The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  The product of Rugby and Jowett’s Balliol, Green by dying young became a sort of liberal saint embodying the way a whole generation viewed the world. Given the division in Europe between Church and state, and given the influence exercised by Britain in the late nineteenth century (a cultural dominance comparable to the strength of the United States today), one sees the force and importance of Green’s voice.

  He differed from Marx both in his analysis of the capitalist horror-story and in his suggested remedy. ‘The increased wealth of one man does not naturally mean the diminished wealth of another,’ Green wrote;28 and though he sometimes contradicted this view, he held to the principle that the market itself was legitimate so long as society was ordered on unselfish lines. Marx believed that one man’s increased wealth did diminish the proletariat. Green even saw that ‘there is nothing in the fact that their labour is hired in great masses by great capitalists to prevent them from being on a small scale capitalists themselves’.29 Again, it is hard to envisage Marx finding this a desirable state of things.

  Green wanted a fair and just distribution of wealth, and protection for the working classes from exploitation to enable them to lead good and dignified lives. He distanced himself not only from the materialism of Marx but from the modified Utilitarianism of Mill. Indeed, Green’s whole metaphysic differed from Mill’s, and he delivered some powerful arguments against the empiricism on which Mill’s views were based.

  Green was the inspiration for an entire generation of British and American philosophers known in their sphere as Idealists – not because they were ‘idealistic’ in the popular sense of the word but because of their theory of how human minds form their notions of truth and their impressions of the world. For the empiricist like Mill the mind which receives impressions of the world of nature is itself part of that world. But the empiricist can never explain the paradox of how a mind which is merely part of what it contemplates can be contemplating, among other things, itself. For T.H. Green, as for Kant, ‘the understanding makes nature’.30 Without the mind’s activity, there would be no nature for us to contemplate. Green’s greatest master was Hegel. There is a neatness about the fact that the great German metaphysician’s influence should extend through his own country in the opening decades of the century and through the English-speaking world at its close. Marx came of age by wrestling with Hegel’s theories of history. British Idealism in its glory years (1880–1930) grew out of redefinitions and re-explorations of Hegel’s ethics and metaphysics.

  Paradoxically, whereas the political influence of Hegel in Germany was intended to be, as it was in fact, conservative, in England, filtered through Green, it became an inspiration of political and social change. The growth of the Workers’ Educational Association, of the college in Bristol which eventually became Bristol University, of ‘missions’ and ‘settlements’ in working-class districts of big industrial cities, carried on the work of earlier Christian socialists like Maurice without being either Christian or socialist. The impetus for women’s education also owed much to Green, who was a member of the Council of the Association for the Higher Education of Women. If the political life of Victorian England had had to be worked out in Parliament, there might well have been a civil war or a revolution. In fact by means on the one hand of trade unions and on the other of independent movements in and for the working classes, change was effected without the need, as there might have been in a different culture, for the guillotine or the tumbril. The new religion was change itself, justice itself, fairness itself. T.H. Green was its prophet.31

  37

  The Scarlet Thread of Murder

  EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON CARRIED its poor in its midst. To walk with Garrick or Johnson through Covent Garden or down to Fleet Street would be to pass courts and alleys crammed with crime, poverty and disease, cheek by jowl with the houses of the rich. As Manning knew, surrounded by the poor of Westminster, there was still great poverty in central London. The Victorian Age, however, witnessed London being laid out along the social classifications which the capitalist revolution had created and enforced. The genteel squares of Belgravia and Mayfair were gated against the intrusion of undesirables. The world of shops and theatres, lights and delights, became for the rest of London the mythical ‘West End’. To visit them was to go ‘up West’. In turn, the villages and suburbs of an earlier age – Hoxton, Hackney, Shoreditch, Stepney, Bethnal Green – swarmed with overpopulation: the ‘East End’, no less mystic to the half-London who did not live there. This was the world which the Salvationists tried to win for God, and which the disciples of T.H. Green and Toynbee wanted for democracy: a hard, brick-built, low-lying, gin-soaked world out of whose gaslit music halls and fogbound alleys mythologies developed. Here Dan Leno and Marie Lloyd began their careers, here Jack the Ripper lurked, and from time to time Mr Sherlock Holmes emerged from a four-wheeler, sometimes heavily disguised.

  The music halls developed out of pubs. By the 1850s, many taverns had their song-saloons – so popular that busybodydom required them to have a theatrical licence, which permitted the performance of popular music but forbade the playing of Shakespeare.1 This was scarcely a hardship to the thirsty patrons of ‘the halls’, who did not go out in the evening with a burning desire to see Measure for Measure.

  Mayhew believed that the theatres of the East End ‘absorb numbers of the inhabitants, and by innocently amusing them, soften their manners and keep them out of mischief and harm’s way’. He approved of the pyrotechnic displays at the Effingham Theatre in the Whitechapel Road – ‘Great is the applause when gauzy nymphs rise like so many Aphrodites from the sea and sit down on apparent sunbeams midway between the stage and theatrical heaven.’ (The theatre burnt down in 1879 and was rebuilt as a theatre for Yiddish plays that appealed to the huge new influx of refugees from Russia and Poland.)2

  It was another matter at the ‘Penny Gaffs’, theatres which had a series of ‘variety’ turns, and where the audience was crammed with teenaged criminals picking pockets and undercover policemen trying to catch them doing so. The act which most revolted the normally unshockable Mayhew was performed by a fourteen-year-old boy, dancing ‘with more energy than grace’ and singing a song ‘the whole point of which consisted in the mere utterance of some filthy word at the end of each stanza’. The audience loved it and cried for more, being rewarded with a song called ‘Pine-apple Rock’, with a rhyme which can easily be reconstructed. ‘It was absolutely awful to behold the relish with which the young ones jumped to the hideous meaning of the verses.’3

  It was to appeal to audiences with comparable tastes that the music halls evolved, though the best performers – from Marie Lloyd to Max Miller in the middle years of the twentieth century (the last great music-hall artist) – depended on double-entendre rather than the blatant crudity which so upset Mayhew.

  Marie Lloyd was born as Matilda Alice Victoria Wood on 12 February 1870 at 36 Plumber Street in the slums of Hoxton. It was a large, poverty-stricken family. Her father, John Wood, made artificial flowers for an Italian who paid him 30 shillings a week, and he worked part-time as a waiter at the Royal Eagle – the tavern in Bethnal Green immortalized in ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ (‘Up and down the City Road, In and out the Eagle’). It was here when she was fourteen that Matilda Wood did a turn under the name Bella Delmare and won instant success. She went on to perform at the Falstaff Music Hall in Old Street, and when her talent was spotted by George Belmont, a music-hall impresario, she was taken on by a big music hall in Bermondsey. By the time she was sixteen she was on tour and earning £10 a week. Soon she was earning £600 a week.

  She died in the year that T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land, 1922. ‘Although I have always admired the genius of Marie Lloyd,’ Eliot wrote, ‘I do not think that I always appreciated its uniqueness; I certainly did not realize that her death would strike me as the important event it was. Marie Lloyd was the greatest Music Hall artist of her time in England; she was also the most popular.’4


  She had a rough life. She was alcoholic. Her third husband, a jockey, beat her, and they were arrested when they tried to disembark at New York harbour posing as man and wife before they were actually married. Her life from the grinding poverty of its origins to the alcoholic pathos of its end had the carelessness for safety which is often the ingredient of an artist’s career that distinguishes talent from genius. The capacity to let rip, to let go, must have been part of what enabled this weird-looking girl with buck teeth and thin hair to electrify an audience of cynical drunks from the moment she got up and sang ‘The boy I love is up in the gallery’.

  Apart from the release of risqué humour, she provided the audience with a reflection, an embodiment of their own hideous lives. It was humour based on staring into the abyss. Some of her most famous songs are about bankruptcy, drunkenness, dereliction. ‘My old man said follow the van’ (a twentieth-century, not a Victorian song) is about being evicted, piling one’s few pathetic belongings on to a cart and getting drunk.

  My old man said follow the van

  And don’t dilly-dally on the way.

  Off went the cart with me home packed in it,

  I followed on with me old cock linnet – but

  I dillied, I dallied, I dallied and I dillied,

  Lost me way and don’t know where to roam.

  Who’s going to put up the old iron bedstead

  If I can’t find my way home?

  Her wit was shown at its best in

  Outside the Cromwell Arms last Saturday night,

  I was one of the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit.

  It was very much a humour for hard, cynical Londoners. She could ‘bomb’ in the provinces. In Ardwick, Manchester, she shouted, ‘So this is Ardwick, eh? Well, to hell with the lot of you.’ And to the good people of Sheffield, after a cool reception, she yelled, ‘You don’t like me, well I don’t like you. And you know what you can do with your stainless knives and your scissors and your circular saws – you can shove ’m up your arse.’5

  Dan Leno (1860–1904) – his real name was George Galvin – made his first stage appearance as an adult on 5 October 1885 at Forester’s Music Hall in Mile End – but he had been on the stage since he was three (‘Little George, the Infant Wonder, Contortionist and Posturer’). His humour was much more fantastical than Marie Lloyd’s. ‘No one ever accused him of vulgarity.’6 There is something almost Blakean about his mad song about a wasp who loved a hard-boiled egg –

  But not one word said the hard-boiled egg,

  The hard-boiled egg,

  The hard-boiled egg,

  And what a silly insect the wasp to beg

  For you can’t get any sense out of a hard-boiled egg!7

  He was a legendary pantomime dame – hurling himself into the parts with quite literally manic energy. He went mad while playing Mother Goose. He was a broken and exhausted man at forty-three: ‘the funniest man on earth’ as it said on the posters. ‘Ever seen his eyes?’ asked Marie Lloyd. ‘The saddest eyes in the whole world. That’s why we all laughed at Danny. Because if we hadn’t laughed, we should have cried ourselves sick. I believe that’s what real comedy is, you know. It’s almost like crying.’8

  We can still hear Dan Leno on record – but the magic was to see him on stage. Max Beerbohm, when asked by foreign visitors to show them something inherently British, would take them first to see the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey – and then to a music hall to see ‘the big booming Herbert Campbell, and his immortal, nimble little side-kick, Dan Leno’.9

  Part of the attraction of music hall for the middle class was its sheer entertainment value. When one considers that there were no plays of any interest or quality written in English between the death of Sheridan and the emergence of Oscar Wilde (both Irish, note well) it is not surprising that many middle-class theatregoers flocked with rapture to Little Tich, Marie Lloyd or Dan Leno. They were superb performers, artists of first-rate quality. But for someone of the class of Max Beerbohm or T.S. Eliot to frequent the halls there was also an element of excitement – tasting a bit of rough. It was the secular equivalent of those who came out in their cabs and carriages to savour the exotic delights of ritualist worship in the ‘slum’ churches.

  Those who penetrated the East End could discover that it was indeed one of the roughest and most exotic ports in the world, where a prodigious mixture of races and cultures could be glimpsed. In many streets in Whitechapel, since the recent influx of thousands of Russian and Polish Jews, English was not spoken at all. In Whitechapel and Commercial Roads’ Jewish shops and kosher restaurants, Yiddish was spoken. Nearer the river in Limehouse and West India Dock Road, Chinese and Lascars could be seen in abundance. The American Daniel Kirwan, visiting Ratcliff, now in Stepney, was astounded by the White Swan public house. Known locally as ‘Paddy’s Goose’, it was:

  perhaps the most frightful hell-hole in London. The very sublimity of vice and degradation is here attained, and the noisy scraping of wheezy fiddles, and the brawls of intoxicated sailors are the only sounds heard within its walls. It is an ordinary dance house, with a bar and glasses, and a dirty floor on which scores of women of all countries and shades of colour can be found dancing with Danes, Americans, Swedes, Spaniards, Russians, Negroes, Chinese, Malays, Italians and Portuguese in one hell-medley of abomination.10

  The enchantment of the alien, the half-thrilling terror of violence lurking in such ‘hell-holes’, the cheap excitement of knowing that such ‘scores of women’ are readily available, masculine self-hatred at the thought of prostitutes, transferring into hatred of the women themselves – all these factors are present in the pornographic fascination of the Jack the Ripper murders. There would seem to be no end to the appetite of so-called Ripperologists for more films, more books and more crazy theories about ‘the autumn of terror’ in 1888 when over ten weeks – from 31 August to 9 November – five women had their throats slit. In two cases, organs were removed from the victims’ bodies with sufficient skill to suggest on the murderer’s part an at least rudimentary knowledge of anatomy. The murders became increasingly savage, culminating with a blood-saturnalia of dismemberment on 9 November – the murder of Mary Jane Kelly. This was the only killing to occur indoors – the others took place in darkened alleys. All the victims – Mary Ann Nichols (42), Annie Chapman (47), Elizabeth Stride (45), Catherine Eddowes (43) and Mary Kelly (25) – had been married. Between them they had twenty-one children. They were all prostitutes.

  This undoubtedly quickens the interest of those who are obsessed by these murders. Their imaginations running riot, the ‘Ripperologists’ have supposed that the women were killed by a Harley Street physician taking revenge for the death of a beloved son from syphilis, or for reasons of religious zeal. (Anti-semites can imagine that the women were killed by methods of kosher slaughter.) Conspiracy theorists imagine a royal murderer (the Duke of Clarence is the favourite) or a cabal organized by Lord Salisbury himself. But the key excitement of the unsolved crimes is the professional activity of the women themselves.

  Part of the excitement stems from the cliché of the Victorian Age as being excessively puritanical or buttoned-up in relation to sex. For those who believe this, or who imagine that the Victorians were so prudish that they draped their chair-legs (whence stemmed that bizarre fiction?), a key text is the pseudonymous pornographic work My Secret Life, privately printed by Auguste Brancart of Brussels circa 1890. Far from lifting the lid on the actual behaviour of Victorian middle-class life, this crazy account of some 1,500 relations by a married man called Walter has all the hallmarks of porno-fantasy. It has lately been suggested that ‘Walter’ was Henry Spencer Ashbee,11 bibliophile father of the Arts and Crafts designer and teacher Charles Ashbee. In a percipient review of the book which sets out this theory, Eric Korn said:

  My Secret Life … despite the often sprightly and inventive copulation, ultimately disgusts because of the power relations, not the sexual relations. Walter was a gentleman; in his
pockets were shillings, and half-crowns, even the occasional guinea in cases of exceptionally obdurate virginity. All doors, all orifices were open to him, and if a little violence was needed too, his conscience was clear … ‘Kto kovo?’ asked Lenin in another context, ‘Who does what, who is done to?’12

  The gleeful way in which the murders are still made a subject of entertainment tells us more about the psychology of those who write or buy the books, or flock to the films, than about the nineteenth century.

  The murders were never solved.13 Those who imagine that the Ripper committed suicide, or that he was an alcoholic who killed while under the influence, and then gave up drinking, have as much claim to be believed as anyone.

  The Whitechapel murders unfolded before the newspaper-reading public like a detective story of the grisliest kind, with the arrest and release of suspects, the letters to the police purporting to come from ‘Jack’ himself – (‘I send you half the Kidne [sic] I took from one woman prarsarved [sic] it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise [sic].’ Everyone had a theory, everyone wanted to chip in with advice. It was left to the Queen in an angry communication to Lord Salisbury to state the most obvious fact of all, after the most disgusting of all the murders, Mary Kelly’s. ‘This new most ghastly murder shows the absolute necessity for some very decided action. All these courts must be lit, and our detectives improved. They are not what they should be.’14