History of England 1-6

Yet the Tories were in no position to guarantee it. They were already in an advanced state of decay, having been breaking up for some years over such measures as the Corn Laws and Catholic Emancipation. There were ultra-Tories, liberal Tories and Tory Tories with any number of splits and sects. This is of course characteristic of all political parties, but excessive good fortune or excessive misfortune can emphasize schisms and increase divisions. In a debate after the beginning of the new parliament, Earl Grey made a speech in which he urged the necessity of ‘reforming Parliament’. The duke of Wellington rose to reply and, in a speech which totally misread the mood of the country, he remarked that he had no intention of introducing reform and that ‘I will at once declare that … as long as I hold any station in the government of the country, I shall always feel it my duty to resist such measures when proposed by others.’ His speech was greeted with some protest. When the duke sat down he asked a colleague what was going on. ‘I have not said too much, have I?’ ‘You’ll hear of it,’ Lord Aberdeen replied.

The stocks fell on the following morning, and by the evening one member after another rose to remonstrate with Wellington. The Dictator had disowned Reform. It was as simple as that. It was soon feared that the ‘radicals’ – whoever they might be in the present circumstances – were bent on creating discord in the streets of London. The fear of instability mounted with rumours of a civil rebellion to topple the administration and monarchy in the recent French manner. Placards were circulated. ‘To arms! To arms! Liberty or death!’ The authors might be accused of plagiarism as well as insurrection. But the populace had more common sense than the incendiaries, and the crowds on the streets of the city remained in good humour. The day ended without a rifle shot. A few half-hearted attempts at riot in Buckinghamshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Berkshire were quickly dissipated by the lords lieutenant of the various counties.

The duke of Wellington reflected on the period some years later. ‘I induced’, he wrote, ‘the magistrates to put themselves on horseback, each at the head of his own servants and retainers, grooms, huntsmen, gamekeepers, armed with horse-whips, pistols, fowling pieces, and what they could get, and to attack in concert, if necessary, or singly, these mobs, disperse them, destroy them, and take and put in confinement those who could not escape.’ The defence of the realm was conducted still in almost medieval fashion.

But for Wellington the blunder of his speech proved his downfall. It was compounded by what seemed an act of cowardice. The king was supposed to attend a city banquet on Lord Mayor’s Day. The administration refused to allow it. They were not afraid of an attempt upon the king but upon the duke. The Commons was in a familiar state of uproar at the pusillanimity of the cabinet. The presence of the new police also provoked hostility as a French-inspired innovation against personal liberty. Wellington could no longer command the majority in his own party, let alone in the Commons. After a vote against his ministry he tendered his resignation to the new king, and William IV called for Earl Grey to lead a new Whig administration. The Wellington ministry itself had lasted for approximately three years, full of misery and misunderstanding, and now it fell unregretted. So the duke was succeeded by an earl, a confirmed Whig who is now better known as a tea than a man. Grey was an imperturbably aristocratic figure with an elevated forehead suitable for lofty thoughts. He loved ‘the people’ in the abstract but, as was said, he loved them at a distance. His perorations in parliament were as measured and stately as his demeanour. He had the look and manner of an elder statesman almost as soon as he joined parliament at the age of twenty-three.

Grey’s Whig cabinet was the most aristocratic gathering since the eighteenth century. Only three commoners found a place in a company of thirteen. Lord Palmerston, as an Irish peer, also sat in the House of Commons, but he can hardly be described as a commoner. Democracy was not even an issue. Yet every second thought was of reform. Grey was ‘deeply dejected’ at the prospect of becoming first minister, according to a colleague, and was complaining constantly. Not the least of his problems was the dilemma set by reform. He had often in the past signalled his favourable interests in the subject, but he could hardly be described as a democrat. His purpose was to maintain the aristocracy and buttress its power with remedial measures. He believed that proper reform would ‘find real capacity in the high Aristocracy … I admit that I should select the aristocrat, for that class is a guarantee for the safety of the state and the throne.’ He was restoring the old identity of the Whigs as aristocrats who directed and supervised the cause of reform. Disraeli later, and quite justifiably, described the orthodox Whig as ‘a democratic aristocrat’, even if it was a term which he professed not to understand. The cabinet itself was a broad coalition of conflicting interests. One Tory, the duke of Richmond, was a member. The new ministers replaced a Tory party that had been pre-eminent for the larger part of sixty years. There used to be a saying that everybody loves a lord.

A committee was established to consider reform as the burning question of the day. It was believed by Grey and his colleagues that it was necessary to effect ‘such a permanent settlement of this great and important question, as will no longer render its agitation subservient to the designs of the factious and discontented – but by its wise and comprehensive provisions inspire all classes of the community with a conviction that their rights and privileges are at length duly secured and consolidated …’ There was no appeal to the people. There was no talk of liberty and equality, let alone of fraternity. These were not matters that concerned the members of the committee. Their overriding ambition was to preserve the unity and harmony of the country, and in particular to preserve the property rights of the landed gentry. The key word was ‘finality’, which could only mean that the Whigs retained power indefinitely. By also including the more respectable freeholders in its provisions, the committee hoped to bring forward some conciliation between the landowners and the middle class so that both might reign unimpeded in their own domain. In January 1831 Grey wrote to a colleague: ‘I am going tomorrow to Brighton to propose our plea of reform. It is a strong and effectual measure. If the King agrees to it, I think we shall be supported by public opinion. If he does not – what is to come next?’ His fears seemed to be illusory. The king approved of the reform project in all its details.

Or so he said. He did not wish to defy or contradict his new first minister. He had some sense of what was known as ‘the spirit of the times’. Even as the social and economic condition of the country had changed significantly, the political system had remained immobile. Descriptions of it included paralysis and putrescence. Cornwall returned forty-four members while Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester returned none. In the borough of Old Sarum two members were elected by seven voters, but in fact the votes were attached to empty fields, as the landowner controlled the franchise. The list of absurdities was immense. The reformers had every justification on their side except the crucial one. Whatever the oddities and failures of the system, it worked. It maintained what the king described to Palmerston, now the new foreign secretary, as the ‘tranquillity of States and the Peace and Prosperity of the country’. The consequences of change might be frightful. The great figures of former parliaments would no longer be introduced into the system but would be replaced by ranks and ranks of mediocrities controlled by the electors. The landed interest would be subdued by a new urban or mercantile class with no traditional ties to the country. This would be only the beginning of a national transformation; England would become London, ruled by mobs and demonstrations.

The debate on the Reform Bill, therefore, took place in a state of great excitement. On the night of 1 March 1831, the leader of the House of Commons, Lord John Russell, began to read out the details of his proposal. Many of those present had anticipated that some twenty or thirty constituencies would be dissolved or changed. Russell, however, had determined that fifty-six ‘rotten boroughs’, each with two members, should be abolished. Thirty other constituencies were to lose one of their members, while 143 seats were to be transferred to the counties and the new towns. The uproar was immense, wholly commensurate with the most radical change in the electoral system yet attempted. A total of 102 seats, at the very least, would no longer exist. Others, yet to be determined, would take their place.

The Tories erupted into hysterical laughter at the enormity of the plan. It just did not seem possible. ‘Such a scene as the division of last Tuesday I never saw, and never expect to see again … It was like seeing’, Lord Macaulay wrote to an acquaintance, ‘Caesar stabbed in the Senate House, or seeing Oliver take the mace from the table.’ He explained how the Commons waited in intense excitement for the final tally of votes as ‘Charles Wood, who stood near the door, jumped upon a bench and cried out “They are only three hundred and one.” We set up a shout that you might have heard to Charing Cross, waving our hats, stamping against the floor, and clapping our hands.’ He described the demeanour of those who had opposed Reform. ‘And the jaw of Peel fell; and the face of Twiss was as the face of a damned soul; and Herries looked like Judas taking his necktie off for the last operation.’ The news soon passed from club to club in Westminster and beyond, where the calls went around of ‘We’ve beat ’em’ and ‘The game’s up’ and ‘They’re done for’.

The bill had passed by one vote, however, which was the next-worst thing to defeat. Grey was now determined to dissolve parliament, no doubt in expectation of a larger majority in favour of Reform. But the opposition was determined to avoid what was considered to be an unhappy fate and spoke eloquently against any move to dissolve. The king considered this to be a design against his prerogative, and he rode down to Westminster with the fixed decision to dissolve. It was done.

The subsequent election of 1831 was known as the ‘Dry Election’, since for the first time the voters did not need to be bribed to cast their vote. Dickens’s account of the Eatanswill election in The Pickwick Papers (set in 1827 but published in 1836) was a poignant reminder of the bribery and drunkenness that habitually took place. The men were kept continually drunk and locked in the public house until it was time to vote. Grey dissolved parliament and precipitated a general election with a popular cry of ‘The Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill’. It was irresistible to all those except the constitutionally timid. It was, perhaps, the closest event to a referendum that England had ever known. London itself was decked with ‘illuminations’ for the event, a euphemism for mayhem and blackmail on the streets. Those who did not put a lighted candle in a prominent position had their windows smashed. You could follow the trail of the mob by the litter of broken glass.

A meeting of the National Reform Association in the Crown Tavern on Museum Street declared that ‘the evils inseparable from misgovernment, having at length pressed upon the people with a severity too great to be any longer quiescently endured, their first efforts have been directed to put an end to a system, the workings of which have entailed upon them such accumulated ills …’ The duke of Wellington believed the revolution had begun and saw nothing ahead but civil war and bloodshed. This had by now become a truism, with about as much reality as a bad dream. But it persisted. In the event the ministry of Earl Grey was returned with a much increased majority of 136. The Whigs themselves were surprised by the extent of support for Reform, and were even alarmed by the depth of popular feeling which they had aroused.

The debate on the second Reform Bill began in the summer, as the Thames continued its slow and noisome passage through the vicinity of Westminster. It seemed that at the time of heat everything was in decay. Everything stank of corruption. The second Reform Bill was passed in June 1831 and was carried with a majority of 136. Determined efforts to stall it were successful as proponents of the bill began to suffer from the burden of argument and division. Russell’s strength began to fail, and he was forced to relinquish his position to Viscount Althorp, whose natural robustness also gave way under the strain. It did not reach the Lords until September. At the beginning of October it was rejected by the peers with a majority of forty-one. Then came the reckoning. The Chronicle and the Sun appeared in mourning black, but the Chronicle announced that ‘the triumph of the wicked does not last for ever’. Parts of Nottingham Castle were burned down, and a meeting in Birmingham of 150,000 people pledged that no taxes would be paid until Reform was introduced. Francis Place, the radical reformer, made a speech in which he declared that ‘no reality we can create will be sufficient for our purposes. We must work on Earl Grey’s imagination. We must pretend to be frightened ourselves.’

Widespread violence followed in Bristol and for the first time since the seventeenth century some country houses were fortified with cannon. The magistrates warned that no rioter or demonstrator could be killed for fear of a conviction for murder. No one wanted to be responsible for another Peterloo. The bishops were hooted in the street, and were afraid to go about their diocesan business. Cobbett reported that ‘every man you met seemed to be convulsed with rage … a cry for a republic seemed pretty nearly general’. Thomas Attwood’s ‘Political Union’ in Birmingham was followed by similar societies, to the extent than an amalgamated National Political Union was established in London with the purpose of extending the suffrage to the lower middle classes and the working people. This was considered to be a threat to law and order, and the authorities attempted, largely in vain, to forestall their effect.

Disruption in the body politic was compounded by physical disease. In the autumn of 1831 cholera began to work its way through the city. John Hogg, a physician, described how ‘the disease generally began by relaxation of the bowels without pain, the evacuations being colourless’. This was followed by spasmodic pains in the bowels and diarrhoea; the condition of the invalid rapidly worsened with ‘excessive torture and prostration of strength’. Death was heralded when the body turned blue or livid, and the vital powers failed with ‘occasional evacuation of a chocolate-like fluid’. Fortunately death came within thirty-six hours. The epidemic increased in intensity. A placard was posted in Lambeth in the summer of 1832 asking:

has DEATH (in a rage) been invited by the Commissioners of Common Sewers to take up his abode in Lambeth … In this pest-house of the metropolis, and disgrace to the nation, the main thoroughfares are still without common sewers … unless something be speedily done to allay the growing discontent of the people, retributive justice in her salutary vengeance will commence her operations with the lamp-iron and the halter.

In the midst of death and disease, the political fire still burned. Despite the incendiary language, one comfort was available to the administration; people who are sick, or demoralized, do not start a revolution. Instead the victims often decided to take what was known as ‘the cold water cure’ by jumping off Waterloo Bridge.

The first and second Reform bills had fallen on the hurdle of the Lords, but a third attempt was made at the end of 1831 and the beginning of the following year. The Lords, fearful of social disorder and of threats to their privileges, passed it on 14 April 1832. Yet, astonishingly enough, three weeks later they passed a hostile amendment and the bill was lost once again. It was not wise to play the game of hazard with the populace. The duke of Wellington was once more asked to form a government with the express intention of introducing more moderate Reform. The country was now against him, with the promise of a run against the Bank of England with the slogan ‘to stop the Duke, go for gold’. But he had already stopped. In these unprecedented circumstances he could not form a government.

The king sweated in his chamber. No possible combination or contortion including Wellington would ever work. The only possible remedy was to pack the Lords with so many compliant peers that Reform would be passed. The king wept and struggled, wept and prayed, but he knew that the end had come. So he wrote a note. ‘His Majesty authorises Earl Grey, if any obstacle should rise during the further progress of the Bill, to submit to him a creation of Peers to such extent as shall be necessary to enable him to carry the Bill.’ It was enough. The threat was sufficient. The existing peers were more concerned with their status than with the voting rights of their inferiors. Most of them now prepared to absent themselves from the Reform vote and thus avoid the creation of new peers. How many might there be? Forty? Fifty? It was unthinkable. It could not happen. On 4 June 1832, the Reform Bill passed its third reading.

It was once believed that the new situation injected a popular vitality into the electoral process, and that the middle class had been able to surmount the interests of the upper classes. The evidence suggests otherwise. The old firm was still in place. All previous forms of corruption were still practised, although perhaps not so blatantly. ‘Pocket boroughs’, controlled by one grandee or family, were still to be found. Sudbury and St Albans were still open to the highest bidder. Peers and landowners continued to exercise unusual and unmerited electoral influence. Gang warfare between the parties was taken for granted. Without the secret ballot that was introduced later in the century, the constituents could be ‘worked’ and bribed by any number of means.

There was no sea-change in the voting system, with an extra 217,000 voters to add to the existing 435,000. There was a slow decline in the number of sons of peers and baronets in the Commons, but the landed interest lost only one hundred representatives in the course of thirty-five years. Some radicals were elected in the first reformed parliament, but only a sprinkling among the usual array of vested interests. John Stuart Mill wrote to a friend in 1833 that ‘our Gironde is a rope of sand … there are no leaders, and without leaders there can never be organisation. There is no man or men of commanding talent among the radicals.’ The Gironde had been a group of twelve French Republicans. But this was no revolution. In Considerations on Representative Government (1861) Mill concluded that it did nothing to change the nature of representation or to make room for any minorities within the general population. It was in effect a plausibly efficient way of maintaining the existing social system while gratifying the pretensions of some urban dwellers and radical enthusiasts. The proposals had nothing to do with manhood suffrage or annual parliaments, which had once been the indispensable demands of the radicals. Grey presented it as a reassertion of ancient, which is to say invented, rights. The crown, the landed interest, the middle classes and the people were meant to fit together like a political Rubik’s cube.

Nevertheless, it was accepted by some for want of anything better and by others in expectation of further innovation. It transpired that the landed interest could join now with the upper middle class and the more prosperous urban interests. It dismayed the Tories, perhaps, but it was well suited to the Whigs who could envisage a vast combination of interests to keep them in power. Reform had nothing to say, however, to the working class or to the lower middle class. They stayed where they were. If they were not £10 householders (occupying but not necessarily owning a house with a rental value of £10 a year) they were disqualified from voting. The proletariat, to use an anachronistic word, was not part of the system. Reform had nothing to do with democracy. Democracy was as incomprehensible as it was undesirable. The principal motive of Reform was expediency rather than principle; it abolished certain abuses, but other anomalies and inconsistencies were left in place. The aristocrats may have suffered a little (although even this is doubtful) but the radicals and reformers really gained very little. What Grey wished for was a crumb to the hungry, and the quelling of the possibility of insurrection. He foresaw, or said he foresaw, no need for any further improvements.

Yet this bill might act as a spur to greater change. John Bright, a leading radical, said that ‘it was not a good Bill, but it was a great Bill when it passed’. The fact that it was passed at all, in other words, was a measure of its greatness. No such measure had been introduced or accepted in any other English parliament, and it wholly discounted Edmund Burke’s theory that the electoral system could only be altered by organic and instinctive means. There was nothing organic or instinctive about the Reform Bill of 1832. It was devised by men with a mission to preserve their caste and to consolidate the stability of the state.

Other aspects of governance were revealed in the process. It had become clear that in any confrontation between the people and the Lords, the Lords must yield. The affluent middle class had played a part, too, which in itself marked an important change in the administration of England. Grey himself was entitled to feel some elation at his eventual triumph; if it had come to the making of peers, the king would have been forced to comply with a measure he profoundly detested. There was no contest.

One MP, Alexander Baring, warned that ‘in a reformed parliament, when the day of battle came, the country squires would not be able to stand against the active, pushing, intelligent people who would be sent from the manufacturing districts’. And could it be said that he was entirely wrong? There was indeed some apprehension about the proceedings of the first Reformed parliament in English history, with the fear that it might prove to be ungovernable. One cabinet minister prophesied that if the government ‘lose the control in the first session over the reformed House, the Meteor will be hurried into space, and Chaos is at Hand’. By the end of 1833 Grey’s son was describing the ministry as ‘utterly without unity of purpose and the sport of every wind that blows’. It was supposed that nobody could govern successfully or effectively. When the duke of Wellington had been asked what he thought of the new reformed parliament he replied: ‘I have never seen so many bad hats in my life.’

Yet the real effects of the Reform Bill were more significant than sartorial matters. The middle-class interest, now estimated to be approximately 20 per cent of the population, had grown in responsibility and influence; petitions were now flooding into the royal closet on matters concerning the slave trade and the corn trade. The power of the political unions and the labour combinations gave material advantage to the proponents of factory reform and trade union reform. The importance of political parties themselves was greatly enhanced by the influx of newly enfranchised voters and, from the 1830s, central party organizations and partisan clubs became part of the landscape of politics.

The redistribution of the ‘pocket boroughs’, and the subsequent dearth of independent members, therefore meant that party ties had grown stronger and more obvious. The two parties were left in charge of the field. As a result, reform had become the keyword of the political vocabulary. The Whigs wanted reform to preserve aristocratic privileges by making concessions to the middle classes. The Tories wanted reform to protect the poor in the old paternalist fashion with, for example, the concept of ‘just price’; the Tories attacked the new Poor Law, also, as an affront to the traditional authority of the landed gentry.

What infuriated many observers was that everything had changed and nothing had changed. That in fact seems to be the nature of English life. It was a revolution which had not changed the nature of governance. William Cobbett, as so often, put it most memorably. ‘Those happy days of political humbug are gone forever. The gentlemen opposite are opposite only as to mere local position. They sit on the opposite side of the house: that’s all. In every other respect they are like the parson and the clerk; or perhaps rather more like rooks and jackdaws; one caw and the other chatter, but both have the same object in view: both are in pursuit of the same sort of diet.’ One outsider clambering to get in, Benjamin Disraeli, asked in 1835: ‘What do they [the radicals] mean by their favourite phrase, THE PEOPLE’S HOUSE … ? … these Commons form a class in the State, privileged, irresponsible. And hereditary, like the Peers.’

The Lords had submitted but no lasting power had yet been secured over them. The Commons had won its victory, but it was still not supreme within the commonwealth. Many unanswered questions hovered over the relative status of the king and parliament. Whenever you came close to any question, however, you found muddle, ambiguity, inconsistency, deviousness and false hope.

7

The inspector

The Reform parliament, as it became known, was dissolved on 3 December 1832. In the ensuing election Grey achieved a large majority over his opponents in the new parliament which assembled on 29 January 1833. The Whigs were crowned with the laurels of Reform and comprised 441 members compared to 175 Tories under the leadership of Wellington and Peel. Peel was generally considered to be ‘the coming man’.

The new administration under Grey included some radicals heartened by the support for Reform. Three measures were crucial to their new stance as reformers opposed to the implacable Tories: the Factory Act of 1833, the Act for the abolition of slavery throughout the empire of 1833, and the New Poor Law of 1834, were the principal fruits of their activity. Their ambitions had a Benthamite cast, since Bentham and Bentham’s laws were congenial to younger and more liberal Whigs.

The Factory Act had its origin fourteen years earlier when Robert Peel had suggested a ten-year-old limit and a ten-hour day for the infants who worked in the cotton factories. He was following in the steps of his father, a rich textile manufacturer intent upon improving the conditions of his employees. The proposals disappeared into the hot air of the Commons, from which they emerged weak and practically unenforceable. However, they were revived by the troubled conditions of 1830 when Richard Oastler, a reformer, described in a letter to the Leeds Mercury the conditions of ‘thousands of our fellow-creatures and fellow-subjects, both male and female, the miserable inhabitants of a Yorkshire town, Parliament are this very moment existing in a state of slavery, more horrid than are the victims of that hellish system “colonial” slavery’. The county of Yorkshire was now represented in parliament by the giant of anti-slavery principles, Henry Brougham, who had been fighting the system for almost twenty years.

Oastler’s description caused a great stir. But the ‘factory system’ was still only imperfectly understood, and one commentator noted in 1842 that ‘the factory system is a modern creation; history throws no light on its nature, for it has scarcely begun to recognise its existence … an innovating power of such immense force could never have been anticipated’. If the characters of Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel – had suddenly come into existence they could not have caused more consternation than the new dispensation of affairs. Everything seemed too large, too complex, too diverse, to comprehend. To think on a national scale about armies and defences was not a new thing but to take a perspective on sanitation, education, housing and work had never before been attempted.

At the end of 1831 John Cam Hobhouse introduced a Ten Hours Bill to limit the employment of factory children, as a result of which a committee was established to investigate the conditions of what were already called ‘the white slaves’. An act came into force on 1 March 1834, which forbade the employment of children under nine, maintained a forty-eight-hour week for children between the ages of nine and thirteen, and a daily maximum of twelve hours for those between thirteen and eighteen years. It was widely flouted or ignored, and many complained that such government measures were in deliberate opposition to the principles of free trade and fidelity to contract. Yet a stand had been made. For the first time the administration took responsibility for the plight of children under eighteen. It was the first hesitant and flawed step towards a national system of education, although no one could have anticipated such an outcome.

As a result of the new legislation, independent inspectors of the cotton factories were introduced to ensure that government legislation was obeyed; it was part of the increase in bureaucratic control that led to inspectors of prisons, of housing, of building regulations, of paving and of street lighting. By the 1840s it was generally agreed that local issues should be governed by a central authority with its own bands of supervisors. The role of inspectors in every public service – sanitation and education among them – was one of the most significant aspects of the Victorian social system which was slowly transformed from the promptings of private initiative to the structures of state intervention. The ‘Society For This’ and the ‘Society For That’ gave way to the blue book and the Home Office.

One recent study of the influence of Evangelical belief on social and political matters in the first half of the nineteenth century has been Boyd Hilton’s The Age of Atonement, its title an apt indication of the prevailing mood among the Christian devotees who, like all citizens of a newly revised world, looked back with horror and outrage at those who came before them.

The children of the mines provoked shame, if nothing else, in the middle-class households of the country. The death of children became one of the central motifs of the age. ‘Is Little Nell dead?’ asked those who had waited for the ship bearing The Old Curiosity Shop to the port of New York in 1841. The son of the assassinated prime minister, Spencer Perceval, touched upon the raw sensibility of the age when he stood up in the Commons and declared: ‘I stand here to warn you of the righteous judgment of God, which is coming on you, and which is now near at hand.’ Colleagues tried to drag him down to his seat and Hansard reported that ‘indescribable confusion prevailed’. It was in this atmosphere that the act for the abolition of slavery passed in the summer of 1833.

It had been the favoured reform of Evangelicals, and particularly of those reformers who came to be known as the Clapham Sect. Twenty-six years before, the slave trade had been abolished, and now slavery itself was banned within the bounds of empire. The original request had come from the Society of Friends, and their missionary or propagandizing qualities animated the political, humanitarian and philanthropic movements of the age. There was another factor. The slave trade had been conducted along the ocean and coastal routes, but England’s maritime supremacy was supposed to carry with it the force of law. All slaves under the age of six were to be freed unconditionally, therefore, while those above that age were to become apprentices with limited hours of labour and guaranteed wages. How quickly and completely these conditions were met on the other side of the world is another matter, but the slave owners were given £20 million in compensation.

Yet the free men of England themselves were not necessarily at liberty, bound by the iron shackles of poverty as tightly as any regimen of slaves. By 1830 one-fifth of the nation’s revenues were devoted to poor relief, against a scene of rick-burning, lawless wandering and the breaking of machines. With the dissolution of the old society, in which poverty was part of the hierarchical order of things, comfortable notions of the necessity of the labouring poor, and the holiness of poverty, were quite out of date. In 1832 the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws had completed its work and had come to the conclusion that no previous scheme of poor relief served its purpose.

So a new system of poor relief was introduced at this time, with the purpose of distinguishing between those who would not work and those who could not work. The old Poor Law was maintained by the people of the local parish, who best knew the circumstances of those who claimed relief; it had been operating since the beginning of the seventeenth century but was now regarded by the new breed of bureaucrats as outmoded and outworn. The New Poor Law was proposed in 1834 as a model of organization and efficiency. It was the Benthamite way. The old parishes were grouped into ‘unions’ which, under the supervision of three Poor Law commissioners in Whitehall, controlled the novel institution of ‘workhouses’ as instruments of containment and control. The new policy of central determination and local administration became the key contribution of the nineteenth century to social policy.

The Whitehall commissioners became known as ‘the three bashaws [pashas] of Somerset House’, ‘the Three-Headed Devil King’ or ‘The Three’. The instruments of their power were the local boards of guardians who ensured that only the sick or the properly indigent were permitted to enter the workhouse. Outdoor relief to able-bodied men was prohibited. Poverty was not enough; after all, the adult male could work himself out of poverty. Workhouses themselves were so constituted as to repel any but those in dire need; families were split up, the necessities of life were severely rationed and the inmates were obliged to take up repetitive, useless and wearisome tasks. One supporter of the system, the Reverend H. H. Milman, wrote that ‘the workhouses should be a place of hardship, of coarse fare, of degradation and humility; it should be administered with strictness – with severity; it should be as repulsive as is consistent with humanity’.

The introduction of this harsh regimen does in part explain the origin of Chartism as a mass movement of protest. The workhouses were hated by the people, and particularly by the poor; they were the agents of oppression and were known as ‘Bastilles’. To be obliged to enter a workhouse was, in effect, to go into a prison. The workhouse was also the child of the reformed parliament; no previous parliament could have created anything so uniform or so bureaucratic. It needed the Whigs, the reformers, the dogmatists and the Benthamites to bring it to fruition. It should also be remembered that the New Poor Law was proposed and passed by the Whigs rather than the Tories. Many Tories supported it, of course, but there was a band of radical Tories who denounced it as the enemy of the people. The suspicion of such institutions soon ran very deep, and accounts in part for the reluctance of parents to send their children into the new schools, which were often built in the dreary grey stone of the workhouse. Disraeli knew it as the new ‘Brutalitarianism’. This image of dour severity and no less harsh sanctimony endured for many decades as an example of what came to be known as ‘Victorianism’. It sprang out of high ambition and solid principle but, as soon as the light shone upon it, it became oppressive and disheartening.

In this period Princess Victoria began a number of ‘journeys’ through England in order to acquaint herself with the country of which she would one day be mistress. In one of the first entries in her diary she wrote that ‘we just passed through a town where all coal mines are and you see the fire glimmer at a distance in the engines in many places. The men, women, children, country and houses are all black …’ Her slight insouciance at the sight of her suffering subjects would be a token of the reign. As a young woman, too, she was possessed of a fierce temper during which she would lash out at those around her. King William was fond of his niece, but had nothing but contempt for the princess’s mother, the duchess of Kent, whom he suspected of manipulation and betrayal. Victoria did not have a happy childhood, therefore, alternately bullied and overprotected. She grew up in a glasshouse, while those around her were more interested in benefits for themselves than advantage for the girl. But she had a shrewd eye for insubordination. Even when small she was every inch a queen and preferred companions who played an obeisant role. ‘I may call you Jane,’ she told one childhood acquaintance, ‘but you must not call me Victoria.’ She may have been a prisoner in all but name, but she was a spoiled prisoner; all her life she remained headstrong, capricious and demanding.

She was an exacting correspondent, and it has been calculated that if her letters were placed from end to end they would encompass 700 volumes. This is a Victorian tendency taken to extremes. Fortunately for everyone concerned, the old king died a month after Victoria had come of age, thus avoiding a regency in which the new queen would have had to defer to the duchess of Kent and her advisers.

8

Steam and speed

The first steamboat crossed the Channel in 1816. If the wind was not strong the crossing took between three or four hours. A paddle-steamer soon rode out from Newhaven to Dieppe, while other steamers chugged away in the vicinity of Hamburg and Gothenburg. The first railway route was a ramshackle effort, its rails stretching only a couple of miles to the local colliery, and it is now generally agreed that the railway age really began in 1815. That is when steam rose to a new height. Many people are aware of James Watt’s inspiration from a boiling tea kettle, but few have seen the engraving of Allegory on the Significance of Steam Power. Watt sits dreaming in a corner while a circle of steam surrounds a vision of factories, chimneys and mills as a foretaste of the new England.

Steam came slowly. An engraving of 1809, Richard Trevithick’s Railway Circus, shows the inventor and engineer guiding his steam locomotive in a circle in front of a throng of spectators just as if he were parading a tame elephant at a circus. The entertainment was called ‘Catch Me Who Can’. But its central significance was missed.

The railway represented, in the phrase of the period, ‘the annihilation of time and space’. The landscape itself seems to have changed. It had long since lost its natural woodland but now its heaths, wastes and village commons were in this period ‘enclosed’ within small patches and areas, partly to make way for the new railway lines. For foreign travellers the English countryside presented a garden-like system of hedges and fences. Yet it was not necessarily picturesque. The northern factory towns, soon to be linked by the railway, were grim enough to compete with the broken-down slums of London where the air was foul and the water poisonous. In some of the rural districts, cottages were still made of mud and road scrapings, while huts of turf still contained the peasant and the pig equally. This is as much part of early nineteenth-century England as the Corn Laws and George IV. The trains would soon run at a speed whereby a blackened city slum might flash past after a colliery and not be distinguished from it.

The building of the railways was the largest human endeavour to take place in so short a time. The Stockton–Darlington Railway, under the supervision of George and Robert Stephenson, was opened in 1825, and the Manchester–Liverpool Line five years later. The Stockton–Darlington’s main line from Shildon to Stockton covered 22 miles, the longest for any locomotive. But the line was also used as a public thoroughfare shared with steam goods trains, horse-wagons and a rail stagecoach. The beginnings of any great enterprise are mixed and uncertain. The steam engine was by now well enough known, however, as were the metal rails that carried it on its short journeys. But nobody had any idea what a railway carriage should look like. The first of them were simply carriages designed for roads that were then placed on railway wheels, with a boot for articles and a rack on the roof for luggage. The carriages had a length of about 20 feet, a width of 6 feet and a body height of 6 or 7 feet; they were like Alice in Wonderland carriages, had Alice then been written.

The explosion had begun. Between the end of 1844 and the beginning of 1849 more than 3,000 miles of track had been laid, as opposed to 172 miles of new roads and streets; in this period the number of train journeys rose from 33 million to 60 million. It is not at all wonderful that the salient aspects of this period were universally attributed to ‘SPEED’. The canals were finished, the turnpike was an anachronism and the roads were neglected. The traps, the gigs, the flys, the chariots, the phaetons, the wagonettes, the dog-carts and the Whitechapels were soon things of the past. But what was the point of speed? William Cobbett met a countrywoman who had never in her life gone beyond the boundaries of her parish. He admired her and complained that ‘the facilities which now exist of moving human bodies from place to place are amongst the curses of the country, the destroyers of industry, of morals and, of course, of happiness’. Meanwhile the great dock system of London was being given its final shape with the East and West India, London, Commercial and Surrey Docks completed by 1816.

The great novelty of speed was the most surprising aspect of life. One contemporary, W. R. Greg, remarked upon a life ‘without leisure and without pause – a life of haste … we have no time to reflect where we have been and whither we intend to go’. This has no doubt been the complaint of many generations in which change is pre-eminent. When Thomas de Quincey’s ‘The English Mail Coach’ was published, with all its intimations of speed and doom, it had already been overtaken by the rushing train. In the year before that essay’s publication, Charles Dickens chronicled the apotheosis of the railway in Dombey and Son (1848) as the lines stretched out from London towards the unknown future. The headmaster of Rugby school, Thomas Arnold, stated in 1832 that ‘we have been living … the life of three hundred years in thirty’. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the idea of change has been incorporated and is part of the human nervous system. In the days of the railway it administered an electric shock. In 1833 Bulwer-Lytton observed that ‘every age may be called an age of transition … the passing-on, as it were, from one state to another never ceases; but in our age the transition is visible’. This was also the year in which the term ‘scientist’ was coined.

It had become what Carlyle called a ‘Mechanical Age’ of which the characteristics soon became evident. It encouraged uniformity and anonymity. It encouraged decorum and restraint. It was an age of quickness of action and reaction, quick at meals, quick at work, quick at dressing. Look deep into the Thames and you might see a tunnel already four years in the making, attended by diving bells. Look up and you could see the hydrogen balloons in the sky. Soon there would be no more exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, no more cries of ‘All right!’ as the coaches left the yards of the inns. Everything was moving forward.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in English Traits (1856), observed that ‘mines, forges, mills, breweries, railroads, steam-pump, steam-plough, have operated to give a mechanical regularity to all the habit and action of men’. The steam engine became the metaphor of the age, and there were many discussions on the notional benefits of men operating like machines. Well, that would be progress.

Nevertheless, this was an age when it was not considered either just or fashionable to decry progress, especially when by the end of the 1840s the presence of electricity became known to a large audience. Its significance as an agent of material advance and increased production was quickly understood. The idea of an electrical culture which could be co-opted into an industrial machine culture was infinitely promising. The voltaic pile invented at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the discovery in 1820 that an electric current created a magnetic field, afforded new means of controlling and changing the natural world. The Victorians were the progenitors of science, the spectators of science, the demonstrators of science and the elucidators of science. Its practitioners were viewed as both shamans and showmen since electricity, in particular, had become the key component of an age which elicited wonder and surprise. In the National Gallery of Practical Science, a flea could be magnified to the size of a very large elephant, and an electrical eel was seen to stun its prey. (The death of the eel attracted much newspaper comment.) Faraday’s ‘Christmas lectures’ were inaugurated in 1825. He was the seer who announced in November 1845 that light, heat and electricity were ‘merely modifications of one great universal principle’.

If the world could be viewed as an electrical scheme, then the scientist became its natural interpreter and, perhaps, its exploiter. Nineteenth-century texts are filled with references to energy and power. The fashion for mesmerism, for example, was based upon the belief that the powers of the human body could be conducted and controlled by means of an invisible electrical fluid creating an ‘animal magnetism’ that bound one person with another; electricity was described by the English physicist James Joule as ‘this surprisingly animated elemental fire’.

In this period, theories of heat, light velocity and electricity were intimately related to the dynamic nature of energy. All was of a piece. These theories were in turn connected to the suppositions about power and dominance that governed social and sexual relations. The concept of political and social ‘system’ would emerge in the 1840s but already discussion centred on ‘the dynamics of systems’, on ‘fields of force’ and on ‘magnetic centres’. It is appropriate that the specifically English contribution to the science of the period lay primarily in physics and in the analysis of energy; it was a world spinning around electricity, magnetism, electromagnetism and thermodynamics. Specialist research societies, such as the London Electrical Society, emerged with a new breed of professional or specialized scientists. One very rewarding experiment lay in the application of electricity to a recently hanged corpse, where ‘every muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action; rage, horror, despair, anguish and ghastly smiles. At this point several of the spectators were forced to leave the apartment from terror or sickness, and one gentleman fainted.’

This is close to the territory of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818), in which the human being becomes in part a machine to be galvanized into life. It was one of the emblems of the nineteenth century, based upon the vision of factory workers being as mechanical as the machinery they attended and reduced in status to nothing more than ‘galvanized corpses’. Machinery was the agent of control and regulation, of order and of discipline.

In 1836 insects began to appear on a continually electrified stone, eliciting the deduction that electricity had in fact created them. The experimenter, Andrew Crosse, reported that ‘on the twenty eighth day these insects moved their legs, and in the course of a few days more detached themselves from the stone and moved over the surface at pleasure, although in general they appeared adverse to motion, more particularly when first born’. This is as ghastly as the account of the revivified corpse, and elicited equivalent responses of horror. The local farmers, believing that the electrical insects had blighted their crops, performed an exorcism in the vicinity. Leaving aside the possibility that the whole exercise was an elaborate hoax, it is assumed that the creatures were cheese mites or dust mites that had contaminated the equipment. The experiment was not replicated.

So if electricity was a living force then perhaps its machines could live? ‘No classes of beings’, Samuel Butler wrote in Erewhon (1872), ‘have in any time past made so rapid a forward movement. Should not that moment be jealously watched, and checked while we can still check it? And is it not necessary for this end to destroy the more advanced of the machines which are in use at present, though it is admitted that they are in themselves harmless?’ The threat was real. ‘The delicacy of the machine’s construction’ will aid the advance of machine language as intricate as our own ‘daily giving them greater skill and supplying more of that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be better than any intellect … surely if a machine is able to reproduce another machine systematically, we may say that it has a reproductive system’. And so the argument continued, accurately conveying the concerns of a much later period.

This is best understood in the context of the theology of the nineteenth-century world, the great burning lamp to which all paid their obeisance. The temples of this new deity were the Victorian exhibition halls, among them the Adelaide Gallery in the Lowther Arcade and the Polytechnic Institution in Cavendish Square. Here could be found a steam gun, a ferro-electric globe and an oxyhydrogen microscope. A 70-foot canal had been constructed to demonstrate the abilities of a paddle-driven steamboat. The collection was highly eclectic, including ‘weapons taken from the natives of Owhyhee, who were engaged in the murder of Captain Cook’. It suggests that even as late as the 1840s the elements of scientific progress were classified as wonders or marvels rather than the discoveries of men. They had no epistemological status of their own. The objects of the exhibition could also be seen as consumer items, similar to those in the new shopping arcades that were becoming part of the commercial world; the engines and machines that had previously been left for the workshop and the factory were steadily taking their place in a more familiar and acquisitive environment.

By 1830, industrialization had increased with more facility and progress than in any other country. England’s exports, too, were greater than elsewhere; the nation was producing 80 per cent of Europe’s coal and 50 per cent of Europe’s iron. All the steam engines in the world came from England, and in 1832 Nathan Rothschild argued that England was ‘the Bank for the whole world. All the transactions in India, in China, in Germany, in the whole world, are guided here and settled in this country.’ Yet in a sense the projections are spurious. They represent the account book of London and the nation. They know nothing of its life. Alton Locke, in Charles Kingsley’s novel of the same name, recollected London in this flourishing period. ‘I am a Cockney among Cockneys … my earliest recollections are of a suburban street; of its jumble of little shops and little terraces, each exhibiting some fresh variety of capricious ugliness.’ God had made him a Cockney for a purpose, ‘that I might learn to feel for the wretches who sit stifled in reeking garrets and workrooms, drinking in disease with every breath, bound in their prison-house of brick and iron, with their own funeral pall hanging over them, in that canopy of fog and poisonous smoke, from their cradle to their grave. I have drunk of the cup of which they drink.’ Did anyone ever tell them that their city, without form or colour or life, was the ‘Bank for the whole world’?

Even if it was a bank for the world, it was not necessarily a welcome one. The whole purport of British foreign policy, under a succession of ministers, was to remain disentangled from the affairs of Europe as much as shame and danger would allow. In the spring of 1831 Austrian troops advanced into Modena and Parma in order to suppress rebellion and to counter French claims of suzerainty. The consequences were obvious enough, and the general conflagration would turn northern Italy into a battlefield. The war between the two sides lasted for almost two years. Viscount Palmerston, as foreign secretary of the time, made the English policy plain. ‘It will be impossible for England to take part with Austria in a war entered into for the purpose of putting down freedom and maintaining despotism; neither can we side with France in a contest the result of which may be to extend her territories: we shall therefore keep out of the contest as long as we can.’ What of the people who witnessed the Austrians marching through their territories? ‘If we could by negotiation obtain for them a little share of constitutional liberty, so much the better; but we are all interested in maintaining peace …’ It is one of the defining moments of English foreign policy. Peace meant trade. Peace meant industrialization. Peace meant low taxes and prosperity. Peace was paramount.

There had been a jolt. In September 1830, a trial run of the steam engine known as the Rocket was advertised; its boiler was painted sunflower yellow, and its chimney was white. This was the springtime of the machine. William Huskisson, the member of parliament for Liverpool, had agreed to be present on 15 September to witness the railway journey from that city to Manchester. It was already being acclaimed as the sensation of the hour. One prominent engineer of the period, Nicholas Wood, wrote that the projected railway seemed, by a common unanimity of opinion, to ‘be deemed as the experiment which would decide the fate of railways. The eyes of the whole scientific world were upon that great undertaking.’

The journey began smoothly enough at Liverpool and a stop was made at Parkside to take in water; the invited guests were told not to leave their carriages. Nevertheless, Huskisson leapt from his carriage to the ground between the tracks. He went over to greet the duke of Wellington, travelling in another carriage, when he was suddenly aware of the fact that the Rocket was bearing down on him on the parallel set of rails. A door was opened and hands were outstretched to help him; but he could not haul himself into the carriage; he fell onto the track and his legs were mangled by the locomotive. Huskisson died a few hours later. The death of a young and already well-known politician was in itself a considerable shock to the newspaper-reading public, but to die in such a gruesome and unprecedented manner provoked a sensation. It seems that Huskisson had never seen a train before, and was under the impression that like a horse or a stagecoach it could move out of the way.

It was also cause for sensation that one of the locomotives transported the ailing body of Mr Huskisson some 15 miles in twentyfive minutes, when it was generally believed that the railway could manage only 8 or 10 miles an hour. The actual and unprecedented speed struck observers and commentators with astonishment. So, paradoxically, the first fatal railway accident confirmed the supremacy of the train and conveyed to the public the power and possibility of the new form of transport. Suddenly it seemed that the island had shrunk in size. The elasticity of time itself was exemplified by the fact that one member of Lord Liverpool’s cabinet was robbed by a highwayman and another killed by a train.

In 1830, too, the actress Fanny Kemble had been permitted to travel on one of the new locomotives by its progenitors, the Stephensons, and reported that ‘you can’t imagine how strange it seemed to be journeying on thus without any visible cause of progress other than the magical machine, with its flying white breath and rhythmical unvarying pace … I felt as if no fairy tale was ever so wonderful as what I saw …’ The instinctive analogy of complex machinery with magic and fairy tale is one of the more interesting characteristics of the first half of the nineteenth century. George Stephenson himself said, many years later, that ‘as I look back at these stupendous undertakings, it seems that we had realised in our generation the fabled powers of the magician’s wand’. It was the only language of wonder then available. Fanny Kemble herself was an insatiable seeker after sensation, and can be said to have thrown caution to the winds; but the great majority of railway passengers were, at that time, nervous travellers. The speed, the noise and the sheer novelty of being driven by a locomotive along metal lines were causes of anxiety if not of outright fear.

The Railway Regulation Act of 1844, passed long after Huskisson’s accident had been forgotten, was designed to consolidate the minimum standards for what had already become a means of mass transport. The first railway ‘boom’ was already taking place. Some investors had been made nervous by the publication of such pamphlets as Railroad Impositions Detected, which claimed that the Manchester and Liverpool railway had not made 1 per cent profit. Cautious investment and gradual success changed the views of speculators, however, with the signal intervention of the London to Birmingham line that opened in the autumn of 1838. In 1844, 800 miles of route were authorized by parliament; in the following year almost 3,000 miles were so approved. ‘The press supported the mania,’ as one writer of 1851 put it, ‘the government sanctioned it: the people paid for it. Railways were at once a fashion, and a frenzy. England was mapped out for the iron roads.’ Within fifty years sea was linked to sea, river to river as well as ports, towns, cities, markets and mines. The recent past was already slipping from view. The old inns and ancient country taverns became one of the prime objects of the camera to evoke what was being seen as ‘old England’. They were becoming part of the antiquarian tradition which had always been popular among the English. They were picturesque and made a pretty photograph.

It has been calculated that the most popular subject among Victorian photographers was the ruin; it could summon up sweet passages of silent thought which, as it were, sealed off the sights and sounds of the modern day. The poet Sadakichi Hartmann remarked on the daguerreotype that ‘it lies in its case among old papers, letters and curios. A frail casement of wood with black embossed paper. We cannot resist the temptation to open and glance at it … The image of some gentleman with a stock or some lady in a bonnet and puffed sleeves appears like a ghost-like vision.’ This might be the equivalent of reading a book of history such as this one, as the first railway engines pass through our field of vision.

A new system of communication had also been developed in this period, and its practicality was first adduced in 1827 when a telegraphic message was transmitted from Holyhead to Liverpool in approximately five minutes. Ten years later a telegraphic system was installed along the Great Western Line, and a cable between England and France successfully laid in 1851. At a time when, it was said, a householder sent a letter to his local fire company to warn that his house was on fire, the immediacy of the telegraph altered all perceptions of time and space. When a young man, Charles Bright, was knighted in 1858 for laying the first transatlantic cable, The Times described it as ‘the greatest discovery since that of Columbus’ and ‘a vast enlargement … given to the sphere of human activity’. Dickens concurred that it was ‘of all our modern wonders the most wonderful’. Such superlative praise was not then out of place. To transmit a message across hundreds of miles of space was considered tantamount to an increase in the rate of human evolution.

9

The pig is killed

By the beginning of 1834 the administration of Earl Grey was under duress. Throughout the previous year he had been contemplating resignation. ‘I go like a boy to school, and with very little expectation of finding myself equal to the discharge of any duties.’ His private doubts were compounded by the fissiparous state of his party in the Commons, where senior ministers clashed over the details of policy. Robert Peel did not want the Whig ministry to fall, however, until his party was ready to take over the administration. The problem was that some 150 nominal Whigs might also be classified as reformers or radicals; their politics were not clearly known and they were in effect unpredictable. One of them was a prizefighter, and another had fought a duel with his tutor, but the radical ‘wing’, if it can be so called, also included such old reformers as William Cobbett. It was in the interests of the Tories, therefore, to assist the government in moments of embarrassment or likely defeat; they had no more wish than the moderate Whigs for a radical coup.

The strain of maintaining this precarious position, as well as various crises in foreign policy, were the reasons for Grey’s reluctance to continue. His son complained that Grey ‘has no longer the energy to control a set of men each of whom is in this manner pursuing his separate interests … and the Government is consequently utterly without unity of purpose, and the sport of every wind that blows’. A windswept government is an unlikely refuge. Grey confessed often enough that he was worn out but that his colleagues would not let him go.

The impression is of ministers talking themselves to death. They could deal with specific measures but they could not bring themselves to discuss the principles of their actions. It would be too foolhardy. The problems of Ireland were characteristic of this, where some advised reform and reconciliation while others recommended more severe actions. The results were half-measures and contradictory signals of intent. The Coercion Act of 1833, for example, was one of the first issued by the Reform administration. It was supposed to enforce the powers of the government of Ireland against radical activity, by creating something very like martial law. Yet at the same time the administration attempted to placate the Catholics and to propose a bill for reform of the Church of Ireland. Some bishoprics were to be removed and the more fervent Protestant clergymen to be excluded from the more pious Catholic parishes. Something was given, and something taken away.

This was part of the ‘Irish Question’, although it was not at all clear what the question was. Disraeli wondered whether it meant the pope or potatoes. It might more tentatively be ascribed to Church tithes, or ‘the cess’. Some ministers wished them to be appropriated for the sake of the state, while others insisted that they should remain in the control of the Irish Church. When the cabinet split on that question, four ministers resigned. Ireland was an open wound which no English government could heal. Various proposals were made to Daniel O’Connell in order to acquire the support of the Irish members, but Grey and others were not inclined to agree with any bargain or compromise. When O’Connell decided that he had been duped he rose in the Commons and declared in strong and colourful language that he had been betrayed. ‘There,’ Lord Althorp whispered to John Russell, ‘now the pig’s killed.’ Althorp had been one of those who misled O’Connell, and he now resigned. So hopeless were the disagreements in the administration, so uncertain were its principles on the matter of Ireland, that Grey also resigned a few days later. ‘My political life is at an end,’ he said, with something like relief. Ireland had done for him.

Melbourne put the matter best. ‘What all the wise promised has not happened, and what all the damn fools said would happen has come to pass.’ Did it mean that the entire ministry would go down, with Grey playing the role of the captain on the deck? When asked the question he replied: ‘In theory, yes, but, in fact, no.’ The king himself favoured a form of coalition, which might mean Wellington and Peel together with the more suitable Whigs. It was not going to happen. Wellington politely refused on the grounds that it would be almost impossible to unite men ‘who appear not to concur in any one principle or policy’. Even the king conceded the point. Reluctantly he chose to ask Melbourne, as the only Whig who would ‘do’, largely on the grounds that he was considered to be no threat to anyone. Melbourne professed detachment on the matter. His private secretary, Thomas Young, said that ‘he thought it was a damned bore’, but what else could he do? It was perhaps his duty to obey his sovereign or, perhaps, inwardly, in the secret sessions of his heart, he realized the opportunity. Young had told him, at the time: ‘Why damn it such a position never was occupied by any Greek or Roman and, if it only lasts two months, it is worthwhile to have been Prime Minister of England.’ ‘By God that’s true,’ Melbourne replied. ‘I’ll go.’ Classical allusions always had an effect on the more aristocratic of the politicians eager to invoke honour and nobility under any circumstances.

Melbourne never betrayed his feelings in any matter, and would always speak inconsequentially to maintain his reserve. He was reluctantly chosen by the king ‘after cautioning him against the admission of persons with visionary, fanatical or republican principles’. The advice was not necessary. Melbourne would no more favour a fanatic or a visionary than a Roman monk or Egyptian conjuror. One of his first measures was to abandon the Coercion Bill and propose something milder. This was much to the discomfort of the king, however, who had thought the original bill to be too pacific.

The problems associated with Catholicism were not reserved to Ireland alone. There had in England always been an element in favour of Anglo-Catholicism, a High Church movement that wished to retain the ritual and ceremony of the Roman Church. It was an attempt to exorcize the spirit and nature of the Reformation and bring the English Church back into the purview of the old faith. It was of course utterly resented by the majority of Protestants who saw it as a threat to the modest and domestic demeanour of Anglicanism. But there were many now within the Established Church who were creeping towards the cross of the Roman benediction.

In the autumn of 1833 a pamphlet was issued that became the first of ninety, entitled Tracts for the Times, that conveyed the essential spiritual position of High Anglicanism; those who supported these doctrines in turn became known as Tractarians and, since many were based at Oxford University, were collectively called the Oxford Movement. One of their adherents, Dean Church, described the tracts as ‘brief stern appeals to conscience and to reason, sparing of words, utterly without rhetoric, intense in purpose’. They had been preceded by a sermon in the summer of the year 1833 at St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, on the theme of ‘national apostasy’; the sermon was delivered by John Keble, who was then renowned for The Christian Year (1827), a series of poems for Christian festivals. He, too, wished to revitalize the established faith with a strong attachment to the Church fathers and a reaffirmation of the beauty of holiness.

The first tract had been composed by John Henry Newman, whose sense of spiritual purpose and simplicity of sentiment were at the centre of the new movement. His austerity and purity were emblematic of the high sense of resolve among the Tractarians who affirmed the Apostolic Succession against the Latitudinarianism inherited from the eighteenth century and the complacent pieties of the orthodox Anglican communion. Newman and his colleagues were like apostles in the desert of nineteenth-century convention. ‘I am but one of yourselves,’ he wrote in the first sentences, ‘a presbyter, and therefore I conceal my name, lest I should take too much on myself by speaking in my own person. Yet speak I must, for the times are very evil, yet no one speaks against them.’ They were utterly opposed to liberalism and the tendency to soften the moral authority of dogma. They were part of the spiritual earnestness of the nineteenth century and can be seen as complementary to the Evangelical revival embodied in Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect. All of them reflected the godliness of English faith.

They reminded many Christians of the limits of established piety, and as a result provoked a controversy that haunted the nineteenth century. They were called Romanists or worse. Some of them were expelled from their colleges and excluded from the pulpit. From a lay perspective they might have been considered as enemies of the crown because of their allegiance to the pope. They in fact posed no threat at all. They were thoroughly loyal and, with their ingrained obeisance to authority, were perhaps more dependable than free-thinkers or Dissenters. They were in no sense related to the Catholic Association of O’Connell.

This was indeed a time of associations, fraternities and clubs for kindred spirits. But when did an association become a trained band, and when did a fraternity become a guild or even a union? In 1834, partly under the guidance of Robert Owen, the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union was established. It had been preceded by a Grand General Union of all the Operative Spinners of the United Kingdom and by a National Association for the Protection of Labour. These organizations were largely concerned with the preservation of the living standards of their members, but the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union had larger ambitions. It wanted to take aim against the Reform Act of 1832, which had left five out of six working men without a vote. Under the stimulus of Owen the Grand Union proposed to organize every trade or industry so that the working people could take control of the economic machinery of the country. It was perhaps an inspiring idea and drew some half a million supporters. But like many utopian projects it fell at that moment when reality breaks through. A myriad of strikes flared up without taking fire, and the workers were systematically ground down by the actions of politicians and magistrates. The employers had already fought back with something known as ‘the presentation of the document’, in which each man seeking work signed a promise to renounce the trade unions and all their works.

This is the context for the Tolpuddle Martyrs, six farm labourers from Dorset who were sentenced to seven years’ labour in Australia. Their offence had been to swear certain ‘secret oaths’ to bind them together when in fact they were following standard union practice in such matters. Melbourne and his colleagues upheld the judgement, thus earning the contumely of most of the working population and many of their political allies. A great demonstration was organized in London for what was called ‘the day of the trades’, but it seemed to lead precisely nowhere. Melbourne had in fact an instinctive sympathy with discipline and punishment ever since his days at school. He told his sovereign that flogging always had an ‘amazing effect’ upon him; it delighted him so much that he practised it on his serving maids.

Melbourne’s first attempt at government lasted only four months. His cabinet was buffeted by resignations, and he himself was aware of a most uncertain political future. ‘There exists a general uneasiness about something,’ Wellington wrote in October to the king’s brother, the duke of Cumberland, ‘nobody knows what, and dissatisfaction with everything.’ Melbourne himself gave at least the appearance of calm or even ennui. Everyone had been astounded by his rise to the premiership. He seemed lackadaisical, preferring not to do anything remotely radical. When the Hollands, a family of Whig grandees, visited Melbourne in his new state they ‘found him extended on an ottoman sans shirt, sans neckcloth, in a great wrapping gown and in a profound slumber’. One of his favourite phrases was ‘It’s all the same to me’. He was well known for judgements of a similar nature. ‘I generally find’, he said, ‘that nothing that is asserted is ever true, especially if it is on the very best authority.’ His knowledge of history was profound, if in his case ineffective, but he was castigated when he admitted that he had not read Wordsworth’s The Excursion. This was a period when even the grandest politicians had a working knowledge of the best of contemporary literature. ‘I’ve bought the book,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing when you leave a book on the table how much you know what is in it, without reading it.’ We may summarize his politics with a short note: ‘When in doubt, do nothing.’

But then there was a purge, at least of a symbolic kind. In the early evening of 16 October 1834, a red glow illuminated the sky. It soon became clear to the surprise and delight of eager observers that the Houses of Parliament were burning down. It was for some the most memorable event they would ever witness, as the great seat of empire subsided in flames. Many people immediately considered it to be a conspiracy. Could it have been Catholics or, worse, the Irish? Could it have been the French or the Russians? Could it have been radicals or trade unionists? Others believed it to have issued from the hand of God as a punishment for the passing of the Reform Act two years before. For others, it was simply a welcome relief. The old parliament had been cramped and constricted with all the damp and noisome smells of an ancient establishment; its tortuous corridors were an image of the delays and divagations of lawmaking. Its immediate neighbourhood shared the contagion. The cardinal-archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Wiseman, described ‘the labyrinth of lanes and courts and alleys and slums, nests of ignorance, vice, depravity and crime’. Slum was a new word, but everyone knew instinctively what it meant.

Much of this was erased by the fire that spread so widely and so furiously that at midnight the light was that of noon. ‘It was a perfect fairy scene’, one observer recalled, testifying once more to the realm of magic and wonder that lay just beneath the nineteenth-century psyche. When parts of the building tumbled down, sometimes in the midst of the crowds, some applauded as if it were an exhibition. The artist Benjamin Haydon wrote that ‘the feeling among the people was extraordinary – jokes and radicalism universal’. In moments of enthusiasm the real feelings of nineteenth-century Londoners emerged. ‘There’s a flare-up for the House o’ Lords’, ‘A judgement on the Poor Law bill’, ‘There go the Hacts [Acts]’. At first light on Friday morning the devastation was clear. The Painted Chamber and the Commons Library were destroyed. The frontage of the Commons and the arcade in front of the House of Lords had gone; the facade had collapsed, the walls were in ruins and the roofs caved in.

While the smoke still rose over Westminster, the king had told Melbourne what everybody knew or guessed – that the Whig ministry, beset by resignations and departures, was in no position to maintain the government of the country; the strength of the administration in the Commons was so weak that the sovereign felt obliged to call for Wellington to take over the post of first minister. The duke demurred, however, and recommended Robert Peel, who was considered by all parties to be the most resourceful of all claimants. The fact that Peel was a Tory rather than Whig seemed to matter not at all. It did cause some controversy, however, that the king had effectively ousted his government without any recourse to parliament or the public. No monarch would ever dare the experiment again.

The Tories had waited for this moment with Robert Peel at their head. Whig or Tory, he was the natural successor in principle as well as in policy. Peel was at that moment in Italy, however, and Wellington acted as his caretaker. The duke took over the conduct of the country just as if he were filling a vacancy in the army command. He occupied all the offices of state from the middle of November to the beginning of December. He was called the dictator, not the caretaker, but he had none of Cromwell’s piercing ambition. He simply wanted regularity and efficiency. It was a time of much speculation, and in his novel Coningsby (1844) Disraeli recalled the winter of 1834: ‘What hopes, what fears and what bets! … Everybody who had been in office, and everybody who wished to be in office; everybody who had ever had anything, and everybody who ever expected to have anything, were alike visible.’

When Peel arrived in haste from Rome he came back to a country which was ready for a general election. He sensed the mood. Melbourne had concluded of the Reform Act that ‘if it was not absolutely necessary, it was the foolishest thing ever done’. Yet for Peel it was a decisive step which had created a new electorate. It was his task to engage this new electorate in a programme of limited reform. He had a strong if not subtle mind and, as he said, approached problems of politics as if they were problems of mathematics.

The circumstances of the country were ready for his attention. The responsibilities of ministers had increased considerably over the past two decades and had nurtured a group of parliamentary managers as well as experts on foreign, economic and imperial affairs. There was need of a first minister who could grasp the political complexities of his office as well as the political requirements of the time. The extension of parliamentary business engaged public attention, and there was rarely a period in which newspapers and periodicals commanded a larger audience. Their attentiveness and detailed reporting would encourage a new kind of minister. Peel might be one of the first.

Peel dissolved parliament in the closing week of 1834 with perhaps some hope that he might increase the strength of his party and perhaps even by some miracle of electoral politics acquire the mastery. He delivered what would now be called a manifesto in the guise of a letter to his constituents at Tamworth, thus reinforcing a new interest in what can be called public opinion; he promised a thorough reform of Church and State, and declared that the Reform Bill was a ‘final and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional question’. In this ‘Tamworth Manifesto’, Peel maintained that he was addressing ‘that great and intelligent class of society’ in order to present them with ‘that frank exposition of general principles and views which appears to be anxiously expected’. He was in other words talking to those people who had been the beneficiaries of the Reform Act, and promising action on their behalf. In the event he gained the large number of ninety-eight seats, but it was still not enough to claim a majority. He had the additional disadvantage of facing a union of opposing parties. In a parliamentary agreement known as the Lichfield House compact, the Whigs, the radicals and the Irish agreed to work together for Peel’s downfall. When the new parliament met on 18 February he knew that he was still on borrowed time. This was not a good omen for a new prime minister. But Peel might hang on, if only because the alternative was a government led once more by Melbourne.

He suffered six defeats in as many weeks and by the spring of 1835 it was clear to the king and the first minister that they were driving down a road that had ‘No Thoroughfare’ at its head. The final curtain closed when Peel was defeated in an act concerning Irish tithes. It is one of the many paradoxes of these difficult years that Ireland brought down more than one English government. Yet the hundred days or so in which he held office did wonders for Peel’s public reputation as a strong and purposeful politician. He had in the process helped to form a Conservative party freed from instinctive reaction and from the image of the rock-hard duke standing guard over its traditional values. The Times described his resignation as ‘a grievous national calamity’, and blamed the ‘excess of party zeal’ that had brought him down. There were complaints that the parties in opposition had made a compact without any shared principles except that of destroying the prime minister.

Peel had become a commanding figure; terse, reticent, with no appetite for small measures. He revealed himself to be of strong administrative mind. He was perhaps a politician without ideals, but what were ideals good for? That is why the Tamworth Manifesto was worthy of what Disraeli called ‘a party without principles’, a taunt that would later be thrown back at Disraeli himself. Daniel O’Connell remarked of Peel that ‘his smile was like a silver plate on a coffin’, but this coldness or hauteur was in part the product of shyness. He was genuinely a withdrawn person. Disraeli, in a later pen-portrait, remarked that ‘he was very shy, but forced early in life into eminent positions, he had formed an artificial manner, haughtily stiff or exuberantly bland, of which, generally speaking, he could not divest himself’. He was from the beginning, as Lord Rosebery said, always ‘the same able, conscientious, laborious, sensitive being’. He was rich enough, but he was not a lord and suffered under his questionable status. He retained his Lancashire accent throughout his life. He was above all a man of practical measures, never so much at home as in the House of Commons. He was often compared to a beacon over the rocks, a pilot in a storm-tossed sea and a light upon the horizon. Other clichés might suggest themselves. He had difficulties with individual members – sometimes he would close his eyes, sometimes look away – but if you presented him with a knotty problem he would almost certainly untie it. He also had an enormous sensitivity to pain, and once fainted when his finger was caught in a door.

So after his first foray into government he stepped down, as the Annual Register suggested, ‘not merely as the first but without a rival’, while his Whig opponents, dazed by the harsh treatment which the king had previously given them, lacked strength and purpose. Melbourne and Russell, their principal men, had not much to comfort them in Peel’s brief ascendancy except the prospect of office. There was very little choice for William but to reinstate Melbourne as first minister, a humiliation for the sovereign who had effectively dismissed him a few months before. It had been demonstrated that parliament and people had more power than the monarch.

The old parliament was now little more than a blackened shell after the great fire, and the new members assembled in a badly singed but still serviceable House of Lords, while the lords themselves were accommodated in the Painted Chamber that had largely escaped the flames. Melbourne guided the Lords while Russell was the dominant figure in the Commons. All the liberals, the moderates, the ultra-radicals, the radicals and the philosophic radicals huddled together in the service of Melbourne. As a result of the Lichfield House compact, the Whigs also depended upon the support of Daniel O’Connell’s Irish MPs to command a majority. They were the key. The parliamentary radicals, under whatever name, were of no account in comparison; they soon dwindled into sects or less than sects. Their weakness allowed Russell to oppose further changes to the Reform Act, which the radicals ardently wished for, and why he became known as ‘Finality Jack’.

The Tories had also been variously named, but the high Tories or ultra-Tories and the liberal Tories could all be enlisted under the banner of the Conservative party. It had its own club, the Carlton, its own associations and its own agents. There was, however, a crucial difference which eventually cost Peel dear. He hoped and believed that he was capable of constructing a modern Tory party ready for the challenges of the 1830s; but in fact the majority of the party were farmers, landlords and tenants whose chief preoccupation was the price of corn and the value of the agricultural interest. The preoccupations of Peel and of the Tory party did not necessarily cohere.

The second ministry of Melbourne was dominated by the prospect of a Municipal Corporations Act that had been under discussion by a select committee of parliament. A royal commission reported: ‘there prevails amongst the great majority of the incorporated towns a general and, in our opinion, a just dissatisfaction with the municipal institutions; a distrust of the self-elected municipal councils … a distrust of the municipal magistracy; a discontent under the burdens of local taxation’. It could not be a more comprehensively damaging report. The towns and counties were in the power of a group of self-selected oligarchs; the mayor and the councils collected the revenues for their own purposes, to enrich themselves or to maintain the power of their families in the localities. The act which came into law in 1835 as a result of these deliberations destroyed the power of civic guilds and all those self-interested parties of tradesmen and craftsmen who controlled the wealth of the town.

Instead the municipal franchise was to be given to all permanent ratepayers or householders, who were to choose their representatives for a three-year period. Mayors and aldermen were to be guided by elected town councils. It was the municipal version of the Reform Act. It passed through Melbourne’s hands, as first minister of the day, but it is doubtful whether he had much to do with it. Although the act applied only to the larger towns it had broken the cold spell of inanition that had settled over the country boroughs for many generations. It could be said, in fact, that the new breed of town councillors were more effective than members of parliament in such matters as public health and sanitation. Nonconformists and Dissenters were sometimes a majority on the town council, leading perhaps to more enlightened policies. ‘It marshals all the middle class in all the towns of England,’ one observer wrote, ‘and gives them monstrous power too.’

That power was clear enough to Melbourne, who stirred himself to promote the interests of Dissenters. In 1836 his administration created a civil register of births, marriages and death, thus breaking an Anglican monopoly, as well as enacting a Dissenters’ Marriage Bill which allowed civil marriage for the first time. In the same year London University received its charter, allowing the entrance of Dissenters who were still barred from the ancient universities. It would be agreeable to ascribe good intentions to Melbourne, but the truth is that he wished to keep the Dissenters on his parliamentary side. They were some of his strongest supporters.

In the same session, the stamp duty on newspapers was lowered from fourpence to a penny. The Morning Chronicle, for example, quickly became a paper of some stature and was described by John Stuart Mill as ‘the organ of opinion in advance of any which had before found regular advocacy in the newspaper press’, by which he meant that it was the first newspaper to introduce Benthamite theory into press discussion.

Melbourne’s Tory opponents were joined in spirit by the king and even by some members of the Whig party. It might seem that he stood on an eminence surrounded by swirling waters, but time and tide were working for him. The Irish and the radicals did not wish to lose him, for fear that the Tories would take his place. Peel had set a course of moderation, until such time as he could depend on a solid victory in an election. That time was still to come. Essentially Melbourne’s administration was kept in office with Peel’s indirect support. They were both men of conservative temper who could work together without seeming so to do. Yet Melbourne was not altogether in command of his destiny. He was working in the shadow of the king’s deep displeasure; William IV had never wanted him back.

Melbourne himself, however, was the very best leader for such a situation; he exuded bonhomie and had no principles to preserve at any cost. He was therefore infinitely malleable and flexible. A government measure might be adopted by the Commons only to be thrown out by the Lords; a period of discussion and compromise would follow, at the end of which a quite different measure would be proposed. Melbourne did not object to such a state of affairs, as long as he had his cabinet with him. ‘I will support you as long as you are in the right,’ one member told him. ‘That is no use at all,’ he replied. ‘What I want is men who will support me when I am wrong.’ He was not in any sense a reformer. Delay, postponement and ambiguity were his stockin-trade. Even when his Municipal Corporation Act was thrown out for the first time by the Lords he did not seem to care. ‘What does it matter?’ he asked. ‘We have got on tolerably well with the councils for five hundred years.’ The measure did eventually pass the Lords and become law. ‘We must see how it works,’ Melbourne stated. This was the distance he always maintained in the affairs of the world. In any case he left most of the detail to the ministrations of Russell, who had the ambition and the appetite for government and was thus doomed to disappointment.

Melbourne also had an indispensable ally in the cabinet with Viscount Palmerston as foreign secretary, who soon enough would strengthen this alliance with his marriage to Emily Lamb, Melbourne’s sister. Palmerston had held his post, apart from the brief Peel episode, since 1830; before that he had been a lord at the Admiralty and secretary at war. So he was used to the diplomatic game, which he fought with cunning and bravado. Like Melbourne he had no particular policy that could be associated with him, unless it were the pragmatic one of keeping Britain one step ahead of her enemies. He worked well and wisely, even though he was cordially hated by those who worked for him; this was because he made sure that they laboured hard and conscientiously.

When the country’s vital interests were at stake, he could be both formidable and resolute. He intervened in Belgium, in Portugal, in Spain and in Syria. In all cases Palmerston believed that Britain’s reputation was at risk and so, like a policeman of the Western world, it was the foreign minister who ensured that it was respected as well as feared. He was in one sense the only light in Melbourne’s ailing ministry. He seemed to speak his mind. He explained, for example, that ‘these half-civilised governments, such as those of China, Portugal, South America, all require a dressing down every eight or ten years to keep them in order … their minds are too shallow to receive an impression that will last longer than some such period and warning is of little use. They care little for words and they must not only see the stick but actually feel it on their shoulders before they yield.’ He tapped a vein of xenophobia and self-assertion that at a slightly later date would be called jingoism.

The jingoes were soon to be found in the Stock Exchange, in the army and the navy, in the streets of fashion where the ‘swells’ gathered, among clerks and dockers and shopkeepers. It was believed that Palmerston had divined the national spirit. He called Austria ‘an old woman’ and ‘a European China’. He could bully and he could bluster. He was sometimes called ‘Lord Pumicestone’ for his ability to rub his allies in the wrong way. He was more generally known as the more kindly ‘Pam’ or the more mysterious ‘The Mongoose’, perhaps because of his ability to scotch foreign snakes. Bulwer-Lytton remarked that ‘generally when Lord Palmerston talks of diplomacy, he also talks of ships of war’. He sent weapons directly from Woolwich arsenal to the rebels in Sicily because of his distaste for the actions of King Ferdinand of Naples. He was no lover of rulers, hereditary or otherwise. Louis Philippe called him ‘l’ennemi de ma maison’ and at a later date Victoria constantly complained that he was taking vital decisions without consulting her or her husband. To this he merely shrugged his shoulders. He always mastered the facts, and he always knew that he was right. He treated the world as if it were a great game, improvising or giving way wherever required.

Palmerston was the proponent of what was called ‘restless meddling activity’, admonishing sovereigns, threatening prime ministers and generally stirring the large cauldron of international politics. Melbourne claimed to the queen that ‘his principle and his practice, too, is that nothing fails, except weakness and timidity, and this doctrine is generally right’. A case in point concerned North Africa, when Mehemet Ali, the pasha of Egypt, decided to rebel against his nominal superior, the sultan of Turkey. This was not to Palmerston’s liking, since the decline or disintegration of the Ottoman empire, ruled by the sultan, might give Russia or France the opportunity to gain the spoils of Egypt. France in particular was seen as a major threat, with the unspoken rivalry between the two nations ever present. Palmerston did what he liked to do, by conducting negotiations and making deals without his colleagues being able to play any role.

France soon faced a quadrilateral alliance between England, Russia, Austria and Prussia. It might be called the Northern alliance. But the prospect of war with France unnerved the English cabinet. When Palmerston proposed to make a treaty with the three nations, two members of the cabinet threatened to resign. At this Melbourne was seriously alarmed. Any split, or hint of a split, would be bound to damage him. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘let nobody resign or we’ll have everybody resigning.’ Palmerston was unmoved and professed complete disinterest in French threats. He merely said that they were bluffing. He persevered. Melbourne grew ill under the strain. The streak of nervous hysteria, fully exposed at times of crisis, was one of the most important characteristics of the Victorian sensibility. A few years later, Melbourne would write to Russell of the Queen that ‘it might make her seriously ill if she were to be kept in a state of agitation and excitement’. Arthur Young, the writer and social observer, was ostensibly speaking of the electric telegraph, but he had made a more general point when he referred to a ‘universal circulation of intelligence, which in England transmits the least vibration of feeling or alarm, with electric sensitivity, from one end of the Kingdom to another’.

It might be described as the apocalyptic imagination. It was widely reported, on the basis of some obscure or invented texts, that London would be swallowed by a conflagration on 17 March 1842. The Times of that day reported: ‘the frantic cries, the incessant appeals to heaven for deliverance, the heart-rending supplications for assistance, heard on every side during the day, sufficiently evidenced the power with which this popular delusion had seized the mind of these superstitious people’. The wharves were crowded with people waiting for a steamboat to take them from the city, and the trains departing from London were crowded; others sought refuge in the fields. But nothing happened.

Palmerston was right all along. He confronted the French king, Louis Philippe, with the prospect of conflict. The king backed down, and soon enough Mehemet Ali’s military bluff was called. This bloodless victory over the French was a cause of immense rejoicing in England, and it was perhaps the only foreign triumph that the Melbourne government could claim.

Palmerston proceeded with an ad hoc policy but it was none the worse for that. He was perfectly clear-sighted about the direction of national affairs and, on the rare occasions when he propounded something like a philosophy, he was invariably practical in his analysis. There was always talk of the Ottoman empire being ‘in decline’ or ‘in decay’, for example, but Palmerston remarked that ‘half the wrong conclusions at which mankind arrive are reached by an abuse of metaphors, and by mistaking general resemblance or imaginary similarity for real identity. Thus people compare an ancient monarchy with an old building, an old tree or an old man …’ But there was no such similarity.

He once said that ‘it is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal; and those interests it is our duty to follow.’ He might also have said that he had no eternal party affinity, since he was always at arm’s length from his nominal leader. He preferred his own path. He stumbled on occasions, as we shall see, but always got up, brushed himself down, and continued on his way.

10

Young hopefulness

Agricultural and industrial unrest had continued through the 1830s. There had been fluctuations in prices, profits and rents that affected everyone. The seven fat years of corn, followed by the seven lean years, of Pharaoh’s dream in Genesis 41 might have been the symbol of the time. Nobody understood the reason for these changes, apart from the dictates of the seasonal cycle, and were quite unable to deal with the expanded demand or the sudden depression. Social unrest and riot had been exacerbated by the New Poor Law and by higher taxes, while events such as the Tolpuddle agitation did not bode well for the Melbourne administration.

In 1836 a group of London and Yorkshire radicals, including social reformers such as William Lovett and Francis Place, determined to establish the London Working Men’s Association. In May 1837, at a grand meeting in the British Coffee House on Cockspur Street, the Association issued its demands, which became known as the Six Points. These were for annual parliaments, universal male suffrage (female suffrage was believed to be a step too far), equal electoral districts, the removal of the property qualification for members of parliament so that young reformers might have a chance to attain the prize, secret ballots to deter bribery and bullying, and the payment of members of parliament once they had been brought there. This was to be of assistance to the workingclass member who had no other source of funds. The points at issue soon became known as The Charter and its adherents as Chartists.

The People’s Charter gave voice to the poor and the hungry who had not before been helped by the Reform Acts already passed. The miseries imposed by the New Poor Law also sharpened the injuries they sustained. The administration had bribed some of the middle classes, but they had turned their faces against all the rest.

In the autumn of the year the Irish activist Feargus O’Connor began the publication in Leeds of the Northern Star, which echoed all the remonstrances and denunciations of the Chartist orators where the workhouses became Bastilles and their dietary servings ‘hell broth’. Even at the price of four and a half pence it had the largest circulation of any newspaper outside London with its mixture of economic, social and political news from the vantage point of the oppressed.

Thomas Attwood, whose Birmingham Political Union had been disbanded, now joined the new great hope of the Chartists in provoking public reform. It would be wrong to dismiss these first Chartists as dreamers or insurgents out of their time. They were quite aware of the power of Irish nationalism, for example, and of colonial insurgents who might assist them in their own battles against the English authorities. In practical fact, however, the motives of the Chartists were unclear; their supporters came from so wide a field, and their aspirations, whether rural or urban, were so diverse that any form of organized leadership was almost bound to fail. It was a mass movement but its size did not help to define it, and its class consciousness was based upon mass rallies and meetings that seemed merely to inflame both speakers and audiences. It was a new type of organization, too, since it included the paraphernalia of speeches and mass meetings with the assistance of pamphlets, posters and newspapers. Never had a militant organization been so well organized.

A distinction was drawn between ‘moral force’ Chartists and ‘physical force’ Chartists. It sounds like a clear alternative, but the boundary remained confused. The hand-loom weavers, one of those groups of workers who were most savagely hit by economic change, were generally for ‘physical force’. The muddle was further compounded by the association between some Chartists and some Methodists who met on the same premises and sang the same hymns. The movement remained at the front of popular consciousness for the next three years. It was always connected with the fear of violence among the authorities but, in fact, very little occurred in these years of anxiety.

The radicals in parliament were becoming more and more frustrated by the delays and hesitations over every piece of legislation by the Whigs. One radical MP, John Arthur ‘Tear ’em’ Roebuck, complained that one day the mood was Whig and on the next day the reverse. ‘The Whigs, have ever been an exclusive and aristocratic faction, though at times employing democratic principles and phrases as weapons of offence against their opponents … When out of office they are demagogues; in power they become exclusive oligarchs.’ They were aristocratic in principle, and democratic in pretence. They came forward with large promises and mean performances. Their talk had been vague, and their measures largely ineffective and useless.

Yet Melbourne, the object of this anger, had one immense advantage. He knew that the king was dying and that his successor, a young girl of eighteen, did not have William’s prejudices. She did not share the same history. The closing days succeeded quickly. Throughout May and June 1837 King William deteriorated, and on 20 June he was dead from a heart attack. William died in the early morning, and Melbourne hardly waited for first light before informing Victoria of her new place in the world. The administration was in truth immeasurably strengthened by the death of the old man and the consecration of a new young sovereign. And why should the world mourn the old man’s passing? It is true that he passed the Reform Act and, if he were remembered for it, it was probably enough. Yet in the seven years of his reign he had also passed Municipal Reform, the abolition of slavery and the New Poor Law. Or perhaps it should be said that he let them pass. ‘He was odd,’ Queen Victoria wrote in her journal. ‘Very odd, and singular, but his intentions were often ill-interpreted.’

The king had died at just the right moment, a month after Victoria had come of age. Thus the young queen was disencumbered of all the courtiers, attendants, relatives and politicians who would have taken advantage of the regency to influence her. The young woman enjoyed to the full her newly discovered freedom. ‘Since it has pleased Providence to put me in this station,’ she wrote, ‘I shall do my utmost to fulfill my duty towards my country. I am very young and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced, but I am sure that very few have more real good will and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.’

She found an unexpected companion in Viscount Melbourne, who took on the role of paterfamilias to the young queen. His wit and imperturbable calm helped her to understand the political world around her, and his advice was practical rather than idealistic. It might have been said that he treated her like a daughter and she treated him like a father, except for that hedge of divinity which stands around the queen. He did teach her, however, some of that cool self-possession which she evinced all her life. He informed her that he did not go to church in case he should hear something ‘extraordinary’ from the pulpit. He advised her against reading Charles Dickens, since the novelist might provoke depressing thoughts. This was not perhaps the best advice for the conditions of the time. The Fleet Prison in The Pickwick Papers (1836) and Jacob’s Island in Oliver Twist (1838) were far worse than even the novelist could bear to describe. The health of the metropolis did not in fact materially improve until 1870, the year of Dickens’s death.

The subsequent general election, on the death of the old monarch, brought back the Whigs with Melbourne, but Peel and the Tories were not far behind. Among the members led by Peel were William Ewart Gladstone, who had entered parliament five years before, and one new member, Benjamin Disraeli, but of course the new queen stood close by the side of Melbourne. She was capricious, she possessed a bad temper, but she liked what she called ‘mirth’ and dancing. Melbourne enjoyed the company of his new sovereign to the extent that he began to ignore parliamentary business. He had never enjoyed the rigmarole, but now he had happier reasons to let it slide. The queen had his full attention. She had had enough of those people who wished to take advantage of her; Melbourne had no such ambition. ‘She is the honestest person I have ever known,’ he once said. ‘The only difficulty is to make her see that you cannot always go straightforward, that you must go round about sometimes.’ He was alluding to her direct nature that would normally brook no obstacles. ‘When he is with her,’ Princess de Lieven, the wife of the Russian ambassador, stated, ‘he looks loving, contented, and a little pleased with himself … dreamy and gay, all mixed together.’

On 5 November 1837, Victoria opened her first parliament. The Tories had high hopes for a new session but the large number of singleminded Irish members could not help but dampen their expectations. It was business as usual with the added complication of the Chartists around the corner. So this is perhaps the best occasion to introduce that amorphous group of men and women who have been given the title of ‘early Victorians’. They were the loud, brusque, colourfully dressed progenitors of the more serious and industrious mid-Victorians; the latter, unlike their animated predecessors, would no more wear a blue cravat and velvet trousers than a flat cap and workmen’s boots. We see the early Victorians in the pages of Dickens, whose portraits of railway magnates, crossing sweepers, charity boys, spinsters, schoolmasters, retired nautical folk, private detectives, coffee-shop managers, second-hand clothes merchants, copying clerks and ladies’ maids comprise a wide world of which they could not see the horizons.

To speak in the broadest possible terms, and with ample possibility of contradiction, this was a world of boisterous energy and novelty, of excitement and of enthusiasm, of speed and sensation, of vigour and of bravado. Successive social reform movements were often led by the same core of fervent supporters. The artisans, tradesmen and shopkeepers, who seem so often to be the backbone of the emerging society, were independent in thought and in religion, individualist and non-deferential. This was the electorate of the Reform Acts. George Eliot, in 1872, looked back upon those times when reforms were begun ‘with a young hopefulness of immediate good which has been much checked in our days’. In The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) Bulwer-Lytton interjected that ‘we moderns have fire, and passion and energy – we never sleep, we imitate the colours of painting, its life and its actions’. The writers of the time were voluminous – the three-volume novels must stretch to the crack of doom – but they were not necessarily verbose. Ruskin, Carlyle, Scott and Dickens could not be usefully abbreviated. It is a mark, perhaps, of innovation that the leading writers of the day looked upon the eighteenth century with something like contempt. Dickens himself added some false shelves in his library with the book-backs emblazoned with the ‘Wisdom of our Ancestors’ that included volumes on ‘Ignorance’ and ‘Superstition’.

Yet there is never light without shadow. There is another aspect of the 1830s which is infinitely more revealing. The great year of the Charter was 1838, in which the authorities anticipated attendant meetings, speeches, demonstrations, petitions and riots; one Chartist, writing at the end of the century in a memoir entitled Memoirs of a Social Atom (1903), recalled that: ‘people who have not shared in the hopes of the Chartists, who have no personal knowledge of the deep and intense feelings which animated them, can have little conception of the difference between our own times and those of fifty or sixty years ago. The whole governing classes – Whigs even more than Tories – were not only disliked, they were positively hated by the working population.’ There was real political antagonism in the various movements and societies, and in 1838 many mass meetings of working people were held by torchlight to protest their fate. At Bolton and at Stockport, at Ashton and at Leigh, many thousands gathered and ‘formed into processions traversing the principal streets, making the heavens echo with the thunder of their cheers … the banners containing the more formidable devices viewed by the red light of the glaring torches, presented a scene of awful grandeur’. It was as if the towns themselves were on fire.

The unions held aloof, as did the more radical Whigs. The leaders of the Corn Law agitation, which was even then growing fiercer, were not part of the movement. Chartists were about politics and not economics. This was in large part a workingclass demonstration of power. It had its roots in the centuries of popular agitation that had marked the history of England from Wat Tyler to John Ball and Jack Cade, as well as the Radical Associations, Political Unions and Democratic Associations of more recent years. The administration looked on in mounting horror at the size and spread of the protests; but one observer was more astute than most. ‘The Tories’, Charles Cavendish Fulke Greville wrote in his diary of June 1837, ‘prognosticate all sorts of dismal consequences none of which of course will come to pass. Nothing will happen because in this country nothing ever does.’

That was not strictly true. Something did happen in the autumn of 1838. An Anti-Corn Law League was established in Manchester with the sole aim of the ‘total and immediate abolition of the Corn Laws’. The League was properly based in the city where the cotton industry had declared the modern triumph of the machine and the vital issue of free trade in British commerce. Free trade was the central imperative. Was the farmer allowed to buy cheap and sell dear, as the market demanded, or should there be restrictions and tariffs on imported grain to keep the prices and profits of English farmers high? The Conservatives, ostensibly the party of the landowners and estate managers, were naturally in favour of maintaining the Laws; their opponents, from Whigs to radicals, were intent upon removing them so that corn could be cheaper.

There were many Dissenting ministers who were ready to declare that the Corn Laws ‘were against the Law of God, anti-scriptural and anti-religious’. The League launched a campaign, organized largely by Richard Cobden and John Bright, that was in effect a religious movement based upon the success of the anti-slavery cause where religion and politics also could not easily be distinguished. Free trade was itself something of a religious nostrum that encompassed cheaper food, more exports, larger employment and greater prosperity. Since nation would stretch out to nation, it would encourage peace as well as plenty. John Bright declared that this was a movement ‘of the commercial and industrial classes against the lords and great proprietors of the soil’. Bright was a Quaker who declared that ‘in working out our political problems, we should take for our foundation that which recommends itself to our conscience as just and moral’. The balance of trade was firmly in England’s favour, and free trade was deemed to be for ‘world bettering’. So material advances were intimately linked to moral improvement, fulfilling one of the great nineteenth-century principles. Palmerston wrote that ‘Commerce is the best pioneer of civilisation.’

The Anti-Corn Law League therefore mounted its national campaign with journals and pamphlets, speeches and meetings and demonstrations, denouncing ‘a bread-taxing oligarchy, a handful of swindlers, rapacious harpies, labour-plunderers, monsters of impiety, putrid and sensual banditti …’ In turn the farmers called those in favour of the repeal of the Corn Law ‘brutes, drudges, clodpates, bullfrogs, chawbacons and clodpoles’. The situation became ever more agitated throughout 1838 as the price of bread steadily rose. It rose from 55 shillings a quarter in January to 72 shillings in September and 74 shillings in December. In January of the following year, it was almost 80 shillings. Melbourne heard the mutterings of those who demanded free trade, but he chose to ignore them. ‘I doubt whether property or the institutions of the country can stand it’, he said. It may be that he was not ready to endure the wearisome disputes and crises that had accompanied the Reform Act. ‘I am listless and ill and unable to do anything, or think,’ he said, ‘which does not suit the time.’

It was Peel, the Conservative, who eventually led the charge for repeal. He was a practical administrator rather than a political philosopher, and it had already occurred to him that the price of wheat was far too high to be tolerated, with the situation made infinitely worse by the poor harvests of Ireland. In Ireland the dead were heaped up daily, while the newspapers revealed that men, women and children were dying of hunger in Scotland and England. Peel was a politician who, once convinced of the principle of a measure, never left it. He was not to be swayed by the vast preponderance of the Conservative party who wished to retain the Corn Laws. It was for them an article of faith, whereas for Peel it was one of reason and justice. The perilous situation in Ireland, where bad wheat had driven out the good after a series of harvests, was also one which could not be ignored. And if he could not rely on his Conservative party, he could still find allies enough elsewhere.

The Chartists had been no less eager than the Leaguers. At the beginning of February 1839, a General Convention of the Industrious Classes met in London to accept the Charter and to draw up a petition which would be sent around the country. It was essentially a national convention of the Chartists with one member representing a number of areas and, as its name implies, it encouraged reform rather than revolution. It had nothing to do with the movement of the trade unions; as one bricklayer put it, ‘trade unions are for botching up the old system; Chartists are for a new one. Trade unions are for making the best of a bad bargain: Chartists are for a fresh one …’ The Convention, if nothing else, was a form of People’s Parliament that was supposed to fill the vacancy left by radicals at Westminster where they seemed incapable of making any progress at all. These were called by Mrs Gaskell ‘the terrible years’. In Mary Barton (1848) she states that ‘this disparity between the amount of the earnings of the working class and the price of their food, occasioned, in more cases than could well be imagined, disease and death. Whole families went through a general starvation. They only wanted a Dante to record their sufferings.’

The calling of the General Convention caused some to take fright, and there was talk of arms. An organized police force was introduced to more towns, the army was increased and some Chartists were arrested. But, as a historian of the time put it, ‘we are become a sober people’. There was no prospect of any armed conflict and, indeed, as so often happened, the conflicts between the radicals themselves were more ferocious than any outer agitation. What should be the methods used? Moral force? Intimidation? Physical force? Or some mixture of the three? Everything was planned for a march upon parliament and the presentation of a National Petition on the Six Points. Mrs Gaskell added that ‘they could not believe that government knew of their misery … yet the idea that their misery had still to be revealed in all its depths, and that then some remedy would be found, soothed their aching hearts and kept down their rising fury’.

The National Petition was to be issued at a mass convention of 1839, and then to be taken up by a variety of reformist clubs in a great march to Westminster. The petition was 3 miles long and contained 1,280,000 signatures. But a million more signatures would not have been enough. It was presented to the parliament, which on 12 July voted even against considering it. There were rumours of a national strike but the working men were not ready for it. Local activists then turned to the notion of a national uprising, but that had even less of a chance to stir England. Riots and strikes were irksome enough, but no one had the appetite for an armed uprising which no leader could properly direct or control. A ‘sacred month’ devoted to the cause was truncated to three days of strikes, during the course of which the more militant Chartists were arrested. Some of them were bound over while others were given prison sentences of several months. There was no general attempt at repression. Yet nothing seemed right. The presence of misery and starvation in the north was known but barely understood. Some people called it ‘the condition of England question’. It was a question, perhaps, without an answer. Thomas Carlyle wrote, in the opening sentence of Chartism (1839), that ‘a feeling very generally exists that the condition and disposition of the Working Classes is a rather ominous matter at present; that something ought to be said, something ought to be done, in regard to it’.

The Chartists in their zeal had nothing to do with the members of the Anti-Corn Law League, whom they called ‘a party comprised of avaricious grasping money-mongers, great capitalists and rich manufacturers’. Nothing could be more conducive to angering the lower classes than the network of financial and political considerations which used popular causes for their own benefit. They looked upon the Anti-Corn Law League as another special interest group destined to help the manufacturers who wanted cheaper bread for their workforce to keep wages down. It should not be forgotten that it was precisely in this period that Engels was considering the causes of workingclass revolution. J. A. Froude, the historian and man of letters, said that ‘all round us the intellectual lightships had broken from their moorings … the lights all drifting, the compasses all awry, and nothing left to steer by except the stars’. The members of the Anti-Corn Law League paid a subscription of 5 shillings per annum which, although it could just be afforded by the rising members of the middling class, was quite beyond the reach of the ordinary working people.

So there was very little ground between the two major groups who opposed the ministry for political or economic causes. It was a nice question whether the priority should be universal suffrage or the repeal of the Corn Laws. But that division ensured that the working classes never became a ‘movement’ in any revolutionary sense, and that the enemies of the Melbourne ministry remained separate from each other until its surcease. There was no class war in the orthodox sense. Sometimes the Chartists and the Leaguers would come together for a demonstration or a protest against the authorities, but their association was temporary and limited.

Melbourne was in any case busily occupied in guiding and educating the young queen, and paid even less attention to matters of public business. This, he might have said, was his public business. But there were other items. The Police Acts of 1839 might have been drawn up in an age of calm, with their prohibition of drinking at fairs and in coffee-houses and a ban on carrying ‘any cask, tub, hoop or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard or placard upon any footway’. Another offence consisted in ‘the circumstance of obscene words being written or chalked on the walls of building, gates of houses and palings etcetera’. The police ‘will in such cases deface the words quietly in the night time when it is possible to do so’. Some of these words would have contained the slogans of the radical agitators who were always at work in the great city.

A political fracas occurred in the spring of this year, however, when Melbourne was brought down on a bill concerning Jamaica. The sugar traders had no wish to liberate the slaves of the region, but a Jamaica Bill to suspend the constitution of the island passed by only five votes. It was more or less a defeat, a humiliation that could be repeated at any time through want of confidence or want of power. The prime minister had no choice but to resign rather than confront more such blows. He wrote to Victoria that he expected her to ‘meet this crisis with that firmness which belongs to your character’. With the resignation of her loved minister, it would seem as if she herself had been voted out by the parliament, She could not eat or sleep; she cried continually. She wrote to the duke of Wellington asking him to take the place of Melbourne, but he gently refused. Sir Robert Peel was the next to face his mistress, but she found him ‘odd’ and ‘cold’. They had discussed the aspects of the new administration and at one juncture he mentioned that the ladies of the queen’s household, altogether Whig in persuasion, should accommodate Tories as well. On the following day she sent him a flat refusal; she could not have her intimate circle breached. She wrote to Melbourne, in disregard for the protocol of the court, that: ‘I think you would have been pleased to see my composure and great firmness: the Queen of England will not submit to such trickery. Keep yourself in readiness, for you may soon be wanted.’ It became known as the ‘Bedchamber Crisis’, although the queen herself had added to it the elements of high drama.

Peel retired from the fray with ill grace, and there were many contemporaries who believed that Victoria had in fact overruled the unwritten laws of regal conduct. Others, most of them Whigs, applauded her independence in such a sensitive matter as the royal household. So Melbourne was persuaded to rescind his resignation and remain prime minister for another two years. The duke of Argyll decided that he was ‘an excellent head of a party dying of inertia’. It was simply a question of getting through. A vote of no confidence in the spring of 1840 was lost by a majority of ten votes, and soon enough the Whigs lost three seats in disparate areas – one in a country borough, one in a cathedral town and one in an industrial town. Robert Peel waited for the moment.

The failure of the national convention of Chartists, and the almost contemptuous rejection of the petition by the members of parliament, had characterized the summer of 1839, sowing the seeds of violent retribution which took place in the early winter. Many of the most prominent Chartists were under arrest or on bail, but the strength of Chartism lay not in its leaders but in the communities from which it sprang. The village tailor or the village shoemaker, the innkeeper or the hand-loom weaver, were part of the fabric of the movement just as much as they were part of the community. That was its power, but also its weakness. For that reason alone they were not ready or prepared to fight against the police, against the magistrates or against the men at Westminster. Melbourne was once more in charge and earned a verse tribute from Winthrop Mackworth Praed:

To promise, pause, prepare, postpone

And end by letting things alone:

In short, to earn the people’s pay

By doing nothing every day.

On 4 November the miners and ironworkers of South Wales, led by well-known Chartists, marched on the town of Newport. This was the season of the year, marked by Guy Fawkes and his plot, when riot and disorder were commonplace. It is not clear what the men of 1839 wished to achieve, but a crowd of demonstrators surrounded the Westgate hotel where some of their Chartist colleagues were being guarded by a small military contingent. In this tense situation it takes only one man to lose his nerve. Shots were heard. The army fired into the crowd, which fled, leaving twenty or more dead. The three leaders of the Chartists were identified, arrested, tried and sentenced to death. But then, at the urgent instigation of the Lord Chief Justice, they were all reprieved. If they had been hanged further rioting might bring chaos; as it was, the fire of the Chartists seems to have been quenched by the bloodshed. The movement was suspended to discuss tactics and to initiate some internal reforms. It was the end of the first stage of their activity, and the Whig government congratulated itself on getting through the worst.

At the same time, in a land far, far, away, named Kensington Palace, Victoria met her future husband and was entranced by him. She was by nature highly sexed, and naturally longed for a husband. Albert was all she could desire. ‘Oh to feel I was, and am, loved by such an Angel as Albert was too great a delight to describe! He is perfection …’ Her liberal use of italics is entirely characteristic. Her use of exclamation marks was also red-hot. On parliament voting to cut Albert’s allowance, on their marriage, she fired away: ‘I cried with rage … Poor dear Albert, how cruelly are they ill using that dearest Angel! Monsters! You Tories shall be punished. Revenge! Revenge!’ Their wedding was less Shakespearean. After the ceremonies were over, on 10 February 1840, and the couple put to bed, Prince Albert suggested to his new wife that their honeymoon at Windsor might be extended. This was the occasion for more italics and exclamation marks. ‘You forget, my dearest Love,’ she replied, ‘that I am the Sovereign, and that business can stop and wait for nothing.’ If he had had plans to rule alongside his wife, he was quickly disabused. He was fortunate if he was allowed to blot her page. Only during the queen’s confinement, and the birth of their first child, did Prince Albert come into his own. He began to act as her private secretary, with the key to all the official boxes. He was no longer blotting the ink but holding the pen.

This might in fact be called the great age of pen and ink, since it was the first age of the penny post and what was known as the ‘pillar letter box’. Rowland Hill, an inventor and social reformer, had done the sums and calculated that the best system was that of pre-payment beginning with the rate of one penny. He also recommended the use of ‘the little paper bags called envelopes’. The first penny black went on sale in May 1840. This in itself created a social revolution equivalent to that of the electric telegraph; it promoted social cohesion and advanced national consciousness, prompting Henry Cole, one of the most ingenious of the nation’s civil servants, to write in his memoirs that ‘of all the events of which my career has been connected no one I feel surpasses or, indeed, is equal in value to the world at large as the adoption of uniform penny postage … the glory of England for all time’. The first official report on the post office system remarked that the postage system evinced ‘the stirring industry and energy which is the national characteristic of all’. The stamp was such a symbol of national pride that no legend, only the head of the sovereign, ornamented it. It was greeted by ‘the innumerable friends of civil and religious liberty’ as ‘a conveyance of thought’ which would assist national self-determination and self-awareness. For more informal occasions the exchange of photographs by post was a significant token of friendship.

There are some vignettes of what became Melbourne’s last days in power. After one lengthy cabinet meeting the ministers were proceeding to the door when they heard Melbourne calling to them. ‘Stop a bit,’ he said. ‘What did we decide? Is it to lower the price of bread or isn’t it? It doesn’t matter which, but we usually all say the same thing.’ Melbourne did not take very well to Prince Albert. He felt a natural jealousy that he had been supplanted in the queen’s mind by a young and handsome foreigner. But he had grave doubts about Albert’s earnestness as an instrument of policy. ‘This damned morality’, he had once said, ‘will ruin everything!’ At a cabinet meeting in the autumn of 1840 a possible war between France and England was discussed or, rather, not discussed. Charles Greville, clerk to the Privy Council, noted the intervention of Russell. ‘I should like’, he interposed, turning to Melbourne, ‘to know what is your opinion upon the subject?’ Nothing however could be got from Melbourne, and there was another long pause which was not broken till someone asked Palmerston, ‘What are your last accounts?’ On this Palmerston pulled out of his pocket a whole parcel of letters and reports from Ponsonby, Hodges and others, and began reading through them. In the middle of Palmerston’s reading someone happened to look up and perceived Melbourne fast asleep in his armchair.

When parliament reopened in January 1841, the prime minister was effectively still asleep. Parliament had become a debating chamber to which petitions were addressed. The unreformed chamber had been more of a theatre where Edmund Burke and others practised their oratorical skills. Those days were soon to disappear, a transition anticipated by the Westminster fire of 1834. It was now a more earnest and more partisan assembly, congregating under the watchful eye of the press who devoted much space to its dealings. The parties were not yet disciplined or controlled in any modern sense; they were essentially coalitions of like-minded members who could go their own way when they so wished. They were distinguished by the inclinations of their leaders but there was no such thing as party policy. ‘All is confusion,’ Greville wrote in this decade, ‘intermingling of principles and opinions, political rivalry and personal antipathy.’ Melbourne was still living and working in the eighteenth century, even if this was really the age of Robert Peel.

But by the beginning of 1841, having lost four by-elections in succession, Melbourne was aware of the shadow of the sword about his neck. The crash came when a motion of no confidence in Melbourne’s administration at the beginning of June 1841 passed by one vote. The subsequent general election confirmed the widespread belief that the Conservatives under Peel had become the party of government; their majority on their return to Westminster in the summer of the year, was more than ninety. Peel, having been cheated of office in the Bedchamber Crisis, now acquired a large enough party to do his best or worst. He became the first truly Conservative prime minister, the epithet ‘Tory’ now being considered a little old-fashioned.

The election did not pass without riot and general bravado. That would be too much to ask of a nation which had a tradition of popular protest. There was a large party, outside parliament, of brick-and stone-throwers who were eternally dissatisfied with the state of politics. They comprised the elements of the ‘mob’ which haunted public discourse. But the new masters of England – the middle classes in an alliance with the old ruling class – still had some reason for satisfaction. In its editorial on 29 July The Times claimed that ‘until now the world has never known an instance of a party being installed in power expressly by the vote of a great people’. The stance of Victoria was not influential in the election but her preference for the Whigs was well known and well publicized. Lord Ashley wrote: ‘I much fear that, in her total ignorance of the country and the constitution, her natural violence, her false courage, her extreme and ungovernable wilfulness, she will betray a disposition and a conduct which, while they will do no harm to us [the Tories] will be injurious to herself and to the Crown.’ Victoria was not, then, universally respected. Even her husband had some reservations. Albert told his German adviser, Stockmar: ‘Victoria is too hasty and passionate for me to be able often to speak of my difficulties. She will not hear me out but flies into a rage and overwhelms me with reproaches and suspiciousness, want of trust, ambition, envy etc. etc.’ The new queen was not making a good impression.

It was a political revolution, but it was a relatively peaceful one. The Whigs had taken relief from the woes of government, according to Lord Clarendon, ‘in a kind of apathetic acquiescence … which looks as if all energy and intention were extinct’. They had once been the commanding party of the nation, self-selected rulers who came from great families utterly accustomed to power; they were now powerless and seemed set for a vast decline and eventual extinction.

The new parliament met for its second session on 3 February 1842, and all the formal conversations were animated by the financial condition of the country. Expenditure was still too high, but how, in particular, would Peel deal with the taxes still imposed upon foreign corn? This was the heart of the matter. The Whigs had gone to the election on the slogan of ‘cheap bread’, but nobody believed them. Peel’s intentions were still not clear, perhaps even to himself. Half his job was done for him by a bountiful harvest in 1842, succeeded by three more good harvests. His immediate actions were to reduce the tax on corn and to lower the tariffs on a wide range of goods; and, to balance the budget, he decided to reintroduce income tax. It had been dropped after the Napoleonic Wars but a fresh look was necessary at the nation’s revenues. He may not yet have been determined to abolish the Corn Laws altogether, but the thought of it cannot have been very far from his mind.

Peel wished to simplify the tax system, revise all the arcane duties and tariffs and generally to discipline the finances of the country. ‘I propose’, he said, ‘that for a time, to be limited, the incomes of this country should be called on to contribute a certain sum’ for the purpose of reducing the deficit. The amount was set at 7 pence in the pound for incomes over £150 per annum. To use one of his own phrases, ‘we cannot recede’. It came as an entire shock to his opponents, who took two or three days before crafting a reply. He had effectively initiated a financial revolution by which the entire system of revenue was changed. It was to be the predominant tone of his ministry.

He had a strong cabinet, however, to support him. Aberdeen replaced Palmerston at the Foreign Office and at once promoted cordial relations with England’s principal allies and eschewed the rougher tones of Palmerston. The duke of Wellington became leader in the Lords, but without a specific ministry to control. Gladstone was promoted to the vice-presidency of the Board of Trade; in the following year he became president of the Board and thus in a powerful position to indulge his appetite for statistics and numbers. Thomas Carlyle described him as a ‘most methodic, fair-spoken, purified, clear-starched, sincere-looking man’, which was, for Carlyle, praise indeed. Edward Stanley (Lord Stanley a little later) had once been chief secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland but was now promoted to colonial secretary; as the earl of Derby, in a subsequent reincarnation he would rise much, much higher. Benjamin Disraeli remained, much to his chagrin, on the back benches; he had believed that his pre-eminent abilities would be as visible to others as they were to himself, but Peel had no room for him.

Peel came to office as a doctor approaching a sick patient. He did not do much at first; he was too busy observing the symptoms and accustoming himself once more to prescribe. It was the worst year to begin a new rule. It was reported to the Commons by Sir James Graham, the new home secretary, that 1 million out of a population of 16 million were receiving poor relief. The cotton mills fell silent and the cost of food rose. The banks themselves were in serious difficulties, and investment had dwindled. It was perhaps the lowest point of the century. The spinners of Bolton had a myriad grievances, ‘namely, in the reduction of our wages, unjust and unreasonable abatements, in forcing upon us unhealthy and disagreeable houses, in charging us unreasonable and exorbitant rents … the above evils arise from class legislation, and we are further of the opinion that misery, ignorance, poverty and crime will continue to exist until the People’s Charter becomes the law of the land’.

These were the conditions that once more roused the spirit of Chartism in an outpouring of pamphlets and addresses to working people, placards and demonstrations. ‘Suffering caused by law’, John Bright wrote, ‘has made the whole population a mass of combustible matter, and the spark now ignited may not easily be quenched.’ Members of the Anti-Corn Law League vied with the Chartists for the support of working men, although the latter were more squarely on the side of the workers. The Leaguers were still in some quarters dismissed as laissez-faire ideologues who were on the side of employers in the great battle. In the Midlands and in the north, in Lancashire and the West Riding, the colliers walked out of their work. In May 1841, another national convention had assembled to create a petition of more than 1.3 million signatures seeking a pardon for certain Chartist prisoners. ‘They came pouring down the wide road in thousands,’ W. M. Cudworth concluded in Rambles Round Horton (1886), ‘a gaunt, famished-looking desperate multitude armed with huge bludgeons, flails, pitchforks and pikes, many without coats and hats, and hundreds with their clothes in rags and tatters’.

A radical journalist noted at the time that:

The spectacle attracted great attention, from the ragged street sweeper to the duchess with the golden eye glass. The city police behaved very favourably, but the metropolitan blues were very indifferent. The omnibus drivers were very rough and violent. We marched down, slow march, through Fleet-street, the Strand, past Charing Cross, the Horse Guards, and to the Parliament House. The windows of the public offices were particularly crowded, and great curiosity seemed to prevail.

Parliament was not to be turned, and the petition was once again rejected on the casting vote of the Speaker. This created a fury that had not been seen before. The strikes intensified, and there was speculation once more that it might lead to a general uprising. Police stations were destroyed, prisoners released and the houses of prominent magistrates or mine-owners were put to the torch. The spring had turned into a hot summer. Another petition was carried to parliament in the following year; the demonstrators were like waves of the sea forever beating against the rocks. The petition was claimed to contain more than 3 million signatures but yet was overwhelmingly rejected by the Commons.

This was the catalyst for the ‘Plug Riots’ or ‘Plug Plot Riots’ of 1842, when the steam-plugs on boilers were removed so that no industrial work could be done. It began in the collieries of Staffordshire and soon spread. With the coalfields closed, the whole of industrial England suffered privation. London, too, was feeling the pinch of want and unemployment. In Clerkenwell Green and Paddington, two centres for urban radicals, large crowds assembled. A report in the Sun of 23 August noted that the leaders of the crowd ‘were proceeding to condemn the conduct of the “Bluebottles” [police] when a loud cry was raised of “the Peelers! the Peelers!” On turning round it was discovered that about a dozen of the horse-patrol, armed with heavy cutlasses and backed by several divisions of police were rapidly advancing upon the crowd.’ The result was broken heads, broken limbs, and worse.

The wreckage was doubly damned since the ‘time-spirit’, as Carlyle put it, was behind the machine. There was still an aura of mystery and secrecy about machinery and its workings. It was in a sense thought to be beyond human control. One ‘disconsolate radical’, as he termed himself, wrote that ‘one rarely finds anybody who ventures to deal frankly with the problem of machinery. It appears to infuse a certain fear. Everybody sees that machinery is producing the greatest of all revolutions between the classes, but somehow nobody dares to interfere.’

If contemporaries did not interfere, they tried to ignore the problem altogether. This may help to explain the genesis of ‘the Young England Movement’ launched into life by the young Disraeli, still dissatisfied that his apparent genius was not appreciated by Peel and the other Tory leaders. What better course than to launch a party of his own? It turned its back upon industry and industrialism, preferring to dwell in an imagined feudal, hierarchical and pre-industrial age where the poorer folk and the nobility shared patriotic and Christian longings. It rejected utilitarianism, political economy, rationalism, Malthusianism and all the other early Victorian remedies for social ills. It was perhaps no accident that in 1842 Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur was published, inspiring a range of short and narrative poems that celebrated Lancelot, Arthur, Guinevere and the other august figures of national myth. In a paean to the ‘Time Spirit’, Carlyle hailed the Man of Letters as the Hero. ‘I say of all Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Governing Classes at present extant in the world, there is no class comparable for importance to the Priesthood of the Writers of Books.’

So the Round Table had once more become one of England’s icons. Young England was a young man’s creed. It was an idealist creed, but it was also an avenging creed damning all that had come before. In the spring of 1845 Disraeli announced that ‘a Conservative government is an organised hypocrisy’. The home secretary, Sir James Graham, took the trouble to write to a colleague that ‘with respect to Young England the puppets are moved by Disraeli, who is the ablest man among them … I consider him unprincipled and dishonest, and in despair [without office] he has tried the effect of bullying.’

Peel was nothing if not a reformer when vital interests were under threat, but it was usually necessary to bring his party with him. Corn was just such an issue at a time when bread was cheap but people were still starving. It might have been expected that the Conservatives would continue their support of farmers and landowners. To deny protection to corn, and thus to risk the danger of cutting agricultural livings, was emphatically not Tory doctrine. But Peel had set his mind to the problem and followed his convictions wherever they led him. He was now sure that the Corn Laws, which had the effect of raising the price of imported corn, had to be changed.

Peel was a reforming prime minister quite different from his predecessors. He familiarized himself with every department of state; he had an appetite for statistics and details of policy. He mastered his colleagues with his administrative fervour and general toughness of approach. ‘Peel has committed great and grievous mistakes’, Lord Ashley wrote in 1843, ‘in omitting to call his friends frequently together to state his desires and rouse their zeal … men would have felt they were companions in arms; they now have the sentiment of being followers in a drill.’

Disraeli may have been a singular figure but, in opposition to Peel, he was not a solitary one. He joined forces with George Bentinck in the fight for Protectionism and for what was known as ‘the Anti-League’ specifically opposed to the Anti-Corn Law League. It organized meetings and protests, in imitation of its successful opponents; it enlisted sympathetic MPs in its support of the values and principles of the landowners. It stood in line with those mild Conservatives who would negotiate between the various classes and interests in order to form a firm and just national settlement. They compared ‘the prosperity, growing wealth and full employment under the old trade’ with the vicious cost-cutting under ‘victorious free trade’.

Nevertheless, the proponents of the Anti-Corn Law League had the strongest speakers and perhaps the most compelling proposals. It was widely argued that those against the Corn Laws were on the side of science; this can be called quite simply the argument of the age, joining the intellectual merits of free trade with the Victorian faith in progress and efficiency. The adherents of the League introduced lessons of political science to those who had no inkling of such things; they lectured on profits and wages to merchants and artisans and clerks. Nine million pamphlets and tracts were distributed through a network of agents. A great meeting was held at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1843, where Cobden used the most contemporary imagery to describe the power of free trade. ‘There was a circle of continuous links which could not be injured in any one point, but it would like electricity pervade the whole chain [great cheering].’

It is hard to disentangle the various Tory policies that Peel had to consider. The Young England men were discussed by ministers, but they had very little effect on policy. The Tories of ‘the old school’ might be said to go back to James II and the Exclusion Crisis for whom reform of any kind was considered unnecessary and obnoxious. Orthodox Toryism was less pugnacious but maintained the settled conviction that the working population were of necessity inferior and that the patrician or governing classes were in effect born to rule. Liberal Toryism, as it were on the left-hand side, emphasized the powers of individual responsibility and held up the central image of ‘the market’ as balancing human values. They were on the whole in favour of parliamentary reform. Radical Toryism was a form of paternalism which was designed to sustain the morality and the well-being of every stratum of society. This was still considered to be a Christian country.

Very few members of parliament would have disowned Christian doctrine, whatever form of Christianity they espoused. A Whig radical and an orthodox Tory might choose the same church or chapel, and it was widely believed that by the early 1840s the moral and physical health of the nation was improved. Pauperism and crime had their climacteric in 1842, for example, and from that time forward they had gradually diminished in size and scale. An analysis of tax duties demonstrates that, from 1840, legislation had the effect of making spirits more expensive and thus of reducing their consumption. This may have been in part the result of Evangelical and Nonconformist missions that maintained their presence in East London and other deprived quarters. The success of the Salvation Army, after its foundation in 1865, may be a case in point.

The social renewal had taken fifty years. The clerk of Bow Street magistrates’ office knew of what he spoke. ‘I have no doubt’, he told one commission of inquiry as early as 1816, ‘that the manners of the lowest classes of society are much better than they were ten years ago, those excessive scenes of drunkenness which I have formerly observed are not by any means so frequent’. He was supported by the curate of St Giles, which had been the church on that pile of rottenness which was known as ‘Rats’ Castle’ in Holborn. ‘I think the face of the general appearance of the parish has improved within that time; there is not so great an appearance of vice as there used to be.’ ‘Yesterday,’ a German traveller wrote in 1835, ‘I wandered into Regent’s Park. Of eating, drinking, singing, music, dancing, not a trace – they walk up and down and lie on the grass which is growing bare and yellow.’ It was a remarkable transformation. No dancing. No drinking. No public sex. No ribaldry and blasphemy.

The public authorities, largely through the efforts of persistent reformers like Wilberforce and enlightened statesmen like Peel, modified the rigour of earlier decades. The worst punishments for felons and transported convicts were alleviated; imprisonment for debt was discontinued; some of the early Factory Acts were passed; children were banned from sweeping chimneys and dogs were prohibited from drawing vehicles like horses. The first public baths and wash-houses, established in 1845, admitted almost 80,000 people in the first year. Victoria Park in Bow became one of the lungs of London. Sir James Graham’s Factory Education Bill of 1843 survived a stormy passage in which the various denominations fought the brave fight over their right to supervise the moral and religious guidance of the working classes. A cumbersome compromise was reached among people who did not relish compromise. Separate classrooms were set aside for Anglican instruction, and Dissenting ministers were invited to attend the schools once a week. It was not enough for the Nonconformists, however, who objected to a permanent Anglican schoolmaster and a majority of Anglicans on the school boards. Eventually the bill created such dissension that it was abandoned altogether. Lord Ashley wrote to Robert Peel: ‘let this last trial be taken as a sufficient proof that “united education” is an impossibility. It ought never again to be attempted. The Dissenters and the Church have each laid down their limits which they will not pass; and there is no power that can either force, persuade, or delude them.’

This was also the period when self-help took on a political aspect with the growth of political societies dedicated to social reform. Trade unionism, Chartism and factory reform vied with benefit societies, secular societies and temperance societies in maintaining the social fabric at a time of perceived stress. The Vigilance Association for the Defence of Personal Rights can be placed beside the National Association for Women’s Suffrage, the Moral Reform Union beside the London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals beside the Lord’s Day Observance Society. Chartism may have been the light that failed, but it illuminated the way for working men’s associations and eventually the Labour party.

No distinction was drawn between moral and physical hygiene or between moral and physical training. Indeed, the physique of the English seems to have been admired. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in English Traits (1847), remarked that ‘they are bigger men than the Americans. I suppose a hundred English taken at random out of the street, would weigh a fourth more than so many Americans. Yet, I am told, the skeleton is not larger. They are round, ruddy, and handsome; at least the whole bust is well formed, and there is a tendency to stout and powerful frames.’ This is the period when the word ‘manliness’ was introduced as a new definition of ‘gentleman’.

11

City lights

If a traveller entered the heart of the kingdom, St Paul’s Cathedral, in 1841 he would have discovered, according to an official report of that year, that ‘the cathedral is constantly and shamelessly polluted with ordure, the pews are sometimes turned into cabinets d’aisance [toilets] and the prayer books torn up [for toilet paper]; the monuments are scribbled all over, and often with grossest indecency’. This was at the height of England’s power and wealth. There were other types of gloom. In November 1841 the darkness of London thickened in the fog where ‘hackney coaches drive up against church windows, old men tumble down cellars; old women and children stand crying up against lamp-posts, lost within a street of their own homes …’ The fogs of London were famous then. White, green, and yellow fogs were the exhalation of coal fires and steamboats, factories and breweries. Torches were lit to find the way. The smell and taste of the fog were of particular concern; it was known as ‘miners’ phlegm’.

Here is a London scene. On London Bridge, in the fog, two entangled lines of cabs are shrouded in darkness; the silhouette of the broad-shouldered driver of an omnibus can just be seen, as well as the red face of the conductor who seems to have shouted himself hoarse; the omnibuses fight for space among the cabs and the coal carts and the beer wagons. All is mist and dust, with the cacophony of London sounds – the crack of the whip, the snorting of the horses, the cries of the children, the shouting out of destinations.

It may act as a prelude to the theme of anxiety and the strain of life in Victorian London. It was believed with some reason that whole societies of people, rich and poor, privileged and outcast, suffered from nervous maladies of one kind or other. The Edinburgh Review noted that ‘throughout the whole community we are called to labour too early and compelled to labour too severely and too long. We live sadly too fast.’ For those of religious temper the strain of conscience was greater than that of any physical suffering; there were many, sitting in small rooms, who believed themselves to be doomed to hell. Insanity often followed.

Walter Pater, in turn, later wrote of ‘that inexhaustible discontent, languor and homesickness, that endless regret, the chords of which ring all though our modern literature’. This is a genuine strain of the Victorian temper that should be placed with all others. It was an age in which all the sustaining props of belief began to crumble. When insecurity and doubt began their insidious work, together with the suspicion, as the English divine Frederick Robertson put it, ‘whether there be anything to believe at all’. It was the panic at nothingness which the Victorians did their best to exorcize. Were we simply, as Charles Kingsley feared, ‘wheels of a vast machine’?

The following year was a time for contrast. On the night of 26 May 1842, Victoria and Albert were driven in a carriage to Her Majesty’s Theatre in the Haymarket for a royal ball. Two weeks before, the royal couple had graced a costume ball at Buckingham Palace where they had dressed as Edward III and his queen, Philippa. This was the same month in which the Chartist marchers presented their second great petition to parliament only to see it contemptuously rejected. It was on this occasion that a member later to be revered for his learning, Thomas Babington Macaulay, declared that ‘universal suffrage is incompatible, not with this or that form of government, but with all forms of government, and with everything for the sake of which forms of government exist’.

This was also the year when Edwin Chadwick published his Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Classes of Great Britain. In the course of this momentous report, largely financed and prepared by Chadwick himself, it was revealed that in the majority of the towns there were no attempts at sanitation. There was no drainage, and the refuse was simply thrown into the streets, where it would fester and rot; the courts and alleys were blocked by ordure and other filth, while there were no public pumps for the poor to find water. Fever was a powerful foe in all the metropolitan parishes, so that the poorest sickened and died before being carried to the workhouse.

In the same year Lord Ashley, who had already found fame for his factory reforms, persuaded parliament to appoint a royal commission on the state of employment in the mines. The details of the women, and the children, of the underworld were revealed to a nation previously unaware of what was essentially a domestic slave trade. The report also included illustrations and woodcuts of the workers – the women half-naked, the children almost completely so – bearing coal and dragging wagons like beasts of burden. They were beaten, stunted, malnourished and diseased. This was an aspect of the Victorian world – of Victorian civilization – that the public did not care to see. Almost at once the Commons passed a Mines and Collieries Act which prohibited female labour in the mines and raised the age of eligible children to ten. Yet the report had been salutary as well as severe. To know that English women and children had been reduced to a state only a little above savagery, to labour for long hours in filthy surroundings, to be exposed to all the opportunities of sexual licence, and to be injured or killed by the perils of defective machinery; all this was intolerable to the mass of people. The act was passed in the summer of 1842, but only after being severely curtailed in committee. Acts of mitigation had a thousand explanations without even mentioning the world of profit. The coaling industry was rich and powerful; two thousand collieries could not properly be investigated. What large body of men could examine them?

Conditions varied with each pit. How could standard measures of ventilation be used? Many questions were left unanswered. But why was no other industry being picked out in this fashion for remonstrance? What about needle-making or cobbling or work in the distilleries? There was no real response to this, which led many to despair of the whole industrial system as it existed in England. It was this despair which led directly to the agitation for better educational and sanitary provision. It seemed that some legislators would have to start from the beginning.

The report on the sanitary conditions of the towns and cities did not have a speedy resolution. Edwin Chadwick had numerous enemies who did their best to block his work when it was ready to be published early in 1842. The Poor Law commissioners, under whose imprimatur the report was commissioned, refused to sign it. So Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population was published under his own name. However, this subdued introduction did not affect its readership, which was soon calculated in the tens of thousands. One quarter of a million people each year flocked to the gutters and sewers. Two thousand eight hundred and fifty people were crowded into ninety-three small tenements. The excrement ‘was lying scattered about the rooms, vaults, cellars, areas and yards that it was hardly possible to move for it’. The living lay with the dead, both bitten by vermin. They could no longer be considered as human, merely the detritus left upon the shore. The average age of mortality in the capital was twenty-seven. Half the funerals were for children under the age of ten.

It could not be considered, therefore, easy reading. In the first pages Chadwick considered the case of a district of Tiverton:

The land is nearly on a level with the water, the ground is marshy, and the sewers all open. Before reaching the district, I was assailed by a most disagreeable smell; and it was clear to the senses that the air was full of most injurious malaria. The inhabitants, easily distinguishable from the inhabitants of the other parts of the town, had all a sickly, miserable appearance. The open drains in some cases ran immediately before the doors of the houses, and some of the houses were surrounded by wide open drains, full of all the animal and vegetable refuse not only of the houses in that part, but of those in other parts of Tiverton. In many of the houses, persons were confined with fever and different diseases, and all I talked to either were ill or had been so: and the whole community presented a melancholy spectacle of disease and misery.

English society might not in fact have been on the brink of collapse, but it seemed to many people of the time that this was exactly what was happening. ‘Certainly I have never seen, in the course of my life,’ Charles Greville wrote, ‘so serious a state of this as that which stares us now in the face, and this after thirty years of uninterrupted peace, and the most ample scope for the development of all our resources. One remarkable feature in the present condition of affairs is that nobody can account for it, and nobody pretends to point out any remedy.’ It was nobody’s fault.

But surely it was somebody’s fault. There was an immediate clamour against the parish vestries and the speculative builders who had allowed these conditions to fester and to spread. The engineers were at fault for improper maintenance, and the doctors at fault for negligent reporting. The reaction was so strong and so vociferous that the home secretary, Sir James Graham, was forced to institute a Royal Commission on the Health of Towns which gave him a breathing space of two years in which to do next to nothing. The Whig opposition did not harry the ministers concerned, as they should have done; the shock of defeat seemed to have left them immobile. Peel and his supporters had come to the conclusion that free trade, and commercial freedom in general, were the best remedy for social ills. The ‘blue books’ or statistical inquiries of Chadwick only served to illustrate the partial response to this great social evil. Organizations such as the Town Improvement Company, which hoped to run at a profit, and philanthropic associations such as the Society for Improving the Conditions of the Labouring Classes were established to fill the emptiness of parliamentary response.

Yet the Victorian city was, in many stretches, still the city of dreadful night. Lord Ashley, having visited what was known as a common lodging house (with men, women and children mingled together), told the Commons that ‘these houses are never cleaned or ventilated; they literally swarm with vermin. It is almost impossible to breathe. Missionaries are seized with vomiting or fainting upon entering them.’ ‘I have felt’, said another, ‘the vermin dropping on my hat like peas.’ No city was alike; each one had ills and vices of its own. The ‘city’ was not itself a favoured term. Victorians preferred the circumlocution of ‘large towns and populous districts’. Sheffield was essentially a congregation of small industrial districts. Birmingham had a more unified sensibility which would eventually be brought by Joseph Chamberlain to life. In Birmingham the small workshop was the key, where in Manchester it was the factory. The workforce was more skilled in Birmingham than in Manchester; housing and sanitation were also better. It was said, in fact, that Birmingham was the best-administered city in England.

Some urban leaders preferred Gothic, Grecian or Italian architecture for their public buildings. Since each city was different, there was no single or central style. This was complemented by the rise in the quality of the architectural fabric of the larger towns with town halls, mechanics’ institutes, churches, squares and public gardens. The Builder reported that ‘one can scarcely walk about Manchester without coming across frequent examples of the grand in architecture. There has been nothing to equal it since the building of Venice.’ Birmingham was, according to the Magazine of Art, ‘perhaps the most artistic town in England’. Leeds boasted ‘whole streets vibrating with colour’. The conscious monumentality of these buildings was particularly striking as the tokens of a new urban age.

Nevertheless, there were towns and cities which emanated Victorianism like a whiff of coal smoke. Of Wigston in Leicester one historian of landscape, W. G. Hoskins, later wrote, ‘the sight of South Wigston on a wet and foggy Sunday afternoon in November is an experience one is glad to have had. It reached the rock bottom of English provincial life; and there is something profoundly moving about it.’ It had identical brick cottages and an iron church. It bears its origins in the nineteenth century like a birth-mark, all the flatness and uniformity an eternal reproach to the facile optimism that characterized many Victorians.

In 1830 Henry Brougham, himself a baron, spoke out in the Cloth Hall Yard of Leeds. ‘We don’t now live in the days of barons, thank God, we live in the days of Leeds, of Bradford, of Halifax and Huddersfield.’ These are the towns and cities that bear the stamp of the nineteenth century as surely as if by some trick of conjuration they had been manufactured out of steam. In Leeds a hundred woollen mills employed ten thousand people, and thirty firms spinning flax counted five thousand workers. Bradford was also a textile town, but Leeds leaped ahead with its burgeoning engineering industry. Of Sheffield an official report claimed that ‘the population is, for so large a town, unique in its character, in fact it more closely resembles that of a village than a town, for over wide areas each person appears to be acquainted with every other, and to be interested in each other’s concerns’.

In Manchester there was no such unity, but a gulf between masters and men, and a gulf between different types of working men. With its unruly people, its social divisions and its contrasts, the city was a seedbed of fiction. The most prominent among the Mancunian novels were Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), subtitled ‘A Tale of Manchester Life’, and the same author’s North and South (1855), where the fictional city of Milton is based upon Manchester. A French observer noticed ‘the river Irwell, forming a kind of peninsula, and if one travels up and down it the whole neighbourhood looks like a grey colourless Venice. Instead of the black gondolas, coal boats glide up and down …’

Yet there was a kind of magnificence in its misery. Disraeli suggested in Coningsby (1844) that only a philosopher could understand ‘the grandeur of Manchester’, while Thomas Carlyle, who was just such a philosopher, suggested that the starting of the cotton mills at half-past five in the morning was as ‘sublime as Niagara or more so’. The suburbs seemed to be lying prostrate along endless streets while the central city was ornamented and rendered magniloquent with public spaces and public buildings. There was in fact a ‘Manchester school’ unified in support of the principle of free trade, whether seen from a financial or social vantage; it included Quakers, philosophic radicals, merchants, political radicals and manufacturers. There was a ferment of activity, of which Peel was the most successful beneficiary, and it was not unconnected to a perception of Elizabeth Gaskell on the Manchester crowd: ‘The only thing to strike a passerby was an acuteness and intelligence of countenance which has often been noticed in a manufacturing population.’ The social divisions were a cause of excitement rather than conflict, however, and it was widely believed that Manchester was the model of the city of the future. The Anti-Corn Law League was built up in Manchester. On the site of the Peterloo Massacre there rose, in 1856, the Free Trade Hall. It was the monument to the idea that first expressed itself here.

In the later decades of the nineteenth century Birmingham became the beacon of what was known as ‘the civic gospel’ and was proud of being known as ‘the best-governed city in the world’. In Birmingham there was greater diversity of trade than in, for example, Leeds. The concentration of smaller workshops other than factories encouraged an intimate and easier air between masters and men. A local Chartist remarked that ‘large manufacturers cannot shut up their men as they did in Manchester … for it was well known that [in Manchester] the working people were at the mercy of the manufacturers’. The labour force of Birmingham was more skilled, promoting more social mobility. Richard Cobden wrote that ‘the state of society’ was ‘more healthy and natural in a moral and political sense … There is a freer intercourse between all classes than in the Lancashire town where a great and impassable gulf separates the workman from his employer.’

This may have been one of the reasons why Prince Albert decided that he would visit Birmingham in 1843, much to the disquiet of his ministers. This was just a year after some of the most bitter strikes in living memory. Robert Peel noted that ‘the difficulty arose from the mayor of Birmingham being a Chartist, and the town council participating in the same violent and dangerous opinions … it would be accompanied by an immense physical demonstration of the trained masses of the second town in the country’. There had been riot in the air during the previous year when the Anti-Corn Law League prepared a declaration that ‘the country is on the eve of a revolution, and that the wheels of Government should be arrested’. The Chartists called for a general strike.

Nothing of the kind took place. In truth Walter Bagehot, the constitutional historian, was always of the opinion that the English were a naturally deferential people. How could they have survived for so long with few bureaucrats and with the help of amateurs only, without a standing army or a secret service or any of the other appurtenances of government? There had not been a police force until recent years.

Birmingham proved to be no different. The prince’s private secretary, George Anson, noted that the ‘280,000 population seemed entirely to have turned out on the occasion, the streets were literally jammed, but nothing could exceed the good humour and good feeling, and apparently excess of loyalty which pervaded the whole multitude’. Dire warnings and threats of revolution had in reality been followed by mass outbursts of loyalty and good feeling. We may take into account the well-known fickleness of crowds, but this does not seem to allow for the vast disparity between the revolutionary slogans and the loyal crowds. It may perhaps be wise to repeat Edmund Burke’s analogy of the grasshoppers and the cattle: the grasshoppers are small in number, but they make the worst din; the cattle murmur only, but they remain the solid life of the country. A report from Manchester completes the more settled picture on a more pathetic note: ‘Yet these poor people are of remarkably peaceable habits, and would have been glad to have work if they had been allowed.’

One incident of the previous year is an example of unsuccessful urban revolution. On Sunday, 3 July 1842, John William Bean, a sixteen-year-old boy, stood in a dark coat on the fringes of the crowds at the Mall waiting for the queen and her cortège to make their way from Buckingham Palace to St James’s and the Chapel Royal. He was described later as a ‘hunchback’ with a twisted spine and the lurch of a confirmed cripple. The more refined Victorians categorized him as one of the unfortunate victims of malign fate; to most of the London populace he was merely a freak, to be whistled at, spat at and stoned by the younger boys. He had sold his small collection of books, one of them a Bible, and bought a cheap pistol for threepence. At that day on the Mall he waited for the coach carrying the queen to pass by; then he aimed his pistol and pulled the trigger. Nothing much happened. The weapon did not fire. Another boy in the crowd, Charles Edward Dassett, saw what had happened and pulled the gun away from Bean. But he was too slow. A crowd had gathered around the small incident while a rumour spread that the queen had been shot. In the confusion Bean managed to slip away while Dassett was caught holding the pistol. It took some time for the confusion to be dispelled and the facts to be ascertained. Eventually a poster was put up with the description of a male ‘thin made, short neck, and humped back, walks a little on one side, long sickly pale face …’ The police leaped into action and hauled into their local stations any young hunchback they could find. It was reported that the number of ‘little deformed men detained’ was ‘astonishing’. But Bean was finally identified and arrested, sentenced to eighteen months’ hard labour. ‘It is worth being shot at’, Victoria said later, ‘to see how much one is loved.’

The cities of the north and the Midlands had one significant similarity. The slums of the poor were still areas shunned, meanly built with dilapidated houses leaning over the narrow and dirty lanes. For all the spacious streets and commodious houses of ‘Woolborough’ or Bradford, there were quarters where dwelt only wretchedness, misery and disease. The lower depths of English towns and cities had no drains, no sewers, no toilets, no water. The mills and factories, the pride of the north, spilled noxious fumes and corrupted water into the nearby streets. ‘In the manufacturing towns of England,’ one health inspector wrote, ‘most of which have enlarged with great rapidity, the additions have been made without regard to either the personal comfort of the inhabitants or the necessities which congregation requires’. And then there was the smoke, the Bradford smoke, the Leeds smoke, the Manchester smoke, each of a different colour and intensity, and each of a different odour; sometimes it condensed and congealed, falling as black rain or what was known as ‘blacks’. The mayor of Middlesbrough asserted that ‘the smoke is an indication of plenty of work – an indication of prosperous times – an indication that all classes of workpeople are being employed, that there is little necessity for charity and that even those in the humblest station are in a position free from want. Therefore we are proud of our smoke.’ If it was set at the right tempo and cadence, this could be a significant Victorian hymn.

A hymn too, might have been formed out of what was known as the ‘associative principle’ which grew up in the cities as part of the common interest and common dependency. This ‘principle’ of mutual interest also covered the various voluntary organizations and social groups which made up the cultural and spiritual life of the cities; choral societies, debating clubs, social clubs and sporting associations all formed the close-knit fabric. A respectable citizen, or his wife, might join The London Philanthropic Society for Providing the Poor with Bread and Coal in Winter or The General Domestic Servants Benevolent Institution.

But a different form of enterprise was reaching out. In 1844 twenty-eight flannel weavers, calling themselves the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, amassed a capital sum of £28 and opened a cooperative store in Toad Lane. Their plan was to sell goods at current prices and then retain the surplus cash as the common property of the membership. Their success was evident, their profits useful, and their reputation spread until it became the Cooperative Wholesale Society. Its members attended meetings after hours in which they discussed the topics of the day. In seven years they had made a gross profit of £900 and there was already talk of schools and housing for their workers. It was one of the most formidable legacies of the nineteenth-century world. It had a tenuous line with Chartists, also built upon solidarity and class interest, but by this time Chartism was in rapid decline. Other forces would have to take its place. At the heads of their articles was the promise that: ‘The objects of this Society are the moral and intellectual advancement of its members. It provides them with groceries, butchers’ meat, drapery goods, clothes and clogs.’

The city implies crowds, grim and monotonous as they make their way to and from their place of work with the steady tread of shoes or boots upon stone; sometimes light and rapid in pursuit of some street entertainment or diversion; and at other times stolid and purposeless like a vagrant without a home. All these and a thousand others make up the nineteenth-century crowd. ‘As we pushed through the crowd,’ Charles Kingsley wrote in 1850, ‘I was struck with the wan haggard look of all faces; their lacklustre eyes and drooping lips, stooping shoulders, heavy, dragging steps, gave them a crushed, dogged air which was infinitely painful, and bespoke a grade of misery more habitual and degrading than that of the excitable and passionate artisan.’

The politics of town and city soon became the politics of the nation. One radical pamphlet of 1885 noted that ‘the great towns as they now are constitute the source and centre of English public opinion. It is from them that Liberal legislation receives its initiatives; it is the steady pressure exercised by them that guarantees the political progress of the country.’ They had developed their momentum in a very short time. In the 1830s Manchester was still organized by a manorial court, and Middlesbrough was barely a name. Yet their new men came forward with their own remedies for social ills. They formed a new urban bourgeoisie, and the editor of the Leeds Mercury remarked of these new cities that ‘although they cannot boast of the historic glories of the great capitals of Europe … are even now superior to many of them in wealth and population and are laying broad and deep the foundations of a future destiny which may vie in interest and importance with some of the most famous cities of the ancient world.’ In the first fifty years of the nineteenth century Manchester’s population rose from 75,000 to 303,000, Birmingham’s from 75,000 to 247,000 and Leeds’s from 53,000 to 172,000. Between 1841 and 1901 the population of England and Wales more than doubled, and it was clear enough that the rising population came from urban surroundings.

The seaside towns, such as Brighton, Weymouth and Torquay, also flourished beyond their respective bounds. Spas and watering places, already with a decidedly dubious reputation, became more and more popular. William Cobbett noted that ‘to places like this come all that is knavish and all that is foolish, and all that is base; gamesters, pickpockets, and harlots …’ The example he mentions is now the genteel Cheltenham.

12

Charitable government

Those who were against government provision on principle summoned up visions of financial malfeasance and economic manipulation in England itself that proved quickly to be baseless. In fact something of an economic ‘boom’ had begun in 1844 and lasted for twenty years, during which period the railway system was more or less completed and the costs of production in cotton mills fell significantly. The impact of new technology and freer trade was now becoming part of public consciousness. In 1844 Gladstone, as president of the Board of Trade in the ministry of Peel, proposed a bill that would allow the government to buy out any railway after fifteen years. Peel did not favour the change, however, and instead proposed a scheme whereby every company would have to run a ‘third-class’ train every day at a penny a mile. These cheap trains had previously been open carriages, with holes in the floor to let the water run through, but the new bill insisted that they were fitted with roofs. Gladstone resisted the idea that cheap trains should run on Sundays on the grounds that ‘the working respectable mechanic would not choose the Lord’s Day for travelling’. First-and second-class passengers, however, were allowed the privilege of defying the Lord under the terms of the Railway Regulation Act.

In the same act provisions were made for the use of the electrical telegraph on every line. Three years before, the first telegraph system for commercial purposes was installed on the Great Western Railway between Paddington and West Drayton; it was only 13 miles in length but it heralded a new world of communication. A newspaper advertisement proclaimed: ‘The Wonder of the Age!! Instantaneous Communication … The Galvanic and Electro-Magnetic Telegraphs on the Great Western Railway … The Electric Fluid travels at the rate of 280,000 Miles per Second.’ The prospect of instant communication across vast spaces was considered to be a feat almost beyond the credible. In previous years the declaration of independence by the American colonies did not reach London for six weeks, while news of Trafalgar did not reach Westminster for twelve days. Within a relatively short time the electric telegraph became the means of mass communication, and was often described as the nervous system of Victorian culture. It controlled information and of course disciplined the railway network. It had a hundred uses. By annihilating time and space the telegraph revolutionized the control of the British empire, for example, and it was widely realized that ‘towns at present removed some stages from the metropolis will become its suburbs’. You could also play long-distance chess. Some years later, in 1889, Lord Salisbury described the telegraph as ‘a discovery which operates … immediately upon the moral and intellectual nature and action of mankind’. A quotation from Job was often employed: ‘Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go and say unto thee, Here we are.’ It was also understood in terms of fairy story and enchantment. But Ali Baba had never stumbled upon anything so wonderful.

Samuel Smiles dated the start of ‘railway mania’ to 1844, the year of the Railway Act, when ‘the public outside the stock exchange shortly became infected with the same spirit, and many people, utterly ignorant of railways, knowing and caring nothing about their great national uses, but hungering and thirsting after premiums, rushed eagerly into the vortex of speculation … Shares! Shares! Became the general cry.’ Soon ‘the madness spread everywhere. It embraced merchants and manufacturers, gentry and shopkeepers, clerks in public offices and loungers in the clubs … No scheme was so bad that it did not find an engineer.’ Hasty and slipshod building was the result; tunnels were made of half-baked clay instead of bricks, and rubble was used for the foundation of bridges. There were already one hundred and four separate railway companies, and six years later the number had doubled. A popular writer of the time, Dionysius Lardner, wrote: ‘it is impossible to regard the vast buildings and their dependencies which constitute a chief terminal station of a great line of railways, without feelings of inexpressible astonishment … And then the speed!’

In this same year, the steam train reached its apotheosis in J. W. M. Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway. An artist need have no opinion, and it is not at all clear whether Turner celebrated or demonized the locomotive. Any number of interpretations have been offered on the theme and composition of the painting; it has been described as a lament for the passing of the old ways or an enthusiastic rendition of the new force of steam that was changing the environment. Turner liked to travel, and it may have been his response to the new possibilities afforded by the train. The painting depicts a locomotive crossing the Thames over the Maidenhead railway bridge between Taplow and Maidenhead, but it is essentially an experiment in the vaporous sublime in which the material world of the train, the bridge and the outlying fields are wreathed in a veil of majesty and the laying down of pure colour elicits the most powerful and profound responses. Mist mixes with steam to show how two forms of reality mingle. The Great Western was already being called ‘the most gigantic work’, and Turner was moved to add the sublime to the grandeur.

Thackeray commented in Fraser’s Magazine that ‘the world has never seen anything like this picture’. The immediacy and energy of the painting are conveyed in his description that ‘there comes a train down upon you, really moving at the rate of fifty miles an hour, and which the reader had best make haste to see, lest it should dash out of the picture, and be away up Charing Cross through the wall opposite’. He notes that the rain ‘is composed of dabs of dirty putty slapped on the canvas with a trowel; the sunshine scintillates out of very thick smeary lumps of chrome yellow’. That one of the pinnacles of Turner’s late art should come in the depiction of a new form of transport confirms the phenomenon of the railway as a form of genre painting. The overriding impression is that of speed. Some painters were more interested in the machine itself, while for others the terminus was depicted with vivid intensity as the architecture of a new way of life.

It is always wonderful to discern the patterns and alignments that manifest themselves in any period. The building of the railways, for example, also satisfied the Victorian passion for geology as the rock face was cut out of the land. One painter’s view of the cuttings for the Manchester and Leeds Railway, for example, afforded ‘a rich treat to the geologist, exhibiting numerous beautiful sections of strata, consisting of alternate beds of rock, shale, sandstone and coal, in which the parallelism and thickness of each is preserved’. So the railway connects with the deep interests of Victorian scientists. It is also significant that at the time of cutting, tunnelling and excavation, the nineteenth-century interest in fossils and the imagined prehistoric worlds became of paramount interest. Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33) became the work consulted for the nature of Creation and of the Flood, and the railway could become an instrument of Christian revelation. The nineteenth century began to explain itself and its concept of ‘deep time’. So the earth was believed to have been created on the night before Sunday, 23 December 4004 BC.

Those who did the cutting, and the shovelling, and the embanking, were the ‘navvies’ or ‘navigators’ who were dreaded by the communities through which they passed. They were dirty, ribald and not at all inclined to politeness. Many were Irish, while others came from the Midlands and the north. But they had a universally recognisable uniform. The navvy would wear a white felt hat with the brim turned up, a velveteen square-tailed coat, a scarlet plush waistcoat and brightly coloured kerchief about his neck; his trousers were of corduroy and were tied at the knee, with sturdy high-lace boots. They were wanderers, moving individually or in groups from one set of works to another. The police or the officials of the railway company did not try to discipline them. It would have been futile.

It is a hard irony that, however much the policy of Peel prospered, the enemies in his own party flourished. In February 1845 he brought forward what was called ‘the great Budget’ in which import duties were abolished or reduced. Yet his obvious supporters were disaffected by his further embrace of free trade, especially since he insisted on maintaining the income tax; it was no longer considered to be a temporary measure. There was another flurry of Tory outrage in the spring of the year when Peel was instrumental in granting taxpayers’ money to a Catholic seminar at Maynooth in Ireland. Not only was he against farmers, but he was on the side of the Roman Catholics! Rumours of treachery were everywhere. The Maynooth Bill was passed only with Whig support. Peel had wanted to tempt the Irish Catholics into friendship with the promise of real equality, but he seemed only able to infuriate the English. Yet the real betrayal, as it seemed to many Tories, was about to begin.

By the middle of October 1845, the dire news from Ireland upset all calculations. The potato crop had failed. This was a matter of life and death for a whole country where the potato was the only food. The duke of Wellington recorded Peel’s suffering at a calamity that should have been considered: ‘I never witnessed in any case such agony.’ He added later to a colleague that ‘rotten potatoes have done it all. They have put Peel in his damned fright.’ The duke’s tone is a measure of the standard response to the Irish calamity, leaving aside the fact that he himself was Anglo-Irish of Dublin stock. The English just wished it would go away. But the famine prevailed and lingered. Over the next three years 650,000 died; in the next three years a further 1,100,000 followed them into the grave. It was believed to be a form of genocide brought on by negligence and indifference.

The policy of England towards Ireland had always been characterized by a kind of shifty ignorance, and this was particularly true of the Famine. The government had no precedent on which to build. Mass starvation on such a scale was a disaster for which it was unprepared logistically and – even more to the point – ideologically. That it was the business of government to alleviate famine in an entire nation was a thought that occurred to no one in power at the time. As far as many in England were concerned, the sufferings of the Irish during the Famine were of the same kind as those they endured even in good years, just in greater degree: semi-starvation was the order of the day whenever the Irish had to wait for the next potato crop to ripen every year. And it is easy to forget that the progress of starvation and disease as a result of the Famine was, though terrible, relatively piecemeal; it was easy for British officials to point to the fact that the harvests were not uniformly disastrous. England and Scotland were not comparably affected. Nevertheless, corn was almost impossible to obtain either from the Continent or from America, a problem the British government could do little to remedy when it cast about for alternatives to the potato.

Two other intractable difficulties bedevilled the question: absentee landlordism and the tenancy system. Though both can ultimately be traced to English oppression and bigotry, they had acquired a distinctively Irish character. Most Irish landlords lived in England, and so when the better-intentioned among them returned to Ireland they discovered, to their horror and shame, that the sixty or so tenants on their lists had mutated into several thousand, clamouring feebly at their door. Simply in terms of finance, they were quite unequal to the demands made of them by the situation itself and, increasingly, by the government.

There was also the peculiar nature of Irish tenancy arrangements. In Ireland, tenancy was a Byzantine system of subletting which ensured that the smaller tenants could be hidden from the landowner by unscrupulous middlemen. They had, moreover, no rights worth the name. Owing to the urgent need to use all possible land for potato cultivation, acres in Ireland could be as dear as acres in Mayfair. The comparisons do not end there: rent in Ireland was effectively ground rent – the peasant paid for the privilege of living on the land. There was thus no ethic of reciprocal obligation such as obtained in England. With all this said in mitigation, however, it was widely felt in political circles that the Irish were guilty of lack of initiative or energy, and their supposed unimaginative attitude poisoned and weakened English fellow-feeling. One example will suffice. A priest from the west of Ireland, begging that a grain store be opened for his starving flock, was informed that such a gesture would go against the principles of free trade and upset the ‘mercantile interest’. The priest’s response was properly fierce, but the chilling obtuseness in the official he encountered was quite typical. While the Irish fell dead in their fields, beef, pork, lamb and a host of other necessaries were still being exported in bulk.

Free trade was Ireland’s Shiva, lord of destruction. The bitter irony is that the Irish were killed not by negligence or indifference, but by a fanatic application of free-trade dogma to an economy that was simply not ready for it. The foods imported were almost useless, the foods exported essential to the exporting country – yet import and export had become sacred nostrums. It was characteristic of Victorian England that once it had found a new toy it must wave it about at every opportunity. Free trade was the new toy, but Ireland was in no condition to play with it. Where the charge of ‘genocide’ has more force, however, is in the policy openly known as ‘extermination’ (though the word still carried its old sense of ‘mass eviction’). It was informed by much the same blithe indifference to Irish needs and realities as fuelled the mania for exporting. The land, it was felt, could not support the people, therefore the people must be driven from the land. English policy towards Ireland may be compared to a magnate suggesting to a beggar that his real problem was not starvation but short-sightedness.

Peel announced emergency measures to provide imported corn and to put the people to work on public projects. But still the people were dying by the roadsides before they were built. It was said that when they died they made no noise nor gave any sign. This was true of the western highlanders, too, when their potatoes rotted in the ground. Henry Kingsley noted from observation that ‘the oldest of the able-bodied men began to lie down, and to fall asleep in a strange quiet way’. A French observer, Gustave de Beaumont, noted that ‘in every nation there are poor people, more or less numerous. But an entire nation of paupers is something never witnessed before.’

At a cabinet meeting of November 1845 Peel proposed two measures which might help to assuage the hunger of Ireland and the anger of England. He proposed to suspend the Corn Laws as they were presently administered in order to alleviate the chronic shortages across the Irish Sea. He also proposed that parliament should consider the Corn Laws as a whole with a view to their repeal. The first measure was broadly accepted, even though many ministers considered it to be too late. The second measure was the occasion of fierce anger and debate, as a result of which Peel resigned. But he was not gone for long. His Whig opponent, John Russell, had recently pledged himself to repeal the Laws; and so he naturally took up the queen’s commission. He took about a fortnight to realize that without the commanding authority of Peel he did not have the power to act. He did not even have full control of his proposed cabinet, when Palmerston refused to hold any office other than that of foreign secretary. So Peel returned to the battle. The newspapers now sensed that the moment had come.

When parliament met once more, in January 1846, Peel made a speech in which he announced his conversion to the cause of free trade and the repeal of the Corn Laws. ‘I will not withhold the homage which is due to the progress of reason and to the truth, by denying that my opinions on the subject of protection have undergone a change.’ The back benches behind him were silent. The debates continued until May, when a third reading was passed by ninety-eight votes. The salient feature of the result, however, was that 222 Tories voted against Peel’s measures. He had won the vote but had lost his party somewhere along the way. Now there were Peelites and anti-Peelites, the larger flock being shepherded by Disraeli and Bentinck. The Tory rebels had their revenge on the next day when they voted against Peel’s Protection of Life (Ireland) Bill, a measure which in ordinary circumstances they would have supported. But the circumstances were not ordinary. Disraeli had already dipped his pen in the darkest ink when in Sybil, published the year before, he had argued that there were ‘two nations’; everybody knew what he meant but he spelled it out in capital letters: ‘THE RICH AND THE POOR’. He could make a novel, but not a programme for government, out of the truism.