The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  When this sad report appeared in the Morning Chronicle public interest in prostitution, the ‘social evil’ – and concern about the spread of venereal disease – were becoming more intense year by year and reached their height in the 1860s when discussion raged as to the merits and iniquities of the Contagious Diseases Acts. The first of these acts was passed in 1864 ostensibly to deal with the problems presented by the incidence of venereal disease in the army which was so high that Florence Nightingale could maintain that ‘fully one half of all sickness’ in soldiers serving at home was ‘owing to the disease of vice’. She herself suggested that if soldiers – only a very few of whom were allowed by army regulations to get married – had better living conditions and recreational activities, they would be less inclined to consort with prostitutes. But others maintained that, since prostitution was inevitable, it would be sensible to regulate it in the manner of certain countries on the Continent. The periodical inspection of men in the army had been abolished in 1859, partly out of a wish to increase their self-esteem; but there was no reason, so those in favour of regulation argued, why the women whom they slept with should not be required to undergo inspection. After all, in eleven garrison towns, so it was estimated by the Inspector-General of Hospitals, there were well over 7000 prostitutes, nearly 1000 of whom were believed to be diseased.

  The Contagious Diseases Acts, which were passed with scant opposition, enabled the authorities to require women found soliciting to be examined in a certified hospital, and, if found to be diseased, to be detained so that a cure could be effected. The Acts were at first limited to certain garrison and dockyard towns; but when it was proposed that they should apply to the whole country, and that prostitutes should be licensed and regulated everywhere, there was widespread protest both from those who condemned the policy as unwarranted state intervention and from ‘moralists, feminists, individualists, and opponents of medical pretension and military arrogance’.9

  Prominent among these campaigners were H. J. Wilson, the Sheffield radical; James Stansfeld, the friend of Mazzini and Liberal cabinet minister who gave up a promising career to devote his energies to the cause; and Josephine Butler, a kinswoman of Earl Grey and wife of the Principal of Liverpool College, an impassioned, eloquent if sometimes almost hysterical reformer, who heatedly drew attention to the double standards of sexual morality which, by enforcing the examination of women but not of men, presumed that it was the female, not the male, who was responsible for spreading the disease. After years of campaigning the Acts were repealed in 1886. It had been accepted by then that, although they had brought about some improvement, they had not been nearly as effective as their supporters maintained. Certainly, cases of venereal disease in the army went on diminishing after the repeal of the Acts, continuing a trend that had begun before they were passed.

  While prostitution undoubtedly remained widespread throughout the Victorian period; while seduction of maidservants by the sons or masters of the house was still common enough, often expected, and sometimes encouraged by the maids themselves; while, so Acton maintained, large numbers of men made a ‘sport and habit’ of debauching any pretty working-class girl whom they fancied, most middle-class Victorians were genuinely shocked by sexual promiscuity. They were sincerely convinced that a better, more fulfilled and enjoyable life could be lived in the care and comfort of a family and in the earnest pursuit of wealth and of a respected place in society, than in the manifestly transient and probably deleterious pleasures of sex. And in this belief they were strengthened by a religious faith which was of profound significance to them.

  Its precepts permeated their nurseries. At their public schools they were told, as Dr Arnold’s pupils were told at Rugby, that ‘religious and moral principles’ were above all required of them: these principles were even more important than ‘gentlemanly conduct’ which was itself to be more highly regarded than intellectual ability. In their adult lives they were conscious always that the probity of their conduct was God’s concern: straight dealing would be rewarded, dishonesty punished in an after-life. There were still, of course, men like Lord Melbourne who had assured the young queen in ‘his amusing way’ that religion must never be allowed to ‘interfere with private life’. But men such as these were now in the minority. For most religion was a dominant force in their lives. Children in the schoolroom, Members of Parliament in the chamber, clerks in the counting-house, all began their days with communal prayers, just as servants and family joined in prayer when the day’s work was done.

  Differences of belief were wide and methods of worship various. One March Sunday in 1851, when a census was taken of people attending places of worship in England and Wales, numerous denominations had to be taken into account from Anglicans high and low, to Roman Catholics (their numbers vastly swollen by Irish immigration) and to Nonconformists of all kinds, from Unitarians (about 37,000) to Mormons (some 18,000). In all, well over 7 million out of a total population of 18 million attended some place of worship, a proportion ten times as great as it was to be a hundred years later. Even so, contemporaries were shocked by the large numbers of those who stayed away, predominantly working-class people living in large towns many of whom were inclined to believe that the Church of England was for the middle classes, as did Joseph Arch, founder of the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union and a Primitive Methodist preacher.

  I never took Communion in the parish church in my life [Arch wrote]. When I was seven years old I saw something which prevented me once for all … First, up walked the squire to the communion rails; the farmers went up next; then up went the tradesmen, the shopkeepers, the wheelwright, and the blacksmith; and then, the very last of all, went the poor agricultural labourers in their smock frocks. They walked up by themselves; nobody else knelt with them; it was as if they were unclean … I said to myself, ‘If that’s what goes on – never for me.’10

  Many working people felt like Arch and thought that, if they were to go to a Christian service at all, one held in a Nonconformist chapel was likely to be more in their line, though there were acknowledged social divisions in dissenting congregations also: Unitarians and Quakers, for example, were regarded as being superior to Primitive Methodists, and Congregationalists to Baptists.

  In Yorkshire on that Sunday in 1851 of the 983,000 or so people who went to a place of worship, 600,000 went to a Dissenters’ chapel or meeting-house, 431,000 of them to a Methodist chapel. In London, as Charles Booth discovered, there was little regular church attendance among the poor. One foggy Sunday morning – a ‘proper day for churchgoing’, he supposed – he looked in at the King’s Cross Mission to the Masses on his way to Charlotte Street. ‘In the body of the church there were only a few people scattered about,’ he noticed. ‘The masses certainly do not come in the morning nor, I found later, do any very large numbers come in the evening.’11

  For the middle classes, though, church attendance was almost de rigueur, if not always either profitable or pleasurable. ‘My back still aches in memory of those long services,’ a writer recalled of his middle-class childhood in the 1870s. ‘Nothing was spared us – the whole of the “Dearly Beloved”, never an omission of the Litany, always the full ante-Communion service, involving a sermon of unbelievable length.’

  Sermons usually were long. Those of the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon, the Calvinistic preacher for whom the Metropolitan Tabernacle was built, were measured in hours rather than minutes. Yet he was so spell-binding an orator that all 6000 seats in the Tabernacle were often filled half an hour before he began to speak and the ‘aisles were solid blocks and many stood throughout the service, wedged in and prevented from escaping by the crowd outside who … stood in throngs as far as the sound could reach’.12

  After going to church most middle-class people stayed at home. And for those who had no homes to go to, Sundays could be days of unutterable gloom as Arthur Clennam discovers when he returns from Marseilles:

  It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close a
nd stale. Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick and mortar echoes hideous. Melancholy streets in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows, in dire despondency. In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the city and the deadcarts were going round. Everything was bolted and barred that could by possibility furnish relief to an overworked people. No pictures, no unfamiliar animals, no rare plants or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient world – all taboo with that enlightened strictness, that the ugly South sea gods in the British Museum might have supposed themselves at home again. Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to change the brooding mind, or raise it up.13

  Provincial towns were just as gloomy on Sundays as London, if not more so; and the active members of such societies as those founded for Promoting the External Observance of the Lord’s Day and for the Suppression of Public Lewdness were determined to keep them so. When bands were given permission to play in the new public parks in Manchester and Salford in 1856, ‘the opposition on the part of the Sabbatarian public was so strongly expressed that the experiment was soon abandoned’. The Sabbatarians were not, however, always successful in their claims. Theatres and pleasure gardens were closed on Sundays, but not all taverns or shops. Sunday postal services were reduced in 1850, but were not altogether abandoned. Despite vociferous objections Sunday trains and omnibuses still ran. The Queen herself came down from Scotland to Euston on a Sunday, though, having broken her journey at Crewe, she got up very early so as to arrive in London before morning service and not cause undue offence to the Sabbatarians whose prejudices she thought ‘overdone’. ‘You know I am not at all an admirer or approver of our very dull Sundays,’ she told her daughter, the Princess Royal, ‘for I think the absence of innocent amusement for the poor people, a misfortune and an encouragement of vice.’14

  There were households, like the Ruskins’, in which Sundays were observed so strictly that the pictures were turned to the wall and only cold meals were served so that the servants had time to worship and study, as the members of the family did themselves; but there were many others as respectable in which the adults read novels or even a Sunday newspaper – though preferably not the scandalous stories in Reynold’s Weekly News – while the children were allowed to play quiet games and to look at their magazines, the Monthly Packet perhaps or Little Folks.

  57 Passengers and Drivers

  ‘Them Confugion steamers,’ cries Mrs Gamp, the gin-loving old midwife in Martin Chuzzlewit, shaking her umbrella at the Antwerp packet to emphasize her detestation of those ‘hammering and roaring, and hissing and lamp-iling … sputtering noisy monsters’ of steam engines. ‘Them Confugion steamers,’ she goes on, ‘has done more to throw us put of our reg’lar work, and bring events on at times when nobody counted on ’em (especially them screeching railroad ones), than all the other frights that ever was took.1

  Such frights had never disturbed Samuel Pickwick’s countryside through which stage-coaches rattled along from inn to inn as they had for centuries. To be sure, there had then been a few local railways; but they had mostly been on the coalfields and even there steam had not yet altogether displaced horse power. But that early nineteenth-century landscape was now being transformed, and conservative Englishmen were aghast at the change. As early as 1838 the Duke of Wellington, who could never reconcile himself to ‘these accursed railways’, was complaining that they had ‘totally destroyed our convenient communications’ and ‘even deranged’ the post. Ten years later he was still expressing his decided opinion that

  People never acted so foolishly as we did in allowing of the Destruction of our excellent and commodious [post roads] in order to expend Millions Sterling on the Rail Roads! It appears to me to be the Vulgarest, most indelicate, most inconvenient, most injurious to Health of any mode of conveyance that I have seen in any part of the World! Mobs of well dressed Ladies and Gentlemen are collected at every Station, to examine and pry into every Carriage and the actions of every Traveller. If an unfortunate Traveller wishes to quit His Carriage, he is followed by one of these well dressed Mobs as a Hunted animal is by Hounds, till he is forced again in His Carriage!2

  Despite such protests railways continued to proliferate, and there were those, unlike the Duke, who welcomed them. Watching a train on the Rugby line, Thomas Arnold said: ‘I rejoice to see it, and think that feudality is gone for ever.’3 The extensive building which had been encouraged by the success of the Liverpool and Manchester line soon gathered momentum. By 1840 Southampton was a terminus; in 1841 the Great Western line reached Bristol. By 1848 about 5000 miles of track had been laid; the line to Dover had been completed; and the London and North-Eastern Counties Company’s line ran to Ipswich, Colchester, Cambridge and Norwich.4 By 1852 all the main railway lines of England had either been finished or authorized. Hereford, Yeovil and Weymouth were exceptional in having no railway station; and in these places the need was soon supplied.5 By 1875 nearly 500 million passengers were being transported by rail each year and the whole tenor of English life, as well as the appearance of the countryside, had been altered for ever. ‘It was only yesterday,’ exclaims one of Thackeray’s characters, ‘but what a gulf between now and then. Then was the old world. Stage-coaches, more or less swift riding horses, packhorses, highwaymen … But your railroad starts a new era … We who lived before railways and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark.’6

  Embankments and cuttings, bridges, viaducts and tunnels took the lines across and under the landscape in every direction, while signal boxes, plate-layers’ huts, coal yards, water-towers and Gothic railway stations, with diapered brickwork and fretted barge-boards, sprang up as though overnight.

  Armies of men who had originally worked on canals and were hence known as navigators – or, more commonly, navvies – had marched across the country with picks and shovels, wheelbarrows and lanterns on their backs to undertake the formidable task of construction. They were a rough, tough set of men, wearing a kind of uniform of corduroy trousers, stout boots, jackets and brightly coloured scarves, and dressing as flamboyantly as costermongers when off duty. They were proud of their strength but, according to one of their number, ‘wonderfully tender-hearted, too. A navvy will cry the easiest thing as is. If you’d only talk a little good to him you can make a navvy burst out crying like a child in a few minutes, if you’d only take him the right way.’7 In the mid-1840s they numbered about 200,000, many of them agricultural labourers attracted to the hard work by the relatively high wages paid. Pickmen and shovellers were paid between 22s 6d and 24s a week in 1846, skilled men, such as bricklayers and masons, 33s. The labourers, working in gangs and often in rows under a foreman, were expected to shovel about twenty tons of earth and rock a day. The work was dangerous as well as hard. In wet weather the men often slipped as they were pushing their wheel-barrows up the steep planks from the bottom of cuttings; in all weathers there was danger from blasting and from collapsing tunnels. The Woodhead tunnel, built between 1839 and 1845 between Sheffield and Manchester, cost the lives of thirty-two men; a further 140 were seriously injured; and there were 400 other accidents.8 Compensation was rarely received from the railway companies or the contractors; the most that could usually be expected was some small contribution from a sick club.9

  Few navvies, however, had families to worry about. They were followed about by young women who were their concubines and by older women who did their cooking; they slept in wood or even mud huts in shanty towns, as many as thirty in a room in the larger huts, one above the other in tiers of bunks, much to the disgust of the outsider. ‘In these huts they lived … in a state of utter barbarism,’ wrote John Francis in 1851, ‘with man, woman and child
mixing in promiscuous guilt, with no possible separation of the sexes … Dissoluteness of morals prevailed. There were many women, but few wives. Loathsome forms of disease were universal. Work often went on without intermission on Sundays as well as on other days.’10

  Navvies remained together in their gangs, moving from one completed line to the next, going wherever the contractors sent them. Their intake of liquor – ten pints of strong ale a day was usual – was matched by the quantities of food they ate. This was mostly bread and meat and was consumed at the rate of two pounds of each a day.11 In order to check their drunkenness, the contractors paid them as infrequently as they could, advancing credit against purchases to be made at the ‘tommy’ shop, the employers’ store, where prices were generally far higher than they were in the nearest village. Yet they often contrived to get drunk, and then fights would break out, and these would sometimes develop into riots involving the local people who grew to dread the establishment of a rowdy navvy camp in their neighbourhood.12

  While the navvies sweated and drank, and the railway mania continued unabated, fortunes were made and lost. George Stephenson, builder of the famous Rocket and of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, was born the son of a poor colliery fireman and died, rich and respected, at a large country house in Derbyshire. Stephenson’s protégé, Thomas Brassey, contractor for the Great Northern Railway among others, died worth many million pounds. George Hudson, a Yorkshire farmer’s son, the ebullient, broad-spoken ‘Railway King’, became a millionaire, Lord Mayor of York, a Member of Parliament, and the owner of a huge house in London which is now occupied by the French Embassy. When he went abroad in 1849 he left investors in companies he had promoted with losses totalling £80 million. Yet after Hudson’s disgrace railway lines spread across the country as fast as ever, while those who expressed their strong disapproval of them gradually fell into silence. Landowners took a kinder view of the new means of transport when it was seen how much money could be made out of it and how, thanks to the muscles of the navvies, the tracks could be kept out of sight of drawing-room windows by cuttings and tunnels. Almost everyone who could afford to do so invested in railway shares; and railway bills and the relative merits of narrow and broad gauges became the subject of heated debate at dinner parties. According to Thackeray the mania spread to the servants’ hall: Lady Clavering’s butler is well on the way to making his fortune while his mistress struggles to comprehend stock-exchange terminology.13