The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  F.D. Maurice had emphasized the obligation on Christians to believe that the law of Christ is ‘applicable to all persons and all cases … he must believe that it lies at the root of all politics’. The cynicism which kept Christianity for Sundays or believed that politics was a necessarily dirty business was one of Maurice’s most persistent targets. Though Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign speeches seem hammy to modern tastes, it would be unfair not to understand how deeply he meant what he said, and how wide was his appeal to some sections of the electorate. Disraeli’s management of the economy was as easy to lambaste as his moral record, particularly since the election coincided with an economic slump. So Gladstone came back from his retirement – not just to restart his political career at the age of seventy-one, but to put to his wider public – who read his speeches in the newspapers – a fundamental choice. The election was a chance to throw out the cynical Utilitarianism of the early nineteenth century, in favour of the applied social Christianity – if not quite Christian socialism – of Maurice. Did we say not quite socialism? Not at all socialist. Gladstone offered the Northern Nonconformists and Scottish Presbyterian businessmen who were his natural constituents the chance to vote for a specifically moralistic, indeed religious, political programme without having to do anything so disturbing as to dig into their pockets. They could huff and puff about the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan without feeling an immediate need for state-funded (i.e. tax-funded) aid to the poverty-stricken families of the big British cities.

  Disraeli captured the essence and nature of Gladstone’s character and appeal in his last, unfinished novel, Falconet. Joseph Toplady Falconet is a young prig who is adopted as a parliamentary candidate for a pocket borough belonging to Lord Bertram – a composite portrait of Palmerston and, possibly, of Disraeli himself. It seems an unlikely combination, it is true, but there is a hint of it in one of the quips for which the fragment is famous. The young Gladstone-Falconet devotes his election address to a fervent speech on the revival of the slave trade in the Red Sea. ‘True it was,’ remarks the narrator, ‘that it subsequently appeared that there had been no revival of the slave trade in the Red Sea, but that the misapprehension had occurred from a mistake in the telegraph, manipulated by a functionary suffering from coup de soleil or delirium tremens.’ But then the Earl advises his young protégé, ‘I think I would leave the Red Sea alone. It was a miracle that saved us being drowned in it before.’49

  When the fragment was first published in The Times in 1905, that newspaper asked:

  Who is the noble Earl … to whose interest the young Falconet owed his first seat in Parliament, and who advised him to ‘leave the Red Sea alone?’… Might he have proved to be one of the chosen people; of whom alone this statement is historically true? Is it conceivable that the author intended to treat the world not only to a portrait of his great rival, but also to an idealized picture of his own career and personality as well?50

  We shall never know. He died – in a house he had acquired since leaving office – in Curzon Street on 19 April 1881, aged seventy-five. The grief-stricken Queen (‘The loss is so overwhelming’)50 was in favour of a public funeral and burial in the Abbey: but Disraeli’s will was specific:

  I DESIRE and DIRECT that I may be buried in the same vault in the Churchyard of Hughenden in which the remains of my late dear Wife Mary Anne Disraeli created in her own right Viscountess Beaconsfield were placed and that my Funeral may be conducted with the same simplicity as hers was.

  There is an obvious sincerity and quiet dignity in this which seems to suggest that with all his love of show, and all his overweening political ambition, Disraeli was with a large part of himself a detached observer of the public scene. Archbishop Tait had been appalled by Disraeli’s last completed novel Endymion. He read it ‘with a painful feeling that the writer considers all political life as mere play and gambling’. Those who admire, indeed love, Disraeli find the hint of this spilling into his political performance highly sympathetic. (The hint only – most of the time he was in deadly earnest about his political aims just as, effortlessly witty and eloquent as he always was, there was nothing frivolous about his manner of public speaking – no smiles, let alone giggles.) When the time came for election defeat, though, he took the news with immense dignity. He did not go off in a huff, as Gladstone had done in 1874, ostentatiously retiring from politics. He remained Lord Beaconsfield, leader of the Conservative Party, and made regular visits to the Lords. But the novels, and the instructions for a private funeral, bespeak an admirable detachment. This was incomprehensible to Gladstone. ‘As he lived, so he died – all display and no genuineness,’ wrote Gladstone in his diary when he heard of Disraeli’s wish to be buried quietly with his wife. He assumed that there could be no other explanation for the behaviour of a politician other than to draw attention to himself. The malice of Gladstone’s comment tells us more about himself than about Disraeli who, as Lord Blake says, ‘had a rare detachment, an extraordinary ability to survey the scene from outside and to wonder what it was all about’.52

  He was a unique being – one of the very few English prime ministers who could be described as a lovable human being, and one of the few with any claim to be thought of as a writer. Disraeli has a greater claim than that. He is a singular novelistic wit, only now perhaps, after an interval, being appreciated again. It is hard to think of many other Victorian novelists being a safe pair of hands as prime minister for so much as a week, let alone stage-managing the Congress of Berlin. An England with Dickens at the Dispatch Box might have been funny; Charlotte Brontë might have managed Irish Famine Relief more mercifully than Lord John Russell. Thackeray and Trollope of course both stood unsuccessfully as (Liberal) parliamentary candidates. It is hard to imagine any of them staying the course. George Eliot (assuming a change in the law to allow women MPs) is the only Victorian novelist one can imagine having the gravitas or staying power, but only on condition that she were merely placed in office, like one of the Platonic Guardians. One can’t see her loving, as Dizzy did, all the intrigue and calculation of the political life.

  George Eliot, as it happens, was one of those who saw the great merits of Disraeli. During the public debates about Bulgaria in 1879 she was vehemently pro-Disraeli and anti-Gladstone. Dizzy was ambitious, she argued, and no fool, ‘so he must care for a place in history, and how could he expect to win that by doing harm?’ She was ‘disgusted with the venom of the Liberal speeches from Gladstone downwards’.53

  She would also, as one who in Daniel Deronda (1876) had written so intelligently and sympathetically about the Jews, have seen the importance for England of having so brilliant a prime minister of Jewish birth and parentage. (She was an accomplished amateur Hebraist as well as philosemite.)54 When the question first arose in 1848 of whether to admit Jews to Parliament, Lord George Bentinck wrote to Lord John Manners, ‘This Jewish question is a terrible annoyance. I never saw anything like the prejudice which exists against them.’ Disraeli was brave enough to vote against his party over the question, consistently siding with the Liberals and bravely scandalizing the House by suggesting, in effect, that Judaism was a religion with at least as good a pedigree as Christianity. The Jews were admitted in 1858. It was in no small measure owing to Disraeli. His own career (baptized Anglican though he was) exemplified the willingness of the English political class to make a sensible compromise. Seeing his qualities, the Tory grandees were quite happy to convert Disraeli into a Conservative country gentleman and to treat him accordingly. But though his father had left the synagogue – on the grounds of insufficient belief and a wish to assimilate his children into Anglican culture – Disraeli was always loyal to his roots. His career, ambivalent and exotic, utterly sui generis, was among other things a signal that although anti-semitism existed in England, it was something from a political viewpoint above which the British determinedly and deliberately rose.

  fn1 The song was written by G.W. Hunt (1829–1904) but perform
ed and popularized by Gilbert Hastings Macdermott (1845–1901).

  fn2 He passed it to his son Herbert. In those days you could contest as many seats as you liked.

  26

  The Devils – Wagner – Dostoyevsky – Gilbert and Sullivan

  WITH MONEY CAME time; with time, leisure, even for those classes who in former ages toiled and struggled all week long. The professional and commercial classes were the first to obtain a Saturday half holiday. By the 1850s, the textile mills in the North tended to close at 2 p.m. on Saturday. (Wordsells, the Birmingham engineering works, seems to have been the first factory to give its workers Saturday afternoon off – in 1853.) The combination of time, leisure and money led to the increase of leisured activity, and the invention of popular pastimes to fill the newfound vacant hours. There was an enormous growth in the popularity of the turf – with 62 new racing events added to the calendar in the 1850s, 99 in the 1860s, 54 in the 1870s. The growth of railways, combined with the growth of free time, made this possible.1

  Football, whose rules became formalized by 1859, became the British national game, linking undergraduates and public schoolboys to the chapels and trade unions and working men’s associations who formed many of the early clubs. The Football Association began in 1863. Thirty clubs had joined by 1868, this largely souther phenomenon echoed by a northern equivalent in Sheffield.2 A Birmingham FA was formed in 1875, and a Lancashire one in 1878. Aston Villa Wesleyan Chapel was typical as an example of the religious origin of many of these clubs, as was Christ Church, Bolton, which became Bolton Wanderers in 1877.3 There was big money to be made by those with the wit to build stadia, charge at the turnstiles and to link home and away matches by arrangement with the railway companies. Bramhall Lane, Sheffield, was drawing crowds of 10,000 by the late 1870s.4 (It was also used for cricket matches.) Very many clubs could draw crowds of seven or eight hundred, and more than thirty clubs in this decade could draw two to five thousand on a Saturday.5

  For those with a taste for crowds of a different kind, shopping had become an activity in itself, not just a means of acquiring goods and groceries. William Whiteley started as a draper’s assistant in Wakefield, and first came to London to see the Great Exhibition in 1851. He started his own haberdashery; by 1867 he was selling silks, linens, drapery, costume jewellery, furs, umbrellas, artificial flowers. The 1870s were the great era of his expansion, with his huge emporium in Westbourne Grove catering for that expanding part of London. His assistant John Barker asked to be taken into a partnership. Whiteley instead offered Barker £1,000 per annum – an enormous sum for a drapery employee. Barker refused, setting up on his own in Kensington High Street with prodigious success. These big stores, still in existence though differently owned and managed, owed much of their success to being on the doorstep of newish suburbs. Many other big shops cashed in on this principle, some such as James Marshall (of Marshall and Snelgrove) and William Edgar (founder of Swan and Edgar) moving in to the centre of London having made fortunes in the suburbs. The vast Marshall and Snelgrove building on the corner of Oxford Street and Vere Street replaced an attractive row of miscellaneous Georgian houses and shops in 1879. It is built in a pseudo-Parisian manner, trying to suggest that the middle-class clientele who went there to sample the newfangled ready-made costumes were as sophisticated as their richer sisters who patronized the great houses of the French capital.6

  If shopping and games and race-meetings flourished with the arrival of ready-made leisure, so too did the arts. The 1870s witnessed a remarkable musical revival in Britain, with a flowering of concerts and operas. This in turn led to the founding of the Guildhall School of Music in 1880 and the Royal College of Music in 1883, with Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford as professors.

  Parry (1848–1918) and Stanford (1852–1924) are the best British composers to appear before Elgar (1857–1934). It seems unfair to them to draw attention to the fact that while they were writing their apprentice-work, Verdi (1813–1901) was writing Don Carlos (1867), or Brahms (1833–97) his German Requiem (1868) and his four symphonies in 1876, 1877, 1883 and 1885 – works which were contemporary with Tchaikovsky’s Evgeny Onegin (1879) and the Hungarian Rhapsodies (1846–85) of the Abbé Liszt. One cannot blame the few heroic souls who kept orchestral and choral music alive in Britain for the general philistinism of churches, colleges and schools which led to the near-death of music in Britain in the generations after the Industrial Revolution. Daniel Deronda, that wonderful novel, captures among many other nuances of life in the 1870s the essentially philistine attitude of the Victorian upper class to music. They thought of it as a diversion, no more. When Gwendolen thinks she can earn her living as a singer, the composer/conductor Klesner is forced to confront her with the unwelcome truth. ‘You have exercised your talents – you recite – you sing – from the drawing-room standpunkt. My dear Fräulein, you must unlearn all that. You have not yet conceived what excellence is.’7

  Parry and George Eliot both played their part in the visit of the most distinguished musical visitor to London in the 1870s. Of all the unlikely customers in Whiteley’s new department store in Bayswater, few could have been more incongruous among the genteel suburban folk than Richard Wagner, who went there in May 1877 with Chariclea Dannreuther. She helped him choose frocks for his daughters and he bought a rocking-horse for his sons which he called Grane, after Brünnhilde’s horse in The Ring. Edward Danreuther was an American-born German living in London; he was a virtuoso pianist who introduced English audiences to Grieg, Liszt and Tchaikovsky and hosted the London Wagner Festival.

  Wagner’s visits to London were made when he was strapped for cash. In 1855, concert versions of his early and more accessible operas had good receptions, though he can’t always have been pleased by the manner in which this praise was expressed. The author of the 1850 polemic Das Judentum in der Musik (Judaism in Music) was depressed by the English fondness for Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn. So when the leading music critic of the day, George Hogarth, still going strong at seventy-three – he lived until eighty-seven – thought to pay Wagner a compliment, he said that a concert rendition of ‘highlights’ from Lohengrin, ‘with scenic action and adjuncts of the opera house … would be as effective as the music of Meyerbeer himself’.

  Wagner left twenty-two years before visiting London again. By then his tempestuous artistic and personal career had stamped itself on the European imagination. His revolutionary status, and his uncompromising consciousness of his own genius, received the predictable philistine mockery from Punch – ‘Having been a considerable time accustomed to play the trilogy [sic: i.e. the Ring cycle] with one finger on the accordion, I was naturally anxious to hear the same work of art performed by a band of two hundred, at the Albert Hall’ etc. etc. The Daily Telegraph, being edited by a Jew, could hardly take kindly to Wagner the man. ‘In the midst of whatever honours are paid to Herr Wagner – and the deserts of his genius are great – there should be no false sentiment about the master’s personality.’ Dannreuther, whose wife took Wagner to Whiteley’s to buy the rocking-horse, accompanied the great man to the grill room at the South Kensington museum.

  There, over a chop and a pint of Bass’s ale, he began to pour out story after story … about German Jews, told in their peculiar jargon. A young foreigner, a painter apparently, had taken his seat at a table opposite, and was quietly watching and listening. Soon, his face began to twitch – I could see that he was making efforts to look serene. But the twitches increased – and when one of the stories came to the final point he snatched up his hat and vanished.8

  Francis Hueffer, the music critic, overheard George Eliot remarking to Cosima Wagner, with that straightforwardness which was so conspicuous and so lovable in her character, ‘Your husband does not like Jews; my husband is a Jew.’ (It was said as a tease – Lewes was not in fact Jewish.) Neither Lewes nor George Eliot herself appear to have been remotely put out by Wagner’s anti-semitism. They saw the Wagners at least a dozen times during t
he course of that month-long visit, more than once for suppers à six with the Dannreuthers, and evidently got on very well with both Cosima and Richard Wagner.9 The Prince of Wales, famously philosemitic, attended the concerts, and the Wagners were received at court – at Windsor – by Queen Victoria. The concerts conducted by Wagner himself were conspicuously less successful than those under the baton of his great interpreter Hans Richter. Wagner’s beat was completely lost during an extract from Tannhäuser, and when Richter resumed the podium the audience greeted him ‘almost uproariously’.

  Richter’s English was no better than Wagner’s, however, and this led to some confusing social exchanges. He and his wife were invited to dine with the Beales, but Richter turned up alone. On being asked why Madame had not come too, he answered, ‘She is lying; when she does not lie, she schwindles’ – his hosts, unaware that ‘schwindler’ in German means to faint, were duly baffled.10