The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Canon Girdlestone, vicar of Halberton in north Devon, organized single-handedly the migration of between 400 and 500 men with families over six years from areas where they were trying to survive on as little as 7s or 8s a week for a 10½-hour working day to towns, factories or parts of the country which were more prosperous and could afford to pay a living wage. In a letter to The Times to publicize their plight this good country parson described how ‘almost everything had to be done for them, their luggage addressed, their railway tickets taken, and full plain directions given to the simple travellers written on a piece of paper in a large and legible hand’. Though their destination was Kent or the north of England, they often timorously inquired if they were going ‘over water’.17 By 1881, 92,250 fewer labourers were at work than in 1871.18

  By 1901, males employed in agriculture in England and Wales had diminished by one third, and British farming which had led the world had been reduced by doctrinaire Free Trade to a state of ruin. Only in the two world wars of the twentieth century, when isolationism and protectionism came about perforce and when governments were forced once again to consider the primary importance of a nation husbanding its own land and feeding its own population, did British agriculture revive. Even so – as recent unhappy decades have shown – this revival was but an ‘episode in a general drama of pain’. Short of another world war, or a British political party with the imagination to repeal the repeal of the Corn Laws, the decline will continue. Much as we have praised Disraeli in these pages, one cannot leave this painful subject without pointing out that he rose to prominence, and splintered the Tory Party, by his eloquent defence of the Corn Laws and his attacks upon Sir Robert Peel. When he was prime minister and the men and women whose livelihood depended on wheat were being destroyed by the grain-giants of the American prairies, Disraeli did nothing to help them.

  So – my dream of being a country parson during the middle to closing years of the nineteenth century is not a pure idyll. It is shot through with suffering and pain. And yet. How one longs to be in that photograph, taken on an autumn day in October 1882 in the garden of the Rectory at Winterborne Carne. The rector, with a shovel hat, black coat and long white beard, is seated in the foreground. He is the Dorset poet William Barnes, surrounded by his women folk and by his son – William Miles Barnes, also a clergyman in a shovel hat with a long beard. One knows this is a world where extreme hardship and poverty are the norm, but in the verses of this old man, written in the dialect of his native Dorset, there is an elegiac note, a regret for a way of life which will never come again:

  An’ oft do come a saddened hour

  When there must goo away

  One well-beloved to our heart’s core,

  Vor long, perhaps vor aye:

  An’ oh! it is a touchèn thing

  The lovèn heart must rue,

  To hear behind his last farewell

  The geäte a-vallen to.19

  Another Wessex poet, and one who owed much to Barnes, visited the old man, accompanied by Edmund Gosse, in his last illness. They found him lying in bed with a scarlet bed-gown and a ‘soft biretta of dark red wool on his head’, his beard abundantly covering his breast, ‘lying in cardinal scarlet in his white bed’. Thomas Hardy wrote a memorable poem, ‘The Last Signal’, about his friend’s funeral. He set out from his house, Max Gate, a little late just as the elm coffin was being pushed out into the road. Through the gloom of cloud there flashed a sudden ray of yellow sun as it was setting.

  Looking hard and harder I knew what it meant –

  The sudden shine sent from the livid east scene;

  It meant the west mirrored by the coffin of my friend there,

  Turning to the road from his green,

  To take his last journey forth – he who in his prime

  Trudged so many a time from that gate athwart the land!

  Thus a farewell to me he signalled on his grave-way,

  As with a wave of his hand.20

  Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) is one of those great writers – Carlyle was one, in the late twentieth century Solzhenitsyn was another – who do not merely produce great artworks, but who seem to embody in their life-pilgrimage deep truths about the nature of their own times. None were ‘typical’ – whatever that may mean – as Scot, Russian or Englishman. All were in fact outsiders. But in their lives and writings they were instinctively attuned to what was going on in their society. Dostoyevsky, half-crazy as he was, had this quality where Tolstoy for example, though obsessed by the state of Russia and the world, did not. I’m talking here less of the writers’ views per se – though these are clearly affected by the phenomenon – and more of the sense of inevitability about what they wrote and what they were. Whereas lesser writers imitate, pose, strike attitudes, these unfailingly truthful men have something in them of Luther’s Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders. Carlyle and Dostoyevsky with their despondent fury saw through the lie of nineteenth-century Liberalism: Solzhenitsyn saw through the much bigger and much uglier lie of Soviet communism. Hardy in his oblique, gentle, provincial English way had a bigger target in his ever-bright blue countryman’s eyes. ‘I have been looking for God for 50 years, and I think that if he had existed I should have discovered him.’21

  It does not matter that many of Hardy’s novels have creaking plots, any more than it matters that he can write on occasion with immense clumsiness – tears are ‘an access of eye-moisture’; early morning or suspense do not chill a man, they ‘cause a sensation of chilliness to pervade his frame’.22 There is a greatness of scheme, a truthfulness about Hardy which makes his faults seem trivial.

  A master mason’s son born in an obscure Dorset parish, he knew poverty from birth, both in his own family and that of his neighbour. As a little boy he dipped his toy wooden sword into the blood of a freshly killed pig and danced about the garden crying, ‘Free trade or blood!’23 Like the majority, the Hardys believed that the repeal of the Corn Laws (it happened when Hardy was six) would bring down the mighty from their seats and exalt the humble and meek; but from an early age he had a sense that life was not to be explained politically. This was the little boy who dressed up as the vicar and preached sermons to his cousin and grandmother. By the time the depression in British agriculture had begun to show itself, Hardy was grown up, a trainee architect in London – his Church interest transferred to the stones and glass in which the Almighty was worshipped rather than to the Holy Orders he supposedly instituted. It was while ‘restoring’ – wrecking, we should say – the church of St Juliot in North Cornwall that Hardy met his first wife, Emma Gifford – the niece of an archdeacon, as he proudly informed readers of Who’s Who.

  His most successful early novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, is a Shakespearean comedy about his parents, who met when members of the same church choir: it lovingly evokes the pre-Tractarian Church of England, the world of box pews, wheezing parish clerks, and the music played not by an organ but by string instruments. The many twists of irony in the plot, however, and the whole tone of the thing, can leave the reader in no doubt where Hardy stood, even at this early stage of his writing life (the book was published in June 1872).24 In his notebook for 30 October 1870 Hardy had written, ‘Mother’s notion, & also mine: that a figure stands in our van with arm uplifted, to knock us back from any permanent prospect we indulge in as profitable.’

  In the great novels – Far From the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure – we encounter human beings against whom all the odds are stacked. One reviewer said that Tess, the most popular of all Hardy’s works, ‘except during a few hours spent with cows, has not a gleam of sunshine anywhere’.25 Jude the Obscure (1895) was burnt by a bishop, which provided Hardy with an excuse to give up writing novels and concentrate on the poetry. Not that the novel did not cost him dear, both in domestic peace (his pious wife gave him hell for the supposed ‘immorality’ of Jude and Sue) and in reputation. He valued his members
hip of the Athenaeum Club, where gaitered bishops were found behind their newspapers in the library. (He was elected in 1878.)26

  Hardy is certainly the most religious of all great English novelists, the most spiritually engaged of all great Victorian writers. He went on regarding himself, after a fashion, as a churchman. ‘The struggle between an intellect subdued to determinism and an imagination nourished upon the Christian assertion of spiritual and moral order wrought Hardy to poetry’27 – that is well said by J.I.M. Stewart, and perhaps is most apparent in the obliquer shots in the poetry than in the doctrinal statements, powerful as ‘God’s Funeral’ and ‘God’s Education’ are. I am thinking of such matchless poems as ‘The Impercipient’, ‘I Look into my Glass’, ‘A Wet Night’, ‘Drawing Details in an Old Church’, ‘A Church Romance’, ‘Where the Picnic Was’, ‘A Wife in London’, ‘We Sat at the Window (Bournemouth, 1875)’, ‘Afternoon Service at Mellstock’ and dozens more. ‘Much confusion has arisen and much nonsense has been talked latterly in connection with the word “atheist”. I believe I have been called one by a journalist who has never read a word of my writings,’ he stated during the First World War. (The journalist was G.K. Chesterton.) ‘Fifty meanings attach to the word “God” nowadays, the only reasonable meaning being the cause of Things, whatever that cause may be …’

  Hardy’s was a dignified witness, not merely for a cultural nostalgia for churchy things, much as he loved all that – and as Jude shows, he had a taste for the new urban ritualist churches as well as for the old country ways – but for the shared spiritual life which a national Church could uniquely supply. He went on hoping all his days for intellectual candour from the Church, and was bitterly disappointed by its failure to speak seriously to modern thinking minds.28 It is entirely apt that Hardy’s most famous piece of writing is not the Schopenhauerian wretchedness of the great fiction, nor yet the almost whimsicality of ‘God’s Funeral’, but the honest yearning of ‘The Oxen’:

  Yet, I feel,

  If someone said on Christmas Eve,

  ‘Come, see the oxen kneel

  ‘In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

  Our childhood used to know,’

  I should go with him in the gloom,

  Hoping it might be so.

  PART V

  The Eighteen-Eighties

  28

  A Crazy Decade

  PHOTOGRAPHY MADE RAPID advances in the 1880s, chiefly in consequence of the invention of the dry plate. It was pioneered by various British researchers. By the end of the 1870s, Sir Joseph Swan’s company was selling them, and the famous ‘Ilford’ plate was introduced in 1879. With smaller, more portable cameras increasingly available, and exposure time reduced to a matter of seconds, it began to be possible to capture moments which earlier photographers could never immortalize. Eadweard Muybridge (his name was originally Muggeridge), working in Paris, invented his photographic gun – fusil photographique – in which he mounted tiny glass plates in a disc to facilitate quick changing. Muybridge was able to establish the pattern of birds’ wings in flight, and to show that a galloping horse lifts all four feet off the ground simultaneously. His zoopraxiscope was to be the pioneer motion-camera – a mere step away from moving pictures. Meanwhile his, and others’, pioneering work could be applied and commercially marketed by Eastman in the form of a portable box-camera, Eastman Number One – slogan ‘You press the button – we do the rest!’1

  The 1880s therefore come to life to us in a way that earlier decades do not: for here have been captured unposed moments. Queen Victoria’s smile during her Golden Jubilee in 1887, caught by Charles Knight, would have evaporated by the time Julia Margaret Cameron or Étienne Carjat or David Octavius Hill had anointed their glass plates with collodion and set up their laborious contraptions of an earlier vintage. The 1880s therefore are the first decade we can see unfrozen, and turning the pages of its photographic achievements is both like watching the modern world beginning to rouse and like intruding into a world which is about to evaporate: as cadavers preserved for centuries in their lead coffins are said to turn to dust when exposed to sunlight.

  So: we can see men laying cobbles outside the photography shop of the Oxford photographer Henry Taunt; look into the eyes of old Lord Shaftesbury with his ragged boys of 1883 (by the time they are thirty, the guns will be thundering in the trenches); watch the dons process with Jowett from Balliol Hall to the Sheldonian for the annual Encaenia in 1884; see the old woman selling magazines at Piccadilly, and the children playing in the slums of Pounder’s Court, Leeds; witness – thanks to Henry Taunt – the last Baptist baptism-ceremony in the River Thames at Hatchetts near Cricklade; see the horse-drawn omnibuses rattle down Regent Street and the steam trains pull into Tunbridge Wells Central; glimpse the recruiting sergeants smoking outside the Mitre and Dove pub in Westminster; see working women packing matches in the Bryant and May match factory in Bow (it was where Freddie Demuth, Marx’s natural son, worked). The rich women descend the staircase at a fancy-dress ball at Iveagh House in Dublin; men trudge the treadmill at Wormwood Scrubs; merrymakers lower their bathing machines on to the shingle at Brighton.2 And some of these faces seem – like Amazonian tribesmen who believe, rightly, that the camera is an instrument of aggression – to look at us, the future, with the distrust of those who have destroyed all that was tranquil in their lives, all that made for good, while others seem not merely to meet, but to anticipate our outlook, our preoccupations.

  The very fact that we look at these photographic images at all and take them as emblems of reality, or imagine their reality to possess a new authenticity denied for example to the author of an Icelandic saga or to the canvas and brush of Sir Joshua Reynolds, is a symptom of how deeply we collude in the Victorian love-affair with science, the confused empiricism which supposes that the distinctions between Appearance and Reality can be made by some organ independent of a human mind. The camera is then elevated into an arbiter. The belief that it can never lie becomes itself not merely an invitation to hoaxers but the source of a tremendous confusion about the very nature of truth.

  Between 30 August and 15 September, in the rhubarb patch at Llanthony Abbey in the Black Mountains between Hay-on-Wye and Abergavenny, a number of people, first some little boys, then the Reverend Father Abbot himself (Father Ignatius O.S.B.) and other adults, all witnessed ‘a most Majestic Heavenly Form, robed in flowing drapery’. It was gigantic, but reduced in size to human dimensions as it approached, a static image facing sideways toward the rhubarb – now designated the ‘Holy Bush’. Not only did all of those who saw the apparition attest that it was Our Ladye (sic), but the leaves of the rhubarb over which the apparition manifested itself became possessed of healing properties, for example healing the abscesses on the leg of an Anglican nun. For these were not Roman Catholics who saw Our Ladye of Llanthony, but – tangentially – still members of the Church of England. There had to be sceptics. Sister Mary Agnes believed that a local railway-clerk with a penchant both for photography and for practical joking had somehow managed to project a magic-lantern image of the Miraculous Apparition of Lourdes on to this rain-sodden rhubarb patch in Wales. For some, this will be a more satisfactory ‘explanation’ than the suggestion that the monk and his companions ‘saw’ what their faith wanted them to see.3

  In January 1882 a group of intelligent and scientifically-minded scholars, public figures, clergymen and university graduates founded the Society for Psychical Research. The founders were Sir William Barrett, professor of physics at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, Henry Sidgwick, the Cambridge philosopher, Frederic W.H. Myers, Edmund Gurney and Frank Podmore – representing the scientific, or at least sceptical, spirit: the spiritualist founder-members were the Reverend W. Staintin Moses, Morell Theobald, Dr George Wild and Dawson Rogers. In time, the Society would include two prime ministers – Gladstone and Arthur Balfour – Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lewis Carroll, John Addington Symonds, and eight Fellows of the Royal Society including Alf
red Russel Wallace.4

  They all apparently believed that science could establish whether there was truth in the spiritualist claims. None seemed troubled by the fact that spiritualism itself came to birth in the age of science and offered apparently scientific ‘proofs’ for its validity – such as spirit photography. W.H. Mumler, principal engraver at the Boston jewellery firm of Bigelow Bros. & Kennard, was the first amateur photographer to receive the impression of departed spirits on his collodion plate, and though he was subsequently prosecuted for witchcraft in New York, and for obtaining money under false pretences, he was acquitted at his trial.5 In the great majority of spirit photographs – usually ghosts hovering in smudgy form behind or beside the sitter – we have been assured by those who took and developed the plates that no tampering or dishonesty has occurred, allowing sceptics to scorn and believers to believe exactly as if no such scientific evidence had been produced in the first place.

  What seems so characteristic of the age is the attempt to confirm one type of belief by means of an essentially alien mental process: enlisting science to verify the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting seeming as inappropriate as appointing mystics to a chair of physics. But the 1880s are an era of kaleidoscopic muddle when the future of Ireland or the Liberal Party is determined not by political discussion but by sex scandals. Aesthetes turn from wallpaper design to redesigning society. One of the most famous atheists of the age became a convert to Theosophy. And journalism, that ultimate fantasy magic-lantern, laid its first serious claims to be not simply a purveyor of news, but a moral mirror to society as a whole.