VICTORIAN PEOPLE A REASSESSMENT OF PERSONS AND THEMES

942.08 B85v
Briggs
Victorian people

60-02199

KANSAS CITY, MO PUBLIC LIBRARY

MAR 23 1981
*ST BRANCH

From the England of Fielding and Richardson to the
England of Miss Austen from the England of Miss
Austen to the England of Railways and Free-trade, how
vast the change; yet perhaps Sir Charles Gran dim would
not seem so strange to us now, as one of ourselves mil
sem to our great-grandchildren. The world moves faster
and faster i and the difference mil probably be consider
ably greater. The temper of each new generation is a con-

tinual surprise.

J. A.FROUDK (1864)

A Reassessment
of Persons and Themes

mi-6i

By ASA BRIGGS

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Lihrtuy u] (Mii^Tttt ( \itdti \ urn fat; JM//,V

THE UNIVFRSHY OF CHICAGO Ptu ss, GHCACK) 37

Published in England by ODHAMS PRI-HS, l;n>., 1954

right 1915 by The Univemty tif C,hh^tL (<:) The
University of CMcA^ /P^f, All rights rnfrvcd, O^y-
rlght under the International Copyright I ww/w, /PfJ. htb-
1955. Composed and printed by Tin. UNIVI.KMIY
OK CHICAGO PRESS, Otti,t^ Illirttas, U&A.

In the preparation of this book I have received generous help
from many friends and colleagues, particularly Richard Sear-
by, who read the manuscript, both in its early and in its late
stages, and made many useful suggestions.

I have made considerable additions and changes in this pres
ent edition to the English version of the book. The Introduc
tion, Epilogue, and Bibliographical Note are new, and many
of the chapters have been substantially rewritten. Although
both editions have the same purpose to illuminate a significant
but little-studied period of English history-the present version
is designed to show that the historical problems of mid-nine
teenth-century England are of considerable interest on both
sides of the Atlantic.

A. B.
WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS .... .... ix

I. INTRODUCTION .... 1

II. THE CRYSTAL PALACE AND THE MEN OF 1851 15

III. JOHN ARTHUR ROEBUCK AND THE CRIMEAN WAR 52

IV. TROLLOPE, BAGEHOT, AND THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION . 87
V. SAMUEL SMILES AND THE GOSPEL OF WORK . . 116

VI. THOMAS HUGHES AND THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS . . 140

VIL ROBERT APPLEGARTH AND THE TRADE-UNIONS . . 168

VIII. JOHN BRIGHT AND THE CREED OF REFORM . . 197

IX. ROBERT LOWE AND THE FEAR OF DEMOCRACY . . 232

X. BENJAMIN DISRAELI AND THE LEAP IN THE DARK 264

XI. EPILOGUE . . 296

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE . . .... 300

INDEX 307

v

FACING PAGE

L THE CRYSTAL PALACE . . .22

II. THE ORGANIZERS OF THE GREAT EXHIBITION .... 23

III. THE CRIMEAN WAR: THE NATIONAL TEMPER ... 54

IV. PALMERSTON S TRIUMPH IN 1857 55

V. WORK 118

VI. POLITICAL HERALDRY 119

VII. BENJAMIN DISRAELI, "THE MYSTERY MAN" .... 150
VIII. THE REFORM BILL OF 1867 151

The period of English history which begins with the Great
Exhibition of 1851 and ends with the second Reform Bill of
1867 is one of the least studied and least understood chapters
in English history. There are two main reasons for the lacuna:
the first, political complexity, a jumble of ministries, and a
constant shifting of political alignments; the second, relative
quiet in the world of events. The picturesque battles of the
nineteenth century fall on either side of the period. On the one
side, there are the sharp conflicts of the 1840 s, when contem
poraries talked openly of class war and imminent revolution,
and, on the other, there are the bitter struggles of the 1880 s,
when Irish nationalism molded English history and Victorian
radicalism overlapped with twentieth-century socialism. The
middle years of the century form a great plateau bounded on
each side by deep ravines and dangerous precipices.

Yet the plateau has a fascination of its own a fascination
which has increased in recent years, when writers and thinkers
of the twentieth century have found far more points of interest
in Victorian England than their iconoclastic predecessors. The
period from 1851 to 1867 was the period of high- Victorian
England; from its social balance it produced a distinctive civili
zation of its own. The key words of the times were "thought,"
"work," and "progress." Clear thinking was preferred to im
pulse or prejudice and the battle of ideas to the dictatorship
of slogans; hard work was considered the foundation of all
material advancement; and both clear thinking and hard work
were deemed essential to continued national progress.

Victorian People

The stress on thought, work, and progress was accompanied
by some of the exaggerations and deficiencies of such an em
phasis overearnestness, smugness, dulness, and what contem
poraries, particularly the bright young intellectuals of the
Satiwday Review, called "cant." But It was accompanied also
by heightened national pride. The 1851 Preface to G. R. Por
ter s Progress of the Nation catches the mood: "It must at all
times be a matter of great interest and utility to ascertain the
means by which any community has attained to eminence
among nations. To inquire into the progress of circumstances
which has given pre-eminence to one s own nation would al
most seem to be a duty." This was the mood of 1851; it sur
vived down to 1 867. The period as a whole was a crucial one
in the development of English national consciousness:

Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,
We see the lords of human kind go by.

Five main influences conditioned the national mood. The first
was the direct influence of prosperity. The economic troubles
of the preceding generation vanished almost as if by magic.
From 1850 there was a rise in prices brought about by the
diversion of investment to ventures which yielded their re
sults over a long period of time or, like war and gold rushes,
yielded few economic returns t all, Britain was the world s
workshop, the world s shipbuilder, the world s carrier, the
world s banker, and the world s clearing-house. Free trade was
the dominant commercial philosophy of the age, and it seemed
as unchallengeable as Magna Carta. Yet farmers and workers
as well as businessmen shared the prosperity. Although the
farmers had been robbed of protection by the repeal of the
Corn Laws in 1846, they continued to enjoy the natural pro
tection afforded by geography against imports of cheap food;
as much as the manufacturers, they benefited directly from
the expansion of the railway system. So too did the workers,
for real wages continued to rise as well as prices. The general
reduction of taxes on food and the shortening of the length
of the working day permitted unparalleled working-class prog
ress. Such a balance of interests and a relative freedom from

Introduction

economic cares made it possible to avoid the political storms
of the 1840 s or the ISSO s, when the interests of landlords
clashed with those of manufacturers and when skilled as well
as unskilled workers were goaded by "knife-and-fork" ques
tions into a state of angry revolt.

The second main influence was the sense of national security.
Britain ruled the waves, and there was no real outside threat
to England s naval supremacy or to the safety of the realm. It
was even the boast of Lord Palmerston that "as the Roman, in
days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could
say Civls Rowiamcs swn^ so also a British subject, in whatever
land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and
the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice
and wrong."

Prosperity and security together encouraged a belief in the
superiority of English representative institutions. They had
withstood the revolutions of 1848, when even English proph
ets like Carlyle felt that "their hour had struck," and they
continued to stand firm when European countries were swing
ing from freedom to autocracy and when the United States
of America was torn by civil war. Although there were no
organic changes in the constitution, there was a movement
of unremitting adaptation and reform carried out without
violence in

A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where Freedom broadens slowly down
From precedent to precedent.

This third influencetrust in institutions was never seriously
shaken. It was an indication of social stability that strong gov
ernment was considered neither necessary nor desirable.

The fourth and fifth influences reconciled order and change.
Belief in a common moral code, based on duty and self-re
straint, was shared by most gtoups in society, including scien
tists, creative artists, and intellectuals." Institutions like the
school, the voluntary organization, the trade-union, and, above
all, the family emphasized the maintenance of those values
which held society together. Even those rebels who refused "to

Victorian People

accept Christianity demanded that men should be good for
good s sake, not God s; and in practice it was difficult to tell
the difference. At the same time there was belief in free dis
cussion and inquiiy. Men with conflicting points of view were
prepared to debate their differences without wishing to ex
change blows if they had the worst of the argument. As John
Stuart Mill put it in his Essay on Liberty (1859): "It is only
by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the
truth has any chance of being supplied. . . . Truth, in the great
practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the recon
ciling and combining of opposites, that very few have minds
sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment
with an approach to correctness, and it has to be made by the
rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under
hostile banners."

It did not prove possible in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century to maintain the balance of the period from 1851 to
1867; even in that period itself the balance was always chang
ing and was never at any moment perfect. Although there was
freedom from economic cares, there were years of economic
crisis in 1857 and 1866, when there were many business bank
ruptcies and great working-class distress. Although there was
no threat to English security, there were war scares in 1852
and 1859. Although there was a belief in the superiority of
English representative institutions at particular moments, as in
1854 and 1855, they were more vigorously attacked than at
any other period in the nineteenth century. Although there
was a common moral code, it was often stretched at the edges
or superficially maintained with the support of cant and
hypocrisy. Although there was free discussion, the range of
the discussion was limited, and many topics were deliberately
left unexplored.

It is a mistake to make ambitious generalizations. The unity
of the period is somewhat deceptive. The general prosperity
did not save large sections of the population from social dis
tress. According to Matthew Arnold, the untaxing of the poor
man s bread resulted not only in cheaper food for the poor
but in the creation of many more poor men to cat it. Machinery

Introduction

had added to national wealth, but it was continuing to produce
"a multitude of miserable, sunken and ignorant human beings."
Certainly the comfortable distinction between the respectable
poor and the the rest of the poor obscured any close examina
tion of the origins of poverty. It covered social questions with
a blanket of morality.

Free discussion was possible only because a relatively small
number of people took part in it. The free interchange of
ideas was for the few rather than for the many, and it was
more often conducted in private than in public. Within the
limits of debate there was more confrontation of opinions than
reconciliation. As one of the first critics of the Victorians,
G. W. E. Russell, put it in his Collections and Recollections in
1909: "In all departments of life and thought the Cocksure
seem to have possessed the earth. . . . Differing from one an
other in points neither unimportant nor few, they [the par
ticipants in debate] were at one in this they were sure that
they were right." Russell exaggerated, for there were impor
tant elements of doubt in mid- Victorian England, but he did
not falsify.

Even the stability of the period can be overemphasized. The
instinct for violence and interest in violence remained. The
first was satisfied by casual rowdyism, which reached its peak
at election times, or by the Crimean adventure and distant
struggles in the colonies; the second was satisfied vicariously
by reading of crime and horrors, witnessing public executions,
or surveying events in Europe. Two hundred and eighty thou
sand copies of the gruesome ballad written for the murderer
Miiller s execution were sold in 1864; no single event more
powerfully affected the mind of that generation than the
massacre at Cawnpore in India in 1857.

A more serious threat to permanent stability was the growth
of militant radicalism in the cities. There was always a great
gulf between the industrial community and the small town or
village a gulf which it was difficult to bridge. k "Suppose you
fell asleep tonight and woke up in I860," G. M. Young begins
one of his essays. "What is the first thing you would notice?"
There is no single answer. It depends where you woke up.

Victorian People

The crowds of the cities and the leaders who influenced them
were preparing throughout the whole of the period for the
great unleashing of popular power, which was made possible
by the Reform Bill of 1867. When the urban working classes
came into the open to clamor for reform, the intellectual argu
ments of Robert Lowe were powerless to prevent a complete
change in the political balance. In the same way the mixture
of reason and dogma which passed for political economy was
incapable of explaining or controlling the economic blizzard
after 1873. From that date onward, in the words of Robert
Browning, it was "never glad, confident morning again."

II

A fair appreciation of the unity and form of this mid- Vic
torian period has only become possible in the middle years of
the twentieth century. "One thing is pretty certain, and in its
way comforting," wrote Leslie Stephen, "that however far the
rage for revivalism may be pushed, nobody will ever want to
revive the nineteenth century." The first historians of the pres
ent century echoed his judgment and went further by often
succumbing to the temptation of staging a war of the ages.
H. G. Wells, for instance, in The New MachiavelK (1911), de
scribed "the Victorian epoch" as "a hasty trial experiment,
a gigantic experiment of the most slovenly and wasteful kind."
"Will anyone, a hundred years from now, consent to live in
the houses the Victorians built," he asked, "travel by their
roads or railways, value the furnishings they made to live
among or esteem, except for curious or historical reasons, their
prevalent art and the clipped and limited literature that satisfied
their souls?" Victorian people were "restricted and undis
ciplined, overtaken by power, by possessions and great new
freedoms, and unable to make any civilized use of them what
ever."

A very different twentieth-century historian, Lytton Stra-
chey, in Eminent Victorians (1918), adopted "a subtler strat
egy." Attacking the Victorian age as a whole, he proceeded not
by frontal assaults but by lightning operations in unexpected
places on the flanks or at the rear. The task of the historian of

Introduction

Victorian England was to "shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight
into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over
that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and
there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day
some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be
examined with a careful curiosity." The bucket was of elegant
design, and the characteristic specimens were suitably nasty.
Contemporaries were impressed. Strachey s brief and brilliant
biographical sketches took the place of the fat Victorian official
Lives, which he conveniently dismissed as part of the cortege
of the undertaker, wearing the same air of "slow, funereal
barbarism."

Wells and Strachey were men in revolt. They did not fore
see, any more than Stephen, that the dusty Victorian biog
raphies would be pulled down from the shelves, while Vic
torian bric-a-brac would be sold at exorbitant prices. They
were so interested in dismissing the Victorian past that they
forgot the twentieth-century future.

Interest in the nineteenth century has increased with the
growing complexity and insecurity of the contemporary world.
The publication of the capacious volumes of Early Victorian
England, edited by G. M. Young in 1934, was a major land
mark in historiography. Since then, the ideas and beliefs of the
Victorians have been frequently revalued in an attempt as a
recent radio symposium put it to shed "light on matters which
puzzle us today." It has now become fashionable to turn back
with nostalgia to the England of the Great Exhibition of
1851; and no one was surprised when a surviving Victorian,
Algernon Cecil, claimed in 1953 that he could "breathe more
freely in the Victorian air" than in that of the twentieth cen
tury. "In our own unpleasant century," another writer, Basil
Willey, has said, "we are mostly displaced persons, and many
feel tempted to take flight into the nineteenth as into a prom
ised land, and settle there like illegal immigrants for the rest
of their lives."

Unfortunately, the meaning of the word "Victorian" re
mains as vague when it is used by historians of escape as it was
when used by historians of revolt. It is no more possible to

Victorian People

embrace the whole of Victorian England than it was to battle
against it. There was no single Victorian England, and there
can be no easy return to the Exhibition of 1851 or to the
Jubilee of 1887. The nineteenth century can be understood
only when we realize that many of the roads back to it are
blocked and that the historical landscape we hope to explore
looks at first glance like a terra incognita. We can only under
stand Victorian England by examining particular segments of
it, such as the segment discussed in this book. The real con
tinuity of the nineteenth century begins to be apparent only
when the unity of the individual periods within it is fully
explored.

Ill

There are various ways of displaying the unity of a period.
The greatest historian of mid- Victorian England, G. M. Young,
thinks in terms of "the generation"; his Portrait of an Age (pub
lished separately in 1936) depicts with brilliant impressionism
the hopes and fears of each succeeding Victorian generation.
His strongest point was that he never forgot that he was paint
ing a moving picture and not a series of camera stills. "The
sequence of the generations," he writes, "is a continuous stream,
so that everybody is a little older or younger than somebody
else." The debate between age groups in any period is as im
portant as the debate between rich and poor or between
Liberals and Conservatives. "Culture is not a state but a proc
ess. . . . The judgements of parents, nurses, governesses, pastors
and masters of all degrees, are, on the whole, the voice of socie
ty in equilibrium and bent on maintaining its equilibrium. The
judgements of the younger generation are, on the whole, the
voice of society dissident and exploratory." Within each period
the unity depends upon a balance^ in mid- Victorian England
the balance was so nicely adjusted that it permitted order and
change. "Of all decades in our history," Young concludes, "a
wise man would choose the eighteen-fifties to be young in."

Writing as foreign commentators, two other historians of
the ninetenth century have adopted different techniques and
styles. Professor W. W. Rostow, in his British Economy of the

introduction

Nineteenth Century (1948), has divided Victorian England
not into early, middle, and late but into "trend periods" of ris
ing and falling prices. To him mid-Victorian England acquired
its unity through the price rise, "what is referred to, with some
considerable ambiguity, as the great Victorian boom," running
from about 1850 to the financial crisis of 1873. Breaks within
the period coincided with shifts in the volume and movement
of capital exports and fluctuations in general business activity.
This analysis is stimulating and suggestive and throws new
light on some of the dark corners of the period, but it is of very
limited value to the social historian.

felie Halevy, the most distinguished of all foreign historians
of England, has found unity in continuity, in the persistence of
the cluster of institutions and attitudes which together made up
"the moral and religious constitution" of England; but his
magisterial six- volume study of the nineteenth century (His-
toire du peuple anglais au XIX G siecle [1912-47]) stops short at
the period covered in this book and is not resumed until 1895.
By then, conditions had so changed from those of 1850 that he
concluded: "The period between 1895 and 1914 does not be
long to the nineteenth century as I see it." No modern historian
can resist the temptation of trying to fill in the Halevy "gap,"
for the explanation of the difference in mood between 1 850 and
1895 lies in social structure and social adaptation in the middle
years of the century.

The method I have adopted in this book is to try to discover
the unity of society through a study of selected people who
were alive and active in the 1850 s and 1860 s. In a sense they
are "specimens," as Strachey s characters were, but they are
specimens which have not been chosen tendentiously. When
Strachey wrote, Victorian people were usually regarded either
as ridiculous or as natural targets for satire. Twenty years later
they began to acquire a certain "period charm." Only today
are they accepted as serious and interesting characters in their
own right. "We are coming to see," as John Holloway has
said in his book The Victorian Sage (1953), "that for all their
blindness and taboos, and for all their wildness and crudities
too, the Victorians made a praiseworthy and fascinatingly

Victorian People

interesting attempt to retain and reorganize and even deepen
their culture, despite changes in knowledge, technique and
society which set them an impossibly difficult task."

The people I have chosen are not unknown "men in the
street" or forgotten personalities; they are men who made a
distinctive contribution to the character of their times. Some of
them were the best critics of their own age or chroniclers of its
history; others were makers of social and cultural values or per
suasive advocates of them; a third group were reformers who
wished to speed up the processes of change. The selected men
include a large majority of politicians, although many of the
politicians chosen were only "part-time" parliamentarians.
While Roebuck, Bright, Lowe, and Disraeli were "full-time"
members of Parliament, Hughes, who sat there for several years,
is better remembered as author of Tom Brown s School Days.
It is significant, however, that such was the prestige attached
to politics and administration in this period, despite the relative
lack of spectacular incidents or issues, that even Trollope, the
novelist, and Bagehot, the economist and editor, whom I have
chosen for their significance as commentators rather than as
actors, made unsuccessful attempts to enter the House of Com
mons.

The belief that to sit in Parliament should be the highest
object and ambition of every educated Englishman has re
mained widespread and influential even in the twentieth cen
tury. The English higher educational system has been geared
to this belief rather than to a belief in business success; so, too,
have the traditional qualities of the "gentleman." The studies of
individual people in this book are not designed as miniature
biographies so much as explorations of the value judgments
and preferences of mid- Victorian society.

The features of that society have considerable interest not
only for specialist English historians but for students of soci
ety in general. Despite the prolonged business prosperity and
the greatly increasing wealth of the businessman in the years
1851-67, England did not become a business society. A Quaker
industrialist like John Bright was still cut off from many of the
streams of national life; an apologist of occupational success

Introduction

like Samuel Smiles never succeeded in making the creed of self-
help the unchallenged gospel of his age. The failure was crucial
in the subsequent development of English society and politics.

Resistance to the power of the businessman came from three
different directions. The small gentry, far more influential in
England than the high nobility, felt only a limited interest in
wealth and through institutions like the public schools and the
universities taught their sons a traditional code of behavior.
Their prestige, too, was high. "So vast is their traditional
power," wrote a shrewd observer, Benjamin Cracroft, in 1866,
"so broadly does it sit over the land, so deep and ancient are its
roots, so multiplied and ramified everywhere are its tendrils,
and creepers and feelers, that the danger is never lest they shall
have too little, but always lest they should have too much
power, and so, even involuntarily, choke down the possibilities
of new life from below."

The new civil servant, who usually came from the public
school and the university, was expected to be a "gentleman,"
just as was the owner of a landed estate. The result, in Young s
phrase, was that "the sudden access of power, prosperity and
knowledge" was confronted in the new civil service by "a
solidly grounded code of duty and self-restraint."

Finally, the world of labor was unwilling, even in a period
when revolutionary or theoretical socialism had little appeal, to
accept the attitudes of businessmen or to place individual mobil
ity above class solidarity. The new model trade-unions, such as
the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, founded in 1851, con
sisted of skilled artisans who might have been expected to
accommodate themselves to a competitive economic system
rather than to challenge it. That they did not and instead
secured essential trade-union rights of organization and action
made far easier the rise of unskilled labor twenty years later.

There was a fourth reason why England did not become a
business society, perhaps the most interesting reason of all. The
businessmen themselves showed only a limited interest in the
values by which they had risen. Many of them were deferential
rather than rebellious, snobbish rather than independent, and
usually tempered by what Gladstone described as "a sneaking

Victorian People

kindness for a Lord." The moment quietly arrived in private
histories when a new family became an old one and when its
members basked in the branches of family trees and forgot that
there had been ladders to climb on the way. Self-help was a more
convenient philosophy for first than for second generations,
and Disraeli saw clearer than Smiles that "the industrious ten-
pounder,* who has struggled into the privileged order of the
Commons, proud of having obtained the first step of aristoc
racy, will be the last man to assist in destroying the gradation
of the side by which he or his posterity may yet ascend." If it
was not easy for a successful businessman to become a "gentle
man" in his own lifetime, he could have reasonable hopes that
his children, educated in the new public schools and marrying
sons or daughters of the gentry, would eventually become
"ladies" and "gentlemen." He could spend his declining years,
if he so wished, "in hunting up genealogies" and spreading his
wings "for sublime apotheosis among the county families."

It is a gross understatement to describe mid- Victorian society
as undemocratic; it prided itself not on its equality but on its
balance, on its nuances of social status, on its varied but con
verging ideals, and on its inherent superiority to other societies
on the continent of Europe or across the Atlantic. Nor was it
troubled about its permanence. "Suppose all our parishioners
were put on a level in the scale of society today," wrote one
pamphleteer in 1852, "before this day twelve months there
would be an aristocracy among them, c a nobility without
heraldry. "

My studies in this book are designed to illuminate the nature
of mid- Victorian society as it seemed to contemporaries. Each
chapter is a separate study, but the chapters are designed to be
read consecutively and as a whole. Subsidiary themes play their
partthe effects of the Crimean War, for instance, on the cli
mate of opinion and on the contemporary assessment of Eng
land s place in the world and the role of religion in society, al-

* A^key word of the period. The Reform Bill of 1832 gave the fran
chise in the towns to the owners, or tenants of one landlord, of buildings
of the annual value of ten pounds. For the history of the ten-pound
householder see Norman Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel (London
1953), esp. pp. 96 fF.

in Y

Introduction

though to explore this last theme fully would require a book of
equal length to the present volume.

There are inevitable omissions. Although I have said much
about schools, I would like to have said more about relations
between young and old. The Victorian maxim, "Little children
should be seen and not heard," was a necessary counsel of
prudence in an age when the average Victorian family in 1860
had either five or six children. I should like also to have said
more about relations between the sexes and to have included at
least one woman in the collection of studies, for I agree with
recent writers that women often "maiden aunts" played a
leading part in the making of Victorian social policy and the
practical application of an ideal of service. A community de
voted to getting on, and limited at its edges by masculine codes
of inherited authority or formalized professionalism, had little
to offer women of spirit and ability. Only exceptional women
like Florence Nightingale, who rejected marriage for service
because marriage did not provide for the promptings of "a
moral, an active nature, which requires satisfaction"--played a
really prominent part in the foreground of national life. But
many other women, including married women who reacted
against the formality and superficiality of subordinate status,
were central figures in local life. The place that Florence
Nightingale would take in this collection of studies would be
very different from that which she takes in Lytton Strachey s;
her life has, however, recently been reassessed at length by
Cecil Woodham Smith in one of the best of modern nineteenth-
century biographies. No other woman was sufficiently central
to the theme of my book, although on a very different plane
Lady Palmerston contributed considerably to the size of her
husband s majorities in the House of Commons by a judicious
distribution of her visiting cards.

IV

People are the subject of my book, but it begins with a chap
ter not on a man but on a year, 1851, and ends with a chapter
which is concerned as much with a year, 1867, as with the man
who dominated it, Disraeli. The year 1851 is an obvious point

Victorian People

to start. It was a year of such excitement that many young
Victorians looked back on it with nostalgia for the rest of their
lives, and many old Georgians regarded it as the climax of
English history. The symbol of the Crystal Palace, built for the
Great Exhibition of 1851, dominates the whole period from
1851 to 1867. The building itself seemed so frail that many
people were sure that the first hailstorm would shatter it. In
stead it was moved from Hyde Park to Sydenham in 1854 and
lasted for eighty-five years, until a fire destroyed it on an
autumn night in 1936. Its destruction severed one of the most
interesting visible links of continuity with the mid- Victorian
period: "It was like watching the burning of a Victorian Val
halla when the gods of our fathers sat in a solemn circle await
ing the end."

I close my book with an account of the last year of my
period 1867. There was an international exhibition in 1867,
too, but it was in Paris, not in London; and in England all the
excitement was reserved for the spectacle of the "leap in the
dark" the granting of the vote to all urban artisans. "The end
of our poor old England," Carlyle called it, and even its sup
porters admitted that they were taking a very risky gamble.
After 1867 the pieces of the mid-century jigsaw puzzle sepa
rate out again, and the picture disappears. Within ten years the
whole intricate pattern had completely changed.

The people themselves were changing too. Cobden and
Palmerston died in 1865; so did Paxton, the Chatsworth garden
er who had designed the Crystal Palace. By the end of 1870,
Derby and Dickens were also dead; Rossetti had published his
first book of poems, and Dilke his first book of politics; Joseph
Chamberlain had secured a place on the Birmingham Town
Council; and Forster had introduced the first comprehensive
scheme for national education. Tempora mutantur no$ et muta-
mur in illis. And for some the Victorian age was only just
beginning.

II

atwcl the

a/ 4 854

These twenty years, how full of gain to us,

To common humble multitudinous Man;
How swiftly Providence advances thus

Our ftag of progress flaming in the van!

This double decade of the world s short span
Is richer than two centuries of old:

Richer in helps, advantages, and pleasures,
In all things richer even down to gold

To all of every class in liberal measures:
We travel quicker now than Isthmians might;

In books we quaff the veriest Hebe^s chalice;
All wonders of the world gladden the sight

In that world s wonder-house the Crystal Palace;
And everywhere is Might enslaved to Right.

MARTIN TUPPER
I

The year 1851 provides a perfect vantage point for a survey of
nineteenth-century England. The century was half-gone, and
contemporaries could look back across the "hungry forties" to
the antediluvian world before the railway and the penny post;
before steam power, in George Eliot s phrase, had "driven on
every wheel double pace, and the wheel of fortune along with
em." They could look forward, too, to long years of progress,
to the further expansion of production, and to the further de
velopment of distributionto what satirists contemptuously
called "the cotton millennium."

An opportunity was given for such an appraisal by the Great
Exhibition of 1851, which dominated the year. Its purpose was

Victorian People

"to present a true test and living picture of the point of de
velopment at which the whole of mankind has arrived . . . and
a new starting point, from which all nations will be able to
direct their further exertions." In its impressive building and in
the wide range of exhibits it offered on display, the Crystal
Palace proclaimed triumphantly the visibility of human prog
ress. As Henry Cole, one of its leading sponsors, said, "The his
tory of the world records no event comparable, in its promo
tion of human industry, with that of the Great Exhibition of
the Works of Industry of all Nations in 1851. A great people
invited all civilized nations to a festival, to bring into com
parison the works of human skill It was carried out by its own
private means; was self-supporting and independent of taxes
and employment of slaves, which great works had exacted in
ancient days. A prince of pre-eminent wisdom, of philosophic
mind, sagacity, with power of generalship and great practical
ability, placed himself at the head of the enterprise, and led it
to triumphant success."

Yet, although the Exhibition was an outstanding success and
the pride which it generated was real and lasting, the year 1851
itself was dominated by contrasts and frustration. There was
economic prosperity and commercial mastery, but there was
also political uncertainty and ministerial instability. At the be
ginning of the year it was generally expectedand hoped that
Lord John Russell s Whig administration, which had been in
power since I 847 but was known to be weak and tending to
decline still further, would remain quietly in office throughout
a season of carnival The ministry did not survive peacefully
even until the opening of the Exhibition on the first of May.
It faced a crisis in February; and, although after a great deal of
political coming and going it returned to office intact, its posi
tion was extremely precarious and remained so throughout the
year. After the dismissal in December of the Foreign Secretary,
Lord Palmerston, the way was prepared for its final breakup
in 1852.

The Queen and the Prince Consort, more than any other
persons in the country, felt both the full thrill of the Exhibition
and the strain and inconvenience of ministerial instability.

The Crystal Palace and the Men of 1851

Prince Albert had worked unceasingly to make the Exhibition
a success. He had continued his labors indefatigably after the
sudden and tragic death of Peel, the most influential political
supporter of the idea. Yet in early 1851, when all the prepara
tions were ready, ministerial crisis darkened the sky. "Alto
gether it is very vexatious," wrote the Queen, "and will give
us trouble. It is the more provoking, as this country is so very
prosperous." The same provoking contrast between economic
prosperity and political fragmentation was to persist for a large
portion of the middle years of the century, and the Queen and
Prince Albert came to see quite clearly that the state of the
country and the state of the parties were two quite distinct
questions.

By the end of 1851 one of the causes of political instability
had apparently been removed. Increasing prosperity was in
fluencing the recalcitrant protectionists unobtrusively to drop
some of their anti-free-trade slogans of 1846, the year of the
repeal of the Corn Laws. Their gradual retreat took the strife
out of politics, but it did not come soon enough to provide
peace of mind for the royal family in the early months of the
year. When Lord Derby told the Queen in June, 1852, that he
considered protection "quite gone," she wrote somewhat wea
rily that it was a pity he had not found this out a little sooner.
"It would have saved so much annoyance, so much difficulty."

The annoyance and the difficulty were not entirely the fault
of the protectionists, although they had been specially awkward
not only about free trade but also about the Exhibition, which
some of them condemned as "the greatest imposition ever
palmed upon the people of England." The year 1851 was one
of general pride and prejudice. The continued alarm about
papal aggression caused by the Pope s restoration of Roman
Catholic dioceses in 1850 roused public opinion to fever pitch
and made ministerial politics extremely difficult. Militant Prot
estantism was stirred to popular action. "Parties were a good
deal confused before thanks to Corn," wrote Cobden, "but the
Catholic element has made confusion worse confounded." In
his view, that of a small minority, it was unfortunate that
England itself, in its violent denunciation of the Pope, should

417}-

Victorian People

be exhibited in the year of the Exhibition "as the most intol
erant people on earth," so that "Europe cries shame on us, and
America laughs at us." The view of the majority was that, in
both the Exhibition and the religious crisis, national honor was
deeply involved and had to be vindicated.

The Exhibition, the political crisis, the religious hysteria, the
commercial supremacy all contributed to the temper of 1851.
Behind the pride and prejudice there were doubts and dilem
mas. How could an Englishman welcome crowds of foreigners
most probably Papists who had come to London to see the
Exhibition, while at the same time he thundered out against
papal aggression? Punch depicted an old Tory who knew one
possible answer. He was shown hanging an Exhibition notice
outside his house, bearing the words, "Ici on ne parle pas
frangais." Once the Exhibition was over, how could its message
of peace and international co-operation be reconciled with the
news of Napoleon Ill s coup d etat just across the channel and
the knowledge of the alarming "defenceless state of Great
Britain," to which Sir Francis Head had drawn attention only
the year before?

Such doubts and dilemmas were as important as the assurance
and self-confidence of the men of 1851. The Crystal Palace was
no abiding city. The year 1851 was a good vantage point to
take stock of the progress of half a century, but the future was
by no means so clear as it seemed at first glance. All that was
certain when the survey was complete was, to use a favorite
railway metaphor, that the great world was spinning forever
"down the ringing grooves of change." On pausing to take
stock, there were innumerable difficulties in making a final cal
culation. One might agree with the Eclectic Review that "the
year 1851, when compared with the year 1801, is as the Palace
of Glass when compared with the houses built under the
regime of the window duty," but one would realize that it all
depended upon the choice of time scale. Tennyson s In Memo-
ricm, a best-seller for the crowds which attended the Exhibi
tion, was as representative of the times as the glass house of the
Great Exhibition itself, but it did not talk, as his Locksley Hall
had done, of the visible triumphs of industrialization and im-

The Crystal Palace and the Men of 1851

provement; it spoke, instead, of vast dimensions of time and
space:

The sound of streams that swift or slow

Draw down Aeonian hills, and sow

The dust of continents to be.

II

From a material point of view there were good grounds for
optimism.

The statistics of material progress underlined the strength of
Britain s industrial position. The Exhibition showed to advan
tage the nation s undisputed leadership in manufacturing. Its
steam engines were the symbols of economic mastery:

These England s arms of conquest are,
The trophies of her bloodless war.

Lancashire manufacturers were prepared to welcome exhibits
from all countries and to demand "a clear stage and no favour"
because they were in no way afraid of a comparison of British
products with those of foreigners. In commerce and finance
British supremacy was even more marked.

Yet the merchants, manufacturers, and skilled artisans were
only a minority of the population. Despite spectacular signs of
progress in trade and industry, over a quarter of the male popu
lation of the country was still engaged in agricultural pursuits,
and one in nine of all females over ten was employed in domes
tic service. More men were employed as shoemakers than as
coal-miners, and there were only just over a quarter of a mil
lion professional workers of all types.

Amid the broad ranks of "the middle classes," independent
small men were the dominant group, not only in retailing, but
in commerce and manufacturing. The virtues they prized were
those to be acclaimed by Samuel Smiles self-help, persever
ance, duty, thrift, and character. They conceived of self-de
pendence not only as a ladder to individual success but as the
mainspring of social improvement. All men could profit from it.

These values were being taught to other groups in society
not without success. With the relaxation of the tension of the
forties and the abandonment of some of the wild projects and

Victorian People

dazzling Utopias of a long period of conflict, some of the work
ing classes, particularly the "aristocracy of labour," were reach
ing up to grasp middle-class virtues. The year 1851 saw the
founding, for example, of the Amalgamated Society of Engi
neers, which claimed that its object was to do nothing "illegally
or indiscreetly, but on all occasions to perform the greatest
amount of benefit for ourselves, without injury to others. . . .
It is our duty to exercise the same control over that in which
we have a vested interest as the physician who holds his diploma
or the author \vho is protected by his copyright," As the work
ing classes were looking up, the upper classes were looking
down. Middle-class ideals set the standard for the nation, and,
while the aristocracy "were beginning to live in fear of the
grocer and the merchant," the Queen and the Prince Consort
were providing a golden model of respectable and happy family
life. The ideals of the court were in conformity with those of
the middle class rather than with those of the older aristocracy:
South Kensington, the new part of London developed as a
result of the Exhibition, was far more congenial to Prince
Albert than Ascot or Brighton.

Along with the spread of middle-class values went a rise in
middle-class comfort. John Store Smith s Social Aspects, a new
book in 1851, noted how "the middle-class family now pos
sesses carpets and hangings, which would have excited great
wonderment even at so recent a period as the American War,
and not a few of our London middle-class tradesmen possess a
better stock of family plate and linen than many a country
squire, even of the last generation." George R. Porter s 1851
edition of The Progress of the Nation painted the same picture
of the prosperous middle-class household, the walls of their
villas covered with paintings and engravings, and the whole
setting "full of evidences that some among the inmates cultivate
one or more of those elegant accomplishments which tend so
delightfully to enlighten the minds of individuals and sweeten
the intercourse of families."

While the industrial and commercial middle classes were
enjoying prosperity, in the spring of 1851 the landlords and
farmers were still disgruntled. Agriculture seemed in the dol-

The Crystal Palace and the Men of 1851

drums, and, although it provided employment for a very large
proportion of the nation, it was no longer universally considered
the backbone of national prosperity. Early in 1851 the division
of interest between landlords and manufacturers the Tory
Disraeli s "unhappy quarrel between town and country" and
the Radical Roebuck s "master-key" to British history since
1832 was the most important source of conflict within the
political arena. A motion by Disraeli in February, 1851, which
would have produced government action to alleviate agricul
tural distress was defeated by only fourteen votes, and dis
gruntled farmers in East Anglia were saying that they would
rather march on Manchester, the capital of free trade, than on
Paris. In May the protectionists held a giant rally in Drury
Lane, where they copied "the arts and violence of the agitators"
which they had so much deplored.

Their economic power was extremely limited. The balance
of forces was such that there could be no easy return to any
form of agricultural protection. By 1851 one-quarter of the
people s bread was foreign. These immense imports of foreign
grain and flour were consumed, as the free-trader Sir James
Graham did not fail to point out, "by millions of mouths that
otherwise would not have been fed. . . . Though Peel is dead,
he still speaks, and from the tomb I hear the echo of his voice."
Wise Tories could not ignore these figures, and clever politi
cians could not afford to overlook one essential element in all
political calculations-the strength of what had become over
the previous five years a free-trade tradition. It was clear that,
if the protectionists came back into office determined to reverse
the decisions of 1846, the threat of a new agitation outside
Parliament, on the lines of the Anti-Corn Law League, would
produce vigorous and ultimately successful reaction. The north
of England was still on the alert. As the Manchester Guardian
put it, "The moral effect of Free Trade supplies a theme which
years of agitation have not stayed, nor the eloquence of Mr.
Cobden exhausted."

By the end of 1851, after a good harvest, there were unmis
takable signs of that agricultural revival which was to persist
throughout the middle of the century; protection seemed less

121 ].

Victorian People

and less necessary. Granby, a prominent Tory leader, visited
Hughenden in November, staying just long enough, Disraeli
wrote, to have time to ask the village butcher whether any land
had gone out of cultivation in the neighborhood. "The astonish
ment of Redrup, who had just sold his barley for 305*. a quarter,
may be conceived." It was not only Disraeli and his friends
who were beginning to think that protection was dead. A little
later even the ultra-Tory Quarterly Review wrote that "the
prospects of British agriculturalists are not of a nature to lead
to despondency" and explained with largeness of gesture that
protectionism did not mean protection of landlords but protec
tion of the interests of the poor, of the labor of young people,
and of the Christian character of the state.

The year 1851 was a critical one in the reshaping of British
agricultural prospects. It ushered in a period of agricultural
prosperity largely dependent upon the opening-tip of the rail
way system and the increase in incomes generated by industry.
Industry indeed boosted agriculture; the middle years of the
century were to be years of prosperity for both farmers and
businessmen.

Contemporaries in 1851 saw the new gold discoveries in
California and Australia as the cause of the rise in prices and
the boom in the economy as a basic force giving, in the words
of the Times, "an electric impulse to our entire business world."
While the crowds at the Exhibition admired a piece of gold
from California, at the other end of the Empire, in Australia,
the gold rush was "drawing even clergymen to the exciting
scene" nor, as one commentator said, "did they confine them
selves in every case to their calling." In excited anticipation of
a new period in history, Ashley wrote in his diary that Cali
fornia had led the way and Australia followed. "Awri sacra
fames. What no motive, human or divine, could effect, springs
into life at the display of a few pellets of gold in the hands of
a wanderer. This may be God s chosen way to fulfil his com
mandment and replenish the earth. "

In the period after 1851 many people thought that they
caught a glimpse of the Promised Land. Certainly much of the
tension disappeared from the relations between both landlords

PLATE I

From the lithograph by Joseph Nash (Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

THE CRYSTAL PALACE

"A blazing arch of lucid glass
Leaps like a fountain from the grass
To meet the sun."

PLATE II

from tiie painting by H. W. Phillips (Victoria and Albert Muswm, London)

THE ORGANIZERS OF THE GREAT EXHIBITION

Standing left to right: Fox, Paxton, Russell, Peel, Robert Stephensoo, Seated left to
right; Cubitt, Prince Albert, Derby.

The Crystal Palace and the Men of 1851

and captains of industry and between masters and men. The
way was prepared for a balance of interests, for what Profes
sor W. L. Burn has called "the age of equipoise."

The fiction of the day reflected the change as much as the
politics. There was a significant shift in writing from "novels in
which the basic structure of society was discussed in terms of
bitter satire and deep passion to those in which personal prob
lems were discussed against the back-ground of a society whose
structure was assumed to be sufficiently stable." There was a
new tendency to introspection, to "the dialogue of mind with
itself," rather than preoccupation with "the condition of
England" question, which had been the great social issue of the
forties.

In such conditions the big issues of politics withered away
not only questions of the Corn Laws or protection but also
questions of parliamentary reform and the granting of the vote
to the working classes. Abortive skirmishes between pres
sure groups absorbed more energy than struggles concerning
large measures of constitutional or social change. There were
squalid intrigues, for example, between the vested interests of
private water companies and the General Board of Health, and
battles in Parliament about the incidence of taxation on differ
ent sections of the community. Income tax, standing at seven
pence in the pound, was considered "inquisitorial" and "bur
densome," and, when the Chancellor of the Exchequer Wood
tried to introduce a new tax on houses in place of the hated
window tax which he managed to abolish, his proposal was de
feated by a conjunction of some of his own supporters with his
enemies. The men who defeated the government were neither
fiery extremists nor Manchester men wedded to the creed of
Cobden and Bright. They were, as the Daily News remarked,
"the quiet, steady representatives of mercantile communities,
who are, in general, chary of extremes." They were the men
who were to count most in the period after 1851 men fright
ened of taxation and suspicious of government. As trade re
mained buoyant and agriculture improved, they felt that they
could rely upon themselves to secure what they wanted far
more than upon politicians.

423 Y

Victorian People

There was in consequence an underlying distrust of govern
ment, which continued to determine the shape of politics until
after the passing of the second Reform Bill in 1867. Self-help
came first; government, except as an agency for dealing with
foreign relations and for facilitating self-help, came very low
on the list of daily preoccupations.

Ill

It certainly came below religion. Religious questions shared
the headlines with news of the Exhibition throughout the first
half of 1851. There was a sustained religious crisis as it was
called by contemporaries which began with Wiseman s an
nouncement, "given out of the Flaminian Gate of Rome" in
1850, of the papal decision to divide England into Roman
Catholic dioceses and restore a regular Catholic hierarchy. Rus
sell, the Prime Minister and "historic champion of religious
liberty," made himself the spokesman of indignant Protestant
exasperation. The noise and excitement of the public reaction
to the Pope s decision surprised even the Evangelical Ashley,
who had long foreseen a religious crisis of this type. "What a
surprising ferment!" he wrote. "It abates not a jot; meeting
after meeting in every town and parish of the country. ... It
resembles a storm over the whole ocean; it is a national senti
ment, a rising of the land! All opinions seem for a while sub
merged in this one feeling." Other less partisan observers re
marked that there had been no similar popular outcry since the
brief period in 1831 and 1832, when the first Reform Bill was
considered to be in danger, and that in 1851, as then, the middle
classes, "those who were usually the calmest and more reflect
ing section of the community," were at the heart of the move
ment.

The flames were fanned by those who pointed not to the
external but to the internal danger the threat, from within the
Church of England itself, of traitors attempting "to lead their
flocks step by step to the verge of the precipice" of Rome and
of ritualists like William Bennett, forced from St. Paul s,
Knightsbridge, in 1851 to an obscure and quiet living in Somer
set. The influence of the Catholic revival was in full swing, and

The Crystal Palace and the Men of 1851

many clergymen of the Church of England seemed to be assist
ing it. The Times warned against "the terrible danger of the
renegades of our national Church" restoring "a foreign usurpa
tion over the consciences of men to sow dissension within our
political society." Even while Parliament was debating legisla
tion against papal aggression, Archdeacon Manning, one of the
leading figures among the younger Anglican clergy, was mov
ing over from the Church of England to the Church of Rome.
"Lord, purge the Church of those men," wrote Ashley in his
diary, "who while their hearts are in the Vatican, still eat the
bread of the Establishment and undermine her." Gladstone
himself told a friend much later in his life that, when the news
of Manning s conversion reached him, it seemed like an act of
personal injury. "I felt," Gladstone said, "as if Manning had
murdered my mother by mistake."

Russell realized the strength of the Protestant cry in the
country and in February, 1851, introduced his Ecclesiastical
Titles Bill in an effort to curb papal claims by legislation. In its
original shape it forbade the assumption of any episcopal or
territorial title without the authority of Parliament and the
circulation inside England of papal bulls. Strong though the bill
was, it was too mild to satisfy militant Protestant feeling inside
as well as outside the House of Commons. But at the same time
the very idea of legislation on this topic alienated the Catholic
Irish group in Parliament, on whose votes the fate of the Whig
ministry depended. Irish members were lobbied by their con
stituents against the measure just as strongly and strenuously as
were English members in its favor. The member for Cork, for
instance, described how his constituents, "who were as calm as
a summer sea when compared with the excited inhabitants of
other parts," had passed a resolution calling upon him to vote
against the Whig government on every occasion, no matter
what the principle involved. Such congenial advice was willing
ly accepted by most of the "Pope s Irish Brass Band," who
found a leader for the occasion in "the pocket O Connell,"
John Sadleir. It was the loss of Irish support which was the
most important factor weakening the Whig government in
1851. Russell found himself in an impossible parliamentary situ-

Victorian People

ation; nor could any other leader have done better, for, as Cob-
den wrote, "any government that perseveres in the anti-Papal
policy will be opposed by the Irish members on every subject,
and if an Administration were to come in to do nothing against
the Pope, they would, I suppose, be turned out by the English.
So that we are in a rather considerable fix."

The Ecclesiastical Titles Bill was indirectly responsible-
through the defection of the Irishfor the defeat of the govern
ment and the ministerial crisis. It also prevented the Whigs,
during and after the crisis, from coming to terms with the
Peelites, the group of antiprotectionist conservatives who re
mained loyal to the principles of Sir Robert Peel after his death
in 1850. There could be no broad coalition, for both the Peelites
and some of the Radicals, particularly John Bright and J. A,
Roebuck, were resolutely opposed to legislation concerning
ecclesiastical titles. If the Peelite Morning Chronicle had been
the property of Cardinal Wiseman himself, wrote one Protes
tant, it could not have advocated his cause more thoroughly or
with more apparent zeal. The Peelites gave as their main
reason for not joining a coalition their opposition to new legis
lation on the Catholic question. "Who could now assert that
the Pope has no power in England? " asked Ashley. "He has put
out one Administration and now prevents the formation of
another."

When the Whig ministry returned unchanged after its
political crisis in February, Russell shortened and modified the
Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, leaving it, as Sir Robert Inglis said,
rather like the play of Hcrmlet with the part of Hamlet left out.
The second reading of the measure, in its mutilated form, was
carried by the enormous majority of 438 to 95, but in commit
tee it met with many vicissitudes. With the Irish contingent
"significantly and ostentatiously abstaining" from speaking and
voting, the Protestants succeeded in carrying extreme amend
ments against the government. Frederick Thesigcr, the Protes
tant leader, whose arguments were described by his opponent
Gladstone as "formidable indeed, 7 proved himself a more effec
tive tactician than Russell. The bill, as amended by the Protes
tants, was finally carried by 263 votes to 46.

426 Y

The Crystal Palace and the Men of

There were spirited protests from the Peelites and a handful
of Radicals. Gladstone made the most telling speech against it.
He said that, while he had disliked "the vaunting and boastful
character" of the papal pronouncements, he disliked the bill
even more. It was hostile to the institutions of the country on
four counts. It would teach the established religion to rely on
other support than that of its own spiritual strength and vitality
which alone could give it vigor. It would undermine and weak
en the authority of the law in Ireland. It would disparage "the
great principle of religious freedom upon which this wise and
understanding people had permanently built its legislation."
Finally, "it would destroy the bonds of concord and good will
which ought to unite all classes and persuasions of Her Majes
ty s subjects." Another member, Grattan, went further and
suggested that the title of the measure should be amended to
read: "A Bill To Prevent the Free Exercise of the Roman
Catholic Religion in the United Kingdom."

These opposition opinions were far from representative of
feelings outside Parliament. Most people in the country would
have agreed with Lord Winchilsea that the bill did not go far
enough and merely attempted to vindicate "the wounded
honour of our illustrious Queen" in pounds, shillings, and
pence. Although the Queen herself regretted "the un-Christian
and intolerant spirit" abroad in the land and "the violent abuse
of the Catholic religion," there was little she could do to damp
it down. Even a large number of nonconformists, who disliked
the Establishment as much as they disliked the papacy, and
stressed the "Dissidence of Dissent" alongside "the Protestant
ism of the Protestant Churches," proclaimed themselves
Englishmen first and attacked the idea of a foreign potentate
"be he Pope or King assuming to divide our kingdom accord
ing to his pleasure." Charlotte Bronte complained that, with the
arrival of Cardinal Wiseman in England, "London will not be
where it was, nor will this day or generation be either what or
where they were. A new Joshua will command the sun not
merely to stand still, but to go back six centuries." The panic
persisted. In less oracular vein Scholefield, one of the members
of Parliament for Birmingham, claimed that cells were being

427 Y

Victorian People

built in Newman s seminary "for the forcible detention of some
of Her Majesty s subjects." He was not convinced when New
man replied that the "cells" consisted merely of a larder and a
kitchen.

The manifestations of hysteria were probably shared by
many who were not troubled at all by profund religious con
victions. Indeed, the Ecclesiastic, a magazine favoring Catholic
tendencies within the Church of England, warned the Rvangel-
icals that their alliance with the "godless crowds" of the large
towns could at best offer only a temporary source of strength
and that before very long anti-Catholicism might turn into anti-
Christianity. Certainly, even in 1851, despite the excesses of
religious enthusiasm, there was a submerged mass of religious
apathy and indifference. The religious census of 1851, which
presented statistics of the numbers of people attending churches
and chapels on a random Sunday, March 30, showed that more
than half the population had not been to a church or chapel at
all and that only 20 per cent had attended an Anglican service.
Furthermore, what was more serious, had they wished to go,
there was seating in the churches and chapels for only 58 per
cent of the population in Birmingham for only 28.7 per cent
of the population and in London for 29,7 per cent. However
easy it might be in a wave of national emotion to justify
England to the Pope, it was more difficult, in Charles Kingsley s
phrase, "to justify God to the people."

The blackest areas were the working-class districts of the
large cities, where there were large groups of people scarcely
touched by Christian influence at all. These were the people
outside the pale of both church and constitution, with few
opportunities to become either members of the fays Ugal or
sons of the church. They had been offered cheap food in 1846
and little else; and it was left to the Eclectic Review, a non
conformist journal, to point out there was no necessary connec
tion between the repeal of the Corn Laws and a religious re
vival. Indeed, in a rapidly changing world, politics and religion
might pull in opposite directions. Kingsley s novel, Alton
Locke, published in 1850, was raising these and similar ques
tions. "It is the book of an age," wrote one reviewer; "it is a

The Crystal Palace and the Men of 1S51

kind of concrete thrown up from the vast cauldron of civiliza
tion, in which luxury and filth, brutality and art, virtue and
intellect, tyranny and wretchedness seethe tumultuously to
gether."

IV

It was against such a background of light and shade that the
ministerial crisis of February and the Great Exhibition stand
out. The first was an affair of private meetings and secret con
ferences; the second, a festival of crowds, bustle, and publicity.

But the ministerial crisis does not make sense if it is left
entirely unrelated to the general national background. It was
reaction to the budget which made the government tremble;
it was the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill growing out of the national
religious panic which robbed Russell of essential Irish support.
It was parliamentary reform, the threat to the balance of the
whole constitutional structure, which, in Lansdowne s phrase,
provided "the last drop which made the cup flow over."

On February 20 the government was defeated on a Radical
motion, which proposed that the conditions of franchise should
be the same in the counties as in the boroughs. This "simple,
moderate, and practical plan" was suggested merely as the
prelude to a great and comprehensive measure by Russell him
self. The mover of the motion claimed that it would crown the
victory of 1846 by finally destroying the political bastions of
protectionist privilege in the countryside. And was not protec
tionism still a dangerous threat to society, "akin to communism
in its worst shape, for Protection might be regarded as the few
taking from the many, and communism as the taking from all"?

Russell attacked the proposal. Simple it might profess to be,
but in reality it was opposed to the spirit of the 1832 Reform
Bill, on which all reform of the franchise should be based. Con
ditions of the suffrage in town and country had been de
liberately left different. "We should not attempt to construct a
new and fanciful edifice, but endeavour to add to the symmetry
and convenience of the old." He pledged himself, however, to
bring in a reform bill of his own during the next session, if he
were still in office. The Radicals, who normally supported the

Victorian People

Whig Russell, paid little attention to such a promise and divided
the House. Most of the Irish and protectionists stayed away,
and the government was defeated by 100 votes to 54. Accord
ing to Lord Stanley, the leader of the Tories (who succeeded
his father as the fourteenth Earl of Derby later in the year), the
minority consisted of 17 protectionists, 27 "official men," tied
to the government in various ways, and only 10 "independent"
Whig members.

There was general surprise in the House of Commons when
Russell chose to resign on this defeat. "Not a creature in or
out of the House," wrote Greville, "expected he would regard
such a defeat as this as a matter of any importance." The
ministers themselves were divided about the propriety of going
out of office. The Queen, however, understood the cause and
sympathized. "Though it was not a question vital to the Gov
ernment, Lord John feels the support he has received so meagre,
and the opposition of so many parties so great, that he must
resign! This is very bad, because there is no chance of any other
good Government, poor Peel being no longer alive . . . but
Lord John is right not to go on when he is so ill-supported, and
it will raise him as a political man, and will strengthen his
position for the future."

The position of a Whig prime minister was, had been, and
was yet to be an extremely difficult one; and this particular
crisis was symptomatic of a chronic weakness in the mid-Vic
torian structure of politics. For this it deserves close attention.
The Tory Quarterly Review offered a shrewd, if one-sided,
analysis of the problem. In the first place, a Whig prime minis
ter always faced the dilemma of being at one and the same time
the leader of a "movement and agitation party" and the head of
a government, "the essence of all government being restraint
and resistance." Apart from the extreme Radical tail, which
normally but not always supported the Whigs, there were
many "Independent members" among the Whigs who were un
willing to support the government in all circumstances merely
because it was a Whig government. They might be won over
by patronage, as they were won over later by Lady Palmer-
ston s visiting cards, but patronage could not at this time meet

The Crystal Palace and the Men of 1851

all the demands made upon it. From 1846 onward, Russell had
governed precariously "from hand to mouththat is, by what
the Treasury hand puts into the mouth of the hungry member."

Where patronage could not be off ered or would not work,
temporary expedients were constantly necessary. From the
Reform Bill of 1832 onward Irish support had been essential
for Whig power; so too had been the intermittent support of
the mixed group of Radicals. As a result of constant recourse
to such expedients, "what was called governing the country
came to be nothing else than the art of keeping this hetero
geneous and discordant body together and in any kind of dis
ciplinewhich could only be accomplished by a constant sub
terraneous traffic of patronage with private jobbers, and by
frequent sacrifices of Church and Constitution to Dissenters
and Radicals. This was the real difficulty of the case and the
cause of every Ministerial crisis."

The condition was a chronic one and could not be attributed
to any single individual or to any particular sequence of events.
It was to produce further crises in 1852.

Russell s resignation in February, 1851, led to several days
of hectic excitement. "Such was the confusion of the Minis
terial movements, and political promenades," wrote Pmch,
"that everybody went to call upon everybody. The hall por
ters were never known to have had such a time of it, but though
knocking at doors continued throughout the whole day, noth
ing seemed to answer."

The Tories were unable to form a ministry of their own.
However right the Quarterly Review was in its thesis on Whig
weakness, there was no doubt at all about the even weaker
position of the Tories. They were not only a minority in
Parliament; they were clearly a minority in the country. The
Whigs could claim on their side two great advantages: experi
ence of office the knowledge that they could form a govern
ment of seasoned ministers and the slogans of free trade and
progress which kept them aligned with "the spirit of the
age." When free trade was threatened from outside, they knew
that they could not only close their own ranks but also widen

Victorian People

the basis of their support. "Upon the first proposition of a
Stanley Government," Aberdeen and Graham, the Peelite
leaders, told the Queen, "the junction of the Parties would be
contemplated, and there would be only one strong Opposition."
The cry of "Free Trade in Peril" would rouse the country and
make the work of a protectionist government impossible. "I
am rhomme impossible" the Tory Stanley told Russell when
the crisis was over.

If the continued identification of the Tories with protection
handicapped them in the eyes of the outside world, their lack
of experience and their differences of opinion about tactics led
to division and paralysis in their inner councils. With the no
table exception of Disraeli, they were neither prepared for nor
willing to accept the responsibilities of office. "It was by no
act of mine or one of my friends that the late Government
fell," Stanley told the House of Lords. "I felt no exultation at
the event, and I felt no undue anxiety to seize the offices they
had held." He begged the Queen, indeed, that "he might not
be called upon to take office except as a dernier ressort"

The Tories could not form a ministry; the position of the
other major political group, the Peelites, was a different one.
They were richly endowed with administrative experience, but
by themselves they were impotent; nor at this time did they
feel disposed to join in a coalition with the Whigs. In the
negotiations with Russell they raised so many issues besides
the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill that it seemed as if some of them
"did not wish to complete any combination." They were un
willing to reach any understanding with Stanley and the Tories,
for, apart from the shadow of Peel and the barrier of free trade,
they felt that the Crown and the country were only safe, "in
these days, by having the Liberals in office, else they would
be driven to join the Radical agitation against the institutions
of the country." Throughout the crisis, however, they talked
of the possibility of joining the Whigs at some unknown date
in the future on terms favorable to themselves. They were
in fact waiting for another and bigger crisis, for, as the Quar
terly Review remarked, "coalitions of this [Whig-Peelite]

{32Y

The Crystal Palace and the Men of 1851

nature are reluctantly taken in cold blood. They are taken out
of a melee rather than a pas seul or a fas de deux"

The Queen tried all possible existing combinations. She was
not in favor of a dissolution of the House of Commons and
a new general election as a means of breaking the political
deadlock and refused to give Stanley a positive assurance that
she would dissolve, saying that "she would discuss the ques
tion when the emergency arose." She was anxious, as were
many other people, to avoid a dissolution in the year of the
Exhibition; but, quite apart from this special consideration, she
feared stirring up electoral commotion in the country before
it was strictly necessary. The Queen s attitude was widely
shared, particularly by members of Parliament who did not
wish to have the expense of appearing before their constituents
again, and there was little public interest in an "appeal to the
country." After the crisis was over, Greville claimed that the
only possible influence which would obtain anything like for
bearance for the restored government was "the general dread
of a dissolution and the anxiety of members to stave it off."

The only possible answer to the deadlock was to follow the
advice of the aged Duke of Wellington and restore the Russell
ministry to office. They came back on March 4, not trium
phantly but as a pis aller. They were "damaged, weak and un
popular. . . . No bonfires were lighted, no bells were rung, no
living man, save those personally interested, rejoiced in the
fact. The administration had worn out the endurance of the
nation; not a particle of enthusiasm remained. Amongst its
followers a dull dead feeling of indifference prevailed. . . . The
country was incredulous. They could not believe that the
Ministry, as a whole, were reinstated."

The return of Russell marked no final solution of the par
liamentary deadlock. "It is the unique distinction of the pres
ent dilemma," wrote the Times, "that it was always foreseen,
and that in similar circumstances, it must inevitably recur.
There exists no political party competent, at the usual chal
lenge, to receive from others the reins of power. We possess
no Opposition convertible into a Government, and we feel the
effects of the privation in the negligence and imperfections of

Victorian People

a Ministry so long as it acts, and in the absolute paralysis of the
State when it can act no longer."

There were three possible interpretations of the recurring
crisis. A reader of the Quarterly Review or indeed a thinking
Tory of any kind would see the dilemma of 1851 as part of the
price of the Reform Bill of 1832, a permanent feature of the
new constitutional framework. "How can the Royal Govern
ment be carried on?" Wellington had asked. The answer was
that it could not, except through a series of perpetual com
promises and surrenders. A Peelite~and the Queen shared Peel-
ite views on this questionwould see the deadlock as largely
personal in terms of the disintegration of the Peelite party and
the premature death of "poor Peel" himself. A Radical would
see it as a chapter in an unfinished political revolution. "The
family coteries of Whiggery require to be broken up," wrote
the Eclectic Review, "and what has occurred will hasten this.
. . . What we have witnessed is only one of the many scenes
which will be enacted before the common right of Englishmen
in the business of legislation is admitted. , . . The times for
oligarchical rule are passed. We have as yet seen only the initial
struggle. The real contest is to come. . . . We must secure
talent and public virtues by whomsoever exhibited, and in what
ever class seen, without regard to the interested cliques which
claim a monopoly of political wisdom." According to this view,
so long as cliques controlled politics at Westminster, they
would while away their time in merely factious struggles, ir
relevant to the progress of the nation.

Caught among all these interpretations of the crisis, Russell
was in his usual uncomfortable position. He had always been
a politician who seemed to get into mischief. "His mishaps
have almost exhausted metaphor," one writer put it. "One day
he overturns the coach, another day he swamps the boat, then
he breaks down, then he blows up, in council he is squirrel
minded, and finally, it is impossible to sleep soundly while he
has cowrmand of the watch. Admiral Byron did not better de
serve the sobriquet of Foul-weather Jack." And his troubles
were by no means over. Although he was to ride safely into a
new year, at the heavy price of losing his Foreign Secretary

{ 3*

The Crystal Palace and the Men of 1851

Palmerston, he met his tit for tat in 1852. The fall of Palmer-
ston from office in December, 1851, had more important polit
ical consequences than the February crisis, for it was Palmer
ston and not Russell who was to dominate politics in the mid
dle years of the century. It was Palmerston who discovered the
art of managing the Commons, thereby imposing some sort of
order and continuity on half-reformed English politics. And
it was by inducing sympathy for his foreign policy rather
than by offering new doses of parliamentary reform that
Palmerston was to cast his spell.

V

Between the February crisis and the fall of Palmerston in
December came the Great Exhibition. To Disraeli, with both
eyes fixed on parliamentary prospects, it was "a godsend to
the Government . . . diverting public attention from their
blunders." To those less interested in the promptings of polit
ical ambition it was a national triumph. The frondeurs, like
Colonel Sibthorp, who had ridiculed both the idea and the
site of the Exhibition in 1850 "an industrial exhibition in the
heart of fashionable Belgravia to enable foreigners to rob us of
our honour" prophesied public indifference and financial
failure. As events proved, there were over six million visitors
between the opening and closing days. Even Colonel Sibthorp
himself visited "the showy bauble" once before the summer
was out. Cheap excursions insured the success of the enterprise.
Visitors poured in from all parts of the country and overseas.
Never had such quiet and orderly crowds been seen in Lon
don before. They made the most of the occasion. "I never re
member anything before that everyone was so pleased with, as
is the case with this Exhibition," wrote the Queen.

Part of the delight lay in the inspiration of the glass mansion
itself designed by Joseph Paxton, who more than any other
Englishman deserved the title of "man of 1851." The enor
mous conservatory of glass and iron which he designed was
really an immensely magnified version of the Lily House at
Chatsworth, where he had been head gardener; but it was de
signed to capture the public imagination. It was 1,848 feet long,

Victorian People

408 feet broad, and 66 feet highwith transepts 108 feet high
so constructed as to contain Indoors some of the finest elms
growing in Hyde Park. The young Edward Burne-Jones might
find it "cheerless" and "monotonous" and John Ruskin dismiss
it with impatient contempt, but most visitors were delighted
and surprised:

As though twere by a wizard s rod,
A blazing arch of lucid glass
Leaps like a fountain from the grass
To meet the sun.

Joseph Paxton had won the prize for the design of the Ex
hibition building in face of 254 designs and specifications sent
in by professional architects from all parts of the world. His
adaptation of the Chatsworth conservatory, which he had be
gun in 1837, when glass was still heavily taxed, was a triumph
of imagination. As John Summerson has said, "Paxton was a
type of creator as new and as characteristic of the Age as the
building he had designed." Paxton, the expert gardener, the
observer of nature, the man of affairs, the engineer, the railway
director (he had sketched his first rough drawing of the pro
posed building on blotting paper at a meeting of the directors
of the Midland Railway), the promoter of newspapers and
magazines, seemed as much the "complete man" of Victorian
England as Alberti had been of Renaissance Florence. He was
the epitome of self-help, and the whole of his career from the
time when he became head gardener at the age of twenty-
three illustrated, as the Queen remarked, how the lowest were
able to rise by their own merits to the highest grade of society.
When his building was being erected and unofficial visitors
were not allowed to inspect the developing site, an exception
was made for the Duke of Devonshire, the owner of Chats-
worth, to whose "fostering hand" Paxton owed his advance
ment, solely because the Duke was a partner in "Paxton and
Company."

The building itself was thought to offer a solution to the
difficult problem of finding a distinctive nineteenth-century
style in architecture. "We have been saved from a hideous and
costly mass of bricks and mortar," wrote one commentator,

The Crystal Palace and the Men of 1851

"and have a graceful and beautiful creation in its stead, and
a new and suggestive fact, a step taken along a fresh track. . . .
Architecture had had to wait for help from a botanist. Quite in
keeping is the building with the age. It is the aesthetic bloom
of its practical character, and of the practical tendency of the
English nation." "Practical" and "magical" were not considered
incompatible. Glass was one of the newly freed commodities
from which a prohibitive tax had just been lifted; it was also
the substance which more than any other dazzled and sparkled
and glittered. "We shall be disappointed," wrote Punch, "if
the next generation of London children are not brought up
like cucumbers under a glass." Disraeli was more romantic.
Caring little for the philosophy of the Exhibition, he called the
building itself "that enchanted pile which the sagacious taste
and the prescient philanthropy of an accomplished and en
lightened Prince have raised for the glory of England and the
delight and instruction of two hemispheres." Douglas Jerrold s
brilliant name "Crystal Palace" was the perfect designation;
it seemed to catch not only the workaday realities but also the
hidden dreams of England in 1851.

The Crystal Palace was a symbol of the age. It suggested at
the same time both fairy tale and success story. Behind the
glitter there was human thought and human work. From the
first flash of the bright idea it took Paxton just over a month to
draw up the blueprints, from June 11 to July 15, 1850. The
achievement of the contractors was equally remarkable. The
ground was handed over to them on July 30; the first column
was raised on September 26. Within seventeen weeks of the
start, nearly a million feet of glass had been fastened on to the
weblike structure of thirty-three hundred columns and twenty-
three hundred girders. The secret of the speed of construction
was prefabrication. All material used on the Palace was inter
changeable: the girders, columns, gutters, and sash bars were
identical throughout the whole building. Even before the
Palace was completed, the exhibits themselves started to pour
in, and on May 1, the official day of opening, the only exhibits
which had not arrived were those from Russia. The planning
had been perfect.

Victorian People

There were over thirteen thousand exhibitors, one half of
the total Exhibition area being occupied by Great Britain and
the colonies, and the other half by foreign states, of which
France and Germany were the most important. The exhibits
were classified according to a scheme of the young scientist
Lyon Playfair, one of the rising men of 1851, an industrious
professor who was also an outstanding public servant. Reject
ing elaborate systems of classification based upon Continental
abstraction, he divided the objects on show into four groups-
raw materials, machinery, manufactures, and fine arts.

Taken as a whole, the objects suggested the meeting of old
and new. Machinery was in the ascendant, but handicrafts were
not yet in general eclipse. Alongside a sewing machine from the
United States and cotton machines from Oldham there w r as
fine black lace from Barcelona and pottery from Sivres.

Harvest-tool and husbandry,
Loom and wheel and enginery,
Secrets of the sullen mine,

Steel and gold, and coal and wine

AH of beauty, all of use

That our fair planet can produce.

The Machinery Court was the noisiest and most popular
spectacle inside the Crystal Palace. Crowds of farmers in
smocks could be seen admiring the agricultural implements,
which included a pioneer reaping machine from the United
States; mechanics from Leeds and Birmingham gathered round
the Jacquard loom and De la Rue s envelope machine; the
Queen herself was specially interested in a medal-making ma
chine, which produced fifty million medals a week. She mar
veled, too, at the electric telegraph and sent appropriate mes
sages to her loyal subjects in Edinburgh and Manchester. Many
of the machines displayed were more clever than useful For
example, among the gadgets on view were "an alarm bedstead,
causing a person to arise at any given hour," and a "cricket
catapulta, for propelling the ball in the absence of a first-rate
bowler."

Pride in ingenuity, as Professor Nikolaus Pevsner has said,
often took the place of aesthetic appreciation in the response

The Crystal Palace and the Men of 1851

of contemporaries to the exhibits of 1851. There were no ac
cepted canons of appreciation and no single accepted style. It
was possible to conceal a predilection for generous curves and
proliferation of ornament behind many different stylistic dis
guises: "Louis Quatorze" vied with "Louis Quinze" and both
with Renaissance Italy and even ancient Egypt. One engine de
signed to drive cotton machinery was complete with scarabs;
one large "Elizabethan" sideboard was made entirely out of
rubber, "gutta-percha" as it was then called. There were some
contemporary critics of "the mass of ornament" and "the sins
committed against good taste," but most visitors to the Ex
hibition seem to have felt as enthusiastic about the objects as
about the building which housed them. Bulgy curves and in
tricate relief appealed to a generation which found comfort in
the richness and permanence of worldly possessions.

The only contemporary artist who believed that there should
be one single style, just as there was one single faith, was Pugin.
His Gothic gloom was fashionable in 1851. Set aside from the
rest of the Exhibition, "looking dark and solemn," was Pugin s
Medieval Court "for the display of the taste and art of dead
men." Gothic gloom or Crystal Palace, 1851, had two faces.
It was possible to look either forward or backward. While Dr.
Whewell, master of Trinity, and Charles Babbage, the mathe
matician, looked longingly to machines and interchangeable
spare parts to create an age of mass production, Pugin lingered
contentedly in the fourteenth century. When the Queen visited
the Guild Hall in July to celebrate with the City of London the
success of the Exhibition, supper was served in the crypt, which
was fitted up for the occasion as an old baronial hall. Lights
were carried by figures in medieval armor.

Candles and gaslight and dreams of electricity; medieval
armor and Birmingham hardware; pyramids of soap and mas
sive ecclesiastical ornaments, which made the commissioners
afraid of cries of "No Popery" all these were part of 1851.
And many recent writers who have made it fashionable to
admire Victorian Gothic have considered that the medieval pre
occupations of the men of 1851 were at least as fruitful as their
confident expectations of continued material progress. It is dif-

Victorian People

ficult to judge. Of two young men who visited the Exhibition,
one, William Whiteley, aged twenty, was so inspired by the
glass building that he began to dream of large retail stores,
"universal providers shops," with plate-glass fronts. The other,
William Morris, three years younger, was moved sufficiently
by the Exhibition to call the whole display "wonderfully
ugly." His revolt not only against mid- Victorian design but
against mid- Victorian society demonstrated the sharp change
of mood in the later nineteenth century.

Both old and new, revival and anticipation, had to be ade
quately represented if the Exhibition were to fulfil the objec
tives laid down by its great architect, the Prince Consort, and
his indefatigable colleague, Henry Cole, who has been properly
described as "a Prince Consort on a lowlier plane/ Their ambi
tious project of an international exhibition developed out of
very humble origins. The Royal Society of Arts, which had
exhibited its prize awards for agricultural and industrial ma
chinery since 1761, held two special tiny exhibitions in 1844
and 1845; it was interested in the possibility of "wedding high
art with mechanical skill." Cole, a civil servant with a taste for
administrative centralization, submitted a model of a tea set
and not only won the silver medal but became a leading mem
ber of the society. He infused an energy into the society s
projects which justified the use of the motto on the title-page
of his biography: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it
with thy might." He and the Prince Consort, working first
through the Royal Society and then through a royal commis
sion, were directly responsible for the scale and magnificence
of the final Exhibition. "For the first time in the world s his
tory," Cole told the members of the Society of Arts, "the men
of Arts, Science and Commerce were permitted by their respec
tive governments to meet together to discuss and promote those
objects for which civilized nations exist."

The Exhibition had a moral as well as an industrial purpose.
It was intended to be a running commentary on the age inter
rupted at regular intervals by object lessons. Two themes were
repeated more than the rest the gospel of work and the gospel
of peace.

The Crystal Palace and the Men of 1851

The gospel of work came first: the Exhibition was designed
to honor "the working bees of the world s hive" and to cast
tacit reflection on the drones. "The workers, of all types, stand
forth as the really great men." The Exhibition medals bore the
words: "Pulcher et ille labor palma decorare laborem." In such
a festival not only the captains of industry but also the manual
laborers had to be remembered. The Prince Consort had be
come president in 1 844 of the Society for the Improvement of
the Condition of the Laboring Classes. In 1851 he commissioned
Henry Roberts, who had already built model working-class
houses, to build a model house for the Exhibition on a patch of
vacant ground close to the Knightsbridge Cavalry Barracks.
Concern for the condition of life of the poor was to be forced
upon visitors. Indirectly, then, the Exhibition focused attention
on the same set of problems as had been raised in Alton Locke.
"Shall we ostentatiously show off all manner of articles of
luxury and comfort, and be ashamed to disclose the condition
of those we have to thank for them?"

This was a question which could no more be dodged than
the other great question of the day the divergence and the rec
onciliation of material and moral progress. The prayers uttered
by the Archbishop of Canterbury at the opening of the Ex
hibition were the prayers of a successful people whose God
had "multiplied on us blessings which Thou mightest most just
ly have withheld," but could all doubts be shelved? "For what
shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose
his soul?"

The gospel of peace was stressed with as much fervor as the
gospel of work. There had been many industrial exhibitions be
fore 1851. The special feature of the 1851 Exhibition was that
it was universal. "Paxton, go forth," Punch depicted Prince
Albert as saying, "take glass and iron, and, beauty wedding
strength, produce the Industrial Hall of Nations." Out of the
honest rivalry of industry and skill, countries would find a new
brotherhood. The Crystal Palace was thought of as a temple
of peace where all nations would meet by appointment under
the same roof and shake each other by the hand. Paxton vobis-
cwn. "The tree of trees to be planted is a gigantic olive that is

Victorian People

expected to take root in the Paxton Palace of Hyde Park; an
olive strengthened, sheltered, and protected by the glass walls
and roof, that admit the commercial trophies of all the world
a veritable Peace Congress, manufactured by the many-coloured
hands of the human family. We do not see why there should
not be an Order of the Olive. Will Prince Albert think of it?"

The emphasis on peace was colored by two philosophies or
by what many people felt were two facets of the same philos
ophyChristianity and free trade. While newspapers reminded
their readers of the connection between the repeal of the Corn
Laws in 1846 and the hope of international business harmony
in 1851, the Archbishop s opening prayers recalled to the first
distinguished visitors not only that all wealth came from God
but also that England could be specially thankful for mercies
received, particularly for "the peace that is within our walls
and plenteousncss within our palaces," The visitors should pray
together that God might help them in their noble purpose of
"knitting together in the bonds of peace and concord the dif
ferent nations of the earth." The earth was the Lord s and all
that dwelt therein. Queen Victoria was pleased with a "nice
sermon" which she heard three days after the opening of the
Exhibition, when the preacher alluded to the ceremony and
took as his text, "And He hath made of one blood all nations of
men to dwell on the face of the earth."

The hopes of peace were soon dashed. They had seemed too
grandiloquently phrased for many of the writers of the time.
The Eclectic Review referred to "stern facts weltering be
neath the rose pink surface" and pointed out how the "federa
tion of the universe" propaganda of the French Revolution
had served, at a previous moment of optimism, as a prelude to
a generation of war* "The tears of joy were turned to tears
of blood, and with their plenteousness watered the earth."
These words were not intended to suggest that similar terrors
were imminent; but it was perhaps an omen that the closing
day of the Exhibition xvas wet and depressing and that, by the
end of the year, scarcely before the contractors had begun to
dismantle the fabric of the Crystal Palace, events in France

442}-

The Crystal Palace and the Men of 1851

rudely shattered the confidence in the new world. At the same
time also, they shattered the summertime equilibrium of Rus
sell s government.

VI

The Great Exhibition had been designed not only to establish
the superiority of British manufactures and to proclaim the gos
pel of free trade and universal peace but also to reveal to for
eigners the attractions of the British constitution. "We are all
agreed," the Duchess of Gloucester wrote to the Queen the
day after the opening of the Exhibition, "in rejoicing that
Foreigners should have witnessed the affection of the People to
you and your Family, and how the English people do love and
respect the Cro f wn." Foreigners did not appear to learn the
lesson very easily. On September 30 the Queen wrote to the
king of the Belgians that the position of princes, which was
difficult in those times, "would be much less difficult" if they
would behave honorably and straightforwardly. To give the
people gradually those privileges which would satisfy all the
reasonable and well-intentioned "would weaken the power of
the Red Republicans. . . . Instead of that, reaction and a re
turn to all the tyranny and oppression is the cry and the prin
cipleand all papers and books are being seized and prohibited,
as in the days of Metternich."

The Queen and the Prince Consort held strong views con
cerning not only the duty of princes but also the methods and
responsibilities of foreign secretaries. They had clashed fre
quently with Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, in 1850, the
Queen persistently urging Russell to transfer him to a diff erent
office or to remove him from the cabinet. On European ques
tions their viewpoint was diametrically opposed. The Febru
ary crisis seemed to offer an easy opportunity for getting rid of
Palmerston, but Russell refused to consider any immediate
change. "Our party is hardly re-united," he wrote, "and any
break into sections, following one man or the other, would be
fatal to us." He knew and confessed that he, Russell, was the
element of weakness in the government, and Palmerston the
element of strength, and that to remove the Foreign Secretary

Victorian People

would break up the administration. He promised that he would
try to get rid of Palmcrston during the Easter recess but, when
Easter came, declared that this was again impossible. Palmer-
ston s departure was indefinitely postponed, and the Exhibition
overshadowed all other questions.

It had scarcely come to a close when the visit of the Hun
garian nationalist exile, Louis Kossuth, to England led to a re
newed antagonism between the Queen and the Foreign Sec
retary and to open conflict between the Foreign Secretary and
the Prime Minister. The visit of Kossuth was one of the big
popular events of the year. He met with enormous cheering
crowds wherever he went, in the provinces as well as London,
and fulsome tributes were paid to his eloquent defense of liber
ty and to his masterly presentation in fluent English of the
salient features of the international situation. The Queen feared
a meeting between Palmerston and Kossuth, and Prince Albert
feared that, if that did not happen, "something worse" would.
When Russell "positively requested" Palmerston not to receive
Kossuth, the Foreign Secretary replied tartly that he did not
choose to be dictated to as to whom he might or might not re
ceive in his own house. "I shall use my discretion, . . . You will,
of course, use yours as to the composition of your Govern
ment." The cabinet backed Russell; and Palmerston did not see
Kossuth, but he did receive radical deputations from the Lon
don suburbs who used colorful language in his presence to
praise the brave fight of Kossuth and to discredit the actions
of the emperors of Austria and Russia, enemies of Hungarian
independence.

The Kossuth affair was still being discussed when news of
Napoleon s coup d?6tat reached London. Louis Napoleon, presi
dent of France, dissolved the Assembly and asked for full
powers. The politique de bascule was over in Paris; midnight
military violence had taken its place. The "Man of Decem
ber," as Napoleon came to be known, had arrived. Behind a
carpet which had been shown at the Exhibition, twelve persons
were killed. England could not escape the impact of the French
crisis, the last big event in the sequence of revolution and
counterrevolution which followed from the events of 1848.

The Crystal Palace and the Men of 1S51

"We are destined to feel the electric shock of every explosion
or convulsion that France undergoes," wrote the Quarterly
Review.

News of the coup d etat reached England by the recently
constructed electric telegraph. There were immediate rumors
in the Daily News that Palmerston, who was known to sym
pathize with Napoleon, had quarreled with his colleagues:
"Along with the alarming dispatch from Paris has come a re
port that Lord Palmerston is no longer in the Cabinet." The
rumors were soon forgotten, however, and on December 16
the newspapers reported that ministers were quietly leaving
London for their Christmas holidays, "congratulating them
selves, no doubt, on the very comfortable state of things in
England compared with France."

Beneath the surface things were very far from comfortable
in the cabinet. Two days after the coup, Queen Victoria wrote
to Russell, explaining that it was of very great importance to
instruct Normanby, the British ambassador in Paris, to remain
entirely passive and to take no part and make no comments on
what was happening. The Queen s advice came too late. Palmer
ston had already expressed "private" approval of the coup (fetat
to Walewski, the French representative in London, and was
writing to Normanby, rebuking him for his hostility to Napo
leon and telling him to report more sympathetically on the
course of events in Paris.

Normanby s brother-in-law, Colonel Phipps, was the Prince
Consort s secretary, and Lady Normanby plied him privately
with information concerning Palmerston s peculiar and "most
flippant" conduct. He had behaved more wildly than ever be
fore. "He ridicules the idea of the Constitution; turns to scorn
the idea of anything being done to the Members of the As
sembly; laughs and jokes at the [English] Club being fired into,
though the English people in it were within an ace of being
murdered by the soldiers; says that Normanby is pathetic over
a broken looking-glass, forgetting that the same bullet grazed
the hand of an Englishman, a Roman citizen. . . ." How could
one reconcile such conduct with the brave defense of all Eng
lish interests which had been urged so powerfully by Palmer-

Victorian People

ston himself in his famous "Civis Romanus sum" speech in the
Don Pacifico debate only a year before, when he had de
fended the rights of a Gibraltar Jew who happened to be a
British subject?

On December 13 the Queen wrote to Russell, inclosing a
Normanby dispatch about Walewski s conversation with Pahn-
erston, and asked, "Does Lord John know anything about
the alleged approval, which if true, would again expose the
honesty and dignity of the Queen s Government in the eyes of
the world?"

Russell received an extremely unsatisfactory explanation from
Palrnerston, offered him the lord lieutenancy of Ireland in
place of the Foreign Office, and, finally, after Palmerston had
refused this greatly inferior position, replaced him by Lord
Granville, "the Polite." Granville was a friend of the Prince
Consort, with whom he had worked closely on the Royal Com
mission for the Exhibition. He was persona gratissima with the
royal family, and, although, as the son of an English ambassa
dor to France, he seemed well equipped for the Foreign Office,
he had, as it were, graduated not through the embassies but
through the Crystal Palace. The public knew less about Gran
ville than did the court; it was Palmerston who was the popu
lar idol. It was two days after the cabinet decided on Decem
ber 22 to back up Russell that the news of Palmerston s fall
was announced in the Ti?ne$. Despite the previous rumors of
resignation, the news came as a shock, "The change had been
made, and all but formally ratified, with the secrecy and celer
ity of the Parisian coup tf&tatr Many people did not believe
the report in the Times and waited for the evening s Globe
to see if a mistake had been made.

The cause of the dismissal of Palmerston was not immediate
ly announced to the public. The Morning Chronicle spread
the report that it was because he had quarreled with the Aus
trian and Russian ambassadors about England becoming "a
place of asylum" for foreign refugees. The Kossuth question
was still in the air. It was not until a little later that the news
came through; first, that the French question had led to a "di
vergency of action, amounting to the opening of two distinct

The Crystal Palace and the Men of 1851

and discordant channels of communication with the French
government," and, second, that, of late, "Lord Palmerston as
sumed an independence and singleness of action altogether in
consistent with the fact that the whole Cabinet shared the re
sponsibility of his acts."

While the readers of the press were bewildered and per
turbed by the fall of such a popular Foreign Secretary, the
Queen was delighted with this ending, or apparent ending, to
what she thought was a long chapter of recklessness and dis
aster. "I have the greatest pleasure," she wrote to the king of
the Belgians on December 23, "in announcing to you a piece
of news which I know will give you as much satisfaction and
relief as it does to us. Lord Palmerston is no longer Foreign
Secretary." Seven days later she philosophized about the news.
"It is too grievous to think how much misery and mischief
might have been avoided. However, now he has done with the
Foreign Office for ever, and the veteran statesman, as the
newspapers call him, to our great amusement and I am sure,
to his infinite annoyance, must rest upon his laurels." This was
one occasion upon which Queen Victoria was amused, al
though the amusement did not last for long.

The Queen and the Prince Consort felt themselves strength
ened by Palmerston s fall; Lord John Russell s administration
was undoubtedly weakened "unto death." Russell chose the
occasion of Palmerston s fall with as much care as he could,
and he acted swiftly. As Disraeli wrote maliciously to Lady
Londonderry: "The success of Napoleon seems to have given
Johnny a taste for coup ffetats" Russell hoped that not all the
Radicals would adopt the same friendly approach to the new
French government which Palmerston had done and that their
opposition to bloodstained dictatorship would more than coun
terbalance their faith in Palmerston as a Radical bulwark in
European politics. He hoped further and in this he was right
in the very short run that Palmerston s waywardness toward
his colleagues and, though it could not be said too openly,
toward the Queen would meet with general disapproval. But
all these optimistic hopes could not cover over the loss of the
one powerful personality in the government who was capable

{47}*

Victorian People

of winning the loyalty of both Radical and "Independent"
members. "Palmerston s good nature, courtesy, and hospital
ity/ wrote one of the cabinet ministers, "made him many
friends, and he was able to turn away the wrath of opponents
as no other member of the Government can do," He even
contrived during the change-over to be friendly and co-opera
tive with his successor, Granville.

In the last few months of 1851 all the paradoxes in the Radi
cal support of Palmerston had been strikingly demonstrated;
for, while he was listening to addresses referring to the em
perors of Russia and Austria as "odious and detestable assassins"
and "merciless tyrants and despots," he was resolutely opposing
Russell s plans for a new reform bill, the long-awaited Reform
Bill which Russell had promised in February. The fate of the
Reform Bill became very problematical after the fall of Palmer
ston, and so did the fate of the government. Lord John realized
that, if he abandoned "finality," standing by his Reform Bill of
1832, and proposed a new measure of reform, he would be
confronted with an impossible situation. If he proposed a com
prehensive reform bill in such quiet times, it would be talked
out or thrown out; if he proposed a mild bill, the "movement
party would spring at him like hounds." Disraeli knew the
answer to that dilemma: "He ought to resign,"

The only way of averting defeat and resignation was to ex
plore yet again the rejected alternative of the crisis of Febru
ary, 1851. The one thing which stood out after December as
a political necessity was a Whig-Peelite coalition, but it did
not prove possible to secure it at once. The failure to secure
it immediately led to the downfall of Russell. February again
proved a cruel month, and the Prime Minister was forced to
resign in February, 1852, when Palmerston threw his weight
against him. This time the protectionists took office, although
Palmerston would not join them. By gradually abandoning
protection, the cause for which they nominally stood, they
were freed from thraldom to a dogma and were able to take
the first step in the long and difficult process of becoming a
popular party. That first step was a necessary condition for a
return to a two-party system in English politics, which had

The Crystal Palace and the Men of 1851

been broken in 1846; so too was the ultimate absorption of the
Peelites in a broader Whig-Liberal party. Until such a two-
party system began to function again, executive government
was bound to be weak and parliamentary reform to seem cal
culated to make it weaker. The Queen s great fear in contem
plating Russell s reform proposals of late 1851 was whether
"the strengthening of the Democratic principle will upset the
balance of the Constitution, and further weaken the Executive,
which is by no means too strong at present."

VII

The weakness of the executive at the end of 1851 might
alarm the Queen, but it cheered large sections of the com
munity. They had no reason for hankering after strong gov
ernment. They wanted to be left alone. While the Queen re
joiced at Christmas, 1851, in the fall of Palmerston, the com
munity as a whole rejoiced in a year of prosperity and prog
ress. "1851 would long be remembered," wrote Macaulay, "as
a singularly happy year of peace, plenty, good feeling, inno
cent pleasure and national glory."

The Manchester Guardian interpreted the events in the
spirit of the year for the benefit of its Christmas readers. "The
best contribution that anyone can make to the happiness of
the Christmas circle is to show its members that they have good
grounds for satisfaction, for hope, and for self-approval. We
are glad, therefore, to be able to say that English society has
never a better right, than at the present moment, to sit quiet
ly under a sermon with that pleasing moral. In all our relations,
we have at least as much, if not more, substantial reason for
contentment and thankfulness, than at the close of any past
year in our history."

It went on to give the reasons for this happy state of affairs.
First, there was cheap food in plenty and with it "clothing,
fuel, shelter, and transition from place to place within the
reach of all, except those whom demerit, or extraordinary mis
fortune, has reduced to complete destitution," Second, "we
have complete domestic tranquility, and as much amity abroad,
as is compatible in these days, with the maintenance of self-

Victorian People

respect." Third, the tone of the country was right, and it was
set on a road of boundless progress. "The last twenty years
have witnessed an unprecedented growth of good feeling
among our widely separated classes, a great improvement in na
tional manners and public morality, the introduction of a more
humane and popular spirit of legislation, and, in general terms,
a patient, but earnest desire of progressive improvement in all
ranks of the people." Finally, but not least, U 5t would be un
seasonably invidious to institute a minute comparison between
our own and our neighbour s pudding; but we cannot refrain
from saying that there are few Christmas parties in Europe to
which we can turn a momentary glance, without greatly height
ening the satisfaction with which we turn again towards home."

There is an underlying smugness in this catalogue of national
blessings, but the qualifications it introduces are important in
catching the spirit of 1851. The phrase "except those whom
demerit, or extraordinary misfortune, has reduced to complete
destitution" recalls once again the submerged ranks of the
nation, those who were not able to help themselves. They were
no longer big enough to be regarded as a second nation in them
selves, as Disraeli had regarded them a few years before; at
the same time they could not be ignored, even by those writers
who tried to dismiss them in the name of social theory or in
evitable accident. They were the hungry at the feast.

The phrase "as much amity abroad as is compatible with
the maintenance of self-respect" recalls the limit placed by
contemporaries, even in this year of peace, on national appease
ment. There was a recognition in the words of Prince Albert
that "we are entering upon most dangerous times in which
A4ilitary Despotism and Red Republicanism will for some time
be the only Powers on the Continent, to both of which the
Constitutional Monarchy of England will be equally hateful.
That the calm influence of our institutions, however, should
succeed in assuaging the contest abroad must be the anxious
wish of every Englishman." The calm influence of institutions
was clear enough in 1851, but could the English people them
selves always be relied upon to be as calm as Prince Albeit had
suggested? It was the Prince s friend, Henry Cole, who called

The Crystal Palace and the Men of 1851

the English people "the richest in the world, and, I fear, the
most pugnacious," but who went on to trust that "the Ex
hibition will have tended to make ourselves a less quarrelsome
and meddlesome people with other nations than we have ac
customed to be, and will have taught us that our true policy in
international disputes, should they unfortunately arise, is to
stand on the defensive, and in that attitude to be as well pre
pared as possible, and to be content with being so."

The recognition of dangerous times ahead on the Continent
did not go far enough in 1851 to disturb the mood of self-
satisfaction. As Sir Llewellyn Woodward has said, "The Vic
torians were living dangerously, far more dangerously than
they knew. The world w r as much stronger than their ma
chinery, and the nature of man more fragile and at the same
time more unfathomable." The elements of doubt had not yet
been fashioned into a pattern of self-criticism. That was to be
the work of the future. Although the main features of the social
system were to remain substantially unchanged through the
middle years of Victorian England, the Crimean War was to
provide a jolt to easy complacency.

4 n

Ill

Roebuck has lived before the world for nearly half
a cc?itury, and his public life has not been lacking In
consistency. But if it comes to talk about honour and
usefulness, it suggests the inquiry whether the wasp is
072 honourable and useful factor in daily life. Roebuck
has been a political and Parlierwentary wa$fa and I never
heard of the bees insisting upon doing honour to this
member of the hymcwopterous family.

HENRY W. LUCY (1878)

I

The gospel of peace proclaimed at the Great Exhibition did
not capture public opinion for long. The Queen had spoken in
1851 of "this peace festival, which unites the industry of all
the nations of the earth," but three years later inflamed opin
ion was clamoring for war against Russia. The Exhibition had
been popular, but the Crimean War, even before it officially
began, was more so. Only a small group of Manchester School
Radicals, the apostles of peace and free trade, stood complete
ly aloof from the supporters of the struggle and called the
Crimean War a crime; for their refusal to identify themselves
with the nation they were pilloried in the press and even burned
in effigy by the crowds in Manchester itself. They were a
very small minority, smaller than the band of protectionist
malcontents, like Colonel Sibthorp, who refused to associate
themselves with the Exhibition. For the most part the nation-
Radical, Liberal, and Conservativewas one, though it was the
Radicals who were the noisiest supporters of the war and the
people least anxious to see it come to a conclusion. "There is

John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War

scarcely a man to be found from Land s End to John o Groats
but would like another year of war," exclaimed one Radical
speaker in 1856. "There is a general impression that now we
are fully prepared for it, another year s war would show the
world that there is that in Englishmen which would conquer
every difficulty."

The war was popular not only with the crowds, particularly
the urban crowds, and the politicians, particularly the Radical
politicians, but also with most of the poets and writers of the
times. The new poet laureate, Tennyson, who had caught the
mood of 1851 in In Memoriam, was equally successful in catch
ing the mood of 1854. The Charge of the Light Brigade was
representative even down to the phrase "some one had blun
dered," while the greater poem Mazed did not scruple to con
demn Bright as "the broad-brimmed hawker of holy things."
In the experiences of war Tennyson discerned a purging of base
ambitions, an escape from selfish individualism, and even a
strange but relentless moral necessity:

For the peace, that I deem d no peace, is over and done,
And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic Deep,
And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames
The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.

"War goes on famously," wrote Robert Pemberton Milnes, an
English squire, to his son Richard in 1854, "and I would have it
go on wars are serviceable, as thunderstorms are there would
be no breathing at Crewe Hall between Manchester and the
Potteries, but for them."

The contrast between the moods of 1851 and 1854 seems
less sharp if the Exhibition itself is placed in its proper perspec
tive. The talk of peace in that year was a little forced. Only a
year before, Palmerston had appealed in the famous Don Paci-
fico debate not to love of peace but to self-assertive national
pride. Throughout 1851 itself there was an undercurrent of
vociferous nationalism. In 1852, as Napoleon III consolidated
his power, France once more assumed the shape of the national
enemy, and the Volunteer Movement was launched to enlist
unstinted middle-class patriotic enthusiasm. The dreams of the
free-traders of 1846 and the makers of the Exhibition of 1851
were already fading, into the background, and Tennyson s

Victorian People

"Hands All Round," "incomparably the best convivial lyric in
the language," \vas accusing the dreamers of peace of deriving
their idealism merely from the desire to sell more cotton goods
overseas:

Tho niggcred throats of Manchester may bawl,
What England was, shall her true sons forget?

We arc not cotton spinners all,
But some love England and her honour yet.

In the same year the death of the Duke of Wellington, the hero
of Waterloo, was an impressive military spectacle; influential
writers were roused to complain that "this nation is a great deal
enervated by a long peace, by easy habits of intercourse, by
peace societies, and by false economies." Even while they were
complaining, it was becoming clear that the "enervation" was
creating its own reaction.

Between 1852 and 1854 the restless mood persisted, although
France, the enemy of 1852, became the ally of 1854, and Russia
became the enemy. Without this shuffling of friends and foes
the war could not have been so popular. Russia as an enemy
mobilized the ill-will of the greatest possible number of the
population. Indeed, popular enthusiasm for the war can be ex
plained in terms both of a general reaction to a long period of
peace and of a specific reaction to the "threat" of increased
Russian power. Czarist Russia appeared not only as a national
rival endangering the balance of power in Europe and British
security in India but also as a despotic tyrant, the gigantic
obstacle to European freedom and liberation. Behind the events
of 1854 were the revolutions of 1848, the flight of the European
exiles, and the dreams of a new European order; behind them
also were the facts of Russian expansion in central Asia and the
fears of Russian domination of the Middle East. Whigs, Tories,
and Radicals could each see the conflict in acceptable but
different terms. Respectable Whigs and Peelites could be anti-
Russian because they wanted to have the claims of public law
vindicated against the ambitions of an aggressor; Tories could
tremble with rage at the policy of "sap and mine" by which
Russia was increasing its power; Radicals could look to Moscow
as the center of international reaction and call upon Hungarian,
Polish, and Italian exiles to prophesy for them that "the state

PLATE III

PLATE IV

John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War

of Europe, and the dispositions of the active party everywhere,
are such as to make us foresee that a supreme struggle will take
place between Right and Might before a long time has elapsed."

The roots of Russophobia in England lay deeper than the
revolutions of 1848. Between 1815 and 1830, writers like Sir
Robert Wilson and George de Lacy Evans had argued that the
Russian objective was Constantinople and that, once Constanti
nople was captured, universal dominion lay within Russia s
"easy grasp." They familiarized important sections of the read
ing public with the view that only enslaved peoples anxious for
their own liberation could drive the semibarbarous Russian
despots back into the steppes of Asia. Nothing fundamentally
new was said by pamphleteers about Russia in 1854 and 1855
which had not been said by 1830. But, between 1848 and 1854,
Russophobes stirred not limited sections of the reading public
but large crowds of people. One of the strongest Russophobes
was Karl Marx. "In this instance," he wrote, "the interests of
revolutionary Democracy and England go hand in hand." Rus
sia was the one great menace to civilization. The message of all
the European exiles was the same; as Kossuth wrote to David
Urquhart, a sympathetic English Radical, in the year of the Ex
hibition from his temporary shelter in Turkey: "There is some
thing in my mind, which tells me we are on the dawn of great
events and must everywhere prepare to meet them in the best
manner we can. We must crush Russia, my dear sir! We must,
and headed by you we will."

Urquhart was only capable of heading a noisy conspiracy,
but he saw mass opinion in the cities move between 1852 and
1854 to a position not very different from his own. Turkey s
welcome to the revolutionary exiles of 1848 disposed Radicals
to regard even the sultan as a friend. As Victor Hugo put it,
"What now glitters in the desperate grasp of Turkey is not the
old dented scimitar of Othman, but the brilliant lightning of
revolution."

Only very few Englishmen cared to contemplate a revolu
tion, but many warmed to a national cause, which had about it
a distinctly "Radical" flavor. The domestic wounds of Chartism,
which had divided the country as recently as 1848, were heal
ing, and the appeal of nation became stronger than the appeal

Victorian People

of class. A representative Radical like G. J. Holyoake talked of
"an unknown and unsuspected instinct of race" stirring in his
blood and confessed an undiscriminating patriotism while the
war was in progress. He was "for the success of England right
or wrong," and, when the peace was declared, he refused to
illuminate his office in Fleet Street, preferring to display a large
placard bearing Elizabeth Browning s verses on the continued
plight of Poland, Italy, and Hungary 7 .

He was not alone. In all the large cities of the country
particularly in Sheffield and Newcastle there were many pub
lic meetings and special new organizations to arrange them.
Speakers from Polish democratic committees were as welcome
as proved local orators. The countryside, however, and the
small market towns were relatively unaffected; they were al
most as impervious to the clamor as they had been to the fiery
rhetoric of Chartism in the previous decade,

Almost as impervious, but not quite, for there was one impor
tant difference between the noise of Chartism and the war
fervor. The press, which for the most part had opposed the
Chartists, did as much as the public meetings to create a war
atmosphere. The press, or, at any rate, the Tiwcs, its leading
organ, penetrated middle-class homes in many quiet parts of
the country. With a circulation of over forty thousand copies,
it was the leading newspaper not only of England but of
Europe: "It is a well-known fact," wrote the Whig, Lord
Clarendon, "that the Times forms or guides or reflects no
matter which the public opinion of England." The Times,
which vacillated between peace and war in 1853 and early 1854,
soon forgot its doubts; so too did Clarendon. When the war
had not been long in progress, he was proclaiming, "We are
not now engaged in the Eastern Question, but in the battle of
civilization against barbarism, for the independence of Europe."

II

Despite the popularity of the war and the bold simplicity
which its issues assumed in the eyes of the general public, the
leading statesmen of the day were unable to give any clear or
consistent account of the reasons why it had broken out or of

John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War

the purposes which they hoped it would secure. Napoleon III
was far more clear than the English Prime Minister Aberdeen,
a well-known lover of peace, who watched his own cabinet
drift into war through a series of halfhearted measures of which
he only half -approved. A Peelite, he had come into power as
Prime Minister of a Whig-Peelite coalition in 1852 after the
failure of the protectionists to establish their ministry. One of
his main purposes was to avoid war. On the opposite side of the
ring, Nicholas I, the czar of Russia, was not so much plotting
as blundering his way into an impossible position; he had no
desire for an international war of any kind.

Even now the causes of the Crimean War cannot be ade
quately stated. It is usually claimed that it grew out of a local
squabble between Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox monks
for the control of the holy places in Jerusalem. The Russian
czar was the protector of the Greek church; Napoleon III con
sidered himself the protector of the Catholics and used the
occasion to maintain the ancient French patronage of the
Catholic church. The two countries fought a diplomatic battle
to acquire influence at the court of the "infidel sultan" in Con
stantinople. In May, 1853, Nicholas demanded that the Turks
should recognize his authority not only over the Jerusalem
monks but also over the whole ten million Greek Orthodox
Christians in the Turkish Empire. When the Turks refused,
Russian troops marched into the Danubian provinces of Tur
key. The first reaction of the great powers France, Great
Britain, Austria, and Prussia was to try to hammer out a com
promise. By this time the Turks were unwilling to accept such
a solution, and in October, 1853, they declared war on Russia.

These colorful incidents were not accidents; they sprang
from an increasingly unstable power situation. The fact that
the Ottoman Empire was "the sick man" of Europe, incapable
of reform, sharpened existing differences and eventually forced
Britain and Russia into opposite camps. Neither country was
certain what to do with what was called the "Eastern Ques
tion" or what the other country would do. "When <we are
agreed," Nicholas had told Seymour, the British ambassador,
at a party in January, 1853, "I am quite without anxiety as to

Victorian People

the rest of Europe. It is immaterial what others may think or
do." The two countries drifted into open war through a welter
of misunderstanding and false estimates of each other s inten
tions rather than through a deliberate policy on either side.

When fighting broke out between Russia and Turkey in
October, 1853, Aberdeen was still most anxious to prevent it
spreading and, far from feeling pro-Turk, strongly disliked any
idea of propping up the Ottoman Empire. "The beastly Turks
have actually declared war," wrote his Foreign Secretary,
Clarendon. Much of the press supported Aberdeen at this stage,
for he was, after all, the respected leader of the coalition which
had finally emerged as the "natural" alignment to secure a more
stable administration. Although his cabinet was divided and his
"leadership" was never accepted within it, there was no oppo
sition to the resort to negotiation between the powers as the
means of dealing with the situation. "We cannot see how any
man who holds himself responsible for his words and actions,"
wrote a representative provincial newspaper in Sheffield, "and
gives the smallest thought to the consequences of war, can urge
upon us such a mad and murderous enterprise."

The advocates of war were held back until, at the end of
November, 1853, the tense international situation, described,
by a recent historian, as a "nineteenth-century cold war," sud
denly became critical. The Russian fleet attacked and destroyed
an inferior Turkish squadron at Sinopc on the Black Sea. Al
though the action was a legitimate operation of war, it blasted
away any lingering British doubts about the need for a "firm
stand." The national temper \vas roused. "Sinopc," wrote the
Times, "dispels the hopes we have been led to entertain of
pacification. . . . We have thought it our duty to uphold and
defend the cause of peace as long as peace was compatible with
the honour and dignity of our country . . . but now war has
begun in earnest."

Officially, however, war did not begin until March 28. In the
meantime the British and French governments, now acting as
allies and backed by an enraged British public opinion, ordered
their combined fleets into the Black Sea. On January 6, 1854,
a British frigate appeared before the walls of Sebastopol. Aber-

John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War

deen might still waiver and complain that "some fatal influence
must be at work" jeopardizing the cause of peace; but, the more
he hesitated and wavered, the more divided his cabinet be
came, and the more determined became public opinion. The
same Sheffield paper which in July, 1853, had talked of peace
and sung the praises of Aberdeen was demanding war in De
cember. "Mere talking to the Czar will do nothing . . . now the
time does appear to be at hand when we must act so as to dis
sipate the evil designs and efforts of Russia."

The conflict between hesitating statesmen and militant
makers of opinion drove a wedge between government and
people even before hostilities began. Once they had begun,
there were two further reasons for increasing domestic antag
onism. First, the diplomats to the annoyance of the critics of
"secret diplomacy" remained as important as the soldiers.
While negotiations for terminating the conflict continued al
most without cease throughout the whole of its course, public
opinion in Britain was unwilling at all points to countenance
a premature peace; and in 1855 there was an increasingly wide
gap not only between government and people but also between
the English people and their far less enthusiastic French allies,
who by then were prepared, under Napoleon himself, to seek
peace.

Historians of the Crimean War have, for the most part, been
more interested in what happened in diplomatic negotiations
in Vienna than in what happened in Manchester or Sheffield,
yet the unpopularity of John Bright in Manchester, when he
opposed the war, and the wild popularity of John Arthur Roe
buck in Sheffield, when he supported it, reveal more of the
England of their time than the elaborate accounts by minis
ters of the aims and purposes of the struggle. The war itself
was without a real decision in the field of international politics,
but it left a profound impact on British politics, government,
and society. As the American Nathaniel Hawthorne noted, the
war gave the country "a vast impulse towards democracy."
Changes on the home front were always more important than
on the narrow front in the Crimea.

There was a second and bigger reason for the antagonism

1S9Y

Victorian People

between government and public. As the war continued, it re
vealed daily evidence of "mismanagement," When war was de
clared, there was little realization, at any rare among members
of the public, of the difficulties and dangers which lay ahead.
"The long, long canker of peace" was over, it was believed,
and war would once again vindicate the qualities of the English
soldier and the English people. But it soon began to be clear in
the hard Crimean winter of 1854-55 that, while the individual
soldiers were heroic, military leadership was incompetent and
military administration chaotic. Forty years of peace and pub
lic economy campaigns had run their course, and the invinci
bility of the army had become a matter of faith rather than of
organization.

The war undermined confidence in the military and adminis
trative system at the same time that it enhanced the prestige of
the individual soldier, who was considered a crusader in the
cause of right. There was shame and anger at his sufferings as
they were described in the press. War correspondents, particu
larly William Henry Russell of the Tbncs, sang the praises of
the "thin red streak topped with a line of steel," while old
Chartists talked not of the six points of the people s charter but
of a new soldiers charter. The bravery of the soldiers was
demonstrated during the storming of the heights of Alma in
September, 1854; but, as the winter advanced, "the failure of
the system" was equally vividly demonstrated by the failure of
the army to capture the city of Sebastopol. The besiegers
rather than the besieged were forced on the defensive, and,
though the battles of Balaclava and Inkermen showed that hero
ism was still alive, the small British army had to face a cruel
winter, suffering from want of shelter, clothes, food, and medi
cine. It was not until September, 1855, that Sebastopol fell, and
by that time public opinion at home had passed from whole
hearted enthusiasm for the war to scathing criticism of its mal
administration, "Efficiency" became a Radical slogan, and the
general sentiment of the country was indicated by the title of a
pamphlet, Whom Shall We Hmg? By then the Russians were
a far less accessible enemy than the English generals and the
"aristocrats" behind the scenes at Whitehall.

4 toy

John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War

A necessary intermediary in the task of interpreting the mis
conduct of affairs was the press, and it carried out its task with
what to many conservatives was frightening effectiveness. John
Delane, the editor of the Times, prepared for the outbreak of
war with more foresight than the government. An army of
correspondents, paid and unofficial, provided him with infor
mation. In consequence Delane could thunder so ceaselessly
against those whom he held responsible for military and admin
istrative blunders that it was a brave man who dared to chal
lenge him. One man who did, the Earl of Winchilsea, had to
preface one of the rare open attacks on the Times in the House
of Lords by giving thanks to Providence that he was not defi
cient in moral courage. W. H. Russell, Delane s chief corre
spondent, was on his way to the Crimea when war broke out;
once it had started, he was in a privileged position compared
with correspondents before or since. He had the newly in
vented telegraph at his disposal, but he had no censorship to
cramp his style. He and the other "crouching tigers" of the
press began to realize during the war that publicity was their
trade and that their readers welcomed sensational revelations
more enthusiastically than bare factual information.

Such a realization shocked conservatives of all sorts, who
were alarmed by the new manifestation of newspaper strength.
Whigs, and Peelites in particular, suffered. Lord John Russell,
who was not one of Delane s heroes, talked of the "vile tyran
ny" of the Times and claimed that it aspired to be "not the
organ but the organizer of government," while Greville wrote
in his famous diary in February, 1855, that for the first time in
his life he was "really and seriously alarmed at the state of
affairs. The press with the Times as its head is striving to throw
everything into confusion and running amuck against the aris
tocratic elements of society and the Constitution. The intoler
able nonsense and the abominable falsehoods it flings out every
day are none the less dangerous because they are nonsense and
falsehood, and backed up as they are by all the vulgar Radical
press,- they diffuse through the country a mass of inflammatory
matter the effect of which may be more serious and arrive more
quickly than anybody imagines."

{61 Y

Victorian People

The public attack by the Radicals began \vith a convincing
barrage of criticism directed against the archaic military system
xvhich was hopelessly split up between a variety of military and
civil departments. There was really no system at all, merely a
division of responsibility, At least eight authorities, whose co
operation was necessary to get anything well done, worked
independently of each other. As Prince Albert remarked in a
carefully prepared memorandum: "We have no generals
trained and practised in the duties of that rank; no general staff
or corps; no field commissariat; no field army department; no
ambulance corps; no baggage train; no corps of drivers; no
corps of artisans; no practice, or possibility of acquiring it, in
the combined use of the three arms cavalry, infantry and artil
lery; no general qualified to handle more than one of these
arms; and the artillery kept as distinct from the army as if it
were a separate profession."

Even when the necessity for reform was accepted, improve
ments were always limited by the feeling that "it is never
prudent to push changes one inch beyond the length it is abso
lutely necessary." Red tape and worship of routine often turned
confusion into deadlock, and by the end of 1854 the Times
was writing powerfully of "the decline and decay of our great
expedition" as a result of "grossest mismanagement" by "that
huge impostor, our military system." England was "on the
verge of ruin," and the "national reputation" had been com
pletely destroyed.

The administrative confusion was made even worse by the
physical conditions in which the troops were bound to live in
the Crimea. Only one-sixth of the deaths in the Crimean War
were caused by battle; disease was always more destructive
than the actual fighting, and at first little was done to alleviate
it. After the Battle of Alma there were no splints and no
bandages, and, when the Times commented some weeks later
that the manner in which the sick and wounded were being
treated was "worthy only of the savages of Dahomey," there
was a surge of public rage at home.

Florence Nightingale s mission to the Crimea was undertaken
in response to the challenge of this "tremendous crisis": con-

John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War

tending against military prejudice, medical jealousy, and even
religious controversy among her nurses, she showed indomi
table courage and determination. More than any other single
person she interested the public in the magnitude of the task to
be carried out in and behind the battlefield. A Crimean veteran
recalled her passing his bed with some doctors who were say
ing, "It can t be done," and her replying quietly, "It must be
done." "There seemed," he said, "to be no appeal from her
quiet conclusive manner."

But no "quiet conclusive manner" could regulate the position
in England from which, as she herself saw, "the grand adminis
trative evil emanates." The more news came through of diffi
culties and disappointments in the Crimea, the more was the
public roused to an angry demand for wholesale changes. The
higher command was criticized at first, then the whole system
of military promotion, and finally aristocracy itself. Favor, in
competence, and stupidity seemed to be "revelling and rioting"
in the camp at Sebastopol. Lords Raglan, Lucan, and Cardigan,
three of the chief officers, were subject to widespread attacks-
Lord Cardigan, "the Noble Yachtsman," was commanding the
Light Brigade from a luxurious private vessel in Balaclava Bay;
his superior officer, Lord Lucan, his brother-in-law, with whom
he had been on bad terms for years, was christened "Lord
Look-On" by his own troops; Lord Raglan, the commander-in-
chief, admitted to be "the kindest, calmest and most gentle
manly of men," had provided positions on his staff for five of
his nephews. Living in the past, he was unable and unwilling to
substitute talent for connections. He proved incapable of man
aging either the war or the private dispute between Lucan and
Cardigan, who were aptly described by one of their captains in
words which shocked his conventional parents: "Without
mincing matters, two such fools could hardly be picked out of
the British Army. And they take command. But they are
Earls!"

It is not surprising that critics at home asked whether it
would be possible to turn for effective leadership from the aris
tocrats to "the great railway administrators and contractors, the
men who manage lines of packets, who own and direct sue-

Victorian People

cessfully the operation of \vhole fleets of merchant ships . . .
men who, conducting their own operations with unfailing
regularity, look with scorn on the miserable and repeated
proofs of official blundering, which has so grievously mis
directed and wasted unbounded resources?" Why not dismiss
the aristocrats and appeal to the businessmen; why not get rid
of the politicians and accept the services of the experts? Vic
tory, on which such high hopes were centered, seemed to de
pend not only on the overthrow of the pacific Aberdeen s
"weak" government but on a searching examination of all tra
ditional English institutions and a purging of the "leaders" who
were undermining the best of them.

Ill

It was against such a setting that John Arthur Roebuck
emerged as a "tribune of the people." On January 23, 1855,
"deeply moved" by events in the Crimea and convinced that
they "cried aloud for investigation," he asked the House of
Commons to set up a select committee to inquire into the con
dition of the army before SebastopoL

Roebuck, unlike several of the active critics of the govern
ment, had no detailed knowledge of the Crimea or of the Near
East. His fellow-critic, Henry Layard, was the excavator of
Nineveh; Roebuck was merely the member for Sheffield. But
his nickname was "Tear Em," and even as late as 1936 the
phrase "Don t John Arthur Roebuck me" was still used in
Sheffield if one felt that a person was getting the better of one,
somewhat tendentiously, in a heated argument.

Roebuck was not an expert but a public accuser. He dealt in
denunciations and judgments more happily than in proofs or
arguments; his favorite word was "sham," and he used it fre
quently. "Placing unbounded confidence in himself and trou
bling his mind very little about anyone else," A. W. Kinglake,
the historian of Crimea, said of him, "he had a hardiness be
yond other mortals." A very small man in height, he had a loud
voice, considerable powers of oratory, and a bundle of
vehement opinions. Although he was ill in 1855, he had by no
means lost his energy, and he had already established his repu-

John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War

tation of being one of the few members of Parliament who
dared to use plain speech and who showed no fear of great
persons, whether in the cabinet or at the court.

His independence was his greatest asset. When he entered
Parliament in 1832, he was, in his own words, "neither Whig
nor Tory. ... I went into the House of Commons determined
to advocate that which I believed to be for the interest of the
people, without regard to party considerations." Such inde
pendence he did not find incompatible with a strong and grow
ing distaste for Whiggery, which he had always considered an
even less congenial political philosophy than Toryism. Born in
Madras and reared in Canada, Roebuck had a natural dislike of
all government by "connection." "The Whigs have ever been
an exclusive and aristocratic faction," he wrote in 1852, "though
at times employing democratic principles and phrases as weap
ons of defence against their opponents. . . . When out of office
they are demagogues: in power they become exclusive oli
garchs." Such a sharp distrust of the Whigs strengthened,
rather than weakened, his position in 1855, when distrust of
"Whig aristocracy" was one of the great levers of public
agitation.

Roebuck was never a conformist, but his political training
and background fitted him in 1855 to be a vocal representative
of the urban middle classes. His great-grandfather had founded
the Carron Iron Works in Scotland and was given a place of
honor in Smiles s Industrial Biography. He himself was a friend
of John Brown, the Sheffield steel king. He had little sympathy
with the doctrines of the Manchester School, particularly with
the views of foreign policy which they expressed, but he had
been a vigorous Benthamite in his youth and a close personal
friend of John Stuart Mill, the first friend the precocious young
Mill ever had. Roebuck, like all Benthamites, loathed privilege,
particularly inherited privilege. "All political power which
exists in the shape of privilege has a tendency to be mischievous
ly corrupt," he once wrote. Although Professor Trevelyan likes
to call him "a pseudo-radical," there was no deficiency of
radicalism here.

Behind Roebuck in 1855 was the turbulent city population

Victorian People

of Sheffield, the great Yorkshire steel town, the population of
which was untouched by Whiggcry and little affected by the
philosophy of the Manchester School Roebuck had been
chosen in 1849 as one of the two members for the city and was
a good judge of its moods. At one of its great annual institu
tions, the Cutlers Dinner, in September, 1853, he described the
recent Spithead naval review as the greatest peace meeting of
the year. "To be prepared for war," he went on, "is the best
preservative of peace." Roebuck was a patriotic Radical before
most Radicals became patriotic. Even in 1850 he was the pri
vate member of Parliament who, by proposing a vote of con
fidence in the government s foreign policy, gave the opportu
nity for Palmerston to make his famous Don Pacifico speech,
claiming that, wherever a British subject might be, the watch
ful eye and the strong arm of Britain would protect him. The
1853 crisis in the Near East inspired no new patriotism in Roe
buck, although his fellow-member of Parliament for Sheffield,
Hadfield, was a follower of Cobden and Bright, anxious at first
to keep out of the Eastern question altogether, and only later
moving round to a modified support of the war. In January,
1855, he was willing to second Roebuck s motion. Sheffield was
united.

The Sheffield tend Rotherham Independent^ which, like the
Times, had swung round from sincere support of Aberdeen to
vigorous approval of the war "war will probably give us a
better route to India via Syria and Mesopotamia. All Asia lies
before us" praised Roebuck in January, 1855, for trying to
break through "the fetters of routine of aristocratic preference.
. . . We are glad that the public voice has found a spokesman in
the House of Commons so able and fearless as our Member . . .
and Ministers must make a wonderfully cogent answer to Mr.
Roebuck before they can satisfy either the House of Commons
or the country that their duty has been done, and that our
whole system of administration does not need a radical change."
Another Sheffield newspaper, the 7m, went further: "It is not
at all improbable that if the popular voice had been heard
through the means of large public meetings in the manufactur
ing districts as early as the end of last November . . . two

A 66 \

John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War

months of trifling at home and misery abroad might have been
spared. . . . Let Mr. Roebuck take heart; his burning words
cannot express the deep-seated shame . . . with which the dis
graceful past is viewed in Sheffield, nor the firm resolve which
exists to bring the authors of our loss to exposure and punish
ment. We trust he will persevere, be the consequence what it
may. 7

Even with Radical opinion behind him, and with the support
of many people in the large cities of industrial Britain, Roebuck
appeared to more than one observer rather like David confront-
ing Goliath when he moved for his select committee in Janu
ary, 1855. That he not only got his select committee but also
brought down Aberdeen s government was the result not so
much of his zeal or ability as of serious divisions inside Aber
deen s cabinet. When he hurled his stones at the government,
it was already shaking at the knees.

The first result of Roebuck s announcement of his motion
was the resignation of Lord John Russell, who had long felt
unhappy and frustrated as an ordinary member of a coalition
ministry headed by the Peelite Aberdeen "the worst govern
ment I ever belonged to," he called it. Throughout 1854 Rus
sell had threatened resignation so often that Prince Albert kept
a special file marked in his own hand, "Concerning the part
which Lord John Russell took in breaking up Lord Aberdeen s
Government, Nov. 1854-Feby. 1855"; this time the resignation
was pressed just at the moment when opinion outside the
House was most critical of the administration.

When the Whig-Peelite government, robbed of Russell, tried
to resist Roebuck s motion, it was defeated by the surprisingly
heavy margin of 305 votes to 148. The House was so amazed at
the size of the majority that, when the figures were announced,
they were greeted not with the usual cheers but with profound
silence followed by derisive laughter. The government had
been condemned, in the words of a contemporary, to "the
most ignominious end recorded of any Cabinet in modern
days."

All the groups which were dissatisfied with either Aberdeen
or more particularly with Newcastle, his Secretary of War,

Victorian People

took the opportunity of bringing the government down. The
lines of division showed how unreal party labels were in the
1850 s and how little the main features of the general political
situation had changed since 1851. Although Whigs and Peelites
had come together in the long-cxpcctcd coalition which had
proved impossible in 1851, they had only done so in terms of
group interest, not in terms of "a coalition of party sentiment
and feeling," "Everybody s principles had united with nobody s
opinions, 5 said one Conservative. Their tepid co-operation was
effected in a House of Commons elected in 1852 which nobody
expected to last for more than a month or two. "It will be an
impossible Parliament," one of the Peelite leaders, Sir James
Graham, had written to Gladstone just after the election.
"Parties will be found too nicely balanced to render a new line
of policy practicable without a fresh appeal to the electors."
No such appeal was made, and the Parliament lasted until 1857,
but it only did so because there was a perpetual shifting of
groups, a desperate hunt for places, and a general dislike of
dissolution. In 1855 the situation was so serious that Matthew
Arnold, meditating on the tombstones in Haworth churchyard,
could turn from the Brontes to politics and write of

This ignominious spectacle,
Power dropping from the hand
Of paralytic factions, and no soul
To snatch and wield it.

The failure to take Sebastopol made the political situation
seem desperate. Ordinary members of Parliament and dis
gruntled people everywhere were asking for u a War Cabinet,
constituted with the single purpose of prosecuting hostilities
with energy, of repairing past errors, and of saving the remnant
of our army."

Yet the crisis did not end with the defeat of the Whig-
Peelite coalition. When Aberdeen s government fell, both
Derby, the protectionist, and Russell, the Whig, found it im
possible to form a ministry. Derby s failure, which made Dis
raeli sullen and bitter, recalled his failure of 1851, He was will
ing to serve if Palmerston and some of the Pcelites joined him,
but he was clearly unwilling to draw too close to Radicals like

John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War

Roebuck, with whom Disraeli was on very friendly terms.
Russell, too, failed to form a ministry. After his resignation
from the government he was generally discredited; his late
colleagues would not serve under him.

In such circumstances only Palmerston was left. He had
served as Home Secretary under Aberdeen, and he was the one
minister of the Aberdeen government whose reputation had
not been impaired by the military disasters in the Crimea.
Tories might consider Derby to be Vhomnie necessaire, but
Palmerston became Fhomme inevitable. Roebuck could claim
that he had put him there, and public opinion was prepared to
indorse the change only if it meant a strengthening of govern
ment and a reform of the administration. The aim was not to
shuffle political personalities but "to put strength into the place
of weakness, courage and resolution in the place of timidity and
fickleness, and enlarged and enlightened views respecting the
true interests of the empire, in the place of paltry and narrow
ideas, which naturally led their owner to cherish a profound
reverence for despots and despotism."

Palmerston in February, 1855, was the creature of the people
rather than their master. There were doubts at the time among
the Radical extremists whether the aristocratic "whiskered
wonder" of over seventy was likely to lift the war out of the
quagmire into which it had been forced by "the aristocratic
system, a system of total incapacity." Disraeli played on the
doubts with the same consummate skill that he had played
upon Tory doubts in 1846. "Palmerston is really an impostor,"
he wrote to a friend, "utterly exhausted, and at the best only
ginger-beer, and not champagne, and now an old painted panta
loon, very deaf, very blind, and with false teeth, which would
fall out of his mouth when speaking, if he did not hesitate so in
his talk." To John Bright he was equally candid: "You may see
the breed, but the action and power are gone." Bright did not
need to be told. "Palmerston Prime Minister!" wrote Bright in
his diary. "What a hoax! The aged charlatan has at last obtained
the great object of his long and unscrupulous ambition."

Responsible opinion accepted Palmerston because of his
popularity in the country, his experience in Parliament, and his

Victorian People

supposed favor in the counsels of France. If Disraeli did not
think much of him, it \vas confidently believed that Napoleon
III did. Even the Queen and Prince Albert were influenced by
these considerations. But he soon lost ground after taking office.
His first night was "a failure," and "the House was bewildered
and disorganized." Roebuck refused, despite the change of
ministry and despite pressure from Palmerston himself, to aban
don his intention of securing a select committee. The change of
government, he said, had not even meant a complete change of
ministers; Palmerston was still surrounded by guilty men, and
inquiry was as urgent as it had been when Aberdeen was in
command. There was no incompatibility between Palmerston s
proposed reforms of the administration and continued inquiry
by members of Parliament into the origins of disaster. "Noth
ing but the authority of the house could enable the official
chief to overcome the vis incrtiae in the atmosphere of office.
He should move his committee," said Roebuck, "as an assistance
to the Noble Lord, in infusing new vigour into the constitution
of the country, which he could not do with his unaided
efforts."

Roebuck got his committee, even though its constitution
was a little different from that which was originally planned,
and the political position of Palmerston was further weakened.
By attempting to suppress the Sebastopol committee, he had
aroused popular suspicion; by eventually giving way, he forced
the resignation of his three remaining Pcelite ministers, Gra
ham, Gladstone, and Sidney Herbert. The old Whig combina
tion of 1851 was restored, and, though the Peclites \vcre dis
credited both as administrators and now as politicians, it was
clear that, as Disraeli said, the only effect of the crisis had been
that "we have replaced a Cabinet of All the Talents by a
Cabinet of AH the Mediocrities."

Palmerston s position remained weak throughout the spring
and early summer of 1855. When Russell, who consented to go
to Vienna in February to take part in peace talks, got caught
up in a web of intricate double-talk and intrigue, there were
many people, dissatisfied with the whole state of affairs, who
sighed for "men who had no party considerations, who cared

{10}-

John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War

not for aristocratic influences, who went out determined to
sacrifice those who were guilty, regardless of persons, and who
did so." Russell, whose erratic course had precipitated a crisis
in 1854, was even more erratic in 1855. He spoke in Vienna as a
peacemaker and in London as a warmonger, and, when it be
came clear that he preferred his Vienna performance to that on
his own soil, he was totally discredited:

I went like a fairy plenipotentiary

To the town of Vienna, to settle the war,

But they ll not believe me then, they vow I ve deceived them,

And call me the friend of the great Russian Czar.

The Tories took the lead in moving a vote of censure on his
conduct, and, when Palmerston told them in defense of his old
rival that "they were making much ado about nothing," Sir
Edward Bulwer Lytton replied pertinently that "Much Ado
came next after The Comedy of Errors" Before Parliament
could pass a vote of censure on Russell, he resigned his special
position on July 13, 1855. Palmerston was now the only com
manding figure left in English politics, but he was still subject
to the close scrutiny of the Commons and the press. "The
country is in a peculiar temper and looks for victory," the
Illustrated London News had written a month or two before.
"Until that be achieved, it will be difficult for any stateman, or
set of statesmen, however great their genius, or pure their char
acters, to conduct its affairs with much profit or satisfaction.
Sebastopol must be taken, or discontent will grow into a dan
ger; and many things more precious than the existence of a
Ministry, or of a Parliament, will be called into question."

IV

It was in this period of political uncertainty that Roebuck s
select committee set to work to examine the origins of mis
management. The establishment and continued existence of the
committee marked an interesting innovationof a very tem
porary character in English government. The English parlia
mentary system has never, unlike the American system, relied
on committees to carry out its work. The supporters of a com
mittee of investigation might claim a precedent in the Wal-

471 Y

Victorian People

cheren Committee during the Napoleonic Wars, but in fact the
existence of an active tribunal of inquiry considering a wide
variety of administrative and political questions was something
new. Radicals always employed the select-committee technique
to explore specific questions, but this was the only occasion on
which a committee with such wide terms of reference investi
gated government as a whole. Roebuck, on one previous occa
sion in 1843, had tried to have such a committee appointed to
investigate the causes of a war in Afghanistan. On that occasion
he had referred to the war as "unjust and impolitic" and had
spoken of Lord Palmerston s "mischievous meddling and more
pernicious influence on our foreign policy. 1 In 1855 he
approved of the war and accepted Palmcrston, and he got his
committee because there was a general demand for it outside
Westminster.

Indeed, in many parts of the country there were local foreign
affairs committees attacking the whole conduct of "secret
diplomacy." The most important of them was in Newcastle,
where the members were proclaiming with satisfaction that
the "deluge seems to be at hand" and that "the time is ripe and
rotten for a change"; the Sheffield committee was almost as
important and was sufficiently strong to intimidate both Roe
buck and Hadfield. The Sheffield committee, while welcoming
the appointment of Roebuck s committee, wanted to go much
further and to set up "a Standing Committee of both Houses
of Parliament, to have a surveillance of foreign affairs, on the
principle of similar standing committees in the United States."

The influence of the local foreign affairs committees would
have been even stronger had they not split into factions, par
ticularly into two groups, one supporting David Urquhart, and
the other violently opposing him. Urquhart, by now a wild
and eccentric Radical, unbalanced and torn by ungovernable
passions, believed that Palmerston himself was a Russian spy,
accepting gold from the czar. He managed to persuade many
workingmen that this melodramatic thesis was tenable, but for
every convert he won he made several skeptics and several vio
lent opponents. Roebuck told the supporters of Urquhart in
Sheffield that he did not believe for one moment that Palmer-

{72Y

John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War

ston had designedly betrayed England, although he had made
many mistakes; for taking this point of view, Roebuck himself
was accused of complicity with the Russians by the Urquhart
group. "Lord Palmerston," they said, "has woven a spell,
against which no British politician has the talisman; the spell
is crime." Roebuck did not fear Urquhart. "That such a person
looks upon me with suspicion," he wrote to the press, "is, I
think, a circumstance rather in my favour."

The supporters of Urquhart were masters of innuendo and
smear, but they could not influence politics in Parliament, and
in Parliament Roebuck was as extreme a Radical as that institu
tion was capable of nurturing. For proposing his committee and
persisting in carrying out the investigations he had demanded,
he was subject to constant criticism from Whigs and Peelites.

All the difficulties involved in "government" by select com
mittee were pointed out by the Peelite former ministers before
the committee met. Graham asked whether it would be open or
secret. Either way there would be many problems to face. If
it were to be secret, the persons implicated by the evidence
would have no opportunity of defending themselves in public,
of examining the witnesses, or of rebutting false accusations. If
it were to be open, the evidence would be published each day
in the press and would be published in such sensational form
that morale would suffer and the winning of the war itself
would become more difficult. In any case there would be no
appeal from any member of the committee to the House until
the committee had presented its report, and this would afford
a serious threat both to personal liberty and to the constitution.
Roebuck had already referred to Lord Raglan, the commander-
in-chief, as "the prisoner in the dock." "I warn the House dis
tinctly," said Sir James Graham, "that it is delegating its
powers, unaccompanied by any check or control, to the
chance-medley of six out of eleven gentlemen, and that it may
thus involve the country in the most fatal consequences." He
added that he would have preferred an inquiry at the bar or,
if there had to be a select committee, the presence of a minis
ter of the Crown on it as a full-time member.

Graham s arguments were cogent, but they were characteris-

Victorian People

tically Peelite; they were tinged with an administrative rather
than with a political coloring. It had never been Graham s
forte to understand the movement of public opinion or to sym
pathize with public vituperation. The Peclites had drifted fur
ther and further away from the public since 1851, when they
had set themselves firmly against the rising tide of anti-Catho
lic prejudice. By 1855 no one really cared what they said; they
were on their way out of English politics as a separate group.
Little attention was paid to Gladstone s statement and in 1855
Gladstone was still a Peelite that the committee, not being a
committee of punishment or a committee of remedy, must
therefore, if it were anything at all, be a committee of govern
ment, taking away from the executive the most important of
its functions. Gladstone s reputation in the House was greater
than his reputation in the country, and at this time he was more
interested in the reform of the University of Oxford than in
the Crimea. This did not, however, stop the Sheffield Times
from dismissing him as one of the Russian party in England.

The House itself rejected the Peelite arguments and followed
the lead of lesser-known members like the Tory, Sir John
Pakington, who became a member of the committee, and
George F. Muntz, the bearded manufacturer from Birming
ham, who protested against arguing from precedent in a case
where there was no precedent. Palmerston himself, somewhat
cynically, accepted the committee on the grounds that, if he
resigned, there would be nobody left to take his place. The
possibility of a parliamentary solution of the difficulties of the
country would then have been exhausted, and the way would
have been open for the emergence of an institution more like a
French committee of public safety than a select committee of
Her Majesty s Faithful Commons. He realized that there might
be inconvenience in an inquiry, but, confronted with such a
strong body of opinion in favor, he thought that he had better
give in gracefully. Very properly he believed that there would
be a greater inconvenience still "in this country presenting the
spectacle of a Government in abeyance at a period so critical 7

Once Palmerston had accepted the committee, the debate on
whether it should be secret or not became more spirited. Pale-

114Y

John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War

ington and Roebuck, supported by most of the committee
members, preferred secrecy, for they felt that the difficulties
of the task of investigation beset them like rocks on every side.
Only Lord Seymour, the Whig member, who had done his best
to hold back public health reform a few years before, pre
ferred open to secret sessions. But Parliament as a whole was
less friendly to "a hole and corner" committee. "The House
loses its powers over the Committee if it be secret," Graham
said. "Witnesses will be more guarded in their statements, and
Members in their questions, if it be open." When he went on
to argue that a secret committee would be an inquisition un
worthy of a free and generous people, Disraeli accused him
of indulging in "the oratory of terror," but the alarm was not
merely a rhetorical flourish. Roebuck himself, seeing that the
House was seriously divided on the matter, showed sufficient
judgment to withdraw the request for secrecy. Common sense
triumphed over doctrine.

The open committee continued its sessions until June in an
atmosphere of great public excitement. The meetings were al
ways well attended, and a large crowd always gathered outside
seeldng admission. Only a small fraction of those wishing to
attend could be accommodated in the space allotted to the pub
lic. The evidence was published each day and could be fol
lowed by readers of the newspapers in all parts of the country.

Most of the witnesses were willing to give full and explicit
evidence and showed conclusively that the blame for misman
agement fell not upon individuals but on the system for which
both political parties and Parliament were responsible. The most
distinguished witness, the Duke of Cambridge, stated in his
evidence that, at the very moment when a cabinet minister
was assuring the House that the number of men fit for duty
was thirty thousand, the real number was only twelve thou
sand, and that the Times had been right in exposing the defi
ciencies of food, medical equipment, and clothing. It soon
became clear that Aberdeen and his ministers, including New
castle, had been unjustly blamed for offenses of which they
were innocent; the causes of administrative confusion lay
buried in the whole structure of government, not in the in-

Victorian People

competence of particular people. "I felt corruption round
about me; 1 wrote Roebuck, "but I could not lay my hand
upon it."

As the committee moved toward such a conclusion, extreme
Radicals became more active in demanding army reform and
administrative reform. The system in the army of promotion
by purchase was so vigorously condemned that the reforms of
1871 would have been carried out in 1855 or 1856 if the war had
continued. One of the leading supporters of army reform was
Viscount Goderich, the son of a former prime minister and
an advanced Liberal who supported co-operative workshops
and even trade-union strike funds. Merit alone should be the
test of a commission, he claimed. If improvements were intro
duced and young sergeants were allowed to become subalterns,
an intelligent class would enter the army, De Lacy Evans, an
army officer himself and an early Russophobe, told stories of
Peninsula veterans still rotting as lieutenants while aristocratic
newcomers were pushed straight to the top. The Duke of
Wellington, he said, had believed that the maintenance of an
aristocracy was more important than the maintenance of an
efficient army. "Those who have more friends get up to the
higher ranks of the Army; but if there is a question of selecting
someone for the command of a corps or of an army, the answer
is *Qh! such a man is not of such a class and Don t talk to
us of him. "

It was clear that inherited notions of hierarchy and status
were breaking down under the impact of unsuccessful war,
but Parliament as a whole was not anxious to change the system
too radically. The Tories helped Palmerston to defeat Goder-
ich s proposals by 158 votes to 114. They were as strongly
opposed as was Palmerston to the "radicalization" of the army,
for many of their own members were army officers. They
produced curiously modern-looking arguments to defend their
point of view, such as that former rankers would find things
more difficult in the officers mess or that an army without so
cial cement would not be able to maintain discipline. There was
also one final argument which was not much used in public

John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War

that to touch the army certainly meant friction with the
Crown.

The most important consequence of the defeat of Goderich s
motion was the conversion of the demand for army reform into
a more general demand for administrative reform, culminating
in a bill for the opening of the civil service to competitive ex
amination. Many administrative reform associations were set
up in the country in cities like Birmingham and Manchester,
designed "to destroy the aristocratic monopoly of power and
place in the Civil Service. They found ammunition in the
famous Report on the Organization of the Civil Service, which
was prepared by Sir Charles Trevelyan and Sir Stafford North-
cote and which stated that admission to the civil service was
eagerly sought for, but mainly by the unambitious, the indolent,
and the incapable. "Those whose abilities do not warrant an
expectation that they will succeed in the open professions . . .
and those whom indolence of temperament or physical infirm
ity unfit for active exertions, are placed in the Civil Service,
where they may obtain an honourable livelihood with no labour
and little risk." Reformers contrasted the hard work, the care
ful attention to duty, and the reserves of energy and ability of
the industrial manufacturing classes with the sloth and incom
petence of the departments. The London Administrative Re
form Association, which staged great demonstrations in Drury
Lane, had Samuel Morley, the great hosiery manufacturer, as
its president and Charles Dickens, then associated with the
Daily News, as one of its speakers. The nonconformist Morley
had been a wealthy backer of the Anti-Corn Law League and
of the disestablishment of the Church of England; Dickens had
always been an administrative reformer, and it was he who
went on to create the picture of the "Circumlocution Office"
and the aristocratic breed of Titus Barnacles inhabiting it.

There were many members of Parliament who sympathized
with the demand for administrative reform as businessmen
rather than as politicians. Samuel Laing, for instance, con
trasted private concerns, where merit was the mainspring, with
government offices, where merit passed unnoticed. The reason
why the system was wrong was the mediocrity of the .people

Victorian People

who were managing It. Mediocrity succumbed to system; only
ability could dominate it. The Tories joined with the Radicals
in Parliament on this issue, and both EHenborough and Derby
agreed that, unless there had been good grounds for adminis
trative reform, men of high mercantile character would never
have plunged into such keen discussions on such a subject. But
the chief supporters of administrative reform were Radical
politicians, particularly Layard, and it was he who introduced
the question in the House of Commons in June, 1855.

The debate on his motion that the House viewed with con
cern the sacrifice of merit and efficiency to party and family
influences and to blind adherence to routine was a most in
teresting one. Layard claimed that the government was a closed
monopoly of a few families, that the army was a stronghold of
favoritism, that the consular and diplomatic services were pri
vate preserves of a small group of people, and that the civil serv
ice needed to be opened to competitive examination. On the
last point he was strongly supported by Gladstone, who de
manded the opening-up of all the departments. Palmerston
showed himself very skeptical. Examinations must not be
trusted too far, nor would throwing them open to all entrants
always secure first-rate men. The brightest and most promising
young men would always be attracted to more lucrative pro
fessions.

Two of the most interesting speeches in the debate were
made by the Tory, Sir Edward Buhver Lytton, and by the In
dependent, Henry Drummond. Both enjoyed the oratorical
opportunities of the war to the full, Lytton claimed that it was
the Prime Minister who had made this question the subject of a
popular platform agitation by the injudiciousness of his resist
ance and the levity of his acquiescence and by his scattering
of pleasant jokes and flowery epigrams. Though he did not
identify himself with Layard s attack on party or the social
system, he did condemn the combination of families and priv
ileged houses "with which the Whig party had chilled the en
thusiasm and energy of the people," Drummond, who had sup
ported the setting-up of Roebuck s select committee, was far
more outspokenly independent in his views. He asked whether

lisy

John Arthur Roetmck and the Crimean War

it was true that the middle classes were better or more "pure"
administrators than the aristocracy. They had not even suc
ceeded in draining the great cities in which they lived. "See
what a precious mess they have made at Manchester. Filled as
that town was with Radicals and philosophers, they could not
drain it. And yet there was hardly a town in the kingdom which
could be more easily drained; for it stands upon two hills and
any man of ordinary common sense would have at once said,
Cut a ditch from the top to the bottom and so drain it. "
Drummond added that the cry for administrative reform was
a delusive cry and that the dream of replacing all those who had
ever been concerned in the government of a country by ship-
brokers, stockbrokers, and railway directors could only lead
to disaster. Drummond s sarcasm was extremely effective, and
Layard s resolutions were defeated by 359 votes to 46.

The matter was not shelved, however, and remained impor
tant until the end of the war. There was a further debate in
July in which the opponents of competitive examinations were
less successful than they had been a few weeks previously.
Gladstone contended that the civil service system as it existed
at the moment not only did not provide the country with the
best men for the job but created a vast mass of collateral evils
connected with the dispensation of patronage, which kept a
large class of men in a state of expectancy, wasting their lives
in solicitation. At the end of this debate even Palmerston ad
mitted that competition might be usefully introduced in some
spheres of the administration.

While these parliamentary debates on the system of govern
ment were continuing and public excitement remained high,
Roebuck s committee was still in session, influenced naturally
by the general temper of Commons and people but unable to
find convenient scapegoats. On June 18, 1855, the committee
presented its report.

It was not so damning a document as it might have been, for
Roebuck s draft was turned down and a far more gentle docu
ment by Seymour accepted in its place. It found that insuf
ficient care had been taken in looking after the welfare of the
soldiers in the Crimea and that particular departments, especial-

Victorian People

\y transport, had been grossly mismanaged; but it exonerated
the Duke of Newcastle, who had been the chief target of crit
icism in January. It was only on the casting vote of Roebuck
that the committee accepted the sentences containing its most
decisive denunciation "that the sufferings of the army mainly
resulted from the circumstances under which the expedition to
the Crimea was undertaken and executed. The Administration
\vhich ordered that expedition had no adequate information as
to the armament of the forces in the Crimea. They were not
acquainted with the strength of the fortresses to be attacked
nor with the resources of the country to be invaded. They
hoped and expected the expedition to be immediately success
ful, and, as they did not foresee the probability of a protracted
struggle, they made no preparation for a winter campaign. . . ,
Your Committee will now close their report w f kh a hope that
every British army may in future display the valour which this
noble army has displayed, and that none may hereafter be ex
posed to such sufferings as have been recorded in these pages."

Some members of the committee and most members of the
House would have been content to let the inquiry terminate
with the publication of the report, but Roebuck Insisted on
moving a motion in July, 1855, visiting "with severe reprehen
sion every member of that Cabinet whose counsels led to such
disastrous results." The moment seemed propitious for a sharp
bout of political excitement, for, between the publication of
the report and the debate on Roebuck s motion, Russell had re
signed for the second time, "shaking the confidence of the
world in the whole of British political stability."

But it soon became clear that the House on this occasion was
less disposed to support Roebuck than it had been in January.
His short speech was far less effective than his very short speech
earlier, which he had been compelled to cut because of illness.
Simply reading out the motion was, as Disraeli remarked, the
most effective piece of rhetoric in January. By July members
felt that Roebuck was flogging a dead horse in attacking Aber
deen s defunct cabinet. There was little support for impeach
ing Lord Aberdeen, and, although Roebuck presented petitions
from Birmingham and Bradford, praying that Aberdeen s minis-

1*0 }>

John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War

ters might be impeached, he did not press the point. Lord
Palmerston and half his cabinet would have been compelled to
resign if the motion had been carried, and only very few mem
bers of Parliament in July, 1855, were prepared to contemplate
another change of government.

Many members of Parliament in the course of the debate on
Roebuck s motion expressed dislike of Roebuck s "acrimoni
ous and vindictive personality." His spell of influence had been
broken. "He evidently delights in casting charges upon every
body," said Russell, "and indulging that abundant vituperation
which is evident in his nature." "His speeches," he went on,
"began with a strong exordium and ended with an admirable
peroration, but lacked proof or substance in the middle. . . .
These are the beak and talons of the bird of prey, but the in
side is nothing but straw." In any case, "was it prudent to exag
gerate the difficulties of a constitutional government by severity
of scrutiny and too great animadversion upon failures?"

John Bright dealt very effectively with Russell, and it was
ironical that on this occasion he was one of Roebuck s warmest
supporters; the peace Radical and the war Radical once again
joined hands. But neither of them was fully alert to the change
of mood. Bright was regretting that Lord Derby had not taken
office, and Roebuck was looking beyond Westminster to Shef
field; but it was Palmerston who was beginning at last to estab
lish a position of complete ascendancy. He attacked Roebuck
for trying to persaude the House to pass a vote of censure upon
the existing government on account of the transactions of a
government which no longer existed, but he had a far stronger
argument which looked to the future rather than to the past.
The army had been in a bad condition in December, 1854, but
it was in a good condition in July, 1855. Indeed, it was in as fit
a condition as any army that had ever existed. Victory was
round the corner. Why spend time brooding on history?

Roebuck s motion was not formally rejected but shelved.
General Peel, a member of the committee and a brother of Sir
Robert, moved the previous question and carried the House
by 284 votes to 182. Government by select committee had
come to an end.

[ 81 Y

Victoria?! People

Sheffield, however, and the large industrial cities stood firm
behind Roebuck. When one writer dared to call him a "failure
in public life," the Sheffield Times wrote: "If the honest ad
vocacy of innumerable measures intended for the welfare of
the people at large . . . constitutes a "failure," then perish from
the scroll of immortality all the Howards and Hampdens that
glorify humanity."

V

The summer and autumn of 1855 saw a further strengthening
of Palmerston s position. June was a hot and feverish month,
with three successive days of rioting by London mobs in Hyde
Park to add to the excitement; yet the rioters were demon
strating not against the government or its military policy but
against a private member s proposal Lord Robert Grosvenor s
bill to put down Sunday trading in the capital. Fussy Sabbatari
anism and the threat to personal liberty of eating and drinking
in London seemed a more lively menace in the summer of 1 855
than crypto-Russians at court or in Parliament.

Party warfare was still being carried on at Westminster with
what Whigs described as "recklessness of consequences" and
their opponents as "unceasing vigilance," but Palmcrston was
beginning to stand out in the Commons as "a Triton among
the minnows." As the military situation improved, he began to
receive a large share of the credit for winning the war. The
more conservative sections of the middle classes were beginning
to abandon their more violent language, to lose some of their
strident radicalism, and to look with suspicion on new extreme
Radical organizations such as the State Reform Association,
which dispensed with the guinea subscription of the Adminis
trative Reform Association and included manhood suffrage
and universal education in its program as well as reform of
government departments. It seemed as though the political
volcano which had heaved and vomited forth its lava through
out the early months of 1855 was at last becoming dormant or,
at any rate, that the damage it brought was being checked. But
there was to be one final eruption. In September news of the
capture of Sebastopol reached London by telegraph. The great

John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War

military objective, which had been expected to fall during the
first few weeks of the war, was at last in allied hands.

Far from improving the domestic situation, the fall of Sebas-
topol complicated it. There was relief at the news, but the
important question of whether to go on with the war or not
was now forced to the forefront. Many members of Parliament
wanted peace, and, more important, so did the French. Indeed,
John Bright at this stage began to turn to Napoleon III as the
hope of the future, while the Tories were divided and un
certain.

Palmerston himself was anxious to carry on the war to the
point of resounding victory: Sebastopol had fallen largely as a
result of a French and not an English assault, and England
needed a victory of its own if it were to emerge from the war
with its national pride satisfied. The militant Radicals went
even further, still holding to the view that only the continua
tion of the war "would force upon the Government the neces
sity of making those changes in our naval and military systems
which alone can give real effect to the valour of our soldiers
and sailors and enable us to reconquer the prestige which we
have lost, so that we may once again become a truly great and
independent power instead of disgracefully hanging on to the
coattails of the usurper of France." The wheel was turning
full circle. Czar Nicholas had died in March, 1855: now, even
before the fighting ended, the emperor of France was begin
ning to assume the more familiar features of a national enemy.
And the dreams of freedom for the down-trampled nationalities
of Italy, Hungary, and Poland were still alive. "If peace is to
be really preserved," wrote the Sheffield Times, "it must be
placed on some new basis. The progress of civilization is al
together incompatible with the preponderance of two or three
despotisms on the Continent of Europe, always capable of dis
turbing the tranquillity."

Palmerston found it impossible, however, to continue the war
without the support of the French, and, after many secret
negotiations, peace talks began in Paris in February, 1856. The
Treaty of Paris was signed at the end of March. There was no
public enthusiasm; the settlement was generally regarded as "a

Victorian People

botchcry and a sham, 77 and the heralds who proclaimed it were
hissed at Temple Bar.

In Sheffield, when the proclamation of peace was announced,
it met with "the very reverse of a hearty response," There were
hisses from the crowd, and "the most uncomplimentary terms
\verc everywhere exchanged by spectators, whom curiosity had
attracted to the route as the procession passed them." The
windows of the embassies in London were brilliantly lit for
the occasion, but the sober citizens of Sheffield were advised
by the Sheffield and Rothcrhwn Independent that the peace
was not glorious enough or the prospect of its continuation so
sure "as to make it wise to spend our time in processions or our
money in gas lights."

The war had not lasted long enough to provide a complete
inoculation against exuberant nationalism. Even though the
leaders of the Manchester School were trying to persuade the
working classes that the high price of corn in 1856 was the re
sult of the continuation of hostilities, "dear bread" did not be
come an antiwar slogan. Rather the public provisions societies,
which were set up in some of the large towns like Birmingham,
were anxious to rally opinion to enthusiasm for a continuation
of the fighting, "There is no pretence of having gained any
thing," wrote another Sheffield newspaper; "the cry is simply
Peace as two years ago it was War. A maniac nation has ex
changed its hatchet for a halter." Nothing had been gained
either by the fighting or by the peace, "We are going to close
a discreditable war by an inglorious peace," wrote Richard
Monckton Milnes; "we shall have 10 p.c. income tax and p.c.
benefit to mankind."

Once peace had been signed, however, there was a sharp de
cline in Radical vigor, and Palmerston more and more won the
support of public opinion. In 1856 the Queen, while assuring
Clarendon, the British representative at the peace talks, that
the settlement was due "to him alone," conferred on the Prime
Minister the first garter bestowed on a member of the House
of Commons since the time of Castlereagh. A year later the
public showed its appreciation-an appreciation Palmerston
greatly preferredby overwhelmingly supporting him in the

John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War

general election. The election was forced by a coalition of all
his opponents in Parliament Russell, Gladstone, Disraeli,
Graham, the Cobdenite Milner-Gibson, and Roebuck. The
issue was Palmerston s "bellicose" handling of an incident at
Canton in China, and Palmerston, who was accused by his
enemies of bellicosity, boldly appealed to the electorate over
the heads of all his opponents. He demanded a plebiscite rather
than an election and gained a triumph "greater than that of any
minister since 1832," as great indeed as any of Napoleon Ill s
triumphs across the channel. The leaders of the Manchester
School were routed, the Peelites were broken up as a group,
and the Prime Minister, who had appealed from a factious
Parliament to a united nation, could claim that he, not Roebuck,
had now become the Tribune of the People.

Roebuck was one of the few of his opponents who did not
lose his seat. Sheffield held firm and returned both him and Had-
field at the top of the poll. A great public meeting offered him
a handsome testimonal and a gift of eleven hundred guineas
collected by subscription. His services during the war were ex
tolled as a lesson for posterity. "The example of his Com
mittee," one of the organizers of the testimonal claimed, "will
be a standing terror for years to come to careless administra
tors. It shook even Lord Palmerston into seriousness." But it
did not keep Palmerston serious for very long; he was one of
the first subscribers to the fund collected for Roebuck. Indeed,
he continued to need men like Roebuck in the years after
1857 to give him substantial independent backing, for he al
ways preferred Radical enthusiasm for foreign questions to
Radical demands for reform at home.

Roebuck became more interested in foreign affairs the older
he got and less and less of a radical reformer. He was not
alone in following this line of development. No other politician
ever showed his zest for incompatible foreign causes, but many
were increasingly indifferent to big questions of reform. The
mood was changing after 1857, and, as it changed, the nature of
Palmerston s appeal to the public altered. When peace was
signed in 1856, Reynold s News complained that "a great
nation" had been "ruled, thwarted, flouted, plundered and dis-

Victorian People

honoured" by Palnierston, "a man not naturally of a capacity
superior to the average churchwarden." By 185S many English
men were showing that they preferred average churchwardens
to eccentric demagogues. The mood of national exuberance
had passed. The music of the guns was fading into the back
ground, and the stage was set for the England of Bagehot and
Trollopc.

IV

There never has been a structure in English political
society: every man has not walked by the light of his
own eyes: the less instructed have not deemed them
selves the equals of the more instructed: the many have
subordinated their judgment to that of the few. They
have not done so blindly, -for there has always been a
spirit of discussion in the air; still they have done so
opinions have always settled down from the higher
classes to the lower; and in that manner, wherever the
nation has been called on to decide, a decision that is
really national has been -found.

WALTER BAGEHOT
I

Once the Crimean War was over, the English people could
settle down without too many anxieties to live through the
great mid- Victorian peace. "Rest and be thankful" The two
writers who most surely described the essentials of life in the
late fifties and sixties were Trollope and Bagehot. Indeed, two
of the labels which have most frequently been attached by tidy-
minded historians to the middle years of the century have
been "the age of Bagehot" and "the age of Trollope." The bril
liant diagnosis of Bagehot s English Constitution and the steady
observation displayed in the forty-seven novels of Trollope
point to a common set of interpretations and conclusions. Both
writers described the same superficially secure and comfort
able England; for both of them young England had passed into
the world of dream and Chartism into the world of nightmare.

487}

Victorian People

The Crimean War left only lingering memories, and they were
memories of what happened at Westminster rather than what
happened at Sebastopol. The fire of the forties had burned out.
So too had much of the social fervor of the Great Exhibition
and the social criticism of the middle fifties. As far as politics
were concerned, "a sense of satisfaction permeates the country,
because most of the country feels it has got the precise thing
which suits it."

Neither Bagchot nor Trollope would have chosen the par
ticular labels attached by their enthusiastic disciples. For both,
the central political figure of their time was Palmerston, and
the age they were describing was "the age of Palmerston."
Palmerston had survived the gloomy prophecy of the Queen
in 1851 and the popular assaults of the enraged Radicals of
1855 and 1856; he even survived the disintegration of his own
triumphant majority of 1857. From 1859 to 1865 he was Prime
Minister of a powerful coalition of Whigs, cx-Peclites, and
Radicals, the ministry from which the Gladstoninn Liberal party
was formed. Yet Palmerston in these years relied on accumu
lated experience rather than on anticipation of the future. He
carried forward into the sixties aristocratic grace and ripe ex
perience, and one of his nicknames was "Lord Evergreen," "His
older popularity," wrote Argyll, "was entirely founded on for
eign affairs, in which the British public are rather fond of
games of bluff. But now, when in the multifarious transactions
of his office as Prime Minister his moderation and good temper
came to be often felt, he was becoming more and more a uni
versal favourite,"

Characteristically, Trollope and Bagchot did not pitch Palm-
crston s claims too high. They did not consider him a hero
as much as a symbol. Bagchot found the secret of his success
in the fact that, though he was not a common man, a common
man might have been cut out of him. "He had in him all that
a common man has and something more." Trollope, who wrote
a little-known biography of Palmerston which appeared in
1882, said similarly that "he was by no means a man of genius
and was possessed of not more than ordinary gifts of talent. . . ,
He was a man who from the first was determined to do the

^ 88

Trollope and Bagehot

best with himself; and he did it with a healthy energy, never
despairing, never expecting too much, never being in a hurry,
but always ready to seize the good thing when it came." Palm-
erston was supreme precisely because he never expected too
much. "He was a statesman for the moment. Whatever was not
wanted now, whatever was not practicable now, he drove
quite out of his mind." He was more interested, in fact, in his
own age than in the past or the future.

The normal politics which both Bagehot and Trollope de
scribed were the politics of the period of Palmerston s ascend
ancy. From 1850 to 1867 fortune favored the politician who
left rapid improvement alone; so too did the economic situa
tion, which allowed for the minimum interference by govern
ment. It was the business of politics not to define political issues
but to provide honest leadership and sound administration. In
Trollope s The Prime Minister the Duke of Omnium is dis
turbed when the restless leader of the Commons suggests that
the government might be well advised to find a policy for the
new session. He is a Treasury official and not a politician; like
his eighteenth-century predecessor, he is immersed in the in
trigues of influence and place rather than in programs or poli
cies. It soon becomes clear, however, that Sir Orlando Drought
has no policy to propound, save a mild increase in armaments,
to which people would not bother to object. Sir Orlando him
self goes on to confirm that the main work of Parliament is
not to legislate but to raise supplies. "When that has been done
with ease . . . Ministers are very glad to get rid of the Parlia
ment. . . . To get a session over and done with is an achieve
ment and delight." Bagehot presented the same picture. The
legislative aspect of the work of Parliament came not first but
third in normal times, subordinate in importance to the execu
tive management of the state and the political education its
debates provided for the whole nation. While the governments
were anxious to avoid contentious legislation, the members of
the House of Commons were loath to seek frequent dissolu
tions. Elections were expensive and violent, and too regular
contact with constituents was demoralizing. And so the polit
ically experienced Palmerston, who had learned how to lull

{ 89 Y

Victorian People

rather than to arouse the minds of his followers, became the
dominating figure in the life of his age.

"Dear old Brock," says one of Trollopc s characters, "he was
the very model of an English statesman. He loved his country
dearly, and wished her to be, as he believed her to be, first
among nations. But he had no belief in perpetuating her great
ness by any grand improvements. Let things take their way
naturally, with a slight direction hither or thither as things
might require. That was his method of ruling. . . . He never
broke his heart because he could not carry this or that reform.
What would have hurt him would have been to be worsted in
personal conflict. But he could always hold his own, and he
was always happy. Your man with a thin skin, a vehement
ambition, a scrupulous conscience, and a sanguine desire for
rapid improvement, is never a happy and seldom a fortunate,
politician."

Fortune is usually more fickle in its dealings with politicians
than Trollope suggested, but it was consistent enough in the
middle years of the century. Scrupulous consciences operated
in private rather than in public. They called upon the active
service of the voluntary body rather than the state. Sanguine
desires for rapid improvement were at best tinged with expedi
ency. The great cry of parliamentary reform, for instance,
which had divided England in the early nineteenth century,
was kept alive in these years, as John Bright once suggested, by
its enemies as much as its friends. Its survival as an issue be
tween 1852 and 1865 is best explained in terms of a delicately
balanced situation within the House of Commons rather than
in terms of sustained pressure from outside or of the persistent
attraction of a fundamental theory. The reform bills of minis
ters were less triumphant vindications of principle than useful
political maneuvers which had the special advantage of being
very unlikely to come off. "Lord Robert Grosvenor s Bill
against Sunday trading," wrote one contented Conservative,
"created five times more popular agitation and excitement than
all the Reform measures united." Another Conservative, more
critical and less contented, complained that "in politics, at least,
the old antithesis of principle and expediency is absolutely for-

90

Trolhpe and Bagehot

gotten. Expediency is the only principle to which allegiance
is paid."

Some writers claimed that the dominion of expediency had
begun with Peel s acceptance of free trade in 1846 against the
wishes of a substantial section of his own party. Trollope sug
gested this in a bitter aside in The Three Clerks. Other writers
claimed that it was not the betrayal of Peel but his death that
had taken the backbone out of English politics. Whatever the
cause, party fragmentation and social compromise maintained
politics in a state of truce, of arrested development. Even dur
ing Palmerston s ministry of 1859-65, which prepared the way
for the emergence of the Liberal party, the American Henry
Adams could write: "Never had the British mind shown itself
so decousu, so unravelled, at sea, floundering in every sort of
historical shipwreck." Or, as Gladstone exclaimed in 1860: "We
live in anti-reforming times. All improvements have to be
urged in apologetic, almost supplicating terms." It was only
after the death of Palmerston and the passing of the Reform
Bill of 1867, which could be regarded either as the crowning
triumph of expediency or as the belated victory of principle,
that politics took a new turn.

II

Both Bagehot and Trollope recognized that the peculiar
characteristics of the English constitution in the middle years
of the century depended upon a social as well as a political bal
ance. The two main features of the social balance, as Bagehot
stressed, were "old deference" and the appeal of the "dignified
parts" of the constitution, "parts, that is, retained not for in
trinsic use, but from their imaginative attraction upon an un
cultured and rude population." Deference and dignity were
safeguards of parliamentary government in a society in which
"primitive barbarism lay as a recognized basis to acquired
civilization."

Deference meant unthinking and habitual respect for social
superiors. Even during the storms of the Crimean War, when
urban radicalism battered against the aristocratic system of
government, Gladstone had claimed that, "if this country is

i 91 Y

Victorian People

more aristocratic . , . than It ought to be, It is not owing to any
legal privileges possessed by the aristocracy, nor is it owing
to any exclusive legislation; but it is owing partly perhaps to the
strong prejudices in favour of the aristocracy which pervade
all ranks and classes of the community," In the small towns and
villages the challenge of the Crimean War had been far less
real. Gladstone s words would have passed as a platitude in a
cathedral close, a senior common room of a college, or a coun
try house. They became one of the most popular platitudes of
the late fifties and sixties. On the eve of the second Reform
Bill even those writers favorable to reform had to admit that,
although the prestige of the aristocracy was "growled at" oc
casionally, it was "on the whole conceded, and even, it must
be owned, secretly liked by the country at large."

Dignity was equally important. It was the dignity of the
constitution which impressed the public more than its efficien
cy or inefficiency. The press, particularly the Times, might in
fluence the reading public, but the ceremonial and theatrical
elements in government impressed the unreading multitude.
"That which is mystic in its claims; that which is occult in its
mode of action, that which is brilliant to the eye; that which
is seen vividly for a moment, and then is seen no more; that
which is hidden and unhidden; that which is specious, and yet
interesting, palpable in its seeming, and yet professing to be
more than palpable in its results; this, howsoever its form
may change, or however we may define it or describe it, is the
sort of thing the only sort which yet conies home to the mass
of men." Dignity and loyalty as well as deference lay at the
heart of the mid-Victorian constitution.

Deference and dignity were more than safeguards of social
peace and political tranquillity; they were necessary conditions.
"A deferential community, even though its lowest classes are
not intelligent, is far more suited to a cabinet government than
any other kind of democratic country, because it is more suited
to political excellence. The highest classes can rule in it; and the
highest classes must, as such, have more political ability than
the lower classes, . . A country of respectful poor, though far
less happy than where there are no poor to be respectful, is

Trollops and Bagehot

nevertheless far more fitted to the best government. You can
use the best classes of the respectful country; you can only use
the worst where every man thinks he is as good as every other."
The qualification "though far less happy" provides the key to
the social philosophy of Bagehot; whereas the Utilitarian Jere
my Bentham had taken "the greatest happiness of the greatest
number" as the unchallengeable aim of government, Bagehot
considered happiness neither as a precondition nor as a prior
objective of "the best government." The "best government"
was that based on discussion; it was most effectively managed
not by the many but by "a select few," men who had enjoyed
"a life of leisure, a long culture, a varied experience, an existence
by which the judgment is incessantly exercized and by which
it may be incessantly improved."

The "select few" were the members of Parliament. Although
some of them were "the finest brute votes in Europe," they
were prepared for the most part to debate wisely and above all
to choose responsible members of the cabinet. They were never
eager "to press the tenets of their party to impossible conclu
sions." Together, they made up "a deliberate assembly of mod
erate and judicious men." They chose rulers "as we wish rulers
to be chosen. If they did not, in a speaking and writing age, we
should soon know."

Trollope accepted the social presuppositions of Bagehot and
explored them very fully in his novels. A more convincing im
pression of what everyday life was like in England in the
middle Victorian years can be gathered from their pages than
from any other source. It is true that Trollope did not describe
the turbulent industrial North, but he was a faithful reporter of
the shires, the small boroughs, and the metropolis. Against a so
cial background which he understood instinctively, he posed
the problems and dilemmas of his individual characters. Dis
trustful, even cynical, about society, he was curious and opti
mistically sympathetic about individual people. In his distaste
for theory and missionizing, he reflected his age; indeed, there is
no more shrewd judge of Victorian people. At a time when it
was fashionable to decry his achievements, James Bryce wrote
(1904) that, even though it would be impossible to predict that

Victorian People

he would be read in fifty years, \vhoever did read him would
catch the flavor of his age more satisfactorily than anywhere
else.

Trollopc maintained with no hesitation whatever that Bage-
hot s "select few" should always be "gentlemen," He was very
sensitive on this point and labored it both in his novels and in
his Autobiography. "He would be defied to define the term
gentleman and would fail should he attempt. But he would
know what he meant, and so very probably, would they who
defied him."

Both Bagehot, the essayist, and Trollope, the novelist, stressed
the simple contrast between the many and the few, the elite
and the mob. At one end of the scale were the "coarse, dull,
contracted multitude," who existed chiefly to serve and minis
ter to the middle ranks of society and the upper classes. Trol-
lope s poor have a language of their own a very stilted lan
guagebut little independent life; in so far as they have aspira
tions of their own, they make themselves ridiculous, as does
Mr. Bunce in Phineas Fhm. Bagehot believed that "the charac
ter of the poor is an unfit topic for continuous art" and attacked
Dickens poor people because they were "poor talkers and poor
livers, and in all ways poor people to read about. . . . Mean
manners and mean vices are unfit for prolonged delineation;
the everyday pressure of narrow necessities is too petty a pain
and too anxious a reality to be dwelt upon,"

A lack of deep sympathy with the poor and a failure to per
ceive the continued existence of a social problem of poverty
are common to both Trollope and Bagehot. Neither of them
knew much of the poor, except the servant and retainer class,
or cared for "the enthusiasm of humanity"; both believed that
any transfer of political power to the poor would mean "the
supremacy of ignorance over instruction and of numbers over
knowledge." It was Bagehot who coined the perfect Trollopian
phrase that "a fulcrum and a position in the world ... is quite
necessary to comfort in England-"

Trollope was the more successful of the two writers in pass
ing from the simple contrast between the many and the few to
a more detailed exploration of the gradations, the boundaries,

Trollope and Bagebot

and the no man s lands which separated them. Between the
"multitude" and the select group of the socially secure there
are the lower ranks of the middle classes, almost as ridiculous
as the poor; in attempting to meddle with politics, they do not
seek the rainbow s end but rather get cluttered up in their
drawing-room parlors. Like Mr. Tappitt in Rachel Ray, they
are trapped into a series of perpetual scrapes and finally have to
console themselves that political activity "is just what gentle
folks is fit for when they re past their regular work." It is only
a few members of the middle classes who manage to rise honest
ly above the level of their station and mix freely with the
squirearchy in a world of politics, which did not ask too many
questions, provided that one was a gentleman. Although the
classes were not separated by high walls of caste, to be accepted
as a gentleman was by no means easy, as Trollope himself
found out.

While the world described by both Bagehot and Trollope
seems at first sight to be surprisingly static, it contained within
itself seeds of change which compelled both writers to qualify
their picture of a society divided between the many and the
few. But it was changes in the distribution of wealth rather than
changes in legislation or social and political theory which were
challenging the existing basis of the constitution. There was a
distant but clearly apprehended danger of a new working-class
hegemony, of an attempt to build a paradise for the poor; but
there was a more immediate danger of government being un
dermined by plutocracy. Bagehot defended the deference
structure of English society because it saved the country not
only from the rule of the mob but also from the rule of wealth,
"the religion of gold"; but he saw clearly that in the 1860 s the
kingdom of wealth was daily extending its boundaries with
alarming rapidity and challenging traditional social structure.
"Every day our companies, our railways, our debentures and
our shares, tend more and more to multiply these surroundings
of the aristocracy and in time they will hide it."

Trollope went further along the path of criticism than the
author of Lombard Street. For Trollope the world of wealth
was completely dissociated from both the world of land and

Victorim People

the world of industry; it was concerned not with the creation
of valuable real capital in the form of machinery or buildings
but with senseless speculation, dangerous bubbles, and "the
infamous trade of stock-jobbing." In its intrusions into politics
it destroyed old values without suggesting new ones; it subtly
insinuated itself into the old aristocracy as well as into the new
business community. In all Trollope s novels the stock-pusher
often a Jew is a conventional villain, leading the simple and
the frail down the slippery slopes of temptation. The slopes
are considered so slippery that Trollope often takes as his text,
both in the Autobiography and in many of the novels, the
phrase facilh desccnms Averni ("Easy is the descent into
Hell"). Many men, like Alaric Tudor in The Three Clerks,
could persuade themselves that they were rising in the world
through speculation when all the time they were on the verge
of destruction. "What if a man be going down, down to
Tophct, and yet think all the while he is scaling the walls of
heaven?"

This was indeed a pertinent question in mid-Victorian
England. The social bases of the constitutional stability of the
age of Palmerston often appeared to be undermined by danger
ous patches of shifting sands. The expansion of the world of
wealth was making it difficult to distinguish between fortune-
hunting and real industry, between social aspiration and legiti
mate self-help, even between "gentlemen" and "cads/

All Trollope s themes revolve around the ease of individual
advancement in a fluid society and the much greater ease of
individual disaster. Integrity appears as a rare gift rather than
as a common denominator of action. The Way We Live Now,
which is usually considered apart from the rest of his novels, is
a bitter attack on the social shams of his day. Influenced by
Delane, who was writing along the same lines in the Times,
Trollope spared no one, rich or poor, aristocrat or bourgeois,
landlord or financier. What Michael Sadleir calls "the clash
between conventional poise and secret catastrophe" is always
stressed as a universal phenomenon.

Society revolves around Melmotte, a financial magnate who
becomes a social potentate and a political aspirant merely be-

Trollop e and Bagehot

cause he is rich and can make others rich too. Yet, even at the
height of his power, in his day of glory, when he recognized
that he must either "domineer over dukes or else go to the
wall," there was doubt as to whether he was an enormous
swindler or a Napoleon of wealth, the titan not only of England
but also the whole world. "As the great man was praised, so
also was he abused. As he was a demigod to some, so was he a
fiend to others." Until the whole tremendous structure of illu
sion crashed, almost the whole of society, young and old,
seemed to cry aloud that "there was but one virtue in the
world, commercial enterpriseand that Melmotte was its
prophet."

The bitter satire of this remarkable novel shows how keenly
Trollope, for all the blanket of dulness in many of his other
novels, felt the sense of danger in his own society. Like Bagehot,
he believed that "the first duty of society is the preservation of
society," but he could never bring himself to appreciate Bage-
hot s optimistic opinion that the expansion of the world of
wealth was up to a point worth while, even though it let in "a
dirty crowd of little men," because it prevented England from
becoming "sleepy." Unlike Bagehot, he cared little for the
analogy between science and politics and the glib consolation
that "the rough and vulgar structure of English commerce is
the secret of its life; for it contains the propensity to variation/
which, in the social as in the animal kingdom, is the principle of
progress." For Trollope it was the impact of society and poli
tics on personality and on personal notions of self-interest which
was of fundamental importance, and not a general law of social
progress. He could find little consolation in a Darwinian notion
of the survival of the fittest or of the unfolding evolution of
society as a whole.

There was a second pertinent question in mid- Victorian
England which was as important as the first. How could indi
vidual advancement in society advancement of any kind be
reconciled with the maintenance of a necessary social balance
between groups and classes? How could the creed of self-help
fit into a society where the landed interest still dominated the
social scene and where most Conservatives preferred the effort-

497 Y

Victorian People

less grace of the "gentleman" to the rugged individualism of
the striving businessman?

Piilnierston believed and his belief was in line with the
orthodoxy of the agethat "we have shown the example of a
nation in which every class of society accepts with cheerfulness
that lot which Providence has assigned to it, while at the same
time each individual of each class is constantly trying to raise
himself in the social scale not by injustice and wrong, not by
violence and illegality but by persevering good conduct, and
by the steady and energetic exertion of the moral and intellec
tual faculties with which the Creator has endowed him." Sam
uel Smiles, as we shall see, could have spoken no more per
suasively. Trollope, although he showed the pitfalls and
dilemmas which checked an automatically beneficent operation
of individual exertion and believed that comfort was a summit
to attain rather than a plateau to sojourn in, accepted the
general principle. So did Bagehot, very specifically, in his liter
ary essays on Sterne and Thackeray, where he distinguished
between social systems founded upon caste and those founded
upon equality. The English system of "removable inequality,"
in which many people were inferior to and worse off than
others but in which each might hope hi theory to be on a level
with the highest below the throne, was superior to both. In
deed, the English system allowed each individual "reasonably
and without sanguine impracticability" to gain one step in social
elevation and to be at least on a level, after a period of striving,
with those who had originally been slightly above him.

One of the advantages of the system, it was generally claimed,
was that it provided through its "mild social discipline ... a
wise and temperate substitute for those harsh police laws and
perpetual interference with the freedom of private action gen
erally enforced throughout the continent and nowhere more so
than in the revolutionized countries." Coercion, which Bagehot
had approved of in the Paris of 1851, was unnecessary in
England, and social conflict was avoided.

Such appreciations of the peculiar excellencies of the English
social system attempted to reconcile self-help and social order,
but they were only plausible so long as there was continued

Trollope and Bagehot

economic progress and social peace. They were as effectively
challenged and undermined by the passing of the second Re
form Bill in 1867 and by the industrial and agricultural "de
pression" of the seventies as was the Palmerstonian constitution
itself.

Robert Lowe s speeches, which were successful on the eve of
1867 in providing a mid-century reconciliation, were, in fact,
the swan song of mid-Victorianism. He was following the au
thentic voices of his age-Smiles, Trollope, and Bagehot-when
he pointed out that a large measure of parliamentary reform
would be unnecessary if every workingman eight-pound house
holder abstained from the consumption of twenty quarts of
beer a year and acquired the ten-pound property suffrage by
effective, but not excessive, self-help. Indeed, the rise in prices,
by reducing the value of the ten-pound house, was permitting
a widening of the social base of the constitution without even
a minimum of self-help being necessary.

These arguments of Lowe were swept away in a welter of
political excitement which transformed the whole basis of the
constitution. By 1872 not a brick of the Palmerston house was
left standing. Palmerston s death had produced "a change not
in one point but in a thousand points ... a change not of parti
cular details but of pervading spirit"; and the danger of the
future appeared to lie not only in constitutional upheaval but
in the complete overthrow of the dignity and deference struc
ture of society. The change in the economic atmosphere after
1873 and the collision of classes in the last quarter of the cen
tury merely served as the final acts of a play which had begun
in an earlier decade.

Ill

Within the framework of the half-reformed constitution
there were two problems which Trollope explored more realis
tically and profoundly than did Bagehot the problem of elec
tioneering and the problem of civil service reform.

Like Bagehot, Trollope was conscious of the honor of be
coming a member of Parliament, of belonging to the inner
circle of the political elite; but he realized that elections were a

+ 99

Victorian People

somewhat unsatisfactory means of getting Into Parliament, be
cause they were sordid and corrupt exercises in bribery, cajol
ery, and violence rather than rational verdicts of the local will.
If society really was constituted as both he and Bagehot be
lieved, the would-be member of Parliament had to lower him
self at election times in order to raise himself when the election
was over. The way to the Palace of Westminster led through
the pigsty. From his own actual experiences, as well as from
his meditations on society, Trollopc acquired a lively and
provocative picture of the place of elections in politics.

In his Autobiofrrapby he wrote that he had always thought
that to sit in the British Parliament should be the highest object
and ambition for every educated Englishman. "I do not by this
mean to suggest that every educated Englishman should set
before himself a seat in Parliament as a probable or even a
possible career; but that the man in Parliament has reached a
higher position than the man out that to serve one s country
without pay is the grandest work that a man can do that of all
studies the study of politics is the one in which a man may make
himself most useful to his fellow-creatures and that of all lives,
public political life is capable of the greatest efforts." In his
interesting commentary on Trollope, Michael Sadleir refuses to
take this remark seriously and for no apparent reason calls it
"a quaint declaration." In fact, it was in keeping with the whole
of Trollope s attitude toward politics and society. He had never
found in the public service of the Post Office, which employed
him, that prestige which membership of the House of Com
mons gave. He realized, despite all his success as a public
servant, that, in Bagehot s famous phrase, "a clerk in the public
service is nobody ; and you could not make a common English
man see why he should be anybody."

Bagehot himself tried on four occasions to get into Parlia
ment, but constituencies as different as Manchester, Bridgwater,
and London University rejected him. His defeats were not
surprising. He had little sympathy with the "enthusiasms" of
the Liberal party, for which he stood. "I hate the Liberal
enthusiasts," he once told a friend. "I feel inclined to say, *Go
home, Sir, and take a dose of salts, and see if it won t clean it

1 100 }>

Trollope and Bagehot

all out of you. Nature did not mean me for a popular candi
date/ Only when he had failed did he convince himself that,
although the member of Parliament gained social position, a
modicum of power, and a smattering of inside knowledge, he
had to pay the heavy price of listening to very dull debates and
cutting down his ideas to the dead commonplaces of the elec
toral mind. Trollope also had to undergo an election defeat
before he persuaded himself that writing political novels was
more exciting than sitting in the Commons.

He has left a fascinating account of his experiences. Seeking
the social prestige and the political distinction of the House of
Commons, he decided in 1867 at the age of fifty-two to enter
Parliament. "I had an almost insane desire to sit there," he
wrote; in fact, when he failed to secure nomination for a safe
seat in Essex, he actually went to the very corrupt borough
of Beverley, in Yorkshire, a year later to try out his fortune.
He had no illusions about the dangers and difficulties of the
enterprise; indeed, a friend there began by telling him not
only that he would not get elected but also that he would lose
a vast sum of money in the process of trying. "You will spend
a thousand pounds and lose the election. Then you will petition
and spend another thousand pounds. There will be a commis
sion, and the borough will be disfranchised. For a beginner such
as you are, that would be a great success." Trollope did not
flinch. "In the teeth of this, from a man who knew all about it,
I persisted in going to Beverley."

Beverley was by no means unique among small English
boroughs, where corrupt practices long survived the Reform
Bill of 1832; but it had a long-standing record of corruption
which was made public for all to see after the famous 1868
election. There had been election petitions challenging the
announced result in 1837, 1857, and 1860. In 1868 a further
petition was presented, and the High Court judge who exam
ined it found that over a hundred persons had been guilty of
corrupt practices. The most influential manipulator of a highly
corrupt electorate was a local draper who acted as Conservative
agent. His method was to buy votes not during parliamentary
elections as in days of more blatant corruption, or as in even

Victorimi People

more corrupt places like disfranchised Sudbury, but during
town council elections, on the sensible supposition that con
vinced voters would remember their duty and their bribes, A
royal commission which went on to examine the state of Bever-
ley more thoroughly in the summer of 1869 not only uncovered
corrupt practices during six preceding elections but brought to
light a traditional structure of corruption. One witness even
produced an account book for the 1 807 election which showed
that, of 1,010 electors who voted for one of the candidates, only
78 had received no money. These and similar revelations led to
the disfranchisement of the borough in 1870. Trollope s friend
had been right.

Trollope himself described the fourteen days of his canvass
ing in Beverley as "the most wretched fortnight of my man
hood." u ln the first place," he declared, "I was subject to a
bitter tyranny from grinding vulgar tyrants. They were doing
what they could, or said that they were doing so, to secure me
a seat in Parliament and I was to be in their hands at any rate
for the period of my candidature. , , . From morning to eve
ning every day I was taken round the lanes and by-ways of that
uninteresting town, canvassing every voter, exposed to the rain,
up to my knees in slush, and utterly unable to assume that air
of triumphant joy with which a jolly successful candidate
should be invested. . . . But perhaps my strongest sense of dis
comfort arose from the conviction that my political ideas were
all leather and prunella to the men whose votes I was soliciting.
They cared nothing for my doctrines, and could not even be
made to understand that I should have any."

On the two issues concerning which his most radical sup
porters felt most strongly the ballot and the Permissive Drink
Bill Trollope disagreed violently with them. But it was not
issues which decided the election but bribes. u lt had come to
pass that political cleanliness was odious to the citizens. There
was something grand in the scorn with which a leading Liberal
turned up his nose at me when I told him that there should be
no bribery, no treating, not even a pot of beer on our side!
It was a matter for study to perceive how at Beverley politics
were appreciated because they might subserve electoral pur-

102

Trollope and Bagehot

poses, and how little it was understood that electoral purposes,
which are in themselves a nuisance, should be endured, in order
that they may subserve politics."

Electioneering provided a favorable opportunity and a
provocation for petty violence of every kind; it also provided
a unique opportunity for making money or drinking free beer
and eating free food. As at Sudbury, which had been complete
ly disfranchised in 1844, the party spirit which prevailed there
was not affected by the local or national political situation but
by "a contest of the parties amongst themselves as to which
shall make most money at elections." "The use of the borough,"
said Trollope, "seems to be realized and approved in the
borough in general. The inhabitants have taught themselves to
think that it was for such purposes that boroughs were in
tended."

From Trollope s account it is clear that he shared, as a result
of personal experience, Bagehot s reluctance to transfer polit
ical power from Parliament to the constituencies, from the
men who knew to the men who did not know. He went further
than Bagehot, however, in showing that constituents were not
only potentially dangerous as manipulators of puppet members
in a democracy but also actively corrupt agents in an undemo
cratic system. The electorate was far more wicked than the
candidates. Only the glory of the goal made the contestants
struggle worth while.

Even before he contested Beverley, Trollope had described
parliamentary elections in his novels. Rachel Ray, for instance,
written in 1862, describes an election in the small borough of
Baslehurst, where the expected cost of campaigning, petition
ing, and scrutiny amounted to over six thousand pounds. Vot
ing behavior depended upon custom and the supply of drinks
and gifts rather than upon political propaganda or persuasion.
When the Conservative candidate was a little worried about his
bad speaking, his agent told him: "It don t matter. It s only
done for the show of the thing and to fill up the day. If Glad
stone were here he wouldn t talk a vote out of them one way
or the other, nor yet the devil himself." The result, indeed,
appeared to be a foregone conclusion before the poll. "It was

{ 103 Y

Victorian People

all known and fairly understood as though the matter was past
a doubt."

The description of the election in Baslchurst was merely a
foretaste of what Trollope would do when he had added per
sonal experience of an election to acute observation from out
side. For in Ralph the Heir, written in 1870-71, Trollope took
his revenge on Beverley. Ralph the Heir contains the best elec
tion episodes in English fiction, more convincing than Dickens
picture of Eatanswill, and introduces us to one of the most
sympathetic candidates who ever presented himself to a cor
rupt electorate-Sir Thomas Underwood.

Sir Thomas had been in Parliament before and had held
minor office; he wished to get back again, even though he knew
the difficulties involved. "I dare say I am a fool for my pains.
It will cost me some money that I oughtn t to spend. If I get in,
I don t know that I can do any good or that it can do me any
good." But he clung on despite illness, violence, and ultimate
unseating by petition. As in Beverley, the end of the story was
the disf ranchiscment of the borough.

The account of the campaign is fascinating. The constitu
ency of Percycross had been fortunate to survive even the
Reform Bill of 1832. It had in its Tory agent, Trigger, a con
summate political manipulator who dealt in votes as easily as
pioneers dealt in oil. Underwood came to loathe Trigger,
but he had to depend upon him, particularly in keeping in
touch with the local network of business interests, represented
by the mustard-maker, the paper manufacturers, and two boot
factors. When Sir Thomas declared himself in favor of purity
of election, one of his most influential supporters was shocked
into sickness. "The idea of purity of election at Percycross
made him feel very sick. It was an idea which he hated with his
whole heart. There was to him something absolutely mean and
ignoble in the idea of a man coming forward to represent a
borough in Parliament without paying the regular fees. ... It
might be all very well in Manchester and such-Iikc disagreeable
places. But that candidates should come down to Percycross
and talk about purity there, was a thing abominable to him."
Blessed with such supporters, Sir Thomas began to feel a

104

Trollope and Bagehot

curious but understandable sympathy for the very raw and
ingenuous Radical candidate, Ontario Moggs, who disassociated
himself completely from his Whig colleague and stood for the
advanced doctrines of purity and the rights of labor. Moggs
also soon realized that there were far too many men in Percy-
cross "who hate the very name of purity and who know noth
ing of the Rights of Labour."

Ralph the Heir recapitulated the gloomy experiences of
Beverley, and in a sense all Trollope s other political writings
were substitutes for political action, "his compensation for
disappointment." If he could not air his political views in the
House of Commons, he could air them in his novels; but it was
not the defeat of Beverley which turned him to the election
as a literary theme. What the defeat at Beverley did was to
quicken his insight and to goad his pen. Just as the election in
Ralph the Heir is more vividly described and more corrupt in
its character than the election described in Rachel Ray, so
Phineas Redux, written in 1870, is more bitter in its tone than
Phineas Finn, written in 1868.

There is one other picture of an election in Trollope which
is of great interest that in The Way We Live Now, written in
1874-75. In his other novels Trollope discussed conditions in
small constituencies, the backwaters of old England. In The
Way We Live Now, however, the election he describes is that
in Westminster, a popular metropolitan constituency a con
stituency which before the Reform Bill had returned John
Stuart Mill to Parliament. It has been suggested by some his
torians that Percycross and Baslehurst were unrepresentative
constituencies even before 1867, that they were lingering sur
vivals rather than characteristic examples, and that the so-called
"popular constituencies" were theaters of very different polit
ical behavior. In his picture of a Westminster election employ
ing the ballot for the first time, Trollope does admit that elec
toral choice was more complicated and more obscure than in
the older constituencies, but he does not admit that it was any
more rational.

Melmotte himself, who was very anxious to become a mem
ber of Parliament, found it difficult to decide whether he

Victorian People

would enter Parliament as a Conservative or as a Liberal. His
financial interests turned him into a Conservative, and his
committee consisted, "needless to say," of peers, bankers, and
publicans, "with all that absence of class prejudice for which
the party has become famous since the ballot was introduced
among us." The ballot, however, introduced an unknown ele
ment into the political equation. Before 1872 there had been
open voting at the hustings; now there was secret filling-in of
election forms. "Men who heretofore had known, or thought
that they knew, how elections would go, who counted up
promises, told of professed enemies, and weighed the doubtful
ones, now confessed themselves to be in the dark." But, if there
was a newness of method, there was no spectacular battle of
new issues. Melmotte "had very little to say when he attempted
to explain the political principles on which he intended to act.
After a little he confined himself to remarks on the personal
attacks made on him by the other side, and even in doing that
he was reiterative rather than diffusive." His opponent, Mr.
Alf, was a newspaperman, part editor, part owner, who was
willing to spend ten thousand pounds on the election and bear
ten thousand pounds in possible costs of libel. He, too, was
ready to forget about issues and to fight the battle with the full
help of the press on the question of Mclmotte s financial integ
rity and reputation. The more material he produced, however,
in his newspaper, the more opinion moved in favor of Mel
motte. "It was supposed that the working classes were in favour
of him, partly from their love of a man who spends a great deal
of money, partly from the belief that he was being ill-used
partly, no doubt, from that occult sympathy which is felt for
crime, when the crime committed is injurious to the upper
classes. Masses of men will almost feel that a certain amount of
injustice ought to be inflicted on their betters, so as to make
things even, and will persuade themselves that a criminal should
be declared to be innocent, because the crime committed has
had a tendency to oppress the rich and pull down the mighty
from their seats."

The final election of Melmotte with a majority of about a
thousand was a triumph of prejudice rather than reason; but,

i 106

TroUope and Bagehot

however it had been secured, it produced incomparable divi
dends. "It was very much to be Member for Westminster. So
much had at any rate been achieved by him who had begun the
world without a shilling and without a friend almost without
education! Much as he loved money, and much as he loved the
spending of money, and much as he had made and much as he
had spent, no triumph of his life had been so great to him as
this. Brought into the world in a gutter, without father or
mother, with no good thing ever done for him, he was now a
member of the British Parliament, and member for one of the
first cities in the empire. Ignorant as he was, he understood the
magnitude of the achievement. ... If they sent him to penal
servitude for life, they would have to say that they had so
treated the Member for Westminster."

Melmotte s election pushes to the final point of bitter satire
Trollope s conviction that the way to glory lay through the
darkest regions of prejudice and misunderstanding. The Way
We Live Now, like his other political novels, reflected his ex
periences, but it also reflected the constitutional theories of
Bagehot. The English Constitution appeared just when Trol-
lope s series of political novels was beginning. It was probably
seen by TroUope at an early stage, for it first appeared between
1865 and 1867 as a series of articles in the Fortnightly, a review
which Trollope had helped to launch in 1865.

Trollope s novels bring to life through illustrative examples
Bagehot s notions of responsible power. They are concerned
with the niceties of party and the perils of coalition, with the
maintenance of majorities in a period when "majorities were
collected God knows how, and voted God knows why," and
with the conventions of dissolution. But they are concerned,
too, with problems which Trollope could explore more sensi
tively than Bagehot, the nineteenth-century equivalent of the
problems of Bacon s Essays, which Trollope read carefully from
cover to cover. Character and circumstances are explored in all
their subtle interrelations. The attempts of men like Phineas
Finn, Palliser, and Monk to keep their ethical standards above
the level of those of purely professional politicians are properly
praised, but the defects in the general pattern of politics are

Victorian People

not obscured. To Trollope the greatest tragedy of all was that
men should want to get seats in Parliament merely to protect
their interests as directors of city companies. This was political
prostitution of the worst sort and a sign that public life was not
all that it ought to be, even after the sordid business of fighting
elections was concluded. Parliament deserved better than this
and quickly made its new members aware of its standards.
Melmotte s degradation was carried to its crowning point when
he made a fool of himself in his speech in the House of Com
mons.

IV

The second problem which Trollope discussed more fully
than Bagehot was that of civil service reform. The background
of the un reformed civil service was systematically examined by
Charles Dickens in his novel Little Dorrit, which appeared in
1857 shortly after the end of the Crimean War. The first title
of Little Dorrit was Nobody* s Fault; the picture which is
painted in it of Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office reveals
the failure not of individuals but of a system. It demonstrated
the necessity for far-reaching reform. Reform was designed to
substitute the principle of competitive choice for the principle
of patronage, to open up government to new influences, to
make it suit the needs of middle-class aspirants as well as
gentlemen.

This problem had been discussed during the Crimean War
by bodies like the Administrative Reform Association, which
Dickens supported; but, several years before that, the demand
for retrenchment by Radical groups had forced the govern
ment to appoint commissions of inquiry into particular depart
ments. Eleven reports had been drawn up by 1853. They were
supplemented in that year by the general report of Sir Charles
Trevelyan and Sir Stafford Northcote, commissioned by Glad
stone. After stressing the growing importance of the perma
nent civil service for the country "in view of the great and in
creasing accumulation of public business," the report attacked
the methods of selection and the great divergences in procedure
in the existing departments. It recommended the establishment

-( 108 }>

Trollope and Bagehot

of a central board composed of independent men, headed by a
privy councilor, to conduct periodical examinations and drew
a sharp distinction within the service between "intellectual"
work and merely "mechanical" clerkship.

Although the aim of the report was to secure a more efficient
civil service, this last distinction which it drew was far from
democratic in character. Its sharpness was strongly emphasized
by Dr. Jowett, professor of Greek at Oxford and later master
of Balliol, and many of the public school headmasters, who had
recently been experimenting with new examinations in schools
and universities; their purpose was to strengthen and multiply
the ties between the upper classes and the holders of administra
tive power. "The tendency of the measure will, I am confi
dent," wrote Trevelyan, "be decidedly aristocratic, but it will
be so in a good sense by securing for the public service those
who are, in a true sense, worthy. At present a mixed multitude
is sent up, a large proportion of whom, owing to the operation
of political and personal patronage, are of an inferior rank of
society . . . the idle, and useless, the fool of the family, the con
sumptive, the hypochondriac, those who have a tendency to
insanity are the sort of young men commonly provided for in
a public office." In short, the reformers did not wish to throw
open the civil service to the middle classes but rather to the new
educational elite of the public schools and universities. White
hall was not to be surrendered to Manchester but to Oxford.
Jobbery was to go, and education was to become the test; but
stratification was to remain. "Our people are few compared
with the multitudes likely to be arrayed against it," wrote
Trevelyan to Delane, "and we must prepare for the trial by
cultivating to the utmost the superior morality and intelligence
which comprise our real strength. It is proposed to invite the
flower of our youth to the aid of the public service."

The method competitive examination had its moral as well
as its intellectual side. It was considered to be far more effective
than patronage, which merely provided the higher aristocracy
with a sort of foundling hospital for their waifs and strays,
"their sons, legitimate and illegitimate." It would make the
most able young men willing to compete for the prizes offered

4 109 Y

Victorian People

and in consequence, in the phrase of John Stuart Mill, act as
"a great and salutary moral revolution."

There \vcre obvious difficulties before an examination system
could be established. Some critics complained that it would be
difficult to find capable and impartial examiners, and Mill had
to reply pragmatically that, if they had been found in the uni
versities, there was no reason why they could not be found for
the civil service, "supposing that there is a sincere desire to find
them." Even if this were so, there remained Macaulay s fear
that the examiners would be paid too much and that "the whole
thing" would be turned into "a job," a new and more sinister
form of patronage than the old.

In 1855 the government took the first tentative step by order
in council to make the competitive examination work. Limited
competition among selected candidates was introduced rather
than open competition among all comers, and the final respon
sibility for appointment rested with the heads of departments.
A civil service commission was set up, empowered to arrange
with the heads of departments responsible the conditions of
entry and to prescribe the subjects of examination. It was not
until 1870, when the civil service had become much more com
plex and far more was demanded of it, that the principle of
examination and differentiation was carried further toward its
logical conclusion.

Trollope was a civil servant, and, like the head of his depart
ment, Sir Rowland Hill it must have been one of the few
points on which they agreed he did not like competitive
examinations; indeed, he thought with Macaulay that they
might increase rather than diminish the danger of jobbery. He
was very skeptical about dons dividing "the adult British male
world into classes and sub-classes" and poured scorn on his
Cambridge don, Mr. Jobbles, who knew how to get through
five thousand oral examinations in every five hours with due
assistance. The whole notion of "government on principles of
the strictest purity" seemed as unreal in Whitehall as it was in
Baslehurst. As Sir James Stephen, one of the greatest civil
servants of the day, claimed, it was completely Utopian. "It is
unknown," he said, "to the great commercial and municipal

-I HOY

Trollope and Eagehot

corporations among us. In every age, and land, and calling, a
large share of success has hitherto always been awarded to the
possessors of interest, of connexion, of favour, and of what we
call good luck. . . . The world we live in is not, I think, half
moralized enough for the acceptance of such a scheme of stern
morality as this."

The reader of The Way We Live Now could hardly fail to
agree with this assessment of mid-nineteenth-century manners.
There was a struggle for "purity," for higher institutional
morality, rather than a confident trust in its existence. The issue
was clear: public probity was as essential to the civil service as
was Smiles s code of hard work to the world of business. While
he was preaching the virtues of self-help to manufacturers and
artisans, the public schools and universities were laying the
foundations of a new institutional morality for the reformed
public service. But the new institutional morality was based on
the old code of the "gentleman."

Trollope stood back from the change and viewed it with
skepticism. He was sensitive, as we have seen, to the social
boundaries which surrounded the gentleman, and he could
point out that the Queen herself had feared that competitive
examinations would "fill the public offices with low people
without the breeding or feelings of gentlemen." Trollope liked
gentlemen who had been taught how to be gentlemen, and he
liked gentlemen to remain intrenched in the civil service.

The Three Clerks describes with superb satire the difficulties
of young gentlemen trying to cope with the sort of traps laid
for them by Mr. Jobbles. "A man has before him a string of
questions, and he looks painfully down them, from question to
question, searching for some allusion to that special knowledge
which he has within him. He too often finds that no such allu
sion is made. It appears that the Jobbles of the occasion has
exactly known the blank spots of his mind and fitted them all.
He has perhaps crammed himself with the winds and tides, and
there is no more reference to those stormy subjects than if Luna
were extinct; but he has, unfortunately, been loose about his
botany, and question after question would appear to him to
have been dictated by Sir Joseph Paxton or the Head Gardener

111

Victorian People

at Kew. And then to his own blank face and puzzled look is
opposed the fast scribbling of some botanic candidate, fast as
though reams of folio could hardly contain all the knowledge
which he is able to pour forth."

This is a very gloomy picture of an examination. It shows the
reaction of a sensitive Victorian observer, determined to be a
gentleman, to the moral milieu of the competitive examination,
to the dismal scene of blank faces and scribbling pens, and to
the uninspired pendantry of the civil service allies of the college
dons, administrative pedants like Sir Gregory Hardlines.
Palmerston shared most of TroIIope s prejudices, and Lord John
Russell could not be convinced even by the eloquence of Glad
stone that civil service reform was necessary. It is significant
that the Peelites, with their great interest in effective adminis
tration, rather than the Whigs, with their sense of family con
nection, were the keenest supporters of civil service reform.

Behind the fears of Trollope-and also of Bagehot, when he
very sketchily touched on the question of the civil service was
the distrust of a bureaucracy, recruited and modeled perhaps
on Prussian lines, "The leaning towards bureaucracy" had to
be resisted. Trollope, who intensely disliked experts and feared
the influence even of "expert" pro fessional "castes" outside the
civil service, shared Bagehot s opinion that bureaucracy tended
to undergovernment in point of quality and overgovernment
in point of quantity. Men selected for training as bureaucrats
would come to think of the routine of business not as a means
but as an end "to imagine the elaborate machinery of which
they form a part, and from which they derive their dignity, to
be a grand and achieved result, not a working and changeable
instrument."

The question of the civil service led back, indeed, to the
central problem of all government. "Politics are made in time
and place institutions are shifting things to be tried and ad
justed to the shifting conditions of a moveable world." No
powerful civil service could manage England s destinies, as the
Benthamite Chadwick or the essayist Matthew Arnold some
times believed it could* People count for more than machines,
and even the smoothest-running machines will be slowed down
and ultimately stopped by human frailty.

4 112 V

Trollop e and Bagehot

V

This approach to politics cannot be given a party label.
Neither Trollope nor Bagehot was a Tory, clinging tenacious
ly to the traditions of the past. Trollope called himself an "ad
vanced Conservative-Liberal," for both he and his generation
like political hyphens more than we profess to do today. Bage
hot claimed that he was "between size in politics"; he was
liberal enough to welcome the fundamental "march of improve
ment" of the nineteenth century but conservative enough to
believe that reforms should be carried to produce greater stabil
ity and not to generate an accelerating demand for further
change. He believed in driving neither so slow as to miss the
train nor so fast as to meet with an accident.

The political conditions of the middle years of the century
allowed Trollope and Bagehot to maintain a position of intel
lectual detachment which they would have found extremely
difficult to hold ten years earlier or fifteen years later. Bagehot,
who had been an "enthusiastic worshipper of Richard Cobden"
in 1846, could settle down in the 1850 s to admire Sir George
Cornewall Lewis, whose chief attraction was that "his mind was
like a registering machine with a patent index." Trollope "did
not give a straw" for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and charac
teristically mocked himself in mocking the spirit of the times:
"God send that we all meet in 1851 under the shadow of some
huge, newly-invented machine. I mean to exhibit four three-
volume novels all failures which I look upon as a great proof
of industry."

The very "dulness" of mid- Victorian England was what
both of them loved, for never were two men more at home in
their age. "Dull" Englishmen provided "good" self-govern
ment. "What we opprobriously call stupidity, though not an
enlivening quality in common society, is Nature s favourite
resource for preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency
of opinion," wrote Bagehot. Trollope proved that it could have
an enlivening quality if it were given fictional form. It was
English as nothing else was: "Dullness is our line, as cleverness
is that of the French. Woe to the English people if they ever
forget that."

Victorian People

The dulncss was accompanied by a consensus about major
political issues. "The spirit of the country is quiet, but reason
able, 1 wrote Bagchot, "indisposed to sweeping innovations,
and equally indisposed to keeping in the old Tory way, every
thing which is because it is. The moderate members of both
parties represent this spirit very fairly. At a recent election a
poor voter is reported to have said that both candidates were
very nice gentlemen, but that for his part he could not see
much difference between them; and this is the simple truth."
Palliser put it in much the same words in Phiudu Redux:
"When some small measure of reform has thoroughly com
mended itself to the country, so thoroughly that all men know
that the country will have It then the question arises whether
its details shall be arranged by the political party which calls
itself Liberal or by that which is termed Conservative. The
men are so near to each other in all their convictions and
theories of life that nothing is left to them but personal compe
tition for the doing of the thing that is to be done."

Both TroIIope and Bagehot lived long enough to see the
consensus disintegrate as a result of the death of Palmcrston,
the second Reform Bill of 1867, and the Ballot Act of 1872; but
they did not live long enough to witness the cleaning-up of the
electoral system, the emergence of a national press, or the
growth of powerful party organizations which redesigned
political machinery and forced new issues into the open. Bage
hot died in 1877 and Trollope in 1882; neither was happy about
the changed conditions of affairs in the last few years of their
lives. Trollope saw his own reputation dwindle away, while
Bagehot, contented enough in his private life, became increas
ingly alarmed about the prospects of the nation: "Our old sys
tem of parliamentary choice will be completely destroyed, for
it is already half gone."

The faithfulness of both writers to the self-satisfied world
of the fifties and sixties is their chief title to consistency. Both
were observers rather than actors clever, at times cynical, ob
serversand they lead us without difficulty into the heart of
mid- Victorian society. If we are to understand that society
fully, we must move from the area of observation to that of

Trollope and Bagehot

action and abandon our looking glasses for walking sticks. We
must turn from Bagehot and Trollope to the makers of mid-
Victorian values, to those who did not scruple to preach values
to the select few or to the multitude and sometimes though
very rarely to both. Neither Trollope nor Bagehot ever
preached; they left this task to men like Samuel Smiles and
Thomas Hughes, whose efforts illuminate the patches of change
in the middle years of the century.

115

As steady application to work is the healthiest train-
rug for every Individual^ so h it the best discipline of a
state. Honourable industry travels the StW/e road with
ditty; and Providence has chsely linked hoth with
happiness. The gods^ says the poet, have placed labour
and toil on the way leading to the Elysian fields.

SAMUEL SMILES

I

Every society has its propagandists who try to persuade their
fellow-citizens to develop a special kind of social character
which will best serve the needs of the day. In mid- Victorian
England one of the most important propagandists was Samuel
Smiles, described by the editor of the Autobiography as "the
authorized and pious chronicler of the men who founded the
industrial greatness of England." Smiles set out, as he said in
the Preface to his most famous book, Self-Help, to "re-inculcate
those old-fashioned but wholesome lessonswhich cannot per
haps be too often urged that youth must work in order to
enjoy that nothing creditable can be accomplished without
application and diligence that the student must not be
daunted by difficulties, but conquer them by patience and
perseverence, and that, above all, he must seek elevation of
character without which capacity is worthless and worldly
success is nought"

It is interesting to learn that the lessons were considered
"old-fashioned" in the middle of the nineteenth century, for
many people have claimed that the Victorians were the first

-! 116 \

Stemuel Smiles and the Gospel of Work

to proclaim the "gospel of work," or at least the first to set it
out systematically in texts and stories. The sense of gospel
may have been new, but the admonition and even the apocalyp
tic enthusiasm were old. William Hutton had already pro
claimed the importance of work in eighteenth-century Birming
ham; the new Poor Law of 1834 had consecrated it; William
and Robert Chambers, the sponsors of The Miscellany of In
structive and Amusing Tracts ^ had popularized it in little didac
tic tales like "The Three Ways of Living: Below, Up to, and
Beyond One s Means" or "A Tale of Life Assurance." Above
all, Thomas Carlyle had made work the cornerstone of his
philosophy. "An endless significance lies in Work," he affirmed;
"properly speaking all true work is Religion." Where Carlyle
thundered, Samuel Smiles warned and pleaded. What Carlyle
prophesied, Smiles turned into homilies. And behind both the
prophecies and the homilies was what Smiles considered his
deepest source, the proverbs of Solomon.

Smiles owed much to Carlyle s influence. He began Thrift
with Carlyle s motto, "Not what I have, but what I do is my
kingdom." He felt the splendor of all "the quantity of dull and
forgotten work that lies silent under my feet in this world and
escorts and attends me, and supports and keeps me alive."
Where Carlyle meditated on the abbot Samson, Smiles told
his stories true stories of men like Josiah Wedgwood, William
Lee, James Brindley, and George Stephenson. He saw that the
everyday work of applied science had its romance, and he
found his heroes among the engineers, the inventors, and the
enterprisers.

He told his tales to eager listeners who were waiting for a
message. The material for Self -Help was first presented to about
a hundred young workingmen in Leeds who entirely on their
own initiative had set up an evening school for "mutual im
provement." Smiles addressed them on more than one occasion,
"citing examples of what other men had done, as illustrations of
what each might, in a greater or less degree, do for himself."
The lectures were so popular that Smiles sought a wider audi
ence, and, although in book form they were turned down by
Routledge because of publishing difficulties during the Crimean

*{ in Y

Victorian People

War, they were printed as Self-Help by John Murray four
years later.

The book was a remarkable success. Twenty thousand copies
\vere sold in the first year; fifty-five thousand by the end of
five years; a hundred and fifty thousand by 1889; and over a
quarter of a million by 1905. These sales far exceeded those of
the great nineteenth-century novels. What was more remark
able, however, was the book s popularity when translated into
other languages. It appeared in Dutch and French, Danish and
German, Italian and Japanese, Arabic and Turkish, and "sev
eral of the native languages of India." As it went round the
world, the gospel of work was spread just as efficiently and as
fervently as any of the other great nineteenth-century mission
ary enterprises. The seed sometimes fell on stony ground, but
it often took root in peculiar places. Like the lessons of the
Crystal Palace, the lessons of this gospel \vere designed for all
men; they boldly asserted that not genius but "the energetic
use of simple means and ordinary qualities" was the real trans
forming agent in society. The fame of Smiles had traveled far
since he first taught his classroom lessons to the group of Leeds
workingmen in a dingy hall, which had once been used as a
temporary cholera hospital Cholera itself could have traveled
no faster.

The speed of transmission was determined as much by the
circumstances of the time as by the eloquence of the words or
the power of the stories Smiles employed. The creed of Self-
Help presupposed a more mobile society than had existed even
a hundred years before. In the eighteenth century, when writers
like Hannah More were writing tracts for the poor or even for
the middle classes, they assumed a relatively static society in
which it was cruelty, not kindness, to educate a child beyond
his station. "The poor are always with us." They should re
main content with the positions in life ro which God had
called them. Distinctions of rank and fortune were not danger
ous but beneficial; they were sanctioned by Christianity and,
along with religion, laid the foundations of the social order.
Smiles was writing for a more dynamic society, which was
searching for social and economic levers and trusting in material

{118}.

PLATE V

From the painting by Ford Madox Brown (Manchester Art Gallery)

WORK

"An endless significance lies in Work: properly speaking all true work
is Religion."

PLATE VI

o
o

o ,

I

si

w

*j

l 1

p IB

S 1

PH ? S

s I ^

I

co a
<) 5

o
rt

a

H

Samuel Smiles and the Gospel of Work

progress. The poor man s remedy lay in his own hands. If he
were only hard-working, thrifty, and determined, he could do
anything. "God helps those who help themselves. Go thou and
do likewise."

On both sides of the Atlantic in the middle years of the
nineteenth century there was a great wave of "success" litera
ture, designed to provide its readers not only with a message
but with a practical guide to the problems of city life and the
right tactics for "getting on." Success in Life, a book published
by Nelson and Sons in London in 1852, anticipated the creed
of self-help in all its details, and the anonymous author ad
mitted that "the original idea of this volume was suggested by
an American publication." Later on, Horatio Alger (1832-99)
found fifty million readers for his stories of success. Smiles
must be considered in relation to this general movement of feel
ing and aspiration, although he was far more solid than Alger
and more profound in what he had to say. There were no fairy
godmothers or fairy godfathers in Smiles assisting the thrifty
hero to find money and success, as there were in many of
Alger s stories. Nor was there an unlimited belief in success
itself. He was always at great pains to point out that he did not
like success stories for their own sake. Good work, honestly
done, character sustained, and independence secured were more
important than worldly success. As his biography pointed out,
if he had been merely interested in worldly success itself, he
would have produced a "factory of biography" rather than
a series of carefully chosen homilies.

II

Smiles s own life is of great interest in relation to his work,
even though he himself was reluctant to write his autobiog
raphy and believed that "my books, such as they are, must
speak for themselves, without any biographic introduction." It
was the appearance of Trollope s biography which made a
friend write to Mrs. Smiles, "Tell your husband to go and do
likewise." The autobiography was never completed, however,
and did not appear until after Smiles s death.

Smiles was born in Scotland, in the same town as John Knox.

Victorian People

He was "fonder of frolic than of learning" when a young man
and was not even thrifty. "I thought," he said, "that the prin
cipal use of money was to be spent." He even forced open his
money box with a table knife in order to collect the few pen
nies he had bothered to save. His later life was an exercise in
self-discipline; before he molded others, he set out to mold
himself. This is perhaps the most important thing about him as
a person. In 1885, when he was seventy-three, he reviewed the
circumstances of his life and the many achievements he had
secured. "Does this mean that I lead a happy life or does it
mean that I have led a happy life?" he asked. But he did not
answer his own question. He complained rather that there were
many things still left to do and took refuge in Carlyle s apho
rism that "perseverance is the hinge of all the virtues." "I wish
I had the power to retouch my life," he said, "as the artist re
touches his picture. But I cannot do so. My life must stand or
fall by what I have done, not by what I have dreamt." It is a
revealing comment*

What he had done filled a large volume of several hundred
pages. He had begun as a doctor, publishing his first book,
Physical Education, in 1836, but he had soon turned from
medicine to journalism and from Scotland to England. For
twenty years, from 1838 to 1858, he lived in Leeds, the smoky
capital of Yorkshire industry. He was an active participant in
Radical politics in the hungry forties, advocating an extension
of the suffrage, the repeal of the Corn Laws, and improved edu
cation of the working classes. These political experiences left
their mark on the rest of his life and provide the background
of his later social philosophy. Unlike Alger or most of the
other "success" writers, he turned to self-help and thrift only
when he saw the inadequacy of collective striving in an atmos
phere of ignorance and poverty. Although he said little of
politics in the later years of his life and had no sympathy with
socialism or even with organic constitutional reform, he had
known politics from the inside and had found political for
mulas inadequate, He had seen the artisans of Leeds and even
the Leeds manufacturers "groping after some grand principle
which they thought would lead them to fresh life, and liberty

-j 120 j-

Samuel Smiles and the Gospel of Work

and happiness," but they were groping in the dark, and the
flickers of light, like Owenite socialism, were merely will-o -
the-wisps.

Smiles gave his famous talk to the Leeds workingmen in the
middle of the forties, not in the middle of the fifties. He told
his audience categorically that it was a fallacy that self-help
"is to be regarded merely as a means of gaining a higher posi
tion in society than that which you now hold. . . . The educa
tion of the working-classes is to be regarded, in its highest
aspect, not as a means of raising up a few clever and talented
men into a higher rank of life, but of elevating and improving
the whole class of raising the entire condition of the working
man. The grand object aimed at should be to make the great
mass of the people virtuous, intelligent, well-informed, and
well-conducted; and to open up to them new sources of pleas
ure and happiness. Knowledge is of itself one of the highest
enjoyments." In short, the creed of self-help grew out of radi
calism and was not designed as an antidote to it. "It may be-
nay, it will inevitably happen," he remarked in 1845, "that edu
cation will teach those who suffer how to remove the causes
of their sufferings; and it may also make them dissatisfied with
an inferiority of social privilege. This, however, is one of the
necessary conditions of human progress. If a man be degraded,
he must be dissatisfied discontented, if you will, with that
condition of degradation, before he can make the necessary
effort to rise out of it. It is the opprobrium of some of the most
wretched and suffering classes in our land, that they are con
tented with their condition. Theirs is the satisfaction of the
blind who have never known light."

Although Smiles reiterated this point frequently during the
rest of his life and used it in self-defense against many of his
critics, he never went any further. Indeed, he became less and
less concerned with public causes and more and more con
cerned with writing and business, particularly after the revolu
tions of 1848. In 1845 he had become secretary of the Leeds and
Thirsk Railway, and in 1857 he produced his first popular book,
The Life of George Stephenson, the railway pioneer, which
gave him the opportunity of linking his business and his literary

Victorian People

interests. From 1857 onward his future as a writer was secure,
and, when he persuaded his company to take on a shorthand
writer to save him the laborious task of writing his own letters
and minutes, he freed his mind and stored up his energies for
an active literary career. Stcphcnsott, which was read with
"real profit and pleasure" by George Eliot, was followed two
years later by Self -Help. In 1862 there followed the Lives of the
Engineers, a powerful panegyric of the aristocracy of Vic
torian technical enterprise. Gladstone found time to read this,
"in little fragments at midnight hours each night, as a compos
ing draught." Gladstone saw as clearly as Smiles that "the char
acter of our engineers is a most signal and marked expression
of British character, and their acts a great pioneer of British
history." He even referred to Smiles in a public speech at Man
chester.

Industrial Biography soon followed, then The Huguenots and
Character. By this time Smiles had taught himself what char
acter meant. Although he had a stroke in 1871, which paralyzed
his right hand and robbed him of his memory for proper names,
he taught himself how to write and how to remember again.
Thrift followed soon afterward, a Life of George Moore in
1878, and a Life of Nasrnyth soon after that. For every book he
wrote he rejected two or three offers made to him, including
offers made by wealthy sponsors who were anxious to have him
write public panegyrics of their business careers. Smiles rightly
pointed out to some of his detractors that "perhaps if I had
written about millionaires, I might have been more successful
myself."

Smiles lived on through a silent old age and did not die until
1905, by which time the temper of the age had completely
changed and there was more interest in paradox than in com
mon sense. A book about men like Smiles would probably bear
the title "Common Sense," though it never will be written in
this century, when the limitations of common sense are more
apparent than its virtues. In his quest for common sense, Smiles
repressed much which might have made his life more colorful;
but he himself, after all, was the first to admit that it was his
works rather than his adventures which deserved to be rcmem-

1 122 Y

Samuel Smiles and the Gospel of Work

bered. There could be nothing more colorful than the letters
he received from Bohemia or Croatia praising his writings or
the Arabic inscriptions on the walls of the khedive s palace in
Egypt which were taken not from the Koran but from Self-
Help. The French and the Spaniards were a little more skep
tical. Smiles himself tells the story of a Frenchman paying
tribute to the aitist who invented ruffles, and Sir John Sinclair
"shrewdly remarking that some merit was also due to the man
who invented the shirt." Shirts and not ruffles were essential to
an Anglo-Saxon nineteenth-century philosophy.

Ill

The most important of Smiles s writings are Self-Help
(1859), Character (1871), Thrift (1875), and Duty (1887).
They are best studied as a whole, not merely because they fol
low the same method of organization and argument "anecdotal
illustrations of life and character" but because they develop a
common theme. Indeed, in his Preface to Thrift Smiles wrote
that it was intended as a sequel to Self-Help and Character. It
might have appeared, he added, as an introduction to those vol
umes, for "Thrift is the basis of Self-Help and the foundation
of much that is excellent in character."

Smiles took none of his ideals for granted. He realized from
observation as well as experience that there might well be a
war between men s natural temperaments and the social char
acter they were seeking to acquire. "Prodigality is much more
natural to men than thrift. . . . Economy is not a natural in
stinct, but the growth of experience, example and foresight."
Self-help was more difficult to live up to as a guiding principle
than a dependence on the good will of others or reliance on
convenient political panaceas, what Carlyle called "Morrison s
Pills," cures for all complaints. "Some call for Caesars, others
for Nationality, and others for Acts of Parliament. . . . What
ever is done for men and classes to a certain extent takes away
the stimulus and necessity of doing for themselves. . . . No
laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the
thriftless provident, or the drunken sober. Such reforms can
only be effected by means of individual action, economy and

Victorian People

self-denial, by better habits rather than by greater rights." It
was a point which had been made to Smiles in an interesting
letter from Cobden, written in 1853. "Depend upon it, there is
a spice of despotism at the bottom of all this intervention by
combined bodies in the concerns of individuals. ... I think we
shall not get right till there is a revolt against all such organiza
tions, whether on one side or another, in the interests of

Lf#?ly PERSONAL LIBERTY,"

The "better habits" to which Smiles referred were frequent
ly lacking. Smiles was no triumphant panegyrist of an Augustan
age. "The deterioration of the standard of public men, of pub
lic morality, and of political principles is undeniable." Scamped
work, gambling, fraud, intemperance, dishonest advertisement,
and sharp practices dominated the business field he portrayed.
Smiles s catalogue of social virtues is best considered alongside
his catalogue of social sins, just as his social philosophy is best
considered against the background of the forties as well as the
fifties. His list of virtues did not spring from some peculiar
source of moral smugness. It reflected the needs of a society in
which, despite striking industrial achievements, there were still
great areas of waste and inefficiency. The Victorians were not
in possession of a secure moral order which enabled them to
tame nature and to harness the machine; rather they needed
such an order if they were to achieve that rate of economic
growth which they themselves demanded.

Smiles understood how far from realization was his dream
of self-reliant men in a developing society. a We often hear
that knowledge is Power, " he wrote, "but we never hear that
Ignorance is Power. And yet Ignorance has always had more
power in the world than Knowledge. Ignorance dominates be
cause Knowledge, as yet, has obtained access only to the minds
of the few." He wanted knowledge to be diffused among the
minds of the many, for better education would abate drunken
ness, improvidence, and crime* By itself, however, it would
not go far enough. Duty and character would be needed to
direct it toward general social improvement. Smiles saw the
whole of life as a school in which lessons were taught and
values expounded. But it was a school where the scholars acted

Samuel Smiles and the Gospel of Work

rather than read and paid for their mistakes not with punish
ment but with wasted opportunity.

Smiles emphasized self-set standards as the props of society.
"National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy
and uprightness as national decay is of individual idleness,
selfishness and vice. What we are accustomed to decry as great
social evils will, for the most part, be found to be but the out
growth of man s own perverted life." Social improvement
could come about only by arid through individuals, through
deeds, not through words. "Men cannot be raised in masses, as
the mountains were in the early geological states of the world.
They must be dealt with as units; for it is only by the elevation
of individuals that the elevation of the masses can be efF ectively
secured."

This skepticism about political action did not imply that
Smiles was a complete believer in laissez faire. He began by
justifying the resentment of the self-made man against too
much interference in the conduct of his business affairs, but
he went on to advocate certain limited forms of state interven
tion with as much enthusiasm as the Benthamite Chadwick.
Too much has been made of the mid- Victorian belief in laissez
faire; the concept was always challenged, particularly by
writers like Carlyle, and even those economistsmainly "vul
gar economists" who popularized it found themselves com
pelled to introduce a whole range of exceptions and qualifica
tions. The Benthamites in particular were attracted by the pos
sibility of employing the machinery of the state to regulate
some of the obvious social disharmonies of the middle years
of the century.

For Smiles as for Chadwick, complete laissez faire was too
simple an answer. Both of them had seen in their own lifetimes
some of the worst effects of standing back and letting things
be. Both were far too industrious and pertinacious to identify
laissez faire with dolce -far niente. Physical disease rather than
social waste opened their eyes to the shortcomings of a laissez
faire society. "The sanitary idea," as contemporaries called it,
the quest for an efficient system of public health, stirred them
rather than dissatisfaction with economic individualism. "Be-

Victorian People

fore the age of railroads and sanitary reforms, the pastoral life
of the Arcadians was a beautiful myth. The Blue Book men
have exploded it forever. 7 * The failure to respond to the advice
of the "Blue Book men" sprang from the powerful driving force
of inertia, which slackened effort and delayed attention. "When
typhus or cholera breaks out," Smiles exclaimed, "they tell us
that Nobody is to blame. That terrible Nobody! How much
he has to answer for. More mischief is done by Nobody than
by all the world besides. Nobody adulterates our food. Nobody
poisons us with bad drink. , . . Nobody leaves towns undrained.
Nobody fills jails, penitentiaries and convict stations. Nobody
makes poachers, thieves and drunkards. Nobody has a theory
too a dreadful theory. It is embodied in two words: laissez-
faire let alone. When people are poisoned with plaster of Paris
mixed with flour, *Iet alone is the remedy. ... Let those who
can, find out when they are cheated: caveat eniptor. When
people live in foul dwellings, let them alone, let wretchedness
do its work; do not interfere with death."

The discovery of this malevolent and invisible "Nobody" re
vealed a hidden figure of evil at the heart of the social world.
Yet at the same time it was still generally believed that a benev
olent and equally invisible hand was directing individual
action, along lines suggested by Adam Smith, to produce social
gain. Smiles was never troubled, as were many of his successors,
about the possible identity of these two invisible powers. He
felt no doubts about their respective spheres of influence. They
were hostile powers at perpetual war with each other, the one
insuring economic progress, the other producing social chaos.
Fortunately, despite all the black spots in Victorian society,
England was on the right side. Smiles believed in the persistent
Victorian contrast between Anglo-Saxon countries like Eng
land and the United States and Latin countries like Spain. The
difference lay not in climate but in social organization. "A
Spaniard will blush to work; he will not blush to beg." There
was Protestantism as well as radicalism behind such a judgment
and also pride. "The spirit of self-help, as exhibited in the ener
getic action of the individual, has in all times been a marked
feature of the English character, and furnishes the true meas-

4126}-

Samuel Smiles and the Gospel of Work

ure of our power as a nation." If Nobody could only be de
feated within, Anybody could be challenged without.

There was one certain way of failing to defeat Nobody-
reliance on socialism. Smiles met Owenites in smoky Leeds and
was not impressed. He objected to Owen s "spinning jenny of
a universe," too far removed from life to deserve serious atten
tion. He met the poet Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn Law rhymer,
in 1847 and agreed with him that competition was "the great
social law of God." "What is a Communist?" Elliott had asked
in one of his poems:

One who hath yearnings
For equal division of unequal earnings:
Idler, or burglar, or both, he is willing
To fork out his penny, and pocket your shilling.

Smiles heartily agreed. "The metaphysics of socialism," he
wrote, "were comprised in an axiom that character is formed
for, not by, the individual; and that society may so arrange
circumstances as to produce whatever character it pleases."
The only character Smiles wished to see was self-made char
acter. He would rather be "a pagan suckled in a creed outworn"
than be a socialist.

Yet it was significant that Smiles, who worshiped self-help
and individual enterprise and abhorred waste of economic re
sources on military expenditure, could not resist the magic of
organized discipline, even military discipline. He never went
so far as the popular versifier and author of Proverbial Philos
ophy, Martin Tupper, who urged Englishmen: "Up, make
ready your rifles!" promising that

. . . with a nation of riflemen ready,
Nobody ll come because no one will dare!

But he did write: "Wonderful is the magic of drill! Drill means
discipline, training, education. . . . These soldiers who are
ready to march steadily against vollied fire, against belching
cannon or to beat their heads against bristling bayonets . . .
were once tailors, shoemakers, mechanics, weavers and plough
men; with mouths gaping, shoulders stooping, feet straggling,
arms and hands like great fins hanging by their sides; but now

1127Y

Victorian People

their gait is firm and martial, their figures are erect, and they
march along to the sound of music, with a tread that makes the
earth shake." Even after the French danger was past and the
Crimean War was over, room was found in his gallery of serv
ice for the soldier as well as the engineer, and obedience, sub
mission, discipline, and courage were extolled. Smiles might
have quoted Carlyle; instead, he chose his words from Ruskin:
"Out of fiery and uncouth material, it is only soldiers disci
pline which can bring the full force of power. Men who,
under other circumstances, would have shrunk into lethargy or
dissipation are redeemed into noble life by a service which at
once summons and directs their energies." Smiles went fur
ther. Impressed by the Volunteer Movement by which civil
ians trained for national service, he headed one of his chapters
with Whyte-Melville s phrase, "the highest of us is but a
sentry at his post," "One dare scarcely hint, in these days, at the
necessity for compulsory conscription; and yet, were the peo
ple at large compelled to pass through the discipline of the
army, the country \vould be stronger, the people would be
soberer, and thrift would become much more habitual than it is
at present."

IV

It was in his analysis of thrift that Smiles outlined the essen
tials of his theory of society. Individual savings provided the
foundation of the national accumulation of capital, and the
national accumulation of capital was essential to continued
economic growth. But thrift was more than an economic neces
sity; it was in itself a praiseworthy social objective. "Thrift
produces capital; and capital is the conserved result of labour.
The capitalist is merely a man who does not spend all that is
earned by work. He is a man prepared to forego present satis
faction for the hope of future reward." Smiles agreed with
John Stuart Mill that "the principal industrial excellence of the
English people [lay] in their capacity of present exertion for
a distant object." Enjoyment was subordinated to prudent fore
sight and self-denial. Smiles made no distinction between big
and small capitalists or between small savers and large investors,

Scmmel Smiles and the Gospel of Work

nor did he worry himself, as Mill did, with the uncomfortable
thought that "the majority of Englishmen have no life but in
their work and that alone stands between them and ennui." He
thought the thrifty man was the good man as well as the wise
man, and he was particularly anxious to encourage the working
classes to find their ideal social type among the provident men
and women with bank accounts. The workingman could be
come a capitalist by adding prudence to industry. "Little
things" added up. Marginal income that little bit wasted on
gambling or drink-could guarantee individual security. He
discussed in detail seven possible ways of augmenting savings
of one penny a day. On a slightly more ambitious calculation
"a glass of beer a day is equal to forty-five shillings a year. This
sum will insure a man s life for a hundred and thirty pounds,
payable at death. Or placed in a savings bank, it would amount
to a hundred pounds in twenty years."

Such savings would guarantee a man s independence. It was
the moral rather than the economic aspect of savings which
Smiles stressed. The little capital a man has saved up "is always
a source of power. He is no longer the sport of time and fate.
He can boldly look the world in the face. ... He can dictate
his own terms. He can neither be bought nor sold. He can
look forward to an old age of comfort and happiness."

Savings were thus the fruit of individual responsibility, or
rather self-abnegation, and provided insurance against the
hazards of the working life and the cares of sickness and old
age. It was the duty of the prudent individual to allow for such
emergencies. The state was in no sense responsible for the social
contingencies of working-class living.

In his approach to this problem, Smiles showed none of the
twentieth-century concern for the maintenance of full employ
ment and social security. He considered that periods of full
employment "prosperous times" were very often the least
prosperous of all times. "In prosperous times, mills are working
full time; men, women and children are paid high wages; ware
houses are emptied and filled. . . . Everybody seems to be be
coming richer and more prosperous. But we do not think
whether the men and women are becoming wiser, better

Victorian People

trained, less self-indulgent, more religiously disposed. , , . If
this apparent prosperity he closely examined it will he found
that expenditure is increasing in all directions. There are de
mands for higher wages; and the higher wages, when obtained,
are spent as soon as earned. Intemperate habits are formed, and
once formed, the habit of intemperance continues. . , . When a
population is thoughtless and improvident, no kind of material
prosperity will benefit them. Unless they exercise forethought
and economy, they will alternately be in a state of hunger
and burst. When trade falls off, as it usually docs after ex
ceptional prosperity, they will not be comforted by the thought
of what they might have saved, had it ever occurred to them
that the prosperous times might not have proved permanent."

There was no natural tendency to full employment, even in
the so-called mid- Victorian boom years, and there was con
siderable short-term unemployment after the financial crises of
1857 and 1866. But Smiles showed little interest in the economic
causes of waves of prosperity and depression and accepted
them with far fewer qualms than he accepted epidemics of
disease. "Trade has invariably its cycle of good and bad years,
like the lean and fat kine in Pharaoh s dream its bursts of pros
perity followed by glut, panic and distress." He was concerned
solely with the "moral" effects of cyclical fluctuations. It was
part of his gospel of work not only that bouts of prosperity
were often founded on overspeculation but also that the easy
gains of a period of real prosperity, founded upon flourishing
industry and trade, were demoralizing if they served merely to
increase individual waste and Improvidence.

He blamed some English workmen not for want of industry
so much as for want of foresight and compared the conspicuous
spending of some working-class families with the prudent care
for the future of professional people. He quoted Chadwick s
remarks on the Lancashire cotton famine during the American
Civil War: "Families trooped into relief rooms in the most
abject condition, whose previous aggregate wages exceeded the
income of many curates." Wage statistics were collected from
Blackburn, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Edinburgh, and Sun-
derland. They are an interesting collection less on account of

Samuel Smiles and the Gospel of Work

their reliability than because of the light they throw on the
nature of current controversy. At Middlesbrough rail-rollers
earned a rate of pay equal to that of lieutenant colonels in the
Foot Guards; plate-rollers, equal to that of majors of Foot; and
roughers, equal to that of lieutenants and adjutants. At Black
burn a perturbed employer complained that he could not afford
lamb, salmon, young ducks, and green peas until after his hands
"had been consuming these delicacies of the season for some
three or four weeks." No doubt the diet of the same hands
varied considerably, with potatoes and porridge providing the
staple food in lean times; but, if only the men had exercised a
little more restraint, they might have been eating bacon and
beans the whole year round.

Smiles did not connect thrift and avarice, even though he
always tended in his private life to a certain austerity of con
sumption. He claimed that he hated the miser, the screw, and
the scrub. He was no Scrooge. Of the eight Keynesian motives
for refraining from spending precaution, foresight, calcula
tion, improvement, independence, enterprise, pride, and avarice
he recognized the first six and spelled them in letters of gold
and rejected with scorn the last two. "Thrift is not in any way
connected with avarice, usury, greed or selfishness. It is in fact
the very reverse of these disgusting dispositions." If it were ap
plied universally among the working classes, it would raise their
whole social position, not reduce their enjoyment or narrow
their horizon. Smiles went back again to the dingy room in
Leeds where he had addressed his first audience. "Those who do
society s workwho produce, under the direction of the most
intelligent of their number, the wealth of the nation are en
titled to a much higher place than they have yet assumed. We
believe in a good time coming for working men and women
when an atmosphere of intelligence shall pervade them, when
they will prove themselves as enlightened, polite and independ
ent as the other classes in society."

It is important to stress that in his writing Smiles s main ap
peal was a direct one to the working classes through the medi
um of the Sunday-school prize and the guidebook of the self-
taught man. He had a warmhearted admiration for the laborer

<{ 131

Victorian People

as much as for the artisan, but what he distrusted was their
lack of self-dependence. "Their pay nights were often a
Saturnalia of riot and disorder," he wrote of the railway nav
vies who helped George Stephenson. Smiles believed that such
scenes almost irretrievably damaged the reputation of working-
men, while organizations like the co-operative movement en
hanced it. When the working classes recognized the values
which he attempted to inculcate, he showed every sympathy
with them.

The creed of the humble man shines through all Smiles s
writing. In Life and Labour he divided great men into different
categories according to their social origins. The resulting table
is more amusing than edifying, but it was designed to be taken
very seriously. In the "Nobles and Squires 1 coluni he placed
Galileo, Mirabeau, and Wellington; in the "Middle Class 1 col
umn he placed Newton, Shakespeare, and Carlyle; in the
"Working Class" column he placed Columbus, Copernicus,
and Marshal Ncy, as well as more familiar figures like Brind-
ley, Stephenson, and Arkwright. He admitted that the line
which separated the middle from the aristocratic classes was
difficult to draw, but he did not identify the working class
with an industrial proletariat, brought into existence by the rise
of steam power. The working class was identified with "all
toilers of hand and brain." Humble they might he, but they
were the real makers of the future; from the start they had the
advantage over the aristocracy that they tended to produce
great inventors rather than great soldiers, a far more useful re
sult despite the appeal of military service. It was with great
approval that Smiles quoted the words of his friend Arthur
Helps, the civil servant, who taught him the advantages of
using shorthand: "Deduct all that men of the humbler classes
have done for England in the way of inventions only, and see
where she would have been but for them."

For those workers who did not rise, Smiles stressed the value
of sound corporate institutions like co-operative societies and
savings banks, which gave a ticket to independence. He praised
"good" trade-unionists, who encouraged individual temperance
and mutual assistance and bitterly attacked employers who

-! 132

Samuel Smiles and the Gospel of Work

were opposed to the introduction of savings banks on the
grounds that the workmen might use their savings to finance
strikes.

Above all, he advocated a greater sympathy among classes.
"Want of sympathy pervades all classesthe poor, the working,
the middle and the upper classes. There are many social gaps
between them, which cannot yet be crossed." An increase in
sympathy could not come about by charity by "giving money,
blankets, coals and such like to the poor"; it could come about
only by increased working-class independence and by mutual
understanding of common interests. "Thus only can the breath
of society be sweetened and purified."

V

Yet if Smiles was talking primarily to those artisans and
workmen who were capable of appreciating the magic of self-
help, his message was a general one. The gospel of work was
as important for the businessman as it was for the working-
man. He, too, had to work or to perish. "All life is a struggle.
Amongst workmen, competition is a struggle to advance to
wards high wages. Amongst masters, to make the highest
profits. . . . Stop competition, and you stop the struggle of
individualism. . . . Under competition, the lazy man is put
under the necessity of exerting himself; and if he will not exert
himself, he must fall behind. If he do not work, neither shall
he eat. . . . There is enough for all, but do your own share of
work you must."

Smiles reacted strongly against lingering mercantilist con
ceptions of the utility of luxury and the evil of thrift, the
superiority of idleness and the inferiority of work. He had a
puritan conception of the fortress wall separating work from
play, although he recognized the need for recreation and was
too good a businessman himself to omit from his illustrative
anecdotes occasional spicy unmoral tales. He told of Sheridan
and Lamartine, both "heroes of debt," the latter running
through half-a-dozen fortunes while boldly proclaiming that
"he hated arithmetic, that negative of every noble thought."
Smiles naturally found this approach extremely unsatisfactory.

Victorian People

Instead of finding "heroic virtue" in conspicuous spending, he
saw only "the seedy side of debt." "A man has no business to
live in a style which his income cannot support, or to mortgage
his earnings of next week in order to live luxuriously to-day."
Nor had he any right to spend his time daydreaming when he
might be working. "The unhappy youth who committed
suicide a few years since because he had been born to be a
man and condemned to be a grocer proved by the very act
that his soul was not equal even to the dignity of grocery. . . .
In human society, social rights necessitate their own observ
ance. When the sense of responsibility is blunted, society goes
to ruin."

Smiles stressed that the arguments he was using were not
new and that they had to be reiterated even in a business con
text. The competitive struggle in mid-Victorian England was
far more effective than "the vortex of extravagant fashion" in
determining men s attitudes; and, as Mill pointed out, there
was an "extreme incapacity of the people for personal enjoy
ment" which made hard work and capital accumulation pos
sible. But the lure of social ideals older than capitalism led
many nineteenth-century businessmen, and even more frequent
ly their sons and grandsons, if not into heroic debt, at least into
a relative idleness in the country. It was difficult to resist the
attractions of a graceful and effortless country gentlemen s
society. In the battle between the self-made man and the gentle
man, the self-made man won in England only if he became a
gentleman himself.

Smiles hated all such forms of snobbery, particularly when
they tempted his new heroes of self-help. He wanted his self-
made man to remember how he had risen, not to forget it,
and to relate his mature attitudes to the process by which he
had acquired them. "The parvenus are of the people, belong
to them, and spring from them. Indeed, they are the people
themselves. In recognising the great parvenu spirit of this age
we merely recognise what, in other words, is designated as the
dignity of labour, the rights of industry, the power of intel
lect" The parvenu became a gentleman not by aping his "bet
ters" but by remaining true to himself. "The true gentleman"

-{ m \

Samuel Smiles and the Gospel of Work

was not the creature of inherited privilege but the person who
was polite, civil, tolerant, and forbearing. He might be of any
rank or class, peasant or noble. Any other definition of a gentle
man was grounded in snobbery.

Smiles would have none of Trollope s subtle dividing lines
between different sections in society; the same rules applied to
all, and by the same tests they could be judged. All real gentle
men "at once identify each other. They look each other in the
eye and grasp each other s hands. They know each other in
stinctively. They appreciate each other s merits." They would
no more think of using their power for private reasons than of
allowing themselves to forget strict self-control; outer conduct
and inward disposition were always perfectly correlated.

Such a picture was based not on observation but on a rooted
belief in a moral code, on the world of ought,, not on the world
of is. It was to Thackeray, who had brilliantly satirized "the
diabolical invention of gentility," that Smiles turned to dis
cover his final advice:

Come wealth or want, come good or ill:
Let young and old accept their part,

And bow before the Awful Will,
And bear it with an honest heart.

Who misses or who wins the prize-
Go, lose or conquer as you can,

But if you fail, or if you rise,
Be each, pray God, a gentleman.

VI

The relevance of Smiles s advice to the circumstances in
which his readers found themselves considerably declined dur
ing the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and his popular
ity waned. The industrial system was becoming less competi
tive and far more impersonal, and social mobility was beginning
to depend more on education than on perseverance and initia
tive in adult life. As a result, the heroes of Samuel Smiles ceased
to command the same prestige as they had done twenty years
before.

Some critics attacked Smiles for turning self-reliance, which
was undoubtedly a virtue, into a ruthless will to succeed, ir-

{ 135 Y

Victoria?! People

respective of social cost. They found virtue in failure, If the
failure had been the product of striving against great odds:

Behold the leader of a vanquished cause
His arms extended on the bitter cross.

Other critics, who were beginning to defy the whole body of
mid- Victorian orthodox economics, disputed much that Smiles
had said about the levers of economic progress. A. F. Mum
mery and J, A. Hobson, for instance, in the Physiology of In
dustry (1889) claimed that excessive saving was responsible for
the underemployment of capital and labor in periods of bad
trade. Thrift was conceived of not as a virtue but as a vice, or
at least as a check upon healthy development. Orthodoxy was
still powerful enough to refuse to allow Hobson to deliver
political economy lectures for the London University Exten
sion Board on the ground that his book was "equivalent in
rationality to an attempt to prove the flatness of the earth."
The arguments seemed a little less silly after the economic
system itself had toppled over the edge of world war and world
depression. The stage w r as then set for books like R. H. Taw-
ney s The Acquisitive Society (1921), which challenged the
social presuppositions of the age of Smiles, and J. M. Keynes s
General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936),
xvhich provided a new economic synthesis.

Since the time of Smiles the social framework has changed
almost beyond recognition, and it requires an effort to see the
relevance of his idea of social character to the particular cir
cumstances of his times. But most of his critics, then and now,
were somewhat unfair to him. To those who accused him of
sneering at failure, he could reply quite rightly that his analy-
sjs of success was not designed to justify ruthless selfishness. To
Mthose who criticized his economics, he could reply that he was
merely relating the gospel of work a necessary gospel at all
timesto the particular circumstances of an expanding econ
omy, a competitive economic system, and an atmosphere of
social peace. In quite different economic circumstances, in the
twentieth century, it is still true that the attitude of our society
to work is the most crucial issue it has to face, since the fate of

Samuel Smiles and the Gospel of Work

every society depends in the long run on the productivity of
its workers. The engineers of a planned economy in twentieth-
century England have not so far been able to manufacture the
social complements of their economic techniques. In the nine
teenth century Smiles was successful in this difficult quest.

He was successful because, for the most part, he let his little
stories speak for themselves rather than attempted to dress them
up in the garments of a unifying philosophy. The lack of such
a philosophy makes some of his books little more than collec
tions of fragmentary anecdotes and quotations, yet at the same
time it makes it possible for different readers to interpret Smiles
in different ways. Each man, indeed, can discover in himself his
own Samuel Smiles.

One of the most unexpected admirers of Smiles was Robert
Blatchford, the socialist pioneer of Merrie England, who wrote
a most interesting essay about Self-Help which appeared when
Smiles s popularity was at its lowest ebb, particularly among
socialists. Blatchford admitted that many socialists spoke of
Smiles as "an arch-Philistine" and of his books as "the apotheo
sis of respectability, gigmanity, and selfish grab"; but he him
self, writing as a socialist, found Smiles "a most charming and
honest writer" and Self-Help "one of the most delightful and
invigorating books it has been my happy fortune to meet with."
He pointed out that Smiles had never claimed that the acquisi
tion of wealth was a proof of moral worth. Rather he had
argued that "the glitter of riches often serves only to draw
attention to the worthlessness of their possessor as the light of
the glow-worm reveals the grub." "Far better and more re
spectable," Smiles had said, "is the good poor man than the
bad rich one better the humble silent man than the agreeable
well-appointed rogue who keeps his gig. A well-balanced and
well-stored mind, a life full of useful purpose, whatever the
position occupied with it may be, is of far greater importance
than average worldly respectability."

The "nimble and picturesque" style of Self-Help appealed
to Blatchford, as did the gospel of work itself. "Its perusal has
often forced me to industry, for very shame." Indeed, the
stories in Self -Help would shame any sluggard into action and

4 157 Y

Victorian People

inspire any faineant with hope and courage. "The sayings of
the heroes quoted ring in the ear like the blare of trumpets, the
firm but glowing sentences of the author stir one s blood like
the throb of drums." Above all, Smiles judged men not by pre
cepts but by practice. He paid little attention to titles, honors,
and wealth but rather to the usefulness of creative achieve
ment

Blatchford s praise was echoed by other writers like the
rationalist Grant Allen, who certainly did not share what is
commonly thought to be a Smilcsian philosophy. In a little
book published in 1884, called Biographies of Working Men,
Allen admitted his debt to Smiles and made explicit what
Blatchford had found implicit in Smilcs s writings. "It is the
object of this volume to set forth the lives of working men,
who through industry, perseverance, and high principle have
raised themselves by their own exertions from humble begin
nings. Raised themselves! Yes; but to what? Not merely, let
us hope, to wealth and position, nor merely to worldly respect
and high office, but to some conspicuous field of real useful
ness to their fellow men." But Allen admitted that self-help
was no social panacea. "So long as our present social arrange
ments exist * . . the vast mass of men will necessarily remain
workers to the last, [and] no attempt to raise individual work
ing men above their own class into the professional or mer
cantile classes can ever greatly benefit the working masses as
a whole." It was right and proper for able men to rise, but it
was also right and proper to provide for politicians to legislate
for social improvement as welL In other words, Allen, like
Blatchford, saw self-help and socialism not as incompatible
but as in some sense complementary. Other socialists in the
last years of the nineteenth century were prepared to go even
further and to produce a theory not of complementarity but
of reconciliation, though it was left to George Bernard Shaw
and Oscar Wilde to claim that only socialism could provide a
proper foundation for full-blooded individualism. Such a para
dox would have shocked Smiles in the same way that he was
shocked by Robert Owen s "sophistries," but it would have
seemed a truism to Blatchford.

4 138

Samuel Smiles and the Gospel of Work

For Smiles s individualism depended not upon the liberated
aesthete or the life-force but upon each man building his own
character, "the crown and glory of life." Such character was
usually acquired in the workship and home rather than in the
school. "The best culture is not obtained from teachers when
at school or college, so much as by our own diligent self -edu
cation when we have become men." Nonetheless, Smiles recog
nized that there were some teachers in England, like Dr. Arnold
of Rugby, who taught their pupils to rely upon themselves
and to develop their powers by their own active efforts.

To understand how within the schoolroom a parallel proc
ess of character formation was developed, it is necessary to turn
from Smiles to Arnold and to those writers like Thomas
Hughes who most actively advertised Arnold s achievements.
The transition is not difficult, for Arnold is frequently men
tioned in the pages of Self-Help; and, after all, Arnold himself
once said that he would rather send a boy to Van Diemen s
Land, where he would have to work for his bread, "than send
him to Oxford to live in luxury, without any desire in his
mind to avail himself of his advantages."

VI

Every pupil was wade to feel that there was work
for Mm to do that his happiness as well as his duty
lay in doi?ig that work well. Hence an indescribable
zest was communicated to a young man s feeling about
life; . . . and a deep and ardent attach?nent sprang up
towards him who had taught him thus to value life and
his own self, and his work and mission in this world.

BONAMY PRICE ON THOMAS ARNOLD OF RUGBY
I

A Czech reviewer and admirer of Samuel Smiles wrote In his
review of Self-Help that "nations are gathered out of nurseries,
and they who hold the leading strings of children may even
exercise a greater power than those who hold the reins of
government." In examining the influences brought to bear
upon the mid-Victorians, the school is of central importance,
particularly the public school, which did much to set the atti
tudes and determine the values of the leaders of society.

The public boarding school is a highly distinctive English
educational institution; indeed, it has been claimed bombasti
cally but with no deliberate attempt at exaggeration that "if a
composite history of all the public schools is ever written it
will be, in reality, the history of England, since the British
Empire has been in the main built up by the founders of the
schools and the pupils who gained their knowledge and had
their characters moulded in those institutions,"

Such a claim could hardly have been true in the very early
nineteenth century, for, although there were nine ancient

140

Thomas Hughes and the Public Schools

schools in the country which stood out above the rest, prepar
ing boys for the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and
associating boarding-school life with classical education, they
were not dominant in the process of the training of national
leaders. Neither Macaulay nor Tennyson, Newman nor Dis
raeli, received their education in such establishments. Robert
Lowe, who did, was always unhappy while at Winchester and
subjected it in later life to scathing criticism.

The schools had obvious weaknesses and were ripe for re
form. Their endowments were often misapplied, their organiza
tion inefficient, their discipline loose and uneasy. In most of the
schools, boys set the tone rather than masters. "Deference to
public opinion," as it was called, frequently meant the rule of
the bully, and "boy nature" revealed itself either in intermit
tent "epidemics of turbulence" or in persistent nonco-operation.
The "keen sense of honor" and "patriotic feeling" in some of
the schools were the result rather of rigid custom among the
boys than of influence by the masters. The customs were often
not only rigid but indefensible. At Westminster, for instance,
there was an old rule that no boy below the sixth form might
walk in school. If a boy wanted to move, he had to run. "The
idler and the bully had no fears," the historian of the school has
written, "while wit and industry fought an uphill battle against
neglect and dislike." As we read in Tom Brown s School Days y
"there are no such bigoted holders by established forms and
customs, be they never so foolish or meaningless, as English
schoolboys."

In attempting to abolish old customs or to make them harm
less, masters frequently had to resort to dubious methods them
selves. At Eton, where the maximum amount of independence
was granted to the schoolboy, the famous John Keate (head
master from 1809 to 1834) used to make point-blank charges of
lying to his boys, quite at random. "You re hardened in false
hood," he told them; yet he expected a certain amount of lying
to go on as "a mark of proper respect." At Rugby, before
Thomas Arnold arrived as headmaster in 1829, the school was
in the grip of an icy discipline; one of the masters jovially re
marked to him that "the boys were the excrescences of pond

Victoria?? People

life." For the most part, the boys slept in communal beds hold
ing six, although some parents paid special fees each term for
single or double beds. Even the grimmest discipline could not
have controlled a school in such conditions, and headmasters
were frequently overburdened with the cares of office. So bad
were conditions at Harrow when C. J. Vaughan arrived in
1 844 that he was told not to throw himself away on the school.
When Stuart Adolphus Pears first arrived at Repton in 1852,
"he was for a moment overwhelmed by the desolate prospect.
He sat at a table with his head upon his hands, in the attitude
of a man appalled at the magnitude of the task he had set him
self."

By 1852, however, the position was changing as a result of
influences from inside the schools rather than from outside,
particularly from the influence of men like Thomas Arnold of
Rugby. While the radical opponents of the public schools, who
disliked endowed and socially stratified education, failed in their
eff orts at reform from without, there was a convincing attempt
to reform the old public school from within, Their essential
characteristics were retained, but many of their abuses were
overcome. New schools were established in keeping with the
dominant ideas of the age, and old and new schools together
provided a reconciliation of necessity and tradition. While
Arnold was important in the reconciliation, it would probably
have been accomplished without him. A society of the type of
mid- Victorian England had much at stake in the schools ques
tion; the answer it reached bore all the marks of what has been
called "the mid-Victorian compromise."

The old public schools had been founded at different times
for different purposes and with different schemes of organiza
tion. They all depended, however, upon endowments for their
effective maintenance. The new public schools which emerged
in the middle of the nineteenth century were anxious to manu
facture traditions comparable with the best of those of the older
foundations. Taken together, both types of school began to be
considered not only as places of learning but as national insti
tutions, so that on the eve of the Public Schools Act of 1868,
which ended a decade of investigation and controversy, Leslie

i 142 }>

Thomas Hzighes and the Public Schools

Stephen could write that "neither the British jury, nor the
House of Lords, nor the Church of England, nay scarcely the
monarchy itself, seems so deeply enshrined in the bosoms of our
countrymen as our public schools."

The importance of the public school in English nineteenth-
century social history was twofold. First, it produced "gentle
men," types as distinct as Samuel Smiles s heroes of self-help.
"It is not necessary," wrote Thomas Arnold of Rugby, one of
the nine old public schools, "that this should be a school for
three hundred, or even one hundred, boys, but it is necessary
that it should be a school of Christian gentlemen." The type
required careful nurture. Boys are not gentlemen by nature,
nor do they naturally become so, and there is no reason to be
lieve that they are by nature Christian. In Arnold s phrase,
"they are not susceptible of Christian principles in their full
development and practise; and I suspect that a low standard of
morals in many respects must be tolerated among them, as it
was on a larger scale, in which I consider the boyhood of the
human race." Arnold was no Rousseau. "Here in the nakedness
of boy-nature," he wrote on another occasion, "one is quite
able to understand how there could not be found so many as
even ten righteous in a whole city." Yet he looked beyond im
perfect boyhood to a more perfect manhood. The school was
to be the training ground for character. "Our work here would
be absolutely unbearable," he said in one of his sermons, "if we
did not bear in mind that we should look forward as well as
backward if we did not remember that the victory of fallen
man lies not in innocence but in tried virtue."

Only the community of a public school under the direction
of a powerful headmaster and the care of "public spirited and
liberal" assistant masters could prepare boys for active life and
act as a powerful agent in society. Preparation foreshadowed
performance. The character-forming role of the school was
considered more important than its strictly intellectual task.
Like Carlyle and Smiles, Arnold believed in the gospel of work
and the formation of character through trial. Work was a
sacred duty, and, under the direction of Arnold, Rugby be
came, in Carlyle s phrase, "a temple of industrious peace." The

Victorian People

diligent plodder was as cherished as the erratic genius. Arnold
was typical of his age when he condemned "mere intellectual
acuteness, divested as it is, in too many cases, of all that is com
prehensive and great and good, [as] more revolting than the
most helpless imbecility, seeming to me almost like the spirit of
Mephistopheles." Academic successes or failures were less
important than moral or religious principles. "If there be one
thing on earth which is truly admirable, it is to see God s
wisdom blessing an inferiority of natural powers, where they
have been honestly, truly and zealously cultivated." In speak
ing of a pupil whose character had triumphed over his lack of
ability, Arnold once said that he would stand to that man "hat
in hand."

This exhortation of character was not accompanied by any
denigration of outstanding ability, which Arnold and the best
public schools did much to encourage; but it was the formation
of character which was the central purpose of the whole theory
of education in the many new public schools which were
created in the 1850 s and 186Q s. The stress laid on the principle
suggests that during this period character was a scarcer endow
ment than ability and that it had not been fostered previously
in the older public schools, where boys were allowed simply to
be boys. The emphasis on character was only challenged effec
tively later in the century when ability rather than character
became the scarce good, and the public schools were turning
out, in A. C. Benson s phrase, "well-groomed, well-mannered,
rational, manly boys, all taking the same view of things, all
doing the same things," conformists to a code rather than high
ly developed or distinctive personalities. The standardization of
character had sapped individuality. By that time the opponents
of the public school, as much as its defenders, were arguing in
entirely different terms from the controversialists of the middle
century.

\ The second way in which the public school was of central
importance was in its mixing of representatives of old families
with the sons of the new middle classes. This social amalgam
cemented old and new ruling groups, which had previously
remained apart. The working classes were for the most part

4 14+}.

Thomas Hughes and the Public Schools

excluded from the schools as they still are in the twentieth cen
tury, but the great social divide of the 1840 s between landlords
and businessmen was bridged. The public school, consequently,
provided for the gradual fusion of classes and their drawing
upon a common store of values. "There was nowhere in the
country so complete an absence of servility to mere rank, posi
tion or riches," wrote Charles Dickens; while Matthew Arnold,
the son of Dr. Arnold of Rugby, told Arminius with pride, in
one of the letters in Friendship s Garland, that "it is only in
England that this beneficial salutary inter-mixture of classes
takes place. Look at the bottle-merchant s son, and the Plantag-
enet being brought up side by side. None of your absurd sepa
rations and seventy-two quarterings here. Very likely young
Bottles will end by being a lord himself."

But, if Matthew Arnold could point to the unique distinction
of the public school, he could be gently ironical about its
limitations. In one of his conversations with Arminius he com
plained in conventional liberal terms of the frightful gap be
tween the poor and "the educated and intelligent class." "Your
educated and intelligent classes," sneered Arminius, "where
are they? I should like to see them." The deficiency of the
schools reflected the weakness of all aristocracies an insensitiv-
ity to ideas. They were more successful, however, in giving to
their boys those qualities which birth and rearing were least
likely to give them "the notion of a sort of republican fellow
ship, the practise of a plain life in common, the habit of self-
help." These qualities were just as important for the sons of the
aristocracy and the upper middle classes as were "sweetness and
light" for the philistine lower middle classes.

In mixing classes together, the public schools did something
to sustain that "practise of a plain life in common" which
acted as a counter to aristocratic display and middle-class com
fort. The living was sometimes so austere that writers could
complain that the inmates of a workhouse or a jail were better
fed and lodged than the scholars of Eton. Neither the old nor
the new public schools pampered birth or wealth; what both
did, at their best, was to introduce their pupils to an ideal of
responsible service. This ideal had little to do with technical

Victorian People

expertise or originality of ideas; it enhanced the prestige of the
professions and the civil service but failed to enliven the world
of business or to illuminate the world of learning. In time it
lent a characteristic flavor to the new ideal of empire.

The obvious limitations of such an ideal were clearly-
apparent before the end of the century, when middle and upper
classes were cementing a new conservative alliance against
labor, but in the middle years of the century its limitations
mattered little when compared with its immediate efficacy. If
Mr. Creakle s school at Blackheath, described in Dickens
David Copperfield, had been all that the middle classes were
looking for, or if unreformed Eton had been the model institu
tion for the aristocracy, Victorian society would never have
discovered any balance or Victorian government any persistent
responsible direction. In the making of the balance and the
formation of character necessary to sustain it, the public school
was a key institution, and changes in the public schools were
responsible in some measure at least for the adaptation of old
institutions to meet new needs.

The idea of the school influenced the idea of the nation,
sometimes very directly. As Sir Joshua Fitch said of Thomas
Arnold, "It would appear that he had formed an ideal of a
Christian State organized on some such mould as his own school
at Rugby, with a chief magistrate, energetic, God-fearing, and
wise, with the clergy and aristocracy a sort of sixth-form, exer
cizing large influence in the repression of evil and encourage
ment of good, and a whole community not necessarily holding
one set of opinions, but willing to share the same worship and
to work together as the servants of the same divine master."

II

Thomas Arnold was by no means the first reformer of the
public schools, but he was above all others responsible for
spreading the gospel of reform and inspiring other headmasters
to follow his example. He died in 1842, nearly twenty years
before the Public Schools Inquiry Commission, set up in 1861,
exposed the grave defects of school organization and teaching
in some of the nine oldest schools in the country. His influence

<{ 146 }

Thoinas Hughes and the Public Schools

bore fruit in the middle years of the century more than in his
lifetime, and the commissioners paid tribute to "the personal
influence and exertions of Dr. Arnold and other great school
masters." Many of Arnold s pupils secured positions in other
schools and in turn produced their own disciples, so that there
was a natural continuity in the reform movement. C. J.
Vaughan, for instance, the headmaster of Harrow from 1844
to 1859, was a pupil of Arnold, "able and willing to carry
out the Arnold system of education." When Pears, one of
Vaughan s housemasters, became a reforming headmaster at
Repton in 1845, his most helpful colleague, Messiter, was a
product of Rugby School. He had been captain of football
under Arnold and shared the same philosophy of education.

Both Vaughan and Pears were men with missions, and both
refused to be daunted by the difficulties of their tasks. Pears,
for example, did not sit with his head in his hands for long.
Like Arnold, he applied himself with vigor to the task of train
ing Christian gentlemen. Like Arnold, he was a born ruler. "His
authority in no wise depended upon the outward paraphernalia
at one time considered inseparable from the dignity of a Head
master"; it sprang from within.

The same point was frequently made about Arnold. One of
the best accounts of his headmastership is given in an article on
him in the Dictionary of National Biography, written by
Theodore Walrond, the head boy of the school when Arnold
died. Walrond stressed that part of Arnold s hold over boys
was explained by his "extraordinary sense of the reality of the
invisible world." In an age when Christian values were the
central values of society and all deep individual problems were
related to Christian morals, Arnold s sense of spiritual insight
was of fundamental importance.

If Arnold s influence was transmitted through former pupils
and former colleagues in other public schools, it was trans
mitted to a far wider public through two written testimonials-
Dean Stanley s Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold,
written in 1844, and Thomas Hughes s Tom Brown s School
y, which first appeared in 1858.

The simplified picture of the headmaster as a strong, just,

\

Victorian, People

and fearless captain which was drawn in the pages of Tom
Brovwfs School Days was more influential than the complicated
original, for such a bold but obvious picture was essential to the
development of the public school as a national institution. The
fact that Thomas Hughes, who was a Radical as well as an old
Rugbeian, presented a favorable indeed, an enthusiasticver
dict on the public schools was as important in establishing their
position as the fact that twenty years previously the liberal
Arnold, who might have been supposed likely to join in the
attack on schools like Eton or on the narrowness of the classical
curriculum in the old schools, was the one who took the most
active part in their defense. Hughes did more than any other
writer to acquaint the non-public school boy, "the simple
reader" as well as "the gentle reader," as he addressed them in
his envoi, with the conditions of life and teaching at Rugby.
The first edition of his book, which appeared early in 1858,
was followed by a second edition in July, a third in September,
a fourth in October, and a fifth in November. By the begin
ning of January, 1859, eleven thousand copies had been sold.
Tom Broii^s School Days has continued to sell ever since in
British and foreign editions. One American reader was so im
pressed by it, for instance, that in 1860 he presented a large
velvet flag to the schoolhouse at Rugby as a token of his
esteem.

Hughes wrote his novel when he was preoccupied with the
question of the education of his own son, aged eight, who was
just about to go to school. Because he had been at Rugby under
Arnold, he felt none of the difficulties which Mr. Tulliver felt
in The Mill on the Floss, "It s an uncommon puzzling thing to
know what school to pick." Hughes was clear that Rugby
alone was the proper destination, not only because it was a
good old school, but because Arnold had been there, "the tall,
gallant form, the kindling eye, the voice, now soft as the low
notes of a flute, now clear and stirring as the call of a light
infantry bugle." The novel recaptured all Hughes s boyish en
thusiasm* If we can occasionally be permitted some doubts
about the authenticity or at any rate the completeness of the
author s picture of Arnold, we can be permitted no doubts that

148 !>

Thomas Hughes and the Public Schools

Tom Hughes himself was the real, though highly idealized
Tom Brown, a grown-up Tom Brown, who had loved his
school days so much that to some extent he remained a boy all
his life, There is an eager anticipation of life in the novel, not a
mere nostalgia for the past, and, as Charles Kingsley wrote soon
after the book came out, "from everyone, from the fine lady on
her throne, to the red-coat on his cock-horse, and the school
boy on his form ... I have heard but one word, and that is, that
it is the jolliest book they ever read."

It needed a jolly book to popularize the public school with
the middle-class and later on with the working-class reading
public, just as it needed a serious biography by Dean Stanley to
provide a convincing assessment of the public school for Chris
tian intellectuals. National institutions need to be defended at
different levels; even those claims which are vindicated in con
troversy need to be buttressed by good-humored popular ac
quiescence. Thomas Hughes, whose work influenced not only
all later fiction about public schools but also the daily round of
the schools themselves, was and remains one of the most power
ful advocates of the system. His lack of subtlety was an advan
tage; his colorful melo dramatics have won more admiration
than the whole of Arnold s sermons put together or those care
fully compiled histories of particular schools which lovingly
and meticulously trace each change in the timetable and plot
the laying of each new brick in the buildings.

The picture of the school in Tom Brown s School Days is a
very simple one indeed. Rugby is the background against
which Tom discovers himself and builds his character. His ex
periences there are worth while recapitulating. He comes from
the sturdy family of Browns, "who are scattered over the whole
Empire, on which the sun never sets, and whose general diffu
sion I take to be the chief cause of that empire s stability." His
father, a small squire, tells him before he goes to Rugby to
stick to the truth and to keep a brave and kind heart and medi
tates to himself that the reason why he had sent him there was
not to produce a good scholar "I don t care a straw for Greek
particles; no more does his mother" but to turn out "a brave,

[ 149 Y

Victorian People

helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Chris
tian. . . . That s all I want."

Truth-telling, bravery, and even the manners of a gentleman
are acquired at Rugby only after innumerable trials and adven
tures, but the process of acquisition begins as soon as Tom
passes the school gates and begins "already to be proud of being
a Rugby boy." After he has heard the Doctor s first sermon, he
starts to be proud of being one of Arnold s boys as \vell. He
makes a serious resolve "to stand by and follow the Doctor, . . .
feeling that it was only cowardice (the incarnation of all other
sins in such a boy s mind) which hindered him from doing so
with all his heart."

Some of the older boys prefer "the good old ways," the
battle of wits with the masters, to the Doctor s morality; but
Tom, helped by other boys as much as his teachers, begins to
realize that the battle against evil where the stakes arc life and
death is the decisive struggle. The sense of battle remains domi
nant. "After all, what \vould life be without fighting? . . . From
the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the
business, the real highest, honestest, business of every son of
man." Tom grows out of the struggles both mental and physi
cal. He "was becoming a new boy, though with frequent
tumbles in the diit and perpetual hard battles with himself, and
was daily growing in manfulncss and thought fulness, as every
high-couraged and well-principled boy must, when he finds
himself for the first time consciously at grips with self and the
devil."

The crisis of the story develops around Tom s use of cribs to
help him in his Latin translation. Arthur, one of the boys in his
class, who acts as his externalized conscience, tells him to aban
don them and to rely upon himself. East, his great friend, the
voice of "nature," reminds him that relations with masters are
"a trial of skill like a match at football or a battle. . . . We re
natural enemies in school [boys and masters] that s the fact."
The crib was a fair weapon, not a means of fraud; to dispense
with it would be to cut at the root of all school morality.
"You ll take away all mutual help, brotherly love, or, in the
vulgar tongue, giving construes, which I hope to be one of our

PLATE VH

BENJAMIN DISRAELI, "TOE MYSTERY MAN"

PLATE VIII

Thomas Hughes and the Public Schools

highest virtues." Tom is pulled between two moralities: that of
his schoolfellows and that of the Doctor. But his conscience is
on the Doctor s side. Arthur prevails over East. Tom is pre
pared for the harder school of life, where such choices must
constantly be made:

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.

Pleasing the Doctor means scrapping the crib, searching the
depths of his young soul, visiting "the great grim man himself,"
and becoming "a hero-worshipper, who would have satisfied
the soul of Thomas Carlyle himself."

The story ends with the visit of a bigger and wiser Tom to
Arnold s tomb. He has realized that beyond the hero-worship
of the headmaster is "the worship of Him who is the King and
Lord of heroes," just as beyond the School is Life. And, though
the Doctor dies, Tom s life of action begins:

Death keeps watch beside the portal,
But tis life that dwells beyond.

For Hughes it was to be a life of action. For Arnold s more
intellectual pupils, like Clough and Stanley, Arnold s death
placed them a on a little island of memory, and all who share
in that memory must hold together as long as life lasts."

Ill

How far is Hughes s account of Rugby and of Arnold s work
there an accurate one, and does it afford a fair assessment of the
virtues and weaknesses of the mid- Victorian public school?

Hughes himself was never a member of the small inner circle
at Rugby, which included Stanley and Clough, brilliant boys
bound to the Doctor by close spiritual and intellectual ties.
He was a more ordinary boy, although a natural leader. He was
captain both of Bigside at football and of the cricket eleven
and not unnaturally had "very little time to give inferior indus
tries, such, for instance, as the cultivation of Greek Iambics or
Latin Alcaics." His interest in school stopped short at the
bounds of scholarship, nor did he measure the success of the
school in scholastic terms. In Tom Brown s School Days, Gray,

Victorian People

the winner of a scholarship to Balliol, is, as the Times pointed
out in its first review, a silent character. "I d sooner win two
School house-matches running than get the Balliol Scholarship
any day," exclaims Brookes, the captain of Bigside, while East
evidently thought the half-day holiday which Gray secured
for the school was more important than the academic triumph
itself.

Hughes, with his boyish love of fighting and his muscular
brand of Christianity, which he derived from Charles Kingsley
rather than from Thomas Arnold, clearly considered games
more important than the Doctor did. "A struggling half hour
of Rugby football is worth a year of common life," he said.
Tom tells one of the masters that cricket is more than a game;
"it is an institution," while Arthur, whom Tom has saved from
too much reading, adds that it is "the birthright of British boys,
old and young, as habeas corpus and trial by jury are of British
men."

"The discipline and reliance on one another, which it teaches,
are so valuable," replies the master. "It ought to be such an un
selfish game. It merges the individual in the eleven; he doesn t
play that he may win but that his side may."

This appraisal of cricket was characteristic of the new
"public school," which turned games into an instrument of
character-building instead of a mere exercise or amusement.
It is significant that in the 1850 s and 1860 s the rules of many
of the school games were codified. The Rugby rules were
formulated as early as 1846, but Repton was more typical in
consolidating its rules a generation later. The interest in games
had been growing among boys earlier in the century, but in the
middle of the century old informal games gradually died out
as the new codes became established. Interschool matches canal
ized school loyalties and enthusiasms, while even at Eton turbu
lent games on the river were giving place to fierce contests for
places in the rowing eight. Games became something more than
games; they became institutions, both absorbing the energies of
growing boys living in a boys world and preparing for real-life
situations by inculcating "games values" and team spirit values

4 m Y

Thomas Hughes and the Public Schools

as important to the gentleman as were competitive values to
Smiles s businessman or skilled laborer.

Hughes foresaw this aspect of school development more
clearly than Arnold, who himself liked physical exercise and
used occasionally to wander down to the playing fields and in a
somewhat detached way observe the battle of the teams.
Arnold did nothing, however, to place games on an equality
with work, nor did his successors at Rugby. He would have
disapproved of the late-nineteenth-century fetish of games on
the grounds that it vulgarized intellectual labor, that it substi
tuted self-indulgence for self-denial, and that it placed those
boys in positions of command and influence who were fre
quently most unfit to exercise authority. Arnold, with his love
of classical parallels, spurned the example of Sparta and saw in
cultivated athleticism "brutality of soul," not embryonic team
spirit.

Although Hughes exaggerated in reading back a cult of
games into his days at Rugby, he did not not exaggerate the
trend in many of the new and some of the old public schools.
The team spirit was easier to nurture on the playing field and
its lessons more simple both to understand and to preach than
intellectual eminence or individuality of spiritual experience,
and the masters in many of the public schools were content to
rest satisfied with it. Its limitations were lost in an excess of
sentimentalism and piety for "the dear old school housethe
best house and the best school in England." Loyalty took the
place of any lucid appreciation of the ends for which the team
spirit was to be applied. Cotton, who had been a pupil of
Arnold, deliberately used organized games in the new school
at Marlborough (1851-70) to discipline a rebellious mob of
schoolboys and build up a disciplined community. It is interest
ing that in his novel Hughes mentioned Cotton, then an assistant
at Rugby, with high praise; at Marlborough belief in games
was crystallized into a code, quite consciously and deliberately.

There is little suggestion in Hughes, or in the schools which
turned to his pages for their standards, of the intellectual pur
pose of the school, a purpose which was close to Arnold s
heart. The reader is given the impression the j oiliest of all im-

4 153 Y

Victorian People

pressions that it is the chief business of a public school to
produce healthy animals, to supply them with pleasant com
panions and with faithful friends, and to teach them the rudi
ments of character.

This impression is very different from that given by Arnold s
critics, many of whom accused him of turning boys into men
before their time-indeed, of forgetting that "there should
exist for a certain time, between childhood and manhood, the
natural production known as a boy." It is different too from
the impression given in Stanley s Life of Dr. Arnold, the second
of the two influential studies of Rugby, though the two books
are best seen as complementary rather than antagonistic. With
full documentary materials at his disposal and with the memory
of a close personal friendship with Arnold, Stanley could pene
trate the headmaster s mind and survey his purposes far more
effectively than Hughes. With a healthy awe and a bold zest
for life, Hughes could recall the "informal" organization of the
life of the boys at Rugby, which Stanley admitted himself he
had never known at all Indeed, when he read Tom Brown s
School Days, he found it "an absolute revelation," opening up
"a world of which, though so near to me, I was utterly igno
rant."

Stanley knew a different side of Arnold. He was one of the
small group of Rugby boys who went on to Oxford University
stamped with a gravity and deep seriousness of purpose in life
which were not to be found in most other young public school
boys. To their enemies Arnold s serious "disciples" were
"prigs"; to themselves they were dedicated men, bound to their
headmaster with what Stanley described as "idolatrous affec
tion." Stanley s picture of Arnold was colored by his own
reverence, and, powerful though it is, it only becomes complete
when supplemented by Hughes s more homely description. If
Stanley saw what happened in Arnold s mind, Hughes saw
what happened in many of his pupils minds, in the minds of all
the Tom Browns who made up "the masses" of the school.

Stanley brought out more clearly than Hughes Arnold s
high-minded pursuit of his purpose within his chosen field. In
accepting his headmastership, Arnold believed that his employ-

Thomas Hughes and the Public Schools

rnent provided him with opportunities which no other calling
presented. To those who complained what a pity it was that a
man fit to be a statesman should be employed in teaching
schoolboys, he retaliated with a modest but firm insistence on
the importance of the school as a training ground of character.
He did not consider his headmastership as a prelude to a dif
ferent task or a passport to promotion but as a full-time voca
tion, offering its own rewards. Sure of his mission, Arnold
never warped it by letting the affairs of the school slip out of
their proper perspective. He always insisted on the "great work
of government" as "the highest earthly desire of the ripened
mind." He governed his school with as deep a sense of responsi
bility as statesmen govern a country. Indeed, as one of his mas
ters is made to say in Tom Brown s School Days, "perhaps ours
is the only little corner of the British Empire which is thor
oughly, wisely and strongly ruled just now."

But, as Stanley saw, his government was not absolute, and
his choice of policy was characteristically English and charac
teristically Victorian. "If the King of Prussia were as sincere
a lover of liberty as I am," Arnold wrote in 1829, "he would
give his people a constitution for my desire is to teach my
boys to govern themselves a far better thing than to govern
them well myself." As much as possible should be done by the
boys, and as little as possible for them. He realized that the
public school was a national institution, not only because it was
rooted in the past, but also because it depended upon a high
degree of self-government by the boys. He refused to rule as a
tyrant or a jailer, preferring to delegate authority to the thirty
oldest, strongest, and cleverest boys in the sixth form. Such
delegation insured a regular government among the boys them
selves and avoided the evils of anarchy, in other words, of the
lawless tyranny of physical strength. From 1829 onward he and
the senior boys met from time to time, almost as equals, to con
sider ways of improving the school. He even caused a flag to
be flown close to his study a signal that any boy could come
to him for a talk. His sixth form was his pride. "When I have
confidence in the Sixth," he exclaimed in one of his farewell

Victorian People

addresses, "there is no post in England which I would exchange
for this, but if they do not support me I must go."

In relying upon the sixth form, Arnold was not following a
new course of action. He was rather adapting for his own pur
poses a traditional feature of the public school system the
substantial degree of independence of the older boys. Conven
tions were turned into ideals with surprising success. It was one
of the boys who wrote in the Rugby School Miscellany in 1843
that "the Sixth Form was an aristocracy of talent and worth,
created neither by birth, interest, nor physical strength. It was a
happy thought, and spoke the observant mind in him who first
set boys to govern boys, and who turned those who should
themselves have been the ring-leaders in any disturbance into
an organized and responsible nobility, with power, privileges,
and a character of their own to preserve."

Hughes enables us to understand as clearly as Stanley the
methods by which Arnold converted an old feature into a new
institution. There was little of the real revolutionary in Arnold;
he set out not to undermine old ways but to Christianize them,
to pour new wine into old bottles. "You need not fear my
reforming furiously," he wrote to a friend just after his ap
pointment. It is true that he raised fees very sharply and exer
cised a strict control over conditions of entry; but he was
always careful to retain customs and institutions which bound
the school with the past, unless their retention was positively
harmful to good morals and discipline. He venerated "the his
torical associations and beauty" not only of Rugby but of his
own school, Winchester, and indeed of the public school sys
tem as a whole. Although he had a deep distrust of Toryism, he
expressed a Liberal-Conservative opinion characteristic of the
middle years of the century when he said, "Another system
may be better in itself, but I am placed in this system, and am
bound to try what I can make of it."

What he made of it depended partly on his choice of assist
ant masters but mainly on the strength of his own will. His
masters, who were expected, like the boys, to be "Christians
and Gentlemen," were persuaded that their positions offered "a
noble field of duty" and that they could only be secured by

Thomas Hughes and the Public Schools

men who were willing "to enter into the spirit of our system,
heart and hand." Arnold was an unquestioned leader, creating
an impression of unhasting and unresting diligence. Like all the
great men of his age, he admired energy and activity. At the
end of a day s work he would sometimes say that he felt that he
could dictate to twenty secretaries a.t once. Such energy could
have driven a bigger institution than a school, but to Arnold
even a school was too big to make perfect. "I came to Rugby,"
he said, "full of plans for School reform; but I soon found that
the reform of a public school \vas a much more difficult thing
than I had imagined." "I dread to hear this called a religious
school," he added on another occasion. "I know how much
there is to be done before it can really be called so."

Arnold s modesty needs to be confronted with Hughes s
pride. Tom Brown s reformation was itself a sign that the bad
old ways inside Rugby \vere coming to an end and that, al
though there were pockets of resistance, Arnold s battle against
the combination of aggressive boys and complacent "public
opinion" was proving successful. The change of tone can be
traced in his sermons as headmaster, In the first few years after
he came to the school he concerned himself with the contrast
between the evils of school opinion and the purity of the moral
law of Christianity; in the last few years he was more exhorta-
tory. Particular faults were forgotten, and general values were
stressed.

His methods were in keeping with the reformation of man
ners which characterized mid- Victorian England as a whole.
He insisted upon truth as fervently as Tennyson. A boy s word
was taken as his bond, and in consequence a general feeling
grew up that it was a shame to tell Arnold a lie, for he always
believed it. There could be no more eloquent evidence of the
change of attitudes within a school,

The impact of the change at Rugby was felt both in the
universities and in other schools, although Eton was not "sensi
bly affected," in Gladstone s phrase, "by any influence extra
neous to the place itself." It had been said in one of Arnold s
testimonials before he was appointed to Rugby that, if he were
elected, "he would change the face of education all through

Victorian People

the public schools of England." The prophecy was fulfilled,
although or perhaps because he made few changes in methods
or organization. His influence came through his simplicity of
purpose and the force of his personality. Without improve
ments in tone and atmosphere, it is doubtful whether the public
schools would have survived the critical examination of the
1860 s. Arnold purged them of their obvious abuses while re
taining their essential characteristics. "My love for any place
or person, or institution, is exactly the measure of my desire to
reform them," he had written to Stanley. The reform made
other people love the places and institutions all the better too.

IV

The investigation of the 1860 s began with a literary contro
versy in the periodicals of the first year of the decade and the
setting-up of a commission of inquiry by George Cornewall
Lewis, Palmerston s Home Secretary, a year later. The govern
ment justified its increasing interest in the welfare of the
schools. It had already examined the universities in the 1850 s;
now it turned to the schools on the ground that they were no
longer monastic establishments or private corporations but "the
great seminaries of learning in this land. . . . Their welfare and
progress concerns in the highest degree the Empire itself." But
the members of the commission were for the most part friends
of the public schools. The chairman, Lord Clarendon, who was
more critical than most of the members, was the son of an
Etonian and the father of a Harrovian, while Sir Stafford
Northcote, who had been concerned with civil service reform,
was also a well-known defender of the public school system.

The commission published its report in the spring of 1864
after a thorough and painstaking examination of conditions
in the nine old public schools Eton, Harrow, Winches
ter, Shrewsbury, Westminster, St. Paul s, Merchant Taylors ,
Charterhouse, and Rugby. Reforms were suggested both in
administration and in curriculum, but there was no criticism of
the main features of the system. Competitive examinations were
welcomed, and the need for securing capable recruits for the
civil service was underlined, but at the same time the schools

Thomas Hughes and the Public Schools

were praised for cultivating the essential English qualities
"their capacity to govern others and to control themselves,
their aptitude for combining freedom with order, their public
spirit, their vigour and manliness of character, their strong but
not slavish respect for public opinion, their love of healthy
sports and exercise."

The commissioners recognized that the genius of one school
differed much from that of another and that it was desirable
that the masters of every school "should be perfectly familiar
with its system of discipline and teaching, its unwritten cus
toms, and all that stamps it with a character of its own, as well
as that they should be animated by a warm attachment to it."
Loyalty to the school was itself an essential element in charac
ter-building. The schools as a whole had been "the chief
nurseries of our statesmen; in them, and in schools modelled
after them, men of all the various classes that make up English
society, destined for every profession and career, have been
brought up on a feeling of social equality, and have contracted
the most enduring friendships, and some of the ruling habits, of
their lives; and they have had perhaps the largest share in
moulding the character of an English gentleman."

It was not until 1868 that a Public Schools Act was passed
to follow up the proposals of the commisson. An executive
commission, appointed by Parliament, was created to insure a
new system for securing governing bodies for the public
schools and to prepare new statutes. Some Conservatives fought
hard against any reform, claiming that the schools were "prod
ucts of Time and of Nature," not to be upset by a utilitarian
generation; some Liberals urged a root-and-branch reform and
considered the bill "one of the most delusive and reactionary
measures ever put before the country." But it passed, as it was
bound to pass once the commissioners had stated the issues in
terms congenial to the ruling opinion of the time.

Like all English national institutions, the public school de
pended upon the support not of extremists but of liberal con
servatives. One Tory critic had maintained that "it is as little
easy to found a school like an Eton, a Harrow, or a Rugby as
it would be to call into existence a nation." But the nine old

Victorian People

public schools were already being supplemented by many new
ones. Cheltenham, Marlborough, Rossall, and Radley had all
been founded between 1840 and 1850; Wellington followed in
1853; and in one single year-1862-Clifton, Malvem, and
Haileybury were all established. The new upper middle classes
launched on the wave of mid- Victorian prosperity were de
manding new schools for their large numbers of children, new
schools as much like the old ones the reformed old ones as
possible. At the same time improvements in transport were
making it possible for children to be sent far away from their
homes. The public school system was nationalizing education
as well as stratifying it, and parents were quick to realize that
"all good schools have a tendency to become expensive, almost
in proportion to their goodness."

It was not only the interests of parents which were at stake.
The drive for civil service reform depended upon a plentiful
supply of able and healthy young men from the public schools
and universities. Reform in the public schools and reform in
the civil service had always been closely associated; in both
competitive examination played its part, but in both the ideal
of the gentleman remained predominant. Reform of the school,
it was believed, would lead to reform of the service, and re
form of the service would lead to reform of the school. As
Sir Stafford Northcote put it, and his opinion was echoed by
most headmasters, "There is nothing which would so promote
the system of education as the throwing open of the Civil
Service to competitive examination."

/The new public schools and universities could be relied upon
to supply character as well as ability. Jowett, the master of
Balliol, could boast that university experience "abundantly
showed that in more than 19 cases out of 20, men of attain
ments are also men of character," while Northcote and Tre-
velyan corroborated the point from the civil service side. The
young men selected by open competition, it was maintained,
would be more likely to be "gentlemen" than those who were
appointed by patronage.

Open competition would thus be safe because it would be
geared to the public school and university system. Proficiency

160

Thomas Hughes and the Public Schools

in the subjects set in the examination would, as Professor
Thompson pointed out, "afford a sufficient test of the social
rank of the candidate" or, at any rate, prove that he had been
brought into contact with influences conducive to the senti
ments of a gentleman. In an age when the shadow of democracy
was already looming on the horizon, men like Vaughan, Jow-
ett, and Trevelyan realized the need for a plentiful supply of
informed gentlemen. It would be dangerous, argued Trevelyan
if, "when the irresistible tendency of the times is to bring into
activity the political power of the lower classes of society,"
the "higher orders" were to relax into intellectual sloth. "We
must be diligent in our own education," wrote Sir J. T. Cole
ridge, the old Etonian Lord Chief Justice. "It will not do to
rest on traditions or on ancient privileges; if we will lead, we
must make our selves fit to be leaders; if even we will float with
the current, and not be overwhelmed by it, we must, by disci
pline and training, learn to throw out our intellectual powers
with the strongest and best trained. . . . While all around us,
the underwood of the forest is making vigorous shoots, our
own growth must not stand still, lest haply we should be over
grown and stifled."

V

The consciousness of a changing social balance fascinated and
alarmed most of the thinkers of the middle years of the century.
The defenders of the public schools were deliberately support
ing the claims of institutions from which the masses of the pop
ulation were excluded. How did they conceive of the relation
ship between the privileged classes and the rest, and how far
did they create attitudes at school which conditioned the
answers of adult men to this question?

In terms of school standards the answer was plain: the ideal
of the gentleman involved a sense of social duty as well as good
form. Arnold was at great pains to insist upon this aspect of the
educated man. He would preach his sermons both in the school
chapel and in the little mission which grew up around the new
railway junction. He would appear before the local Mechanics
Institute as well as before his own sixth form. He would visit

Victorian People

the homes of the poor as well as the classrooms of the boys.
He even co-operated in working-class journalism, and, as early
as 1831, letters which he wrote to the Sheffield C our ant "were
read with great interest by the mechanics and people of that
class" in one of England s busiest industrial cities.

Arnold s attitude toward the poor was neither condescending
nor patronizing. "Feeling keenly what seemed to him at once
the wrong and the mischief done by the too-wide separation
between the higher and lower orders," wrote Stanley, "he
xvished to visit them as neighbours, without always seeming
bent on relieving or instructing them," and could not bear to
use language which to anyone in a higher station would have
been thought an interference. If at times he drew a distinction
between the "good poor" and the rest, he was merely behaving
like all his contemporaries; but for the most part he was far
ahead of most social workers. Poor people were sometimes
embarrassed by his treating them on equal terms and did not
know quite how to deal with him. "He used to come in to my
house," said an old woman who lived near his home in West
morland, "and talk to me as if I were a lady." There was noth
ing patronizing about such an encounter, but it could hardly be
called an equal one. Indeed, it was difficult to discover a true
equality of classes in the England of the early nineteenth cen
tury, for the very words "lady" and "gentleman" were barriers,
not avenues, to real understanding.

Mid- Victorian deference could not be broken down from
above, even when a genuine attempt was made; it needed a
great democratic upsurge from below to sweep away the bar
riers. Arnold was no unqualified believer in a theory of de
mocracy, but he did not attempt to break the first democratic
waves. It was only later in the century, as the democratic tide
advanced, that some of the public schools began to take an
increasingly antidemocratic stand. It is true that some of their
pupils turned into rebels rather than conformists and allied
themselves with democratic movements, but the average boys
became increasingly complacent and proud. The "old school
tie" became the gentleman, the man inside it the dummy, and

4162 Y

Thomas Hughes and the Public Schools

by that time the voice of the ventriloquist was very different
from the voice of Thomas Arnold.

It is dangerous to generalize too glibly; and certainly in the
middle years of the century, when stratification was being
talked of most openly, there was no complete standardization
of product. The career of Thomas Hughes himself reveals just
how much and how little the public school of his day suc
ceeded in fitting an able but not outstanding boy into a mold.
The approach of the real Tom Brown to the social questions
of his day is as deserving of attention as the approach of the
sanctified Arnold.

Hughes was "formed" by his family and by Rugby. His
father was a squire with "true popular sympathies," but a true
Tory as well, insisting on "strict obedience and deference" from
his servants. His headmaster was an equally important voice of
authority. During the important years from ten to eighteen he
had been placed under the spell of Rugby and Arnold and for
half a century had "never ceased to thank God for it."

At Oxford he became a Radical "the noble side of democ
racy was carrying me away" and in 1848, the year of revolu
tions, when Smiles was prudently turning from politics to self-
help, Hughes joined F. D. Maurice and the Christian Socialists.
To the dogmas of capitalist competition he opposed the ethics
of the co-operative team. A lawyer by profession, he devoted
most of his time to "causes," particularly co-operation and the
Working Men s College Movement. But, if he was a Radical,
he was not a rebel. Rugby guided him in his social work among
the London worldngmen even more than it had guided him in
his studies at Oxford. Little in demand as a lecturer, he was in
great demand as an athlete and a pugilist. "Round shoulders,
narrow chests, stiff limbs," he told the students at the London
College, "are as bad as defective grammar and arithmetic."
The science of fisticuffs was a necessary prelude to the science
of government, in London as much as at Rugby.

In the 1850 s and 1860 s Hughes became a more militant
Christian and a less dogmatic socialist, but he did not abandon
his belief in worldngmen. In 1859, when he joined the Volun
teer Movement, he raised a corps of two companies from the

4 163 Y

Victorian People

Working Men s College. During the American Civil War he
was a staunch supporter of the North: "If the North is beaten,
it will be a misfortune such as has not come upon the world
since Christendom arose." Right and wrong were as clearly de
fined in American politics as they had been by Arnold at Rug
by: "I think the free-soilers were as much in the right, and
the pro-slavery party as much in the wrong, as parties com
posed of human beings are ever likely to be." This was the sort
of decision for which Rugby had prepared him. As James Rus
sell Lowell, who became one of Hughes s regular correspond
ents and mentors, had put it in 1859:

We know we ve got a cause, John,
That s honest, right, and true;
We thought t would win applause, John,
If nowhere else, from you.

The American Civil War, which reinforced the lessons of
Rugby, drew Hughes closer to the English working classes,
who discovered a new conscience and vitality during the
conflict.

Even before the war Hughes had been interested in trade-
unions, the growing voluntary organizations of workingmen,
which were to become a national institution as intrenched as
the public schools. In 1860, at a meeting of the Social Science
Association, he defended the representative character of the
new unions and their regulative possibilities in the world of
labor. They could become guarantors of social peace as well
as agents of national productive power. Hughes s support of
the unions and of the cause of the North brought him into
close touch with the leaders of the London Trades Council,
who were largely responsible for pushing his candidature for
Parliament in 1865 and assuring his victory at the top of the
poll at Lambeth. Tom Brown had become a working-class
leader. "Hughes has the art of ingratiating himself into the
favour of the artisans/ wrote one of his opponents; "a leader
of the people he undoubtedly is."

The people he led were not socialists, but they were resent
ful of their incomplete citizenship. They demanded the right
to vote and the protection of their unions. "Labour is here at

-4

Thomas Hughes and the Public Schools

the door, asking respectfully that it may be opened." Hughes
was already trying to open the door from the other side. As a
member of Parliament and later of the Royal Commission on
Trade Unions in 1867, he was a vigorous advocate of social
and political rights for workingmen. During the commission
he was in constant touch with Robert Applegarth, the trade-
union leader, and, when the work was concluded, he was a
signatory to the minority report, which expressed the union s
point of view. "Under a system which professes the right or
rather the duty of all men peacefully to pursue their own in
terest for themselves, unionism appears to us the exact cor
relative of competition." The legal reforms he suggested be
came the basis of the new trade-union code of the 1870 s.

Hughes s association with the royal commission was the
high- water mark of his political career. Between 1870 and
1875 he ceased to be the champion of the unions and no longer
went wholeheartedly with them in the pursuit of their claims.
At the general election of 1874 he was at the bottom of the poll
in Marylebone, and, when he accepted a place on Disraeli s
new and unpopular royal commission to examine trade-union
law, he was regarded as a traitor to the union cause. It was only
when Disraeli had recognized the strength of the unions in
1875 and, indeed, had gone much further than Hughes was
prepared to go that the unionists paid tribute to Hughes s work
in the past. By that time Hughes felt misgivings about union
power and recognized that the social mood of the country had
changed. "Their future is practically in the hands of the work
people themselves . . . and it is for them to show that they can
rise to the new situations and prove themselves patriotic and
true Englishmen who can put their country before their class."
Rugby had done its work. "It is quite natural that a new gen
eration should turn to new admirers, and I certainly am neither
sad nor sorry that it should be so."

The passing of the Reform Bill of 1867 had created a new
world in which Hughes had a minor part to play. Full political
citizenship for the urban working classes separated them from
Hughes instead of drawing them closer to him. And so he
turned back from the greater community to the smaller, and

4 is! y

Victorian People

pitched his hopes in a pioneer community in the great new
world overseas. He planned a settlement in Tennessee, where
grown-up Tom Browns could prove that they were not
anachronisms and could work with their hands to create a
new society. England was no longer big enough or adventur
ous enough to provide a home for Brown or East: "The spirit
of our highest culture and the spirit of our trade do not agree
together. The ideas and habits which those who have most
profited by them bring away from our public schools do not
fit them to become successful traders." Nor could they be
union leaders. Colonists they might become if they had a cause
which was big enough. It is significant that Hughes was re
sponding to a challenge which had fascinated Arnold many
years before. "If we are alive fifteen years hence," Arnold had
written in 1829, "I think I would go with you gladly to Swan
River [in Australia], if they will make me a schoolmaster there,
and lay my bones in the land of kangaroos and oppossums.
. . . No missionarizing is half so beneficial as to try to pour
sound and healthy blood into a young civilized society."

Hughes called his colony in distant Tennessee "Rugby" and
gave it a church in the heart of the community to stand like
Rugby Chapel in the midst of his old school. If it had no Big-
side, it had a tennis club, and its monthly magazine was called
the Rugbelan. When Hughes went out to visit the settlement
for the first time in 1880, he was greeted there by five exiled
Englishmen, all former public school boys, from Eton, Har
row, Wellington, and Rugby. But there was no Thomas
Arnold in Tennessee, and the colony failed. Only the dream
remained the old recurring dream of Rugby, England, which
haunted Hughes until the end of his life so that his last book,
published in 1894, two years before his death, was dedicated
jointly to Rugby and the Working Men s College.

The word "haunted" is misleading. Hughes was too eager,
too active, too optimistic to be troubled by ghosts. He was
rather "a grown-up school boy in a large playground," as
staunch and true to his school values as he had been fifty years
before. Stock product he never was. Beyond the values and
behind the carefully formed character was the irrepressible

{ 166 Y

Thomas Hughes and the Public Schools

temperament, the cheerful disposition, that neither public
school nor political hurly-burly could transform. When Lowell
left him after their first meeting in 1870, he wrote: "I was real
ly saddened to part with him it was saying goodbye to sun
shine." The sun always shone. It was the natural Tom Hughes
and not the transformed Tom Brown who uttered the most
convincing crl de cceur:

I love vagabonds, only I prefer poor to rich ones. Couriers and
ladies-maids, imperials and travelling carriages, are an abomination
unto me; I cannot get away with them. But for dirty Jack, and
every good fellow who, in the words of the capital French song,
moves about,

"Comme le limagon,
Portant tout son bagage,
Ses meubles, sa maison"

on his own back, why, good luck to them, and many a merry
roadside adventure, and steaming supper in the chimney corners
of roadside inns, Swiss chalets, Hottentot kraals, or wherever else
they like to go.

No institution, not even a reformed public school, could stand
ardize a boy like that.

VII

We shall be -faithless to our -fellow working men if we
omit to record our honest conviction that this much
to be desired condition must be preceded by the equally
universal spread of the principles of economy and so
briety, which would be accelerated by our meeting for
business in public halls or private rooms, where, by the
establishment of libraries and listening to the voice of
the lecturer on all subjects connected with our inter
ests, we and our sons shall become respectful and re
spected, and make rapid progress In the onward march
of reform.

RULES OF THE AMALGAMATED SOCIETY
OF CARPENTERS AND JOINERS (1869)

I

Thomas Hughes established his position as an active friend of
the trade-unions during the great building dispute of 1859-60.
When the carpenters, masons, and bricklayers went on strike
in London to defend the right of combination and to press
for the nine-hour working day, Hughes leaped to their defense,
wrote articles on their behalf, and helped to secure a settle
ment. In the course of the strike he came to know Robert
Applegarth, the secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Car
penters and Joiners, with whom he remained on friendly terms
for the rest of his life. Public school boy and trade-unionist
met and found much in common with each other. After all,
both had a highly developed sense of order and community.
As the building unionists told the Central Master Builders Asso
ciation in 1860 "that our society shall be governed by laws,

168

Robert Applegarth and the Trade-Unions

and that the members shall be requested to conform to those
laws is but natural, and we believe that such is the case in all
corporations and every club among the upper classes in Pall
Mall and St. James s."

Robert Applegarth was an outstanding specimen of the new
labor leader of the middle years of the century; in the words
of the manufacturer and politician, A. J. Mundella, he was "an
ornament to his class, and I know some of the best men in the
country are proud to call him their friend." His career and
outlook illuminate intelligent working-class attitudes the atti
tudes of a new artisan elite, for whom the trade-union was as
basic an institution as the public school was for Hughes. Un
like the public school, however, the trade-union was considered
by many orthodox spokesmen of the age as a tyrannical and
seditious organization. Not even the prudent tactics and the
obvious public spirit of Applegarth could convince all his con
temporaries, or even the most influential among them. The pub
lic school reflected national values; the trade-union often
seemed to subvert them. Yet the union, like the school, was
gradually establishing itself as a characteristically English insti
tution, and in 1875, after more than a decade of agitation, it
secured what appeared to be a full and comprehensive charter
from Parliament. The new franchise of 1867, based on the
urban working-class vote, had turned the artisans into full citi
zens; within ten years, with the full recognition of trade-union
rights, the seeds of social as well as political democracy had also
been sown.

The active political and trade-union life of Applegarth spans
the exciting years between widespread social fear of the unions
fear which reached the point of terror in 1866 and 1867
and genuine recognition. It gains in importance, moreover,
because it was not a narrow life devoted to a particular cause
or a single battle. Applegarth saw the trade-union merely as one
instrument of working-class emancipation; co-operation, full
participation in politics, and a greatly extended educational
system were equally important elements in working-class prog
ress. Such progress alone could transform society. "To teach
workmen the practical lesson of self-reliance, to provide during

4 169 Y

Victorian People

the term of prosperity for the hour of need, is one of our great
objects; but the highest duty of trade unionists is to teach
man s duty to man. " Trade-unionists would be judged not
only by the care they devoted to their own interests but by
the willingness with which they contributed to "the well-being
of the whole human family."

The events of Applegarth s life fall into place only if they
are related to the greater pattern of which they were a part.
Applegarth was both an actor with a leading part in the social
history of the period and a symbol. His actions speak for them
selves, but, to grasp their full significance, they must be stud
ied against the social background of his age.

II

He was born in Hull in 1834, the son of a sailor who went
whaling in the southern seas and rose to be the captain of a
brig. Although the young Applegarth became a carpenter, not
a mariner, he always remained something of a wanderer. He
was never bound by the confines of a workshop or even the
coasts of England; he was a worker of the world as well as a
Yorkshireman.

Fired by descriptions he had heard of life in America, he
left Sheffield, the bustling industrial community where he had
learned his carpentry, for New York and Chicago. When he
landed in New York in December, 1854, he had only half-a-
crown in his pocket, but he soon met a fellow-worker from
Sheffield who welcomed him in homely fashion to his new
country. Within three years he had raised sufficient money
to be able to invite his wife to join him. If Mrs. Applegarth
had not been too ill to go, there would have been no place for
Applegarth in the English working-class story. His undoubted
enterprise and persistent energy would have carved out for him
a more than comfortable niche in the open society of the United
States. He might have become a very successful businessman.
Even in England, after his trade-union career ended, he was
sufficiently forceful to become a small employer, proprietor of
a firm of engineering manufacturers. However far he diverged
from the views of Samuel Smiles, he can in fact be regarded

Robert Apple garth and the Trade-Unions

as a distinguished minor example of the triumph of self-help.
In Who s Who he characteristically gave his recreations as
"work, more work, and still more again."

His American experiences taught him, first, that working-
class problems were international in character and, second, that
democracy could exist as a reality as well as a dream. They
also taught him what slavery meant. He did not rest content
with reading the novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe; he went
down the Mississippi himself to see a slave market and actually
collected one of the slave-dealers receipts, which he later pre
sented to the National Liberal Club in London. He became a
strong supporter of Negro emancipation and met Frederick
Douglass, the freed slave and orator of the liberationist cause.

Such experiences broadened Applegarth s horizons. They
helped him to appreciate the issues of the American Civil War,
which broke out a few years after his return to England. Dur
ing that struggle even those English workers who had not been
to America rallied to Lincoln and the support of the North. To
them the meaning of the contest needed no explanation: free
dom was contending with slavery. "They saw the one great
issue," wrote one of their admirers, Richard Hutton, later the
editor of the Spectator, "and left out of consideration all the
comparatively unimportant issues, to which our professional
classes attach such undue weight." They were less insular in
their enthusiasms than the middle classes or many sections of
the aristocracy. "They have a livelier sympathy with the popu
lar feelings and the lives of other nations than the classes now
most influential in politics," continued Hutton. "This may be
based upon their mobility. If the working man does not prosper
in England this year, he may prosper next year in the United
States, or Canada, or Australia. . . . This is a condition of things
which tends to liberate him from the more selfish prejudices of
place and time." Applegarth translated the language of one
continent into the language of another and eventually became
as vigorous an advocate of understanding between the workers
of different countries in Europe as he had been of understand
ing between the workers of Europe and the United States.

His American journey did not separate him from his English

4 nr y

Victorian People

fellow-workers but rather drew him closer to them, for there
was a general feeling when he went there that the United
States was a workingman s paradise, a natural escape route
from the hardships of life in England. Applegarth saw work
ing-class visits to America as a form of tramping, shifting tem
porarily from one job to another, while the Amalgamated So
ciety of Carpenters and Joiners, of which he became secretary,
praised emigration "as a prudent means of getting on in the
world" and America as the natural destination of the surplus
of a growing English population. The escape route lost some
of its significance as the century progressed, but even during
the cotton famine of 1861 operatives paid visits to America, in
an effort to better themselves, with an ease and carelessness that
astonished commentators. One writer described the widespread
habit of Scottish miners visiting the Pennsylvanian coal mines
for a few months each summer. When social mobility was im
peded in England, it was still possible across the Atlantic. For
Applegarth belief in social mobility was not a matter of theory
but a segment of his own experience.

Yet it was not America but England which turned Apple-
garth into a democrat or a radical. Once in the late sixties his
bitter Sheffield opponent, Roebuck, asked him if he had learned
his radicalism in America, to which he replied with characteris
tic pungency: "No, I learnt it from the People s Paper by
Ernest Jones and Papers for the People by John Arthur Roe
buck." The Chartist tradition more than the American tradition
lay behind his social philosophy, but it was a Chartism tem
pered to the new mood of the middle years of the century and
to the new middle-class-working-class understanding which he
himself did much to foster. Indeed, one of his outstanding gifts
as a working-class leader was, as the Webbs have pointed out,
"instinctively to make use of those arguments which were best
fitted to overcome the prejudices and disarm the criticism of
middle-class opponents."

He was always willing to take part in deputations which
conferred with national statesmen like Palmerston and Glad
stone and to address middle-class societies, such as the Social
Science Association and even the Statistical Society. The first

Robert Apple garth and the Trade-Unions

of these bodies quickened the conscience of social reformers;
the second presented the facts of the contemporary situation.
For every such encounter Applegarth had ready advice. That
a distinguished Liberal statesman should misrepresent union
organization was too much, he told Gladstone to his face in
1864; "for gentlemen to read essays," he told the statisticians,
"and for workmen to agitate" were not enough. Only by dis
cussion between the two groups could "much good" result.

Such a discussion a discussion on more or less equal terms-
demanded the creation and consolidation of independent work
ing-class organizations. Applegarth was important not because
he was the workingman follower of a middle-class movement
but because he remained a real workingman, seeing the world
through the eyes of a workingman:

Toiling hands alone are builders
Of a Nation s wealth and fame.

He did not turn the artisan or the laborer into a metaphysical
abstraction or an ideal type, as some so-called workingmen s
"friends" from other ranks of society did "friends" described
by one pamphleteer as "Crushers, Spouters and Codlins." "The
fashion among a certain class of politicians," Applegarth once
said, "is to treat the working man as a peg on which to hang
any pet theory or crotchet they may happen to have, or as a
stepping stone on which to walk in the direction of their own
interests. Such persons dress up a dummy in their own fashion
as a tailor dresses his block figure and call it the working man.
For this model man they are prepared to legislate, talk, write
goody-goody style of books for his edification, tell him what
he ought and ought not to do, in fact to do everything for him
except one, to treat him as a rational thinking being."

There is something characteristically English about Apple-
garth s picture of the "rational thinking" workingman and his
assessment of working-class objectives, yet for a time he was
closely associated with the group of militant socialists who
founded the First International in 1864. The original program
was one which a Gladstone or a Bright might have accepted
with a good conscience but it soon became extremist. Apple-

Victorian People

garth nonetheless attended many of its meetings and was chair
man of its General Council in 1868 when it met at Brussels.
In 1869 he was prominent at the conference at Basel which re
iterated its belief in the nationalization of land. Even when the
International was breaking up, Applegarth remained faithful
to its program long after most of the English leaders "out and
out opportunists," Marx angrily called them had withdrawn.
During the Franco-German War of 1870-71, some of the Paris
cornmmards were actually piloted out of the city with the
help of his passport. Applegarth stressed the interests of workers
everywhere in proletarian peace, and it is not surprising that
Longuet, Marx s grandson, was willing as late as 1913 to de
scribe Applegarth as an "old and respected warrior in the
great international army."

Applegarth s support of a program of left-wing socialism
must not, however, be given exaggerated importance. It must
rather be examined in the light of his experience in America,
the background of Chartist and Labor politics, and, above all,
his own warm and sympathetic temperament. Like most of the
English labor leaders of his time, he was more interested in
working-class causes than in theories of the class struggle or of
"scientific politics." Indeed, just because he was an indefati
gable supporter of causes, he was able in the same year 1870 to
co-operate with the Liberal nonconformist Joseph Chamberlain
in the National Education League, to win the support of Marx,
and to achieve the tacit approval of Queen Victoria. The
Queen recognized his right to be considered "our Trusty and
Well-beloved" by making him the first working-class member
of a royal commission, that on contagious diseases. Contagious
diseases became as important to Applegarth as the nationaliza
tion of the means of production; there was a fine catholicity
about his political preoccupations.

But, while he might urge the necessity for international
working-class solidarity and talk of the capitalist evils that
oppressed the workers in all countries, he was anxious to dis
tinguish even at Basel, in 1869, between the relatively fortunate
lot of trade-unionists in England and their tyrannical exploita-

Robert Apple garth and the Trade-Unions

tion overseas. "Fortunately we in England have no need to
creep into holes and corners lest a policeman should see us, but
can meet in open daylight and organize ourselves, and treat of
any questions which affect us without fear." He was proud of
his country, and he was not ashamed of his English political
tactics. Although another English delegate at the conference,
Eccarius, warned those present that the "political love-making"
of 1867 between the middle and working classes could not go
on in Britain forever, Applegarth knew that he himself had
been responsible for some at least of the original advances.
By his subsequent actions he proved that the courtship was by
no means over.

In one last personal way Applegarth conformed to English
type. He turned in later life from city to country, from the
delights of the public meeting to the sports and pleasures of
garden and estate. In 1890 he went to live in Epsom, a rural
area and race-course center outside London he was then fifty-
six years old and taught himself to ride. Occasionally he fol
lowed the hounds, and it was he who protected the rights of
the public on Epsom Common against the attempted encroach
ments of the oligarchic Grand Stand Association. In 1898 he
became still more of a countryman. He moved to a small estate
at Bexley in Kent, kept poultry even introducing a new type
of hen, the Favorelle diverted a small stream through his
garden, and built a handsome rustic bridge. Although he aban
doned this estate and went to live in Brighton, the fact that he
chose at all to "return to the land" is of great significance. Just
as middle-class manufacturers were able to buy farms on the
strength of mill chimneys, so even trade-union leaders could
acquire land and become smallholders, at any rate if they
showed Applegarth s indomitable spirit of self-help.

But Bexley was one of the last chapters in Applegarth s life-
story. Before Bexley there were Sheffield and Manchester and
London busy Sheffield, smoky Manchester, and gaslit London;
above all, that corner of mid- Victorian London managed by a
little group of full-time trade-union secretaries, which the
Webbs called the "Junta."

Victorian People

III

Applegarth became a "Junta" leader in 1862, when he was
appointed general secretary of the recently founded Amal
gamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners. Between 1858 and
1862 he had served his union apprenticeship in a small localized
Sheffield craft union, which attracted his support soon after his
return from the United States. In Sheffield Applegarth soon
demonstrated his gifts of leadership. He persuaded the mem
bers of his little union, not without opposition, to change its
place of meeting from an inn to a reading-room. He had little
use for the traditional association between the bar and the
union which existed in most of the highly localized carpenters
organizations. He believed that the foundations of a healthy
unionism could be established only in a proper moral atmos
phere. This was not because he was a convert to middle-class
morality but because he believed that there was a real working-
class conflict between temperance and improvement. Like the
Flint Glass Makers, he considered that it was more important
to get intelligence than to get alcohol: "it is sweeter and more
lasting." Already in America he had started a mutual improve
ment society; back in England, on May 17, 1858, he became a
union member, and on June 1 he acquired his Sheffield free
library ticket. Again he was setting a fashion which other
trade-unionists learned how to follow. As Patrick Kenney
wrote two years later: "On the 20th of September 1860 I left
off buying beer and took to buying books to improve my
mind." Behind such decisions rang the voice of necessity, not
the voice of convention. When Applegarth persuaded his local
union to join the newly established Amalgamated Society of
Carpenters and Joiners in 1860, he must have been proud that
the society laid stress on the fact that its members aspired to
"become respectful and respected." Not all the little unions in
Sheffield reached such heights of ambition; that they did not
was a threat to the future of unionism as a whole.

The setting-up of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters
and Joiners was an important event in the history of the trade-
union movement. Already, nine years before, the Amalga-

Robert Apple garth and the Trade-Unions

mated Society of Engineers, though a natural product of the
past, had set what was called a new model. Its aim was exclu
sive and protective, a national extension of the older type of
local trade club of skilled workmen following a common craft.
Its organization, based on strong central control from London,
was extremely successful. It did not win over all types of
skilled engineering craftsmen, but within its limits it brought
together into a compact bargaining body the majority of skilled
fitters and turners in London and Lancashire. The carpenters,
more dispersed than the engineers, took longer to organize,
both locally and nationally, and their deficiencies were plainly
revealed during the London builders strike of 1859-60. The
old General Union of Carpenters and Joiners, founded in 1827,
was less effective in practice than the new amalgamated union,
and it was with a mixture of awe and gratitude that the build
ers accepted three successive weekly donations of a thousand
pounds from the engineers while their strike was in progress.
The canny William Allan, general secretary of the engineers,
helped the carpenters to adapt the rules of his society to their
own trade. From the start the ASCJ was modeled on the ASE;
Applegarth himself deliberately used the word "model."

By the end of 1860 the new union had twenty branches and
618 members, but there were only two branches outside
London. It was not until 1862, when Applegarth himself left
Sheffield to become secretary of the union in place of a man
who had just embezzled some of the funds, that it really be
came a national organization, and one which prospered.
Although it never won the allegiance of all the local carpenters
unions and remained smaller in total membership than the older
General Union of Carpenters and Joiners, it increased the
scale of its operations until in 1870 it had over ten thousand
members and over two hundred and thirty branches. The
effects of Applegarth s leadership are clear from a perusal of
the society s Reports. By 1865 Applegarth could boast that "in
the most remote parts of the country, as well as in the principal
seats of industry, the name of our Society is fast becoming a
household word."

Building an effective craft union, financially sound and eco-

Victorian People

nomically powerful, was Applegarth s main objective. It was
a labor of love and faith rather than a lucrative employment.
Applegarth was never paid more than 2 Ws. a week, and
when he was first appointed he only received l Ws. His
private residence in Lambeth also had to serve as the meeting
place for the executive council of the union. It was indicative
of Applegarth s desire for self-help as well as for union ad
vancement that out of his small initial salary he paid fees to a
writing master in order to improve his penmanship. Through
out his career as secretary he never neglected his own improve
ment or his general duties as a politically conscious citizen, but
he put the union first.

The union which he created bore no resemblance to the
small secret societies which dominated the old skilled trades of
Sheffield. Its primary object was to act for trade purposes, that
is to say, to organize the labor market and to enable carpenters
and joiners to engage in collective bargaining. Applegarth was
very efficient in the conference room. As secretary of his little
union in Sheffield he had once appeared before the formidable
John Brown, the great Sheffield steel master, who had himself
risen in the world from the son of a Sheffield slater to an ad
venturous captain of industry.

"You re from the trade-union," said Brown curtly.

"Yes," admitted Applegarth.

"Well, I shall cut you short," said Brown.

"Please don t," replied Applegarth. "I m only five foot two,
and that s short enough."

Like Roebuck in physique if not in temperament, he was a
small man with a big voice, and on this occasion he too was a
David facing Goliath. But he was less petulant than Roebuck;
he could honestly claim that he never "had a wrong word with
an employer in my life, either as a workman or as a representa
tive of working men." He could be as powerful in influencing
workers as he was firm but disarming in dealing with employ
ers, and he did much to persuade the workers that the most
effective form of collective bargaining was not always the most
noisy and seldom the most violent.

But the union he built up had important secondary purposes

Robert Apple garth and the Trade-Unions

as well. It set out to raise funds for the mutual support of
members in the case of sickness and accident; for superannua
tion; for meeting the funeral expenses of members and their
wives; for replacing tools lost by fire, water, or theft; and for
assisting members out of work. Social security benefits, pro
vided at a time when the state paid no attention to social needs,
were so great a boon to the workers that even the opponents
of the trade-unions could not directly challenge such mutual
aid. They rather insisted on drawing a difference between the
friendly society activities of the unions and their regulative
trade activities, claiming that the necessary funds for the two
types of activity should be kept apart. Applegarth refused to
separate them. When questioned on this point by the Royal
Commission on Trade Unions in 1867, he resolutely refused to
distinguish between different forms of union action. "I am
afraid there has been so much said about the social aspects of
our societies," he remarked, "that is their benevolent purposes,
that the main purposes for which they are established have
been somewhat lost sight of, and therefore I take this oppor
tunity of stating that pure and simple ours is a trade society,
and as such I wish it to be regarded, although we have a num
ber of excellent benefits in connexion with it. 7 Applegarth be-<
lieved that members supported his society, "and all such soci
eties as ours, the better on account of the many benefits they
gave the members"; but it was not true to say that some people
joined for benevolent purposes and some for trade purposes.
"The fact is that they join it as a whole."

The sound management of union funds both in the branches
and in the central office in London was a responsible and essen
tial task if the union were to become a permanent organiza
tion, yet it was not easy to pursue it. Applegarth insisted that
the members should all be "men of good moral character,
steady habits and good workers." He was able to boast to the
royal commission that the union "as a rule consists of the
superior class of workmen" who were capable of paying the
relatively high subscription of a shilling a week; like the engi
neers and others, "many of our members hold positions of re
sponsibility as foremen and managers, which renders it neces-

4 119 Y

Victorian People

sary that they should be men of good character and steady
habits, and however much we regret to leave a man behind
who is not up to our mark, we do it."

The local branches, which had to consist of at least seven
workers with at least five years experience in their trade, were
free to conduct their own business along their own lines, but it
was London which set the tone and dictated the general tactics.
The centralized funds of the union were to be used prudently
and not to be dissipated in reckless strikes or whittled away
through financial incompetence or neglect. But it would be a
mistake to believe that Applegarth was interested merely in the
accumulation of large central funds or that he was opposed to
all forms of strike action. "Never surrender the right to strike,"
he told his union, "but be careful how you use a doubled-edged
weapon." Immediately after his own local Sheffield union
joined the ASCJ in 1862, there was a short successful strike
which led directly to the employers recognition of a code of
working rules. Applegarth did not believe in indiscriminate or
hasty strikes, but he admitted with no regrets to the commis
sion of 1867 that the number of short strikes had increased, not
diminished, in the previous four years. What he insisted upon
was that the workers involved in a dispute should look to out
side opinion as well as to their own judgment in determining
the Tightness of their course of action. Strikes should not be a
secret weapon but a final sanction of union power. He agreed
with another of his trade-union colleagues, George Odger, the
secretary of a small union but a key figure in London working-
class politics, that "strikes in the social world are like wars in
the political world; both are crimes unless justified by absolute
necessity."

By advocating moderation, Applegarth won considerable
respect from people who were not in any way connected with
the trade-union movement. Above all, he persuaded them that
a sharp distinction could be drawn between the new national
amalgamated unions and the old secret union clubs, which had
their roots in the distant past. It was an important distinction
to clarify, for the critics of trade-unionism often assessed the
movement as a whole in terms of its worst manifestations rather

i 180

Robert Apple garth and the Trade-Unions

than its best, while its enemies concentrated on obvious abuses
and publicized them with considerable skill. Respectable
though Applegarth and his close friends among the London
trade-union leaders were, they did not find it easy to make
their unions respectable. For every enlightened employer, like
Mundella, who became member of Parliament for Sheffield in
1868, there were several who viewed trade-unions as pernicious
institutions, created and led not by good men but by "design
ing and idle men for their own purposes." Much as Applegarth,
Allan, and Odger might wear gold watch chains in their waist
coats and look like chosen representatives of the "bourgeoisie,"
they were often visited with the sins of the cloak-and-dagger
unionists in the dark recesses of the great industrial cities.

The distinction became of crucial importance in 1866 and
1867, when events in Applegarth s adopted home of Sheffield
provoked anger and alarm among the middle classes and caught
the attention of all sections of the press. Cloak-and-dagger
unionism, often based upon crude intimidation of members to
make them pay their dues, and violent threats to nonmembers
to make them join the union, had already received some public
ity in 1859, when one Sheffield worker had been killed by a
shotgun, and two years later, when an attempt had been made
to blow up a small workshop. In October, 1866, national atten
tion was focused on the explosion of a can of gunpowder in a
house belonging to a workman who had just seceded from the
local Saw Grinders Union.

The Sheffield police were unable to trace the culprit, and
there was demand for a national investigation. At a time when
many critics of the unions were claiming that trade-unionism
was little better than a criminal conspiracy, the government
responded to the clamor and to the genuine desire for a full
inquiry by enlightened unionists like Applegarth by appoint
ing a royal commission to examine not only the background
of the Sheffield outrages but the whole position of trade-unions
in society.

Before the commission met, the chief constable of Sheffield
had discovered the villain of the piece, William Broadhead, a
saw-grinder, landlord of a local inn, and treasurer of the Asso-

[ 181 f

Victorian People

dated Trades of Sheffield, to which Applegarth had once
belonged. Broadhead had been clever enough to avert any
suspicion by heading a subscription list for increasing the
reward promised to an informer, but, when his secret was
revealed, he and a group of other unionists confessed in July,
1867, to a whole series of acts of violence. The cause of union
ism was threatened by these disclosures and similar evidence
from Manchester, even though it was also shown that only
twelve of the sixty unions in Sheffield had resorted to outrage
and that in these twelve unions most members had been quite
unaware of the guilt of their officials. The London Trades
Council itself and the executive of the Amalgamated Society of
Engineers, which sent a joint deputation to Sheffield to investi
gate the case, themselves attacked intimidation and "the abomi
nable practice of rattening" the temporary removal of the
tools of a workman whose subscription was in arrears "which
is calculated to demoralize those who are concerned in it, and
to bring disgrace on all trade combinations." They pointed out,
however, the unhealthy conditions in the grinding trade, the
narrowness of the horizons of the local leaders, and the high
risks they took. There was an obvious contrast between these
conditions and this leadership and conditions and leadership
in the engineering and carpentry trades.

The opponents of the trade-unions were in no mood, how
ever, to accept qualifications, and in 1867 the trade-unions
faced a real crisisthe turning point in their national history.
The urgency of the crisis was enhanced when, in the same year
that Broadhead made his confession, a decision in the Court of
Queen s Bench (Hornby v. Close) declared that, though trade-
unions were not forbidden by the law, they were nevertheless
associations "in restraint of trade" and consequently could not
be allowed to sue for the recovery of funds appropriated by
dishonest officials. As one writer put it, trade-unionism became,
"if not criminal, at any rate something like betting or gam
bling, public nuisances and criminal publications things con
demned and suppressed by the law." This legal decision, along
with the public outcry against the outrages and the appoint
ment of a commission which seemed to some workers like the

\m \

Robert Apple garth and the Trade-Unions

beginning of an inquisition, provided a decisive challenge to
the unions. It was vitally important that at that moment of
crisis the unions could rely upon leaders of the caliber of
Applegarth, who could point to years of responsible manage
ment of the amalgamated unions and who had already won the
good will of nonworking-class sympathizers like Thomas
Hughes. It was to Hughes that Applegarth appealed immediate
ly after the Sheffield outrages, asking him to write a letter to
the Spectator defending the trade organizations. Applegarth
did not fear an impartial investigation. "By all means let there
be a Commission of Inquiry," he wrote, "and if a searching
investigation leads to the discovery of an ulcer in our system,
however small it may be, let the knife go to the very core."
He believed that it would be shown conclusively that the
trade-unions were not the cause of all the disputes and heart
burnings which alarmed the middle classes. "The causes of
these things are a thousandfold [and are all] parts of one
stupendous whole."

IV

Applegarth had pressed for the appointment of two experi
enced trade-unionists to the commission, but Walpole, the Con
servative Home Secretary, refused on the grounds that he was
anxious to avoid all partisan interests and that he wished the
commission to act as a quasi- judicial body. As constituted, it
comprised a band of distinguished individuals, not all of them
unfriendly to the unions. Two of the outstanding members
were Hughes and Roebuck. Their opinions were as sharply
opposed as any two men s opinions could be. Hughes was
strongly supported by Frederick Harrison, the young positivist
philosopher and barrister and a great friend of the unions,
while Roebuck was supported by Lord Elcho, who had been
bitterly opposed to him during the Crimean War. By this time
Roebuck had moved almost entirely from the Radical position
and Chartist sympathies of his youth and had become the most
virulent opponent of the trade-unions.

Divergence of opinion showed itself among the members of
the commission from the very first meeting and in all the ques-

4 m Y

Victorian People

tions put to the witnesses who had been summoned. On Apple-
garth s suggestion the witnesses were granted a bill of indem
nity so that they could testify without fear, but the sort of
questions asked them was mixed and sometimes hostile in char
acter. As each member had the right of asking questions, the
witnesses continually found themselves subjected after their
first examinations to a cross-examination put by some commis
sioner anxious to criticize the value of their evidence and to
demonstrate its weakness when it happened to contradict his
own views. Roebuck, in particular, profited from this proce
dure to harass union sympathizers whenever he could.

The most important union witness was Applegarth, who
attended the meetings of the commission as a representative of
the London trade-union leadership, the Association of Organ
ized Trades; he soon became the star of the proceedings. His
integrity was unquestionable. Once in his absence, when a
witness had cast aspersions on his veracity, one of the com
missioners promptly retorted, "I do not suppose that any man
who has sat at this table and heard Mr. Applegarth can doubt,
for one moment, a single word he has stated."

Applegarth s evidence ranged widely over the experience of
his own union and also over the whole field of trade-union
organization and problems. He told the commissioners about
the history of his own union and the methods it employed,
offering the written rules of his society for their perusal. He
explained why the society opposed piecework, what was its
attitude to foreign competition, how it enforced its rules, and
what its members thought about strikes. His language was
forceful and persuasive.

Piecework was opposed because it led to the introduction
of bad material and of overlong working hours; in consequence
homes and leisure were neglected. "We believe that it deters
men from pursuing education and other matters which they
really should attend to."

Roebuck pressed him on this point and asked him whether
he had ever directed his mind to the piecework of a sculptor
like Praxiteles creating a statue of Venus. "You, as I under-

^ 184

Robert Apple garth and the Trade-Unions

stand, would interfere and say No, you must work on the
same terms as Thomas Smith, and not work by the piece. "

Applegarth replied with considerable shrewdness, "I do not
admit that that is a fair application of principle. We are not all
Arkwrights, Brunels, or Stephensons. Men of such extraordi
nary talent soon become other than working men. We have to
make rules and regulations which will apply to workmen
generally." Even if Applegarth had never heard of Praxiteles
previously, he did not forget him. In the report of the Amal
gamated Society of Carpenters in 1868 he said that the union
was "tired of that system of individualism which gives Praxit
eles his due and Arkwright, Brunei and Stephenson full scope
for the exercise of their extraordinary skill, but leaves the
thousands less skilful to scramble through a selfish world as
best they can." The union acted as a harmonizing and uplifting
influence, raising "the less fortunate to their proper position."

On the subject of foreign competition Applegarth refused
to take up that protectionist position which was so bitterly
assailed by orthodox economists. He showed similar modera
tion in countering charges of "union tyranny." Admitting
frankly that some of the smaller unions engaged in rattening,
he went on to add that, while he detested the practice, "he
could yet understand it." Roebuck asked him why a non-
unionist was not entitled to make his own private bargain with
an employer and why the employer could not make his own
private bargain with the men. Applegarth replied that the
union helped both the employers and the men.

"How should you like me to interfere with you as you inter
fere with those men?"

"If you were a member of my society, and you, in conjunc
tion with the majority, decided that I must conform to certain
regulations, I should be bound to do so; but if we are all to be
left to do as we like, the sooner we dissolve our society the
better."

"Is not that bringing the opinion of the majority in all cases
to govern mankind?"

"Undoubtedly, and I see no reason against it."

"Then you think that the minority should have no voice?"

{ m Y

Victorian People

"Undoubtedly, let them have a voice, and if they have right
on their side, let them agitate till they convince the majority
they are right."

"But who is to decide whether they have right on their
side?"

"The same remark may be applied to the question of the
suffrage, about which I suppose we shall have to go on agitat
ing until we get what we wish."

Once again Applegarth had worked his position round to the
point where it was difficult for Roebuck, the former Ben
thamite upholder of the greatest happiness of the greatest num
ber and the supporter of an extension of the suffrage, to make
any effective reply.

The whole case against "union tyranny" was finally ex
ploded after Frederick Harrison, the positivist friend of the
unions, asked two leading questions to which Applegarth made
simple one-word replies.

"The restriction upon your freedom of labour which your
society imposes amounts to this, that the members of the
society will voluntarily consent to work under certain condi
tions so long as they receive certain benefits?"

"Certainly."

"And if they choose to work under different conditions they
must forego those benefits and leave the society?"

"Yes."

Finally, on the question of strikes, Applegarth did not at
tempt to minimize their beneficial value on certain occasions
or to deny that the number of small strikes had actually
increased during the previous four years. But he did claim
that some of the strikes were caused by the employers rather
than by the men and that it was true in general that "employ
ers, by their overbearing and tyrannical conduct, compel
workmen to combine for their mutual protection." He held up
the ideal of co-operation between masters and men and sup
ported the beginnings of a system of voluntary understanding,
which eventually was to become the guiding principle of Brit
ish industrial relations. "We are doing all we can to extend it;
we believe that nothing can be more advantageous than for

4 186

Robert Applegarth and the Trade-Unions

the masters and men to meet and agree upon certain condi
tions, and we think that it should be a matter left to them-

up, Applegarth claimed that the excellence of his
union consisted in the fact that it was a general organization
extending throughout the kingdom and that it was an absolute
impossibility for any one branch to become bankrupt. The
fortunate assisted the less fortunate at the end of every year,
and in mutual help the carpenters and joiners were bound to
one another. Only by such working-class solidarity was it
possible to guarantee real national progress.

It is sometimes claimed that the trade-union leaders of the
middle of the century were uninterested in social as distinct
from political and civil rights, but Applegarth looked beyond
the machinery of collective bargaining and the apparatus of
mutual insurance to certain basic social rights which it was the
task of working-class organizations to vindicate. "I would have
a man do a fair day s work for a fair day s wage. ... I believe
that every man who is willing to toil for his bread is entitled
to sufficient to feed, clothe, and educate his family, and to lay
by something to keep him in his old age, so that he shall not
need to work after 60 or 55 years of age." The same basic
philosophy had been expressed in the first report of the ASCJ
in 1861: "Where a man, who is willing to work for the bread
of life, is seen wending his way through the streets and re
turning unsuccessful, you see a walking evidence of the ne
cessity for such societies as this to provide him that bread of
which political economy deprives him, until the future de
velops a state of society in which it will not be possible for
such an anomaly to exist."

Applegarth lived long enough until 1925 to see the begin
nings of an English welfare state dedicated to the achievement
of these objectives; but in 1867 the state was still a "night
watchman state" concerned essentially with the protection of
property. The main preoccupation of the unions themselves
was with the protection of their own property and the recog
nition of their rights to dispose of it as they wished. The
majority of the commission, while prepared to hear Applegarth

4 isi Y

Victorian People

with respect, were strongly swayed by the counterevidence of
the Central Association of Master Builders. They accepted
the existence of trade-unions as a fait accompli, but they wished
registration to be limited to those unions which had no rules
to control the number of apprentices, to prevent the use of
machinery, to stop men doing piecework, and to maintain a
closed shop; they also wished to forbid unions to assist other
unions in trade disputes. Orthodox political economy took little
account of union solidarity, "the associative spirit, strongly
implanted in man/ or the theory of social rights implicit in
Applegarth s organization. The majority were expressing the
view, natural to employers in an age of an expanding com
petitive economy, that the unions were restrictive bodies im
peding the efforts of the most hard-working employers, keep
ing up the costs of production, threatening property through
violent strikes and picketing, and diminishing the power of
Britain to produce staple commodities better and more cheaply
than its commercial rivals. The year 1867 was the one not only
of the Sheffield outrages and the second Reform Bill but also
of the Paris Universal Exhibition, which, it was alleged, ex
hibited the increasing advantages that Continental competitors
were deriving from the fetters imposed on British industry by
the unions.

A minority of three of the commissioners Hughes, Harri
son, and Lichfield supported the arguments put forward by
Applegarth and published a report of their own, which became
the basis of subsequent legislation. They pointed to Apple-
garth s statistics and evidence to prove their point that the
expansion of the new amalgamated trade-unions was not "the
spasmodic growth of a temporary movement, but the progress
of a stable institution. The degree of completeness to which
the organization has attained, and the scale on which the
operations are conducted, quite equal that of a first-rate mer
cantile enterprise." No contemporary note of praise could have
been more firmly sounded. There was no connection be
tween trade-unions like those of Applegarth and Allan and
the Sheffield societies. "Outrages of the Sheffield kind, however
lamentable, are proof of an unhappily low state of intelligence,

{ 188 Y

Robert Apple garth and the Trade-Unions

and of an unsettled industrial condition; but the riots of
the rough population have but very little bearing on the
claims of such societies as the Amalgamated Engineers or the
Amalgamated Carpenters to a legal position and to the protec
tion of their property. . . . We cannot suppose that the officials
of the Engineers, or the Carpenters, or the Printers . . . look
on the acts of illegality and violence with any less feeling of
abhorrence than we do ourselves." The moral was obvious.
"In proportion as the unions acquire extent in area, regularity
and publicity in their transactions, and become properly con
stituted associations, they gain in character and usefulness. In
proportion as they are irregular in organization, and approach
the form of the old secret trades union, without benefits/
they preserve some criminal features of the surreptitious unions
under the old law."

The minority report served as the basis for the trade-union
legislation of the Liberal government in 1871. Applegarth, along
with his colleagues, refused to accept any of the recommenda
tions of the majority report and remarked that, if this was the
price trade-unions had to pay for protection, "they will prefer
to go unprotected to Doomsday. . . . Not even for legal rec
ognition will they attempt to smother one of the highest mo
tives by which men can be actuated that of desiring to assist
others less fortunate than themselves." The 1871 act conceded
the demands of the unionists for adequate legal status: no
union could be regarded as criminal because it was "in restraint
of trade," any unions whose rules were not criminal could
be registered; registration gave protection to funds. All these
privileges were granted without the unions having to become
incorporated. But there was one new and very serious com
plication. The Liberal government passed a criminal law amend
ment act at the same time which declared that picketing and
all allied activity was illegal.

This second act, which was originally phrased as part of
the first, meant that the trade-unions lost their most effective
practical sanction at the same time as they secured their legal
recognition. From previous experience of interpretations of
"molestation," "intimidation," and "obstruction" in the courts,

Victorian People

the unions knew how much more difficult it would be to
organize effective strike machinery in the future under the
new legislation. As one trade-union manifesto put it, "Instead
of the spirit of fairness, the same class bitterness and prejudices
as of old characterize the passing of this measure, which for
unjustness and one-sidedness exceeds the old law which it
supersedes."

Trade-unionists of all types rallied against the new bill. The
London leadership of the large Amalgamated Trade Unions
for the first time associated with the provincial union leader
ship of the miners, metalworkers, and textile employees. George
Howell, the bricklayer, became secretary of the Trades Union
Congress, which had its roots not in London but in the prov
inces, and four years of lobbying began, which only ended
with the passing of the Conspiracy and Protection of Property
Act of 1875. By this measure peaceful picketing was legalized,
and no act carried out in combination was to be a punishable
offense in the future unless it would have been considered so
when committed by an individual. It seemed that the burden of
the criminal laws specially relating to labor had finally been
lifted and that "every legal grievance" of which they had com
plained had been removed.

The trade-union legislation of the 1870 s brings to a close
the mid- Victorian period in the history of labor. The acts
could never have been passed if Applegarth and his friends had
not exhibited remarkable qualities of organization and tactical
skill. If they had not been passed, there could have been no
burst of new unionism among unskilled workers later on in
the century and no subsequent alliance between trade-unions
and Labour party to insure the emergence of the working
classes as an effective force. The political developments of the
last quarter of the century, which have been considered crucial
by most historians, had their roots in the middle period of the
century. Yet between the passing of the legislation and the great
burst of new unionism from 1889 to 1892 there was deep de
pression. The unemployment of those years and the sectional
battles between trade-unionists cut a deep divide between
mid- and late- Victorian England.

Robert Apple garth and the Trade-Unions

V

It is doubtful whether the legislation of 1871 and 1875 would
have been carried so easily, or at all, had it not been for the
extension of the suffrage to the urban artisan in 1867. Apple-
garth was just as active in the fight for the vote as he was in
the parallel fight for union recognition. He had always refused
to separate economics from politics, even when some of his
trade-unionist colleagues, like Allan, warned him that "fools
rush in where angels fear to tread." When he became secretary
of the ASCJ in 1862, he made it clear from the start that he in
tended to instruct his society to use political action.

The action which he himself took was, as always, varied in
character. He enjoyed equally leading delegations to see cabinet
ministers and organizing mass rallies. He was as eager to attend
a meeting of the International in Switzerland as to take part in
a pioneer conference on trade-union rights called by the Glas
gow Trades Council in 1864. Although he avoided too close a
co-operation with those militant provincial trade-union leaders
who were associated with industries less skilled and exclusive
than his own, he welcomed the rise of agricultural labor and
wished to see the farm worker take his place in the community
as a full citizen. One of his great delights was meeting and
corresponding with foreign workers or visitors; for instance,
he was one of the 1864 committee which welcomed Garibaldi
to London as a popular hero when the cheers were so lusty
that it was difficult to believe that the English had ever acquired
the reputation for being "a cold, calculating, phlegmatic and
undemonstrative race."

The most important of all the political associations of the
1860 s with which the working classes could completely iden
tify themselves grew out of Garibaldi s visit. A public meeting
called by the Working Men s Garibaldi Committee to protest
against the curtailment of his visit was broken up by the police,
and the angry organizers decided, with the co-operation of a
middle-class barrister, Edmund Beales, to form a political asso
ciation to secure working-class rights. It was inaugurated as the
Reform League in January, 1865, with Beales as president and

4191 Y

Victorian People

Howell as secretary. Applegarth became a foundation member;
he had already written an address for an earlier reform organ
ization founded in Manchester in 1862, and he warmly wel
comed the new league, which, under the direction of its bar
rister-president and bricklayer-secretary, harnessed London
labor to the cause of political reform. A new period of move
ment was beginning in English politics. The league issued its
first address in May; Palmerston died in October, and before
the next year was out the league had raised the London crowds
and the trades to a greater pitch of enthusiasm for reform than
there had been since the 1840 s.

In the political agitation which was stirring again, Applegarth
realized the importance of close co-operation with the middle
classes. His own purpose was to build up the influence of the
skilled artisans in "the interests of the toiling masses of our
fellow countrymen," but he saw that this purpose could be
come effective only if the support of middle-class reformers
like Bright was secured. There were difficulties in creating
a working alliance, for the middle classes of the North and
Midlands had their own organization, the Reform Union, set
up in Manchester in the same year. It inherited the methods
and some of the personnel of the Anti-Corn Law League and
could mobilize large funds in the cause of reform. But there
was some difference of outlook as well as of membership in
the two organizations. The Reform Union began by recom
mending household suffrage; the league pressed for manhood
suffrage, although one trade-unionist told a packed meeting
that "if they went to the House of Commons and asked for
manhood suffrage they might as well stay at home and whistle
jigs." Even Bright, who was the most militant middle-class re
former, did not go far enough for some of the working-class
radicals.

Three factors brought the two organizations close together:
the defeat of the relatively moderate Reform Bill introduced
by Russell and Gladstone in 1866; the split in the Liberal ranks
between reformers and defenders of the old order; and the
advent of a Conservative government in June, 1866. Beales,
faced with a parliamentary crisis, declared the willingness of

4192 Y

Robert Apple garth and the Trade-Unions

the league to accept household suffrage as the basis of con
tinued agitation, on the grounds that it would unite reformers
and serve as "a link between Manchester, Birmingham, and
London."

It was between the autumn of 1866 and the spring of 1867
that the Reform League reached the zenith of its power. Cir
cumstances rather than leadership gave the reformers their
opportunity. The winter was a hard one, and the harvest had
been ruined by heavy rains. Bread prices rose in consequence,
as did the price of milk and meat, which had been affected by
a serious cattle plague in the home counties. Business condi
tions too were depressed. The failure of Overend and Gurney s
Bank in the City and a rise in bank rate curbed credit expansion
and ushered in a series of industrial and commercial bankrupt
cies. Finally, to add to the distress, cholera, the regular har
binger of political excitement, made another of its dramatic
appearances. The political equilibrium of mid- Victorian Eng
land was being shattered in a moment of maximum social
temkm.

i/Unemployment, hunger, and disease were concentrated in
London, where the Reform League was already most popular.
In the East End of London, in particular, the distress was so
acute that, as one writer put it, "no one can sound the depths
of its absolute, deplorable misery."

What gave the league its greatest opportunity in such a
situation was neither the misery nor the panic but the resent
ment caused by some of the speeches in Parliament during the
debates on Gladstone and Russell s Reform Bill. The brilliant
but acrid speeches of Robert Lowe, which battered the work
ing classes with abuse, captivated the House but enraged the
London population. The gap between Parliament and people
grew wider than it had been since 1832. The Reform League
began to play a similar role to that of the National Political
Union thirty-five years before on the eve of the first Reform
Bill, and Applegarth, as the man in touch with innumerable
labor organizations, became a second Francis Place. This time,
however, there were many Francis Places, for the labor move
ment was far stronger than it had been in the England of Wil-

4 193 Y

Victorian People

liam IV, and the active and well-informed labor leader was
ceasing to be an exception in politics.

In July, 1866, before the economic and social situation sug
gested real danger, the league decided to hold a mass evening
demonstration in Hyde Park, after the workers had left their
places of employment. It had already held rallies in Trafalgar
Square, but Walpole, the new Conservative Home Secretary,
and Sir Richard Mayne, the commissioner of police, were afraid
of rioting in the park and banned the meeting. On the night of
July 23 the reform leaders were denied entry to the park,
which they claimed as a legal right. The crowd of between
one hundred and two hundred thousand people clearly sym
pathized with the reformers, and under their pressure the park
railings began to give way. Applegarth, who had ridden in the
same carriage as Beales and Howell, was the first man to be
forced against the railings as the crowd pushed through. In
the meantime Beales had lost his gold watch and chain, which
were stolen during the skirmishing.

The Hyde Park incident was hardly a riot, and the league
could not be blamed for failing to control such a large number
of people, but there was considerable fear among leaders of
the government and the ruling classes of an outbreak of work
ing-class violence. The trade-union leaders were attaching
themselves more firmly each day to the crusade for reform;
and the small group of revolutionaries associated with Marx
were working behind the scenes, persuading themselves that
they were playing a strategic part in a movement which had
now reached "immense and irresistible dimensions." Marx was
writing hopefully to Engels that "the Englishman first needs a
revolutionary education, and two weeks would be enough for
this if Sir Richard Mayne had absolute control." Even Goldwin
Smith, the liberal professor, was expressing alarm lest "the
struggle may in the end cease to be one between parties in
Parliament and become one between classes, the class repre
sented by the House of Commons on the one side, and the class
represented by the trade unions on the other."

There were three important reasons why, despite the tension,
the political struggle did not turn into an open class struggle

Robert Apple garth and the Trade-Unions

-three reasons which are fundamental to an understanding of
mid- Victorian England. The first was the leadership of Bright,
who, though a middle-class manufacturer himself, believed that
it was essential to secure the wholehearted support of the trade-
unions both in London and in the provinces. He saw that only
a conjunction of the Chartist and Anti-Corn Law League tradi
tions could overturn the half-reformed constitution. He had
labored for middle-class-working-class co-operation ever since
the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 in the belief that only
such co-operation could liberalize the organization and policy
of government. The ghost of the Anti-Corn Law League lin
gered in the offices of the Reform Union in Manchester; while
in London, to many of the workers, "the blood of the Chart
ists of 48" was the seed of 1866. For a few months two tradi
tions converged. Bright, as an outstanding orator and the un
disputed radical leader in Parliament, was able to place himself
at the head of a united movement, and men like Applegarth
were willing to serve him.

The second reason was the political strategy of the Tory,
Disraeli, who was watching and waiting, not only in 1866, but
throughout the whole of the previous twenty years. In his esti
mate of the situation in 1861 Goldwin Smith had written that
"the true statesman would rather drag the working men with
in the pale of the constitution by force than suffer them to
organize themselves into a separate community outside it."
Disraeli was ready to drag, or rather to cajole, to tease, and
to maneuver his party into accepting a complete change in the
structure and balance of the constitution.

The third reason is the most important of the three. The
English working class was not revolutionary, although for a
moment it seemed as though it might become so; the trade-
unions were not the cells of socialist conspirators either in the
provinces or in London. Nor were they shock troops. "If the
railings and it was touch and go had been used offensively
and defensively against the police and about twenty of the lat
ter had been knocked dead," wrote Marx in a description of
the Hyde Park riots, "the military would have had to intervene
instead of only parading. And then there would have been

<{ 195 Y

Victorian People

some fun." That "touch and go" echoes across English history.
It was the hinge on which Marx s wishful thinking always
turned. In England the wish was never capable of becoming a
fact. The workers did not pick up the railings and use them
offensively, or even defensively, against the police; they de
manded their rights and secured them, but even when they
were provoked they never flirted with the thought of "a really
bloody encounter with the ruling powers."
v/To understand the English working classes in the middle
years of the century, there is little need to go beyond Apple-
garth. He believed in the class from which he sprang and con
sidered it as a class and not as a conglomeration of individuals;
but he held that it could advance only by education and supe
rior organization, not by picking up railings in Hyde Park or
by accepting a "scientific" theory of tactics and objectives.
He would collaborate with Marx, as he collaborated with Mun-
della, but he looked beyond them, prompted by both his experi
ences and his sympathy. The trade-union which he helped to
create was to be a stable organization, justified by its practical
results, as much a creature of law as "all corporations and every
club among the upper classes in Pall Mall and St. James s."
When he looked to the future, Applegarth did not see a Utopia
but a land of more equal opportunity, where unionists were
full, responsible citizens, exercising an active influence in
national affairs and building with care and vision a co-operative
commonwealth.

4 196

VIII

There are in an old poem that I read with great
pleasure many years ago the Faerie Queene two lines
which I think may teach us something in our present
position

"No fort so fencible, no wall so strong
But that continual battery may rive"
I -feel certain that the -fort of selfishness and monopoly
cannot be held -for ever, and that the walls of privilege
cannot through all time resist the multitude that are
gathering to the assault. In all the nations of the world
of this day, I believe the powers of good are gaining
steadily on the powers of evil. I think it is eminently so
in this country.

JOHN BRIGHT (1865)

I

John Bright was the most important figure in the history of
mid- Victorian radicalism. His career spans the period from
the free-trade agitation of the 1 840 s to the home-rule dispute
of the 1880 s. His life is in itself a chapter of English history.
"The history of the last forty years of this country," he told
his Birmingham constituents long before his political battles
were over, "is mainly a history of the conquests of freedom. It
will be a grand volume that tells the story, and your name, and
mine, if I mistake not, will be found on some of its pages."

Yet Bright was never an important or effective cabinet minis
ter. He prided himself that he was a plain citizen, "dwelling
among his own people." All titles he disliked, even necessary
ones. Happier in the public meeting than in the "warm precincts

Victorian People

of the Treasury," he preferred manipulating opinion to master
ing administration. His justification was a simple one: "Parlia
ment had no more power than the smallest vestry until public
opinion had become convinced." Even in private conversation
he was always conscious of his audience and the need to con
vince it. An American journalist, George W. Smalley, who
first met him in 1866, has left an unforgettable account of the
occasion:

It was a low room, rather crowded, with two jets of gas flicker
ing in the face of the orator. His hair even then was gray, though
abundant, the complexion florid, and the rather irregular but
powerful features gave you at first sight an impression of singular
force and firmness of character. So did the whole man. The broad
shoulders, the bulk of the figure, the solid massiveness of his mas
terful individuality, the immovable grasp of his feet upon the firm
earth, his uprightness of bearing, the body knit to the head as close
ly as capital to column all together made the least careful observer
feel that here was one in whose armour the flaws were few.

This was an American picture of Bright in the middle sixties,
when he was clearly the man of the hour; in the fifties and
early sixties he was by no means so congenial a figure to many
English writers and politicians. There seemed to be too much
firmness and bulk, too thick an armor; his radicalism seemed
to admit of no doubts. His politics were concerned not with
expediency but with moral principles, and, though the prin
ciples were always stated in majestic language, the language
bore little relation to the detailed logic of particular situations.
In a shrewd but hostile picture of Bright, which sharply con
trasts with that painted by Smalley, Trollope wrote:

I think that when once he had learnt the art of arranging his
words as he stood on his legs, and had so mastered his voice as to
have obtained the ear of the House, the work of his life was not
difficult. Having nothing to construct, he could always deal with
generalities. Being free from responsibility, he was not called upon
either to study details or to master even great facts. It was his busi
ness to inveigh against evils, and perhaps there is no easier business.
... It was his work to cut down forest trees, and he had nothing
to do with the subsequent cultivation of the land.

Mid- Victorian intellectuals could forgive anything except un
bounded self-confidence; they liked doubt, for doubt was the

1 198

John Bright and the Creed of Reform

evidence of subtlety. They profoundly mistrusted Bright, who
appeared never to have had a doubt in his life. At the same
time mid- Victorian politicians liked elasticity, even if elasticity
led to inconsistency. Palmerston was admired for his tricks, and
Russell was forgiven for his scrapes; Bright did not worry
whether he was admired or not, and he never needed to be for
given for either inconsistency or mischief. He did not fit easily
into the England of Bagehot and Trollope; it was only before
their time and when their world was breaking up that he came
into his own.

There was a further reason for mistrusting him. In his appeal
to the electorate, and more dangerously to the nonelectors, he
seemed to play deliberately on class antagonisms. The reason
Palmerston gave for not including Bright in his cabinet of
1859 was that he was a danger to social peace. "It is not per
sonalities that are complained of," Palmerston said. "A public
man is right in attacking persons. But it is his attacks on classes
that have given offence to powerful bodies, who can make
their resentment felt." Bright was never able to live down his
bitter oratory of the 1 840 s, when he built up the political con
sciousness of the middle classes by attacking the aristocracy as
a moribund social caste. In the 1850 s and 1860 s it seemed as
though he were intent on building up the political conscious
ness of the working classes as well, on welding an alliance be
tween manufacturers and artisans against landlords and states
men. With no respect for the traditional deference structure of
English society, he appeared to be anxious to substitute in its
place a society not unlike that of America. Democratizing
English parliamentary institutions was merely one aspect of
a bigger assault on English society.

Most of the mid- Victorian attacks upon Bright were under
standable but unfair. In the first place his self-confidence had
its limits. As a sincere Quaker he never lost a genuine spiritual
humility. When late in life he was offered a position of re
sponsibility in his local meeting house, he replied that the labors
of his career had taken him "out of the way of service for our
little Church and have to a large extent unfitted me for it. I
feel that there is nothing but the humblest office shall I say

^ 199 Y

Victorian People

that of doorkeeper? which I could properly undertake." Even
during the Crimean War, when he was absolutely certain of
the righteousness of his cause and expressed himself with un
qualified self-assurance, he was afraid of the temptation to
which his successes as an orator were exposing him. Unpopular
in the country, he feared the implications of the respect peo
ple felt for his speeches in the House of Commons. Compliments
offered him by senior politicians of different parties provided
too much "food for vanity and self love" and created and
fostered "a foolish pride." Bright s inner uncertainties were
concealed from his supporters as well as from his enemies, but,
as occasional remarks in his Diary reveal, they were never com
pletely absent when he worked out his own calculations.

The second charge that he fomented class antagonism is
easier to deal with. Far from accentuating class conflicts on the
eve of the second Reform Bill, Bright did much to soften them.
He co-operated on equal terms with workingmen and, not with
out difficulty, won their confidence. In consequence, Marx re
ferred to him scathingly as "Father Bright" and held him large
ly responsible for "the period of corruption" in the middle years
of the century during which the workingmen became "hench
men of the capitalists." If middle-class politicians like Bright
had refused to interest themselves in the agitation by artisans
for an extension of the suffrage, the year 1867, despite the
working classes lack of revolutionary fervor, might have been
one of bloodshed rather than reform.

It is true that throughout the whole of his life Bright was a
bitter critic of the existing establishment, both ecclesiastical
and civil, and that he thundered against the privileges of par
sons and squires; but he never wished to see a complete trans
formation of English institutions, even a complete middle-class
transformation. Bagehot was right when he detected in Bright
an essential conservatism, and so was the Spectator when it
talked about "a sort of moderation in him," provided only that
people were willing to meet him halfway. Bright himself went
so far on one occasion as to claim that he was "the perfect Con
servative. I should like to know what there would have been
left of Conservatism for Conservatives to conserve at this hour

4 200 Y

John Bright and the Creed of Reform

but for me," he declared. As early as 1859 he told Conservative
members of Parliament that he professed "to be in intention as
Conservative as you. I believe infinitely more so, if you look
twenty or thirty years into the future." It was the Tory party
and not the Radical party which was the "turbulent party of
this nation." In later life he went further still. "I am in favour,"
he exclaimed, "of the constitution, which has come down to
us from our forefathers, with such amendments as circumstances
and our own experiences seem to warrant." The English con
stitution, which he did not hesitate to call "ancient and noble,"
had not been based, nor should it be based in the future, on
universal suffrage; it depended upon a balance of classes, not
on the dominance of one over the rest. "I do not pretend myself
to be a democrat. I never accepted that title, and I believe those
who knew me and spoke honestly of me never applied it to
me. What I am in favour of is such freedom as will give security
to people, but I am not in favour of that freedom that will de
stroy it."

Such inherent conservatism was concealed from the eyes of
most spectators between 1846 and 1867. During those years
Bright seemed anxious to keep domestic politics in movement,
while other men wished to keep them in repose. He refused to
welcome any diversion of public interest to questions of na
tional prestige or colonial expansion. The only good thing about
the Crimean War, he believed, was that it had produced a de
mand for administrative reform and Florence Nightingale.
Although he interested himself in one great foreign cause, the
American Civil War, he did so not because it was a foreign
cause but because it was for him a battle in which all men were
implicated. There was no political constitution in existence, he
believed, "in the preservation of which the human race is so
deeply interested" as the American constitution. When news
arrived of the surrender of General Lee and his army to Gen
eral Grant, Bright saw the issue of the struggle in universal
terms. "Slavery has measured itself with Freedom, and Slavery
has perished in the struggle. . . . This great triumph of the
Republic is the event of our age, and future ages will confess

-{ 201

Victorian People

it, for they will be better able than this to estimate the gain to
freedom and humanity which will spring from it."

Bright lacks the attractive simplicity of Lincoln chiefly be
cause he was too enmeshed in the economic philosophy of the
English manufacturing interest, but he shared the same belief
in human rights and liberal government. Though he and Lin
coln never met, they were friends, exchanging across the At
lantic the "good wishes of all Men who love Liberty."

In English politics the importance of Bright was that he
turned liberalism into a creed, that he made men seek reform
because reform was "right," and that he refused to separate the
spheres of morality and politics. Moreover, he did all this at a
time when the mood of the informed men of the age disposed
them to prefer subtle calculations of political expediency to ad
herence to general principles of conduct. He was freely ac
cused of making discontent, but he created no discontent which
was not already there beneath the surface. It was his mission to
guide the discontented toward a definite goal and to force the
contented to realize that they also could not afford to ignore
the creed of reform.

II

Bright accepted the articles of the creed in his youth. His
family was a Quaker family which had moved from Wiltshire
to Rochdale, a small Lancashire town on the edge of the Pen-
nines, a few years before he was born. He always bore the
double imprint of his religion and his birthplace. "I could not
be otherwise than Liberal," he once said. "I was then, as I am
now, a member of the Society of Friends. . . . Belief in the
equality of all men in the sight of heaven, and in equal rights
of all men before earthly governments, naturally leads to a
strong sympathy with the great body of the people." Bright
sprang from Puritan and martyrs stock; "the persecutions
they had endured, and their principles of equality and justice,"
drove him to liberalism by necessity as well as by inclination.
Unlike Gladstone, he had nothing to unlearn before he became
a Liberal; he had merely to remember.

Yet traditionalist Quakers had chosen to be select rather than

4 202 Y

John Bright and the Creed of Reform

popular and were anxious to remain "quiet in the land" rather
than discontented. Bright, even in his youth, tried to teach them
a civic gospel. He castigated those Quakers of whom he dis
approved with as much vigor as he castigated the bishops, and
he spoke of some Quaker institutions with little more respect
than he spoke of the House of Lords; but he remained a Quaker
until his death and was buried in 1889 in the graveyard of the
Rochdale Meeting House, which he had attended as a child.
In fifty years of endeavor he built a new political tabernacle,
but he never felt any temptation to seek a new spiritual home.

The Quaker origins of his liberalism and his lifelong sym
pathy with nonconformity explain the religious core of his
conception of government liberal government grounded in
responsibility, self-respect, and justice. He had only one cri
terion of statesmanship which he applied at all times: "In work
ing out our political problem, we should take for our founda
tion that which recommends itself to our conscience as just
and moral."

Particular problems all demanded a common approach. Of
the repeal of the Corn Laws, he said in later life: "You find it
in Holy Writ that the Earth is the Lord s, and the fulness there
of. We have put Holy Writ into an Act of Parliament." During
the Crimean War he pleaded with hostile audiences: "You
profess to be a Christian nation. . . . Within the limits of this
island alone, on every Sabbath, twenty thousand yes, far more
than twenty thousandtemples are thrown open, in which de
vout men and women assemble that they may worship Him,
who is the Prince of Peace. Is this a reality or is your Chris
tianity a romance?" Dr. Robert W. Dale, the great Congrega-
tionalist minister in Birmingham, tells a story of "the extraor
dinary effect" of Bright s first speech in Birmingham after he
became a member of Parliament for the city. The audience had
come expecting some fierce onslaught on the privileged classes;
they found themselves surprised and awed by Bright s tone of
moral earnestness. "We rebuked ourselves," Dale declared,
"with the words of the Prophet, Surely the Lord is in this
place and I knew it not. "

It was this moral fire which impressed Gladstone and drew

Victorian People

him close to a man whose religious views were quite different
from his own. "The supreme eulogy which is Bright s due," he
said, "is that he elevated political life to a higher elevation, and
to a loftier standard, and that he has thereby bequeathed to
his country the character of a statesman, which can be made the
subject not only of admiration and of gratitude, but of reveren
tial contemplation." The Queen admired Bright for the same
reasons, but Palmerston was never impressed; when he sarcasti
cally called Bright "the Honourable and Reverend gentleman,"
he was deliberately attacking those qualities which Gladstone
and the Queen came most to appreciate. To Palmerston, Bright
was a humbug, and a dangerous humbug to have in the House
of Commons.

If the pull of "an omnipotent and eternal moral law," as he
saw it, was the first great influence on Bright, the second was
the tug of locality. In his youth he looked at the world from
Rochdale, a textile town on the edge of the moors, representa
tive, in his own words, of "the millions of Lancashire, whose
industry had not only created, but sustained the fabric of na
tional power." Until he was thirty, Bright took no part in
political activities outside Rochdale, Burnley, Bury, and the
neighboring Lancashire towns, the cotton towns of a new age.
Although one of the first effects of his association with the
Anti-Corn Law League was increased travel, and election in
1842 for the city of Durham, he returned to Lancashire and
became member for its great cotton capital, Manchester, in
1847. "I am induced to consent to become a candidate for the
suffrages of Manchester," he told the electors, "in the belief
that to a large extent my sympathies accord with theirs, and
because my sympathies are bound up in an especial manner
with the advancement of that great and industrial population of
which Manchester may be deemed the centre." It was from
Manchester that the gospel of free trade was proclaimed and
"the deliverance of the country" effected in 1846. With the
election of Bright, wrote the Manchester Times, "the city now
stands forth to the world," crowning "the new alliance of in
dustrial independence with political power."

With Rochdale and Manchester behind him, Bright ap-

i 204

John Bright and the Creed of Reform

proached politics in a very different way from Trollope and
Bagehot. There was less deference in Lancashire than in most
parts of the country. Indeed, Bagehot, who married the daugh
ter of a prominent member of the league, asserted that Lanca
shire was more egalitarian than any other part of England.
"Lancashire is sometimes called c America-and-water, " he
wrote; "we suspect it is America and very Iittl6 water." Bright
did not worry about the ingredients; he was only anxious that
Lancashire should become a larger ingredient in the English
democratic mixture.

The harmony between Bright and his background was more
than a harmony of thinking. During the days of his Rochdale
apprenticeship he was shaping his character as well as his atti
tudes in the rugged mold of the industrial North. His educa
tion, begun in Quaker schools at Ackworth and York, was con
tinued in the Rochdale Literary and Philosophic Society, the
Rochdale Temperance Society, the Order of Rechabites, the
Bible Society, and even the local cricket club. Agencies of this
kind molded many other political figures of the period; for
Bright they took the place of a university. The industrial North
in the bleak age of the nineteenth century was not merely a
land of slag heaps and dark Satanic mills; it was a land of chapels
and clubs, of co-operative and friendly societies (the Co-opera
tive Movement began in Rochdale with the pioneers of 1844),
of small but energetic social and religious groups, of intense
and variegated loyalties. Bright grew up in such a world. It was
in odd breaks at his father s mill that he first studied statistics,
political economy, and social theory; in the evenings he put his
teaching into practice and learned how to address an audience
without being tempted to run away.

Religion and locality together inspired Bright to take part in
his first two exercises in political agitation: the battle against
church rates in Rochdale and the national battle against the
Corn Laws. The first venture, limited though it was in scope,
tested all Bright s powers; it turned into a fierce struggle in
which the contestants rose far above the normal stature of local
leaders. When Bright became a leading propagandist for the
league, he had already received a sound basic training.

Victorian People

The origins of the quarrel were not unusual in industrial
communities. All parishioners were traditionally expected to
pay church rates in order to maintain the fabric of their parish
church, the local center of the established Church of England,
and to provide what was necessary for the decent celebration
of its services. From the 1830 s onward dissenters were increas
ingly loath to fulfil this obligation. They were building large
numbers of new chapels of their own and were full of a natural
zeal for their own mission. Why should they be compelled to
pay twice, they asked, once as nonconformists for their own
chapels and a second time as citizens, for churches of which
they did not approve? The question became particularly bitter
in Rochdale in 1834, when the vicar, who had been the chair
man of the Lancashire County Magistrates at the time of the
massacre of Peterloo, attempted to increase the rate. Bright de
scribed the subsequent squabble about "this miserable question"
as "a stand-up fight."

By 1840 Bright had become a leading participant in the
debate, a redoubtable opponent for Dr. John Molesworth, a
new vicar who had come straight from the serene cloisters of
Canterbury to the noisy alleys of a very raw Rochdale. Moles-
worth was shocked by what he saw: "Plainly as Dissent has
lately shown the cloven foot," he wrote in his parish broadsheet
Common Sense, "yet its rampant malice and would-be tyranny
as here exhibited, would scarcely be credited in districts where
its mob rule is more circumscribed." Bright retaliated, when
words of this kind were uttered, by drawing upon the services
of Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn Law rhymer:

When palaced paupers, sneering, beard the town,
They preach the church tax in a text like this
No text more plain "To Caesar give his own!"
Ah, serviles, knavishly the mark they miss,
And give to Caesar ours not theirs, nor his!

In 1840 and 1841, after he had stirred up local opinion to
fever pitch, Bright won the battle of the Rochdale church rates.
Although a bill abolishing church rates in all parts of the coun
try was not passed until 1868, the most dramatic of all church-
rate controversies had ended in a victory for nonconformity.

4 206 Y

John Bright and the Creed of Reform

Bright looked forward to a greater victory. "The time is com
ing," he told the men of Rochdale, "when a State Church will
be unknown in England, and it rests with you to accelerate or
retard that happy consummation."

From church rates Bright turned not to disestablishment as
an immediate objective but to free trade as the condition of all
national progress. The Anti-Corn Law League mobilized the
same two forces of dissent and local feeling in Lancashire as
the opponents of church rates had done. It was founded in
Manchester in 1839, after industrial England had been plunged
into deep depression. Two years later Richard Cob den and
Bright made a solemn vow never to rest until the Corn Laws
were repealed. For five years they battered against "monopoly,"
claiming that only total repeal would relieve the burdens of
businessmen and the distress of the working classes. They
gained their chief support in the north of England, where new
industrial wealth was freely contributed to sustain the agitation.
Economic arguments were given the necessary religious color
ing to appeal to as wide a northern audience as possible. "Blessed
is he that giveth the corn and cursed is he that withholdeth it."
"When Jacob saw that there was corn in Egypt he said unto his
sons: Why do you look one upon the other? Behold, I have
heard that there is corn in Egypt; get you down thither, and
buy for us there, that we may live and not die." There was
only one proper conclusion to devise from such texts: "As a
nation of Bible Christians, we ought to realize that trade should
be as free as the winds of heaven."

The amalgam of biblical rhetoric and economic theory
turned explosive when it was fused by social jealousy. The
manufacturers of Lancashire were anxious to vindicate in face
of the landlords-"titled felons" or even "landed vampires,"
they called them their rightful claims to political and economic
power. The year 1832 had given the middle classes the vote;
only the repeal of the Corn Laws could confirm the reality of
middle-class power. Protection seemed to the manufacturers
merely a "protection of native idleness at the expense of the

1207Y

Victorian People

impoverishment of native industry." A landlord Parliament
should be made to yield, but it would only do so if the demand
for tree trade was wielded as a bludgeon.

Bright was more eloquent than any other spokesman of the
league in clarifying these political and social implications of the
repealers case. As he told a Manchester audience in 1849: "The
Anti-Corn Law League will henceforth stand before the world
as a sign of a new order of things. Until now, this country has
been ruled by the class of great proprietors of the soil. Every
one must have foreseen that, as trade and manufactures ex
tended, the balance of power would, at some time or other, be
thrown into another scale. Well, that time has come, and the
rising of the League . . . was sufficient to have pointed out to
any statesman that the power of the landed aristocracy had
reached its height and that henceforth it would find a rival to
which eventually it must become subjected. We have been liv
ing through a revolution without knowing it."

The revolution of the 1840 s was the prelude to all Bright s
work in the 1850 s and 1860 s. His share in the success of the
league was smaller than that of Cobden; his share in following
up the work of the league, after 1846, was far greater. Until the
Corn Laws were repealed, it was Bright s task to excite the
emotions after Cobden had convinced the understanding. "The
Corn Law has scourged you with thongs," he shouted; "it has
lashed you with scorpions. It has made your trade fluctuating
and hazardous. It has deprived you of political independence.
It has surrounded you with discontented and impoverished
labourers." After the Corn Laws were repealed, it was his task
to continue the battle against the landlord and the parson on a
new front. "The League is the foe of aristocratic injustice, and
the State Church is the creature and tool of the aristocracy."
No single measure taken by Parliament could settle the whole
social question. When respectable men in Rochdale and Man
chester refused to pay a penny in church rates and contributed
sometimes several thousand pounds to the Anti-Corn Law
League, something, in Bright s opinion, was wrong with Eng
land. It was his mission, he believed, to put it right.

4 208 Y

John Bright and the Creed of Reform

III

He had no doubts about the necessary Items in a further
political program an extension of free trade, a reduction of
taxation, changes in the laws relating to the holding of land
("free trade in land," he called it), a cheaper foreign policy,
and an extension of the suffrage to increase the power of the
large populous districts at the expense of the countryside. There
is an air of crude self-interest about these proposals, but Bright
saw them all as moral issues and stated the case for them in
terms of justice and freedom.

The program soon began to be called the program of the
Manchester School. It had been a familiar maxim twenty years
before that "the school master now walks abroad in English
politics"; by 1848 it was clear that the men of Manchester were
dictating the main outlines of the syllabus. "We are called the
Manchester party," said Bright, speaking at the Free Trade Hall
in Manchester in 1851, "and our policy is the Manchester
policy, and this building, I suppose, is the school room of the
Manchester School."

The influence of the Manchester School depended upon the
power of the cotton manufacturers. In the 1850 s raw cotton
was England s greatest import and manufactured cotton goods
were England s greatest export. The trade was still expanding.
There seemed to be an analogy between the character of the
cotton products and the men who made them: "They are not
luxuries, such as can be laid aside without privation, but articles
of prime necessity to men of all ranks." The businessmen of
Manchester were proud of their contribution to social and eco
nomic progress. "Our treasures of iron and coal, our crystal
mountain streams, and convenient outlets to the ocean, could
hardly have failed to render us distinguished in the annals of
commerce, but if Providence had never planted the cotton
shrub we should in all probability never have known that pro
digious expansion of trade which has distinguished the last
hundred years." Cotton provided "the magic impulse which
has been felt during that period in every department of na
tional energy, which has affected more or less our literature,

{ 209

Victorian People

our laws, our social condition, our political institutions, making
almost a new people."

Bright began all his thinking with such a picture of the rela
tion of cotton to progress in his mind. His father was a cotton-
spinner, and his brothers remained active in the family business
at the time when Bright was becoming a politician. Bright kept
in close touch with them. The noise of a cotton-mill could al
ways be heard in the classrooms of the Manchester School, and
the smoke of mill chimneys was behind every agitation. The
direct influence of the business background on the syllabus of
the school can best be seen in the attitude the teachers adopted
to factory legislation. Freedom of trade, they thought, was an
essential element in the freedom of the individual, and the state
had no more right to limit hours of work in the factories than
it had to interfere by protective measures in the network of
buying and selling. Bright consistently opposed factory legisla
tion, first, on the grounds that a reduction of hours would
mean a reduction of wages and, later, after the repeal of the
Corn Laws, on the grounds that "all legislative interference
with labour market, all attempts of Government to fix the
wages of industry, all interference of a third party between
employers and employed, are unjustifiable in principle and
mischievous in their results." He was a benevolent employer,
but he believed that no employer should be compelled by the
state to become benevolent. Quite frankly, he stated that he
had never professed "to keep on my manufactory for the bene
fit of my workpeople, or for the sake of clothing my customers.
My object is, by the expenditure of capital, and by giving
labour to a business, to procure for myself and family a com
fortable income, with a hope of realizing something like a
competency at a late period of my life."

The state had no right to interfere with such private striving.
When representatives of the landed interest, like Ashley, took
up the cause of the factory operatives and demanded state inter
ference to protect them, Bright accused them of bias and de
liberate ignorance. "When they view from their distant emi
nence the state of the manufacturing districts [they] look
through the right end of the telescope; what they see is thus

John Bright and the Creed of Reform

brought near to them and is greatly magnified. But when they
are asked to look at the rural districts, they reverse the tele
scope, and then everything is thrown to the greatest possible
distance, and is diminished as much as possible." Did not the
manufacturers know best?

The operatives did not always think so, and they persisted
in demanding factory legislation. They eventually secured it in
1847 and 1850 with the help of a group of sympathizers in
Parliament, some of them manufacturers themselves. Yet even
in the 1850 s and 1860 s, when men like Sir James Graham, who
had opposed the ten-hours bills in the 1840 s, were converted,
Bright continued to oppose factory legislation. Nor did he ever
admit the right of the state to interfere with the smoke of the
large towns or even the public health conditions of local com
munities. "Hands off!" remained his slogan. He made many
enemies as a result of his obstinacy; although his own employees
in Rochdale on more than one occasion expressed complete
approval of his conduct as an employer, working-class opposi
tion to his attitude on factory questions persisted. In 1911 the
Rochdale Trades Council, for instance, refused to send repre
sentatives to the centenary celebrations of Bright s birth on the
ground that "John Bright was a capitalist, and an employer of
labour, who opposed industrial legislation and was against
shortening the hours of labour of children."

But Bright s attitude to state interference was consistent even
when his own personal interests were not directly involved
and when his opinions might have been expected to predispose
him to support economic legislation. He believed in temper
ance, for example, but he could never be induced to support a
permissive drink bill allowing local authorities to stop the liquor
trade. "The trade of the licensed victualler is a trade that has
been permitted and is now permitted," he said, "and I think
Parliament and the Law are not justified in inflicting upon it
unnecessary difficulties and unnecessary irritation." Restrictions
on drinking should not be introduced in an attempt to make
men sober. "Larw must be founded on broad and general princi
ples, such as are consistent with political economy, but indi-

<[ 211 >

Victorian People

viduals may use their own discretion as to what they abstain
from, and men may persuade each other to do many things
which it would not be proper for the law to compel them to
do."

The opposition of Bright and most of the other leaders of
the Manchester School to state interference drove a wedge be
tween the manufacturing middle classes and the working
classes. The wedge was always an obstacle to Bright in his
efforts to secure political co-operation. Economic interests and
political principles cut across each other and made it impossible
for the Manchester School ever to attract broad ranks of
operative opinion.

A more serious obstacle to the success of the school was a
division within the middle classes themselves. Not all Manches
ter men, and certainly not all middle-class manufacturers in
other parts of the country, were prepared to support the full
program Bright wished to realize after 1846. Cobden himself
was suspicious of Bright s belief in the working classes as a
political force; many other manufacturers were uninterested in
"Free Trade in land"; and, above all, large numbers of manu
facturers supported instead of opposing Palmerston s foreign
policy. They were not mere "economic men" seeking a cheap
foreign policy which would keep taxes low; they were English
men whose loyalty to their country and belief in its destiny
made them sensitive to any challenge to its honor and prestige.
They were not all like the famous Manchester man whose only
remark on being shown the uniform worn by Nelson at
Trafalgar was: "Was the uniform manufactured in the West
Riding of Yorkshire or in the West of England?"

There was another division in the middle classes, which
Matthew Arnold stressed. One half was "serious" and the other
half was "gay" and even "rowdy." The real strength of the
English middle classes lay in the serious portion, but in times of
stress the "gay" half might well take the initiative. Bright came
to realize this himself when the Crimean War broke out, and
Palmerston was able to exploit middle-class support in the
country against the motley band of his parliamentary enemies.

4 212 V

John Bright and the Creed of Reform

The "comic premier ... a gay old Tory of the older school,
disguising himself as a Liberal and hoaxing the Reform Club,"
was not incapable of hoaxing the men of Manchester.

IV

The campaign of the Anti-Corn Law League had concluded
with a triumph. Cobden and Bright were heroes, at least for the
middle classes of the North. The Crimean War, by contrast,
turned them both into national outcasts. Exultation gave way
to humiliation, leadership of opinion to dogged resistance to
the voices of the crowds. It was a sign of Bright s greatness
that he did not hesitate to express his unpopular opinions as
vigorously as he had canvassed his popular program in the
previous decade. "Even if I were alone," he exclaimed in one of
his famous war speeches, "if mine were a solitary voice, raised
amid the din of arms and the clamours of a venal press, I should
have ... the priceless consolation that no word of mine has
tended to promote the squandering of my country s treasure
or the spilling of one single drop of my country s blood."

In his short speech in the House of Commons after Bright s
death, Gladstone dwelt for some time on Bright and Cobden s
renunciation of popularity during the Crimean War. "I felt
proudly," he said, "and have never ceased to feel, what must
be the moral elevation of men who, having been nurtured
through their lives in an atmosphere of popular approval and
enthusiasm, could at a moment s notice consent to part with the
whole of that favour which they had heretofore enjoyed, and
which their opponents might have dreamed was to them as the
very breath of their nostrils."

Bright s opposition to the Crimean War was not based upon
complete pacifism. He did not accept the doctrine of nonresist-
ance in all circumstances. "I have not opposed any war on the
ground that all war is unlawful and immoral," he once wrote to
a friend. He rather examined the specific situation in 1854 and
reached the conclusion that this particular war was both un
necessary and criminal.

The background of his opposition to the Crimean War is
complicated, not simple. As a Quaker, he had a natural dislike

-[ 213 Y

Victorian People

of bloodshed and violence, and many of his Quaker friends
were prepared to oppose the war merely because it would in
volve the loss of life. The Quaker "Meeting for Sufferings" de
cided, for instance, in January, 1854, on the very eve of the
war, to send Joseph Sturge, Robert Charleton, and Henry Pease,
three of their most notable members, to Moscow to discuss with
the czar the possibility of maintaining peace. Bright approved
of the mission, which, as the members themselves predicted,
could do nothing to stop the drift to war. After war had broken
out, the small group of Quakers continued to act as "the soul
of the peace movement," and Bright found consolation, when
he was pilloried by the public, in the knowledge that he could
retreat from the turmoil into the spiritual peace of a small
community which shared his deepest convictions.

If Bright was not a complete pacifist, his approach to the
Turkish question was very strongly influenced by moral con
siderations. In the summer of 1836 he had visited Constanti
nople, Jerusalem and the Holy Places, and many other parts of
the Turkish Empire. The remarks which he made in his Diary
show that before the Anti-Corn Law League was set up, and
before he had met Cobden, he had convinced himself that
Turkey was a barrier to social progress in the Middle East.
Cobden reached the same conclusions analytically at about the
same time. In his pamphlets England., Ireland and Russia (1835)
and Russia (1836) he derided balance-of-power arguments in
foreign policy and strongly attacked attempts to bolster Tur
key against the expansion of Russian commerce and possibly
Russian troops. There would be little harm, he said, if the Rus
sians occupied Constantinople. "Religion, language, national
character, and the plague, all oppose the claim of the Turk to
preference over the Christian rival." Commercial interests were
also involved, for the Russians would be more likely than the
Turks to turn Constantinople into a great trading city. Britain
would then take its share in the newly provided opportunities.
"Cheapness, and not the cannon and the sword, is the weapon
through which alone we possess and can hope to defend our
commerce."

The Anti-Corn Law League systematized this philosophy of

John Bright and the Creed of Reform

foreign relations. Peace and free trade were held to be inextri
cably interrelated. The greatest result of free trade, indeed,
would be "to draw men together, to thrust aside the antago
nism of race, and creed, and language, and unite us in the bonds
of eternal peace." "I believe," said Cobden at Manchester in
1846, "that the desire and the motive for large and mighty
empires, for gigantic armies and great navies, for those materials
that are used for the destruction of life, and the desolation of
the rewards of labour, will die away."

Between 1846 and 1851 Cobden and Bright were able to rally
a considerable body of opinion to press for "a peace policy."
International peace conferences were held in 1843, 1848, 1849,
1850, and 1851. A Peace Society organized propaganda, and in
1849 and 1850 Cobden brought forward resolutions in Parlia
ment itself in favor of arbitration as a method of settling inter
national disputes. At the 1849 Paris Conference Victor Hugo
told the delegates in his opening address to look forward to the
day when cannons would be relegated to their proper places in
museums. A year later a more important figure than Victor
Hugo spoke in much the same vein: Prince Albert talked of
"that great end to which all history points the realization of
the unity of mankind." Not far from the Great Exhibition,
which was dedicated to the gospel of peace, Joseph Sturge
leased a house in which he gave a series of receptions to canvass
peace, temperance, and antislavery. These high hopes of 1851
wilted in 1852 and 1853. Radicals were plainly dividing into
two hostile camps, not the camps of the serious and the gay,
but of the "pacifists" and the crusaders. It is significant that,
when Kossuth visited England, the Peace Society tried to warn
people against treating him like a romantic hero; Palmerston
knew better. He was more interested in the Radicals who sup
ported Kossuth than in Kossuth himself.

Kossuth s visit aroused popular hostility toward the Russians
and enthusiasm for the Turks. The Turks had sheltered Kos
suth in 1 849, when Austria and Russia were hunting him down;
the moral was not left unexplained by his supporters. Turkey
was a haven of refuge; Russia was a citadel of tyranny and its
czar a despot and a bully. The stereotypes were completely

Victorian People

different from those of Bright, who believed with increasing
conviction that "the Turkish Empire is evidently approaching
decay. Within itself it contains the seeds of decay, as all des
potisms do." Bright and Cobden both tried to present this point
of view to the public in 1854 and 1855, but they met with little
success. When war broke out, their arguments appeared almost
treasonable to full-blooded supporters of the struggle. It was
not only the enthusiastic followers of Urquhart who writhed
when they heard the Turkish Empire described by Bright as
"one of the most immoral and filthy despotisms over one of the
fairest portions of the earth," or the contest dismissed by Cob-
den, in one of his less pro-Russian moods, as "a war in which
we have a despot for an enemy, a despot for an ally, and a
despot for a client."

Even Manchester, which had supported Cobden and Bright
so enthusiastically a few years before, and had returned Bright
unopposed at the general election of 1847, swung round be
tween 1852 and 1855 to wholehearted support of war against
Russia. The swing was first discernible as early as 1850; when
Bright was expressing skepticism about Palmerston s policy of
"meddling everywhere," his skepticism was "much condemned
in Manchester by men who ought to know better." "They
seemed to wear their principles but loosely," Bright com
plained, "and expect me to do the same." By 1853 there was as
enthusiastic a war party in Manchester as in any other English
city, although the resistances to it were greater than in Birming
ham or Sheffield. After war had started, Blight s effigy was
burned in Manchester, while the crowd chanted:

To Brighten up the Quaker s fame,
We ll put his body to the flame,
And shout in mighty England s name,
"Send him to old Nicholas."

Scurrilous pamphleteers joined in sneering at the "buttonless,
broad-brimmed, unbaptized and heartless humbug."

Although public opinion was strongly opposed to Bright
and Cobden during the war, Bright actually increased his repu
tation in the House of Commons. "My position in the House,"
wrote Bright in his Diary in August, 1854, "not worse but bet-

1216}*

John Bright and the Creed of Reform

ter, notwithstanding my opposition to policy of Govt. and
House. . . . Have met with many marks of respect and good
feeling from men of all parties." Bright s enhanced stature was
the result partly of his oratory, partly of the general political
situation. His oratory was universally admired even when his
arguments were deemed unpalatable. During the league agita
tion he had not reached the heights of his eloquence; the war
gave him his opportunity. The strength of the opposition which
confronted him brought out his full powers. Nothing short of
greatness could have saved him from ridicule or humiliation in
1854; but, when the waging of war proved more difficult than
had been anticipated and involved a far greater loss of life than
had ever been thought likely, members were ready to listen to
him. They were emotionally prepared for speeches heavy with
emotion and would rush into the House when it was announced
that Bright was about to take part in a debate. There were tears
in some members eyes when he reached the great sentences of
his most impressive peroration: "The angel of death has been
abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating
of his wings."

Members of Parliament felt a sense of deep responsibility in
1855, almost a sense of guilt, and Bright was able to exploit this
sense to the full. Even Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the British
ambassador in Constantinople, who has often been considered
the villain who caused the Crimean War, declared on visiting
Sebastopol soon after its fall that "John Bright is fully borne
out by all this. If this is a sample of the effects of war, who
would not be willing to join his peace party? It is more like the
crater of a volcano than a ruined city."

The sense of guilt was accompanied by a general political
confusion, which afforded a second opportunity for Bright.
When Palmerston replaced Aberdeen in 1855, he did so not
because he was a hero but because there was no alternative.
Bright detested Palmerston and consequently found it possible
during the war to reach temporary agreement with other
members whose objections to Palmerston were the product of
political calculation rather than sincere conviction. With
Disraeli, Bright was always on good terms throughout the war.

4 211 Y

Victorian People

They shared confidences and even talked, as they had once
talked perhaps rather whimsically in 1852, about "a reconstruc
tion of parties" and a coalition of former protectionists and
Manchester men. Disraeli appreciated Bright almost as much as
he appreciated himself: "I have always thought Gladstone,
Bright and myself the three most energetic men in the House,"
he told the Saxon minister in July, 1855. "Bright is sometimes
blunt, but his eloquence is most powerful. He has not the
subtleness of Cobden, but he has far more energy, and his
talents are more practically applied." After Bright had made his
"Angel of Death" speech, Disraeli told him that he would have
given all that he had to have made a speech of the same elo
quent simplicity. But Bright was prepared to talk with many
other disgruntled members as well as with Disraeli; more than
once he had long discussions with Layard, the chief supporter
of a more vigorous war than Palmerston was prepared to wage,
and with Roebuck, who had views on the war quite different
from those of the Manchester School. In a fluid parliamentary
situation, when Palmerston s government was by no means
secure, Bright figured in most political calculations. His abilities
were generally advertised, and even Delane murmured that
"Cobden and Bright would be our ministers now but for their
principle of Teace at all price/ "

Public opinion was less easy to convince than "the men who
knew" in Parliament. In the country it seemed that Bright
was merely "playing the game of the despot kings":

This broad-brim d hawker of holy things,
Whose ear is stuft with cotton, and rings
Even in dreams to the chink of pence.

The Peace of Paris, which Cobden and Bright welcomed, was
unpopular; and, after Palmerston had shown between 1856 and
1857 that he did not intend to become a pacifist himself now
that hostilities were over, Bright and Cobden were once again
ready scapegoats. Bright, physically exhausted by the political
struggle, was taken ill and had to travel abroad; while Palmer
ston, profiting from increased popularity, was able to gain new
supporters even in Manchester, where he received an enthusias-

4 218

John Bright and the Creed of Reform

tic welcome in 1857. In the elections of that year Bright was
bottom of the poll, nearly three thousand votes below his lead
ing antagonist. In 1852 he had secured a majority in every ward
except one; in 1857 he was in a minority in every ward. The
defeat was not made more palatable by the knowledge that one
of the victors was "a vain man who ate and dined his way to a
knighthood through the Mayoralty of Manchester." The Man
chester School had been renounced by Manchester: "We have
brought what is true into our School," Bright wrote, "but the
discipline was a little too much for the scholars." The same
moral was drawn by .spectators: "The town which has won
with such effect so great a fame in the electoral field," ex
claimed the Dally News, "now sinks back into insignificance,
preferring local thrift to the world-wide honour of being
represented by the most distinguished man in Parliament."

Bright was not alone in eclipse; in other cities of the north of
England, Manchester men were defeated also. The results were
depressing to contemplate. Cobden, beaten at Huddersfield,
complained that "the most warlike returns", had come from the
most popular constituencies, "the least warlike from the most
aristocratic counties." The Crimean War seemed to have re
versed the direction of English politics. "Was there ever any
thing," asked Macaulay, "since the fall of the rebel angels, like
the smash of the Anti-Corn Law League? How art thou fallen
from Heaven, O Lucifer!"

Macaulay, despite his dislike of the league, wished that
Bright and Cobden had been returned; so did most politicians
in Parliament. Even the Times and the Conservative newspapers
regretted the defeat. "Rarely have politicians retired from the
parliamentary stage," commented the Saturday Review, "at
tended by so general an expression of respect and esteem as that
which Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright have received from those
who were most opposed to the ideas and principles by which
their careers were guided."

In the moment of despair Cobden lost heart and suggested
that, while people were growing conservative and aristocratic
with prosperity, honest men were not in demand in govern
ment. "Foolish notions" were abroad, which it would be diffi-

Victorian People

cult to check. Bright, recovering from his illness, was more
optimistic. "Ten years hence," he wrote to Cobden, "those
who live so long may see a complete change in the public mind
on the questions on which the public mind has recently been so
active and so much mistaken." He was determined to take an
active part in changing the public mind and to start a new
crusade for parliamentary reform, the biggest casualty of the
war. The battle for reform was not terminated; it was begin
ning. Manchester might be "passionate and ungenerous," but
England could still be stirred.

V

It was in such a mood that Bright accepted the invitation of
Birmingham Radicals to become a candidate for the great
metropolis of the Midlands, "the home of the most convinced,
intelligent and rational Radicalism in all England." In August,
1857, he was returned unopposed for Birmingham, which he
continued to represent without interruption until his death
thirty-three years later. The switch was of national significance.
Manchester had dominated English reform politics in the 1840 s;
Birmingham took its place in the later nineteenth century. Early
Victorian England was symbolized by the one; late Victorian
England, by the other. But Bright was never at home in Bir
mingham in the same sense that he had been at home in Man
chester in 1847. He continued to represent Manchester ideas in
a Birmingham setting; it is significant that in his Birmingham
speeches he always referred to "your city" and not to "our
city." But he found it and left it unlimited in its approval of
his influence and example.

In one respect his move to Birmingham assisted his efforts to
extend the suffrage. The social structure of mid-nineteenth-
century Birmingham was more congenial to a middle-class-
working-class Radical alliance than the social structure of
Manchester. Both cities were industrial as well as commercial
centers, but in Birmingham there was "less aristocratic snob
bery" and more class co-operation. While, in Cobden s phrase,
"the great capitalists of Manchester form an aristocracy, indi
vidual members of which wield an influence over sometimes

4 220 }>

John Bright and the Creed of Reform

two thousand persons," in Birmingham businessmen and work-
ingmen were not separated by high walls of social privilege.
Workshops were small, and manufacturers were often skilled
artisans who had risen by their own efforts. The middle classes
were ready to work heartily with the working classes and from
1830 onward had put their trust in a a thorough union." It was
this thorough union which Bright himself was most anxious to
build up not only in Birmingham but throughout the whole
country. It was, in his view, a precondition of any further
extension of the franchise.

The reform issue he had clearly stated in 1 849, when, along
with Cobden, he set up the Parliamentary and Financial Reform
Association to advocate a double program of tax reduction and
franchise extension. At that time he worked with Hume and
Roebuck in supporting the Little Charter household suffrage,
the ballot, triennial Parliaments, and a more equal distribution
of seats. The association lost its grip on opinion even Man
chester opinion during the Crimean War, and it was officially
dissolved in 1855. Bright s election for Birmingham revived the
agitation, and in October, 1858, at the first meeting at which he
addressed his Birmingham constituents, he pressed for a new
movement to secure reform. "If your great town," he told his
audience, "with its great constituency, is only to send two men
to Parliament, whilst an equal population and property in some
other part of the kingdom is to send twenty men to Parliament,
then I say that the franchise is of little avail." Between the ses
sions of 1858 and 1859 Bright addressed great popular meetings
on the same subject in Manchester, Edinburgh, Bradford, and
other towns, as well as Birmingham, and claimed that they had
"exceeded in numbers and in influence almost every meeting
that was held by the Anti-Corn Law League."

Many Radicals, like Roebuck, who had opposed him during
the Crimean War, took part in this campaign. It seemed as
though the Radical splits were being patched up and the con
flicts of 1854 and 1855 were being forgotten. But the campaign
had a very limited success outside the large cities: "The middle
classes are against Brightism witness their able organ, the
Economist" wrote Disraeli, "and the educated classes are

Victorian People

against it, as is proved by the articles in the Saturday Review.
That the opinion of the country is the same is sufficiently
proved by the tone of the Times" The Times was very sure of
the mood. "The more Mr. Bright talked of reform," it com
mented, "the less the country seemed to desire it. He frightened
and disgusted the upper classes without conciliating the lower."
He might try to convince himself that there was a "steady,
ever-growing, irresistible tide of public opinion," but outside
the large cities there was little to justify such a claim.

The reformers, unable to stir opinion, were having to employ
the unconvincing argument that the best time to carry through
Radical changes in the suffrage was not when there was en
thusiasm but when there was no public excitement at all. "It
appears that there are two periods," wrote one shrewd Tory,
"two states of the public mind, equally propitious to changes
in the representative systemone when people are quiet, the
other when people are agitated." It was like the old drinking
song:

Friends and neighbours, I ve been thinking
What s the fittest day for drinking;

Sunday, Monday,

Tuesday, Wednesday,

Thursday, Friday,

Saturday, Sunday,
I find, after all my thinking,
These are the fittest days for drinking.

The tranquillity of the public did not prevent statemen of
all parties from proposing reform bills as part of the game of
parliamentary maneuvering. Russell had already brought for
ward one abortive bill in 1852 and had withdrawn a second
bill, with tears in his eyes, because of the outbreak of the
Crimean War in 1854. In 1859 Derby and Disraeli produced a
Tory reform bill which Bright described as "a Spanish feast
a very little meat and a great deal of table cloth"; a year later
Russell produced yet another bill which was withdrawn after
the House had shown no particular interest in it. In 1861 both
Parliament and the public were so quiet that Russell, the chief
Whig enthusiast for reform, announced that the ministry did

222

John Bright and the Creed of Re-form

not intend to waste time by introducing another reform bill.
He was quickly dismissed by Bright as "a bankrupt tradesman,
who, having carried on his business for many years on fictitious
credit, at length called his creditors together, glad of an oppor
tunity of getting rid of his obligations."

In an effort to interest the public in the creed of reform,
Bright laid great emphasis during these years on the association
of franchise reform with fiscal improvement. Only a popular
House of Commons, he maintained, would check the extrava
gant expenditure of the governing classes and reduce indirect
taxation. Such arguments were emotionally unexciting; they
did not stir working-class opinion at all, any more than criticism
of the Crimean War, on the grounds that it doubled the nation
al debt and greatly increased the burden of taxation, had stirred
the middle classes in the 1850 s. The creed of reform possessed
a singular unattractiveness when it was expressed in terms of
pounds, shillings, and pence. If it were to capture opinion, it,
would have to become an issue of right and wrong rather than
an issue of hard cash. It would have to reach men s hearts as
well as their pockets. A similar raising of the tone of argument
had been necessary before the demand for the repeal of the
Corn Laws could change from the cry of a pressure group into
a wholehearted crusade.

When Bright took up the issue of reform again on a large
scale in 1865, he was in a better position to enlist enthusiasm.
Three important developments between 1861 and 1865 changed
the whole picture the American Civil War, the conversion of
Gladstone to belief in parliamentary reform, and the death of
Lord Palmerston.

The American Civil War was a war which Bright strongly
supported; while it lasted, he was able to rally the whole of the
working classes, instead of antagonizing and dividing them as
he had done during the Crimean War. He depicted the issues
of the war in the same simple terms as Palmerston had employed
during the Crimean War, but this time the colors were those of
class rather than nation. The war was a battle between aristoc
racy and democracy; the cause of the North was the cause of
the worker and the manufacturer. As John Morley once said,

Victorian People

partisanship on the American issue veiled a hidden English civil
war, and the triumph of the North was "the force that made
English Liberalism powerful enough to enfranchise the work
men, depose official Christianity in Ireland, and deal a first
blow at the land-lords."

From the start Bright realized the moral issues of the struggle.
Cobden at first was more doubtful. He was disposed to sympa
thize with the seceders in the South on the grounds that they
were free-traders throwing off the yoke of a protectionist gov
ernment. Bright converted him, and, though he was not able to
convert Gladstone, he counteracted the effects of Gladstone s
declaration of faith in the emergence of a southern nation with
his impressive alternative picture of "one vast confederation,
stretching from the frozen north to the glowing south, and
from the wild billows of the Atlantic westward to the calmer
waters of the Pacific main . . . one people, and one language,
and one law, and one faith, and over all that wide continent the
home of freedom and a refuge for the oppressed of every race
and of every clime."

He persuaded workingmen of the glory of this vision and
enlisted their energies to help make it a reality. He found some
of his most lively supporters in his native Lancashire, even
though the cotton areas were badly hit by the cutting-off of
raw-material supplies from the South. A larger cause triumphed
over the immediate claims of self-interest.

During the Crimean War, Bright had refused to mobilize
the enthusiasm of the nation because he thought the cause was
unjust, and less generously because he held that it was not his
duty "to make this country the knight-errant of the human
race, and to take upon herself the protection of the thousand
million human beings who have been permitted by the Creator
of all things to people this planet." On that occasion it was left
to men like Roebuck to appeal to the sentiments of sympathy
and chivalry. But by a quixotic twist of attitudes Roebuck was
the great supporter of the South during the American Civil
War, even going so far as to demand the recognition of the
South by the British government and to indulge in private
diplomacy with Napoleon III in an effort to bring about an

John Bright and the Creed of Reform

armistice on the other side of the Atlantic. Roebuck found so
little support in the House of Commons in June, 1863, in the
course of the debate on his motion to secure recognition of the
South that he did not press it, but, before he had time to with
draw, Bright had completely pulled his arguments to pieces.
"He shook Roebuck as a terrier shakes a rat," said one who
heard the debate. In fact, he finally shook him out of that
reputation for radicalism which had hitherto always clung to
him even in moments of temporary aberration.

When the Civil War ended, Bright had established his posi
tion as the leading popular politician in the country, and he
had drawn the working classes and the trade-unions into poli
tics. The way was prepared for an agitation to extend English
democratic rights rights which Lincoln had himself pro
pounded in a famous letter to the workingmen of Manchester.

The American Civil War persuaded Bright to change his
arguments in demanding an extension of the suffrage. Hitherto
he had complained of "the secret and irresponsible doings of
the Foreign Office" and the consequent burdens of taxation;
now he spoke of moral challenge. "The class which has hitherto
ruled in this country has failed miserably. It revels in power
and wealth, whilst at its feet, a terrible peril for the future, lies
the multitude that it has neglected. If a class has failed, let us
try the nation! That is our faith, that is our purpose, that is our
cry: Let us try the nation!"

There was one furher difference between his speeches on
reform before and after 1865. In his early speeches he had em
phasized the need for a redistribution of seats in favor of large
towns and had attacked the "dead body" of the county repre
sentation; in his speeches after 1865 he laid greatest stress on
the extension of the suffrage to the working classes as the first
and indispensable element of reform. More anxious to win the
support of the working classes in the acquisition of additional
power in the large cities, he was shifting the foundations of his
agitation from interest to justice.

The change in approach was partly the result of changes in
the parliamentary situation, particularly the increasing interest
of Gladstone in questions of franchise reform. Bright had

Victorian People

learned to appreciate Gladstone during the Crimean War. At
that time Gladstone was a Peelite, not a popular Liberal poli
tician. As late as the spring of 1860 he was still a member of the
Carlton Club. He was drawn more closely into popular politics
by his sympathy not with the Americans but with the Italians,
a people for whom Bright cared very little, and by the series
of free-trade budgets which he introduced as Chancellor of the
Exchequer between 1860 and 1865.

Gladstone was never a "mystery man" like Disraeli, but in
the early sixties his actions were often unfathomable to his
fellow-parliamentarians. He was, in fact, reaching the years of
decision which were to determine his place in history. "I feel
within me the rebellious unspoken word," he wrote in his Diary
at the end of 1860. "I will not be old. The horizon enlarges, the
sky shifts around me. It is an age of shocks; a discipline so
strong, so manifold, so rapid and so whirling that only when it
is at an end, if then, can I comprehend it."

The shocks began to echo outside the pages of his Diary in
1864. It was then that he made his famous remark in the Com
mons that "every man who is not presumably incapacitated by
some consideration of personal unfitness or political danger, is
morally entitled to come within the pale of the constitution,"
This was far from a revolutionary speech, and it simply ex
pressed Gladstone s view that the question of reform could not
be postponed any longer; but it had far-reaching results.
Palmerston complained that it was "more like the sort of speech
with which Bright would have introduced the Reform Bill
which he would like to propose, than the sort of speech which
might have been expected from the treasury bench in the
present state of things." The complaint was misplaced, but
Bright himself commented that it marked the beginning of a
new era in the reform question.

A year after this famous speech Gladstone moved one step
further along the road to reform; defeated by the Oxford
University electors at the general election of 1865, he turned
to the industrial North and became a member for South Lanca
shire. For the first time in his life he was now the representative
of a great popular constituency, and he felt free to act without

\226\

John Bright and the Creed of Reform

restraint. "Keep him in Oxford and he is partially muzzled,"
Palmerston had said to Lord Shaftesbury, a few days before
the election, "but send him elsewhere and he will run wild."
If he did not run wild, he certainly began to express opinions
which would have seemed shocking to himself a few years
before. Although he was still only very indirectly associated
with Bright, he was now subject to the same influences which
had turned Bright into a reformer.

Gladstone s father had been a Liverpool merchant, and his
own sense of a Lancashire background "Oxford on the surface,
Liverpool below" inspired him to a new feeling of identity
with his county. The conduct of the general body of the opera
tives of Lancashire during the cotton famine forced him to fee]
that "it was a shame and a scandal that bodies of men like these
should be excluded from the parliamentary suffrage." He
looked to the working class with increasing confidence, "strong
conviction and an overpowering sense of the public interest."

But he could become an active reformer only when Palmer
ston had disappeared from the political scene. "The life of
Lord Palmerston," it was generally admitted, "was a security
against the introduction of a measure of reform." For twenty
years he had kept the waters of politics still. "When the old
pilot dropped off," wrote one nineteenth-century writer, "the
ship of State, though steered with energy and skill, left the
protection of the harbour and encountered rough weather in
the open sea." "The truce of parties is over," wrote Disraeli on
Palmerston s death in 1865. "I foresee tempestuous times, and
great vicissitudes in public life."

The immediate effect of Palmerston s death was to dis
organize and demoralize the House of Commons. The Parlia
ment of 1865 had "no faith in any principle, no enthusiasm for
any cause, and no fidelity to any leader." Both Lord John Rus
sell, the new Prime Minister, and Gladstone, the leader of the
government in the House of Commons, were anxious to dispel
the confusion by introducing a new reform bill. Naturally their
attention turned to Bright, the one unquestioned reformer of
the previous twenty years. For the first time the possibility of
including him in the cabinet was seriously considered. "If we

^ 227 y

Victorian People

can get him to renounce his allegiance to President Johnson,"
wrote Russell to Gladstone, "and to be a loyal subject to Queen
Victoria, there are few better speakers in the House of Com
mons, or anywhere else but he must grow tamer than he is
before he ceases to be the wolf of politicians." They did not
include him, but they knew that they could rely upon him to
support them in any far-reaching reform bill they might pro
pose. And, even though they might fail in their own attempts,
they knew that Bright would persist in his determination to
alter the whole balance of English politics. He had no fears, as
many of the Whigs had, of making a leap in the dark. To him
a comprehensive reform bill was a leap into the light: "The case
for a parliamentary reform is more glaring and undeniable if
possible than our free trade cause was."

VI

In the crucial battles for franchise reform in 1866 and 1867
Bright could rely upon the cluster of new urban Radical organ
izations which had grown up in the 1860 s. There was always
an alternative England to Trollope s "Barsetshire." The "popu
lous districts," as the large cities were called, were never com
pletely quiet in the mid- Victorian period even when they
appeared to be quiescent. When in 1864 Palmerston visited
Bradford, for example, he was given a very different reception
from that which he received in his own small Devonshire con
stituency of Tiverton. The working class greeted him in silence,
and the middle-class leaders told him bluntly that "the people
of Bradford have extreme opinions." "We hope that when you
return to London," one of them went on, "you will go to your
right hon. colleague, Mr. Gladstone, and tell him that he did
not make so great a mistake as you thought when he made his
Reform speech."

After Palmerston s death, urban radicalism became noisier in
places more inhibited than Bradford. Some members of Parlia
ment stood as "nonelectors candidates," and at many of the
city meetings the majority of those present were nonelectors.
Manhood suffrage societies and political unions sprang up in
towns as far apart as Norwich, Leeds, and Bristol. Large bodies

^ 228 Y

John Bright and the Creed of Reform

like the Reform Union and the Reform League drew on the
support of such local organizations.

After Gladstone s speech introducing his reform bill in
March, 1866, the Times wrote, in the same strain as it had
written in 1860: "There is no applause, not even an echo. We
have listened in vain for the faintest note of approval, or the
contrary, or bare recognition from the provinces." This time
the comment was wrong. Within a fortnight resolutions of sup
port for Gladstone had been carried at mass demonstrations in
Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, and
Rochdale. At the very moment when Conservatives were claim
ing that "England is now satisfied with her institutions," the
supporters of change were preparing for a final struggle.

It soon began to be clear that the opponents of reform in the
House of Commons included not only members of the Con
servative party but also a sizable group of Liberals whom
Bright christened the "Adullamites." At first he claimed they
merely consisted of a party of two Horsman and Lowe. "This
party of two reminds me of a Scotch terrier, which was so
covered with hair that you could not tell which was the head
and which was the tail of it." But eventually he had to concede
that it consisted of at least "forty thieves." Ironically the exist
ence of the Adullamites assisted rather than handicapped the
reformers; Lowe s rhetoric stirred the working classes not to
defend but to attack: "It is Mr. Lowe s speeches," said Forster,
"that have aroused the working classes from their apathy, and
enlisted them one and all in the cause of reform." After Lowe
had talked of the "venality and corruption" of the lower orders,
Bright made the most of the vituperation. "I would recommend,
he said, "that these passages from that celebrated and unhappy
speech should be printed on cards, and should be hung up in
every room in every factory, workshop and clubhouse, and in
every place where working men are accustomed to assemble."
Bright had little difficulty in turning Lowe into the most un
popular man in the country. Victory, he argued, was just round
the corner. "The men who, in every speech they utter, insult
the working men, describing them as a multitude given up to

4229Y

Victorian People

ignorance and vice, will be the first to yield when the popular
will is loudly and resolutely expressed."

The more powerful were the arguments advanced by the
opponents of reform in the House of Commons, the stronger
were the speeches Bright made to attack the unreformed House
of Commons at mass meetings in the country. "Parliament is
never hearty for reform, or for any good measures. It hated
the Reform Bill of 1831 and 1832. It does not like the Fran
chise Bill now upon its table. It is to a large extent the offspring
of landed power in the counties, and of tumult and corrup
tion in the boroughs; and it would be strange if such a Parlia
ment were in favour of freedom and of an honest representa
tion of the people. But notwithstanding such a Parliament, this
bill will pass if Birmingham and the other towns do their duty."

The bill did not pass, though Birmingham and the towns did
their duty. Because it did not pass, popular interest in reform
grew. When Gladstone s government was defeated in June,
1866, and Derby and Disraeli returned to power, Bright ad
dressed meetings of almost every section of the reform move
ment. The Conservatives and Adullamites were branded as
enemies of the people. "The accession to office of Lord Derby,"
he said, "is a declaration of war against the working classes."
The object of the reformers was not to overturn the British
constitution but to "restore it in all its fullness, with all its
freedom, to the British people."

The object of the reformers was in effect secured in the sum
mer of 1866. After the Hyde Park "riots" the English Leader
remarked that the reform question had been reduced "to one
simply of date and extent." After Bright had addressed a crowd
of over two hundred thousand people in Birmingham in August,
the Economist commented that the Conservatives could not
shelve reform now, even for one session.

The burst of popular agitation was the prelude to the debate
on reform in the House of Commons. But, noisy though opin
ion was, it could not hinder the debate from continuing or
silence the critics of the measure. The Reform Bill of 1867,
as it finally emerged, was as much a product of Tory flexibility
as of Radical principles. And Robert Lowe, afraid of Tory

4230Y

John Bright and the Creed of Reform

democracy as much as of militant radicalism, opposed it to the
last.

Bright claimed much of the credit, particularly in the eyes
of the crowds. The Manchester Examiner was expressing a com
monly held view when it stated that the bill had passed because
the people had been called in to redress the balance in the
Commons. "The nation decreed its own political organization.
Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright were organs of its will."

That Gladstone profited in public esteem and not Disraeli
was unfair to Disraeli but no one could deny the influence of
Bright. With pardonable exultation Bright himself took credit
for the final result. "It is discovered in the year 1867," he said,
"that my principles all along have been entirely constitutional
and my course perfectly patriotic. The invective and vitupera
tion that have been poured upon me have now been proved
to be entirely a mistake."

IX

Sir, it appears to me we have more and more reason
every day we live to regret the loss of Lord Pabner-
ston. The remaining members of his government would
seem, by way of a mortuary contribution^ to have
buried in his grave all their prudence, statesmanship
and moderation.

ROBERT LOWE (1866)
I

John Bright guided the forces of change in English politics,
and the Reform Bill of 1867 was his greatest triumph. Robert
Lowe gave strength to the forces of resistance, and to him the
Reform Bill was a national disaster.

Lowe s resistance did not spring from naked self-interest or
blind prejudice. Although he was member of Parliament for a
pocket borough, Calne, not even his worst enemies claimed that
his opposition to reform was based merely on a desire to pro
tect that which was his own or that which was his patron s.
There was less self-interest in Lowe s approach to politics than
there was in that of Bright. He attacked reform not as a Whig
apologist defending an order but as an intellectual pleading
for government by the educated against government by the
masses. The only aristocracy he recognized was the aristocracy
of intellect; mere lineage was unimportant. "All knowledge,"
he once said, "except heraldry, has some use." In 1866 and 1867
it was reason, not passion or personal property, which per
suaded him that "the greatest happiness of the greatest number"

\232 \

Robert Lowe and the Fear of Democracy

could not be secured by an extension of the suffrage to the
working classes.

Lowe established an ascendancy in the House of Commons
during the debates of those years because he asked one bold
question which was in the back of many of the members 7 minds:
"Is England to continue a monarchy in which the aristocratic
and democratic elements of the nation have ever harmoniously
blended? Or is it, in spite of all experience, to adopt a lower
form of civilization?" Interest in this question was so great
that Lowe, by intellectual brilliance alone, was able to secure
command of the House. His chief opponent, Gladstone, stated
many years later that in the whole of his experience no one
had ever surpassed Lowe s achievement, and, in recommending
him for a viscountcy in 1880, he pressed his claims "as a tribute
to his former elevation, which, though short-lived, was due to
genuine power of mind. ... It seemed to me that a man who
had once soared to those heights trodden by so few, ought not
to be lost in the common ruck of official barons."

Ironically, as Bright realized, the very lucidity of Lowe s
arguments and the brilliance of his exposition assisted rather
than hindered the cause of reform. The more he chilled the
imagination of his hearers in Parliament and frightened them
into deep gloom, the more he fired the working classes to a
feverish enthusiasm for reform. Had he not made his powerful
speeches in the Commons attacking the working classes, the
Reform League would have lacked a convenient scapegoat.
The demand for reform grew stronger the more keenly Lowe
prosecuted the attack.

Lowe s personality was as important as his speeches in pro
voking the anger of his opponents. He was, on the surface at
any rate, a hard man who did not appear to consider the feel
ings of others. He liked to be rude, and he enjoyed an argu
ment for its own sake. There were scores of anecdotes about
him circulating not only in the clubs but in the streets. Once,
when traveling with the Lord Chancellor, he arrived by cab
at the railway station some time before the train was due to
start. To pass the time, he said, "Let us have a row with the
carman about the fare." To the Lord Chancellor s consterna-

\233 Y

Victorian People

tion he had a very effective row. Years before, when he had
been an examiner at Oxford, he was once asked, while an oral
examination was in progress, how he was getting on. "Excel
lently," he replied; "five men plucked [failed] already, and
the sixth very shaky." He felt a terrible temptation to fail
people for the rest of his life, and any shaldness on the part of
his enemies-or even his friends brought out the devil rather
than the angel in him.

His choice of arguments was clever but often offensive, and
he made no concessions to the mood of his audience. "He
cannot help being brilliant," wrote Bagehot. "The quality of
his mind is to put everything in the most lively, most exciting
and most startling form. . . . He startles those who do not like
to be startled, and does not compose those who wish to be
composed." He disliked the slow, the dull, and the unen
lightened, even when they were members of Parliament. "Brute
votes" did not interest him. "Look at that fool throwing away
his natural advantages!" he exclaimed when a deaf member
of the House of Commons put up his ear trumpet. In 1866
and 1867 he managed to win over many members of Parlia
ment and to impress the rest, but he did not make many per
manent friends. He moved more easily in intellectual than in
political circles, and, after several years of high office between
1868 and 1874, the last years of his life were years of total polit
ical eclipse. His light had always come from the moon rather
than the sun, but now the moon was completely blotted out;
he was generally regarded as a Cassandra seeking confirmation
of his early prophecies of doom in all the political changes
of the day.

Many of his political weaknesses were the result of physical
infirmity. He was an albino, so shortsighted that it was a won
der he was ever able to read a book at all. His brilliant achieve
ments at Winchester and Oxford were a triumph of mind over
physique: It was said that he would have taken even higher
honors than he did at Oxford if he had not rubbed out with
his nose what he had written with his pen. With such a com
bination of an acute mind and exceptional shortsightedness, it
is not surprising that Lowe cared little for the values of the

4 234 Y

Robert Lo<we and the Fear of Democracy

playing field, which in his view merely "opened to dullness its
road to fame." He preferred the caustic wit of the First Class
men to the team spirit of the First Football Fifteen. He always
liked to walk, or to run, alone. "Outstripping others in the race,"
Gladstone wrote to him in a very frank, fault-finding letter in
August, 1873, "you reach the goal or conclusion before them;
and, being there, you assume that they are there also. This is
unpopular."

Lowe blamed his political unpopularity on his physical con
stitution. "With a quiet temper and a real wish to please," he
remarked in his short typewritten fragment of an autobiog
raphy, "I have been obliged all my life to submit to an amount
of unpopularity that I really did not deserve, and to feel myself
condemned for what were really physical rather than moral
deficiencies." This self-judgment was naive. Lowe suffered
from mental shortsightedness; he could never see his own faults,
nor could he understand why his brilliant and carefully con
trived schemes often went astray. "His self-delusions about his
own faults and merits are extraordinary," wrote his friend
Lord Granville, "praising and condemning himself in wrong
directions." It was not only that "the clearness, power, and
promptitude" of his intellect was a handicap to him in dealing
with lesser men; what was a far bigger hindrance to smooth
relationships was a sharpness of tongue and an irresistible flash
of contempt. He seemed to prefer conflict and animosity to
unity and understanding. As early as 1856, for example, when
as vice-president of the Board of Trade he introduced a bill to
abolish local dues on shipping in Liverpool, he was so tart in
his speeches and so provocative in his criticism of parties inter
ested in the question that the bill was thrown out. His chief
opponent, Sir Frederick Thesiger, was able to say, "Lowe and
I have thrown it out." A few years later, between 1861 and
1864, he managed to provoke the unanimous opposition of all
parties interested in the question of education, from the High
Anglicans to the militant dissenters, and, for good measure, the
inspectors of schools as well.

Lowe loved to test the superior qualities of his mind in sharp
encounters with vested interests, for which he had a Benthamite

Victorian People

sense of repugnance, and with parliamentary opponents, whom
he regarded as ill-informed laymen. No one doubted his bril
liance, but Lowe was never happy himself unless he was dis
playing it. His "quiet temper and "real wish to please" were
very rarely displayed outside the pages of his own unpublished
autobiography.

In 1866 and 1867 he enjoyed the fight against reform even
when he felt most gloomy about the consequences of a reform
bill. In contrast to many Whigs, who were afraid of the polit
ical turmoil which they knew would follow Palmerston s death,
Lowe confessed that he was glad that stormy times lay ahead.
"Poor Macleay used to say I was always fond of hot water,
and lately it has not only been cold, but stagnant." The hotter
the water became, the cooler were Lowe s arguments and the
more icy was his oratory.

II

Taken together, Lowe s speeches on reform set out the most
comprehensive case against democracy expressed in the House
of Commons in the nineteenth century. The first occasion on
which he publicly stated his views was in 1865, when a private
member, Edward Baines, brought forward a borough franchise
extension bill. Although many "Liberals" opposed Baines,
Lowe feared that, once Palmerston was dead, a government
reform bill would be introduced; and he ventured to predict
"that if they [the great Liberal party] unite their fortunes with
the fortunes of Democracy, as it is proposed they should do in
the case of this measure, they will not miss one of two things
if they fail in carrying this measure they will ruin their party,
and if they succeed in carrying this measure they will ruin
their country."

It was after Gladstone and Russell had introduced their bill
as soon as they could in March, 1866, that Lowe, who had not
been given office in the new government, first dazzled the
members of Parliament with his rhetoric and challenged Glad
stone s leadership. The bill was moderate, its central feature
being a seven-pound property franchise in the towns in place
of the existing ten-pound franchise, but Lowe wanted no re-

\236\

Robert Lowe and the Fear of Democracy

form bill at all, not even a moderate one. In discussions with
the Conservative Addeiiey before the details were announced,
he promised the support of a sufficiently large group of Liberals
to overturn the government if it brought forward a bill. "What
bill do you mean?" Adderley asked. "Any bill that lowers the
borough franchise by one sixpence," replied Lowe. In such an
intransigent mood he reveled in the beginnings of the great de
bate. "Mr. Lowe is the great reputation of the Session in the
House of Commons," the Spectator noted. "No stranger goes
there without looking for the white gleam, or rather flash, of
his striking head, or listening anxiously for the cold, sardonic
ring of his lucid voice, penetrating it with a shiver of half-
mocking intelligence."

Lowe soon gathered around him a small group of members
of the Liberal party who were opposed, like himself, to any
lowering of the franchise. They included Lord Elcho, Lord
Grosvenor, and Mr. Horsman; "unattached" men or unrepent
ant Palmerstonians who felt no special loyalty to Russell or
Gladstone; and some of the members for small boroughs who
feared changes in the distribution of seats. In all, they num
bered more than forty, and they were not without influential
supporters outside, like Delane, who believed that they were
capable of becoming "a third party." These were the men
Bright had christened the "Adullamites," dismissing them as a
cabal, collecting in their cave "every one that was in distress
and every one that was discontented." But they were more
influential than that. Lord Elcho s home was a very comfortable
cave and appealed to some Liberals outside it whose loyalty to
the government kept them from organized opposition. When
Gladstone s bill was put to the vote in April, it was carried
only by 5 votes (318 to 313), with 32 Liberals voting against
it. Lowe, "the prince of the revolt," was "flushed, triumphant,
and avenged. His hair, brighter than silver, shone and glistened
in the brilliant light. His complexion had deepened into some
thing like a bishop s purple." Members asked each other, "Who
would have thought there was so much in Bob Lowe?"

The government s majority was so small that it seemed un
likely that the franchise bill would survive the committee stage.

Victorian People

In an attempt to meet the arguments of men like Lord Gros-
venor, who had refused to consider changes in the franchise
without also considering changes in the distribution , of seats,
Gladstone and Russell introduced a redistribution bill in May,
1866. It did not abolish small boroughs but "grouped" them
together; the transfer of power to large urban electorates was
severely restrained. At the end of May the two modest reform
bills were incorporated in one single bill, which the govern
ment prepared to pass on to a committee.

At this point Conservatives and Adullamites united again
to defeat the government on an unimportant Conservative
amendment by 248 votes to 238. Unimportant though the issue
was, the moral strength and authority of the government were
further reduced. A more damaging amendment to abolish
"grouping" was proposed by Hayter, a disgruntled representa
tive of a small borough. Lowe backed him, but Hayter with
drew his amendment for fear of further splitting his party. It
was no surprise when the government was finally defeated on
an important amendment moved by an Adullamite in June.
When the figures 315 to 304 were announced, Lowe and the
denizens of the cave stood up and waved their hats in triumph
over the heads of their own party.

The Queen, who as usual was more preoccupied with ques
tions of foreign policy than reform, was anxious that Russell
should remain Prime Minister; but after a short exchange of
courtesies Russell told her bluntly that "there are things which
can and cannot be done. To acquiesce in a further limitation of
the enfranchisement . . . would cover us with shame and WOULD
NOT SETTLE THE QUESTION." He refused to recommend a dis-
solution-on the interesting grounds that the southern counties
were apathetic in the cause of reform and in consequence
Derby and Disraeli accepted the task of forming a new Con
servative government.

Lowe and his Adullamite colleagues had shown little en*
thusiasm for Disraeli in the complicated Conservative-Adul-
lamite negotiations in the spring of 1866. They refused in June
to join the new Conservative cabinet, although a few of them
thought that, unless they associated with Derby, "next year we

Robert Lowe and the Fear of Democracy

may see a worse measure of reform carried than would have
been borne now." Lowe himself was willing to give "unofficial
support" to Derby, but within a few weeks he began to realize
that the new government was unlikely to prove a bulwark of
the constitution. "I hold Bright and his mob in such sovereign
contempt," he wrote to his Conservative brother in October,
"that I require no external support to fortify me against their
abuse. What I am afraid of is your friends the Tories, and,
above all, Dizzy, who, I verily believe, is concocting a very
sweeping Bill."

By February, 1867, his suspicions were confirmed. It was
clear that Derby and Disraeli were anxious to settle the ques
tion of reform themselves and, if necessary, to outbid the
Liberals. "The reign of reason seems over," wrote Lowe.
"Everybody is determined to settle the question of reform, and
they hardly seem to care how."

In attacking Disraeli, Lowe was angrier than he had been in
attacking Gladstone. He claimed that the Conservatives were
knaves and traitors as well as fools. "We have inaugurated a
new era in English politics this session," he told the members of
Parliament in 1867, "and depend upon it, the new fashion will
henceforth be the rule and not the exception. This session we
have had not what we before possessed a party of attack, and
a party of resistance. We have, instead, two parties of competi
tion, who, like Cleon and the sausage-seller in Aristophanes,
are both bidding for the support of Demos." Lowe not only
refused to appeal to Demos; he tried to prevent other states
men from making the appeal as well. He was as proud of his
lonely superiority Athanasius contra Mundum he saw him
self rather than Adullam in the cave as Bright had been of
his loneliness in the Crimean War.

He maintained his opposition to reform to the very end.
When the Tory Disraeli gloried in his triumph in carrying a
Radical reform bill, Lowe commented bitterly that "England
had gained a shameful victory over herself" and referred to "the
shame, the rage, the scorn, the indignation, and the despair
with which the measure was viewed by every Englishman who
is not a slave to the trammels of party or dazzled by the glare

Victorian People

of a temporary and ignoble success." He realized by then that
he had made a serious miscalculation in 1866. Frightened as
he was, even then, of Disraeli s unscrupulousness, he had never
thought it possible that, if Russell and Gladstone were defeated,
Disraeli would be prepared to go even further than Bright. He
never forgave Disraeli during the rest of his life. Nor did Dis
raeli ever forgive him for his relentless criticism. The mutual
dislike went deeper than a mere difference of opinions. Disraeli
dismissed Lowe s speeches in 1867 as those of an inspired
schoolboy, while Lowe, going one stage further, called Dis
raeli s arguments in 1875 "lispings of the nursery." When Dis
raeli was made an earl in 1876, Lowe wrote to his brother, "I
am glad Dizzy is out of the House. It may stave off a little
longer electoral districts and universal suffrage." Dislike turned
into hatred. Two or three years before Disraeli died, a friend
asked him whether there was anyone in London with whom
he would not shake hands. Reflecting for a moment, he
answered, "Only one," and named Robert Lowe.

Ill

Lowe s political calculations were faulty in 1866 and 1867,
but his analysis was, within its limits, convincing. He began by
challenging the reformers to state why they wished to tamper
with the constitution. "The burden of proof of existing institu
tions is in their favour"; it was for the reformers to say why the
institutions should be modified. They were reluctant to do this,
however keen they were to stir the crowds at public meetings.
"I find nothing so difficult as to get a Reformer to assign his
reasons. The plan is to assume that there are reasons. Bring in
the Bill, solvitur ambulando, by walking into the subject."

When they tried to give reasons for reform, they could not
agree among themselves. Radicals, like Bright, talked of the
necessity of reform: the unenfranchised were thundering at the
gates, and it was a matter of prudence as well as of justice to let
them in. More moderate Liberals, like Gladstone, talked of the
inevitability of reform: "Time is on our side. The great social
forces which move onwards in their might and majesty, and
which the tumult of these debates does not for a moment im-

4240^

Robert Lowe and the Fear of Democracy

pede or disturb those great social forces are against you; they
work with us; they are marshalled in our support," Intellectuals,
like Mill, were "sentimental advocates of democracy"; they had
forgotten their Benthamite political calculus and w r ere relying
upon intuition. "Our business," they said, "is to elevate the
working classes." Lowe criticized all types of reformers. The
question of reform was not one of sentiment, of rewarding,
punishing, or elevating, but a practical matter of business and
statecraft. "What we have to do is to find out any practical evil
in the working of our institutions, and then to suggest a remedy
for it." The test of reform should be its effect on Parliament,
the governing body of the nation, not on the class which re
ceived the franchise. "The end being good government, in
which of course I include stable government, before I give my
assent to the admission of fresh classes, I must be satisfied (not
on a priori but on experimental grounds) that their admission
will make the government better or more stable."

Lowe did not admit that there was a case for reform com
parable with the case in 1832. The grievances which were com
plained of in 1832, he said, were practical grievances, while
those of 1866-67 were theoretical. The political system as it was
actually operating in 1866 was reasonably satisfactory, as
satisfactory as any political system could be. "This House holds
not only in England, but throughout the whole world a
position far above that ever held by any other deliberative
Assembly that ever existed." The ten-pound householder suf
frage had served "as one of the most respectable institutions
that any country ever possessed. The seven Houses of Com
mons that have sat since the Reform Bill, have performed ex
ploits unrivalled, not merely in the six centuries during which
Parliament has existed, but in the whole history of representa
tive assemblies." Useful reforms, such as the introduction of
free trade and limited liability, had been carried; new classes
had been hitched to the constitution; and a proper balance of
interests among different groups in the community had be^n
maintained.

The alternative to the existing House of Commons was not
a House of Commons elected on a slightly more open franchise

4 241

Victorian People

but a democratic House of Commons elected by the masses of
the people. It would be impossible to determine the franchise
for long by drawing a new property line at the seven-pound
voter or the six-pound voter. The tendency of all reform was
toward democracy. "It is trifling with the House," said Lowe
in 1866, "to suggest that when you have passed this Bill you
will have settled anything; all that you do is to unsettle every
thing, perhaps to lay the foundation of a real agitation, because
people, when they find that so much will be gained with such
little trouble, will be encouraged to ask for a great deal more."
The result would be not only political but social democracy,
for it was only too easy to destroy the work of centuries within
a few months. "Democracy you may have at any time. Night
and day the gate is open that leads to that bare and level plain,
where every ant s nest is a mountain and every thistle is a
forest tree."

Democracy would have three disastrous consequences.
First, it would transfer political power to the ignorant. Intelli
gent government would then be impossible. "If this House
means to maintain the great power and influence which it
exercises over the executive government it must beware of
putting itself on too democratic a foundation." Second, it
would destroy real leadership. "If you form your House solely
with a view to numbers, whatever other good you obtain, you
will destroy the element out of which your statesmen must be
made. You will lower the position of the executive government,
and render it difficult, if not impossible, to carry on that happy
union between the two powers which now exists." Third, it
would lead to the canvassing and carrying of policies which
would undermine national unity and prosperity. The working
classes would use the franchise as a means to an end. The
machinery of the state would be employed to assist strikes, to
abolish free trade, even to lead the country to war. "Once give
working men the votes, and the machinery is ready to launch
those votes in one compact mass upon the institutions and
property of this country."

Lowe went on to point out that democracy would not be in
the best interests of the provident section of the working

1 242

Robert Lowe and the Fear of Democracy

classes themselves. The merit of a limited franchise was that the
suffrage had to be earned. Thrifty and industrious workers had
already won the vote or were winning it each day under the
half-reformed constitution. The way to elevate the working
classes was not to bring down the franchise "to the level of
those persons who have no sense of decency or morality" but
to keep it as a privilege of citizenship. Universal suffrage could
only create "that sort of elevation which has resulted in
Australia in the franchise being so despised that people hardly
care to pick it out of the gutter." When, in Australia, one
statesman had "hit upon the happy device" of requiring a
shilling fee for registration of voters, "the effect was magical. I
am informed that it diminished the personal voters by one half.
A franchise which in the estimation of those who have it is liter
ally not worth a shilling, cannot be an elevation of the working
classes."

IV

Lowe s opposition to reform was founded on experience as
well as logic. There were three features of his own history
which made him suspicious of democratic government.

The first was his memory of Australia. It was in New South
Wales that he served his political apprenticeship from 1842 to
1850. For eight years he wrestled with the problems of a colo
nial community, originally serving as a Crown nominee on the
Legislative Council and finally emerging as the "popular
favourite" of the Sydney electorate.

All Lowe s abilities and weaknesses were apparent in his
Australian record, a complete career within a career. His
speeches and journalistic articles anticipated his performances
in England. Brilliant and incisive, they spared no one, not even
the governor, his old friend and patron. The first Anglican
bishop of Sydney was described as "arrogant," and his clergy
were dismissed as "trembling, crouching, sneaking bigots."
Sydney Corporation was castigated as "an engine of corrup
tion," and paid commissioners recommended as efficient re
placements of idle mayors, aldermen, and councilors. There 9
was merciless radicalism in many of his remarks and policies,

Victorian People

and he soon acquired the title of "the Cromwell of the Antipo
des." His enemies, unable to hold their own with him, called
him "the most quarrelsome man in the new world."

For a brief spell he was a popular hero, almost a demagogue.
At the election of 1848 he staged his own private revolution.
Breaking with officialdom and with the rural squatter groups,
he stood as the people s candidate in the large urban constitu
ency of Sydney. His allies were the skilled artisans, his enemies
"the petty aristocracy," and his election was a victory for
"democracy." A year later he reached the pinnacle of popular
success. On one glorious day in June, 1849, "one of the few
heroic moments in Australian history," he harangued at Sydney
Circular Quay an excited crowd which had gathered to protest
against the unloading of -a ship bringing transported convicts
from England. Speaking from the top of an omnibus, Lowe
attacked not only the governor and "the parasites and syco
phants" who surrounded him but also Earl Grey, the Colonial
Secretary in London. The transportation system and the colo
nial system were equally worthy of condemnation. "England
herself is but part of the Empire," he maintained, "and when
she treats us as if she were the whole she is actuated by a nar
row and provincial spirit."

One old woman in the crowd was so stirred by Lowe s
rhetoric that she shouted, "Ah! bless his dear old white head"
an unusual benediction for him. The enthusiastic gathering was
roused to the point where it dragged Lowe s carriage through
the streets of Sydney. The convict ship did not land its human
cargo at the habor, nor was it ever possible again for the
Colonial Office in London to extend its transportation system.
Lowe had earned his place in Australian history as a pioneer of
representative government in New South Wales.

Basically, however, his philosophy was not unlike that which
he later expressed in 1866. "I care not for mere names," he told
the Australians; "I look to the substance, and the constitution of
England was framed not for the assertion of mere abstract
principles, but to guard and maintain the substantial benefits of
free government. Let pot-house politicians indulge in rhetorical
flourishes concerning venerable institutions and consecrated

A 244 Y

Robert Lowe and the Fear of Democracy

principles principles violated before the ink was dry in which
they were acknowledged but give me the application of the
general principles of the British Constitution to the useful and
the new." The difference between England and Australia was
that the "useful and the new" seemed less synonymous in an
old country like England, where the "pot-house politicians"
talked not of "venerable institutions" and "consecrated prin
ciples" but of Radical reform.

Even before he left Australia, Lowe had begun to change.
His local popularity did not last, and when he left for England
in January, 1850, there were no mass demonstrations. Although
his first public speech in England on his return was at a meeting
of the Society for the Reform of Colonial Government, he soon
passed from colonial questions to English domestic issues. As
the blue skies of Australia faded from his mind, his memories
became increasingly selective. He recalled the crowds as crowds
of ignorant enemies, the Australian constitution as a dangerous
experiment in democracy, and the squatters as "an important
and useful element in colonial security" and "a necessary prop
of colonial institutions."

When he thought of Australia in 1866 and 1867, it was not
of an omnibus at the quayside but of a distant country managed
by the mob. "In the colonies they have democratic Assemblies.
And what is the result? Why they become a curse instead of a
blessing." The only way to save them from anarchy was to
relieve them from universal suffrage. "Victoria and New
South Wales are both governed by universal suffrage and it is
as much as we can do to prevent them from going to war with
each other. ... If you want to see the results of democratic
constituencies you will find them in all the assemblies of
Australia and in all the assemblies of North America."

America was a more familiar example to English audiences
in 1866 and 1867 than Australia, although both were frequently
discussed. The cry of "Americanizing the constitution" was
freely used against Bright, and Lowe was one of the makers of
it. In 1856 he had visited America and added personal knowl
edge of another "new country" to bolster his case against

Victorian People

democracy. On the voyage out he studied De Tocqueville; once
in the United States, he was shocked by much that he saw.
There seemed an utter absence of distinction, a complete lack
of a leisured class, a wide range of corrupt institutions, and an
anxiety to kowtow to the multitudes. Everyday life was full of
lessons. He was alarmed, for example, to observe a passenger
on a railway train asking his fellow-passengers in turn which
man they thought should be President. This was not the right
way to secure effective political leadership or to develop "pure"
government. And there was a terrible nemesis in store. "It
is impossible for universal suffrage to continue where there are
so many poor who will want to divide or destroy property."

As a result of his career in Australia and his visit to America,
Lowe became "a mine of useful information on colonial and
new country subjects." Much as he disliked and feared de
mocracy in "new territories," he hated it much more in
crowded England, where there was a shortage of land, a pres
sure of population, and an inherited social structure. The most
serious danger came from the English poor. In an unreformed
Parliament the worst abuses of the political system were con
centrated in those parts of the country where the working
classes were strongest. "If you want venality, if you want igno
rance, if you want drunkenness, and facility for being intimi
dated; or if on the other hand, you want impulsive, unreflecting
and violent people, where do you look for them in the constitu
encies? Do you go to the top or to the bottom?" In a reformed
Parliament such classes would hold power.

Lowe s personal experiences in England provided the third
element in his personal case against democracy. In Australia he
had been "a stranger, a cork floating on the ocean; one who
might be here to-day and gone tomorrow"; in America he had
been a temporary visitor; in England he was at home. And his
first memories of home disposed him to think ill of crowds. As
a young man he had watched Reform Bill mobs sack Colwick
Hall in Nottinghamshire; as an undergraduate at Oxford he had
been taught, like Gladstone, that democracy meant the govern
ment of the rich, who were few, by and for the poor, who were

<{ 246 Y

Robert Lowe and the Fear of Democracy

many. When a member of Parliament for Kidderminster, he
had been struck on the head by a stone thrown in an election
riot. "The bribe and the beer-barrel" were effective political
weapons in Kidderminster, as they were in Trollope s Beverley.
English experience convinced Lowe that democracy could
never mean government of the best.

Many members of Parliament who were unable to argue the
case against democracy in such intellectual terms were able to
share some of Lowe s fears for the future. Even Radicals like
John Stuart Mill and John Bright had spoken about the dangers
of extending the suffrage. Mill had written both in Political
Economy and in Representative Government of "the extreme
unfitness [of] the labouring classes ... for any order of things
which would make any considerable demand on either their
intellect or their virtue"; while Bright had conceded the exist
ence among the working classes of what he called a "residuum,"
a group "which it would be much better for themselves if they
were not enfranchised, because they have no independence
whatever, and . . . much better for the constituency also that
they should be excluded." In the House of Commons a per
suasive Lowe was able to turn on Bright and warn him that free
trade, too, was in peril if the working classes secured the vote,
adding, "If we have a precious jewel in the world, it is our free
trade policy." Turning toward Gladstone, he was able to re
mind him that as late as 1865, just before he began to concoct
his reform bill, he (Gladstone) had said:

It has been our privilege to see a process going forward in which
the throne has acquired broader and deeper foundations in the
affections of the country; in which the law has commended itself
to the respect and attachment of the people; in which the various
classes of the community have come into close communion, the one
with the other; in which the great masses of our labouring fellow-
countrymen have come to be better supplied than they were in the
time of their immediate forefathers, and in which, upon the whole,
a man desirous of the welfare of his kind, looking out on the broad
surface of society, may thank his God, and say, "Behold, how good
and pleasant a thing it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!"

Why should the surface of English society be disturbed? Why
should the underlying unity be destroyed?

4247Y

Victorian People

V

Behind Lowe s political arguments was a profound suspicion
of the working classes as a whole. He admired those provident
individuals among the workers who had acquired middle-class
respectability, but he considered that specifically working-class
organizations, like the trade-unions, were anxious "to make war
against all superiority; to keep down skill, industry, and
capacity; and to make their members the slaves of clumsiness,
idleness, and ignorance." The routine of the trade-unions im
plied restriction and protection; rules relating to piecework,
for instance, could not be justified by any economic arguments.
But behind the routine there was "a system of terrorism."
Granting the franchise to the working classes would mean arm
ing the terrorists with the vote. Political power would auto
matically be used in the interests of crude class domination.
Not only would the constitution be swamped by numbers;
society would be torn apart.

To those thinkers like Mill who denied that, if the working
classes were given the vote, they would act together, Lowe
pointed to existing working-class cohesion in the field of labor
relations. He recognized, as did the middle-class supporters of
the trade-unions, that "nothing is so remarkable among the
working classes of England as their intense tendency to asso
ciate and organize themselves." He differed from Hughes and
Harrison, however, in fearing rather than admiring such
mutual co-operation. "It is impossible to believe that the same
machinery which is at present brought into play in connexion
with strikes would not be applied by the working classes to
political purposes." It was idle to assume that artisans and un
skilled laborers would continue to defer to their betters. "You
know very well that they will soon possess the secret of their
own power, and then what is to prevent them using it?" Once
the suffrage had been extended, nothing could prevent the rise
of a separate Labour party. Neither Liberals nor Conservatives
would satisfy trade-unionists for long, "They will say, *We can
do better for ourselves. Don t let us any longer be cajoled at
elections. Let us set up shop for ourselves. "

{248}*

Robert Lowe and the Fear of Democracy

Lowe expressed these views in Parliament with great deter
mination, but he was anxious that they should reach a wider
audience. In 1867, after the passing of the Reform Bill, he
wrote an interesting article for the Quarterly Review which
related questions of labor very directly to questions of reform.
He foresaw the rise of unskilled labor and refused to believe
that "the aristocracy of labour" would long remain in control
of the trade-union movement. Trade-unions, he said, "are
rapidly taking possession of the mind of the unskilled assistants
of the higher class of operatives. ... A Trades Union is in this
respect similar to a great military power. It not only possesses
great off ensive force itself, but is the cause of the creation of
great offensive force by others. Every trade can collaterally
exercise so much influence on other kindred trades, and direct
ly so much influence on the employers of labour, that it drives
all those with whom it comes in contact to imitation. The more
the Union spirit spreads, the more is it likely to spread. It is a
machine excellently qualified for political action, and we can
not doubt that the new Reform Bill will give an additional im
pulse to this species of association."

In addition to looking far ahead into the future, Lowe
reviewed in detail the events and attitudes of 1866 and 1867. He
discussed the Sheffield and Manchester outrages, and he
examined Applegarth s evidence before the royal commission.
His approach was analytical, but he could not keep out of the
picture the lurid details of cloak-and-dagger unionism in Man
chester and Sheffield. "Needles are put by the thousand into
the clay to lame the hands of whose who load it. ... Watch
men are wounded in the head with slugs a policeman is mur
dered outright. . . . We read of stabs with knives, of pistols dis
charged, of persons who cannot swim thrown into deep water,
of waylaying and beating; and one person nearly killed because
he was taken for another." Admitting that "a vast interval sepa
rates such an association as the Amalgamated Carpenters and
Joiners from the Bricklayers of Lancashire or the Saw Grinders
of Sheffield," Lowe added that "they all contain within them
the germs and elements of crime, they are all founded on the
right of the majority to coerce the minority, on the absolute

{ 249 Y

Victorian People

subjugation of the one to the many, and the employment of
such means as may be necessary in order to give effect to these
false and dangerous principles."

The Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners spent
one-third of its income in supporting strikes; it rejected piece
work; it enforced its rules, no matter how strong the minority
opinion. Lowe conceded it to be "one of the most moderate,
best regulated, and best conducted of existing Trades Unions";
if it could not stand the application of ordinary economic
principles, no other union could. Yet, when Lowe examined
the approach of the ASCJ to questions of wages and competi
tion, he came to the conclusion that it was "utterly reckless" of
the degree to which it increased the expenses of production and
"deliberately blind" to the problems of foreign competition.
The subscriptions of the union were wasted in "pretending to
do that which the laws of demand and supply are already
doing, or in ruining that very fund out of which the support of
the contributors must come. . . . We do not denounce these
Unions as wrong or selfish, but as an enormous blunder, a
gigantic miscalculation, based on fallacies the most obvious
and mistakes the most easily detected." With great difficulty
England had accepted the principles of free trade. "Now there
is growing up in the midst of us a monopoly of labour far
more oppressive and indefensible than the monopoly of trade
we have abolished." Lowe condemned the well-regulated
unions in the name of political economy, just as he condemned
the terrorist unions in the name of law and order. The fact that
Applegarth s union was founded in direct defiance of economic
principles weighed gravely against it on the grounds of justice,
fairness, and expediency. "Political economy is not exactly the
law of the land, but it is the ground of that law. It is assumed
as its basis and foundation." If the skilled unionists had their
way, the good effects of free trade would be undone and eco
nomic progress would be jeopardized; if unskilled unionists
began to increase in numbers, the ruin of England as a com
mercial and industrial power was certain.

Lowe s conclusion was a simple one: all societies formed in
restraint of trade should be declared illegal, and magistrates

~{ 250 Y

Robert Lowe and the Fear of Democracy

should be given powers of summary jurisdiction over their
members. "The law will then be adequate to the mischief. If
it can be enforced, society will have freed itself from a great
peril; dangers to our manufactures and commerce, the amount
of which no man can measure, will have been arrested, and a
demoralization which threatens to lower the character of the
English operative to the level of the Thug of India will have
been stayed; if not, we must be prepared to see our prosperity
wither and perish under the ruinous influence of persons as
ignorant of their own true interests as they are careless of the
feelings and reckless of the interests of others."

It was natural that such views, so clearly and forcibly ex
pressed, should win Lowe the support of many manufacturers
and provoke the sharpest possible opposition from labor leaders
and sympathizers of every kind. A Leeds manufacturer wrote
to him, saying that the unions were doing incalculable injury to
trade and that there was hardly a man among them who ever
received as much during a strike as he had paid in. "The poor
fellows are the willing dupes of a few idle demagogues." Since
the demagogues had taken over, the word "master" might as
well be expunged from the social vocabulary. A Yorkshire
surgeon went further and attacked not only the unionists but
the workers as a whole. "I know more than one butcher," he
wrote, "who last year sold weekly from three to seven legs of
first-rate mutton to the ironworkers to feed prize dogs, and
during the last strike in the same town, one personally known
to me was getting two, or sometimes three, legs weekly for the
same purpose. . . . Surely I may express surprise that such men
are to be put in possession of a responsible privilege affecting
the whole community."

Working-class opposition to Lowe was converted into hatred
in 1866 and 1867. The Reform League directed much of its
propaganda against him as it strove, in his phrase, "to make me
an object of the hatred, perhaps a mark for the vengeance, of
my fellow-countrymen." Lowe was indifferent to threats of
violence. "I am like Caesar in one respect," he wrote in April,
1866; "at least I receive warnings to take care of my life and
always to go to the House in a cab." There was no violence.

Victorian People

The only injury which Lowe suffered in 1866 was a bad fall
from a railway platform when, because of his shortsightedness,
he stumbled over a bag of books and had to have his hand tight
ly bandaged. Like Marx, Lowe was perhaps disappointed that
there was not a little more evidence of a revolutionary spirit
among the working classes.

One member of the Reform League tried to make him think
again about his social presuppositions. Joseph Guedalla, a mem
ber of the executive of the Reform League, wrote a very
modest and quiet letter to him in January, 1867, asking him
whether he would not consider modifying his views of work
ing-class organization. "Surely you will be ready to confess that
the recent gatherings have been characterized by uniform
decorum and good conduct, by an entire absence of drunken
ness, violence, turbulence, and the other vices enumerated by
you." Self-control and intelligence had been demonstrated even
by the crowds. "The moment has arrived," Guedalla con
cluded, "when you may well undo what threatens to be a fatal
work, and gracefully retract accusations which only enemies
of English freedom, English character, and English institutions
could hail with pleasure or satisfaction." Lowe flatly refused to
argue with Guedalla or with the league. "With such a body
and its leaders, of whom you appear to be one, I have no cour
tesies to interchange. When I think proper to give an opinion
on the recent popular demonstrations, it is not to the Reform
League that I shall offer it." The crispness of Lowe s reply con
cealed profound emotion. Lowe chose to argue that the league
had been misrepresenting him on the basis of one of his speeches
in Parliament, the speech relating to corruption and venality
among the poorer voters in the constituencies; in fact, the
league was judging him by his speeches as a whole, and he was
doing little to contradict their main charge that he was an
enemy of the working classes.

Lowe s picture of the working classes was very sharply
criticized by writers far less interested in popular agitation
than Guedalla. Richard Monckton Milnes, who had been
created Baron Houghton in 1863, and R. H. Hutton, later the
editor of the Spectator, were two of a distinguished group of

{252 Y

Robert Lowe and the Fear of Democracy

contributors to Essays on Re-form, an influential collection of
studies published in 1866. Hutton admitted that the artisans
were less thrifty, less disposed to be guided by those who were
their superiors in culture, less cautious in their political in
stincts, and less attached to the political institutions under which
they lived than the middle classes, but he went on to praise the
solidarity and vigor of workingmen. Their organizations
proved their class patriotism; this class patriotism could be
turned to national account. "Only the working class have got
a clear conception how much individuals owe, by way of self
sacrifice, to the larger social organization to which they belong.
. . . What I think may fairly be hoped for, is the diversion of
some of this high esprit de corps from the narrow organization
of the Trade Society to the wider organization of the nation."
It was certain that the working classes would demand stronger
government. They would not feel that "wholesome dread of a
strong central power" which the middle classes had felt. But
this, to him, was a ground for optimism rather than fear. A
stronger state was necessary to carry further reforms without
which England would be torn by social jealousy and economic
conflict.

Houghton made the point even more strongly: "The real
danger to England now is not from the working class, for no
working class in any country was ever more peaceably disposed
than ours is, but from the isolation of classes, caused by the
extinction of the yeomanry and the growth of a manufacturing
population, and from the alarming increase in the political, and
still more in the social, power of wealth." This danger was not
to be met by treating classes as hostile bodies and playing one
off against another. Nor could it be removed if the narrow
franchise were maintained. It would only disappear if the
working classes were admitted to a share in political power in
the same way that the middle classes had been admitted in 1832.

Neither Houghton nor Hutton feared the swamping of the
constitution. For them, social safeguards still seemed strong
enough to guarantee peaceful progress. They refused to proph
esy about the distant future, "for in politics nothing is more
certain than that it is impossible to predict how political and

Victorian People

social forces will adjust themselves under a new Constitution."
It seemed likely that, for a time at any rate, there would be no
drastic changes. As another of the essayists, Leslie Stephen, put
it: "England is still an aristocratic country . . . because the
whole upper and middle, and a great part of the lower, classes
have still an instinctive liking for the established order of
things; because innumerable social ties bind us together spon
taneously, so as to give to the aristocracy a position tolerably
corresponding to their political privileges. If this instinct ever
dies out, so that the political ceases to be the expression of the
social organization, it will be utterly vain to boost it up by
legislation; any such expedients will be temporary and cause
sufficient irritation to ensure their downfall; it is because the
correspondence has become palpably imperfect that some
Reform is now imperatively demanded."

Such a conclusion shocked Lowe. He was pessimistic about
the future of English society and the possibility of retaining
safeguards once the door to democracy had been opened. Only
one new safeguard seemed to him worthy of serious attention
the extension of popular education. Although he never used
the phrase which is usually put into his mouth, "We must
educate our masters," he did declare, as soon as the Reform Bill
was passed, that it was now essential "to compel our future
masters to learn their letters." Like a good Benthamite, he
turned to education as a condition of all improvement, al
though as an experienced politician he was not very sanguine
about the outcome.

VI

Lowe had interested himself in educational questions long
before 1867. In Australia he had tried to introduce a compre
hensive system, and on his return, between 1859 and 1864, he
was vice-president of the Council and in charge of education.
His ideas on education were as clearly defined as his ideas on
the suffrage, and he was unwilling ever to change them.

He drew a sharp distinction between education for the rich
and education for the poor; but he was unhappy about the
existing provision of services for both sections of society.

Robert Lowe and the Fear of Democracy

Although he was a brilliant product of Winchester, he felt no
enthusiasm for the public schools or for the classical form of
education which they provided. Education at Winchester was
"coarse and brutal," even though Winchester was considered
one of the best of the schools. Tradition should have little
importance in education.

Political economy made him as suspicious of the public
schools as he was of the trade-unions; they were endowed
bodies, and all endowments were dangerous. "Endowed schools
are the eldest sons of education"; they became comfortable
homes for men of inferior ability. There was no reason why
education for the rich should not become more competitive.
Formal rules and statutes should give way to the natural inter
play of supply and demand. "No one believes that if an endow
ment were given for supplying the City of London with meat
or bread, its effect would be to make the meat or bread of
London better." Education was like bread; if there was free
trade in corn, there should be free trade in schools.

The first effect of a more competitive educational system
would be a change in the curriculum of the schools. Although
an outstanding classical scholar himself, and a one-time coach
of Latin and Greek at Oxford, Lowe came to detest classical
studies in the schools. Dead languages, he believed, were less
important than living modern languages, and living modern
languages were less important than science. "To acquire the
scientific habit of mind," he said, "is the one invaluable thing
in life."

After the passing of the Reform Bill the need for more scien
tific knowledge, he believed, had become urgent. With the
advent of the democratic franchise it was suicidal for the
young men of the upper classes to spend the best years of their
lives studying Latin and Greek. Unless the landed gentry
wished to abrogate its position as a ruling class, it was necessary
that its members should be taught something about the lords of
the Treasury in London as well as about the archons of Athens,
something about physics and chemistry as well as Tacitus and
Cicero. Lowe was a powerful and consistent advocate of educa
tional reform. In the middle of the debates on the Reform Bill,

Victorian People

he found time to address the banquet of the civil engineers,
where he described classical studies as "a minute analysis of the
forms of expression and the modes of thought which were used
by people many thousand years ago, and concerning which
there was much controversy and no certainty would be arrived
at." It is not surprising that Lowe became as unpopular with
fellows of Oxford colleges and masters at public schools as he
was with trade-union leaders in London.

Education for the poor also needed reform. For Lowe it was
to be simple basic education, primarily in the three R s read
ing, writing, and arithmetic. His career as vice-president of the
Council reveals clearly his attitude toward state-provided in
struction, which was carried out before the Education Act of
1870 by government subsidies to voluntary bodies. Necessary
though it was in England as well as Australia, its purposes
should be clearly defined and its costs assessed scientifically.
Lowe co-operated with Gladstone in cutting down the cost of
education to the government and introduced the system of pay
ment by results. Grants to elementary schools with more than
a hundred pupils were to be made only if the children passed
an examination in reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Three factors influenced his decision to introduce a "revised
code" along these lines. The first was "the battle for thrifty
husbandry." In 1860 the education grant was reduced for the
first time since 1834. The second was efficiency; examination
was deemed a more efficient test of good school management
than inspection. The school inspectors dealt in abstract phrases
like "general efficiency," "moral atmosphere," "tone," and
"mental condition"; examiners dealt in marks. If education
costs were to be cut down, then it was necessary to find a
simple test a good Benthamite test which would enable
government grants to be distributed fairly. "If education is not
cheap it should be efficient: if it is not efficient it should be
cheap." The third was distaste for subsidized "luxury"; all edu
cational frills were thought unnecessary. Lowe sympathized
with the view of his Conservative predecessor, Adderley, that
"any attempt to keep children of the labouring classes under
intellectual culture after the very earliest age at which they

Robert Lowe and the Fear of Democracy

could earn their living, would be as arbitrary and improper as
it would be to keep the boys at Eton and Harrow at spade
labour."

Lowe was a tidy administrator but, even in 1861, a bad poli
tician. His educational proposals were sharply criticized on all
sides, and in 1864 he was forced out of office by a coalition of
enemies. Charges made against him of mutilating and falsifying
the reports of the school inspectors were unfounded, but he
resigned after the House of Commons had passed a vote of
censure. His revised code stayed, and even after the passing of
Forster s Education Act of 1870, the first comprehensive na
tional education act, it was still considered the task of the
elementary-school teacher "to bring up the children in habits
of punctuality; of good manners and language; of cleanliness
and neatness; and also to impress upon them the importance of
cheerful obedience to duty, of consideration and respect for
others, of honour and truthfulness in word and act." The pur
pose of elementary education, in a phrase of H. G. Wells, * Vas
to educate the lower classes for employment on lower-class
lines, with specially trained, inferior teachers."

There was one final consideration which influenced Lowe in
his approach to elementary education: he was not anxious,
either before or after 1870, to see "a completely bureaucratic
system of national education" in England. In his approach to
the problems of the best way of distributing the educational
grant in 1861, he showed fears of educational centralization. A
single system of schools unified under rigid public control
meant dangerously strong government. Lowe s Benthamism did
not lead him, like Edwin Chadwick, toward an efficient auto
cratic state; rather it made him afraid of too great a concentra
tion of power at the center. Despite his utilitarian approach to
religion, he praised "the invaluable superintendence of the
gentry and the clergy, the zeal of religious conviction, the har
mony with the present state of society, and the standard al
ready reached" in the existing educational system; and he
feared that these qualities would all be sacrificed if the instruc
tion of the poor were placed "in the hands of indifferent and
incompetent local bodies, or of a central department which

Victorian People

shall henceforth take charge of what used to be the work of
free and spontaneous growth, the formation of English charac
ter and habits of thought."

There was a danger that a democratic electorate might
tamper not only with the property system but also with the
educational system in such a way that the unity of society
would be further undermined. Although Lowe believed that it
was necessary "to compel our future masters to learn their let
ters," he felt that it might be dangerous if they attempted to
learn much more. He was too honest a believer in the merits
of educational progress to press this argument to its conclusion.
Adderley did not scruple to do so. "The educating, by the arti
ficial stimulus of large public expenditure, a particular class out
of, instead of in the condition of life in which they naturally
fill an important part of the community, must upset the social
equilibrium," Adderley maintained. "It is clearly wrong to at
tempt to keep ordinary children of the working class at school
after the age at which their proper work begins, and there are
some kinds of work which must begin very early." Education,
like society, was to remain stratified; the elementary school
should not be organized in order to change the world but to
keep it exactly as it was.

VII

Lowe s belief in sound administration and cheap government
might have made him the favorite of the middle classes. He
never found it easy to understand why many of them seemed
to prefer Bright. "I was one of those," he said at Liverpool in
1867, "and they were very few indeed who lifted their
voices in favour of the middle class not so much for their sake
as for the sake of the country. ... I never met with the slightest
encouragement or support from those whose cause I was
pleading."

This lack of sympathy increased his sense of isolation. He
always defended the claims of the ten-pound householders, a
group of people who had "discharged their duty in a manner
which almost defies criticism"; and he frequently quoted Aris
totle s remark, "Happy and well-governed are those States

Robert Lowe and the Pear of Democracy

where the middle part is strong and the extremes weak." While
a don at Oxford ten years before the repeal of the Corn Laws,
he was attacked by many respectable parents for teaching their
sons "the heresy of Free Trade." In Australia his criticisms of
the Colonial Office were not unlike those of Bright, and in
similar language he thundered against "horse-racing dukes, fox
hunting squires, and blackleg baronets." In England he was
always active in supporting those parliamentary measures which
assisted middle-class interests. During the Crimean War, for
example, he stressed the need for reform both in the civil
service and in the army. After the war ended, he introduced in
the Commons the Limited Liability Bill of 1856. His sympathy
for middle-class ambitions is reflected in all his speeches of this
period. "Until merit is the only avenue to public office," he
exclaimed, "we are fighting with a leaden sword against a man
who uses a steel one."

His approval of middle-class aspirations was even more
clearly demonstrated after 1868 when he became Chancellor
of the Exchequer in Gladstone s great Liberal government.
While he was at the Treasury between 1868 and 1872, he
attempted to implement a policy which would satisfy the most
ardent supporters of orthodox political economy. He took a
penny off the income tax in 1869 and abolished the shilling
duty on corn, the residual element of the old protectionist sys
tem. The duty on fire insurance he also abandoned on the
grounds that it was "a tax upon prudence." In 1870 another
penny off the income tax seemed to forecast the total abolition
of the tax within a few years. In 1871, however, he suffered a
serious setback when he had to increase the income tax and
introduce a new tax on matches which created surprising
popular opposition; and in 1873 he was moved from the Treas
ury to the Home Office. As usual, he had impressed himself
with his achievements far more than he had impressed the pub
lic. According to the touching words of his own epitaph:

Twelve millions of Taxes I struck off,
Left behind me six millions of gains;
Of Debt forty millions I shook off,
And got well abused for my pains.

Victorian People

During his years in office after 1868, he drew close to Bright s
foreign policy as well as to Bright s economics. In 1870, for
example, he very strongly opposed the British purchase of the
Suez Canal shares on the grounds that he did not believe that
the returns "would pay the interest of the money considering
all that remains to be done" and that "we should be involved
yet more deeply than at present in the politics of Egypt and
might very probably find ourselves driven to an occupation."
"I hold to the policy of avoiding entangling occupations of
territory," he told Granville, "which can only result in scatter
ing our forces and leaving us weak at home without making
us strong abroad." When Disraeli actually bought the shares in
1876, Lowe strongly objected and contrived to annoy not
only the public but also his old friend Lord Rothschild, from
whom Disraeli had raised the money, and who did not like
Lowe s reference to the 100,000 commission on the deal. By
attacking Disraeli s bill to confer on the Queen the title "Em
press of India," he succeeded in alienating the Queen as well.
His views on India were as firm as his views on the absurdity
of the royal title. "I do not think India worth the sacrifice im
plied in a permanent occupation," he had written categorically
in 1870.

His detailed knowledge of "new countries" and his opposi
tion to spending large sums of taxpayers money made him an
even more vigorous critic of imperialism than Bright. In the
1870 s, indeed, he looked forward to a time when the British
dominions overseas, which he knew so well, would be com
pletely free to manage their own affairs, although he was not
optimistic about the results. "I am averse to setting up a con
sular jurisdiction in Fiji," he wrote in 1871, "which I believe
would be both costly and unsatisfactory. If it is done the Euro
pean residents ought to bear the expense. But I think it would
be far better to annex Fiji to New South Wales or Victoria.
They are quite silly enough to take it and would govern it
much better than we should. I am much against forming New
Colonies but see no objection to adding troublesome places like
this to old ones."

The stout advocacy of such views won Lowe the good will

Robert Lowe and the Fear of Democracy

of nobody. Although he often expressed opinions in keeping
with those of the old-fashioned Radicals, he never made any
attempt to flatter middle-class audiences. He was contemptuous
of nowueaux riches who were Tories "because they think it
genteel"; but he did not care overmuch to win the support of
the Liberal middle classes either. He always preferred to move
in small circles than to mix with people whom he considered his
intellectual inferiors.

Perhaps the turning point of Lowe s later career was his re
fusal in 1859 to stand as an opponent of John Bright at a
Birmingham election. He rejected an offer made to him by a
group of local Liberals, even though his sponsors offered to
pay all his election expenses. He had no desire to repeat his ex
periences in Sydney. Instead he chose to stand for the pocket
borough of Calne, which was in the safe keeping of the Mar
quis of Lansdowne. It is unlikely that Lowe would have won
an election in Birmingham against John Bright, but, by failing
to do more than curtly acknowledge the offer, he made it pos
sible for Bright to lampoon him in the House of Commons in
1866. "The constituency which the right hon. gentleman rep
resents," Bright remarked, "consists of a hundred and seventy
four men, seven of whom are working men; but the real con
stituency of the right hon. gentleman is a member of the other
House of Parliament, and he could send in his butler or his
groom, instead of the right hon. gentleman, to represent the
borough." There was no effective reply to this charge in
1866.

Lowe s refusal to take his chances with a large electorate
may have been determined by his sense of physical deficiency;
but, whatever its cause, it became a serious handicap to him as
a politician. When, after the second Reform Bill, he was re
turned as member for the newly created University of London
seat, it was possible for Disraeli to taunt him too, for Disraeli
was able to say that, if he had not created a new constituency
for the University of London electors, Lowe would have been
left without a place in the Commons. "The right hon. Robert
Lowe by kind permission not of the Marquis of Lansdowne but
of Mr. Benjamin Disraeli"; there was no taunt more crushing.

{261 Y

Victorian People

Lowe turned eagerly from the shifting world of politics to
the world of the civil service, to the permanent element in
each department of state. He was always on terms of the
closest friendship with civil servants, and they were unhesitat
ing in their admiration not only of his tidy mind but also of his
"kindness of heart and freedom from spleen and malice." Sur
rounded by papers in his office and with good officials at his
shoulder, Lowe was always at his ease; the trouble came from
vested interests, ruthless politicians, and dull members of Par
liament. In twentieth-century circumstances he might have been
a distinguished civil servant himself, preparing memorandums
which inferior men could later sift and publicize. As it was,
even in the mid-nineteenth century, he moved easily in the
ill-defined territory between the realm of the civil servant and
the realm of the politician. By advocating the extension of the
system of competitive examination to all departments of the
civil service, he was pointing the way forward to the permanent
and independent civil service of the twentieth century. He was,
indeed, one of the first persons to apply the phrase "head of the
whole Civil Service" to the Permanent Secretary to the Treas
ury, and his contribution as a minister to effective civil service
reform was substantial.

But there was a fatal flaw even in his approach to the civil
service. He advocated an improvement in the machinery of
government without wishing to give the machinery more tasks
to perform: "Our business is to diminish not to increase the
duties and responsibilities of government," he wrote in 1873.
He trusted the civil service at the same time that he feared
democracy. Administration reform was to be a substitute for,
not a complement of, political reform. His civil service was to
have little, not much, to do. The logic was defective. It was
only after he had passed from the political stage and his great
enemy Disraeli had launched the first program of social legis
lation between 1874 and 1880 that the civil service could begin
its period of spectacular expansion. The pressure of interests
and the clamor of voters were to be as important as logical
analysis in the making of the design of the new civil service,
what Graham Wallas boldly described as "the one great ^polit-

4262 }>

Robert Lovoe and the Fear of Democracy

ical invention in nineteenth-century England." Lowe s great
bogy, the growth of "state socialism," was the greatest effec
tive challenge to old administrative methods; and the Fabians,
not the Benthamites, were to lead the way into the twentieth
century. Neither Lowe s intellect nor his imagination was
powerful enough to discern such a sequel to the Reform Bill
of 1867. It was Disraeli s vision, conditioned by tradition as
well as by calculation, which was to prove more sensitive to the
claims of the future.

\263

What an unknown world we are to enter If the

gentry will take their part they will be adopted as lead
ers. If we are left to demagogues, God help us!

GATHORNE HARDY

When Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, died in 1881,
the French newspaper Debats remarked that both in office and
in opposition he had stood out as "the most trusted representa
tive, the staunchest champion of that non-exclusive Toryism
which has known how to modify and transform itself daily,
and which has enabled the aristocracy of England to remain
Liberal without ceasing to be Conservative."

Disraeli would have welcomed such a Continental verdict,
for he always liked to consider his career as an English states
man against a European background. Unembarrassed by English
prejudices, he understood them sufficiently well to know how
to exploit them in others; cool and detached in his own calcula
tions, he discovered the secret of inspiring enthusiasm in his
followers. His aim was to educate "his party," and the first
lesson he taught was that the party could not hold together on
the principle of stubborn resistance against the spirit of the
age. Change was the order of the day. Conservatives had to
accept the necessity for change and to adapt their tactics ac
cordinglyattacking, defending, snatching advantages, and
chasing opportunities as occasion demanded. Conservatism

1264 Y

Benjamin Disraeli

could survive only if it considered something more than con
servation. The historic past was alive, but it was also dead.
After the second Reform Bill of 1867 had been attacked by both
the Whig Edinburgh Review and the Tory Quarterly Review,
the two great organs of traditional English politics, Disraeli
compared them to two old-fashioned rival posting-houses. They
had each described his policy as dangerous, revolutionary, and
precipitate. So, said he, "you may behold the ostler at the Blue
Lion and the chambermaid at the King s Arms, though bitter
rivals in the bygone epoch of coaches and post-horses, making
up their quarrels and condoling together in the street over their
common enemy the railroad."

Intelligence and dexterity allied with creative imagination
formed an unusual blend of qualities in an English party leader.
Disraeli was as much of a "mystery man" to many of his own
supporters as he was to Gladstone and Bright. He had made
his debut in English politics in 1832 at the age of twenty-eight
as a romantic dandy flirting with radicalism; after more than
thirty years of striving, he still remained a "stranger" to many
of his mid- Victorian contemporaries. The radicalism had blos
somed out into Toryism, but it was a Toryism of imaginative
opportunism rather than principle, an opportunism which mys
tified and shocked. Yet his strength in 1867 lay in his force of
character as much as in his intellectual brilliance, for he had
risen to be leader of his party in the House of Commons in
the teeth of prejudice and without the support of the crowds.
Only supreme confidence in himself could have overcome the
obstacles which confronted him.

His achievement was the reward of genius and pertinacity,
although it did not conform to the texts and homilies either of
Self -Help or of the Victorian public school. He had been edu
cated first at a small private school at Walthamstow, managed
by a Unitarian, and then at home in a rich Jewish household.
Neither setting had much in common with Arnold s Rugby.
Two of the heroes of his novels, Contarini Fleming and Vivian
Grey, fight and thrash the biggest boy in their schools, but
they hardly do it in the spirit of Tom Brown s School Days.
Disraeli believed not in thrift but in destiny, "in that destiny

Victorian People

before which the ancients bowed." The stars, he knew, were
with him in his adventures; by 1867 he had lived long enough
to see his impossible wishes corne true.

It was Disraeli s individual contribution to the history of
mid- Victorian England to carry the Reform Bill, which, after
years of detached debate, finally gave the vote to the working
classes of the towns. He carried the bill not as a Radical but
as a Conservative, showing a willingness in the process to go
further even than John Bright in his acceptance of the need
for remodeling the constitution. One of the brilliant satirical
magazines of the period, the Tomahawk, coupled the names
of Bright and Disraeli in an imaginary letter from Bright to
Disraeli written after the bill had passed the Commons: "We
have had a very hard struggle to carry our Bill," Bright is made
to say, "and as it left the Commons, spite of one or two blem
ishes, it promised to effect our object by transferring power
from the hands of those who may be clever enough to see
through us, to the hands of those who are sure to take us at
our own valuation." Other writers saw Disraeli merely as the
putative father of the bill, Bright as the real one. "This off
spring is a stolen child," exclaimed Bernal Osborne, one of the
political wits of 1867. "The right hon. gentleman has stolen
it, and then, as the School -for Scandal has it, he has treated it
as the gipsies do stolen children he has disfigured it to make
it pass for his own. But the real author of this Bill is ... the
Member for Birmingham."

\s/For those who view English history through Radical eyes
the granting of the suffrage to urban artisans in 1867 was the
great landmark in the making of modern democracy. But for
Disraeli, too, the Reform Bill was a dazzling personal triumph.
He had carried Conservative supporters with him in passing a
reform bill which changed the whole political atmosphere in
England. After twenty years of struggle as one of the leaders
of a minority party after the repeal of the Corn Laws, he felt
the full excitement of riding on the crest of the parliamentary
wave. "For him," as Herbert Paul aptly said, "the supreme test
of human affairs was success." The material results of victories
were less satisfying than the simple pleasure of having suc-

i 266

Benjamin Disraeli

ceeded. "It was not his Bill (as it finally passed), but it had
passed, and he, not his adversaries, sat upon the Treasury
Bench. Sing, riding s a joy! For me, I ride. "

Disraeli s victory was all the more exciting because it was
gained against heavy odds. The Conservatives were in a minor
ity in the House of Commons. If all the opposition groups had
voted against them, they would have been defeated by about
seventy votes. Clever tactics were necessary to keep the Liberal
party divided and the Conservative party united. In a Parlia
ment which cared little for party discipline the situation was
always strategically open, and, if Disraeli had not been a master-
strategist, no Conservative Reform Bill could have been passed.

The secret of his success lay in his intimate knowledge of the
House of Commons and the procedures it followed. He was,
as Froude has said, "a child of Parliament." It was Parlia
ment and the confidence of Parliament which gave him his
place in the State." He handled Parliament far more effectively
in 1867 than Sir Robert Peel had handled it in 1846. Although
dissident Tories complained that he was re-enacting the great
betrayal of 1846, they were unable to exploit the situation as he
himself had exploited circumstances twenty-one years before.
He was always in control, even when he seemed to be most de
pendent upon the Radicals.

The Reform Bill which was eventually carried was the
half -accidental result of the balance of forces in the House. It
could not have been passed in a House dominated by the
"monolithic" party blocs of the twentieth-century English
system of government. No single member of Parliament in
February, 1867, including the party leaders themselves, could
have prophesied the final collective result. Disraeli, however,
insured his own control of events by approaching the question
of reform in an ingenious way. He wanted at all costs to main
tain political power for the Conservative government. He did
not want to try to dictate a settlement; rather he was prepared
to allow the House of Commons considerable freedom to do
what it wished. There was only one proviso: initiative should
not pass from him to the Liberal party.

Maintaining control was made far easier by the way in which

4 261 Y

Victorian People

he framed his own bill. In its origins it was not a democratic
measure. Two criteria of reform were laid down household
suffrage, based on personal payment of rates to the local
authority, and, to prevent it from being too revolutionary, nec
essary constitutional guaranties on which the extension of the
suffrage was dependent, such as special franchises for privileged
groups and dual voting. The Liberal party was confronted
with serious tactical dilemmas when it considered the Con
servative proposals. The Radicals wanted to scrap the guar
anties; the Adullamites wanted to scrap both guaranties and
household suffrage. The moderates did not want the guar
anties, but they did not want complete household suffrage
either that is, what would be left if the guaranties were with
drawn. With such divided aims, the Liberals were in no mood
to accept leadership from Gladstone or from anyone else. Tac
tics became more difficult to evolve than principles were to
defend, particularly when choices were offered not between the
simple alternatives of good or bad but among complicated pref
erences for various goods and evils. Disraeli split his opponents
from the moment he introduced his bill, and he had the
Machiavellian advantage over them that he never needed to
concern himself unduly about the relationship between tactics
and principles. By introducing distinctions which few of his
opponents accepted, like that between personal rating and
rate-compounding (the former, paying rates direct to the local
authority and, the latter, paying them as a weekly supplement
to the landlord s rent), he confused his enemies in their pur
poses and made them fight not against him but among one an
other. The one clear line which they might have taken to
unite in throwing out his bill and substituting a measure of
their own was barred by the knowledge of the failure of Rus
sell and Gladstone s bill in 1866.

II

When Russell and Gladstone were defeated in 1866 and
the opposition leaders, Derby and Disraeli, took their places,
it was agreed that the reform issue could not be shelved for
long. At first Derby, the Prime Minister, refused to commit

{ 268 Y

Benjamin Disraeli

himself and said that he would only proceed if he could find
a course of action which would command general support; but
it was not long before several Conservatives expressed their
interest in a settlement of the question. The Queen, too, was
clear that a new reform bill was necessary. "If the question
of Reform be not taken up in earnest by her Ministers with a
view to its settlement," she wrote to Derby in October, 1866,
"very serious consequences might ensue."

In the autumn of 1866 Disraeli was far less convinced of
the urgent need for reform than some of his colleagues. When
Derby wrote in December that he was reluctantly coming to
believe that "we shall have to deal with the question of Re
form," Disraeli replied that "observation and reflection have
not yet brought me to your conclusion as to the necessity of
bringing in a Bill for Parliamentary Reform, but I hope I say
this with becoming diffidence." Derby continued to press-
"we must deal with it, and that immediately" but down to the
end of 1866 Disraeli was anxious to postpone rather than force
the issue.

His change of mind came when he appreciated the extent
of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary support for a new
reform bill. The apathy of the previous year had been blown
away both in the Commons and in the country, and Disraeli
formed a revised estimate of the state of opinion. "He would
not admit in the autumn," wrote Buckle, "that the success of
the agitation which Bright was conducting showed that the
country had determined to obtain Reform; but by January he
found the evidence conclusive." By January, 1867, he had
become convinced that the right procedure for his party to
adopt was not to set up a royal commission on the subject,
which would have delayed the passing of legislation, but to
introduce general resolutions on reform and eventually a com
prehensive reform bill. In making his new assessment, he was
as strongly influenced by reports from the provinces as by
firsthand evidence from the campaign of the Reform League
in the capital. The economic situation favored a sharp spasm
of political radicalism, and "the people" were showing "in an
unmistakeable manner that the Reform issue be trifled with no

Victorian People

longer." The more active public opinion became, the more
tempted was Disraeli to resort to a policy of parliamentary
opportunism.

The Queen s speech, drafted for her by the government,
at the opening of the February session of Parliament forecast
measures which, "without unduly disturbing the balance of
political power, shall freely extend the elective franchise"; it
was followed up six days later by the government s introduc
tion of general resolutions on the need for reform. The resolu
tions were extremely general. They included, for instance, as
the first clause, "The number of electors for counties and
boroughs in England and Wales ought to be increased," and,
as the ninth clause, the delightfully vague suggestion that "it is
expedient that provision be made for the better prevention of
bribery and corruption at elections." The resolutions were
deliberately general; they were designed not to illuminate but
to conceal. Pious platitudes were all that a divided cabinet
could agree upon. "I think resolutions are only safe as long
as they are general," wrote Cranborne, one of the opponents
of reform within the Conservative government. Behind the
scenes there was a widening difference of opinion between
those Conservatives who wanted at most a "small" reform bill
and those who wanted a comprehensive "great plan," as Disraeli
was already beginning to conceive it. Only the resolutions
could reconcile irreconcilable opinions.

The House of Commons as a whole wanted something more
substantial than vapid generalizations. Gladstone, Bright, and
Lowe agreed that it was essential for the Conservatives to de
clare their real intentions. Lowe hoped that he would then be
able to trounce them; Bright, that he could advocate in their
place "a substantial and satisfactory Bill"; and Gladstone, that
he could hold the Liberals together as a party whatever was
proposed. "The crisis is serious," wrote Lord John Russell.
"We must allow no peace to the dishonest, fraudulent attempt
to shut England out of good Government." Already, however,
some Liberal tacticians were beginning to realize that the real
danger of the future lay not in milk-and-water Conservative
proposals but in an all-out attempt to carry a comprehensive

Benjamin Disraeli

bill which would go much further than the Liberal bill of 1866
itself. The only bill that the Conservatives would be capable
of carrying would, as Gladstone put it, "be larger and not
smaller, than would have been, or even would be, accepted
from us."

Lowe and Bright, for opposite reasons, wished to vote against
the Conservative resolutions. Lowe was irritated that Derby,
who had defeated the moderate Liberal measure of reform in
1866 with the support of the Adullamites, was now preparing
to introduce a reform bill of his own; Bright was suspicious of
Conservative intentions, believing that the administration was
"bitterly hostile to Reform" and anxious "to murder the cause
and the question by a course contrary to Parliamentary usage
and odious in the sight of all honest men." The moderate
Liberals, who did not share the extreme feelings of either
Bright or Lowe, were not anxious to launch a frontal attack on
the resolutions; they preferred to bide their time until the
government announced details of their proposed bill.

If the tactics of the moderates had been defeated within the
divided Liberal party in February, 1867, and a conjunction of
Adullamites and Radicals had joined the moderates in attacking
the government from the start, Disraeli would have had no
chance of introducing a comprehensive bill. Tory democracy
would have been stifled at its birth. But, of course, his strength,
as he himself well knew, lay in the weakness of the Liberal
party.

Before he could introduce a comprehensive reform bill, he
had to compose the differences within his own party. Some
Conservatives, particularly General Peel, the brother of Sir
Robert Peel, refused to accept any increase in the number of
artisan voters, even the granting of the franchise to selected
working-class groups with educational or property qualifica
tions. Others, while prepared to accept "fancy franchises,"
were not prepared to consider any changes which would pro
duce democratic domination in a large number of constituen
cies. Working agreement was reached within the government,
however, on February 23, on the basis of carefully prepared

4271 Y

Victorian People

electoral statistics, and the cabinet decided that Disraeli should
introduce a "large" reform bill two days later.

During the week end of the twenty-third to the twenty-
fifth more than one member of the cabinet spent a miserable
arithmetical Sunday making precise calculations of what the
government s proposals implied. Three influential ministers
were not satisfied with the answers to their sums. On the morn
ing of the twenty-fifth Disraeli received a note from Derby,
written at 8:45 A.M., telling him that Cranborne, Carnavon,
and Peel were strongly opposed to the bill and were threaten
ing to resign. "Utter ruin," added Derby. "What on earth are
we to do?"

"Stabbing in the back," commented Disraeli. But he was not
too wounded to act. A hastily summoned cabinet, which
could not be collected until the early afternoon, decided in ten
minutes to maintain unity by reverting to a small bill instead
of the large one. Disraeli went down quickly to the House of
Commons and introduced a measure completely different from
that which he had planned to introduce less than twelve hours
previously. He had found it necessary to be an opportunist in
relation to his party as well as to the opposition.

The measure which he introduced provided for a six-pound
rating franchise in the boroughs, designed to add 130,000 voters
to the list; four new fancy franchises, based on education,
savings-bank deposits, investment in the public funds, and
amount paid in taxation; and a twenty-pound rating franchise
in the counties. In all, 400,000 new voters would be added to
the electorate.

Bright, Lowe, and Gladstone all poured scorn on these
proposals, and those Liberals who were neither Adullamites nor
Radicals agreed that they would now oppose the reform reso
lutions when they were to be discussed the following week.

Disraeli realized that there was little point either in attempt
ing to press the resolutions or in pushing the small bill. Backed
by many members within his own party, he decided instead
to reintroduce the large measure. "All I hear and observe," he
wrote to Derby on February 28, "more and more convinces
me that the bold line is the safer one, and, moreover, that it will

Benjamin Disraeli

be successful." Derby agreed, although it was known that, if
the large bill were reintroduced, Cranborne, Carnavon, and
Peel would resign from the government. On March 2 they did
resign. Reform now seemed to be more important than party,
though Derby, like Disraeli, was aware that few members of
the Conservative party were likely to follow an antiref orm line.
Most of them shared the opinion of Gathorne Hardy, "Lord
Derby is to be pitied, but feels it a profound duty to the Queen
to go on, and I for one will go with him." The vacancies in
the cabinet were filled by the promotion of three ministers to
higher posts and by the introduction of three new men to
cabinet rank.

The way was now prepared for Derby s and Disraeli s ideas
and tactics to go forward without fear of cabinet division. A
few days after Cranborne s resignation, his wife met Derby at
a party. "Is Robert still doing his sums?" asked the Prime
Minister.

"Yes," replied Lady Cranborne, "and he has reached rather
a curious result take three from fifteen, and nothing remains."
Her repartee was more effective than her judgment. In the exer
cise in power politics which was about to begin, the govern
ment was strengthened rather than weakened by the loss of
three men of rigid principle. Take three from fifteen, and any
thing was possible, even the spectacle of a Conservative ad
ministration carrying a Radical measure. It was not long before
Cranborne was commenting rather wearily that he wished
Gladstone s safe and conservative Reform Bill of 1866 had been
carried. "I sometimes hear the Bill of last year mentioned with
a feeling of regret and perhaps something like penitence," he
wrote, "for I feel that if we had accepted that offer, though
perhaps I might not have been standing on this side of the
House ... the prospects of the British constitution would have
been a good deal brighter than they are now."

A Radical reform bill, however, was the end and not the
beginning of the story. The second bill which was introduced
by Disraeli on March 18, while comprehensive in character and
designed to establish the House "on a broad, popular basis,"
was still not an experiment in democracy. Like the small bill of

Victorian People

February, it included checks and counterpoises and suggested
no extensive redistribution of seats. The franchise in the
boroughs was to be based on personal rating. All householders
paying their own rates and possessing a residential qualification
of two years were to be given votes. Lodgers and those rate
payers who compounded their rates along with their weekly
rents were not to be given votes. The county franchise was to
be lowered from a rental qualification of fifty pounds to a rat
ing qualification of fifteen pounds. Special franchises were to
be introduced for particular groups. Graduation from a univer
sity; fifty pounds in the funds, the Bank of England, or a sav
ings bank; and membership of a learned profession were also to
confer the right of voting. Two hundred thousand additional
people were to be enfranchised who paid twenty shillings a
year or more in direct taxes. Dual votes were to be conferred
on those individuals who possessed special as well as property
qualifications.

Disraeli claimed that 237,000 urban ratepayers would get the
vote for the first time, 100,000 belonging to the specially
privileged groups, and another 171,000 in the counties. In addi
tion, the twenty-shilling direct taxation franchise would give
about 200,000 members of the middle classes a second vote. The
final result of the passing of the bill would be a new social
balance within the electorate, which would insure a fair and
stable settlement. No class would be preponderant; representa
tion would rest with the nation. One-quarter of the voting
power would belong to the aristocracy, one-quarter to the
working classes, and the remaining half to the middle classes.
Parliament would not become a mere representative assembly
based on the brute force of number; it would mirror social
interests and at the same time insure the continuation of good
government.

Ill

From this bare outline of events and proposals, some of the
reasons why Derby and Disraeli produced a reform bill can be
deduced. One reason was pressure from outside, a subsidiary
factor but an important one in determining the timing of events.

Benjamin Disraeli

Disraeli s conversion to the belief that a reform bill was urgent
ly necessary was influenced by statements made to him by his
friends concerning "the unanimity with which all classes . . .
desire a Reform Bill from Lord Shaftesbury to the Shropshire
rustic." The Reform League too was sufficiently influential for
some writers to claim that the Hyde Park rioters really carried
the Reform Bill of 1867 just as the Birmingham Political Union
carried the Reform Bill of 1832.

More important than external pressure was the desire of the
Conservative leaders to secure a comprehensive settlement.
Reform had been toyed with for many years; it now seemed
possible at last to get the issue out of the way. Conservatives
like Lord Malmesbury believed that the boldest course was the
safest and that it was preferable to follow a line of action
which would be simple and direct, not "complicated, invidious,
and incomplete." Settlement of the question appealed, indeed,
as Lady Gwendolen Cecil has written, to all types of politician
--"to the easy-going man who wanted quiet times and a safe
seat, to the indifferent man who was bored to exasperation by
the prolonged controversy, to the earnest-minded man who
saw in its continuance a bar to all useful legislation." Party
leaders, "accustomed to measure the forces at their command,"
were beginning to recognize that, if they did not carry reform,
their successors certainly would. They were anxious to secure
credit while credit was good, and to prevent their rivals from
capitalizing on what was now beginning to be recognized by
ambitious politicians on all sides as an inevitable development.

But there was more to the motives of Derby and Disraeli
than the attempt "to dish the Whigs," or, as Disraeli put it,
"to terminate the monopoly of Liberalism." They were fasci
nated by the thought of comprehensive reform for its own
sake. In this there was more consistency in their position than
has sometimes been conceded. Derby, as Lord Stanley, had
helped to draft the Reform Bill of 1832; he had stood out in
Parliament at that time as the "Prince Rupert of debate"; he
had displayed great sympathy for the poor of the London
slums; during the cotton famine he had shown great solicitude
for the Lancashire artisans; and in 1864 he had rubbed elbows

Victorian People

with Garibaldi. Finally, as George Saintsbuiy put it, "in addi
tion to a genuine wish to get the question done with and out of
the way, a little of the apres moi le deluge feeling entered into
his motives." There was to the last a great deal of boyishness in
Lord Derby; and this boyishness took, among other forms, the
form of being ready to act in a sort of here goes and in for a
penny in for a pound spirit." It was he who wrote, when he
had made up his mind to introduce a new bill, "of all possible
hares to start, I do not know a better than the extension to
household suffrage." As for Disraeli himself, in addition to de
light in mischief ("Schadenfreude" Carlyle called it), there was
a remarkable continuity in his ideas on reforma continuity
which was only broken sharply on one occasion, during the
debates on Gladstone s Reform Bill of 1866.

The nature of his continuity can best be discerned in a
volume of his speeches which he published in January, 1867,
under the title Speeches on Parliamentary Reform. The volume
was designed as propaganda to demonstrate the facts of Dis
raeli s career as a reformer. It was "a complete and consistent
record" the editor wrote; it would enable the country to see
"with what justness it has been asserted that the Tory party are
disqualified from dealing with the most difficult of modern
political questions," that of reform.

When the propaganda element is discounted, the speeches
speak for themselves. As early as April, 1851, Disraeli protested
against "what is popularly understood as the principle of final
ity," the unwillingness to tamper with the act of 1832. In 1852
he stated that he had always been in favor of extending the
suffrage to include more sections of the working classes. In the
same year, while attacking universal suffrage and constant tam
pering with the constitution, he was prepared to consider
sympathetically the claims of nonelectors. In 1854 he opposed
Russell s Reform Bill on the grounds that, since the country
was faced with war, it should not make war on itself, but he
added that "you can never obtain such a change as you desire
until the great preponderance of public opinion demands it."
Three years later at Aylesbury, he condemned "bit-by-bit
reform" and indicated his preference for "a complete measure."

1276}*

Benjamin Disraeli

"A bold and decided course" would put the Conservative party
on its legs and "greatly help the country, and secure the State."

In 1858, summing up the various attempts at reform down to
that date, he claimed that, from the moment that Lord John
Russell and many of the Whigs abandoned finality, he too, and
the Conservative party with him, "held ourselves free to con
sider the question of Parliamentary Reform upon its merits. 7 If
any future plan were brought forward to change the parlia
mentary constitution of this country, "we were open to offer
those suggestions which, to our minds, might appear to lead to
a settlement most conducive to the public weal."

The Conservative minority government of 1858-59 intro
duced a reform bill after considerable discussion as to whether
it should be large or moderate. "Our fear," wrote the Whig
Edinburgh Review, "is that, like new converts, they may pro
pose wild and fantastic measures intended to captivate the tastes
of the uneducated classes, and though Conservative in name,
they become destructive in reality." In bringing his bill before
the Commons, Disraeli vindicated the right of the Conservative
party to deal with a subject "which touches the interests of all
classes and all individuals, and in the wise and proper settlement
of which the very destiny of this country is concerned." Al
though the bill proposed "fancy franchises," it equalized voting
conditions in town and country (a reform not achieved until
1884) and set out to be "a conclusive settlement," not a mere
parcel of palliatives. Disraeli even talked, in language later
picked up by Gladstone, of opening avenues to the mechanic
"whose virtue, prudence, intelligence and frugality entitle him
to enter into the privileged pale of the constituent body of the
country." He insisted, however, that mechanics should enter
the pale as individuals and not as a multitude, otherwise they
would become the predominant class, swamping the rest. When
Bright protested against "fancy franchises," Disraeli retaliated
that alliteration was not an argument in legislation but "a very
popular form of language among savages." He underlined the
right of the Conservatives to change the constitution just as
much as the Whigs or the Radicals. All parties had their share
in "the pedigree of progress." The same arguments he reiterated

4217 V

Victorian People

in 1865 in the debates on Barnes s bill: "It has always been
clear," Disraeli said, "that if you deal with the subject popular
ly called Parliamentary Reform, you must deal with it compre
hensively."

These speeches taken as a whole suggest, first, a refusal to
leave reform to the Whigs or to the Radicals; second, a willing
ness to accept a substantial measure of reform; and, third, a
hankering after a comprehensive settlement. The comprehen
sive settlement, Disraeli believed, would not be incompatible
with Toryism. Indeed, reform would produce its best results if
it were fitted into a Tory context. Disraeli s speeches reflect his
political calculations and are best considered as forensic orations
of a leading counsel, but his imagination was engaged as well as
his reasoning when he talked of an extension of the suffrage. He
had begun life as a Radical, and in the famous Rimnymede
Letters of 1835 and the Spirit of Whiggism of 1836 he main
tained with great force that Toryism was the really democratic
political philosophy of the English people; the word "demo
cratic" was not considered in these studies, as it was in 1867, as
a bogy word but as the opposite of his own bogy word "oli
garchic." Liberties and rights, he claimed, were preserved not
by revolutionary parties and radical republicans but by historic
institutions and traditions. The monarchy of the Tories was
more democratic than the republic of the Whigs; it recognized
the nexus of rights and duties. An extension of the suffrage
could not by itself sever the ties of a highly integrated society.
Even if constitutional arrangements were changed, the social
system was a guaranty of national stability. "I do not believe,"
he argued, "that any scheme of the suffrage, or any method of
election, could divert [the power of England s natural aristoc
racy] into other quarters. It is the necessary consequence of our
present social state. I believe the wider the popular suffrage, the
more powerful would be the natural aristocracy. This seems to
me an inevitable consequence, but I admit this proposition on
the clear understanding that such an extension be established on
a fair, and not a factious basis."

This line of argument, totally opposed to that of Lowe,
Disraeli abandoned only once, in 1866, when he made his most

1 278 > r

Benjamin Disraeli

conventional Conservative speeches against reform, probably
for strictly party reasons, to help defeat Gladstone. By 1867 he
had returned to his instinctive position, and seven years later he
reflected that his zeal for Tory democracy had served as the
consistent element in all his work: "I have for forty years been
labouring to replace the Tory Party in their natural and historic
position in the county."

Instinct and imagination were as strong with Disraeli as was
calculation, though it is difficult to disentangle the operations
of the three different forces. It may have been either instinct or
calculation which accounted for Disraeli s curious friendship
with John Bright in the 1850 s and 1860 s. Although their polit
ical positions were far apart, their personal relations were good.
The dandified Tory in a bright waistcoat and the quiet Quaker
in a broad-brimmed hat often shared confidences with each
other. During the Crimean War they were on very friendly
terms; even in 1867, when Bright believed that Disraeli was
merely using the reform question to cling to power, he did not
turn against him. In a conversation in the spring of 1867 Disraeli
recalled to Bright that earlier talk they had had in 1852 when
they had both objected to "Whig deception" in government.
He went on to describe his approach to reform. "He said he
did not care much for the counties: the Working-Class Ques
tion was the real question, and that was the thing that demanded
to be settled." Bright promised Disraeli that he would not in
dulge in factious opposition. "I told him," he recorded in his
Diary, "that people said that he and I always fought with
gloves on, but sometimes I had been tempted to take them off."
He replied that there had "always been something of sympathy
between us," which, added Bright, "I suppose is true tho our
course and aims have seemed so different. ... As we were talk
ing Mr. Brand, the Opposition Whip, went by, and Disraeli
said, He will think it is a Coalition that he and I should be
seen in conversation in such a crisis as this. At parting, he
pressed my hand with an apparent earnestness of feeling, saying,
Well, whatever happens, you and I will always be friends. "

Bright was always a friendly foe,; Lowe was unpalatable even
as a friend. Disraeli s estimate of the two personalities and the

{219 Y

Victorian People

causes they represented influenced his attitudes in 1866 and
1867; it made him averse to any combination with the Whigs or
the Adullamites and tempted him, even before he saw the full
possibilities, to go all out for a major resettlement.

IV

The nature of the ultimate resettlement was very different
from that envisaged by the Conservative party in March, 1867.
In the course of the debates on reform between March and
July, the Conservative Reform Bill was totally transformed. A
series of amendments was carried which not only swept away
the original safeguards but deliberately shifted the whole bal
ance of political power in Britain*

The reason for the transformation was the parliamentary
confusion in the House of Commons. The Liberals became so
divided on tactics that it was possible for Disraeli to win votes,
as Bernal Osborne pointed out, by the unsportsman-like prac
tice of cross-fishing, by which both sides of the stream were
swept, and fish attracted from every direction by a display of
different colored baits.

Tactical dilemmas made it necessary for the parties to hold
frequent meetings either inside the House of Commons or in
the houses of their leaders. So frequent did these meetings be
come that one Whig critic, Homersham Cox, the first historian
of the reform bills of 1866 and 1867, believed that the dignity
and independence of the House as a whole was being under
mined.

Disraeli was willing to take the risk of dislocating his own
party if he could further disorganize his antagonists in the
process. The task of disorganizing them was not difficult.
Lowe and Bright both wished to oppose the second reading:
Lowe, because the leaders of the government were "by the
contagion of their own immorality, breaking up and democ
ratizing everything around them"; Bright, because they were
not democratizing enough. Gladstone, as parliamentary leader
of the opposition, attempted to lay down a party line which
would satisfy both sides. He wanted to restrict the franchise to
exclude those ratepayers who were paying less than five pounds

280

Benjamin Disraeli

a year in rates but at the same time to enfranchise every house
holder above this line, whether he paid personal rates or com
pounded his rates through his landlord. In suggesting this
"compromise," he succeeded in satisfying neither Radicals nor
Adullamites, although Bright, who shared his distrust of the
"dregs of the working classes," the residuum, came to his sup
port. Opposition to Gladstone ranged from murmuring and
scuffling of feet at party meetings to voting with Conservatives
in the lobbies. "I can hardly speak a word in the Commons,"
Gladstone wrote in March, "especially if it in any manner
oppose or reflect on Disraeli with any confidence that some
man will not rise on the Liberal side to protest against it. It is an
almost unexampled position a party of vast strength is com
pletely paralysed by internal dissension. But for myself I think
the best course is to avoid all acts of leadership which can be
dispensed with."

Ten days later he forgot the "best course" and made an
attempt to lead the party by suggesting that an amendment
should be introduced embodying his own notions concerning
both suffrage restriction and compounding. Forty or fifty
Liberal members of Parliament, meeting in the tearoom of the
House of Commons, decided to oppose him. They included
a sprinkling of Adullamites, led by Lord Elcho; a Radical
group, led by Henry Fawcett, the blind member for Brighton
and professor of political economy at Cambridge; and several
Russell Whigs who "cannot bear Gladstone as their Leader."
The motives of the tearoom group were very mixed. Lord
Elcho claimed in a letter to Cranborne that "it is composed of
men acting with the fear of a coming democracy and Trades
Union tyranny before their eyes"; Fawcet had only one aim,
"to get the largest measure of reform, whether it should come
from the hands of the Government or from the Opposition."
Disunited though they were in principles, the tearoom group
were united in dislike of Gladstone s tactics, and they forced
him to withdraw his proposal to introduce a party amendment
to Disraeli s bill. This was the first real breach in the defenses
of the opposition.

Having failed to carry the party with him, Gladstone pro-

1281 f

Victorian People

ceeded to act on his own. He proposed an amendment in com
mittee to admit the compound householder as well as the per
sonal ratepayer to the franchise. It was generally known that
he wished to change the franchise along these lines only if it
were also restricted along other lines; and, consequently, he was
able to secure the support of some dissident Conservatives who
did not like reform at all. Private preferences were very diffi
cult to sort out at this stage, and the lines of party division
were very confused. Disraeli was in a position to exploit the
divisions to the utmost. In a speech which he himself described
as "marvellous and memorable" he broke through the ranks of
his enemies. Although 7 Conservatives voted with Gladstone,
his amendment was defeated by 310 votes to 289; 45 Liberals
voted against their party leaders 25 Adullamites, 12 Radicals,
and 8 members of the tearoom party and nearly 20 others ab
stained. The result of the division was "a smash perhaps without
example," and the House immediately adjourned for the Easter
recess with Disraeli the master of the situation. It was being
freely said in the lobbies that he "would hold Gladstone down
for twenty years."

It now seemed certain, as Disraeli put it, that reform could be
carried "in a canter." "There are no doubt breakers ahead," he
wrote, "but I feel great hope of our overcoming them, and of
realizing the dream of my life, and re-establishing Toryism on
a national foundation." After the Easter recess, however, it was
the Radicals who took control of the situation. They succeeded
with little difficulty in carrying amendment after amendment
against the government. During the process of revision the Re
form Bill took on an entirely new shape.

Their first amendment, proposed by the Radical member for
Tower Hamlets, the great London constituency, reduced the
period of residential qualification for voters from two years to
one. Disraeli opposed the amendment, but was beaten by 81
votes. The following night he announced that the government
had decided to accept the change.

A second amendment, proposed by the Radical member for
a second London seat, Finsbury, extended the borough fran
chise to lodgers who had occupied rooms for the whole of the

4282 Y

Benjamin Disraeli

preceding twelve months. The amendment was not put to the
vote, for Disraeli at once accepted it. At this stage he did not
very much care what particular Radical clauses were passed;
what was important was that a bill of some kind should go
through while a Conservative government was in power. At the
very moment when Conservative speakers in the Commons
were attacking the principle of offering the franchise to every
"migratory sojourner in a borough," Disraeli was writing flip
pantly to Stanley: "I wish, in the intervals of settling the affairs
of Europe, you would get up an anti-lodger speech or a speech
on the subject either way; as I think our debates want a little
variety."

The third Radical amendment was far more important than
the other two. A Newark solicitor, Hodgkinson, proposed an
amendment which abolished the distinction between com
pound householders and personal ratepayers altogether within
the boundaries of parliamentary boroughs. The technical ques
tion of compound rating had been discussed in the House of
Commons for many weeks, and on more than one occasion the
House had refused to give the vote to compound ratepayers.
The question was of great practical importance, since there
were nearly a half -million compounders in England and Wales,
comprising 35 per cent of the total number of householders.
The frequency of compounding (i.e., paying rates to the local
authority not directly but through the landlord) varied very
much from place to place. In Brighton, for instance, where
there was a great deal of compounding, only fourteen new
electors would have been added to the electorate on the basis of
Disraeli s personal rating proposal, whereas in Sheffield, where
almost all tenants paid their own rates, the whole body of
householders would have been granted the vote. Disraeli tried
to justify this variety of franchises, but Liberals as a whole dis
liked patent inequalities founded on accident rather than prin
ciple. It was, however, difficult for them to know what to do.
They did not accept the distinction between personal ratepay-
ing and compound ratepaying as a proper test of fitness for
political power; many of them would have preferred, as did
Gladstone and Bright, a division between ratepayers of all types

{283 Y

Victorian People

based on the amount of rates paid, to a division between dif
ferent categories of ratepayers. But to admit this would have
meant challenging Disraeli s slogan of "household suffrage."
The government was, as Gladstone admitted, "bowling us over
by the force of the phrase."

Hodgkinson s amendment provided a way out for the
Liberals. The mover himself thought that it would be defeated
by about a hundred votes. Instead, to the astonishment of a
small House, Disraeli accepted it; three hundred thousand new
voters were added to the franchise as a result of its passing. The
worst fears of Lowe were realized. The Conservatives were
making a desperate attempt to win the support of Demos.
Power was being transferred, as Cranborne pointed out, to
"those who have no other property than the labour of their
hands. The omnipotence of Parliament is theirs."

Hodgkinson became "immortal," as Argyll put it, as a result
of his success. His amendment virtually established complete
and unlimited household suffrage as the foundation of the bor
ough franchise in England and Wales. The concession of the
lodger franchise, the abolition of compounding restrictions, and
the cutting-down of the period of residential qualification
opened the borough franchise so wide that the fancy franchises
lost all their point. Practically everyone who might have quali
fied in terms of a fancy franchise now qualified in any case.
Unostentatiously, therefore, Disraeli eliminated all the fancy
franchise clauses which provided a link with his earlier efforts
at reform. The bill in its new form went further than any bill
which Bright had ever sought to introduce.

But there was more to come. The conditions of the franchise
had been radically altered; so too were the clauses relating to
distribution of seats. In the past the Conservatives had always
held firm on this question and had refused to increase the repre
sentation of the cities and large populous districts in the House
of Commons. But notions of balance were cast on one side in
May and June, 1867. Samuel Laing, an independent Liberal who
had supported the Adullamites, proposed a more drastic scheme
of redistribution than any the government had brought for
ward. He moved to increase the number of boroughs to be

Benjamin Disraeli

redistributed to 38 by taking away one member from boroughs
with an electorate of less than 10,000, instead of 7,000 as the
government suggested. The extra seats gained were to be
handed over in the form of second members for towns of
over 50,000. Despite the opposition of Disraeli, Laing s amend
ment was carried by the large majority of 127 votes, 72 Con
servatives voting with Laing against the government. The
process of educating the Conservative party in the political
facts of life had clearly gone a very long way. Although Radi
cal amendments to disfranchise all boroughs with a population
of less than 5,000 were defeated with Liberal help and a new
clause providing a third member for large cities was lost by 8
votes, Disraeli made a backstairs compromise by offering third
members to Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds.
It was this unsavory "surrender" which bestirred General Peel
to comment that the proceedings on the bill had taught him
three things that nothing had so little vitality as "a vital point";
that nothing was so insecure as "a security"; and that nothing
was so elastic as the conscience of a cabinet minister.

The bill, as it finally emerged from the Commons in July,
was thus different at almost every point from the bill as it was
first introduced. It was far more democratic than Disraeli, or,
indeed, most of his opponents, had ever intended. Yet for Dis
raeli himself its passing was a parliamentary triumph of the
highest order. A minority government had smashed the opposi
tion and had carried its reform bill against all the expectations
of its enemies; the greatest joy of the victory was the conscious
ness of an opponent outwitted and outmaneuvered. It was not
surprising that Bernal Osborne declared that Disraeli was the
greatest Radical in the House. It was not surprising either that
orthodox Conservatives like Lord Cranborne claimed that the
monarchical principle was dead, the aristocratic principle
doomed, and the democratic principle triumphant, all because
of a "political betrayal, which had no parallel in our annals, and
which had struck at the roots of that Parliamentary confidence
upon which alone the strength of our representative system
was maintained."

-{28JY

Victorian People

V

Why were the Conservative backbenchers prepared to ac
cept changes suggested by the Radicals with little opposition
and at times with wholehearted concurrence? Three obvious
answers stem from the preceding analysis. They shared Dis
raeli s and Derby s desire to settle the reform question; they
felt the exhilaration of the battle and reveled in the buoyant
high spirits of the debates; and they were anxious to "dish the
Whigs." After all, they had been members of a minority party
since 1846, and their short-lived share in government had de
pended upon parliamentary suiferance, not upon public sup
port. In 1867, at the end of the struggle, Derby stated quite
frankly, some said cynically, that the intention that had been
uppermost in his mind when he took office the previous year
had been to avoid at all costs being ousted by the reunited
Liberals; his purpose was "to take such a course as would con
vert the existing majority [the Liberals] into a practical minor
ity." He was determined not to be a stopgap, as he had been
before in 1852 and 1858, acting as Prime Minister until it suited
the Liberal party to forget their dissensions and bring forward
a reform bill which would oust him from office and place
them in power.

Derby s strong feelings on this subject provided a guaranty
that, once reform had been introduced, it would not be aban
doned. Many of the rank-and-file members of his party felt the
same way, and in their case feelings were intensified by fear of
a dissolution of Parliament. When Derby first told his support
ers of the nature of the reform bill he proposed to introduce,
he added that, if its central provisions were rejected, the govern
ment would dissolve. Such a penal dissolution would mean that
every member who voted against the government would, if his
cause succeded, subject himself to a fine of several hundred
pounds. It is not surprising that representative rural Tories, in
cluding some who, like Henley, had refused to support the
bill of 1859, rallied to the government.

Fear of a dissolution was real, but the positive drive for
reform came from the enthusiasm generated by Disraeli s han-

4 286 Y

Benjtmiln Disraeli

dling of the question, particularly in the vital stage before "the
Conservative surrender" after the Easter recess. It was then
that Disraeli played upon dislike of Gladstone with such con
summate skill that he made most of his backbenchers share his
delight in dividing the Liberal party. His outstanding speech
just before the Easter recess, which was largely responsible for
the bill continuing to go through, was described by Stanley as
"one of the best you have ever made. ... It has pleased all our
friends. . . . After our troubles it has conie like the warm
weather after frost and snow." Although frequent capitulation
to the Radicals after the Easter recess made some of his follow
ers restive, they were by that time in the mood for political
education. The mind of Parliament had been prepared; now it
was time for action, not purposeful action, but a series of
mental jerks, depending upon almost limitless resilience. The
better the training, the more convincing was the exercise.

The Conservatives did not make up one single team. There
were many different groups in 1867, although most of them
used the Carlton Club as a common social and political center.
Most of the ultra-Tories had died or disappeared in the previous
ten years, but the biggest group still consisted of those whom
Bernal Osborne described as "the stupid, heavy country gentle
men." Some of the members of this group were by no means
completely well disposed to Disraeli. He was disliked by the
ordinary member of Parliament for his reserve and mistrusted
by many of them as a Jew and a "mystery man." "They did his
bidding" -one of them said in retrospect "for the party has
always followed its leader, but they hated it; and very many,
including myself, felt that there was something like a repetition
of Sir R. Peel s betrayal." That there was no large-scale rebel
lion was important. Horsman, Lowe s friend, had estimated
that forty to fifty Tories would follow Lord Cranborne, but
they never did so. There was no "Cranborne Cave" comparable
to the cave of the Adullamites; nor was Cranborne tempera
mentally suited or of sufficient political experience to play the
same part in 1867 which Disraeli had played in 1846.

Bagehot suggested that it was the stupidity of most of the
Tories which insured the success of Disraeli s tactics in 1867.

Victorian People

They did not know what was happening. Chancing to visit a
purely agricultural and Conservative county, he asked the local
Tories, "Do you understand this Reform Bill? Do you know
that your Conservative Government has brought in a Bill far
more Radical than any former Bill, and that it is very likely to
be passed?"

The answer I got was, "What stuff you talk! How can it be a
Radical Reform Bill? Why Bright opposed it!" There was no
answering that in a way in which a "common jury" could under
stand. The Bill was supported by the Times and opposed by Mr.
Bright; and therefore the mass of the Conservatives and of com
mon moderate people without distinction of party, had no con
ception of the effect. They said it was "London nonsense" if you
tried to explain it to them. The nation indeed generally looks to
the discussions in Parliament to enlighten it as to the effect of the
Bills. But in this case neither party, as a party, could speak out.
Many, perhaps most of the intelligent Conservatives, were fearful
of the consequences of the proposal; but as it was made by the
heads of their own party, they did not like to oppose it, and the
discipline of party carried them with it.

There was a very small group of Tories, however, who were
prepared to follow the same course of action as Cranborne.
They included General Peel, "whose eye," according to Dis
raeli, "lit up with insanity" when the phrase "household suf
frage" was mentioned, and Carnavon, one of the rising hopes
of the party. Among backbenchers, men like Sir William
Heathcote, the senior member for Oxford University, persisted
throughout the debates in arguing that the Reform Bill would
destroy the influence of rank, property, and education by in
creasing the force of numbers. But men like Heathcote and
Cranborne were intellectuals of the right, never unduly wor
ried by tactical considerations within the House of Commons
or by pressure from their constituents outside. Disraeli had al
ready had to tell Heathcote in 1861 to think more of tactics and
less of principles. "After all, politics is like war roughish
work," Disraeli had written then; "we should not be over
sensitive." If the advice was not repeated in 1867, it was because
Disraeli knew it would have no effect.

There was a third group of Conservative members of Parlia-

<[ 288 Y

Benjamin Disraeli

ment, distinct from both the country members and the intellec
tualsthe Conservative members for urban constituencies. It is
clear that these men played a not inconsiderable part in the
story of the passing of the second Reform Bill. The most impor
tant of them was Samuel Robert Graves, the member for Liver
pool. Graves, who was a wealthy merchant and shipowner and
had been mayor of Liverpool in 1860, saw Disraeli immediately
after the government had decided to include a reference to
reform in the Queen s speech and expressed delight at the pro
posals "an immense relief to him: only one opinion out of
doors: settlement of the question." Graves was called upon to
second the reply to the address in the House of Commons.
Throughout 1867 he led a group of Conservative members who
were anxious for large-scale redistribution rather than a lower
ing of the franchise as the basis of comprehensive reform; and
it was because of his pressure that Disraeli finally expressed his
willingness to grant a third member to Liverpool, Manchester,
Birmingham, and Leeds.

Another urban Conservative from the same area was also
influential. Laird, the shipbuilder, who sat for Birkenhead, was
in close touch with middle-class Conservative interests in Lan
cashire. So indeed was Derby himself. It has been said that
Derby s local leadership during the cotton famine "had not a
little to do with turning Lancashire from one of the most Radi
cal into one of the most Tory districts in England. * After the
bill was passed, he welcomed the mass demonstrations in favor
of the bill in the cotton areas. Towns like Blackburn and Sal-
ford were strong centers of urban conservatism. The pressure
of constituency affected the character of the representatives
selected. Conservatives were bound to become more "demo
cratic" when they sat for large towns.

It is difficult to estimate the strength of the urban Conserva
tive group or the extent to which industrial activity influenced
the attitudes of Conservative members. Fourteen Conservatives
had interests in shipping, three in engineering, seven in metals,
and one in building and contracting. Some of these members
sat for small boroughs rather than for large cities, and the
Graves group was supported throughout by men like Goldney,

Victorian People

the member for Chippenham, and Jervis, the member for Har
wich. Apparently, the inner core of the group consisted of
about twenty-two men, but they were able to win over many
county members as well. One hundred and fifty members of
Parliament were present at a Conservative meeting held at the
end of February, and the majority of them declared in favor of
household suffrage with three years residence and a personal
payment of rates. The urban members succeeded in persuading
the "county caucus" present at this meeting that there was little
point in preserving a constitution which maintained Whig
supremacy in Parliament. As Malmesbury had pointed out as
early as 1853, there were grounds for believing that if the five-
pound householders were often Radical, the laborers were often
Conservative; or, as Dudley Baxter, the electoral statistician,
had told Disraeli, "beer-barrel influence" would be most pro
nounced if the widest of all plans were adopted.

It was this decision of this meeting which had persuaded
Disraeli that "the bold line is the safer one, and, moreover, that
it will be successful." Throughout the whole reform struggle
Disraeli, who had spoken disparagingly only a year earlier of
"the rule of mobs in great towns, and the sway of turbulent
multitudes," leaned more and more heavily on the urban Con
servative members. The results of the alliance with urban
conservatism were not apparent until the end of the 1874 elec
tion, although at the general election of 1868, which the Lib
erals won, nineteen out of the thirty-two Lancashire seats
returned Conservatives. In 1874 striking Conservative gains
were recorded in great manufacturing towns, such as Man
chester, Leeds, Bradford, Oldham, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Not
tingham, Stoke-on-Trent, Wakefield, Wigan, Warrington,
Staleybridge, and Northampton, as well as in the large popu
lous London districts such as Chelsea, Greenwich, Marylebone,
Southwark, and, most important of all, the vast constituency
of Tower Hamlets. The 1874 election showed that it was the
Whigs and not the Tories whose power had been challenged
by the extension of the franchise and the redistribution of
seats. Pure Whiggery had always survived with difficulty in a
smoky atmosphere; now its continued existence came to be

4 290 Y

Benjamin Disraeli

almost impossible. The great Whig Clarendon might write
slightingly in 1868 that "a demoralized nation admires the
audacity, the tricks and the success of the Jew"; but, by 1874,
new Radicals, like Chamberlain, were as anti-Whig as they
were anti-Tory. Probably Derby, who himself knew the vigor
and vitality of the Lancashire workingmen s Conservative asso
ciations, and followed up the Reform Bill with "Tory demo
cratic" speeches at Manchester and Liverpool, was as farsighted
as Disraeli in foreseeing the long-term results of 1867.

VI

Although the passing of the second Reform Bill was wel
comed by most of the Conservatives, including some, like Lord
Cairns, who had hitherto attacked all schemes of substantial
reform, it was less happily received by influential Conservative
sympathizers outside the immediate parliamentary circle. "The
gross hypocrisy," the aged Lord Shaftesbury called the bill.
"With the exception of a very few advanced Democrats, they
all detest and fear the measure. But it is a sensual and self-
seeking age, they hate trouble, they hate responsibility, they
hate to look an evil in the face. They crown their cups with
roses, and their heads with folly and f orgetfulness. " It was not
the welfare of the realm or the security of national institutions
which had prompted the measure but the seeking after place,
the omnivorous desire for power and office. "You practically
banish all honourable men from the political arena," added
Cranborne; "and you will find in the long run that the time will
come when your statesmen will become nothing but political
adventurers, and professions of opinion will be looked upon
only as so many political manoeuvres for the purpose of obtain
ing office." "Derby has set himself to prove that dishonesty is
the best policy," wrote Lord Dalhousie. "The Reform Bill may
be a leap in the dark to him, it is none to me. Where we have
lifted the sluices of democracy an inch, he and Dizzy have
raised them a foot. My own private hope is that they will be
the first to be washed away in the flood." Eraser s Magazine
described an incident at the Carlton Club. A message boy with

Victorian People

a sense of humor stopped at the doors and asked, "Is this the
Reform Club?"

"No, you rascal," was the reply, "the Revolution Club."
Party discipline may compel votes, Frasefs concluded; "it can
not compel conviction, hide regret, or cover shame."

Writers like the prophet Carlyle and the poet Coventry Pat-
more were equally enraged. "Traitorous politicians grasping at
votes, even votes from the rabble/ 7 had tumbled the country
over the precipice. Eighteen-sixty-seven was

The year of the great crime,

When the false English nobles, and their Jew,

By God demented, slew

The trust they stood twice pledged to keep from wrong.

Carlyle could see no hope for the future. "Perhaps the sooner
such a mass of hypocrisies, universal mismanagements, and
brutal platitudes and infidelities ends, if not in some improve
ment then in death and fms, may it not be the better?"

Such profound gloom could not have been produced by an
ordinary act of political legerdemain or the most clever polit
ical juggling. It emanated from a complete uncertainty about
the future. Power was to be transferred "tamely and miserably"
so it seemed to the critics from the middle classes to the
working classes, from the political elite to the masses of the
large towns.

Some of the critics, like Shaftesbury, could claim that they
knew the towns better than the makers of the act. They could
see in them happy hunting grounds for the carpetbagging
demagogues and shady corners for the corrupt wire-pullers.
The masses themselves would become dangerous not because
they were violent but because they were amenable to pressure
the pressure of socialists as well as of plutocrats. Shaftesbury s
fears were shared by Lowe and by Bagehot. The extension of
the franchise would open the gates to dangerous forces which
had previously been kept under control. "If the first work of
the poor voters," said Bagehot, "is to try to create a poor man s
paradise, as poor men are apt to fancy that paradise, and they
are apt to think they can create it, the great political trial now

i 292 Y

Benjamin Disraeli

beginning will simply fail. The wide gift of the elective fran
chise will be a great calamity to the whole nation, and to those
who gain it as great a calamity as to any."

"The leap in the dark," Derby called the act. But was it not
the first of a series of leaps in the dark which might go on for
years to come? Facilis descensus Averni. "The appetite for
change can never be glutted," said Cranborne; neither Disraeli
nor Bright could appease it. "When Mr. Bright is preaching
moderation and caution, Mr. Beales [of the Reform League]
will be just girding himself for the battle; and doubtless Mr.
Beales already numbers among his lieutenants politicians who
look upon him as absurdly behind the age. The Girondist al
ways has a Jacobin behind him ready to trip him up."

Behind such gloomy prophecies were the memories of twen
ty years of political controversy and the very real fears of the
working classes. Was it not taking a big risk in 1867 to give the
vote to large numbers of workingmen about whose real pur
poses the leaders of society knew very little? It did not need
the icy eloquence of Lowe to emphasize the key importance of
this question. As Homersham Cox, the moderate Whig reform
er, put it: "The Earl of Derby hopes that all will turn out
well. Adventurous gamesters are always hoping for luck; that
the right card will be dealt, the right number turn up on the
dice, the right horse win. But hitherto it has not been con
sidered good statesmanship to commit the destinies of our
empire unreservedly to Fortune. We have been content to ad
vance from precedent to precedent, to pass from the known to
the unknown by slow and heedful steps. The policy of political
leaps remained to be invented by a government which called
itself Conservative." A period of measured discussion of poli
tics and society had ended in a political gamble.

There were three possible grounds for optimism. The first
was general. Why fear the masses of the people? Working
people were just as much entitled to the vote as of right as any
other people. They were England. How, then, could they do
anything against English interests? This democratic argument
did not excite even philosophic Radicals like Mill or middle-
class Radicals like Bright. Mill was increasingly afraid of the

4 293 f

Victorian People

tyranny of majorities and of a "governing majority of manual
labourers" limiting competition in the labor market, taxing or
restricting machinery, and protecting the home producer
against foreign industry; while Bright feared the enfranchise
ment of a dependent class and was careful not to identify his
arguments too closely with those of democracy. Disraeli, the
author of the bill, was very careful to insist that democracy
was a form of government with which his party had no sym
pathy.

The second ground was based on observation. The working
classes were not dangerous or revolutionary; they fitted into
the social system rather than aimed at its destruction. Their
organizations, including the trade-unions and the co-operative
societies, were valuable voluntary bodies, subordinating indi
vidual selfishness to the good of the group. The state would
gain from their active interest in politics. Far from the influence
of liberal statesmen being diminished in the future, it would
increase. Far from conservatism being blotted out, it would
discover new support in the lower strata of the population. The
deeper one penetrated the working classes, the more likely
would he be able to find there a vein of gold and to encounter
the presence of highly conservative feeling.

The third reason was closely associated with the second,
though it depended on temperament rather than on calculation.
If one were not melancholy but optimistic by nature, he might
put his trust in the good sense of all groups in the community.
Derby and Disraeli did this. Derby expressed "the greatest con
fidence in the sound sense of my fellow-countrymen" and
entertained "a strong hope that the extended franchise which
we are now conferring upon them will be the means of placing
the institutions of this country on a firmer basis." Disraeli talked
also of strengthening the institutions of the country. To the
members of a workingmen s club he wrote: "None are so inter
ested in maintaining the institutions of the country as the work
ing classes. The rich and the powerful will not find much dif
ficulty under any circumstances in maintaining their rights, but
the privileges of the people can only be defended and secured
by popular institutions." This was not cant, though it may have

Benjamin Disraeli

been emotion calculated in tranquillity. Being good politicians,
Derby and Disraeli knew that, once they had begun to tamper
with the constitution, there was no natural barrier between
them and the full concession of household suffrage. Disraeli
knew, too, that his own ambitions for the future could be real
ized only if the country had a future also. He trusted the elec
torate. In the last resort it was Disraeli, the opportunist, who
was the optimist, and Cranborne and Lowe, the men of princi
ple, who were the cynics.

The passing of the Reform Bill in 1867 brought to a close a
period of history. As soon as the act was passed, new political
and social questions began to force themselves to the forefront.
As Bagehot said: "A political country is like an American
forest: you have only to cut down the old trees, and immediate
ly new trees come up to replace them; the seeds were waiting
in the ground, and they began to grow as soon as the with
drawal of the old ones brought in light and air."

Soon the landscape itself was to change. The intellectual
and social climate of the 1870 s was far more variable than that
of the 1860 s, and the new trees were no longer allowed to
grow where the old ones had been withdrawn. An enlarged
electorate was left to wrestle with the problems of a compli
cated world in which ideas and interests clashed and issues
loomed larger than men.

129SY

XI

The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a great
transformation in the character of English politics and society.
The Reform Bill of 1867 proved no more final than the Reform
Bill of 1832, and in 1884 the vote had to he granted to the
agricultural as well as to the urban laborer.^v ith the emergence
of a mass electorate, political ideas and organization were
bound to change, and the central issues of politics moved from
the battle for the vote to the battle for what to do with it.

There was a change too in theoe^onomic atmosphere. From
1868 to 1872 the country passed through a roaring boom, what
Disraeli described as "a convulsion of prosperity," but in 1873
there was a dramatic financial crash, followed by a sustained
fall in interest rates and commodity prices. The rate of increase
of total industrial production fell also, although output per
man continued to increase.

Against such a backgroundi^griculture was the first indus
try to languish: prices dropped, rents fell, and many great
country estates were in the doldrums. The mid-century power
of land was partially broken; in the words of Lady Bracknell,
in Oscar Wilde s The Importance of Being Earnest (1889):
"What between the duties expected of one during one s life
time, and the duties exacted from one after one s death, land
has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one posi
tion, and prevents one from keeping it up. That s all that can
be said about land." Farmers were swamped from the bad
harvest of 1879 onward by a flood of cheap wheat from Amer
ica. The acreage of home-grown wheat fell by a million be
tween 1875 and 1884, and prices per quarter, which had soared
to 74 shillings in 1855 during the Crimean War, dropped to as

Epilogue

little as 19 shillings in 1894. In such circumstances it is not
surprising that there was a new demand for agricultural protec
tion, even while John Bright was still alive. "It is strange to
hear after thirty years of silence," wrote the Echo in 1878,
"issuing as it were from the tomb the assertions and fallacies
which most people thought were buried beyond the hope of
resurrection."

Businessmen, too, were confronted with serious problems in
the 1870 s and 1880 sproblems springing from increased for
eign competition and falling profit margins. "Chimneys still
smoke and engines clank," wrote J. A. Froude in 1890, "and
the volume of our foreign trade does not diminish, but if the
volume is maintained the profits fall, and our articles must
be produced cheaper and even cheaper if we are to hold our
ground." Some of the hardest-hit businessmen dropped all
talk of free trade and talked of "fair trade" instead; others
abandoned their reliance on themselves and turned increasingly
either to industrial combination or to the state. Against such a
background, the appeal of Samuel Smiles was bound to diminish
among employers as well as workmen.

As far as the workmen were concerned, although the em
ployed continued to enjoy rising real wages and there was no
general contraction of output, there were dangerous concentra
tions of unemployment in some areas and hard fights in some
industries to maintain money wages. Sectional struggles with
in the labor movement were accompanied by increased antago
nism in the relations of labor and capital. Large claims were
made in the political as well as the economic field, as Bagehot
had feared in 1867, and as Lowe had prophesied. "We [labor],"
wrote the editor of Reynold s Newspaper in 1882, "have about
as much real power as the child enjoys who tries to get hold
of the stars. Nurse gives it a bit of coloured glass and the little
silly goes comforted to sleep."

It is no longer fashionable or in conformity with technical
economic vocabulary to describe the last quarter of the nine
teenth century as a great depression, but there is something de
pressing about this course of events. The balance of the middle
century was upset as the clamor of sectional interest groups

Victorian People

began to prove stronger than the voice of the nation. When the
new gospel of empire produced a noisy rallying point in the
last decade of the century, it was the turn of the intellectual
to be disillusioned. Already he had begun to react strongly
against mid- Victorian conceptions of authority in the moral as
well as in the political sphere; now he often became disillusioned
with the results. "Fin de siecle" murmured Sir Henry in
Wilde s Picture of Dorian Gray. "Fin du globe" answered his
hostess. "I wish it was fin du globe" said Dorian with a sigh;
"life is such a great disappointment."

The conditions and mood of the last generations of Victorian
England were more complicated than these bold generalizations
suggest, but the contrast between the conflicts of the late nine
teenth century and the balance of the middle century is real
enough. A strident note can be detected in English late-nine
teenth-century society, which made Elie Halevy feel that Vic
torian England died several years before the death of Queen
Victoria. "The period between 1895 and 1914," he remarked,
"does not belong to the nineteenth century as I see it."

Yet the historian must not use too strong colors if he wishes
to be faithful to the continuities hidden behind the story. There
was a real relationship between the mid-century period and
that which followed it. Just as the world described in this book
grew out of the troubled world of the 1840 s the context of
the first initiating experiences in society and politics for Dis
raeli, Bright, Hughes, and Smilesso, many of the new features
of England after 1873 were prepared by hidden social erosion
in the 1850 s and 1860 s.

The mid- Victorian family, for instance, which was con
sidered by contemporaries as "the unit upon which a constitu
tional government has been raised which is the culmination and
envy of mankind," was faced by serious social and psycho
logical problems before the spectacular development of family
limitation in the late seventies and eighties. The younger mid-
Victorian intellectuals, also, were moving in a new world to
that of Bagehot or Lowe even before the 1850 s had ended.
Perhaps 1859 was the turning point. "It would be difficult to
name any one year in the whole history of mankind," wrote the

i 298 Y

Epilogue

rebel Havelock Ellis, "in which the human spirit was more pro
foundly stirred to more manifold original achievements" than
the year 1859. The Origin of Species and the Rubaiydt of Omar
Khayyam appeared in the bookshops in this year at the same
time as Self-Help. So did Mill s essay On Liberty, which not
only looked back to Benthamite individualism in the early cen
tury but forward also to that burst of late-nineteenth-century
individuality which unsettled all existing intellectual systems
and challenged all existing moral codes.

But Havelock Ellis saw a different 1859 from that seen by the
characters described in this book; it was the annus mirabilis
only of the young men and the future. For an older generation

This double decade of the world s short span
Is richer than two centuries of old.

It is difficult to believe that any of the Victorian people de
scribed in these pages could have traced their steps differently
across the mid-century years. They walked with assured and
measured tread although they were not always certain of the
road they were taking toward different destinations. It was
only after 1867, when the young men were talking of a new
age of emancipation, that a few of the old were sure that they
were journeying into the darkness.

This bibliographical note is highly selective; it is designed primarily
for the assistance of the reader who wishes further to pursue the
subjects of the separate chapters.

I. INTRODUCTION

For a general narrative history of the period three volumes are
of great value: Spencer Walpole, History of England, 1815-1815
(6 vols.; rev. ed.; London, 1890); Herbert Paul, A History of
Modern England (5 vols.; London, 1904); and W. N. Molesworth,
The History of England, 1830-1874 (3 vols.; London, 1875).

More recent books which signpost the changes in historical in
terpretation are Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (London,
1918); G. M. Young (ed.), Early Victorian England (2 vols.; Lon
don, 1934); W. W. Rostow, British Economy of the Nineteenth
Century (Oxford, 1948); Basil Willey, Nineteenth Century Studies
(London, 1949); Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians (London,
1949), a useful symposium of radio talks; Joseph E. Baker (ed.),
The Reinterpretation of Victorian Literature (Princeton, 1950);
John Holloway, The Victorian Sage (London, 1953); and Kath
leen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen Forties (Oxford, 1954).

lie Halevy s masterly Histoire du peuple anglais (6 vols.; Paris:
1912-47) has been translated into English. Although it does not
cover the years described in this book, it is of fundamental impor
tance in understanding the background of the period.

II. THE CRYSTAL PALACE AND THE MEN OF 1851

Martin Tupper, from whom the introductory quotation is taken,
was a poet-philosopher whose Proverbial Philosophy (London,
1850) was a best-seller of the day. A recent book about him is by
Derek Hudson, Martin Tupper: His Rise and Fall (London, 1949).

Many books on the Exhibition of 1851 were published for its
centenary celebrations, but a study of its Official Catalogue (Lon
don, 1851) is still the best source. See also Christopher Hobhouse,
1851 and the Crystal Palace (London, 1937). In a 1950 edition,
illustrated by Osbert Lancaster, Mr. Lancaster contributes an inter
esting Preface on the changing attitude toward the Victorians.
C. R. Fay s Palace of Industry, 1851 (Cambridge, 1951) is an inter
esting scrapbook, and Yvonne Ffrench s The Great Exhibition

i 300 Y

Bibliographical Note

(London, 1951) is a good popular study. Nikolaus Pevsner s High
Victorian Design (London, 1951) is by far the best book on the
"taste" of the period.

There are few good studies of religion and politics in 1851. The
Letters of Queen Victoria: A Selection,, edited by A. C. Benson
and Lord Esher (London, 1908), Volume II, gives perhaps the best
over-all picture. An interesting and well-documented article by
G. H. Le May, "The Ministerial Crisis of 1851," History Today,
Volume I (June, 1951), deals with the central political maneuvers
of the early part of the year; there is no full study of the dismissal
of Palmerston. Edwin Hodder s The Life and Work of the Seventh
Earl Shaftesbury (3 vok; London, 1887) is useful for social as well
as religious questions.

Sir Llewellyn Woodward has written a stimulating essay on
"1851 and the Visibility of Progress," in Ideas and Beliefs of the
Victorians (London, 1950).

III. JOHN ARTHUR ROEBUCK AND THE CRIMEAN WAR

P. E. Leader s Life of J. A. Roebuck (London, 1897) remains
the only full study. For Roebuck s Radical background, including
relations with Urquhart and Layard, see Simon Maccoby, English
Radicalism, 1853-1886 (London, 1938).

Some other personalities discussed in this chapter are described
in Sir Edward Cook, Delane of the Times (New York, 1916).
Cook has also written about Florence Nightingale, as has Mrs.
Cecil Woodham-Smith, whose book called Florence Nightingale
(London, 1950) was mentioned in the Introduction and whose re
cent book on the Charge of the Light Brigade, The Reason Why
(London, 1953), is a lively and exciting study.

The classic book on the Crimean War is by A. W. Kinglake,
The Invasion of the Crimea (9 vols.; 6th ed.; Edinburgh, 1887),
but it is interesting to compare it with the volume by W. H.
Russell, the war correspondent, The Great War with Russia (Lon
don, 1895).

The distant origins of Russophobia are discussed by J. H. Glea-
son, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain (Cambridge,
Mass., 1950), while the immediate background of public opinion and
the war is sketched in Kingsley Martin, The Triumph of Lord Palm
erston (New York, 1924). G. B. Henderson has produced an excel
lent series of essays on Crimean War Diplomacy (Manchester,
1947).

IV. TROLLOPE, BAGEHOT, AND THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION

.ution
iportant

4301

Bagehot s English Constitution was first published in 1867; a
second edition, with an important additional chapter, was pub-

Victorian People

lished in 1872. His complete works have been edited by Mrs.
Russell Harrington in ten volumes (London, 1915). There has been
little critical writing about his personality or his ideas.

By contrast Trollope has had many commentators; one of the
ablest is Michael Sadleir, Trollope: A Commentary (rev. ed.; New
York, 1947). It provides a full bibliography of his novels and a
scholarly analysis of them. Trollope s own An Autobiography
(London, 1883) is still an indispensable source.

For the political background of the period see Norman Gash,
Politics in the Age of Peel (London, 1953), and C. C. Seymour,
Electoral Reform in England and Wales (New Haven, Conn.,
1915). A fascinating nineteenth-century study is by Sir John Walsh,
The Practical Results of the Re-form Bill of 1832 (London, 1860).

There is no good secondary material on civil service reform,
although one side of the picture is presented fully in an article
by Edward Hughes, "Civil Service Reform, 1853-1855," History,
Volume XXVII (June, 1942).

For the general background of English political thought see
Crane Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Cen
tury (Cambridge, Mass., 1950).

V. SAMUEL SMILES AND THE GOSPEL OF WORK

The most important source for the study of Smiles, who has
received little attention from twentieth-century historians, is his
Autobiography (London, 1905), edited by Thomas Mackay. For a
picture of the radical milieu of his early youth see an article by
Asa Briggs, "Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn-Law Rhymer," Cambridge
Journal, Volume III (August, 1950). On the mid-Victorian middle
classes in general see Roy Lewis and Angus Maude, The English
Middle Classes (London, 1949).

Success literature is more common in the middle of the nine
teenth century than has usually been recognized. Three interest
ing English examples are Success in Life: A Book for Young Men
(London, 1852), mentioned on page 119; Men Who Have Risen:
A Book for Boys (London, n.d.); and Fortunes Made in Business
(London, 1887). On the comparative American material see Rich
ard Word, "The Rags to Riches Story: An Episode of Secular
Idealism," in Class, Status and Power, ed. Reinhard Bendix and
S. M. Lipset (Glencoe, III, 1953).

VI. THOMAS HUGHES AND THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

A valuable detailed study of English public schools in relation to
the main currents of national thought and life is the two-volume
work of E. C. Mack, Public Schools and British Opinion (New
York, 1941).

4 302 Y

Bibliographical Note

For a more popular picture of the history and buildings of each
of the main public schools see F. A. M. Webster, Our Great Public
Schools: Their Traditions, Customs and Games (London, 1937).
It is from this book that the proud declaration, quoted on page 140,
is taken.

By far the best work on Thomas Arnold is still A. P. Stanley s
The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold (2 vols.; London,
1877). When he wrote it, Dean Stanley was Regius Professor of
Modern History in the University of Oxford. He and some of Ar
nold s other pupils are discussed at length in Frances J. Wood
ward, The Doctor s Disciples (Oxford, 1954). A popular modern
picture of Arnold himself is painted by Norman Wymer in Dr.
Arnold of Rugby (London, 1953).

On Thomas Hughes see the excellent recent study by E. C. Mack
and W. H. G. Armytage, Thomas Hughes (London, 1953), which
firmly sets Hughes in the middle of Victorian society. Tom
Brown s School Days (1858) is obtainable in many different editions.

VII. ROBERT APPLEGARTH AND THE TRADE-UNIONS

The best general account of English trade-unionism, although it
must now be qualified at many points, is that by Sidney and Bea
trice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (London, 1920 ed.).
G. D. H. Cole has written an interesting essay called "Some Notes
on British Trade Unionism in the Third Quarter of the Nine
teenth Century," International Review for Social History (Am
sterdam), Volume II (1937).

On the engineers see J. B. Jeffreys, The Story of the Engineers
(London, 1945); on the builders, carpenters, and joiners see Ray
mond Postgate, The Builders History (London, 1923).

None of the twentieth-century writers catches the full flavor of
the Report of Royal Commission Appointed To Enquire into
Trade Unions (1867) or the earlier Report on Trade Societies
(1860) of the influential Social Science Association. Interesting
mid-nineteenth-century surveys are J. M. Ludlow and Lloyd Jones,
The Progress of the Working Classes, 1832-1867 (London, 1867),
and the Comte de Paris, The Trade Unions of England (London,
1869). This latter book had the distinction of being translated by
the economist, Nassau Senior, and of being edited by Thomas
Hughes. See also for the attitudes of a journeyman engineer who
was quoted by Matthew Arnold as one of the finest examples of
the working class, Thomas Wright, Our New Masters (1873).

There is only one life of Applegarth, that by R. Humphrey
(London, 1913).

Victorian People

VIII. JOHN BRIGHT AND THE CREED OF REFORM

The best introduction to the politics of the period and a good
link with the material in the previous chapter is F. E. Gillespie,
Labor and Politics in England (Durham, N.C., 1927).

For John Bright himself see G. M. Trevelyan, John Bright
(London, 1913), and a more recent and very useful book by J.
Travis Mills, John Bright and the Quakers (2 vols.; London, 1935).
G. B. Smith s The Life and Speeches of John Bright (2 vols.; Lon
don, 1881) is a basic book to study, as is John Morley s Life of
Cobden (2 vols.; London, 1881). Much useful additional material
is contained in The Diaries of John Bright, with a Foreword by
Philip Bright (London, 1930).

It is interesting to compare Bright s creed of reform with the
main current of reform ideas in the middle of the century. See a
stimulating article by F. H. Herrick, "The Second Reform Move
ment in England," Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume IX
(April, 1948). For the key years after 1859 see W. E. Williams,
The Rise of Gladstone to the Leadership of the Liberal Party,
1859-1868 (Cambridge, 1934), and, more recently, Sir Philip Mag
nus superb biography, Gladstone (London, 1954).

Bright s attitude toward the United States is analyzed sympa
thetically by J. G. Randall in an essay, "Lincoln and John Bright,"
reprinted in Lincoln, the Liberal Statesman (New York, 1947).

IX. ROBERT LOWE AND THE FEAR OF DEMOCRACY

There is no satisfactory biography of Robert Lowe. A. P. Mar
tin s Life and Letters of the Rt. Hon. Robert Lowe, Viscount
Sherbrooke (2 vols.; London, 1893) deserves all the rebukes Lytton
Strachey bestowed on heavy "official lives." It is one-sided and
ponderous, but it does include Lowe s own typewritten memoir,
produced in 1876. A good account of his Australian experiences is
given by J. F. Hogan in Robert Lowe (London, 1893), while Vis
count Bryce wrote stimulating essays about both him and Disraeli
in Studies in Contemporary Biography (New York, 1903).

Lowe s political ideas are set out cogently and at times brilliantly
in his Speeches and Letters on Reform (London, 1867); those of
critics are similarly propounded in Essays on Reform (London,
1866). For his ideas on administration, foreign policy, and economic
questions there are some interesting unpublished letters to and
from Lord Granville and some useful comments on his views and
personality in the Political Correspondence of Mr. Gladstone and
Lord Granville, 1868-1816 (2 vols.; London, 1952).

For the background of the educational changes of the last cen
tury see G. A. N. Lowndes, The Silent Social Revolution (Lon
don, 1937).

Bibliographical Note

X. BENJAMIN DISRAELI AND THE LEAP IN THE DARK

The monumental standard Life of Benjamin Disraeli, by W. F.
Monypenny and George Earle Buckle (2 vols.; London, 1929), is
the sourcebook for all Disraeli studies. It does not completely over
shadow or supplement earlier books, however, of which the best
written is by J. A. Froude, The Earl of Beaconsfield (London,
1890). Lewis Apjohn s The Earl of Beaconsfield (London, 1884) is
also useful. The last days of the Earl are discussed in Memorials of
Lord Beaconsfield (London, 1881).

There is a dearth of good accounts of nineteenth-century con
servatism or of the development of the Conservative party. The
necessary material for such a survey is scattered about in innumer
able biographies, of which the most useful is Lady Gwendolen
Cecil s Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury, Vol. I: 1830-1868
(London, 1921). There is no good biography of Lord Derby; the
brief and ill-documented Life by George Saintsbury (London,
1892) is most inadequate.

On Lancashire, which is a key area in this story, see R. A. Ar
nold, The History of the Cotton Famine (London, 1865).

XI. EPILOGUE

Of many books on the England of the last part of the nine
teenth century, by far the best is by T. H. S. Escort, England: Her
People, Polity and Pursuits (London, 1885). A useful modern study
with a full bibliography of books and articles is H. M. Lynd, Eng
land in the Eighte en-eighties: Towards a Social Basis for Freedom
(New York, 1945). See also Elie Halevy, Imperialism and the Rise
of Labour (rev. ed.; London, 1951).

4 305

Aberdeen, fourth Earl of, 32, 57,
58, 66, 67, 70, SO, 217

Adams, Henry, 91

Adderley, Sir Charles (Lord Nor
ton), 237, 256,258

Adullamites, the, 229, 230, 237 fL,
268, 271, 280, 281, 282, 284

Agriculture: late-century depres
sion in, 296-97; mid-century
prosperity of, 2, 22; state of, in
1851, 20-22

Albert, Prince Consort, 16, 17, 20,
40, 41, 42, 50, 62, 67, 70, 215

Alger, Horatio, 119, 120

Allan, William, 177, 181, 188, 191

Allen, Grant, 138

AUen, William, 177, 181, 188, 191

Alma, Battle of, 60, 62

Amalgamated Society of Carpen
ters and Joiners, 168 if., 249, 250

Amalgamated Society of Engi
neers, 11, 20

American Civil War, 130, 164, 171,
201, 223, 224, 225

Anti-Corn Law League, 21, 192,
195, 204, 205, 207, 208, 213, 214

Applegarth, Robert (1834-1925):
assessment of career of, 169-70,
173; association of, with labor
movement, 168 ff.; association of,
with Reform League, 191-93;
background of, 170 ff.; connec
tion of, with Thomas Hughes,
165; role of, in the proceedings
of the Royal Commission of
1867, 183-89, 249; visit of, to
America, 170-72

Argyll, eighth Duke of, 88, 284

Arkwright, Sir Richard, 132, 185

Army: appeal of, 127; reform of,
76 fT., 259; and volunteer move
ment, 128
Arnold, Matthew, 4-5, 68, 112, 145

Arnold, Thomas, 138, 141 if.
Ashley, Lord ( seventh Earl of

Shaftesbury), 22, 24, 25, 26, 210,

227, 291, 292
Australia, 22, 171, 243-46, 254, 259

Babbage, Charles, 39

Bacon, Francis, 107

Bagehot, Walter (1826-77): atti
tude of, toward society, 98 if.,
113-14; background of, 87 ff.,
199; eiforts of, to sit in Parlia
ment, 99 ff.; opinion of, on
Bright, 200; opinion of, on
Lowe, 234; opinion of, on Re
form Bill of 1867, 287-88, 292-
93, 295, 297-98; philosophy and
writings of, 87 if.; political po
sition of, 113-14, 205, 295

Baines, Edward, 278

Balaclava, Battle of, 60

BaUot, 105, 114

Baxter, Dudley, 290

Beales, Edmund, 191, 192, 194, 293

Bennett, William, 24

Benson, A. C, 144

Benthamites, 65, 93, 125, 254, 263,
299

Beverley, 101 ff.

Birkenhead, 289

Birmingham: political activities in,
84, 203, 216, 229, 230, 275, 285,
289; religious composition of, 28;
social structure of, 220

Blackburn, 289

Blatchford, Robert, 137-38

Bradford, 228, 290

Brand, Henry Robert, 279

Bright, John (1811-88), 10, 240,
259, 260, 266, 293, 297, 298; and
the Adullamites, 237; and the
American Civil War, 201-2, 223-
25; attitude of, toward state in-

4307

Victorian People

terference, 210, 211; background
and personality of, 197 ff.; and
church rates, 205-6, 208; and
Corn Law repeal, 23, 198 ff.; and
the Crimean War and the East
ern Question, 59, 66, 81, 83, 201,
213 ff., 239; and the Ecclesiasti
cal Titles Bill, 26; importance
of, assessed, 197; on Lowe, 261;
and the Manchester School,
209 ff.; as member for Birming
ham, 220 ff.; on Palmerston, 69;
and parliamentary reform and
the Reform Union, 192, 220 ff.,
228 ff., 247, 266 if., 280, 281, 288,
294; relations of, with Disraeli,
279; on Russell, 222-23

Brighton, 283

Brindley, James, 117, 132

Bristol, 228

Broadhead, William, 181

Bronte, Charlotte, 27, 68

Bronte, Emily, 68

Brown, John, 65, 178

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 56

Browning, Robert, 6

Brunei, Isambard K., 185

Bryce, James, 93

Buckle, George, 269

Burn, W. L., 23

Burne-Jones, Edward, 36

Burnley, 204

Bury, 204

Byron, Admiral John, 34

Cairns, Lord, 291

California, gold from, 22

Calne, 232, 261

Cambridge, Duke of, 75

Cardigan, Lord, 63

Carlton Club, 226, 287, 291

Carlyle, Thomas, 3, 14, 117, 120,
123, 125, 128, 132, 143, 151, 276,
292

Carnarvon, Lord, 272, 273, 288

Catholic revival, 24-25

Cawnpore, massacre at, 5

Cecil, Algernon, 7

Cecil, Lady Gwendolen, 275

Central Master Builders Associa
tion, 168, 188

Chadwick, Edwin, 112, 125, 130,

257

Chamberlain, Joseph, 14, 174, 291
Chambers, Robert, 117
Chambers, William, 117
Charlton, Robert, 214
Chartism, 55, 56, 172, 183, 195
Chelsea, 290
Chippenham, 290
Civil service, 11, 77 ff., 108 ff., 259,

262
Clarendon, Lord, 56, 58, 84, 158,

291

Clough, Arthur Hugh, 151
Cobden, Richard, 14, 17-18, 23, 66,

113, 124, 207, 208, 213 ff.
Cole, Henry, 16, 40, 50-51
Coleridge, Sir J. T., 161
Columbus, Christopher, 132
Co-operation, 132, 205
Copernicus, 132
Corn Laws, repeal of, 2, 17, 23,

195, 203 ff., 223, 259, 266
Cox, Homersham, 280, 293
Cracroft, Benjamin, 11
Cranborne, Lord, 270, 272, 273,

281, 284, 285, 287, 288, 291, 293,

295

Cranborne, Lady, 273
Crimean War, 12, 52 ff., 200, 201,

203, 212, 213, 217, 219, 221, 223,

224, 226, 239, 259, 296
Crystal Palace, 14, 16, 18, 36 ff.,

42, 118

Dale, Dr. Robert, 203

Dalhousie, Lord, 291

Darwin, Charles, 97

de la Rue, Warren, 38

Delane, John, 61, 96, 109, 218, 237

Derby (Edward Stanley, four
teenth Earl of Derby) (1799-
1869) : attitude of, toward social
questions, 275-76; character of,
276; and civil service reform, 78;
and the crisis of 1851, 30, 32;
death of, 14; inability of, to
form ministry in 1855, 68-69, 81;
and parliamentary reform, atti
tude and tactics of, Reform Bill
of 1832, 275, Reform Bill of

308

Index

1859, 222, Reform Bill of 1867,
269 ff.; quoted, 17; return of, to
power in 1866, 230, 268

Devonshire, Duke of, 36

Dickens, Charles, 14, 77, 108, 145,
146

Dilke, Charles, 14

Disraeli, Benjamin (first Earl of
Beaconsfield (1804-81), attitude
of, toward protection, 21-22;
character and background of,
265, 279; death of, 264; and the
Great Exhibition, 35, 37; and the
lower classes, 50, 277; motives
and tactics of, 195, 268, 270, 278,
280, 282, 287, 288, 294, 295; on
Palmerston, 69, 70; and parlia
mentary reform: Reform Bill of
1859, 222, Reform Bill of 1867,
231, 264 ff.; quoted, 221-22, 227;
relations of, with Bright, 217,
218, 266; return to power of,
in 1866, 230, 238, 268; and Royal
Commission on Trade Unions,
165; on secret sessions of Par
liament, 75; and Suez Canal
shares, 260

Douglass, Frederick, 171

Drummond, Henry, 78, 79

East Anglia, farmers of, 21
Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, 24 ff.
Edinburgh, 229
Education: Lowe s views on, 254

58; in public schools, 140 ff.;

through self-help, 124 ff.
Elcho, Lord, 183, 237, 281
Elections, 99 ff.
Eliot, George, 15, 122
Ellenborough, Lord, 77
Elliott, Ebenezer, 127, 206
Ellis, Havelock, 299
Engels, Friedrich, 194

Fabians, 263

Family, 13, 298

Fawcett, Henry, 281

Fiji, 260

Finsbury, 282

First International, 173 ff., 191

Fitch, Sir Joshua, 146

Foreign affairs committees, 72
Forster, William Edward, 14, 229,

257
Froude, J. A., 267, 297

Galileo, 132

Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 191, 276
General Board of Health, 23
Gentleman, 10; idea of, 95, 97-98,
111, 133 rT.; and the idea of def
erence, 91 ff.

Gladstone, William Ewart, 70, 85,
172, 173, 246, 256, 259, 277, 279;
attitude of, toward Bright and
parliamentary reform, 192, 193*
202, 203, 204, 213, 218, (m&
233, 270, 272, /ml$ 287Tand
civil service reform^ 78, 79, 108,
112; and the Crimean War, 74;
defeat of, in 1866, 268; and the
Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, 26;
quoted, 11-12, 25, 91, 157, 247
Goderich, Viscount, 76, 77
Graham, Sir James, 21, 32, 68, 70,

73-74, 85, 211
Granby, Marquis of, 22
Grant, General Ulysses S., 201
Granville, Lord, 46, 48, 235, 260
Grattan, Henry, 27
Graves, Samuel Robert, 289
Great Exhibition, 7-8, 14, 15, 19,

22, 24, 35 ff., 215
Greenwich, 290
Greville, Henry, 30, 33
Grey, Earl, 244
Grosvenor, Lord Robert, 82, 90,

237, 238
Guedalla, Joseph, 252

Hadfield, George, 66, 72
Halevy, Elie, 9, 298
Hardy, Gathorne, 273
Harrison, Frederick, 183, 186, 188,

248

Harwich, 290
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 59
Hayter, Sir William, 238
Head, Sir Francis, 18
Heathcote, Sir William, 288
Helps, Sir Arthur, 132
Henley, Joseph, 286

4 309

Victorian People

Herbert, Sidney, 70

Hill, Sir Rowland, 110

Hobson, J. A., 136

Hodgkinson, John, 283, 284

Holloway, John, 9

Holyoake, G. J., 56

Hornby v. Close, 182

Horsman, Edward, 229, 237, 287

Houghton, Baron; see Milnes,
Richard Monckton

Howell, George, 190, 192, 194

Huddersfield, 219

Hughenden, 22

Hughes, Thomas (1822-96), 10,
115, 139, 298; assessment by, of
public school life, 151 ff.; asso
ciation of, with trade-unionism,
164-65, 248; background and ca
reer of, 163 ff.; character of,
151 fT.; and Tom Brown s School
Days, 141, 147 ff.; visit of, to
America, 166

Hugo, Victor, 55, 215

Hull, 170

Hume, Joseph, 221

Hutton, Richard Holt, 171, 252,
253

Hutton, William, 117, 171

Hyde Park, 14, 194, 195, 196, 230,
275

India, 261

Inglis, Sir Robert, 26

Ireland, 25

Jerrold, Douglas, 37

Johnson, President Andrew, 228

Jones, Ernest, 172

Jowett, Benjamin, 109, 160, 161

Keate, John, 141
Kenney, Patrick, 176
Keynes, J. M., 131, 136
Kidderminster, 247
Kinglake, A. W., 64
Kingsley, Charles, 28, 149, 152
Knox, John, 119
Kossuth, Louis, 44, 46, 55, 215

Lacy Evans, George de, 55, 76
Laing, Samuel, 77, 284, 285

Laird, John, 289

Lamartine, Alphonse Marie, 133

Lansdowne, Marquis of, 29, 261

Layard, Henry, 64, 78, 79, 218

Lee, General Robert E., 201

Lee, William, 117

Leeds, 120, 131, 228, 229, 250, 285,

289, 290
Lewis, Sir George Cornewall, 113,

158

Limited Liability Bill, 259
Lincoln, Abraham, 202, 225
Liverpool, 227, 229, 285, 289, 291
London Trades Council, 164
Lowe, Robert (Viscount Sher-
brooke) (1811-92), 6, 10, 99,
144, 193, 297, 298; attitude of,
toward education, 254-58; atti
tude of, toward reform and the
Adullamites, 229 ff., 270, 271, 278,
280, 292, 293, 295; attitude of,
toward trade-unions, 248-52; ca
reer of, in Australia, 243-45;
character and personality of,
233-36; relations of, with Dis
raeli, 238-40; visit of, to Amer
ica, 245-46

Lowell, James Russell, 164, 167
Lucan, Lord, 63
Lucy, Henry, 52
Lytton, Sir Edward Bulwer, 71, 78

Macaulay, Lord, 49, 110, 141, 219

Malmesbury, Lord, 275, 290

Manchester, 79, 101, 204, 207, 208,
215 ff., 229, 249, 285, 289, 290, 291

Manchester School, 52, 84, 85,
209 ff., 218, 219

Manning, Archdeacon Henry Ed
ward, 25

Marx, Karl, 55, 174, 194, 195, 196,
200, 252

Marylebone, 290

Maurice, Frederick D., 163

Mayne, Sir Richard, 194

Mill, John Stuart, 4, 65, 105, 110,
128-29, 134, 241, 247, 293-94, 299

Milner-Gibson, Thomas, 85

Milnes, Richard Monckton (Baron
Houghton), 53, 84, 252, 253

Milnes, Robert Pemberton, 53

1310Y

Index

Mirabeau, Comte de, 132
Molesworth, Dr. John, 206
Moore, George, 122
More, Hannah, 118
Morley, John, 223-24
Morley, Samuel, 77
Morris, William, 40
Mummery, A. F., 136
Mundella, A. J., 169, 196
Muntz, George F., 74

Napoleon III, 18, 44 ff., 57, 83, 85,

224

Nasmyth, James, 122
Nelson, Admiral Horatio, 212
Newcastle, 56, 290
Newcastle, Lord, 67, 75, 80
Newman, Cardinal John Henry,

28, 141

Newton, Sir Isaac, 132
Ney, Marshal Michel, 132
Nicholas I, 57, 83
Nightingale, Florence, 13, 62-63,

201

Normanby, Marquis of, 45
Northampton, 290
Northcote, Sir Stafford, 77, 108,

158, 160

Nottingham, 290
Norwich, 228

Odger, George, 180, 181
Oldham, 290

Osborne, Bernal, 266, 280, 285, 287
Overend and Gurney s Bank, 193
Owen, Robert, 121, 127, 138

Pakington, Sir John, 74

Palmerston, Lord (1784-1865), 172,
199, 204, 212-13, 215, 216, 217,
218, 226, 228; appointment of, as
Prime Minister (1855), 69; and
army reform, 76; awarded the
Garter, 84; and civil service re
form, 77-79; "Civis Romanus
sum" speech of (1850), 3, 46;
and the Crimean War, 69 fT.;
death of, and its significance, 14,
192, 223, 227, 236; dismissal of,
from Foreign Office (1851), 46-
48; period of supremacy of, 88;

quoted, 98; and the "tit-for-tat"
(1852), 46-48
Palmerston, Lady, 13, 30
Paris Conference (1849), 215
Paris Exhibition (1867), 14, 188
Paris, Treaty of (1856), 83-84
Parliamentary and Financial Re
form Association, 221
Parliamentary reform: and lack
of interest, in 1860, 90; Locke
King s motion (1851), 29; Lowe
on, 241 fT.; and reform acts,
31, 91, 114, 200, 228, 230, 232,
255, 261, 263, 265 ff., 268; and
situation in 1851, 48
Patrnore, Coventry, 292
Paul, Herbert, 266
Paxton, Sir Joseph, 14, 35ff., Ill
Peace, gospel of, 41 ff ., 52
Pears, Stuart Adolphus, 142, 147
Pease, Henry, 214
Peel, General Jonathan, 81, 271,

272, 285, 288
Peel, Sir Robert: death of, 17, 91;

principles of, 26, 34, 267
Peelites: disintegration of, 85; and
the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, 26;
in the 1852-57 Parliament, 67-
68, 70, 73, 74; and the political
crisis of 1851, 32-33; and the
two-party system, 48-49
Peterloo, massacre of, 206
Pevsner, Nikolaus, 38
Phipps, Colonel Charles, 45
Place, Francis, 193
Playfair, Lyon, 38
Porter, George Richardson, 2, 20
Press, 56, 60, 75
Price, Bonamy, 140
Protection, 17, 21-22, 224
Public schools, 11, 140 ff.
Pugin, Henry, 39

Quakers, 202 ff .

Raglan, Lord, 63, 73

Railways, 121, 132

Reform acts: of 1832, 24, 31, 230;
of 1867, 24, 91, 114, 200, 230, 232,
255, 261, 263, 265 ff., 268

Reform Club, 292

y

Victorian People

Reform League, 191 ff., 229, 233,
251, 252, 269, 275

Reform Union, 192, 195, 229

Religion, 12, 24 ff.; census of, in
1851, 28; and the Great Exhi
bition, 41 rL

Roberts, Henry, 41

Rochdale, 202 ff ., 229

Roebuck, John Arthur (1801-79),
10, 21, 172, 218; background and
personality of, 64-66, 81, 178;
and the campaign for parliamen
tary reform (1858-59), 221; and
the Crimean War, 59, 64 ff.,
71 ff.; and the Ecclesiastical
Titles Bill, 26; as member of
Royal Commission on Trade
Unions, 183-86; retainment of
seat in Parliament by (1857), 85

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 14

Rostow, W. W., 8-9

Rothschild, Lord, 260

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 143

Rugby, 143

Ruskin, John, 36, 128

Russell, G. W. E., 5

Russell, Lord John, 16, 85, 199,
237, 240, 277; appointment of, as
Prime Minister (1865), 227; and
civil service reform, 112; and
the dismissal of Palmerston, 43-
47; and the Ecclesiastical Titles
Bill, 24, 25, 26; and the fall of
Aberdeen, 67; and introduction
of Reform Bill: of 1852, 222,
of 1854, 222, 276, of 1866, 192,
193, 236, 238; and Palmerston s
"tit-f or tat," 35, 48; and the po
litical crisis of 1851, 24 ff., 34-
35; quoted, 228, 270; resignation
of (July, 1855), 80; and the
Times , 61; at Vienna, 70-71

Russell, William Henry, 60, 61

Russia, 54, 55, 214, 215, 216

Sadleir, John, 25
Sadleir, Michael, 96, 100
Saintsbury, George, 276
Salford, 289

Saw Grinders Union, Sheffield,
181, 249

Scholefield, William, 27
Sebastopol, 58, 60, 63, 68, 70, 71,

82-83, 88, 217
Select committees, 71 ff.
Self-help, 10, 12, 24, 97-98, 111,

116ff., 178, 265

Seymour, George Hamilton, 57
Seymour, Lord, 75, 79
Shakespeare, William, 132
Shaw, George Bernard, 138
Sheffield, 56, 66, 72, 82, 170, 175 ff.,

216, 249, 283

Sheridan, Richard B., 133
Sibthorp, Colonel Charles, 35, 52
Sinclair, Sir John, 123
Sinope, Battle of, 58
Smalley, George W., 198
Smiles, Samuel (1812-1904), 65, 99,
115; background, career, and
personality of, 119-23; Blatch-
ford s admiration of, 137-38;
critics of, 135-36; and the ideal
of a gentleman, 134-35; influ
ence of Carlyle on, 117; and
laissez faire, 125-27, 133-34; and
Self-Help, 11, 12, 19, 111, 116 ff.;
and thrift, 128-34
Smith, Adam, 126
Smith, Cecil Woodham, 13
Smith, Goldwin, 194, 196
Smith, John Store, 20
Social Science Association, 164, 172
Society for the Reform of Colonial

Government, 245
Southampton, 290
Staleybridge, 290
Stanley, Dean Arthur, 147, 149,

151, 154, 155, 158, 162
Stanley, Edward (later fifteenth

Earl of Derby), 283, 287
Statistical Society, 172
Stephen, Sir James, 110
Stephen, Leslie, 6, 7, 143, 254
Stephenson, George, 117, 121, 132,

185

Sterne, Laurence, 98
Stoke-on-Trent, 290
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 171
Strachey, Lytton, 6-7, 9, 13
Stratford de Redcliffe, Lord, 217
Sturge, Joseph, 214, 215

312 >

Index

Suez Canal shares, 260
Summerson, John, 36
Sydney, 243-44, 261

Tawney, R. H., 136

Tearoom party, 281, 290

Temperance, 211-12

Ten-pounder, 12 n., 241

Tennessee settlement, 166

Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 18, 53,
141, 157

Thackeray, William, 98, 135

Thesiger, Sir Frederick, 26, 235

Thompson, Professor W. H., 161

Tiverton, 228

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 246

Tower Hamlets, 282, 290

Trades Union Congress, 190, 249

Trade-unions, 11, 76, 132; Royal
Commission on, 165 ff.

Trevelyan, Sir Charles, 77, 108,
109, 161

Trevelyan, G. M., 65

Trollope, Anthony (1815-82): at
titude of, toward society, 95 ff.;
background of, 87 ff., 199; and
civil service reform, 108 ff.; ef
forts of, to sit in Parliament, 10,
99 ff., 247; opinion of Bright,
198; philosophy and writings of,
87 ff.; political position of, 113-
14, 205

Tupper, Martin, 15, 127

Turkey, 55, 57, 58, 214, 215 216

Unemployment 190, 193
University reform, 74
Urquhart, David, 55, 72-73, 216

Vaughan, C. J., 142, 147, 161
Victoria, Queen, 16, 17, 20, 27, 32,

33, 35, 43 ff., 70, 114, 204, 238,

260, 269, 270, 289, 298
Vienna, Conference of, 70-71

Wakefield, 290

Walewski, Count Alexandre, 45,

46

Wallas, Graham, 262
Walpole, Spencer, 183, 194
Walrond, Theodore, 147
Walthamstow, 265
Warrington, 290
Webb, Beatrice, 172, 175
Webb, Sidney, 172, 175
Wedgwood, Sir Josiah, 117
Wellington, Duke of, 33, 54, 76,

132

Wells, H. G., 6, 7, 257
Whewell, Dr. William, 39
Whiteley, William, 40
Whyte-Melville, George John, 128
Wigan, 290

Wilde, Oscar, 138, 296, 298
WiUey, Basil, 7
Wilson, Sir Robert, 55
Wiltshire, 202
Winchilsea, Lord, 27, 61
Wiseman, Cardinal Nicholas, 24,

26, 27

Wood, Sir Charles, 23
Woodham-Smith, Cecil, 13
Woodward, Sir Llewellyn, 51
Work, gospel of, 41, 118 ff.

York, 205

Young, G. M., 5, 7, 8, 11

PRINTED IN U.S.A.

0229.

CO