The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  We cannot hope in the space available to provide more than a series of snapshots of this extraordinary ten-year period. What is so striking, as we consider the history of socialism; the relations between America and Europe; the Press and sex; the story of Ireland; the expansion of the Empire into Africa; the life of India; the Ripper murders; the Jubilee itself, is how often, as in some huge novel, the same characters recur in different incarnations. During this decade human visions and revisions took bizarre and violent forms: it is the decade when Marx died, Nietzsche published Also Sprach Zarathustra and socialism began to lead to riots and conspiracies worthy of Dostoyevsky’s The Devils; when the Irish scene was peppered with assassinations and explosions and the British dreams of Empire shed much African blood; when modern America begins the relationship with Europe that will shape the twentieth century. Life became, for millions, more comfortable yet more constrained, and for yet more millions no less wretched than it had been for their grandparents. Not so much ‘a low dishonest decade’ like Auden’s 1930s, as a decade that is high as one might be high on narcotics, and so painfully honest that parties and parliaments would rather tear themselves apart than compromise their idea of truth. It was a crazy, uncontrolled decade, over which Dostoyevsky, dying at the beginning of it, seems to hover like a godfather. Who, at the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign, could have predicted that the decade culminating in her Golden Jubilee would begin with intense parliamentary rumpus and debate about atheism and end with the most disgusting series of unsolved murders in the East End of London?

  ‘The only way to start a revolution is to start with atheism,’ maintains one of the characters in The Devils.6 Charles Bradlaugh the social reformer and Jack the Ripper are both in their different ways like Dostoyevskian emanations – difficult to separate from fiction. The perennial task set for themselves by patient minds, of distinguishing Appearance and Reality, grew no easier as the nineteenth century hurtled on, a mad ghost-train out of control.

  29

  The Plight of the Poor

  THE GULF BETWEEN rich and poor and the numbers of the poor, the grinding degradation of their state and the ever-greater prosperity of the rich: these things escaped the notice of no one with eyes to see in the 1880s. Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, novelist turned prophet, beheld in the streets of Moscow a reproach to himself and his class which could not be evaded. On a visit to Paris he had witnessed a man being guillotined and felt that, merely by attending such an atrocious act, he was colluding in murder.

  In the same way now, at the sight of the hunger, cold and degradation of thousands of people, I understood not with my mind or my heart but with my whole being, that the existence of tens of thousands of such people in Moscow – while I and thousands of others over-eat ourselves with beef-steaks and sturgeon and cover our horses and floors with cloth or carpet – no matter what all the learned men in the world may say about its necessity – is a crime, not committed once but constantly; and that I with my luxury not merely tolerate it but share in it.1

  The diatribe, perhaps rightly called the most powerful of all Tolstoy’s works,2 calls for everyone to follow the law of Christ and give up surplus wealth; for those with two coats to give to those with none; for landowners to give their property to their peasants, for householders to do their own chores instead of expecting others to do them for them; for the richer classes to be less greedy, more imaginative about the plight of the poor.

  A failure for them to do something would be met, Tolstoy predicted in 1886, by a terrible retribution. ‘The hatred and contempt of the oppressed masses are growing and the physical and moral forces of the wealthy classes are weakening; the deception, on which everything depends, is wearing out, and the wealthy classes have nothing to console themselves with in this deadly peril.’

  Thirty-one years later, Lenin would arrive at the Finland Station in St Petersburg. No two thinkers could have been more at odds – Lenin believed that Tolstoyan pacificism and simple-lifing would seriously impede the revolution; Tolstoy abominated violence, hated the industrialism which is really the material background taken for granted by Marxist-Leninism, and had an essentially agrarian solution to the problems of Europe. His account of the money-labour relationship which must be the starting-point of economic theory only really works in an imagined world of small crafts and agriculture.3

  But the book had enormous impact, and the title What Then Must we Do? expressed the truly urgent question for the Europeans of the 1880s. The problem was observable all over Europe: its danger and, if unaddressed, its sheer moral ugliness. It is a great decade of political novels – Zola’s Germinal (1885) has an unmatched picture of the sufferings of working-class people, coal-miners, and the overwhelming forces which drive them to strike action against their managers, and to violence. Even Henry James, pacing the streets of London, found material for his novel of socialist insurrectionaries The Princess Casamassima (1886). The hero of that book feels utterly excluded. ‘In such hours the great, roaring, indifferent world of London seemed to him a huge organisation for mocking at his poverty, at his inanition.’4 Staying in grand country houses in Yorkshire, James acknowledged that all the wealth and privilege of such places was based upon ‘a sooty and besmirched landscape’. He predicted that ‘in England, the Huns and Vandals will have come up – from the black depths of the (in the people) enormous misery … Much of England is grossly materialistic and wants blood-letting’ (6 December 1886).5

  If you did not dare to climb on an omnibus and ride through the poorer parts of a late Victorian city, you could read the articles by George Sims, reprinted in book form as How the Poor Live and Horrible London; or you could read the Congregationalist Andrew Mearn’s pamphlet The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, or the punctilious sociological surveys of Charles Booth, whose multi-volume Life and Labour of the People in London showed that London could present a human being with sights every bit as troubling as those which caused Tolstoy moral exasperation in Moscow. The dirty, cramped living conditions, the disgustingly high rents, the foetid water supplies, the near impossibility of scraping together enough to eat in such places, let alone to pay for your child to go to school – all these daily humiliations were widely publicized.

  Asked what was the most signal fact in contemporary history, shortly before his death in 1884, Mark Pattison replied without hesitation, ‘The fact that 5,000,000 of our population possess nothing but their weekly wages.’6 Florence Nightingale scribbled a pencil note: ‘It is always cheaper to pay labour its full value … Labour should be made to pay better than thieving. At present, it pays worse.’7 In a private letter of 1865 Gladstone had remarked on how much the privileged classes needed to remember ‘that we have got to govern millions of hard hands; that it must be done by force, fraud or goodwill; that the latter has been tried, and is answering.’8

  As the 1880s unfolded, however, the goodwill broke down, prompting in many areas, not just in Ireland, the question, Were merely extending the franchise, or offering elementary education, solutions radical enough to cope with an unsteady labour market, and a growing population? Jerry-built suburbs sprawled out of London, put up in a hurry by speculative builders in such places as West Ham, whose population rose from 19,000 in 1851 to 267,000 in 1880. Office-building, new streets and railways within the confines of the City of London led to a decline in the population here, which fell from 113,387 in 1861 to 51,439 in 1881. The construction of Farringdon Street alone displaced 40,000 people. But a survey by the Metropolitan Board found that many of the new suburbs were empty – in Tottenham, Stamford Hill, Peckham, Battersea and Wandsworth the jerry-built streets were unpopulated. There was no underground railway as yet. The unemployed could not afford to live there. Those employed upon precarious terms, either in manual or clerical work, needed to be able to walk to work, which led to gross overcrowding of areas within hailing distance of the City, such as Bethnal Green. The rebuilding programmes and the haphazard migrations of workers (and this was not a problem u
nique to London) took place without any central planning at all. No government or political party in England saw it as any part of its business to house the workers. ‘They must put up with dirt, and filth, and putrefaction; with dripping walls and broken windows; with all the nameless abomination of an unsanitary hovel, because if they complain the landlord can turn them out at once, and find dozens of people eager to take their places who will be less fastidious.’ That was George Sims, who said, ‘Is it too much to ask that in the intervals of civilizing the Zulu and improving the condition of the Egyptian fellah the Government should turn its attention to the poor of London, and see if in its wisdom it cannot devise a scheme to remedy this terrible state of things?’9

  The governing classes did not consider socialism to be an option. The debates within the upper echelons of the Liberal Party boil down to the alternatives spelt out by Gladstone in 1865, whether the rich govern the poor by force, fraud or goodwill. Even those, such as the younger radicals Joseph Chamberlain and Sir Charles Dilke, who advocated a more radical social programme than the old Whigs or Gladstonians are deemed by at least some historians to be deliberately counterrevolutionary – killing working-class agitation with kindness.10 In this they were entirely at one with Lord Salisbury, who began at this time to concern himself with the problems of housing, recognizing that the conditions described by George Sims, Charles Booth and others could not long endure without great social disruption.

  And disruptions there were. Trade union militancy was common throughout the middle and late years of the century – there were frequent strikes, even before the official inauguration of the Trades Union Congress (1868)11 and the change in legislation, under Disraeli’s second term, by which peaceful pickets were not automatically deemed in law to be criminal conspiracies.

  By the early Eighties, the socialist ideas of Marx had begun to reach an influential audience. Bernard Shaw read Marx in French translation at this date. So too did an Old Etonian called Henry Hyndman, who read the French Das Kapital on the way home from Salt Lake City in the 1870s.12 In 1881 he founded the Democratic Federation, and asked radicals such as Helen Taylor (Mill’s stepdaughter) and Professor Beesly to the preliminary meetings. Hyndman was an unintentionally absurd figure. Marx found his unsolicited visits to his house in Kentish Town a great bore, and many must have raised an eyebrow at the sight of Hyndman, who never abandoned his silk hat, frock-coat and silver-topped cane, addressing the toilers as his comrades.

  William Morris joined the Democratic Federation in January 1883 because it was ‘the only active Socialist organisation in England’, not because he was attracted to Hyndman. He had ‘never so much as opened Adam Smith, or heard of Ricardo, or of Karl Marx’13 when he was converted from radical liberalism to being a socialist revolutionary.14 The simple unfairness of life under capitalism, the poor becoming no better off in many quarters as the rich became richer, inspired Morris. It was not a carefully thought out but a deeply felt decision, more akin to religious conversion than reasoned argument. He had not even heard Henry George, the American who was such an influence on Tolstoy, who preached the nationalization of land and who had been to London for a lecture tour in 1881. Rather, an inner hankering drew Morris on. He confided in his friend Georgie Burne-Jones, wife of the painter, ‘You see, my dear, I can’t help it. The ideas which have taken hold of me will not let me rest: nor can I see anything else worth thinking of … One must turn to hope, and only in one direction do I see it – on the road to Revolution: everything else is gone now. And now at least when the corruption of society seems complete, there is arising a definite conception of a new order …’15

  Morris was to demonstrate in his own personal pilgrimage one of the key reasons why the Left took so long to become an effective political force in England in the years up to the First World War: namely a fatal tendency to sectarianism. The psychology of the rebel against the system is unlikely to be that of the team-player. However much he or she believes themselves converted to a system of universal comradeship, they are always likely to rebel against the actual comrades’ way of going about things. The Democratic Federation was destined to splinter in the mid-Eighties, with Morris and others forming the Socialist League on 30 December 1884 (it included an old Chartist veteran), only to leave it three years later when it had drifted into the hands of anarchists.

  Here was a second reason why socialism was slow to appeal to the British public – and especially to the British working class. Those who have lived in England since 1945 and the Labour government of Clement Attlee think of socialism as the imposition of order. Those who dislike it accuse it of bureaucracy, or incompetence; those who wish it worked better in Britain yearn for its more efficient administration at the levels of government, civil service, or in the local and immediate nationalized hospital, school, dole office. For many in the nineteenth century, as the novels about socialism demonstrate – The Devils, Germinal, The Princess Casamassima, The Secret Agent – socialism was indistinguishable from anarchism.

  Morris himself wasn’t above a few fisticuffs in Hyde Park. At a meeting of the unemployed in Trafalgar Square in 1886 – organized by the Tory Fair Trade Association – Morris wanted his Socialist League to hold back, but the Socialist Leaguers were intent on stirring up the crowd. There were between 8,000 and 10,000 people marching down Pall Mall towards Hyde Park, past the most grandiose club buildings in London. As they passed the Liberal Reform Club, the servants pelted the unemployed with shoes and nail-brushes. The marchers returned the hoots and jeers of the clubmen and their servants, and by the time they had turned the corner into St James’s Street, tempers were high. The Tories of the Carlton Club jeered at them and soon found metal bars and paving stones hurtling through the broken glass of the club windows. The rampage then became total, with rioters running amok in Piccadilly and smashing shop windows. At another meeting in Hyde Park, at which inflammatory speeches were made, the demonstrators crossed Park Lane into North Audley Street and Oxford Street, smashing shop windows – narrowly avoiding No. 449 Oxford Street, the showrooms of Morris & Co.

  The middle classes who so eagerly bought William Morris curtains, wallpaper and carpets were not so keen on William Morris’s socialist ideals if they led to such scenes as this. For several days afterwards London behaved as if it were under siege.

  But this is to race ahead chronologically. There were three other cogent reasons why socialist ideas such as those of Marx and Morris had no hope of wide adoption in the early 1880s. The first is that while the condition of the poor was as truly awful, throughout Europe, as Tolstoy, Zola or Morris observed, the evidence about overall growth in wealth and prosperity is very mixed. One recent account observes: ‘Even if there were substantial gains in real income or in real wages for the working class in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, these were more than outweighed by other features of the environment – urbanisation, disease, diet and possibly work intensity.’16 Yes: and this is not an opinion. It is based on the demonstrable fact that in some industrial English towns, the average height of human beings – a sure indicator of nutritional and general well-being – went down between 1830 and 1880. But against this melancholy statistic must be placed the unquestioned fact that many felt more prosperous – not the unemployed, not the agricultural workers, not the day-labourers in the building or docking industry when trade slumped: but for many, even in the working class, and particularly in the upper working and lower middle classes, the opportunity of self-betterment, self-promotion, even against a cruel atmosphere of risk, was preferable to nihilism and ideas culled from foreigners with funny names. E.P. Thompson has suggested that when Morris became a socialist in 1883 probably no more than 200 people made the same journey.17 It is only because we know, with hindsight, how important socialism was to become that we note its burgeoning in such detail. In British political life at the time it was a minor issue. There were far more pressing things on the agenda – a crisis in Egypt, a very unsettled Ireland, and the p
reparedness of Gladstone’s second government to work towards extending the franchise to all males. The 1884 Franchise Act increased the electorate from about 3 to 5 millions. (It was not until 1918 that everyone – all males, that is – got the vote.)18

  This leads to the second reason why socialism was not a political option for the late Victorians. If the first was that the majority of voters were too prosperous to need or want it, the second is a double and contradictory fact: the strength of Liberal Radicalism during Gladstone’s second term of office. Over such questions as education, or extending the franchise, the Radical wing of the Liberal Party was strong, and represented by figures as diverse as Charles Bradlaugh and Joseph Chamberlain. But, as mention of the last name indicates, radicalism meant different things to different people. Chamberlain, the dynamic embodiment of commercial and municipal power in a great industrial city, a thrusting atheist who had made his fortune manufacturing screws and was then going to advance – from mayor of Birmingham, to Cabinet minister, to prime minister-in-waiting – was by no normal definition a man of the Left. Gladstone’s parliamentary majority depended on the old Whigs, on urban radicals like Bradlaugh, on Northern Methodists, on Chamberlain and the brass tacks contingent: none were sympathetic to the Irish Home Rulers towards whom Gladstone was inexorably moving. Dostoyevsky voiced the fear of many Europeans in The Devils when he imagined the Liberals being the ‘front’ who were too weak to prevent the incursion of nihilist-socialist-anarchists into society, wrecking and tearing apart. The story of English Liberalism is stranger, for Gladstone’s parliamentary dependency on so many contradictory groups did indeed ‘let in’ to the forefront of political life a force which many would deem diabolical: it was not Russian nihilism but Birmingham Unionist-Imperialism.