The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Gladstone appears either to be stating the obvious – that Roman Catholics should be loyal citizens and, in the case of members of both Houses of Parliament, prepared to take an Oath to the Crown; or he is making the surely monstrous suggestion (for a Liberal) that Roman Catholics should give up their religion and join the Church of England. His wild pamphlets finally brought his friendship with Manning to a close, and drew from Newman the graceful rebuke in his A Letter Addressed to his Grace the Duke of Norfolk on Occasion of Mr Gladstone’s Recent Expostulation: ‘If I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts … I shall drink – to the Pope, if you please – still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.’24

  Yet the gracefulness does not really get round the difficulty. If Gladstone was impugning the political loyalty of Catholics, then his pamphlets were unpardonable. But very many Catholics knew what Pius IX and his more extreme supporters would make of Newman’s after-dinner toast; and many, including Döllinger, knew that though they chose to remain in the Church for reasons of spiritual solidarity, Catholics of Newman’s colouring were, to put it mildly, dismayed by the infallible pretensions and political posturings of the Papacy. After all, this bizarre debate stirred up by Gladstone, with its appeals to the memory of the Spanish Armada, was taking place at a period of history when many Europeans, far from worrying about the rival claims of infallible popes versus scholarly Döllingers, of Presbyterian monarchs or ritualist saints, were asking the more searching question, whether religion itself was true.

  In the year that the pope declared his own infallibility Darwin published The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, with its humbling conclusion: ‘Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.’25 There are certain passages in this book which make disturbing reading for us in the twenty-first century. One of the core beliefs of the Western world, post-National Socialism and its Götterdämmerung, is in the equality of all the races of humankind. The easy way in which Darwin assumes the superiority of Northern and Western and white human beings to those of other climates and hemispheres will bring a blush, or an embarrassed smile, to many readers today. There is something, for us, chilling in Darwin’s meditations on the contrast between those ‘Eastern barbarians’ who overran the Roman Empire, and the ‘savages’ who wasted away at the prospect of British colonization. He cheerfully speaks of the ‘inferior vitality of mulattoes’.26 Savages have ‘low morality’, insufficient powers of reasoning to recognize many virtues, and ‘weak power of self command’.27 Darwin accepts Malthus’s view that barbarous races reproduced at a lower rate than civilized ones and he appears (he who so abominated the cruelty of Brazilian slave-owners in The Voyage of a Naturalist) to believe that acts of genocide, if perpetrated by the British, were somehow part of the Natural Process:

  When Tasmania was first colonised the natives were roughly estimated by some at 7,000 and by others at 20,000. Their number was soon greatly reduced, chiefly by fighting with the English and with each other. After the famous hunt by all the colonists, when the remaining natives delivered themselves up to the government, they consisted of 120 individuals who were in 1832 transported to Flinders Island … The grade of civilisation seems to be a most important element in the success of competing nations.28

  This is the element which the twenty-first-century reader would find most shocking in Darwin. Most Victorian readers would be untroubled by the notion that European races were superior to those in other parts of the world. Had not Tennyson spoken for all of them by stating, ‘Even the black Australian, dying, dreams he will return a white’?29

  What upset Darwin’s contemporaries was the possibility that evolutionary theory eliminated the need for God as an hypothesis. ‘The declining sense of the miraculous,’ as Lecky called it in 1863, ‘was pushed further into decline by Darwin and the public acceptance of evolution. By removing special creation of species, Darwin removed the need for very numerous interferences with physical laws.’30 Those words are by a Church historian. We should now see, as the late Victorians in general began to see, that even to talk about ‘laws’ of nature – if by that is implied any external agency or mind behind matter or grand Designer of the universe – is to talk in metaphor. Things happen in certain ways. Darwin’s patience in assembling evidence for why he believed evolution worked by a process of sexual selection is untainted by rhetoric or noise. His is a quietly reasonable tone of voice. The metaphysical implications of what he so slowly and so gently worked out caused him grief. His disciple Huxley and others could shout these implications through a megaphone, but not Darwin. It makes him all the more deadly as a voice to undermine traditional theism.

  Whatever he did or did not do for God, Darwin certainly cut the human race down to size. In a year when one man persuaded the greater part of Christendom that he was infallible, there was surely a corrective, in the reminder (Darwin’s part I, chapter VII) of ‘the wonderfully close similarity between the chimpanzee, orang and man, in even the details of the arrangement of the gyri and sulci of the cerebral hemispheres’.31

  Already, a decade and more after T.H. Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce had their spat at the Oxford conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the debate had moved on. Wilberforce, to whom posterity has been unjust, left Oxford in 1869 and became bishop of Winchester. He was not there long. In July 1873 – when he was sixty-seven – he was thrown from his horse while riding with Lord Granville on the Surrey downs at Abinger, and was killed instantly.32

  Huxley, a materialist Don Quixote tilting at religious windmills, was to continue waging a campaign to promote evolutionary thought for the next two decades. If the Church of England was run by men like Wilberforce, he opined, ‘that great and powerful instrument for good or evil, the Church of England will be shivered into fragments by the advancing tide of science’. As for the Church of Rome, it was ‘the great antagonist’ of science. Huxley, as late as 1889, believed that only secular governments prevented the Inquisition from persecuting scientists – ‘the wolf would play the same havoc now, if it could only get its blood-stained jaws free from the muzzle imposed by the secular arm’. There were, he asserted, only two intellectually honest beliefs: strict orthodoxy and agnosticism. Since ‘a declaration of war to the knife against secular science’ was the only position ‘logically reconcilable with the axioms of orthodoxy’, there could be no neutral ground.33

  Human nature, however, is more complicated than Huxley wanted it to be. Many Christians absorbed Darwinism, or other versions of evolutionary theory. Perhaps theologians were, in the decades after Darwin, more inclined to stress God’s indwelling in the creation than his part in its origin, but men and women continued to go to church. Nonconformism, with its heavy reliance upon a literal interpretation of Scripture, might have been more vulnerable to the assaults of scepticism if it had numbered among its adherents more Herbert Spencers, George Eliots or Edmund Gosses. It is unlikely, however, that the American evangelists Dwight L. Moody or Ira D. Sankey, who visited Britain in 1874–5, found many in their large audiences whose evening lamp shed its rays on the pages of Feuerbach or Darwin. Their meetings took the form familiar in our own day to those who have watched such American revivalists as Dr Billy Graham. ‘It was an impressive sight to see masses of human beings hanging or sitting on the shelves, and to all appearance on the clefts of the rocks behind the preacher,’ wrote a reporter when Moody and Sankey held an open-air meeting in Edinburgh, ‘for it reminded us of the time when men and women will be crying to the rocks to fall on them, and cover them from the face of him who sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb.’34 In Belfast there was another ‘soul-stirring sight’, when three thousand stood up to sing. ‘It was like the sound of many waters to hear this multitude sing the new song as all stood and sung in one burst of praise,

  O happy day, that fixed my choice

  On thee, my Saviour and my God!35

  Of course there will
always be mockers. ‘A London Physician’ wrote a pamphlet claiming that ‘The People Go Mad Through Religious Revivals.’ ‘Alas! judged by the low standard of an American ranter, Mr Moody is a third-rate star,’ wrote this acerbic, anonymous medical gentleman. ‘As for Mr Sankey, the friend who can sing, his voice is decidedly bad, and, like all worn-out singers, he endeavours to conceal this by startling alternations of high and low notes.’

  Similar sneering was no doubt directed to the activities of William Booth (1829–1912), who started as an Anglican layman, became a Methodist lay preacher, and then adopted the uniform and style of a musical army – ‘The Salvation Army’. ‘Its impact upon slums can easily be exaggerated,’ says a modern historian of this well-meaning movement, established in 1878.36 We need not be so dismissive, even though William Booth’s most famous rhetorical question – ‘Why should the Devil have all the best tunes?’ – must puzzle anyone with an ear. To compare the hurdy-gurdy noises made by the Sally Army with Haydn’s masses, or even with the conventional Anglican psalm-settings, would suggest that the Devil was in fact comparatively lacking in musical advantage. The Salvation Army particularized a general tendency among the many movements to improve the lot of the Victorian poor, whether these worthy efforts were sacred or secular. In general, there was no evidence of the populace at large taking kindly to schemes of human improvement. Improve their houses, their conditions of work, their drains and, if you must, their doctors – this seemed to be the mood: but hold back from the rather less attractive wish to improve them. This surely is what distinguishes the liberal from the conservative temperament throughout the ages and helps to explain, in a time when there was such continuing inequality and such evident hardship in some quarters, why electors chose to return Conservative governments.

  There was also the fact that in Disraeli the Conservatives had a leader of consummate charm, wit and lightness of touch. This by no means suggests, because his surface shone, that he was a man of no depths. Over the religious questions of the day, for example, Disraeli was in his way as keen to preserve the orthodoxies as Gladstone, though less anxious to be seen like the Pharisees praying in the marketplace. Though he quipped, ‘I am the blank page between the Old and the New Testament’37 he was in fact a simple Church of England man, as far as observance was in question. As to belief – when he addressed the dons and undergraduates of Oxford in 1863, who were agonizing about whether humanity was of the apes or the angels – ‘My Lord, I am on the side of the Angels.’38 Disraeli’s wit, in such marked contrast with the prolixity and the intense seriousness with which Gladstone wished to be seen to take not only the world, but himself, opened up a fascinating gulf in the politics of the 1870s. If Gladstone’s first administration was the first really Liberal government, Disraeli’s second – of 1874 – was the first clear Conservative government in the modern understanding of the term. The electorate were choosing not simply between two great coalitions, new-formed into political machines; nor yet alone between two of the giants of British political history; but, as it were, between two visions of life itself.

  To savour the spiritual distance between the two men, you have only to turn from Gladstone’s speeches on Ireland, quoted in Hansard, or his pamphlets on Ritualism and the Vatican decrees, to Disraeli’s novel Lothair (1870). Gladstone wrote and spoke like a mad clergyman – earnest, excitable, unstoppably prolix. Disraeli’s novel covers much the same ground. Its themes are the predatory character of modern Catholicism, with a sub-plot involving Italian radical nationalists and Fenian terrorists. Its settings are just those grand London dinner-tables and country houses with which Gladstone and Disraeli were both familiar. But Lothair has fizz, and like the best satire it delights in what it mocks. During his brief period of premiership in 1868, Dizzy had tried to set up a Catholic university in Ireland. Archbishop Manning had at first been supportive of the scheme. Then he withdrew from it and threw his support behind his old friend Gladstone. Disraeli’s Irish policy was in ruins – a key factor in losing him that year’s election. The retiring prime minister – then aged sixty-five – sat down and wrote his sprightliest and best-constructed novel, his first (by the time it was published) for a quarter of a century. The chief target of its satire is the figure of Cardinal Grandison. Etiolated (he never eats, and turns up at grand houses after dinner), interfering, worldly and fanatical, Cardinal Grandison is a genuinely seductive character. And he is quite unmistakably a portrait of Manning. Ecclesiastical obsessives might mock Disraeli’s hazy grasp of the raiment and ritual of the Catholic clergy, but as a work of High Camp fantasy Lothair is richly enjoyable in its own right, as well as being, clearly, the inspiration for much of Ronald Firbank and for Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. As the cardinal discourses of the Japanese government at the soirée of Mrs Putney Giles, Bayswater hostess, ‘the Mikado himself was not more remarkable than this Prince of the Church in a Tyburnian drawing-room, habited in his pink cassock and cape, and waving, as he spoke, with careless grace his pink barrette’.39

  The novel as it happens makes the same point, and shares the same view, as Gladstone’s pamphlets on Vaticanism. At first Lothair, the young aristocratic hero, is nearly seduced by the atmosphere of the old Catholic families, and by the delicious mystery of Tenebrae chanted in a chapel not unlike Knowle (‘Vauxe’ in the book). Then, after a series of improbable adventures fighting for Garibaldi in Italy, he escapes the wiles of the cardinal and of the religious maniac Miss Arundel, and marries the lovely Protestant Lady Corisande. The cardinal is left to ‘my banquet of dry toast’.40

  Disraeli’s novel irritated his more pompous parliamentary colleagues who thought that ex- and aspirant prime ministers ought to be boring. But it sold very well. By the time he became prime minister again in 1874 Lothair had earned Disraeli £10,600.41

  One reason for the book’s appeal is that it is an obvious roman à clef. Lord and Lady St Jerome are based on Lord and Lady Howard of Glossop; Monsignor Catesby is a portrait of Monsignor Capel, the ‘society’ priest; the Bishop is Soapy Sam Wilberforce and the Duke is clearly the Duke of Abercorn. Lothair himself is a clear portrait of the 3rd Marquess of Bute (1847–1900), who was indeed seduced by the Church of Rome and who devoted a comparatively short life to the pleasures of ecclesiastical aestheticism. He translated the Roman Breviary into English, and commissioned William Burges to rebuild Cardiff Castle and to build Castell Coch. He beautified and transformed many churches. He was prodigiously rich.

  J.A. Froude was surely right to say that:

  the students of English history in time to come, who would know what the nobles of England were like in the days of Queen Victoria, will read “Lothair” with the same interest with which they read “Horace” and “Juvenal”. When Disraeli wrote, they were in the zenith of their magnificence. The industrial energy of the age had doubled their already princely revenues without effort of their own. They were the objects of universal homage – partly a vulgar adulation of rank, partly the traditional reverence for their order, which had not yet begun to wane. Though idleness and flattery had done their work to spoil them, they retained much of the characteristics of a high-born race. Even Carlyle thought they were the best surviving specimens of the ancient English. But their self-indulgence had expanded with their incomes.42

  Money enabled eccentricity to flourish on a prodigious scale in the Victorian upper class. They ranged from a low-life peer such as the 4th Marquess of Ailsbury, whose heavy box coat had real half-crowns for buttons and who spoke in rhyming slang, mixed with bookies and actresses and gambled away £175,000,43 to rarer creatures such as Robert, 2nd Baron Carrington (1796–1868). He owned Wycombe Abbey in Buckinghamshire and Tickford Park near Moulsoe. Lord lieutenant of Buckinghamshire, a Fellow of the Royal Society and an enterprising landowner who left £70,000, he was known in clubland as ‘glass-bottom Carrington’ because of his unshakeable belief that ‘an honourable part of his person was made of glass, so that he was afraid to sit thereon and used to discharge his
legislative and judicial functions standing’. Grenville Murray, illegitimate son of the 2nd Duke of Buckingham, revealed this fact to the world the year after the unfortunate peer’s demise, and was horsewhipped by Carrington’s son on the steps of the Conservative Club for doing so.

  During the whole of his uneventful life, he persistently refused to sit whenever it was possible by any exercise of ingenuity to stand up or lie down … He even adopted a recumbent posture with many precautions; and when he retired for the night was accustomed to go gingerly on his stomach in order that the lower part of his body might be uppermost. He then trusted that, if lightly covered, it might escape crack or damage. When he walked abroad, he could never hear the sound of approaching footsteps from behind without emotion.

  Loathing both his county houses, Carrington took a twenty-year lease on the neighbouring Gayhurst, where he commissioned William Burges to build kitchens, brewhouse, dog kennels and of course lavatories in the most ornate Gothic manner.44

  The 1st Earl of Dudley, ‘the Lorenzo of the Black Country’, died insane in 1833 after a lifetime of conversing with himself in two voices, one squeaky, one bass. In 1847 his town house, 100 Park Lane, was taken over by Lord Ward, who installed a stupendous Louis XVI-style ballroom, heavily gilded, and a number of magnificent drawing-rooms.

  The grand houses of London at this date were palatial on a scale difficult for the imagination to recapture, even with the aid of photographs. The saloon at Bridgewater House, completed in 1854, the picture galleries and the state drawing-rooms, were inspired by the Palazzo Braschi in Rome. Popes or emperors might have found the rooms ostentatious: they were occupied by an obscure Gloucestershire squire called R.S. Holford,45 who had made a fortune from shares in the New River Company. The grandeur of the residences of the Rothschilds, the Beits (by the end of the century) or the dukes of Devonshire beggared belief. Dickens’s Mr Merdle in Little Dorrit was not an exaggerated figure. The high Victorians worshipped money, and the grander you were, the more you were expected to flaunt it. What Lady Eastlake experienced at Devonshire House in 1850 could have been replicated in many London palaces any year of Queen Victoria’s reign: