The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Almost as soon as the vote had gone against him, Parnell went over to Ireland to help one of his candidates fight the Kilkenny by-election. Parnell had a good candidate, and in one district of the constituency he was even supported by the parish priest, but he was beaten by two to one.

  A little before the announcement of the election result, Morley, who had been visiting Ireland, called on Gladstone at Hawarden, finding the eighty-year-old recovering from a cold. He ‘looked in his worsted jacket, and dark tippet over his shoulders, and with his white, deep-furrowed face, like some strange Ancient of Days. When he discovered from Morley that Parnell was still fighting on, he “flamed up with passionate vehemence” – “Are they mad, then? Are they clean demented?”’15

  They continued to talk of Ireland, and then Gladstone asked if there was anything in history like the present distracted scenes in Ireland. Morley suggested Florence, Pisa or some other Italian city, with the French emperor at the gates. Gladstone came up with the siege of Jerusalem, with Titus and the legions marching on the city, and the Jews still fragmented into factions. Then they go into luncheon, and Morley says that Joseph de Maistre observed that in the innocent primitive ages, men died of diseases without names. Gladstone: ‘Homer never mentions diseases at all.’ Morley: ‘Not many of them die a natural death in Homer.’ Gladstone quotes the passage where Odysseus meets his mother among the shades, and Morley says that the Greek word pothos is ‘such a tender word, and it is untranslatable’. Gladstone suggests desiderium and quotes from Horace:

  Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus

  Tam cari capitis. …16

  – ‘What restraint or limit should there be to grief for one so dear?’

  Can one imagine any politician in the Western world today having such a conversation? They wander off into the library and a little later, Morley finds that the old man has turned up the passage in his ‘worn old Odyssey’. ‘Homer’s fellows,’ says the leader of the Liberal Party, ‘would have cut a very different figure, and made short work in that committee room last week!’

  Comparatively recent as it is, Gladstone himself seems as remote from our world as Homer’s fellows.

  Parnell was a brave man, but vanity played its part. He was thunderstruck by the defection of Irish MPs and fought two more gruelling by-elections, hoping to prove a point. He was humiliated on both occasions, at North Sligo in April and at Carlow in July. In June 1890 he married Katharine O’Shea, a step which placed him finally beyond the pale in the eyes of the Catholic bishops who had always been prepared to overlook his Protestantism and his unbelief. ‘You cannot remain a Parnellite and remain a Catholic,’17 a priest told his flock the following year in Meath, and the truth or otherwise of this contention exercised many an angry Irish household or bar in the years to come, as readers of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man will recollect.

  Parnell himself was exhausted. On 27 September 1890 he addressed a meeting in the rain, while suffering from rheumatism. He came over to England gravely ill, joined his wife at Brighton and died in her arms on 6 October. Like Homer’s fellows, he was already a figure in mythology, as Joyce showed – and Yeats, with his talk of

  None shared our guilt; nor did we play a part

  Upon a painted stage when we devoured his heart.18

  To this day one has an overpowering sense, reading his story, that Parnell was a greater man than any of those who took part in the tragic drama of his downfall, a man of epic status, whose fall was not merely a private tragedy but also a great national calamity.

  PART VI

  The Eighteen-Nineties

  39

  The Victorian Way of Death

  THE ENGLISH, WHO in our day are so diffident about funerals, positively revelled in the trappings of death during the nineteenth century; and the 1890s ‘witnessed the golden age of the Victorian funeral’.1 The surviving photographs remind us that the most elaborate ceremonials, of a kind which today would appear extravagant for the obsequies of a head of state, were matters of routine when burying a grocer or a doctor.2 The hearse would be a glass coach groaning with flowers, but smothered in sable and crêpe. Four or six horses nodding with black plumes would lead the cortège, preceded by paid mutes who, swathed in black shawls and with drapes over their tall silk hats, make an alarming spectacle to the modern eye: medieval Spain could hardly produce images more macabre. Behind the coffin in their carriages would follow the mourners, in new-bought black clothes, bombazine and crêpe and tall silk hats and black gloves and bonnets – all a tribute to how much money the mourners had, and how highly they considered themselves to have climbed in the ladder-game class-system created by democratic capitalism. The more the funeral became a social status symbol, the more in turn it grew to be big business, with many undertakers in the larger cities becoming people of substance on the strength of it.

  If private families went to such impressive lengths to ensure costly funerals for their loved ones, public figures could be sure of huge shows. The one which stayed in everyone’s mind from the middle of the century was that of the Duke of Wellington. The funeral of Cardinal Manning, on Thursday 21 January 1892, attracted even larger crowds – possibly the largest ever to assemble for any such event in London. The greatest promoter of Roman Catholicism in Britain who has ever lived – the man who ensured that his religion would be followed and believed by millions, and respected by ten times that number – died before there was a cathedral for his branch of Christianity in London. Getting a cathedral built was precisely the sort of thing which brought out the worst – the Cardinal Grandison – in Manning. First he commissioned a relation by marriage, Henry Clutton, who spent six years designing a Gothic pile, only to realize that no money had been raised to pay for it. Then in the Eighties, a wealthy Yorkshire landlord, Sir Tatton Sykes, offered to pay for a cathedral if they employed Baron von Herstel as an architect. The baron died in 1884, and Manning thought no more of a cathedral – that was to be the concern of his successors, completed in the twentieth century.3

  Manning’s genius was human, organizational. He wasn’t an intellectual. ‘I habitually considered Manning’s faculties of action, I mean in the management and government of men, to be far in advance of his faculties of thought,’4 Gladstone wrote, somewhat loftily, of his old friend – but this should not imply that Manning’s mind was not sharp and serviceable. He had the true statesman’s faculty of quick adaptability – witness his immediate recognition, once the kingdom of Italy was created, that claims for the Temporal Power of the Papacy should be dropped. Always the clever Balliol man, he had in common with one of a later generation, Thomas Hill Green, the rare quality of applied intelligence – whether he was thinking about the personal and political implications of the Dilke case, or the solution to the Dock Strike. Another Balliol man, Hilaire Belloc (whose feminist Unitarian mother, Bessie Parkes, had been overwhelmed by Manning’s personality, and like the women in Lothair became a Catholic in consequence), saw Manning as the greatest figure of his age.

  The poor of Jesus Christ whom no man hears

  Have waited on your vengeance much too long,5

  Belloc wrote, in a poem about the London poor. It was these people that, without any desire to cut a figure for himself, Manning represented. He was sufficiently a gentleman to know that Roman Catholicism in England was utterly not the religion of gentlemen. To this degree, no one could have been less like Cardinal Grandison, and the snobbish fantasies which Lothair bred – most notably Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited – would have disgusted Manning. If a member of his own class visited him in the early days of his Catholicism he would apologize for his clothes – the ‘Roman Collar’ now worn even by Protestant clergymen. But once he had lost his self-consciousness, he could make the joyful claim, ‘If I had not become Catholic I could never have worked for the people of England, as in the last year they think I have worked for them. Anglicanism would have fettered me.’6

  It was probably true that Manning was dri
ven out of the Church of England by quasi-political factors. ‘If Manning leaves us it will be because his trust in our being a true branch of the Church Catholic is killed – & this will mainly be the work of Lord J Russell,’ Soapy Sam Wilberforce had written bitterly in October 1850.7 What a world away that was from the urban, industrialized, politicized London of the 1890s which – on one level so surprisingly – had taken to its heart this etiolated, severe, early Victorian parson turned Roman prince and prelate. It was surely because people recognized that he was one of the few establishment figures who had dared to leave the establishment, and who was genuinely moved by principles to which they would have liked to aspire. ‘Without God there is no law but the human will, which is lawless, & without law, no moral bonds or cohesion among men.’ By arguing the case of the dockers with their employers (Manning said he had ‘never in my life preached to so impenitent a congregation’) he had shown in the concrete what was meant by his embracing as his political watchword the saying of Aquinas – Reges propter regna, non regna propter reges.fn1 No one else in the Victorian Age – not even Shaftesbury – had been in quite that position of Manning in the strike: actually being able to call individual rulers to account and bringing off victory, albeit modest victory, for the ruled.

  So it was, after the solemn requiem at the Brompton Oratory, that pastiche of a Roman city church set down in the middle of Knightsbridge, attended by sixteen bishops, that they took their cardinal to be buried. Many Londoners had never seen such a sight – hundreds of priests, monks and friars in their medieval habits, singing their solemn Gregorian chant, set out in procession to Kensal Green cemetery. From the windows of shops selling the shades for electric lamps or the latest outfit for a cycling holiday, the chanting friars could be seen – just such figures as Gibbon had watched in the ruins of the Capitol a hundred years and more earlier. But these enchantments of the Middle Ages were accompanied by figures quite new in history: behind the Funeral Car were the National League, United Kingdom Alliance, Trades Unions of London, Dockers’ Societies, Amalgamated Society of Stevedores, Federation of Trades and Labour Unions, Independent Order of Good Templars and Universal Mercy Band Movement. How strange they would have seemed to Manning’s parishioners if they had appeared half a century earlier to greet him in his Protestant incarnation, and had appeared on the lawn of the archdeacon of Chichester at Lavington. Now they marched on, they the future, taking the old Victorian to his grave. And for every step of that four-mile journey, the pavements were thickly lined with crowds. At some points, they were so dense that the procession was halted.

  It was twilight, on that dim January day, when they finally reached Kensal Green. The bishop of Birmingham said the final prayers, the acolytes held up their twinkling tapers, and the choir sang a Miserere, as they buried him in the Catholic plot, near Wiseman, and near that heroine of the Crimean War, Mary Seacole. As the candlelit procession dispersed, some mourners might have turned their eye to the huge expanse of Kensal Green Cemetery and thought perhaps how apt it was to bury Manning beside a burial-ground so much a creation of the swollen population of Victorian Londonfn2 – and a plot, too, which is full of such a rich variety of his contemporaries.

  There, among the merchants and self-made men of the age, is the solid grey mausoleum inscribed ‘In Memory of His Royal Highness Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex, K.G.’: the uncle who gave away the Queen in marriage. (He had requested to be buried in the new public cemetery because he had been so appalled by the slipshod funeral of his brother William IV at St George’s Chapel, Windsor).8 Here lies James Miranda Barry, the Inspector General of the Army Medical Department, who was found by those laying out his corpse in 1865 to be a woman.9 Here lie Anthony Trollope and Wilkie Collins and William Makepeace Thackeray. Charles Blondin, the tight-rope walker, would in 1897 be destined to join Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who was buried here in 1859. Here is the resting place of Millais, Leigh Hunt, Mulready, Cruikshank. Feargus O’Connor, Chartist firebrand, John Murray, publisher, Robert Smirke, the architect of the British museum, and John Gibson, the sculptor, still lie here. It is rather a pity that Manning does not do so any more, but has been taken to lie in the twentieth-century Catholic cathedral among his comparatively undistinguished successors as archbishop of Westminster. Manning belongs in the rich variety of Victorian grandees and eccentrics, more than in the narrow confines of ecclesiasticism.

  Kensal Green, the first public cemetery (as opposed to churchyard or church-owned burial-ground), was the inspiration of a barrister called G.F. Carden, who had been impressed by the new general cemeteries in Europe, especially Père Lachaise in Paris. Carden first attempted to take over Primrose Hill. He engaged Thomas Wilson to design a vast pyramid on the site, capable of housing 5 million bodies, but in the end the General Cemetery Company established itself at Kensal Green in 1831. There were soon public cemeteries in Norwood (1837), Highgate (1839), Nunhead, Abney Park and Brompton in 1840, Tower Hamlets in 1841. It was initially the custom to pay sums ranging from 1s. 6d. to 5s. to one’s parish clergy in compensation for the funeral fee which would have been paid had the burial occurred on consecrated ground. The truth was, though, that the Malthusian principle operated in death as in life. There was simply no room for any more dead in the old burial grounds, and the new public cemeteries – which of course could provide interment for those who owed no loyalty to the established Church – soon filled up.

  A very obvious solution lay to hand but there were objections – emotional, theological, and even legal – to the sensible idea that in an overcrowded world, riddled with disease, dead bodies should be consumed by fire, rather than buried in the earth.

  Sir Henry Thompson (1820–1904) was one of the first to pioneer the idea of cremation as an alternative to burial, in an article in The Contemporary Review in January 1874. Thompson was a versatile man, an eminent surgeon at University College Hospital, London, learned and caring. His wide interests included an expertise in Nanking china. He also concerned himself with what we would call preventive medicine and with all the social aspects of the medical calling. The overcrowding of urban cemeteries was a major problem of town planners. Thompson in his Contemporary Review article reminded readers that it is a mistake to suppose that burial is the beginning of eternal rest. ‘Rest! No, not for an instant! Never was there greater activity than at this moment exists in that still corpse. Already a thousand changes have commenced. Forces innumerable have attacked the dead … Nature’s ceaseless agents [are] now at full work.’ Thompson went into graphic detail about the putrescent decay of the body, and proposed the substitution of a furnace, cheap and hygienic. The cheapness hardly recommended itself to a generation addicted to advertising their social status by ostentatious obsequies. The fact that the body will in any event dissolve in the earth did not deter the Roman Catholic Church from teaching that cremation would somehow interfere with, if not actually prevent, the resurrection of the body. (This doctrine was changed in 1963, when Catholics were for the first time allowed to be cremated.) While many other Christians shared the Catholic misgiving, the police feared that in – for example – the case of a poisoning, cremation would destroy vital forensic evidence. Thompson, undeterred, formed the Cremation Society with a number of friends, including Sir John Tenniel of Punch, the illustrator of Alice.

  Though the habit of cremation was slow to be adopted, the notion of it, as the most efficient means of disposing of the dead, had certainly entered public consciousness. When the English cricket team lost heavily in the Test match against Australia in 1882, the result was not the Coffin of British Luck – but the Ashes. (The joke appeared first in The Sporting Times – ‘In affectionate remembrance of English cricket, which died at the Oval, 29th August, 1882, deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing friends and acquaintances. RIP. NB The body will be cremated and the Ashes taken to Australia.’)10

  The Cremation Society applied for a site on which to erect the first furnace, and at length managed to find one ne
xt to the ‘London Necropolis and National Mausoleum’ at Woking, Surrey. (This had been designed as an absolutely splendid modern burial-ground, with a funeral railway, and a magnificently tomb-like Gothic station at Woking by Smirke, which never got built.)11

  It remained an open question whether cremation was yet legal. When a Captain Hanham of Blandford, Dorset, cremated both his wife and mother (at their own request) in a privately constructed furnace, it was felt that the law had been infringed, but nothing was done about it by the then home secretary.12

  It was a Welshman who, in 1884, was bold enough to take an action which, eventually, made clear what the law actually was. William Price, eighty-three years old, was an outspoken radical, a medical doctor, a fervent Welsh Nationalist and a Druid. When his five-month-old son – whom he had christened Jesu Grist (Jesus Christ) – died, Dr Price placed the infant in a barrel of petrol on a hillside at Llantrisant and ignited it.13 He was prosecuted for the common law offence of burning, not burying, a body, and the case came before Mr Justice Stephen at the Glamorganshire Assizes, Cardiff, on Tuesday 12 February 1884.14 The judge ruled that ‘a person who burns instead of buries a dead body does not commit a criminal act unless he does it in such a manner as to amount to a public nuisance at common law’.15

  Thereafter the way was open, and the Society carried out its first cremation at Woking in March 1885. There were only 3 that year, 10 in 1886, 104 in 1892. Even by 1914 there were just 1,222 cremations, 0.2 per cent of the 516,000 deaths that fateful year. The baleful Edwardian and Victorian legacy of the huge public cemetery is with us yet, and every large city in Britain has its miserable hinterland, now ruinous, bramble-grown and strewn with our own contemporary detritus, of mile on mile of damp vaults, sunken tombstones, chipped stone angels and illegible headstones, monuments to the forgotten Victorian millions.