by A. N. Wilson
And while the House of Peers withhe!
Its legislative hand,
And noble statesmen do not itch
To interfere with matters which
They do not understand,
As bright will shine Great Britain’s rays
As in King George’s glorious days!32
This obvious burlesque was in fact the political creed of the huge majority of the Liberal and Tory first audiences for Iolanthe in 1882.
This was one of the great eras of education for women, with the foundation of colleges of higher education for them. The prospectus for ‘Vassar Female College’ – Poughkeepsie, NY – was published in 1865, ‘to accomplish for young women what our colleges are accomplishing for young men’.33 British equivalents included the opening of the London Medical School for Women in 1875, against tremendous opposition; the foundation of the Royal Holloway College in Egham, Surrey, in 1879; and the admission of women to Oxford and Cambridge. Newnham College became part of Cambridge University in 1871, though women had to take separate exams, and were not considered capable of studying Latin and Greek. In 1880 the British-American Charlotte Scott (1858–1931) studied at Girton College, Cambridge, and was allowed to take the same mathematics examination as the men. She came eighth, which, had she been of a different gender, would have allowed her the title ‘eighth wrangler’. Since women were not allowed degrees, she was not allowed. When the name of the eighth male wrangler was read out in the Senate House, a party of doughty feminists chanted, ‘Scott of Girton! Scott of Girton!’34
It is hard to recall these things without being moved. For Gilbert and Sullivan fans of course the very notion of females in higher education is inherently ludicrous, as their version of Tennyson’s The Princess – Princess Ida (1884) – confirms.
In Mathematics, Woman leads the way:
The narrow-minded pedant still believes
That two and two make four! Why, we can prove,
We women, household drudges as we are –
That two and two make five – or three or seven;
Or five-and-twenty, if the case demands!35
The downside of Gilbert and Sullivan mania – as an expression of the English character and attitude to life generally – is that it can make large sections of the populace who ought to think a bit harder snigger instead. There is no doubt that the progress of feminism – both the education of women and the extension of the franchise – was held back by decades simply because so many people, women as well as men, could dismiss it as a joke.
And, in England, events did so attempt to force themselves into Gilbertian, farcical mode. What could be more satisfying to the philistine public than the legal spat between James McNeill Whistler, American aesthete, painter and author of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890), and John Ruskin, who by 1877 was beginning to exhibit symptoms of the insanity which would at length enclose forever that lovable and wonderful prophet? Ruskin went to the Grosvenor Gallery to see the Whistlers on show there, and in the next instalment of his highly distinctive Fors Clavigera, a sort of open letter to the labouring classes and others – a stream of consciousness which contains some of his finest writing – he was to observe fatefully, ‘I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.’ Whistler sued. The trial was heard by Sir John Huddleston, famous for ‘the tiniest feet, the best kept hands and the most popular wife in London’36 (i.e. Lady Diana Beauclerk, daughter of the Duke of St Albans). The trial was a farce. Poor Burne-Jones was asked as a witness on Ruskin’s behalf and lost Whistler’s friendship. The jury found Ruskin guilty of libel and awarded Whistler a farthing’s damages. W.S. Gilbert on a particularly whimsical day could not have dreamed up anything more absurd. But the opera about the aesthetes, Patience – which in an earlier draft was to have been a spoof of the Ritualist clergy – has about it that whiff of cruel satire which in England has the occasional tendency to turn into mere bullyism. In 1881 they were laughing at an aesthete who walks down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in his medieval hand, and has ‘an attachment à la Plato for a bashful young potato, or a not-too-French French bean’. Fourteen years later, the spectator-sports were the Wilde trials.
Likewise, in the most popular of the Savoy Operas, H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), it would be a po-faced member of the audience who had not laughed at the ‘ruler of the Queen’s Navee’, Sir Joseph Porter KCB, First Lord of the Admiralty.
SIR JOSEPH
Now landsmen all, whoever you may be,
If you want to rise to the top of the tree,
If your soul isn’t fettered to an office stool,
Be careful to be guided by this golden rule –
Stick close to your desks and never go to sea,
And you all may be Rulers of the Queen’s Navee!37
Any observer of the English scene over the last two hundred years knows that this is archetypical – that the political history of Britain is one of chancellors of the Exchequer who know nothing about money, education ministers who can’t spell, bishops with little or no religious faith. The original audiences for Pinafore would have roared their recognition at the first lord of the Admiralty played by George Grossmith, who had made so many of the ‘patter songs’ his own. For here was Disraeli’s first lord of the Admiralty in person, that landlubber son of the Methodist chain of newsagents, W.H. Smith. In fact, this Wesleyan grammar-school boy of philanthropic mien who had probably never stepped aboard a paddle-steamer, let alone a battleship, was destined, first as first lord of the Admiralty, then – in Lord Salisbury’s second administration – as secretary of state for war, to oversee an extraordinary transformation in British naval policy.
HMS Devastation, 285 feet long by 62 feet, was built in 1873, four years before Smith became first lord. It has been described as ‘a floating armoured castle, invulnerable to any foreign guns’.38 The name alone sends a chill into the spine. Throughout the late Seventies and early Eighties – the time of Disraeli’s last, Gladstone’s second, governments – there was agitation by the jingoists for an ever-bigger and more devastating navy. Both Smith as a Tory, Gladstone as an old Peelite, were more anxious by instinct to save money than to increase military or naval expenditure. But events, and the large political fact that Britain had an economy which was bound up with an ever-expanding empire, made so judicious a hold on the purse-strings only a partial possibility. During the war scare of 1878–9 Smith was obliged to think of a greatly expanded navy. And in 1884, when Gladstone was in power, a series of scaremongering articles by W.T. Stead – ‘The Truth About the Navy by One Who Knows the Facts’ – jumped the government into programmes of rearmament. A supplementary vote of £5,525,000 was given by the Exchequer in 1885 – ‘£3,100,000 of it to be devoted to building one ironclad, five protected cruisers, ten protected scout vehicles and thirty torpedo boats’.39
Since no weapon or ship in the history of warfare has been invented without being used, these belligerent developments could only lead to the inevitable Götterdämmerung of war – not in the lifetime of W.H. Smith, but in the lifetime of many who attended the first night of Pinafore. Only a lunatic would blame Gilbert and Sullivan for the build-up of armaments and the sparring of the Great Powers. But it is fair to observe that a culture which threw up, and feasted upon, H.M.S. Pinafore (and the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan are effectively the only memorable music produced by the English in the 1870s and 1880s) was also the culture that failed to ask itself any serious questions about the desirability of a country which was still au fond a small trading island – albeit a prodigiously rich and energetic one – playing the role of world-dominator, superpower and ‘Empire’. Its lifetime of so doing was short and on the whole disastrous; which is why, though Gilbert and Sullivan can still delight us with their zany jokes and whistleable tunes, the operas themselves in the context of their times seem like Neronic fiddling against a fiery sky.<
br />
fn1 There had been a flop in 1871 with an imitation of Offenbach entitled Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old.26
27
Country Parishes – Kilvert – Barnes – Hardy
IT IS DIFFICULT for me to conceive of any more agreeable way of life than that of the Victorian country parson. If I had to choose my ideal span of life, I should choose to have been born in the 1830s, the son of a parson with the genetic inheritance of strong teeth. (Improvements in dentistry are surely among the few unambiguous benefits brought to the human race by the twentieth century.) I should avoid a public-school education through being ‘delicate’, and arrive at Balliol with a good knowledge of Greek to be taught by Benjamin Jowett. (The Tractarians would pass me by, but after my ordination, upon being elected to a fellowship, I should take a bemused and tolerant interest in the Ritualist churches while having no wish to imitate their liturgical customs.) After a short spell – say, five years – teaching undergraduates at the Varsity, one of them would introduce me to his pretty, bookish sister, and we should be married. I should resign my fellowship and be presented with a college living, preferably a medieval church, a large draughty Georgian rectory and glebe enough to provide the family with ‘subsistence’. By now it would be, let us say, the 1860s, and I should remain here for the next forty years, a faithful friend to generations of villagers to whom I would act as teacher, amateur doctor and social worker, as well as priest. My wife, cleverer than I, would read French, German and Italian with our innumerable children and be pleased when the daughters entered St Hugh’s or Somerville. Whether any of the sons – keen cyclists, antiquarians, butterfly-collectors and botanists all, like their father, all good at Latin and all admirers of William Morris and George Bernard Shaw – would follow me into a clergyman’s career is unlikely, for we should all have Doubts, and the children, as they grew up, would be more honest than their father about expressing them. Perhaps as the country parson, approaching fifty by the time of Disraeli’s death, I would instinctively feel that I had entered upon a drama which was coming to an end; that the Age of Faith, embodied in the old medieval building where, every day, I read aloud from the Book of Common Prayer, had irrevocably been destroyed – whether by Capitalism, or Darwin, or Railways or Imperialism, or a nebulous Zeitgeist, who could say?
My fantasy-life as a Victorian parson can be lived out when I take down from the shelves the diaries kept by the Reverend Francis Kilvert, curate of Clyro in Radnorshire from 1865 to 1872, from 1872 to 1876 at his father’s parish of Langley Burrell in Wiltshire, and vicar of Bredwardine in the Wye Valley of Herefordshire from 1877. He married in 1879, which is probably why the diaries (candid in their aching, unfulfilled heterosexuality) came to an end. (We shall never know. He died five weeks after marrying.) The best entries in the diary are the snapshots, rather than the set pieces – such as this, for May Day, 1871:
Up early, breakfast at 7 and the dog cart took me to the station for the 8 train. It was a lovely May morning, and the beauty of the river and green meadows, the woods, hills and blossoming orchards were indescribable. At Hereford two women were carrying a Jack in the Green about the High Town. In the next carriage a man was playing a harp and a girl a violin as the train travelled.1
Or
May 29 1876
Oak-apple day and the children all came to school with breast-knots of oak leaves.2
Kilvert has painted England and Wales before they were ‘wrecked’ by cars, macadamed roads, supermarkets, factory farms, holidays for all – with their attendant holiday-cottages – retirement bungalows, theme parks, science parks, carparks and railway stations called parkway. No wonder the readers of the twenty-first century escape into his pages as into the most delightful fantasy. And yet, the world Kilvert depicts is in fact one of desperate poverty.
Tuesday, 9 January 1872
Went to see old Caroline Farmer and read to her the latter part of Luke vii. On my way thither I fell in with a boy in the lane named George Wells. He was going to beg a bit of bread from a woman who lived at the corner of the Common under the Three Firs. He said he did not know the name of the woman but she knew his mother and often gave him a bit of bread when he was hungry. His mother was a cripple and had no parish relief, sold cabbage nets and had nothing to give him for dinner. Then a very different figure and face came tripping down the lane. Carrie Britton in her bright curls and rosy face with a blue cloak, coming from the town with a loaf of bread from the baker’s for her grandmother.3
The abolition of the Corn Laws in the 1840s had been for the radical economic liberals the means of bringing about a glorious era of meritocracy and plenty. Cobden, the chief agitator for Corn Law repeal, has his statue in many an English town. Working men’s clubs are called the Cobden Club. Meaner terraces of houses in industrial conurbations are named Cobden Crescent and Cobden Terrace. ‘The people of this country look to their aristocracy with a deep-rooted prejudice – an hereditary prejudice, I may call it – in their favour; but your power was never got, and you will not keep it by obstructing that progressive spirit which is calculated to knit nations more closely together by commercial intercourse …’4
Twenty years later, the agricultural poor of Britain were, on the whole, more wretched than ever, though the big landlords continued to own most of the agricultural land. Though land values and rents fell in the course of the century, half the entire country was owned by 4,217 persons in 1873.5
In the 1860s Cobden exclaimed, ‘If I were five and twenty … I would have a League for free trade in Land just as we had a League for free trade in Corn.’ He and his economic liberal allies could not see what effects were visited upon the land by treating farming as just another ‘industry’.
In 1860 the United States had some 30,800 miles of railway; by 1870 this had reached 53,200 miles and by 1880 some 94,200. It was now possible for the grain-producers in the great prairies to send their grain to market fast and cheaply. Transatlantic steamer-transport also reduced transportation costs. In 1873 the cost of sending a ton of grain from Chicago to Liverpool was £3 7s.; by 1884 it had fallen to £1 4s. – a cheapening equal to 9s. 9d. on every quarter of corn for water-freight alone.6
Almost every country in Europe responded to this threat by introducing tariffs on imported corn – i.e. by introducing Corn Laws very similar to the ones so enthusiastically abolished by Sir Robert Peel and his Liberal friends in 1846. Russia – itself a big corn exporter now, much of its cheap grain coming into Britain along with the American – slapped on import tariffs, as did France and Germany. Only industrialized Britain and Belgium chose to believe Cobden’s discredited dogma that commercial intercourse between nations inevitably spells progress. Wheat – the largest arable product of English farms – fell in price from 56s. 9d. per quarter in 1877 to 46s. 5d. in 1878. By 1885, the British area under wheat had shrunk by a million acres. By the 1880s the British were importing an absurd 65 per cent of their wheat, and nearly a million workers had left the land, most of them by emigration, though others had swarmed into the industrial towns.7
In addition to the devastating ravages of capitalism, rural England in late Victorian times suffered a series of terrible natural calamities. In 1865–6 and 1877 outbreaks of cattle plague (rinderpest) and pleuropneumonia were so severe that the government had to restrict the movement of cattle and pay compensation to the owners of slaughtered beasts to check the spread of infection.8 A run of wet seasons from 1878 to 1882 produced an epidemic of liver-rot in sheep in Somerset, north Dorset and the Lincolnshire marshes – 4 million sheep were lost in the period.9 The floods caused wipe-out for many arable farmers. Foot-and-mouth disease raged, out of control, through British livestock from 1881 to 1883.
Wheat and wool – the two staples of English and Welsh prosperity since the Middle Ages – fell into the hands of overseas markets.10 One must not exaggerate the agricultural depression of the closing decades of the nineteenth century, nor simplify its causes. Farmers who did stay in business during t
hese bad years managed not merely to survive, but to increase their profits.11 There was an increase in meat-production, dairy produce and vegetables, and the introduction of machinery improved economic efficiency, so the period saw the grubbing up of many hedges. Wiltshire at this period acquired the bleak leafless look which it retains today.12
But – overall – the cost to the rural poor, to the agricultural labourer, was terrible. Life had always been tough for them, but in the glossily wealthy new world of the 1870s onwards, rural poverty must have seemed even bleaker. When the Earl of Yarborough died in 1875, his stock of cigars was sold for £850, and this has been calculated as more than eighteen years’ income for the agricultural labourers on his estate.13 Child labour is an inevitable part of agricultural life for the poor. Lord Shaftesbury’s reforms, which began to better the lives of factory children, did little to help those in the country. The Gangs Act of 1869 aimed to remedy the abuses brought on the children by gangmasters, who dragooned their gangs – sometimes as young as six years old, numbering anything from ten to a hundred persons – as itinerant cheap labour, offering stone-picking, weeding, turnip-singling, potato-setting, hoeing. Life in these gangs was brutal. The children were knocked about a lot, the women forced to drug their babies with opium and leave them in the hedgerows while they worked.14 The new Act laid down that no child could work in such a gang under the age of eight, but this did not stop small farmers who needed cheap or free labour from setting children to work as young as six. One such, named George Edwards – who rose to become a Member of Parliament – recalled that he started work aged six, and was paid 1s. per week.15 Poor families in the Celtic fringes could live at incredibly low levels of subsistence: crofters in the Highlands of Scotland were living on as little as £8 a year.16 In the south, where there simply was no work, and where the farms were not broken up into peasant smallholdings, there was no option. The labourers had to leave the land or starve.