feet and slamming of doors, the same hustling of the clergy and maltreating of helpless little choirboys, the same blasphemies, the same profanity, the same cowardliness, the same brutality as ever’.7