The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Bradford, one of the great wool towns of the North, was also one of the places where the mid-century Nonconformist revival had been strongest. Horton Lane Congregational Chapel towered like a great symbol in the town of Nonconformist strength.6 It was known as the Temple of Nonconformity, many of the early mayors of Bradford, and most of the aldermen, coming from this congregation. By the 1890s, however, these middle-class worthies had moved to the suburbs, or to the more genteel dormitory towns of Ilkley and Harrogate.7 Those who retained religion expressed their gentility by transferring their allegiance to the Church of England. The Cathedral of Nonconformity gradually declined until, by the end of the century, a local newspaper described its ‘parlous state – no congregation to speak of, no Sunday school worth mentioning, no pastor’.8

  The mayors and aldermen with their great silver ‘Alberts’ – watch-chains stretched over well-tailored worsted – the small businessmen, shopkeepers, manufacturers and traders were Gladstone’s natural supporters, the creators of that political world whose ‘prevalent tone … is one of surfeited, self-satisfied Liberalism. Local papers were busy celebrating the improvements in standards of life since the hungry forties, and recalling for the hundredth time the wisdom of the repeal of the Corn Laws.’9

  The new Labour Party was never to appeal to such as these. For many of its adherents it satisfied the same religious hunger which in an earlier age had been appeased by the Congregationalists, Baptists and different varieties of Methodists. The atmosphere of the political meetings was revivalist, with new songs set to old tunes. Verses by J.L. Joynes, printed in the year of the ILP’s foundation and entitled ‘What, Ho! My Lads’, proclaimed:

  In our Republic all shall share

  The right to work and play,

  The right to scoff at carking care,

  And drive despair away –

  Drive poverty away, my mates,

  With struggle, strain and strife:

  What use are Parliaments and States

  Without a happy life?

  To the tune of ‘The Union Jack’ they sang ‘The Starving Poor of Old England’:

  Let them brag until in the face they are black

  That over oceans they hold their sway,

  Of the Flag of Old England, the Union Jack,

  About which I have something to say;

  ’Tis said that it floats o’er the free; but it waves

  Over thousands of hard-worked, ill-paid British slaves,

  Who are driven to pauper and suicide graves –

  The starving poor of Old England.

  The message was not merely simple, but compelling – spelt out in The Labour Annual of 1894 (produced, at the cost of one shilling, for ‘The Nationalist Socialist Federation’ – of the Fabian Society, the ILP, the Labour Church, the SDF and ‘all the Advanced Movements’): ‘in a country where our accounts are so incredibly ill-balanced that out of a population of thirty-six millions, only one and a half-millions get above £3 each week and more than half of the total national income “belongs” to a very few thousand people’. Hardie himself made the same point in his ‘chat with the Scotch miners on their strike’ – ‘Why have 50 Mineowners power to starve 70,000 miners into submission?’

  In their electoral contests, the Labour candidates had two principal enemies. The first were the Liberals. For the first twenty or thirty years of its life, the Labour Party was unable to shift the perception that the best way to achieve radical change was through alliance with the Liberals. Many heroes of the early socialist cause, such as John Burns, supported a Lib-Lab alliance, partly because this appeared the only plausible way of achieving actual political power (as opposed to the inner satisfaction of striking heroic attitudes), and partly because they distrusted some of the left-wing extremists who gave support to the ILP. Versions of these two dilemmas would dog the Labour Party throughout its century or so of coherent history – before the arrival of ‘New Labour’. It was always necessary, then, to persuade the electorate that the Liberals and the Tories elected to Parliament ‘are rich men – landlords, employers and lawyers – and they are not Socialists. They are making wealth out of the present system, and so they want it to continue.’

  John Morley received the deadliest verbal attacks from the socialists in his Newcastle-upon-Tyne constituency. Fred Hamill, from the Woolwich branch of Amalgamated Engineers, stood against him, and he identified the other great enemy against which the ILP contended: working-class scepticism or indifference. He told a Newcastle audience in 1893:

  Your greatest enemy is the poor, indolent, apathetic, indifferent, lazy, cowardly worker, who will not support those who are trying to do their very best to improve his condition and lift him from the gutter of despair. (Applause) The emancipation of Labour can be brought about, but only by bona fide Labour representation in the House of Commons, independent of any party, faction, clique or class. (Applause) Too long! too long have you, fellow-workers, been looked upon as mere human machines; as illustrated by the words of Sir Lyon Playfair, now a lord of the Upper House. He said, ‘The children of the productive classes grow up stunted in form and of low productive value, because the State does not provide for conditions of healthy human development in crowded populations. If the babies were pigs, or oxen, or sheep, the Vice-President of the Council would be daily questioned in the House of Commons if any unusual mortality came amongst them, but being only human infants, no one thinks of their welfare. Beasts with a selling value are taken more care of than men in free countries.’ Because this is true of England as she is today, we intend to replace it by real liberty, equality and economic freedom. And where is the man who can deny the necessity of an Independent Labour Party to achieve it?

  No one would question the reality of the sufferings and injustices identified by the socialists. In trade unions and Co-operative Societies throughout Britain, working-class people joined the Movement, but never in the numbers that Fred Hamill and his comrades would have hoped. G.K. Chesterton, with his brilliant political reading of Dickens’s Great Expectations, which was discussed in relation to Marx on Chapter 22, had seen Joe Gargery, the patient poor man, and Trabb’s boy, the perky tailor’s assistant, as archetypal: ‘The first is the poor man who does not assert himself at all, and the second is the poor man who asserts himself entirely with the weapon of sarcasm.’ Chesterton went on to say that this sarcasm was a real weapon – ‘what guns and barricades were to the French populace, that chaff is to the English populace … It is the one way in which they can make a rich man feel uncomfortable, and they use it very justifiably for all it is worth. If they do not cut off the heads of tyrants at least they sometimes do their best to make the tyrants lose their heads.’

  Trabb’s boy is the assistant at the tailor’s where Pip first goes to be measured for a suit of clothes when he comes into those Great Expectations which give the title to Dickens’s greatest novel. Later, when he returns to the town, Trabb’s boy pursues him down the street, first pretending to be overcome with terror at Pip’s dignity. He then imitates Pip’s walk. Altogether he refuses to be impressed by the pretensions of his supposed betters.

  As it happens British politics was to be provided, in the 1890s and onwards, with the most wonderful Trabb’s boy, though Chesterton would not have recognized him as such: one who could use comic sarcasm to an even greater effect than Disraeli. But this Welsh firebrand and comic genius, whom we shall encounter before this chapter is done, chose not to join the Labour Party.

  The architect of that party, and its most outstanding political inspiration in its first twenty years, was James Keir Hardie (1856–1915). The illegitimate son of a Lanarkshire farm servant, he began work in a Glasgow printing works at the age of eight and became a coal miner at the age of ten. He was a working collier until he was twenty-three, and entered politics by becoming active in trade unionism. The Labour Party was always a marriage of contrarieties, and some of these oddities reflect the strangeness of Hardie’s own character. He was al
ways much more of a Bohemian than a stereotypical member of the working class, affecting a Sherlock Holmes-style deerstalker hat as often as the famed cloth cap which he wore for his first entry to the Commons. In summer months he defied convention yet further, and while other Honourable and Right Honourable members still wore their black frock-coats and stiff collars he wore a ‘Japanese kaftan’ (a kimono we must assume) and nothing on his feet. In this eccentricity of dress he rather resembled the Tory prime minister: not that Lord Salisbury wore a kaftan and sandals, but he was often swathed in loose tweed when other parliamentarians would have been wearing dark clothes.

  Hardie’s ideological credentials were as eclectic and perplexing as his clothes. Sometimes he claimed to be a disciple of Marx, discovering in the writings of the German revolutionary a quiet gradualism, a belief in socialism by degrees, which was surprising to doctrinaire Marxists. Having insisted with great bravery that the Labour Party must be Independent of even the most sympathetic Liberals, and having vilified and attacked such figures as Morley at the beginning of the Nineties, by the end of the decade he was making common cause with Morley and Lib-Labs over the issue of the Boer War. Having begun as an ardent trade union activist, he lost all sympathy with the unions and by the late Nineties he was referring to the hero of the Dockers’ strike as ‘that dirty little hypocrite’ Ben Tillett. At times he seemed to speak as if socialism was Class War or it was nothing; at others, as if it was a creed to unite all classes behind a common cause. Certainly in the initial decade of his leadership the ILP lost members at an alarming rate. (10,720 members in 1895 had shrunk to 6,084 in 1900, and its appeal was increasingly to the middle classes.)

  Yet the fact remains that Keir Hardie was there in the Palace of Westminster. The man who had worked down the pits for thirteen years was sitting on the green leather benches beside the (still overwhelmingly) upper-class Tory and Liberal MPs. Not until the Liberal landslide of 1906, when the Tories lost not merely seats but a hold on the political scene, could the Labour Party make a significant parliamentary advance. (In that election they won 29 seats and could begin to look like an alternative radical party when the Liberals disintegrated.) In the 1890s, Hardie was right to see that his role in the Commons was primarily a prophetic, symbolic one. Socialism is, as he observed, ‘much more an affair of the heart than of the intellect’; and although with his thick bushy beard he bore a passing resemblance to Marx, he liked to reflect that long before he had heard of The Communist Manifesto he had learnt what he called socialism from the ballads of Robbie Burns, with their message of the brotherhood of man and their acerbic distrust of the rich or the ‘unco guid’.

  Hardie’s finest moments in the Commons were in fact worthy of Robert Burns. In June 1894, in the Albion colliery at Cilfynydd in east Glamorgan, 251 men and boys were killed in an explosion. In the previous three years alone, over a thousand miners had lost their lives in explosions. The disaster in Cilfynydd coincided with the birth of the future Edward VIII – the son of the Duke and Duchess of York. The House of Commons put down a motion to congratulate Her Royal Highness on the birth of her son. Hardie rose, after the various fawning compliments had fallen from the lips of other Honourables and Right Honourables, to say that, ‘It is a matter of small concern to me whether the future ruler of the nation be the genuine article or a spurious imitation.’ He then used his parliamentary privilege to allude to the frequent adulteries of the Prince of Wales and other members of the royal family. This same Prince of Wales – grandfather of the newborn baby – owned property in London ‘which is made up of some of the vilest slums’ and brought him in £60,000 a year. Moreover the ‘fierce white light’ which beat upon the Prince’s private life could ‘reveal things in his career it would be better to keep covered’. He then turned to the baby – a fact which that child, when he was in exile as the Duke of Windsor, recalled in his Memoirs – and said, ‘From his childhood onwards, this boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score.’ (Cries of ‘Oh, oh’.) ‘The government which could waste time in discussing so trivial an event, could not find time for a vote of condolence for the relatives of those who are lying stiff and stark in a Welsh valley.’

  Hardie was much criticized for this speech. Even a sympathetic modern biographer says that his passion took control over his political instincts when he made it. But if passion cannot allow a politician to tell the truth, even in so unlikely a setting as the House of Commons, it is hard to know what the radical movement in British politics was for. Though many of his fellow MPs must have deplored his lack of manners, some of them must have heard in Hardie’s accents the voice of the future, and wondered how long the aristocratic system, so undemocratic and so inequitable, could endure.10 The Albion Colliery disaster paved the way for the very first Workmen’s Compensation Act in 1897. This ended ‘the doctrine of common employment’ which had first been elaborated in 1837, the year of Victoria’s accession, and which denied workpeople protection from negligent employers. In the year of the Diamond Jubilee this abuse was abolished. It is an eloquent example of ‘Victorian values’ at work: on the one hand, we see the cruelty of the capitalist system refusing what seems to us an obvious human right; on the other, the redeeming Victorian capacity for self-criticism and reform.

  One of the more momentous surprises in A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust’s masterly description of French aristocratic life from 1870 to 1919, is the fact that the Princesse de Guermantes in the final volume turns out to be none other than our old friend Madame Verdurin from the beginning of the story. The absurdly posturing social climber, with her ‘petite bande’ of largely unimpressive friends, has become a high aristocrat. Victorian England could boast many such elevations and transformations, as we have already seen. The very class who had supposedly ousted the aristocracy from their seats of power by the Industrial Revolution and by the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867 and 1884 discovered, when they had made their millions, that there were few more agreeable things to do with them than to acquire lands, and having acquired lands to acquire the manners, daughters and titles of the old landed class. Between 1886 and 1914 two hundred and forty-six new titles were granted. Discounting those who were members of the royal family, or who were being promoted within the peerage, two hundred of these were entering the nobility for the first time and some seventy of these were new money made from business or industry. Lord Salisbury, who had fought so hard to defend the landed interest in 1866–7, quickly saw that this cause was lost, and that Conservatism henceforward was to be of a different complexion. In his first brief ministry he made a Burton brewer, Henry Allsopp, into the first Baron Hindlip. In his second administration he made a second Guinness peerage – that of Iveagh; the silk broker H.F. Eaton became Lord Cheylesmore and the wool-comber Samuel Cunliffe-Lister became Lord Masham.

  In this Indian Summer of aristocratic life, then, in the thirty years before the outbreak of the First World War, the aristocracy could be said to have shown Darwinian skills at adapting and modifying itself to survive. In so doing they were able to bring money to prop up the system. Cunliffe-Lister’s wool-combing, for example, enabled him to become a great Yorkshire landowner, with the purchase of the Swinton Park estate for £457,000 in 1882, and the Marquess of Ailesbury’s estate in 1886, for £310,000. He owned some 34,000 acres by the time he established himself in his principal seat, Jervaulx Abbey.

  The fact, however, that it was possible for industrialists and shipbuilders and brewers (‘the beerage’ they were snobbishly known in the Edwardian parliaments) to buy land was an indication that others had been forced by poverty to sell it.11

  England had changed deeply and fundamentally since the Queen came to the throne, and the two doomed categories, sociologically and politically, were the old Whig aristocracy and the squires. The Whig idea – upheld by all the great aristocrats who supported the Reform Bill of 1832 – was that they governed for the People. The democratization of the representative system, albeit a very modified demo
cratization, finished the notion of Whiggery. Because the voting systems introduced since 1884 are based on a ‘first past the post’ system, and because the electorate remained quite small, the new political castes could borrow from the Whigs the convenient cloak of being ‘representative’ when they least wished to consult the populace or its wishes. They do so even today. But the ethos of Whiggery, with its base in the educated aristocracy, was doomed by extending the franchise.

  Whigs did not believe in government by the people, whatever that might mean. They were an élite which upheld as its own by the right of heredity, tradition, rank, property and experience the prerogative of governing the country, dispensing patronage and regulating reform. At times of crisis they stood with ‘the People’ to detach it from ‘the Populace’, a distinction which assumed that the views of the Populace were of no importance, except as imparting the element of crisis to the national affairs. But if the People and the Populace were to become one and the same, if the mass was to preponderate on the ruins of the representation of interests and varied communities, Whiggery was doomed. For it was the one element in British politics so specialized that in a democratic climate it could exist only as a frail exotic.12

  The Last of the Whigs was the Marquess of Harrington, Harty Tarty, who succeeded as the 8th Duke of Devonshire in December 1891. He was a spiritual exile in Gladstone’s Liberal Party, and after the Home Rule split he joined Lord Salisbury’s Cabinet as lord president of the Council. ‘Villa Conservatism’, however, was as remote from this man’s world as had been the Liberalism of Northern mill-owners and chapel-ranters.13 Lofty, forgetful – he once went to dine alone at the Turf Club forgetting he had invited the King to dine at his house – he said, ‘I have six houses, and the only one I really enjoy is the house at Newmarket.’14 His happiest appointment was as a steward of the Jockey Club and one of his proudest hours came in 1877, when his horse Belphoebe won the One Thousand Guineas (and a prodigious £4,750 in prize money).15