The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  True, the Ulster question – still ‘pulling us to pieces’ – was never put to the test by the Parnell-Gladstone idea; but had things turned out differently in Parnell’s personal fortunes, he might well have overcome even this perennially impossible problem.

  Gladstone’s conversion was to throw his own party, the English Liberals, into considerable disarray. His worst enemy within his own ranks, and whom he woefully underestimated, was the Flash Harry from Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain, soon to begin the distinctive Odyssey which would take him from the Radical wing of the Liberal Party into Lord Salisbury’s third Cabinet as a rabidly jingoistic colonial secretary. Other senior Liberals, most notably Hartington, by now 8th Duke of Devonshire, would leave the Liberals and as Liberal Unionists ally themselves with the Tories over the Irish issue.

  This is a story which we must resume towards the end of our consideration of the 1880s, when we have had time to think of some of the other events of the decade. Whether or not Home Rule ever had a chance of succeeding is one of the most agonizing historical ‘ifs’ which can occur to an Irish or British mind. How many lives would have been saved, and how much misery avoided, is incalculable.

  Parnell in 1885–6 was in the ascendant. He was only forty, he had Ireland, and the most eminent of all British statesmen, on his side. He also, known to a handful of insiders, was having an affair with the estranged wife of Captain O’Shea, one of his own MPs. Triumphant as he was at this time, it is impossible to imagine that he did not view with foreboding the tragic case of Sir Charles Dilke, another extraordinarily talented parliamentarian – a Radical who was seriously spoken of in many quarters as a potential successor to Gladstone himself.

  Dilke (1843–1911) was the youngest member of Gladstone’s outgoing Cabinet. He was rich, being the heir to the second generation of a fortune based on journalism: not on the sensational stuff which would be the means by which his ruin could be told to a salacious public but on then-popular periodicals such as the long-defunct Athenaeum and the – heroically, still with us – Notes and Queries. As a rich young man in Chelsea, Dilke was well-read, well-travelled and knew ‘everyone’. At the end of his life he wrote that he had ‘known everyone worth knowing from 1850 until my death’ and those who share or are impressed by this approach to life can count off a roll-call with which few could compete – from the Prince of Wales to Cardinal Manning, from Bismarck to George Eliot. One senses a great chilliness, not to say hollowness, about Dilke – it would be hard in fact to find any man more different from Parnell.

  When Gladstone took office for the second time, Dilke and his great political ally Chamberlain had issued the old man with the joint ultimatum that neither would serve under him unless he appointed both to Cabinet office. After some humming and hawing they had accepted a compromise – Chamberlain was made president of the Board of Trade, and after a reshuffle in 1882 Dilke got the presidency of the Local Government Board. Moreover his friend of some years, Emilia Pattison, the much younger wife of the crabby old rector of Lincoln, was now a widow and had agreed to marry Dilke on her return from India.

  But on Sunday 19 July 1885, Dilke heard the fateful news that Mrs Donald Crawford – sister of his brother’s widow – had told her husband that after her marriage, Dilke had been her lover. Crawford was to sue for divorce, citing Dilke as co-respondent.

  The case of Crawford v. Crawford and Dilke was heard before Mr Justice Butt on Friday 12 February 1886. The decree nisi was given by the learned judge, though he did not accept Mrs Crawford’s fairly hair-raising testimony against Dilke. Indeed he appeared to accept the truth of Dilke’s denial that he had slept with Mrs Crawford and as Roy Jenkins says in his biography of Dilke, ‘the verdict appeared to be that Mrs Crawford had committed adultery with Dilke, but that he had not done so with her’.13

  Mrs Crawford lied in court – of that there’s no doubt. She lied in the divorce hearing, and she lied when, in the following July, Dilke tried to clear his name through a process whereby the evidence was presented to the Queen’s Proctor. (In this he failed – and Mrs Crawford’s decree was made absolute in the summer of 1886.)

  The lurid nature of Virginia Crawford’s evidence – allegations that Dilke had a long-standing affair with a maid called Fanny Gray, whom he persuaded to have three-in-a-bed sessions with Mrs Crawford – is only one of the puzzling features of the whole sordid affair. We are not here dealing with Doll Tearsheet. When Virginia was seventeen she married the law don at Lincoln College, Oxford, Donald Crawford. He was a colleague of Pattison’s, so Emilia – Mrs Pattison, the future Lady Dilke – knew her independently of her family connection with Dilke. She was having an affair with a Captain Forster at the time she told her husband that Dilke was her lover. Why did she choose to blacken her own name in public with these allegations – whether they were true or false?

  Cardinal Manning is a figure in the story. As a political ally and social friend of Dilke’s, he was taken into the confidence of the beleaguered politician. He maintained Dilke’s innocence, and continued to associate with him, which one suspects he would not have done had he believed Dilke had lied about the matter in court. (Manning was to play a decisive role in the downfall of Parnell, as soon as his adultery became public, ruling it out of the question that a man cited as a co-respondent in a divorce could lead a political party.)

  At the same time, Manning was the confidant, and eventually the confessor of Mrs Crawford, whom he received into the Roman Catholic Church. She went on to lead a blameless life of social work and membership of the Labour Party, dying deep into the twentieth century. She never recanted her evidence against Dilke, as perhaps conscience would have prompted her to do – if only in a posthumous written note – had her story been substantially false. Perhaps the key ingredient in the story was her discovery that Dilke had also been having an affair with her mother.

  Roy Jenkins’s biography, sunnily at home with the complexities of political intrigue in the higher echelons of the Liberal Party and the social upper reaches of late Victorian London, whirls into eddies of incoherence when trying to come to grips with the psychology of this young woman. As his story stands – and it remains easily the best account of the case, and one of the best vignettes ever written of political life in Victorian England – the baffling figure of Virginia remains incomprehensible.

  Some things are clear. She wanted to carry on her love affair with Captain Forster, so she didn’t confess it to her husband. Instead she named Dilke. In spite of all his protestations it looks as if he did have something going on with her, even if some of the incidents (such as three-in-a-bed with a maid) were either inventions or as Jenkins says transferred: i.e. happened in actuality with Forster. Presumably she blurted out her story to her husband because their marriage had become intolerable, but could not have dreamed of the terrifying cross-questioning from lawyers that lay ahead.

  So, some of the mystery of the case, which will always cling to it, emanates from the confused motives of an evidently unhappy young woman. But there is another element to all this, which makes the case something more than a sexually titillating scandal. The extraordinarily innocent childish-all-knowing Henry James was so scandalized by the ‘revelations’ of the two legal cases – not so much what they alleged against Dilke as what they suggested about the sexual mores of those whose drawing-rooms he had frequented as an eager diner-out – that he could fashion two exquisitely mysterious disquisitions of innocence in the face of sexual depravity – The Awkward Age and What Maisie Knew. Most people were not so naive as the virginal novelist. They knew how, in the present reign, Lord Melbourne and Lord Palmerston had conducted their lives; hence whether or not this or that bit of filth, aired in a divorce court and greedily reprinted in the Pall Mall Gazette, was strictly true was less interesting than the bigger question, Why was this coming out at all? It would be a fair assumption that in the summer of 1885 very many distinguished figures in London were involved with affairs which would cause scandal if made
public. Why was Dilke singled out?

  The answer is, we don’t know that he was, and the notion of any sort of conspiracy against him got up for political purposes has never been proved. But nor has the evidence of ex-Inspector Butcher ever been explained either. Two days before she made her confession to her husband, Virginia Crawford was spied upon by a detective, Inspector Butcher, calling at Joseph Chamberlain’s house in London. Chamberlain had no previous acquaintance with Virginia Crawford. He did not tell Dilke, supposedly his dear Radical ally, about the visit, and when challenged about it, he never supplied an adequate answer.14

  What we know in the political sphere at this time is that Dilke was Chamberlain’s only serious rival as a leader of the Radicals and as a potential successor to Gladstone. We also know that Dilke had moved into a position of broad general sympathy with Home Rule, an idea which would drive Chamberlain out of the Liberal Party eventually but which that summer he might have hoped (five months before the ‘Hawarden Kite’) to scotch. Who will ever know? Whether or not Chamberlain, or another, deliberately set up the Dilke scandal for political ends (and there are those who favour the theory that Rosebery was the instigator),15 we shall probably never know. What is certain is that the Dilke case demonstrated how utterly the scandal of a divorce case could ruin a political career. To have affairs is one thing; to have them published in the newspapers is quite another. The incident would give powerful ammunition to those who knew of Parnell’s love-affair with Katharine O’Shea and gave an ugly boost to what could be called the power of the Press. The Press, and the anti-Parnellite politicians, would use any weapon which came to hand to destroy the workability of Home Rule. When it is examined, what is the ‘Irish question’ but another version of the poverty question? It was a question of whether grotesquely few landlords should be allowed to go on squeezing the very life out of millions of Irish men, women and children; and whether an English Parliament should continue to criminalize those who did not have the money to pay their rent. Under the gaudy embrace of a Union Flag, politicians and public could disguise the raw nature of the question, make it one of patriotism and decency versus dynamiters and superstitious papists. But the glaring, brutal injustice – the sheer weakness and poverty of the Irish, the wealth and strength of their overlords – though it could be dressed up then as the nature of things, or even as a political virtue, returns to haunt us with its moral ugliness.

  fn1 Cnoc is Gaelic for a hill.

  31

  The Fourth Estate – Gordon of Khartoum – The Maiden Tribute of Babylon

  ONE OF THE strangest legacies left to the world by the Victorians is the popular Press – and by extension, the radio and television journalism which has largely modelled itself on ‘the New Journalism’. The ways in which human beings have observed, noted, told stories about the world have varied much since they first began to paint versions of their doings and preoccupations on the walls of caves, or to devise mythologies to make sense of their puzzlements or calm their fears. Since classical times, historians and chroniclers had attempted to draw a distinction between narratives which were fictitious and those which bore some resemblance to what had taken place, though in many cultures this distinction did not seem markedly important.

  The need for ‘news’, an instantaneous impression of the world on a weekly or daily basis, evolved within a century or so of the invention of printing, but the great age of journalism in Britain was undoubtedly the nineteenth century. By then there was a plethora of locally produced daily newspapers, and in addition to the provincial press there were many London newspapers printed with a national audience in mind. Of these, The Times at 3d. was pre-eminent under the editorship of J.T. Delane. There were many other dailies selling for a penny, including The Daily Telegraph, The Daily News, The Daily Chronicle, The Morning Post and The Standard. One of the stories of the 1880s, and the direct result of Gladstone’s Irish policy, was how many of these originally Liberal papers, such as The Telegraph and The Morning Post, became Conservative.1

  Then, as now, politicians shamelessly used the newspapers to ‘leak’ their views, and to carry weight against their Cabinet or parliamentary opponents. When Sir Charles Dilke realized that his Cabinet colleague was moving in the direction of using a policy of coercion in Ireland, he leaked the fact to his tame editor, Hill of the Daily News. ‘The result of it was that the Daily News had an article the next morning which smashed Forster’s plan,’ said Dilke.2 Chamberlain frequently leaked government secrets to the Press – using Escort, editor of the Standard. W.E. Forster himself (now chief secretary for Ireland) whispered in the ear of the editor of The Times. We have seen how Gladstone used his son to brief the Press about his change of heart about Home Rule. John Morley, destined to become chief secretary for Ireland in Gladstone’s third government – and Gladstone’s biographer – was editor of the Pall Mall Gazette during the second Gladstone administration. ‘It would be worth silver and jewels,’ he told Dilke when still in journalistic mode, ‘if I could have ten minutes with you about three times a week.’3

  Morley (1838–1923) was one of the great exponents of Victorian Liberalism, and even those of us who involuntarily smile at that creed cannot deny the sheer intellectual impressiveness of his career. A doctor’s son from Blackburn in the North of England, he went up to Lincoln College, Oxford, and in spite or because of the example of the rector, Mark Pattison (who maintained a cynical public silence about his disillusionment with religion), the young Morley came clean about his own unbelief. These were the days when Oxford undergraduates were still obliged to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. Morley got a second in Mods – the exams taken after five terms in Latin and Greek – but opted to go down with only a pass degree rather than stay and take Honours in the name of a Holy Trinity he disbelieved. Intellectual honesty and a dogged agnosticism guaranteed him a life of poverty for the next few years but were to be the most marked features of his character for the rest of his life.

  Morley was a ‘journalist’ in the glory days of nineteenth-century periodical literature: its exponents were such as George Eliot, Mill, Huxley, Matthew Arnold, Leslie Stephen, Walter Bagehot, George Meredith, Robert Cecil (before and after becoming 3rd Marquess of Salisbury) and many other great names. As editor of the Fortnightly Review for fifteen years, Morley published many of these names, always giving space to such important articles as Huxley’s ‘The Physical Basis of Life’. Morley made a special study of the French thinkers of the Enlightenment and wrote books on Rousseau and Voltaire, as well as two short books on Burke.4

  In periodicals such as the Fortnightly Review or the Liberal Spectator under Hutton’s editorship, or the Westminster Review, the Victorian upper and middle classes could mull over what they thought of the news, of science, of religion, literature and their place in the world. This higher journalism is one of the great evidences of their sophistication and moral literacy. But something which Matthew Arnold called ‘the New Journalism’ was on its way, and its most energetic exponent was Morley’s deputy at the Pall Mall Gazette, William Thomas Stead (1849–1912). When Gladstone offered Morley the post of Irish secretary, Morley is reported to have said, ‘As I kept Stead in order for three years, I don’t see why I shouldn’t govern Ireland’: just the sort of remark that the liberal Governor von Lembke might make in Dostoyevsky’s great prophecy in The Devils: for of course neither Morley nor any other Englishman was henceforth able to ‘govern’ Ireland. Nor could his sensible Enlightenment viewpoint restrain the hydra of the new journalism, a monster machine whose twin-turbo was fuelled by sensationalism and moralism.

  No visitant from another age who landed in the midst of our twenty-first-century culture would begin to make sense of our popular journalism – prurient, self-righteous, spiteful and pompous – unless they were able to trace its origins to the chiefly North Country traditions of the nineteenth-century Nonconformists. Dickens had ridiculed the Puritan conscience in such grotesques as Mr Chadband (Ble
ak House). What happened in the following generation was that a fervour, a craving for the emotional excitement of the prayer-meeting and the conversion experience, was awkwardly translated into secular spheres. As has been well said, ‘in an epoch of varied achievements, scientific, literary and commercial, the elect of God related themselves to mundane reality almost exclusively through their aptitude for money-making; balancing this imperfect contact with a complex epoch by self-complacency’.5

  Stead was the son of a Congregationalist minister from Yorkshire. ‘I was born and brought up,’ he wrote:

  in a home where life was regarded ever as the vestibule of Eternity, and where everything that tended to waste time, which is life in instalments, was regarded as an evil thing … Hence in our North Country manse a severe interdict was laid upon all time-wasting amusements … Among them in my youth three stood conspicuous from the subtlety of their allurement, and the deadly results which followed yielding to their seductions. The first was the Theatre, which was the Devil’s Chapel; the second was Cards, which were the Devil’s Prayer Book; and the third was the Novel, which was regarded as a kind of Devil’s Bible, whose meretricious attractions waged an unholy competition against the reading of God’s Word. Where novel-reading comes in, Bible-reading goes out, was a belief which, after all, has much to justify it in the experience of mankind.6