Dickens's England: Life in Victorian Times
Page 14
It is true that if philosophers have suffered, their cause has been amply avenged. Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed, if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain. But orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget; and though, at present, bewildered and afraid to move, it is as willing as ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the beginning and end of sound science; and to visit, with such petty thunderbolts as its half-paralyzed hands can hurl, those who refuse to degrade Nature to the level of primitive Judaism.
Philosophers, on the other hand, have no such aggressive tendencies. With eyes fixed on the noble goal to which ‘per aspera et ardua’ they tend, they may, now and then, be stirred to momentary wrath by the unnecessary obstacles with which the ignorant, or the malicious, encumber, if they cannot bar, the difficult path; but why should their souls be deeply vexed? The majesty of Fact is on their side, and the elemental forces of Nature are working for them.
Thomas Huxley, ‘The Origin of Species’ (1860), Lay Sermons (1870)
MAN IN TIME
LV
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life . . .
LVI
‘So careful of the type?’ but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.
‘Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more.’ And he, shall he,
Man, her last work, who seemed so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of useless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed
And Love Creation’s final law –
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shrieked against his creed –
Who loved, who suffered countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or sealed within the iron hill?
No more? A monster then, a dream,
A discord. Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music matched with him.
O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.
Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)
A THOUSAND AGES IN THY SIGHT ARE AS AN EVENING GONE
For was, and is, and will be, are but is:
And all creation is one act at once.
Alfred Tennyson, The Princess (1847)
[Henry Knight is clinging to a cliff face on the coast of Cornwall.]
By one of those familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the inanimate world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense, opposite Knight’s eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early crustaceans called trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their place of death. It was the single instance within reach of his vision of anything that had ever been alive and had had a body to save, as he himself had now. . . .
Knight was a fair geologist; and such is the supremacy of habit over occasion, as a pioneer of the thoughts of men, that at this dreadful juncture his mind found time to take in, by a momentary sweep, the varied scenes that had had their day between this creature’s epoch and his own. There is no place like a cleft landscape for bringing home such imaginings as these.
Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity of the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate centuries simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in the hides of beasts . . . antelopes of monstrous size, the megatherium, and the myledon . . . Folded behind were dragon forms and clouds of flying reptiles; still underneath were fishy beings of lower development; and so on, till the lifetime scenes of the fossil confronting him were a present and modern condition of things.
Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873)
DOVER BEACH
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; – on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Matthew Arnold, New Poems (1867)
FOUR
Country Life
There were hundreds who could speak out and up when they were by themselves, but who had learned the trade of mouth-shutting and teeth-locking as soon as they could talk, and before they knew what bird-scaring was. A man with the weight of many masters on him learns how to be dumb, and deaf, and blind, at a very early hour in the morning.
Joseph Arch, Joseph Arch. The Story of his Life (1898)
The end of the Napoleonic wars severely jolted the rural economy, as prices of meat and grain dropped sharply, while returned soldiers and sailors competed for employment. Most farms, averaging 100 acres, were rented from large landowners, who owned most of the country. Farmworkers were hired by the year, accommodated in poorly-maintained ‘tied’ cottages, worked usually from dawn to dusk in all weathers (with women and children pressed into labour, especially at harvest time), and paid very badly, especially in the south (where wages dropped from 12s a week in 1815 to 7s in 1851); many lived mainly on potatoes and greens, with occasional bacon.
Various poor-relief schemes were in operation, resented by those who had to pay for them. The Poor Law Reform of 1834 was intended to reduce habitual pauperism and a dependency culture by a deliberately hard and callous régime (with enforced labour, separation of families and denial of social life), but proved excessively severe. Enclosure of common
land further exacerbated the plight of the poor, while schemes for the provision of allotments of land fizzled out.
Modernisation came slowly. The introduction in 1830/1, in southern England, of threshing-machines, depriving men of winter work and wages, provoked riots and arson; 400 machines were destroyed, 19 men hanged, nearly 500 transported and hundreds imprisoned. Movements towards farm-workers’ unions were repressed. In 1832, after farmers in Tolpuddle, Dorset, reneged on promises of better wages, six men sought to set up a Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers, ‘to maintain the wages of farm servants’: they received seven years’ transportation with hard labour. Nevertheless, the pressure could not be resisted indefinitely, and in 1872 Joseph Arch encouraged his fellow farm-workers to form a National Agricultural Labourers’ Union; farmers, rural magistrates (often farmers) and rural Anglican clergy (often farmers or magistrates) continued to resist with lock-outs and imprisonment; despite this, in 1884 agricultural workers got the vote, and in 1885 Arch became an MP.
In 1851 there were about 2 million farm-workers, more than twice the numbers in the factories or the mills, but the rural population decreased rapidly after that. There was an increasing ‘flight from the land’ provoked by the poor wages and conditions on the land and the dubious attractions of urban life and work (farm-workers were usually in better condition than town-dwellers, as recruiters for the Boer War were to discover); thousands more sought the opportunities of Canada, America, Australia and New Zealand. The railways also absorbed thousands, as drivers, engineers or station staff (from 65,000 in 1851 to 174,000 by 1880).
In 1815, the Corn Law had attempted to prop up the price of English wheat against imported grain, but it was unworkable, was steadily undermined and repealed in 1845, which was generally regarded as the decisive event in the development of the agricultural industry and rural life. Agriculture was starting its long decline. In the third quarter of the century, it seemed to be doing well, with increasing mechanisation and improved farming methods, even though ‘high farming’, as it was known, was expensive. Wheat prices remained stable as increasing consumption absorbed the growth in imports; increasing prosperity led to a greater demand for meat, cheese and butter over bread and potatoes. Many farmers shifted from arable to pasture, ‘from corn to horn’ (though both were threatened by American wheat and then Australian frozen meat).
Then, in 1874, a major agricultural depression set in, occasioned by a sequence of bad summers and poor harvests, with animal and crop diseases, losses of livestock and low prices. In 1851 agriculture had accounted for 20 per cent of national income, but by the end of the century it was only 6 per cent.
The labourers’ flight intensified; middling farmers struggled; many landowners turned to game shooting; the large landowners, however, while less wealthy, still retained considerable influence. New great country houses were being built in the 1860s and 1870s, often by ‘new money’ from financiers, bankers and industrialists, not always welcomed by the traditional landowning aristocracy, and not deriving their wealth from, nor greatly contributing to, the rural communities they now owned (or evicted). Farming was less important, ‘land’ of less value and the landowners more detached. As Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell observed, ‘Land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up. That’s all that can be said about land. . . . A girl with a simple, unspoilt nature, like Gwendolen, could hardly be expected to reside in the country.’ (Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895)
* * *
IN THE COUNTRY AND OUT OF THE COUNTRY
[Cirencester, 7 November 1821]
I passed through that villainous hole, Cricklade, about two hours ago; and, certainly, a more rascally-looking place I never set my eyes on. I wished to avoid it, but could get along no other way. All along here the land is of a whitish stiff loam upon a bed of soft stone, which is found at various distances from the surface, sometimes two feet and sometimes ten. Here and there a field is fenced with this stone, laid together in walls without mortar, or earth. All the houses and out-houses are made of it, and even covered with the thinnest of it formed into tiles. The stiles in the field are made of large flags of this stone, and the gaps in the hedges are stopped with them. There is very little wood all along here. The labourers seem miserably poor. Their dwellings are little better than pig-beds, and their looks indicate that their food is not nearly equal that of a pig. Their wretched hovels are stuck upon little bits of ground on the road side, where the space has been wider than the road demanded. In many places they have not two rods [1 rod=16½ feet] to a hovel. It seems as if they had been swept off the fields by a hurricane, and had dropped and found shelter under the banks on the roadside! Yesterday morning was a sharp frost; and this had set the poor creatures to digging up their little plats of potatoes. In my whole life I never saw human wretchedness equal to this; no, not even amongst the free negroes of America, who, on an average, do not work one day out of four. And this is ‘prosperity’, is it? These, Oh, Pitt, are the fruits of thy hellish system! However, this Wiltshire is a horrible county. . . .
[Kensington, 24 June 1822]
Set out at four this morning for Redbourn, and then turned off to the westward to go to High Wycombe, through Hempstead and Chesham. The wheat is good all the way. The custom is in this part of Hertfordshire (and, I am told, it continues into Bedfordshire) to leave a border round the ploughed parts of the field to bear grass, and to make hay from, so that, the grass being now made into hay, every cornfield has a closely mowed grass walk about ten feet wide all round it, between the corn and the hedge. This is most beautiful! The hedges are now full of the shepherd’s rose, honeysuckles, and all sorts of wild flowers; so that you are upon a grass walk, with this most beautiful of all flower gardens and shrubberies on your one hand, and with the corn on the other. And thus you go from field to field (on foot or on horseback), the sort of corn, the sort of underwood and timber, the shape and size of the fields, the height of the hedgerows, the height of the trees, all continually varying. Talk of pleasure-grounds indeed! All along the country that I have come, the labourers’ dwelling are good. They are made of what they call brick-nog (that is to say, a frame of wood, and a single brick thick filling up the vacancies between the timber). They are generally covered with tile. Not pretty by any means; but they are good; and you see here, as in Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire, and, indeed, in almost every part of England, that most interesting of all objects, that which is such an honour to England, and that which distinguishes it from all the rest of the world, namely, those neatly kept and productive little gardens round the labourers’ houses, which are seldom unornamented with more or less of flowers. We have only to look at these to know what sort of people English labourers are: these gardens are the answer to the Malthuses and the Scarletts. . .
[Canterbury, 4 September 1823]
When I got upon the corn land in the Isle of Thanet, I got into a garden indeed. There is hardly any fallow; comparatively few turnips. It is a county of corn. The labourers’ houses all along through this island, beggarly in the extreme. The people dirty, poor-looking; ragged, but particularly dirty. The men and boys with dirty faces, and dirty smock-frocks, and dirty shirts; and, good G— what a difference between the wife of a labouring man here, and the wife of a labouring man in the forests and woodlands of Hampshire and Sussex! Invariably have I observed, that the richer the soil, and the more destitute of woods, that is to say, the more purely a corn country, the more miserable the labourers. The cause is this: the great, the big bull frog grasps all. In this beautiful island every inch of land is appropriated by the rich. No hedges, no ditches, no commons, no grassy lanes: a country divided into great farms; a few trees around the farmhouse. All the rest is bare of trees; and the wretched labourer has not a stick of wood, and has no place for a pig or cow to graze, or even to lie down upon. . . .
At Up-street I was struck with the words written upon a board which was
fastened upon a pole, which pole was standing in a garden near a neat little box of a house. The words were these. ‘PARADISE PLACE. Spring guns and steel traps are set here.’ A pretty idea it must give us of Paradise, to know that spring guns and steel traps are set in it! This is doubtless some stockjobber’s place; for, in the first place, the name is likely to have been selected by one of that crew; and, in the next place, whenever any of them go to the country, they look upon it that they are to begin a sort of warfare against everything around them. They invariably look upon every labourer as a thief. . . .