History of England 1-6

The Conservatives never loved Peel, and they never forgave him. Disraeli in particular brought his energies to bear on Peel’s destruction. ‘I love fame’, he said, and for the rest of his life he acted on that assumption. He hardly needed to repeat the obvious. It was already clear that the days before Peel’s departure could be numbered.

There was much rejoicing at Peel’s belated defeat and Peel was obliged to resign; he was followed by the appointment of Lord John Russell as the head of a minority Whig government. But the deed had been done. The Corn Laws were gone. The middle-class shopkeepers and artisans cheered at the news. The Tory party may have withdrawn in smoke and confusion but, as Richard Cobden said, ‘the intelligent middle and industrious classes’ would be the beneficiaries.

Now that the Corn Laws had been removed there was an almost palpable sense of relief that an unjustified oppression, born out of social inequality and a self-interested legislature, had been lifted. Cobden addressed one of the last meetings of the Anti-Corn Law League and stated:

there is no human event that has happened in the world more calculated to promote the enduring interests of humanity than the establishment of the principle of free trade – I don’t mean in a pecuniary point of view, or as a principle applied to England, but we have a principle established now which is eternal in its truth and universal in its application … it is a world’s revolution and nothing else.

His exuberance may be justified by the occasion but it is also testimony to the high principles of the politics of the day.

The repeal of the Corn Laws also put aside any remaining talk of revolution on the French model. As Cobden wrote a few days later to Francis Place, ‘bless yourself that you live in times when reform bills, steamboats, railroads, penny postage and free trade, to say nothing of the ratification of civil and religious liberties, have been possible facts’.

The liberal Conservatives now followed Peel, although he disclaimed in any sense a Peelite faction; yet eventually Peelites joined with the Whig free-traders. The Protectionists, now bereft of leaders except for Disraeli and Bentinck, had all the appearance of having missed the omnibus. They seemed to be aware of the fact, and Bentinck was observed in the chamber making a bitter attack upon the government. ‘His voice was raised to a screaming pitch – his eye gleamed like a wild animal at feeding time and his whole demeanour was so excited that no man out of Bedlam ever came near it.’

The same sensation of unanticipated liberty had followed the Reform Act of 1832. Now, as then, was another chance to clear away the dead wood that had accumulated over the generations. John Stuart Mill wrote to his French philosophical counterpart, Auguste Comte, in 1847:

we have embarked on a system of charitable government … Today all the cry is to provide the poor not only with money … shorter hours of work … better sanitation, even education. That is to say they are to be governed paternally, a course to which the Court, the nobility and the wealthy are quite agreeable. They forget that what is done for people benefits them only when it assists them in what they do for themselves.

And so there passed a twelve hours bill and other salutary factory reforms (by which was primarily meant the textile industry), a new mines act and progress both with the poor law and public sanitation. The working day for women and children was steadily reduced from twelve hours in 1844 to ten hours in 1847; the hours for factory children were reduced to six and a half to make way for education; and the power of factory inspectors was significantly increased.

The process took some years and was accompanied by fiery speeches and reproaches. In his Memoirs Charles Greville notes of the furore accompanying one Ten Hours Bill which failed that there was ‘such intermingling of parties, such a confusion of opposition … so much zeal, asperity and animosity, so many reproaches hurled backwards and forwards’. It was in part the rage of Caliban looking in a glass. By 1847 the ‘system’ had emerged or, as Disraeli wrote in Tancred (1847), ‘men obey a general impulse, they bow before an external necessity’ which was also known as ‘the powers of society’. Six years later, however, Dickens declared that ‘our system fails’.

In 1847 itself there was already general talk of failure. One of the great motors of investment in the railway was the opposing tendency between ‘mania’ and ‘panic’. Those who have studied the madness and exhilaration of crowds are quite familiar with the phenomenon. There was in 1847, for example, a sudden ‘panic’ in the financial markets. A fall in the price of corn in the summer, prompted by the repeal of the Corn Laws, caused the bankruptcy of many dealers; a significant number of banks found that they were burdened by so many bad debts that they had to suspend dealing. The shortage of basic food supplies was responsible for a rise in prices, as well as trade deficits which created a drain of bullion from the Bank of England. The turmoil worked through the ‘system’ at precisely the time when ‘railway mania’ increased the demand for circulating capital. In America the cotton crop was less bountiful than usual at a time when England took 80 per cent of its cotton from the southern states. Turmoil and fear fed one upon another. Did the railways starve the country of capital or did they provide income and employment? But the panic subsided almost as soon as it arose, and became part of the general fluctuating and erratic nature of the business cycles which seemed to defy rational explanation. In the dark womb of time recovery seemed to come from nowhere. That is why some people related economic cycles to the phases of the moon.

Despite the interest in social reform there had been little progress in the education of the people. Even by 1870 only one child out of three attended a school of even the most rudimentary kind. Many people disputed that there was any progress to be made. Children were meant to work and to sustain their families in the unequal battle for survival. What was the point of stuffing their little heads with facts when they had no earthly use for them? Let them learn to work in a pin factory or cotton mill. And what was the point of universal literacy? The lower orders would only learn to read salacious propaganda, radical pamphlets and Whig tracts. The experiment of the ‘ragged schools’, meant for the children of the street, was not altogether a success; they were accused of spreading lice and bad habits.

Yet the educational reformers persisted. Their work took two forms. The ‘national schools’, established in 1811, used a model devised by Andrew Bell whereby older children acted as monitors and taught the younger children. Joseph Lancaster, another prominent educational reformer, used a broadly similar system but with more rigid discipline. When in 1833 parliament made an annual grant of £22,000 the amount was equally distributed between the two schemes; it could hardly be said to have been a generous provision. There were deep pits of ignorance which no funds could reach, abysses among the poor where no light could be seen. The Church and Dissent fought over the spoils of the little children, with the result that 75 per cent of the children who had gone through ‘the system’ only knew the letters of the alphabet and had little or no understanding of the words they uttered by rote.

The Whigs, together with assorted radicals, now governed Britain with any number of compromises, conditions and caveats. The leader of the party in the Commons, John Russell, was a natural debater without being a natural politician. Peel himself, in opposition, was withdrawing to the margin of visibility. ‘The fact is,’ he told a colleague:

that the state of public business while Parliament sits is becoming in many ways a matter of most serious concern. I defy the Minister of this country to perform properly the duties of his office – to read all that he ought to read, including the whole foreign correspondence; to keep up the constant communication with the Queen and the Prince; to see all whom he ought to see; to superintend the grant of honours and the disposal of civil and ecclesiastical patronage; to write with his own hand to every person of note who chooses to write to him; to be prepared for every debate, including the most trumpery concerns; to do all these indispensable things, and also sit in the House of Commons eight hours a day for 118 days. It is impossible for me not to feel that the duties are incompatible, and above all human strength – at least above mine.

Peel did not leave parliament. He thought it enough to resign his leadership of the party and forsake any further ambition. But he had to remain even if only to support the demoralized Whig party that had come into office as a result of his defeat. He could not contemplate the possibility of the Protectionists or radicals coming to power, and so he did all he could to prop up John Russell and his colleagues. He made it plain that he would support the Whig administration so long as they maintained the conditions of his policies. It was now believed that Peel essentially stood ‘above party’. While some still continued to speak of his betrayal there were many who applauded his rigour and determination to maintain the state and to protect Reform.

Everyone talked about Ireland. No political conversation could do without it. It was on every politician’s mind. Gladstone wrote to his wife in the autumn of 1845: ‘Ireland! Ireland! That cloud in the West! That coming storm! That minister of God’s retribution upon cruel, inveterate and but half-atoned injustice! Ireland forces upon us the great social and great religious questions. God grant that we may have the courage to look them in the face!’ The Almighty was invoked for a number of reasons. For many it was the punishment for espousing Roman Catholicism or, in an alternative eschatology, the divine rebuke for sloth and fecklessness. More secular souls believed that providence had nothing to do with it, and that the failures were biological and mechanical. The harvests had in fact begun to improve by 1847, but they had left sickness, debility and fever in their wake.

13

The salamander

Peel’s resignation speech at the end of June 1846 was notable for its unaccustomed oratory. ‘It may be’, he said, ‘that I shall leave a name sometimes to be remembered with expressions of good will in the abodes of those whose lot it is to labour, and earn their bread daily by the sweat of their brow, when they shall recruit their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer leavened by a sense of injustice.’ He was escorted from Westminster by a cheering crowd. When Lord John Russell took office after Peel in the summer of 1846 he offered cabinet posts to Wellington and other Conservatives, but all of them refused. Peel remained the most prominent politician in parliament, and Cobden congratulated him as ‘the Idea of the age’, the word doubly underlined.

Lord Palmerston joined Russell’s cabinet as foreign secretary, thereby detonating some explosions of ill will in foreign capitals. It was a minority cabinet in the sense that the Whigs, radicals and Irish under Russell by no means represented a majority of the parliament. But Peel had no intention of leading a determined opposition against him. The Peelites were not so much a party as a fellowship of Peel’s former supporters. The Times noted that ‘their present difficulty is that they are not a party; they have not its ties; they have not its facilities; they have not its obligations’. But they still possessed Peel’s ideals of free trade and economic stringency; and perhaps most importantly they retained Peel’s independence of mind. It did not seem likely that they would be open to the bribe of cabinet posts.

In fact over the next twenty years squalls and tempests followed doldrums. Eight administrations followed each other, and for some years there was no party with a stable majority. There was at one stage a patched-up government between Whigs, radicals and Peelites, but this ill-starred coalition was directly responsible for the Crimean War. The general feeling was one of immobility, and if it had been hoped that the subsequent general election in the summer of 1847 might galvanize the electors and the elected, the expectation was largely unfulfilled. The result was much the same as before, with John Russell and his light cavalry dashing through the divided ranks of the Protectionists under Bentinck and the free-traders under Peel. But what exactly did it mean to call yourself a Whig or Tory? Nobody seemed to care very much, one way or the other.

It is significant that the new chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Charles Wood, asked for and accepted Peel’s advice on financial matters. In a debate Peel outlined what became his position for the rest of his life – that he would not encourage ‘a factious or captious opposition’ and that ‘I cordially approve of the general principles of commercial policy set out by the administration.’ John Russell was recognized as the leader of the Liberal party but he knew himself to be, at bottom, an old-fashioned Whig. So the Factory Act, passed in 1847, was an attempt at social amelioration, although the prime minister gave it only passive support. Women and young people were now allowed to work only ten hours a day in the textile mills; it was the result of a fifteen-year campaign. It has been described as a victory by the people against the government, and this may partly be true; it issued from a groundswell of support among operatives with encouragement from labour reformers such as Lord Ashley and John Fielden, a cotton manufacturer and MP for Oldham. It has also been described as a victory for landowners against the free-traders who had helped to repeal the Corn Laws. Those who supported laissez-faire were not inclined to support state intervention in traditions of employment.

John Russell took on his role as first minister with caution; his reforms were modest and moderate without a hint of revolutionary change. He had tinkered with the edges of the Irish famine, although it is not clear that any immediate changes would have made any difference to the suffering nation. It was left in the hands of God, who could not be criticized or blamed for His ministrations. Yet there were measures which had all the traits of what once would have been called Whig government. A Poor Law Board was established in 1847, and in the following year a parallel Central Board of Health was able to create local boards with statutory powers on public health from water to cemeteries. State control over education was strengthened, and the parliamentary franchise widened. A public welfare service was slowly coming into place. All these measures were manna for the quondam Whig aristocrats who had inherited a political sensibility which encouraged relief for all classes. The great landlords were, or thought themselves to be, the guardians of the nation who had a permanent interest in the welfare of all the people. Russell himself governed much as his Whig ancestry would suggest, with a waspish dominance, but he was not an inspiring prime minister; he was one of those who attain their eminence only by degrees.

The administration inaugurated by the ministry of Lord John Russell, had other consequences. The radical or Nonconformist members of parliament were now often businessmen or urban professionals; they sat for urban industrial seats, and the prosperity of commercial and industrial interests encouraged the rise of what might be called a professional class in suits of black and stovepipe hats. The great landowners could still ride this wave of new men, but gradually the temper and tenor of the Commons changed. It was no longer a congregation of the rich landlords and their dependants. It was now being affected by what eventually became known, by Disraeli and Salisbury, as ‘industrial’ Conservatism. There had been before the ‘landed interest’ or the ‘local interest’, composed of loyalty and patriarchy, but this was now diminished. The ubiquity of the railways meant that many on the land were displaced, and that many landowners became more interested in industry than agriculture. The lawyers of the railway companies were more than a match for the farmer, and the individual members of the ‘landed interest’ were on their own. So the lawyers also came into parliament. The politicians and agitators knew all about Protectionism and free trade, but those who were dependent on agriculture were woefully ill-equipped to deal with the issues of the day. Inevitably their influence waned. Various attempts to set up Protectionist societies fell apart; farmers and labourers alike were loath to engage in popular demonstrations, even if they could have been organized.

Rural depopulation, however, was something of a chimera. Some of it was the result of a steady stream of emigration to North America, and in each of the three years after 1847 more than half a million emigrants crossed the ocean. Yet such was the energy or fecundity of the people that the population continued to increase. We can speak of depopulation only in terms of the number of families involved in agriculture, which did diminish, but the overall population of the countryside remained the same. In the country areas, too, improved agricultural techniques and more labour-intensive crops increased the workload for those who stayed on the land. The pattern of movement from fields to the local town was significant enough, but the outline of rural change over fifty years was a sequence of small-scale migrations over a limited territory. There was a continuity, even though a cursory reading of William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1830) would cure the reader of any illusion of rural comfort or tranquillity. The lives of the labourers were often dirtier and not less wretched than those of their dogs. They worked on the land because they feared and hated the spinning mills or, even worse, the privations of the poor house. The unknown was also the father of fear; when some manual labourers were being moved from north Devon to Kent, at the fiat of some landlord, they asked if they were ‘going over the water’.

In 1846 Harriet Martineau wrote to Elizabeth Barrett:

I dare say you need not be told how sensual vice abounds in rural districts … here is dear good old Wordsworth forever talking of rural innocence and deprecating any intercourse with towns, lest the purity of his neighbours should be corrupted. He little knows what elevation, self-denial and refinement accrue in towns from the superior cultivation of the people.

Yet the rural population had performed its duties. The King of Brobdingnag believed that ‘whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.’ In 1816 the population of the British Islands had numbered 19 million; forty-five years later it had reached 29 million. But they were still being fed.

The attention of the nation turned again to the generally forgotten fields of foreign policy. Eighteen forty-eight became known as the ‘year of revolutions’, much to the dismay of those who wished for a century of peace. It was perhaps fortunate that the most formidable member of the Whig cabinet was Viscount Palmerston, who once more reigned over the Foreign Office. Reign is the word, because he was the sole monarch of his domain. He was a consummate man of business, a tireless worker, and a man whose apparent recklessness concealed cunning and, on especial occasions, high seriousness. The temperature had been raised at the beginning of 1847 when the duke of Wellington rose up and prophesied gloom. He wrote privately to a fellow officer on the unprotected state of Britain and, as such things happen, his letter was leaked to the press. It was revealed to the public that there was ‘not a spot on the coast on which infantry might not be thrown on shore at any time of tide, with any wind, and in any weather, and from which such a body of infantry, so thrown on shore, would not find within a distance of five miles, a road into the interior of the country’. Immediate panic was the inevitable consequence. The fact was that Britain had for some time seemed to be uninterested in foreign affairs until they came too close for comfort.

The prospect of disorder loomed nearer when revolution touched France, Germany and Italy. In February fire and street-fighting filled the avenues of Paris, after Louis Philippe banned certain private meetings of the opposition parties; the troops shot at the crowd, and the riots followed. When Louis took off his wig he was, according to Victor Hugo, ‘but an ordinary tradesman’. He fled to England under the name of Mr Smith just as the Second Republic was proclaimed. In March the people of Berlin rose up, as a result of which William, Prince of Prussia, fled to England. Ludwig I of Bavaria followed the procession by abdicating in favour of his son. The emperor of Austria, Ferdinand I, left Vienna for Innsbruck and then Moravia. The Hungarians demanded independence from Austria. The Czechs of Bohemia demanded their own parliament. Venice and Lombardy also rose against their old imperial enemy. The pope left Rome in disguise. But then the balloon burst.

One by one the rebel forces were defeated by the old guards; ethnic tensions were exploited as the Magyars turned upon Slavs instead of their common imperial enemy. One by one the rulers crept back upon their thrones. It might be described as a moment of madness in what Punch called ‘the Asylum of Europe’, but Lewis Namier described it as a ‘turning point at which history failed to turn’. It is perhaps better to say that the ambition for change and freedom outstripped the resources available. The coming men of 1848, at the head of the middle classes and working people, became the martyrs and shackled prisoners of 1849.

The temporary surge of freedom had remarkably little consequence in Europe. It put Louis-Napoleon at the head of France, where he conducted a moderately successful regime as the president of the French Second Republic before he inaugurated the Second Empire. The year of revolutions also prompted the Russians to intervene more powerfully in Hungary, where they faced the indomitable spirit of the republican hero Lajos Kossuth. The cabinet and the royal family did not wish Kossuth to call upon Palmerston during his subsequent wanderings in exile; but the politician who was now the idol of the people replied that he would invite anyone he liked to his house. Charles Greville, clerk to the Privy Council, complained of Palmerston that ‘the ostentatious bidding for radical favour and the flattery of the democracy, of which his speeches were full, are disgusting in themselves and full of danger’.

Palmerston, like the salamander, lived in fire, sending robust diplomatic missives to every court and every capital; this was not to the taste of Victoria and Albert, who were constitutionally inclined to the older order which Kossuth, for example, was intent upon undermining. The complaints against the foreign secretary by the royal family were constant and demanding, but he had a habit of ignoring them or shrugging them off. ‘He was easy and obliging and conciliatory in little matters,’ Disraeli wrote of Palmerston as the lightly disguised earl of Roehampton in Endymion (1880), ‘but when the credit or honour of large interests were concerned, he acted with conscious authority … He was a man who really cared for nothing but office and affairs … but he was always playful and ever taking refuge in a bantering spirit.’ This is not the Palmerston that Victoria knew. She told Russell that ‘he was not always straightforward in his conduct’. This was the regal manner of calling him a liar and a hypocrite.

The nearest the nation ever came to the revolutions of 1848 occurred in the spring of that year when some latter-day Chartists organized a demonstration on Kennington Common. Their purpose was once more to deliver a petition to parliament on the need for universal suffrage and the secret ballot. Their numbers are not known for sure, but it was not the half-million of Chartist mythology. They were forbidden to march with their petition to Westminster and their leader, Feargus O’Connor, took a hansom cab instead to parliament while the crowds dispersed. It had not been a famous victory.

Such was the panic in advance, however, that the authorities had taken extraordinary measures. The cavalry and infantry were posted on both sides of the bridges that spanned the Thames; boats were made ready and cannon were stationed outside Buckingham Palace and the Bank of England; 170,000 volunteers were enrolled as special constables with truncheons and white armbands. It was clear that the fear of revolution, like those in Europe, was real. But the crowds simply melted away. This effectively ended the prospect of any revolutionary party in England.

Yet the trouble was not over. In the summer of 1848 an ill-judged and ill-timed revolution in Ireland was mounted by the Young Ireland movement in imitation of the revolutions in Europe. It degenerated into a shooting match between the rebels and the police which continued for some hours until the rebels were wounded or retreated. They had been trapped in the house of Mrs McCormack, and the fracas became known as ‘The Battle of Widow McCormack’s cabbage plot’. It is perhaps only surprising that the rebellion collapsed as suddenly and as completely as it did. The instinctive reaction of the English government was still one of rage. Russell wrote in 1849 that ‘we have granted, lent, subscribed, worked, visited, clothed the Irish; millions of pounds of money, years of debate etcetera – the only return is calumny and rebellion’. These were the predictable but unjustifiable remarks of one who in the heat of the moment had forgotten the contempt and savagery which the English had lavished on the Irish for centuries. The English found it easy to forget or to excuse their own barbarity; the Irish never did.

The year 1848 was when the first two volumes of Macaulay’s History of England were published, the preface of which declared that ‘the history of our country, during the last hundred and sixty years, is eminently the history of physical, of moral and of intellectual improvement’. It is a salutary instance of the fact that formal history can be quite at odds with the reality of the world. This ‘Whig interpretation of history’, as it has universally been called, acted as an intellectual comfort blanket for those who otherwise might harbour serious doubts about the future of the country.

Here we may justifiably substitute Liberal for Whig. The new term was first used in the mid-1830s, but its meaning was not clear. The Liberals suffered from weak leadership of which John Russell was the latest example, and their avidity for office was matched only by their inability to do anything much with it. Russell knew as much himself, and confessed that his party needed Peel and an injection of Peelites to give them strength and confidence. When in 1848 a group of fifty or sixty MPs decided to identify themselves as Radicals with their own political programme the Liberals were in a quandary. Were these Radicals potential allies or potential rivals? No one seemed to be sure. As a result Russell’s reputation gradually dimmed. The election of 1847 had only served to emphasize the fact that he was first minister only because the Conservative opposition remained fatally divided between the Protectionists and free-traders.

The Liberals were not democrats in any proper meaning of the word, and half of their elected members were landlords or the sons of landlords. They thought themselves to be the principal ruling party on the basis of past experience rather than present politics. As late as 1886 the Fortnightly Review could write that ‘only a few years ago the name [Whig] was a proud boast, an hereditary recollection, the appanage of a great party; now it is an historical recollection, recalling colours and cries, buff and blue …’

There is one other phenomenon closely associated with 1848. This was the year when spiritualism, with its panoply of levitations, ghosts, spirits, table tappings, automatic writing, telepathy and shadow photographs, became the popular version of the learned discourses and experiments on electricity. Utopian socialists were some of the earlier students of these methods, but scientists and politicians were touched by the new beliefs. Many of the first founders of the Labour party were occultists. It would be a nice question to interpret these waves of feeling – whether electrophysical or mesmeric or spiritual – which passed over the country (and indeed other countries) in this period. The Theosophical Movement of 1875 was part of this yearning towards the spirit, as was the rise of the Oxford idealists in the work of T. H. Green and the spell of J. H. Stirling’s The Secret of Hegel published in 1865. From where did this wind of idealism and awakening derive? It is impossible to say, but it might have been some sort of reaction to the ‘hard facts’ theory of education as parodied by Dickens in Mr Gradgrind and to the fixity of purpose and meaning in such Victorian shibboleths as free trade, profit and loss, and factory hours. In the same spirit, and in the same period, Christian Socialism sprang up among the determined or devout young men in plain opposition to Victorian materialism. It was suggested that the conventional tenets of Victorian Anglicanism were in direct opposition to God’s law. The law of life should be above the law of labour. The cash nexus was the work of the devil.

There was one figure who stalked the corridors of the House of Commons who might have been conjured by a djinn. Disraeli walked silently, looking neither right nor left; he walked with a permanent stoop, his eyes cast down to the floor. ‘See him where you will,’ a journalist from Fraser’s Magazine remarked in 1847, ‘he glides past you noiselessly, without apparently being conscious of the existence of externals and more like the shadow than the substance of a man’. The reporter added that ‘when he is speaking he equally shrouds himself in his own intellectual atmosphere, concentrating on the idea burning in his mind’. If he is interrupted he pays no attention or averts the speaker ‘with a gesture of impatience, or with something like a snarl’. When he sat in the chamber he did so ‘with his head rigid, his body contracted, his arms closely pinned to his side, as though he were an automaton, like one of those stone figures of ancient Egypt that embody the idea of motionless quiescence for ever’. Yet, in contrast, his speech often seemed careless or supercilious. He gave the appearance of not caring a damn for anybody. In reality he was always cautious, always calculating.

With the withdrawal of Peel, Disraeli, still in theory the Protectionist, was the leader in waiting. He was not everyone’s first choice. His unusual looks, his very precise way of enunciating English, gave him the false reputation of being a foreigner. And of course the word on everyone’s lips was Jew or ‘the Jew’. He knew it and did not mind it. He might have preferred it to his other nickname of ‘Dizzy’. With a leading Protectionist, Lord Edward Stanley (to become Lord Derby in 1851), consigned to the Lords, Disraeli was obliged to bear the heat and the dust of parliamentary combat. He was a realist by instinct. That is why the favoured theme of Protectionism was in fact losing its savour for him. He could do nothing, and go nowhere, with it. He was, to put it kindly, lukewarm on the matter. It had lost its savour, now that free trade had become the creed of the kingdom; it was a positive encumbrance.

Yet Disraeli was optimistic. In February 1849 he announced to his sister that ‘after much struggling I am fairly the leader’. The few words accounted for a multiplicity of past deals, compromises and broken promises. Disraeli was in the end the most astute and eloquent of any Tory. He also had the inestimable support, if not admiration, of the leading Tory in the Lords. Lord Edward Stanley came from a revered and noble family. He would do his duty to his colleague, but it was not clear whether he would go any further.

The tapestry of the time grew more complex. In August 1849,Victoria visited Ireland to great acclaim, despite the horrors that the country had only recently endured. When she stepped ashore at Cork an old man shouted: ‘Ah, Queen dear, make one of them Prince Patrick, and Ireland will die for you.’ The queen wore Irish linen decorated with shamrocks. She had purchased Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, which was even then being rebuilt. ‘I was brought up very differently,’ she said. ‘I never had a room to myself. I never had a sofa, nor an easy chair, and there was not a single carpet that was not threadbare.’ This was a time when all England was drowning in cholera, reaching up to 2,000 fatalities each week. The diagnosis of a ‘zymotic’ fever, whereby the disease spread by fermentation, was anyone’s guess. It took the physician John Snow to trace the source of the cholera outbreak to a polluted water pipe in Soho.

At the end of June 1850 Sir Robert Peel’s horse slipped on the road of Constitution Hill. Peel lingered for a while but his injuries were too severe. This was a severe blow to the body politic, even though Peel had more or less given up party politics. He had agreed to save the administration from Protectionism, but his ambitions did not stretch beyond that. Prince Albert had greatly admired him and tried to manage the royal administration with the same efficiency and what might now be called modernity.

In his death lay a puzzle. Who had the right, and presence, to take his place as the leading free-trader? Gladstone had remained a ‘Peelite’ in Peel’s lifetime and said that Peel ‘had a kind of authority that was possessed by no one else’. He added significantly that ‘the moral atmosphere of the House of Commons has never since his death been quite the same and is now widely different’. Peel had brought a certain astringency and steady intellectual power that no one could contest or perhaps even emulate.

In fact, Peel suffered his fatal accident three days before one of the most redoubtable of English statesmen enjoyed what was arguably his greatest triumph in the ‘Don Pacifico Affair’. Pacifico, a Jewish businessman born in Gibraltar (and therefore a British citizen), had his house in Athens pillaged and fired by an anti-Semitic crowd. Another minister might have cooled heads with conferences and compromises. After few months of fruitless negotiation, Viscount Palmerston ordered British gunboats to secure Greek shipping to pay an indemnity and to organize a blockade. It was not the usual procedure. The queen had been furious that she had not been warned or advised about the matter, and that Palmerston had put the country at risk for the sake of one man; in short, the foreign secretary must resign. Prince Albert understood events more quickly. He wrote to Russell in the spring of 1850 that ‘his boldness pleases and his dexterity amuses the public; if his case be ever so bad a one he can represent it and dress it up to his own advantage’.

The sangfroid of Palmerston was below freezing point. He did not need to resign just yet; he had no particular regard for the queen, and never knowingly pandered to her feelings. He spoke for five hours in the Commons in his own defence, expatiating on the fact that it was the duty of the British government ‘to afford protection to our fellow subjects abroad … as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity when he could say civis Romanus sum’. This was the peroration that Lords and Commons, already bewildered and nervous about the growing extent of the British empire, needed to hear. He won the debate by forty-six votes.

Towards the end of 1851 the president of the Republic, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, took over the state machinery of the Republic and imprisoned many of his rivals to make way for the inauguration of the Second French Empire under his rule as Napoleon III. In England the royal couple, and the ministry, had concluded that nothing whatever should be done to praise or to blame the French action. But this was not Palmerston’s way. He let it be known that he approved of Louis-Napoleon’s action as the inevitable outcome of the situation in France. This was more than the royal couple could bear, the matter made infinitely more grave when Palmerston actually congratulated Louis-Napoleon on his success without first consulting them. This was Pilgerstein, or pumice stone as Albert contemptuously called him, at his worst. As first minister Lord John Russell considered that the die had been cast and, calculating that he might survive with a new foreign minister or without any foreign minister all, he ordered Palmerston to resign.

But he may have misjudged the man. Palmerston was not going to leave quietly. He crossed the floor with his allies and joined the Conservatives under Lord Derby, who was still better known for exercising horse flesh. ‘Palmerston is out!’ Charles Greville confided to his diary on 23 December 1851, ‘actually, really and irretrievably out. I nearly dropped off my chair yesterday afternoon …’ Lord Granville was his chosen successor and the queen instructed him to lay out a set of general instructions with the help of Lord Russell.

Peel’s sudden death had left men bewildered. Would X take over the leadership of the Peelites, leaving Y high and dry? Or would M dish the lot of them by going to the Lords? And, if so, what would N do? ‘Such was the confusion of the Ministerial movement and the political process,’ Punch wrote, ‘that everybody went to call upon everybody.’ After Palmerston was dismissed following constant royal pressure he promised to have his tit-for-tat with ‘Johnnie’ Russell as soon as may be. In February 1852 Russell introduced a Militia Bill and, when Palmerston successfully introduced an amendment, Russell resigned. This was Palmerston’s revenge. Lord Derby succeeded in the very slippery position of first minister of an unstable Conservative administration divided between Peelites and Protectionists.

Another crisis had already presented itself. In the autumn of 1850, after the pope had been restored to the Vatican by his French allies, he issued a brief for ‘the re-establishing and extending the Catholic faith in England’. England and Wales were converted into twelve sees, with Henry Edward Manning, soon to be archbishop and then cardinal, at the top of the procession in London. The furore was immense; the queen considered it to be an affront to her rule while the then prime minister, Lord John Russell, dismissed Manning as an ambitious convert.

In a letter to the comfortably orthodox bishop of Durham, Russell condemned the pope’s intervention as ‘insolent and insidious’. Russell knew very well that the queen considered him to be a small man in every sense, and needed some great cause to raise him higher. Now he had found it, and he was not about to let it go. In the queen’s speech, on the opening of parliament in 1851, she announced her ‘resolution to maintain the right of her crown, and the independence of the nation against all encroachments, from whatever quarter they may proceed’. All eyes turned to the papal apartments in the Vatican. Russell then issued a motion banning Catholic priests and prelates from claiming any territorial titles and ordering that lay gifts to them should be returned.

This pleased the people, not least the electorate, just as Russell had planned and hoped. It was in truth a minor storm in the baptismal font which caused no great alteration. But the cry of ‘No Popery!’ was one which united Englishmen, whether rich or poor, religious or neutral. The hawkers and the sweepers on the street knew all the words of the protest songs. It was clear that the pope would head the victims on Bonfire Night.

The missive from the pope coincided with mounting dismay in the ranks of Anglicans. Old-fashioned churchmen were not happy about the progress of ritualists within the Church of England; their vestments and thurifers belonged to Baal. Lord Shaftesbury remarked that he ‘would rather worship with Lydia on the bank by the riverside than with a hundred surpliced priests in the temple of St Barnabas’. The newly built church of St Barnabas, in Pimlico, was a treasure house of Catholic ritual, including a wooden screen to separate the participant clergy from the congregation. It contained fair cloths and jewels, all of them condemned by Nonconformists as the trappings of Satan. The outcry against papal intervention was therefore more bitter. ‘What a surprising ferment,’ Lord Shaftesbury wrote. ‘It abates not a jot, meeting after meeting, in every town and part in the country … it resembles a storm over the whole nation … All opinions seem for a while submerged in this one feeling.’ Benjamin Disraeli was an acute observer. He wrote to Lord Londonderry: ‘what do you think of Cardinal Wiseman? Even the peasants think they are going to be burned alive and taken up to Smithfield instead of their pigs.’

Catholicism in England was tainted by association with Ireland, adding to the sentiment of anti-popery. ‘In former Irish rebellions,’ one of Gladstone’s political allies, Sir William Harcourt, wrote, ‘the Irish were in Ireland. Now there is an Irish nation in the United States, equally hostile, with plenty of money, absolutely beyond our reach and yet within ten days of our shores.’ It was believed also that the Irish migrants were a threat to their English neighbours. A supposed humorist in Punch noted the ‘missing link’ between the gorillas of the jungle and ‘the Negro’ in the presence of the ‘Irish Yahoo’ in the lowest areas of London. The Birmingham Star remarked of the Fenian brotherhood that ‘numbers of insane people, of the very lowest class, get together stealthily in out of the way places for the purposes of drill. “Death to the Saxon” is of course supposed to be their watchword and their object, but of what they would do after the killing, neither they, nor anyone else, have the least idea.’ This is one of the most powerful anxieties of nineteenth-century England, and it was reinforced by statistics that purported to show the connection between the Irish and criminality. The fact that the Irish-born population in England rose by some 30,000 from 1841 to 1861 only served to increase hostility. The people did not need statistics but relied upon native observation. South Lancashire and London were the areas most affected. By the latter part of the century, however, xenophobia was being directed against the Jews of the East End. There was always an enemy somewhere.

The Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, as Russell’s measure was called, passed with a large majority. It was repealed twenty years later after altering nothing whatsoever. William Ewart Gladstone travelled to Rome during the parliamentary recess of 1851, but not to kiss the fisherman’s ring. He had come to investigate the troubled politics of the region. He had also come, according to his first biographer, John Morley, ‘into that great stream of European Whiggism which was destined to carry him so far’.

He had gone down to Naples ostensibly for a pleasure trip but he seized the opportunity of visiting the prisons and prisoners there. He was appalled by what he saw. Here were filth and misery, ‘the sick prisoners, almost with death in their faces’. He was determined to bring the merciless injustices of Naples to the attention of the British press, thereby to mend them or end them. It was his first manifestation of the moral earnestness he would now carry with him everywhere; he possessed a passionate purposefulness combined with an angry will for improvement.

So the tit-for-tat by Palmerston against Russell had succeeded, with the earl of Derby as the bewildered Conservative victor. Disraeli had called Palmerston ‘an imposter, utterly exhausted, and at best only ginger beer, and not champagne, and now an old painted pantaloon’. Yet Pantalone might turn into Harlequin, and a vengeful Harlequin is to be avoided. Russell had therefore fallen from grace and favour.

14

A most gorgeous sight

By now public attention had moved on to the crystal palace in the park. There had been nothing quite like it, a transparent palace filled with marvels mechanical and electrical. It was considered by some to be the eighth wonder of the world, and London itself now greater than Athens or Rome.

On the first day of May 1851, some half a million people gathered in Hyde Park to witness the opening of the Great Exhibition by the queen. She wrote in her diary that ‘the glimpse of the transept through the iron gates, the waving palms, flowers, statues, myriads of people filling the galleries and seats around, with the flourish of trumpets as we entered, gave us a sensation which I can never forget and I felt much moved’. Her husband had helped to supervise the funding and the construction of the great palace, perhaps with the idea of uniting the monarchy with the people in a joint celebration of England’s power and inventiveness.

It was reported that there were 100,000 exhibits and marvels on display from all over the world. The exhibition itself was devoted to four great schemes, the first a survey of the raw materials of the earth and the second of machinery and mechanical inventions. The third section was given to manufactures, and the fourth to sculpture and plastic art. More than 2,000 men worked on 2,000 cast-iron girders, 3,000 columns, and 900,000 square feet of glass; the vast glittering edifice was created out of 4,000 tons of iron and 400 tons of glass. The building itself was 1,851 feet in length from east to west and 408 feet in width from north to south, with an interior height of 128 feet. The language used to describe the architectural detail, of vault and transept, nave and aisle, was taken from the great cathedrals to which this was the closest relative. Almost 300,000 panes of glass glittered in the light and motion of a crystal fountain some 27 feet in height. It was built on the summit of a gently rising slope so that the entrance from the west would display the interior all at once.

The Exhibition attracted 6 million visitors, and thus set the tone of profusion and extravagance which the Victorians felt most keenly. Twentyfive thousand season tickets were sold in advance, and the average entrance fee was at first 5 shillings, with ‘shilling days’ eventually introduced for the ‘poorer sort’. On show were locomotives, microscopes, air pumps and cameras. But the spectacle of elm trees rising up at the sky within the great glass house seems to have been the first wonder. In the mid-nineteenth century there was no clear division between mythology and material progress. ‘Technology’ was too recent to have its own category and so was seen as the sister of Art. The ‘vulcanizing’ process came from Vulcan, the god of fire. The new techniques of manufacture were themselves the object of wonder. Cast iron was the material of the age, but here were also corrugated iron and zinc for those in the vanguard of the modern.

The colours were striking – blue, white and yellow for the verticals, blue, white and red for the curving girders and red, white and yellow for the roof bars. This was a thoroughly modern design, and the photographs of the interior reveal a surprising contrast with the usual dim and fudged Victorian interiors. In these photographs, also, the impression is of a bazaar or department store rather than an exhibition. It might almost be the work of Fortnum and Mason. To other visitors it resembled a vast railway terminus where in fact new locomotives were on display. It is possible to sense the context, or the conditions, of the ‘mass market’ which flourished in the next century.

The visitors participated in the universal excitement banishing the apocalyptic ferments of the 1790s, the rural unrest of the 1830s and the political controversies of the 1840s. They could forget the famines of Ireland and the Chartist meetings of the day before. A spell of peace and security seemed to hold the capital. Entire parishes, led by their clergymen, arrived in London; colonels came with their soldiers and admirals with their sailors; schools came with their pupils en masse, and manufacturers with their workers. The Illustrated London News had a cartoon of ‘Country Folk Visiting the Exhibition’ but it was not sardonic or cynical; it showed young and old wandering in wonder. The average Londoner, too, knew very little about the industrial and technological changes which generally occurred within workshops out of sight; the Exhibition, if nothing else, was a huge surprise.

A contributor to the Cyclopaedia of Useful Arts wrote:

the state of the metropolis throughout the whole period of the Great Exhibition will be remembered with wonder and admiration by all … Instead of confusion, disorder and demoralisation, if not actual revolution, which were foretold by some gloomy minds, instead of famine and pestilence confidently predicted by others, London exhibited a wonderful degree of order … it was like a gigantic picnic.

That can be seen as a further meaning of ‘exhibition’, as a way of ‘exhibiting’ the essential peacefulness of the British people. And this was the marvellous thing – 6 million people and barely a hint of violence. When the Victorians thought of crowds they thought of mobs, but the spectacle of Hyde Park, untouched, exorcized many of the panics that had been created out of thin air in previous decades. It seemed that ‘the people’, en masse, were not dangerous at all. Soldiers and policemen were ready for the call to arms, but it never came. This is perhaps the single most important aspect of the enterprise. It was also the context for the manufacture of glass beehives, also on display, in which the observer might reflect upon the discipline and cooperation of large numbers.

It is possible that the large crowds were overawed by the vision of a crystal palace never before dreamed of. They had a glimpse of the future and of progress as if they were a vision on a hill. It was related to that endemic optimism which accompanied the ardent endeavours of the time. Charles Kingsley put it best in his novel Yeast, published in volume form in the year that the Exhibition opened.

Look around you and see what is the characteristic of your country and of your generation at this moment. What a yearning, what an expectation, amid infinite falsehoods and confusions, of some nobler, more chivalrous, more godlike state! Your very costermonger trolls out his belief that ‘there’s a good time coming’ and the hearts of gamins as well as millenarians answer ‘True!’

The glass palace also acted as a giant machine for classifying and dividing the products of the earth and of the individual nations. A wig-maker complained that his product had been removed from ‘Art’ and placed in ‘Vegetable and Animal Substances chiefly used in Manufacture, as Implements, or as Ornaments’. Was a wig art or ornament? The question has never been settled. Many groups and subgroups grew up like the elm trees in the Exhibition Hall, and some unlikely combinations proved the variety and diversity of the enterprise. Just outside the Hall was placed a block of coal weighing 24 tons, as a symbol of England’s material wealth, and beside it stood a huge equestrian statue of Richard I as a symbol of the nation’s greatness. The Roman marble of the ‘dying gladiator’ was beside Nasmyth’s steam hammer, a penknife beside a graphic telescope. The visitor might be awed by the triumphs of British machinery, from a cigarette machine which produced eighty cigarettes a minute, to the copying telegraph which produced facsimiles of documents at the other end of the line and the ‘silent alarm bed’ which pitched the sleeper onto the floor at any given time. Ribbons were piled on silks, tapestries on carpets; ornamental plate and elaborately carved furniture, bowls of porcelain and ivory, were all gathered together. There were critics as well as admirers. Here, according to an article in Papers for the People, ‘we have sham-classic … sham stone-mouldings and tracery; sham-stone pillars …’ This was one of the nineteenth-century maladies, condemned by Carlyle, Ruskin and others who saw in their century the appetite but not the capacity for great work. Despite the mechanical and technological accomplishments there was a sense of something missing, something wanting, which no steam hammer or electric telegraph could assuage.

It was of course attacked by those who detested novelty of any kind. Some said that the Hall would collapse under the weight of its own glass or that a lightning storm might shatter it to fragments. What if people were baked alive in this giant greenhouse? Some said that it was simply an advertisement for free trade and therefore a gigantic fraud on the public. Others lamented the effect on one of the most important London parks, where the grass might never grow again. Might not the masses of people congregated together create an epidemic illness? But the major source of controversy was the sheer vulgarity of display which shocked some contemporaries. It was the kind of criticism that became vocal in the early part of the twentieth century when Victorianism was considered out of date. Lytton Strachey caught the mood in Eminent Victorians (1918).

But the seeds of the disenchantment can be found even before the time of the Great Exhibition itself. As Philip James Bailey puts it in his Festus (1839):

What England as a nation wants, is taste;

The judgement that’s in due proportion placed;

We overdo, we underdo, we waste …

When William Morris visited the Exhibition he remarked that the objects within it were ‘wonderfully ugly’. Other observers were less than impressed by the English contribution to the extravaganza, the French and the Americans in particular regarded as having supplanted Britain in various manufactures. The French had more taste and refinement, and the Americans more energy and gusto.

It was observed that many of the visitors were working men with their families, and the Exhibition may have reconciled many to the industrial culture all around them which they treated with due suspicion as the destroyer of employment. Charlotte Brontë also found herself among the crowds in Hyde Park. ‘Its grandeur’, she wrote, ‘does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created you find there … It seems as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth.’ Once again the language of magic and enchantment came easily to the Victorians. It was a mark of their sentimentality but also of their susceptibility to a world of novelties. ‘I made my way into the building,’ Macaulay wrote, ‘a most gorgeous sight … beyond the dreams of the Arabian romances. I cannot think that the Caesars ever exhibited a more splendid spectacle.’

It was the immensity of the collection that astounded the visitors. Individual objects might not satisfy the taste for sublimity. But one of the great Victorian imperatives was innovation. One of Victoria’s favourite exhibits was an envelope-making machine which could fold and gum sixty envelopes a minute; it fascinated her, perhaps, as a homely version of the ever-encroaching machine age. For better or worse, this was a peep-show into the soul of Victorian England. A dream of mechanical ingenuity and expertise, prompting some to ascend even further into the reaches of the imagination. A positive craze for the exhibition of novel inventions accompanied the event. A hall erected on the east side of Leicester Square included a diving apparatus, a ‘vacuum coated flask’, the ‘Aurora Borealis Apparatus’, the ‘Gas Cooking Apparatus’, the ‘Patent Ornamental Sewing Machine’ and ‘the Manufacture of Paper Hangings’.

The year 1851 was also the year of the national census which confirmed the impression that the middling classes were growing. The clerk, the shopkeeper and the man of business were part of an expanding constituency; the plumbers, house-painters and glaziers joined with the cabinetmakers, upholsterers and printers in their increasing numbers. The ‘railway servants’ had almost tripled in numbers in twenty years, as had the puddlers, forgers and moulders in the iron trade. It seemed that there could be no end to the expansion. This was also the first year in which the majority of the English lived in cities. And so, if the Exhibition was a way of exorcizing domestic and social fears, perhaps that was achievement enough for the moment.

15

Blood lust

After the fall of Lord John Russell at the hands of Palmerston, in February 1842, there followed one of those apparently interminable attempts to make a government. None of the candidates seemed capable of forming a coalition that would last longer than a day. Lord Derby, a Tory who had inherited the title from his father, was recommended to the queen as the least worst person to lead. He took the post eagerly enough, but found it difficult to create a cabinet of quality. He had intimated to the queen that he might have Palmerston, but she replied: ‘If you do it, he will never rest until he is your master.’ It was the kind of direct advice that her ministers might usefully employ.

Derby was scrutinizing a list of possible candidates for the cabinet when he is supposed to have said: ‘These are not names I can present to the queen.’ He had moved so far from the old Conservative leadership that none of Peel’s cabinet were called forth. Eventually, after another short spell in opposition, he managed to perform the trick. When the names were read out in parliament the duke of Wellington, now growing deaf, questioned in a loud whisper the names of those chosen. ‘Who?’ he asked. ‘Who?’ So it became known as the ‘Who? Who? ministry’. It is perhaps best known for the fact that Benjamin Disraeli was appointed chancellor of the Exchequer. When he admitted that he had no expertise in finance he was told not to worry because ‘they give you the figures’.

Derby adumbrated a programme quite different from Palmerston’s, principally by ‘not indulging vituperation and intemperance of language’. Its purposes were clear. The times themselves seemed out of joint, and Derby was determined to safeguard the present institutions from the threat of an increasingly radical world. The Quarterly Review stated ‘we humbly but most earnestly’ desire the new government ‘to avert a democratic and socialist revolution’. The duke of Wellington confided to Croker, an Irish politician, that ‘it is some consolation to us who are so near the end of our career that we shall be spared seeing the consummation of the ruin that is gathering about us’. It is curious that even the most experienced observers will interpret politics through the peep-show of their own fears and illusions. It cannot be denied, however, that in a society so deeply divided between great wealth and grinding poverty there was bound to be resentment and anger on one side with fear and trembling on the other. One Tory, Robert Cecil (later to become Lord Salisbury), wrote: ‘the struggle, however, between the English constitution on the one hand and the democratic forces that are labouring to subvert it on the other, is, in reality, when reduced to its simplest elements, and stated in its most prosaic form, a struggle between those who have, to keep that they have got, and those who have not, to get it’.

One publication of the time added fuel, if not flame, to the fire. Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, published in volume form in 1851, anatomized the horrors of the city in terms of sheer pain, punishment and epidemic plague. Many children suffered death in squalid and pestilential conditions; the ordinary victims of London’s filth and stench knew that death came just as certainly and with little enough to assuage it. Mayhew included terrible stories of the urban poor. ‘When I went back to the lodging house they told me she was dead. I had sixpence in my pocket but I couldn’t help crying to think I lost my mother. I cry about it still. I didn’t wait to see her buried, but I started on my own account. I have been begging about all the time till now. I am very weak, starving to death. I would do anything to be out of this misery.’ This was really more terrible than anything in Dickens. There was a state within the state, a community of persons who had no real connection with the external world of events and characters which is chronicled by history. These are people who had no religion of any kind, no sense of their country, no knowledge of their rulers and indeed no sense of their real selves. They are our forebears, the unknown people who lived and died in a world which offered them little but misery and disease. Another deadly bout of cholera stirred Charles Dickens to fury, and in his periodical Household Words he declared that the incompetence of the authorities meant that ‘they are guilty, before GOD, of wholesale murder’. One more such attack ‘and you will see such a shake in this country as never was seen on earth since Samson pulled the Temple down on his head’. All his rage, his pity, and his impotence to force action, are visible.

Food riots were endemic in the early 1850s, largely in areas like the West Country where no adequate railway service was yet in use. Other grievances grew and grew. Factory operatives joined with miners in dispute with their employers, but perhaps the main issue was their under-representation in the Commons. The clamour for parliamentary reform returned as soon as it was realized that the measures of 1832 were barely adequate for a new electorate. Continental reforms following the ‘year of revolution’ added salt. Napoleon III instituted universal male suffrage for the workings of the Second French Empire, but it was not an example which the grandees of Westminster necessarily wanted to follow.

Nor was it a period of parliamentary calm. None of the ministries that fell apart in the fifteen years from 1852 to 1867 was ever despatched by a popular vote; they had all foundered on the rock of internal disagreement and division. Pressure from without was less deadly than pressure from within. The new parliament met on 4 November 1852, but it took a further two weeks to prepare the funeral car of Lord Wellington and to order the obsequies; he had died in September but it was considered not quite fitting to put the old man into the earth without proper parliamentary respects.

It was widely believed that the new administration could not last very long, and Derby decided to end the suspense with a summer election. The duke of Argyll had written that:

the year 1852 was a highly critical one among parliamentary parties, and yet singularly destitute of the nobler interests which ought to belong to them … The moment it became certain that all danger of a return to protectionism was a thing of the past there remained nothing but personal feelings and the associations of long antagonism to prevent all the free trade sections from uniting to form a new and a strong government. The whole year was spent in attempts, by endless interviews and correspondence, to realize the aspiration.

The election of that summer was once again an inconclusive contest, with the Whigs gaining more votes and the Conservatives more seats, but the general consensus seems to have been the continuation of the same policies under Derby. In one of his election speeches Palmerston adverted to the fact that in France an innkeeper would attract custom by christening his inn ‘The New White Horse’ or ‘The New Golden Cross’, whereas in England it would no doubt be called ‘The Old White Horse’ or ‘The Old Golden Cross’. It was an astute observation of the English character. It is often believed that Derby was simply a figurehead, but it did not seem like that at the time. Victoria told the queen of the Belgians that ‘our acquaintance is confined almost entirely to Lord Derby, but then he is the Government. They do nothing without him.’ She was not so sure of his colleagues. She told King Leopold that Derby had ‘a very sorry Cabinet. I believe, however, that it is quite necessary they should have a trial and then have done with it.’

Disraeli, as chancellor of the Exchequer in Derby’s government, had to remove the yoke of Protectionism from Tory necks. He did so cautiously and deliberately with a series of proposals to reduce the land tax and thus conciliate the agricultural interest to free trade. He had to plead and explain and exonerate; his entire effort according to Lady Dorothy Nevill was ‘to drag an omnibus full of country gentlemen uphill’. His central financial policies of low taxation and low government expenditure were not too far away from those of his great opponent in the Liberal party, William Ewart Gladstone, but he reached them by different means. Gladstone was in essence a moral leader whose robust principles were matched by a ferocious intelligence. Disraeli’s policies on taxation were driven by questions of political calculation. Gladstone’s principled vision encouraged a policy in which financial, foreign and military matters were closely related; the policies of Disraeli, with a whimsical touch here and there, did not materially add to them. They had once belonged to the same party, even though Peel had favoured Gladstone.

The appointment of Disraeli as chancellor came as a distinct surprise. The Edinburgh Review commented that ‘his appointment to this post was one of the most startling domestic events which have occurred in our time. People seemed never tired of talking and speculating on it. He glittered in the political horizon as a star of the first magnitude.’ Disraeli was never one to lower expectations and was eager to impress the English people with his major budget of December 1852.

‘Yes, I know what I have to face,’ he told the Commons. ‘I have to face a coalition.’ By which he meant Peelites, free-traders and various Irish representatives. Disraeli spent some hours in explaining and defending his measures, but all his efforts were in vain when Gladstone launched a bitter invective against them as frivolous and opportunistic. The duel between the two men took place in lightning and storm, with peals of thunder interrupting the cheers and counter-cheers that rang through parliament. Disraeli had planned, by means of his budget, to steady the national Exchequer after the inoculation of free trade had threatened some kind of nervous collapse, and at the same time he wished to install a more favourable system of taxation. The agricultural interest, for example, was to be rewarded a 50 per cent cut in the malt tax. As he sat down Gladstone, against all precedent, jumped to his feet. ‘My great object’, he wrote to his wife, ‘was to show the Conservative party how their leader was hoodwinking and bewildering them, and this I have the happiness to believe that I effected.’ The correspondent for The Times noted that Gladstone’s speech was ‘characterised throughout by the most earnest sincerity. It was pitched in a high tone of moral feeling – now rising to indignation, now sinking to remonstrance …’ This was the Gladstone style, which did not really change over twentyfive years. It was described by one colleague as ‘Oxford on the surface, but Liverpool below’.

Derby’s son, Stanley, recorded that ‘Gladstone’s look when he rose to reply will never be forgotten by me. His usually calm features were livid and distorted with passion, his voice shook, and those who watched him feared an outbreak incompatible with parliamentary rules. So strong a scene I have never witnessed.’ Disraeli’s budget was defeated by nineteen votes, and Derby went down with it. It is usually believed that Gladstone delivered the significant stroke, but in truth Disraeli’s budget was fatally flawed. ‘Now we are properly squashed,’ Derby said. ‘I must prepare for my journey to Osborne to resign.’

On another occasion he would have been succeeded by Russell and a Liberal ministry, but after the ‘tit-for-tat’ with Palmerston they hardly possessed the confidence of the country, let alone each other’s. Instead the queen sought out the former followers of Peel who, standing apart from both sides, had acquired the reputation of being ‘statesmanlike’; they also happened to be the most accomplished members of the Commons. The Liberals were the larger party, but the erstwhile followers of Peel had most of the talent.

Some would not serve under Russell, and others would not serve under Palmerston. The earl of Aberdeen was the natural choice. He was the leader of the ‘Peelites’ and had been foreign secretary for five years under Peel himself. And the queen liked him. He took over the administration towards the end of the year on the clear understanding that he would reconcile Liberals and Peelites. His audience with the queen lasted an hour, primarily because they had already reached agreement of a kind. Aberdeen was willing to create a cabinet and then withdraw from the proceedings. It would be a farewell gift to his country. The proposed cabinet had a disproportionate number of Peelites, members of Aberdeen’s old party, and a few last-minute adjustments were required. The Times was enthusiastic: ‘If experience, talent, industry and virtue are the attributes required for the government of this empire …’ then the political experiment had been a success.

Russell, forever eager to maintain Whig or Liberal honour, was nominated for the Foreign Office, and Palmerston to the Home Office, realizing only too well that the queen herself would deter him from returning to the Foreign Office. Palmerston confessed to his brother-in-law: ‘I have for the last twelve months been acting the part of a very distinguished tightrope walker and astonishing the public by my individual performances and feats … So far, so well; but even Madame Saqui, when she had mounted her rope and flourished among her rockets, never thought of making the rope her perch, but prudently came down again to avoid a dangerous fall.’ It is interesting to note that he compares himself with a star-spangled female circus performer. The new cabinet held their first dinner on 29 December 1852, where Palmerston was all smiles.

Leaving Madame Saqui aside in the green room, this was in theory the most talented and most experienced cabinet of the century, with its members in favour of moderate progress and free trade. Gladstone joined them at the Exchequer, and proved to be one of the better chancellors of the nineteenth century. He was in a different league from Disraeli, who tended to prefer bright ideas to solid policy. Gladstone may have picked the knave of spades when he opted for the Treasury. He knew that it would be a heavy burden, but he did not flinch from it. He had already developed the habit of self-flagellation after his conversations with the women of the streets, the prostitutes whom he was keen to ‘rescue’ from their calling, and never more obsessively than in the 1840s and 1850s. Various biographers have diagnosed ‘emotional distemper’, ‘near despair’ and ‘private torments’. He was filled with repressed energy and repressed anger, quite unlike the demeanour of the ‘grand old man’ of later reports.

Gladstone’s subsequent budget of 1853 was most singular for its maintaining income tax but lowering or abolishing duties on all foodstuffs and on items from soap to life insurance, from dogs to tea. He spoke for almost five hours, the longest budget speech on record, and declared at the close:

these are the proposals of the government. They may be approved, or they may be condemned, but I have at least this full and undoubting confidence, that it will on all hands be admitted, that we have not sought to evade the difficulties of our position – that we have not concealed those difficulties either from ourselves or from others; that we have not attempted to counteract them by narrow or flimsy expedients; that we have proposed plans which, if you will adopt them, will go some way to close up many vexed financial questions.

He had, as one peer put it, ‘made a long and flying leap in his ascent to power’. The earl of Clarendon declared that ‘it was the most perfect financial statement ever heard within the walls of parliament, for such it is allowed to be by friend and foe’. It was remarkable that Gladstone could look at one year in advance, in distinction from his predecessor, who knew about as much arithmetic as would calculate his publisher’s earnings.

It was a time of modest prosperity, encouraged by Gladstone’s homage to the ideals of free trade. British exports never grew more rapidly than they did in the seven years after 1850. The rate of growth of cotton exports doubled in the same period. Economic liberalism and the growth of free trade created an unprecedented demand and maintained the condition of what was essentially a financial new world; Henry Hyndman, a Marxist who managed to combine his creed with Victorian capitalism, compared the years from 1847 to 1857 with the great era of world discovery by Columbus and Cortez. This was also the period when mid-Victorian England witnessed the birth of ‘la semaine anglaise’, the Saturday afternoon of leisure, at least for the industrial labour force. Factory workers now passed their Saturday afternoons in the musical hall or at the market, in the pub or in the parks, shopping, exercising, drinking, flirting, socializing. Many dedicated their free time to sport, and especially to football, which was played and watched in industrial towns and cities across the country. Going to see the football on a Saturday afternoon became one of the most important of Britain’s male-bonding rituals. ‘It is now a stock saying’, commented one workingclass engineer, ‘that Saturday is the best day of the week, as it is a short working day, and Sunday had to come’. After the factory bell rang, the men downed their tools and gathered outside their workshops, eager to ‘devote themselves to the business of pleasure.’

It was said by Disraeli that the British people did not like coalitions – a surprising aspect of a nation that favoured compromise above all else. But there was also the favourite metaphor of ‘drift’, There was a feeling abroad in 1853 that events were getting out of control and that a looming war between Russia and Turkey over the collapsing Ottoman empire was becoming inevitable. These are moments when the prophets of fate and destiny are at their loudest. ‘We are drifting towards war’, Aberdeen wrote in June 1853, and only a month later he declared again: ‘we are drifting hopelessly’ towards war. So drift was the word on everyone’s lips. Why, then, did sober, rational men feel themselves to be hopelessly swept along? ‘If the country might be roused,’ Derby told a colleague, ‘it might be well; but we are falling into the fatal sleep which precedes mortification and death.’ It could be that the pressures of life encouraged blankness or fatalism, and that even the most experienced elder statesmen threw up their hands in despair and preferred to be lost in the maelstrom of events.

Aberdeen might have been made for the arts of peace, but fate decreed otherwise. He was in many respects an elusive figure, marked by the early deaths of both his parents and of his first wife. As a result, perhaps, he was disinclined to play a leading part in the world. ‘You look for interest and amusement in the agitation of the world,’ he told a noted contemporary, Princess de Lieven, ‘and the spectacle it affords, now I cannot express to you my distaste for everything of the kind … but I have had enough of the world … and would willingly have as little to do with it as is decent.’ Fourteen years after writing this, he became prime minister. He had an awkward manner and a diffident or difficult temperament. Disraeli had the most damning verdict when he described ‘his manner, arrogant and yet timid; his words insolent and yet obscure; his sneer, icy as Siberia; his sarcasms drear and barren as the Steppes’. Yet he also earned affection and admiration. Gladstone called him ‘the man in public life of all others whom I have loved. I say emphatically loved. I have loved others, but never like him’. He was in politics for most of his life but he never became a victim either of cynical self-regard or hypocritical self-abasement. He was not an oily man, to use a phrase of the day. He was bone-dry. It would perhaps be fruitless to investigate his foreign policy, apart from his need of ‘doing the job’ or ‘seeing it through’.

When at the end of 1852 Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte proclaimed the Second French Empire and became the Emperor Napoleon III, the world groaned. The tsar, Nicholas I, raged at the assumption of this parvenu ruling dynasty, but the lightning flash came out of the Holy Land. This sacred area, comprising Palestine and the shrines of Jerusalem, as well as the present Israel and Jordan, was under the control of the Ottoman empire. The new French emperor, ever in search of glory, threw his protection over a group of Catholic monks and placed a silver star with the arms of France in the sanctuary of the church of Bethlehem. He also seized the keys to the doors of the church and to the sacred manger of Jesus Christ. Nicholas I was now directly threatened. He was the self-appointed protector of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and sent an ultimatum that the Orthodox monks and worshippers should be placed under his protection.

The Ottoman empire could not allow its space to be contaminated in such a conspicuous fashion. Having obtained the support of France and Britain, its Sublime Porte or central government declared war on Russia in October 1853. The manger of Jesus Christ might have had little to do with it. ‘Really and truly,’ Palmerston wrote, ‘this is a quarrel more for times long gone by than for the days in which we live.’ It could perhaps be interpreted as a crisis between Orthodox monks and Roman Catholic monks over who should guard the Holy Places; Richard I might have ridden out on his charger, but it is hard to see Disraeli or Gladstone in such a martial posture. In truth the Russians and the Turks were essentially fighting over territory and the 12 million people inhabiting it.

Some believed that it would be a short war, others were convinced that it could extend indefinitely. It was commonly believed that it would be a great war that would redefine the map of Europe. The Register believed that it was a struggle ‘which may change, ere it closes, the destinies of the civilised world’.

At the beginning of the war the tsar attacked and occupied the two regions of Wallachia and Moldavia which now, with Transylvania, comprise Romania. Every thought of Aberdeen was for peace and compromise, but other members of his cabinet disagreed. Just as the war was beginning Aberdeen told John Bright that ‘his grief was such that he felt as if every drop of blood that would be shed would rest upon his head’. His son would later recall how he left an abandoned church on his estate to be rebuilt by a successor in deference to a sentence from Chronicles: ‘thou shalt not build an house unto my name, because thou hast shed much blood upon the earth in my sight’.

In February 1854 more than five divisions of infantry and one of cavalry made their way via Malta to the north of the Crimea in the expectation that two or three short battles would determine the issue. England was the master of the world, was it not, with the railways and the electric telegraph, the screw-propeller steamship and perhaps most importantly a muzzle-loading rifle known from the name of its French inventor as the Minié. In comparison the Russians were still considered primitive.

So the people were with the soldiers, marching alongside as they made their way to their barracks, cheering and singing. But the singing was soon to stop. Eight days after the announcement of war, Lord John Russell withdrew a proposal for further electoral reform legislation, in the light of more significant events, and at once fell prey to what was called ‘an hysterical fit of crying’ on the floor of the Chamber. This was not the time to look for indulgence. The ensuing war destroyed the peace that had lasted since 1815, and inaugurated a period when every great power was at war with another great power. From 1853 to the 1880s, England was engaged in a European war once, France thrice, Austria thrice, Russia twice, Germany (Prussia) thrice, Italy twice, Denmark once and Turkey twice. It is little wonder that Europe was sometimes compared to an armed encampment and that the periods of peace were as hazardous and fragile as the periods of war. It was disconcerting too, that former enemies were now allies. The French experience of the English had been at the wolf’s throat, but now they were obliged to greet them as long-lost relatives.

Palmerston had no responsibility for foreign policy in these months, but he strongly opposed the Russians and argued that Britain, if necessary, should ally itself with Turkey. It was a contest between two less than lovely despots, but the English public (as the newspaper-reading classes might be called) supported Palmerston and his horror of the Russian bear. Aberdeen was still steering a middle course when the Russians set sail from their port at Sebastopol in the Crimea and sank the Turkish fleet at Sinope on the Black Sea. That finally decided British and French policy. It would be war against Russia which, for the French, might be a belated revenge for Napoleon’s fate in 1812. For the English it was an instinctive matter. For a foreign power to sink a foreign fleet was to trespass on Britain’s empire of the waves. On 14 December Palmerston resigned from the government, only to resume office ten days later. It was all very mysterious, unexplained and perhaps inexplicable. Was he pursuing his feud against Russell, or was he opposed to Aberdeen’s lukewarm war policy? Public opinion does not love a vacuum. This was the year when realpolitik was first coined.

It was soon believed that a Russian conspiracy was active within the inner circles of the administration. Who was, as the Morning Advertiser put it, ‘the interpreter of Russian wishes and the abetter of Russian purposes’? The suspicion soon fell upon the one foreigner who reigned at court, Prince Albert, who by every standard of speech and custom was indeed a ‘foreigner’. Did he not speak with a pronounced accent? It was whispered finally that he had been placed in the Tower for treason. Husband and wife became prostrated with nervous illness as the rumours mounted. ‘Since yesterday I have been quite miserable,’ he wrote to a companion, ‘today I have had to keep to the house.’

It was said that the Russians had long been preparing for war, made even more certain after the events at Sinope and the British demand that Russian ships leave the Black Sea. There was a feeling in the early weeks of 1854 that events were gaining a momentum of their own. ‘We have on our hands’, the tsar told the English ambassador in St Petersburg, ‘a sick man, a very sick man: it will be, I tell you frankly, a great misfortune if one of these days he should slip away from us, especially before all necessary arrangements are made.’ The ‘sick man’ was Turkey and the Ottoman empire. These portentous words are perfect for the period – vaguely threatening, a hint of menace and danger, a sense of steel somewhere behind it. So the Russians seemed to have been set for this moment. Lord Shaftesbury told the Lords that ‘this was a long-conceived and gigantic scheme, determined on years ago, and now to be executed, for the prevention of all religious freedom, and so ultimately of all civil freedom, among millions of mankind’. The more inflated the rhetoric, the more readily it was believed.

Palmerston feared that Russian power might supplant the Turks, while Aberdeen was sceptical of Turkish rule over Europeans. The cabinet was divided, and just before England entered the war Disraeli had told the Commons: ‘I would like to know how the war is to be carried on with efficiency and success by men who have not settled what the object of war is.’ There was growing impatience with the English high command, who did not seem to know when or where they were going. When was the fighting going to begin?

The Turks believed that they were fighting for their survival, while the Russians were determined to augment and defend their empire. The forces of the Turkish allies, France and England, had turned their attention to the port of Sebastopol, from which the Turkish fleet had been detached to Sinope. In the middle of September they landed at Calamita Bay, on the western coast of the Crimean peninsula, and a few days later the first battle was fought near the banks of the river Alma. It was a case of hard pounding and heavy fighting, but the British infantry regiments and the Highlanders, in particular, eventually routed the Russians. One of the British colonels said: ‘and we have to do the same thing on new ground tomorrow, and perhaps once more before we reach the port of Sebastopol’. Lord Raglan, overall commander of the British army, wrote a despatch to the foreign secretary in which he stated that ‘all our anxieties point to the last scene at Sebastopol’. It was on everyone’s mind.

The battle at Alma was a foretaste of the larger war. A contemporary traveller surveyed the dead shrouded in linen cloths. ‘What did these fellows know about the Turkish question? And yet they had fought and trembled, they had writhed in agony, and now father and brother, maid and mother, were weeping and breaking their hearts, and all about the Danubian principalities.’ It had been hoped that the soldiers of two mighty powers would make short work of the Russians. It was not quite like that. In front of a group of interested observers with bottles of champagne and opera-glasses, approximately 5,000 men died. This was quite a new sensation for the spectator, a real battle with all the blood and detritus flying in all directions. They had read accounts of the Napoleonic Wars but they could not have been prepared for the screams and the stench. Forty years of peace had prepared no one for war.

From the battle of Balaclava, fought in the next month, came two phrases of fire, ‘The Thin Red Line’ and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. Both of them were in essence ambiguous; they could be redolent of triumph but they could also be tokens of disaster. The charge has effectively been taken out of time by Tennyson’s poem. ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ is at once a ballad, an ode, and a memorial of an event that would otherwise soon have been forgotten. It was written at a gallop, as soon as the news of the event reached England. Tennyson even uses the dactylic metre which has the cadence of a gallop to echo the horses. The charge of British light cavalry was led by the earl of Cardigan against Russian arms and forces; they consisted of the 4th and 13th Light Dragoons together with the 17th Lancers and the 8th and 11th Hussars. Their horses were unarmoured, therefore light and fast; the men were armed with lances and sabres to effect swift and massive shock. In charge of the British cavalry was the 3rd earl of Lucan. Cardigan and Lucan were brothers-in-law who despised one another. The British army was in the overall command of Lord Raglan.

Raglan ordered Lucan to deploy his cavalry to prevent the Russians from withdrawing captured naval guns from the redoubts in the valley between Fedyukhin Heights and the Causeway Heights. This was named by Tennyson as ‘the Valley of Death’. But the lie of the land around Lucan meant that he could not see the movement of the Russian troops in the vicinity. The Light Brigade could see the danger, but not one of them questioned the order to gallop unto sudden death. The English were on the left and the Russians on the right; and so the English charged them almost blindly. They were only obeying orders. The French forces were more sagacious and cleared the Fedyukhin Heights of the Russians.

The Light Brigade descended for three-quarters of a mile before they came under showers of shells and shot which surrounded them with a ring of fire: 670 men succeeded in getting through the Russian cavalry, but on their subsequent ascent of the hill 118 men were killed and 127 injured. Two-thirds of the brigade were destroyed. It had been a massacre. News of the disaster did not reach England for three weeks, and Tennyson read a leader on the affair in The Times of 13 November. The newspaper reported that ‘some hideous blunder had occurred’. In his poem Tennyson wrote:

Not tho’ the soldier knew

Someone had blundered …

But the poem is not a lament or criticism; it is couched in the language of heroism and of magnificence, as if the Light Brigade had been so many life-size statues suddenly come to life.

For Tennyson’s contemporaries it was a catastrophe, too, but on an heroic scale; it was a tragedy but at the same time a triumph. This was how the English characteristically understood their defeats. That is why they were considered by others to be almost obtuse in the face of imminent peril, to be valorous beyond the call of duty, and to be almost negligent about deaths and casualties. A French cavalry commander remarked that ‘the British cavalry officer seems impressed by the conviction that he can dash or ride over everything as if this sort of war were precisely the same as that of foxhunting’. The ill-starred charge has quite obliterated the charge of the Heavy Brigade which took place earlier on that same day; under the command of James Yorke Scarlett, the brigade ignored the conventions of warfare and charged uphill against a much larger formation of Russians. In this it was triumphantly successful, and the Russians were routed. Unlike the humiliation of the Light Brigade, however, this victory has been forgotten. It might seem that the British prefer heroic failure to heroic success.

In truth Balaclava was an unnecessary battle notable only for misunderstanding, arrogance and blunder. The valley of death into which the cavalry rode was no more and no less than an abattoir. But the theatre of war is not an area for shrewd or patient judgement. The charge of the Light Brigade may be considered by some as glorious, if costly. Others will still consider it to have been ill-timed, ill-judged and ill-conducted.

Balaclava led to the third of the infernal trio of battles, Inkerman, where once more the individual soldiers were lost in the mist of strife. One brigadier general recalled that ‘on our part it was a confused and desperate struggle. Colonels of regiments led on small parties, and fought like subalterns, captains like privates. Once engaged, every man was his own general.’ The Scots Guards could smell the Russians in their vicinity, a ‘peculiar strong leather-like smell’. When the fog lifted with the winter sun the dead and dying lay in heaps.

For every hundred men in the battalions, seventy-three were killed by hunger or by cold; and these were the troops from the richest country in the world. All that could be said was that they had done their duty, much more than the country which despatched them into the Crimea. The new recruits were often the first to die. There were no roads. Fuel was in short supply. There were no ambulances and the hospital ships were overcrowded. In one hospital more than half the patients died in one month. In another, where 2,000 were suffering from dysentery, only six shirts were washed. The Crimea was a festering sore. Albert wrote in a memorandum that ‘we have no generals trained and practised in the duties of that rank; no general staff or corps; no field commissariat; no field army department; no ambulance corps; no baggage train; no corps of drivers; no corps of artisans …’ The battle of Inkerman became known as ‘the Soldier’s Battle’, since it was fought one against another like any battle between Briton and Anglo-Saxon. The soldier lost in the fog of the battlefield is one of the enduring images of the Crimea.

Winter was now settling in. All battles ceased and the primary concern was the siege of Sebastopol itself with its Russian defenders. It was now heavily fortified, its defences very hard to pierce, and the difficulties of communication further hampered by bad weather and bad field control. The arena around Sebastopol became a place of suffering and pestilence. A fierce storm descended that did not blow itself out for three days. The story of the dying and wounded was transmitted to London and elsewhere by means of the electric telegraph. The correspondent of The Times, William Howard Russell, sent candid and uncensored reports of the chaos and inefficiency that are the handmaids of war. The dead were left unburied and the injured left untreated; there was no hygiene to speak of, and the medicines were in woefully short supply. The flies alighted on the festering wounds, and more died from filth and privation than from injuries sustained in battle.

The siege of Sebastopol has only indistinct links with that of Troy, but the idea of a siege had more than martial associations. It was always a sign of endurance, of individual heroism and ingenuity. But Sebastopol did not fall. The year was late, and winter came early to the Crimea; the troops were not adequately fitted, clothed or fed. Amoebic dysentery had already begun its work. As for the defenders of Sebastopol, they were reported to be in high spirits, confident that they could outlast any siege. The allied commanders were bereft of information, and did not even know the number of Sebastopol’s defenders. The earl of Clarendon wrote: ‘It seems to me, God grant I may be wrong, that we are on the verge of a monster catastrophe.’ He was not alone in his forebodings. The memory of the Great Exhibition was now hopelessly lost in the fog and fury of a war the English did not believe they could win.

At the end of 1854 Charles Greville wrote in his diary:

The last day of the most melancholy and disastrous year I ever recollect. Almost everybody is in mourning and grief and despair overspread the land. At the beginning of the year we set forth an army of joyous and triumphant anticipation … and the end of this year sees us deploring the deaths of friends and relations without number, our army perishing before the walls of Sebastopol, which we are unable to take, and after bloody victories and prodigies of valour, the Russian power hardly is yet diminished or impaired.

A world of suffering lay behind the words.

A British army surgeon reported that ‘we say here that “We did not take Sebastopol because the French would not fight by day, the English would not fight in the dark, and the Turks won’t fight at all.”’ There was a morsel of comfort. By the beginning of 1855 a railway, ‘The Grand Crimean Railway with Branch to Sebastopol’, was being built, notable for the speed of its construction and the fact that it was the first attempt to organize mechanized warfare. But Raglan, the commander of the British troops, had died – some say of disappointment, others of a broken heart and others of strain. The point was that everybody wanted the war to end. It had gone on too long, and had been responsible for the loss of too many lives, to be endured. The tsar emphasized in a despatch to a Russian commander, Michael Gorchakov, ‘the necessity to do something to bring this frightful massacre to a close’. This is what it had become, a massacre and not a war.

Another inglorious battle was fought in the spring of the year when the English forces attempted two sieges of the Great Redan, one of the fortresses guarding Sebastopol; they were forced off and were obliged to retreat, a signal contrast to the successful French assault of the fort at Malakhov.

The war had already engulfed Gladstone and his budget of 1854 which reversed much that had been decreed in 1853; income tax was doubled, and additional revenue was once more derived from sugar, spirits and malt. It was Gladstone’s belief that war costs should be borne out of revenue and not out of borrowing. ‘The expenses of war’, he told the Commons, ‘are the moral check which it has pleased the Almighty to impose on the ambition and lust of conquest that are inherent in so many nations.’ The combination of piety and belligerence was not to everyone’s taste, especially since Gladstone himself would soon enough have recourse to borrowing.

The real crisis of the Crimean War occurred towards the end of January 1855. A radical member of parliament, John Arthur Roebuck, was able to pass a resolution demanding a committee of inquiry into the mismanagement of the war. It was essentially a motion of no confidence, and almost at once John Russell resigned from the cabinet, saying that Aberdeen’s government was ‘the worst I ever belonged to’. His abrupt departure was considered by some to smack of ambition. The queen sent him a note expressing ‘her surprise and concern at hearing so abruptly of his intention to desert the Government on the motion of Mr Roebuck’. Russell had thoroughly disgraced himself in the eyes of most observers, and the queen never forgave him, but he attained office again after a few months. The parliament agreed to a committee of inquiry into the debacle by the surprising majority of 157 votes; the result was followed by silence, not cheering, and a few derisive laughs.

Aberdeen resigned his post into the hands of the queen after surviving for two years. ‘The country was governed for two years’, Disraeli wrote, ‘by all its ablest men, who by the end of that term had succeeded by their coalesced genius, in reducing that country to a state of desolation and despair that they could hear their heads thump as they struck the ground.’ The committee of inquiry itself was not a success. ‘I felt corruption all around me,’ Roebuck wrote, ‘but I could not lay my hand on it.’ The same discontent and frustration affected the public reaction. The Administrative Reform Association was established as a direct response to the mismanagement in the Crimea; it comprised City men and London professional men but it was slow, cumbrous, and achieved very little.

Someone had to take the blame, or at least to take the helm. It might be thought that no sane man would wish to take on the duties of a prime minister in wartime, but who will necessarily believe that politicians are altogether sane? It was thought that Derby, as leader of the Conservatives, might step forward; but, much to Disraeli’s fury, he refused to do so. Disraeli had an affection for the Levant and was bitterly disappointed that his leader in the Lords had shirked the fight against Russia. But you could never know what Disraeli was really thinking. Sir William Gregory, once on the fringes of the Young England movement, remarked: ‘that he was a man of immense talent not even his greatest enemy can deny; but even I, his personal friend, must confess that from his entrance into public life until his last hour he lived and died a charlatan’.

There seemed only one viable candidate, however he may have been disliked by the queen. Palmerston’s bravura and assertive patriotism, together with his ambition to crush any despot within reach, had endeared him to the workingclass radicals who might otherwise have abhorred the war. He felt that he had the support of the people, too. There was another way of looking at it. ‘I object to Lord Palmerston on personal grounds’, the queen said. ‘The Queen means’, Prince Albert explained, ‘that she does not object to Lord Palmerston on account of his person.’ It might have come from Lewis Carroll, if he had been writing at the time. ‘Pam’, as he was widely known, cobbled together a ministry, or, rather, he preserved the same ministry without the embarrassing presence of Aberdeen, Newcastle, former secretary of war, and of course John Russell, who like a jack-in-the-box returned later as colonial secretary. He could not be kept down. If it had not been for the occasion of a war, this particular ministry might have endured the course, but it did survive long enough to seal the peace. Palmerston had stepped forward, no doubt with a spring in his step. The old warhorse was pawing the ground but, more importantly, he elicited the support of the nation as a defender of its vital interests.

All the combatants were tired of the bloody and messy war fought over a small territory, but Palmerston did not wish to end it until England and France had taken Sebastopol. Once that was achieved, with the retreat of the Russians, the peace negotiations could begin in earnest. On 9 September 1855, the Russians eventually abandoned the fortress of Sebastopol. It was a victory of sorts for the English and French, but they hesitated to follow the enemy any further. Under the circumstances this was considered to be a famous victory. It is estimated that 300,000 Russians lost their lives in Sebastopol, which had by the end of the hostilities become a smoking ruin. One of the burial places was known as the Cemetery of the Hundred Thousand. A great storm tore down the huts and tents used by the allies. The British forces were reduced to shreds and patches.

The English public had become acutely aware of the imbecility of the military command, or what The Times on 13 December 1854 described as ‘the incompetency, lethargy, aristocratic hauteur, official interference, favour, routine, perverseness and stupidity which revel and riot in the camp before Sebastopol’. Nonetheless the British people expected a spring campaign to finish off the enemy. The blood of two years might otherwise be shed for nothing; the commanders had already lost a third of the army. There was a hunger for news. The first national penny daily, the Daily Telegraph, emerged on the streets on 29 June 1855. The walls of the wooden huts that sheltered the besiegers of Sebastopol were covered with engravings torn from the pages of the illustrated papers. Some inglorious fighting muddied the issue before its close. An attempt to storm the fortress of the Redan was aborted when the British refused to leave the safety of their parapet. One of their commanders, Colonel Windham, complained that it was the ‘greatest disgrace that had ever fallen on the British soldier’. It had not been a lovely war.

The English army was prevented from finishing its mission by the terms of the treaty of Paris, signed at the end of March 1856. The participants had become ever more determined to escape the quagmire of the Crimea, but they had conflicting purposes. The Russians wished to snatch what profit or dignity they could from their humiliation. The French and British wished to preserve the Ottoman empire from all possible harm, as a bulwark against the Russians, while at the same time renewing their own ancient and almost prehistoric rivalry. But the terms of the treaty lacked any sense of determination. The integrity of Turkey was guaranteed, the Danube was opened to shipping, and the Black Sea was neutralised. That was all. The treaty of Paris was disconcerting and disappointing to those who believed that England had been fighting a moral as well as a military battle. The English were shocked, and in many cases horrified by what they considered to be an inconclusive and ineffective peace. The heralds who announced it were hissed as they stood by Temple Bar, and no one was sure whether they should illuminate their windows in celebration. They might have been smashed. All the patriotism, all the expectation and fervour, all the ideas of a just cause, had come to nothing.

The expansion of Russia would be checked for fourteen years, but this was scarcely the victory the home crowds had been seeking. The conflict did not assist or make any military reputations, and the war itself had emanated from the fear of an attack which was never contemplated and a threat which barely existed. Lytton Strachey remarked that ‘its end seemed as difficult to account for as its beginning’. It was a war of foreboding, neither just nor necessary, but it was hurried on by public opinion in one of its moods of foolish optimism. The peace itself was premature and too partial to the enemy, with concessions over neutral shipping and trade with Russia. Diplomacy, not battle, won the day where the English had expected a significant victory. Aberdeen had drifted into war, and Palmerston drifted into peace. The fate of the European peoples still under the Ottoman empire would have to wait for another day.

The other effects of the war are difficult to determine. The disappointment of the peace had been too sudden, and too unexpected, to trace many more subtle consequences. It helped to sustain the movement for military reform, with a greater level of efficiency observed in the ‘Scientific Corps’. A Staff College was also established. It is said that the example of the soldiers encouraged a cult of heroism, such as that embodied in the Volunteer Movement of 1859 to strengthen the defences against a proposed but illusory threat from Napoleon III. This is hard to believe. This was the period when the cigarette – or, as it was first known, the paper cigar – was introduced to England by the soldiers coming home from abroad.

Palmerston had a ‘good war’ primarily because he had little to do with it. Gladstone had become more isolated in the heady atmosphere, and described parliamentary business at the time as ‘the tossing of a ship at anchor’, where there was ‘motion but no progress’. Disraeli, in turn, described the Tory task as ‘to uphold the aristocratic settlement of this country’. The aristocracy had indeed faltered, and in some cases been disgraced, but they came back fighting in later decades. All in all, nothing much had happened on the domestic front. One moment from a state visit to England by Napoleon III in April 1855 may leave an appropriate impression. At the end of the national anthems the French empress quickly looked behind her to make sure the seat was in place; Victoria sat down at once without turning. She was born to rule without hesitation.

Nevertheless, the war in the Crimea had become a national shame, more than humiliation, to which the efforts of Florence Nightingale and her cadre of nurses brought much relief. Her devotion to the soldiers, her selflessness in her duty, her courage in the face of difficulties, helped to soothe the suffering spirit of the nation with an embodiment of clear-headed and efficient administration. It could be achieved, after all. A report in The Times on her conduct perhaps gilds the lily a little but was what people wanted to read after the empty bravura of Raglan and Cardigan:

She is a ‘ministering angel’ without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow’s face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary round.

Nightingale was not the only woman to devote herself to the sufferings of the soldiers. One other such was Mrs Mary Seacole, a ‘quadroon’ from the British West Indies who confronted prejudice against her sex and her race simply by knocking it down. Like many formidable women (Lady Hester Stanhope is another shining example from a period just before), she had a confirmed and powerful wanderlust. ‘I have never wanted [lacked] inclination to rove’, she wrote, ‘nor will powerful enough to carry out my wishes.’ This was the antithesis of the Victorian idea of a woman, immured in the house as a domestic prisoner. How much is ‘the angel in the house’ a masculine illusion foisted upon frustrated wives who may have had adventurous spirits as powerful as that of Mary Seacole?

She acquired many of her skills at the British Army Hospital in Jamaica, where yellow fever in particular led to many deaths. Of her decision to minister to the soldiers of the Crimea, she remarked that ‘heavens knows it was visionary enough’. But she recalled that in ‘the ardour of my nature, which carried me where inclination prompted, I declared that I would go to the Crimea’. She was not at first welcome, since Florence Nightingale had doubts about a non-white nurse, and she was also rebuffed by the War Office and the Medical Department. Eventually she decided to make her own path and to bypass the authorities by opening a hotel for invalids. Cards were printed and distributed in the war region, announcing a ‘BRITISH HOTEL’ where she intended ‘to establish a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers’.

The fame of her skills as a healer and nurse soon spread. She called her patients ‘sons’ and she was universally known as ‘Mother Seacole’. As soon as she arrived on the Crimean peninsula she learned that ‘the hospitals were full to suffocation, that scarcity and exposure were the fate of all in the camp’. She built up a cadre of female nurses of whom she said that ‘only women could have done more than they did who attended to this melancholy duty; and they, not because their hearts could be softer, but because their hands are moulded for this work’. It may not be going too far to suggest that without the unacknowledged assistance of the women the men would not have survived. Mary Seacole returned to England and died in May 1881.

Aberdeen’s fall after his humiliation had proved that ‘the public’ was now too great a presence to be ignored. It was what Carlyle sarcastically called ‘The Wonderful Face of Public Opinion’. This new ‘reading public’ wanted news and more news. Speeches were read out from the newspapers at social meetings and Lord Rosebery recalled that when he was a boy his family sat down after breakfast also to read the speeches. The street ballads, so much a part of nineteenth-century life, were often snippets and precis of news in rhyme and rhythm.

At the end of the Crimean War the nation was more than ever split by class consciousness. The numbing complacency and incompetence of the aristocratic military elite destroyed any confidence that the working classes possessed in their leaders. In the summer of 1855 a Sunday Trading Bill had just passed its third reading in the Commons, by which the licensing laws were restricted and Sunday trading forbidden. An immediate and furious reaction followed. A Chartist poster, in large print, was displayed over all London

New Sunday Bill prohibiting newspapers, shaving, smoking, eating and drinking and all other kinds of recreation and nourishment both corporal and spiritual, which the poor people still enjoy at the present time. An open-air meeting of artisans, workers and ‘the lower orders’ generally of the capital will take place in Hyde Park on Sunday afternoon to see how religiously the aristocracy is observing the Sabbath and how anxious it is not to employ its servants and horses on that day, as Lord Robert Grosvenor said in his speech. The meeting is called for three o’clock on the right bank of the Serpentine, on the side towards Kensington Gardens. Come and bring your wives and children in order that they may profit by the example their ‘betters’ set them!

The carriages of the wealthy were ‘mobbed’ on three successive Sundays in Hyde Park. Those without carriages mobbed those with carriages; this is not quite the same thing as the poor mobbing the rich, but it came somewhere close to it. The repressive legislation was withdrawn, a sign of changing class consciousness in the 1850s and also of the nervous fear that beset the administration after the Crimean debacle.

It had been widely believed that the war would banish all the materialism and selfishness that had afflicted the nation and that a new mood of national unity and purpose would purge the ‘condition of England question’ which had been so much part of the periodical press. But the most promising hopes are the first to die. In 1859, five years after the end of the war, The Times delivered its judgement: ‘That ill-starred war, those half million of British, French and Russian men left in the Crimea, have discharged to the last iota all the debt of Christian Europe to Turkey. Never was so great an effort made for so worthless an object. It is with no small reluctance that we admit a gigantic effort and an infinite sacrifice to have been made in vain.’

Yet war expedited the process of invention and improvement, continued step by step in the directions suggested by earlier inventions and previous improvements. These, too, were largely created, as Isambard Kingdom Brunel put it, in correlation with ‘a demand which circumstances happen to create’. In 1856 the first approaches to the age of steel were made with the patenting of the Bessemer technique; a powerful blast burned out the carbon and silicon from pig iron which, when manganese was added, became steel. Steel rails eventually became cheaper than iron rails and were far more durable. In the same year a chemistry student discovered the process for creating mauveine, the first synthetic dye, which changed the clothes and the interiors of the world.

The ill-fated Administrative Reform Association, established in 1854 following the disaster in the Crimea, was merely a token of the fact that efficiency and modern organization were far more significant than personal bravery or heroics. War was a practical business to be run on business principles. This could have been the lesson of the Crimea. A tendency to preach lofty ideals was combined with disgust at existing political institutions. In the same year the Northcote–Trevelyan Report urged that open and competitive examination was the best way to find proper recruits for the civil service. It was in other words an implicit recommendation that the middle class should play an active role in the administration of the country. It was significant, perhaps, that Samuel Smiles’s Self Help (1859) became popular after the Crimean War. ‘At this moment,’ Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote at the beginning of 1855, ‘it would be an absurdity in the nobles to pretend to the position which was quietly conceded to them a year ago. This one year has done the work of fifty ordinary ones; or more accurately, it has made apparent what has long been preparing itself.’

The apparent thing was the emergence of a country organized by the middle classes on the virtues of thrift, self-help and businesslike efficiency. Local self-government was still seen to be the key to administrative progress. In 1855 the Metropolitan Board of Works was established, and three years later an act was passed for the cleansing of ‘that noble river’ the Thames, the state of which was ‘little creditable to a great country, and seriously prejudicial to the health and comfort of the inhabitants of the Metropolis’. So the businesslike work was being done. In 1863 the first section of the Metropolitan Underground Railway was opened, and in 1862 the Board of Works was authorized to build an embankment on the north side of the Thames from Westminster to Blackfriars Bridge. And business needs statistics. Between 1876 and 1884 the Board began schemes to displace 22,000 people and rehouse 28,000.

Within months of the treaty of Paris, Palmerston, who had become prime minister following Aberdeen’s resignation, once more made sacrifice to the god of war over a minor incident in the harbour of Canton. A ship manned entirely by Chinese seamen, the Arrow, flew the British flag for convenience; it had an English captain, too, and so sailed in the shadow of Viscount Palmerston. The captain of a passing cargo ship recognized one of the crew of the Arrow as an erstwhile pirate and called in the local authorities to arrest him. The ship was boarded and, apparently, the British flag was hauled down. The incident had become an insult and the governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, ordered the immediate bombardment of Canton. The English newspapers took his side as if in some way he were countering the disappointment of the Crimean campaign. It has been called the Second Opium War, the first having been fought fourteen years before over the Chinese blockade of trade. This earlier incident was granted the soubriquet of ‘gunboat diplomacy’, and as a result the British confiscated Hong Kong and signed an ‘unequal treaty’ allowing them extensive trade privileges. But they were not enough. The second war, started on a pretext, was designed to garner larger and larger profits from opium by opening up China to foreign merchants.

It was essentially the conflict between a modern industrial power and an ancient system of civilization which considered its assailants to be nothing but barbarians. In turn the Chinese were caricatured as wife-murderers and child-beaters. Punch had said: ‘What do the Chinese matter to us? They are faraway and good for nothing.’ Never had two civilizations less in common. When Lord Elgin travelled to Shanghai in January 1859 he noted that ‘uninvited, and by methods not always of the gentlest, [he had] broken down the barriers by which these ancient nations sought to conceal from the world … the rags and rottenness of their waning civilisations’. But he had done more than that; he had introduced to the West one of the great powers of the world.

The first battle of Canton took place in 1857 and the allies, Britain and France, retained the city for three years. The Conservatives with a sprinkling of Radicals, ever ready to topple Palmerston from his popularity, drew up a motion against the Cantonese imbroglio. When Palmerston lost the vote he promptly dissolved parliament in the spring of 1857. By astute management and confident self-promotion he had become the hero of the hour, and the subsequent general election gave him for the first time an overriding victory over the Conservatives with a clear majority of eighty-five seats. Cobden and Bright, both illustrious pacifists, were rejected by their constituencies. It seemed that international morality would never beat national patriotism. The Emperor’s Summer Palace was burned down. This was the result, as Lord Derby put it, of ‘a Conservative minister working with Radical tools and keeping up a show of Whiggism in his foreign policy’. Palmerston, in other words, was following the tradition of British diplomacy.

The English were moving forward on another front. The great Moghul empires of India were beginning to break apart. In 1613 the ‘Company and Merchants of London were granted a trading station north of Bombay’. This was the beginning. In 1707 the last great Moghul left a divided country partitioned among sons, grandsons, Moghul governors and Hindu nobles. The English were not long in following and under the aegis of the East India Company became the predominant military and commercial power in the region. In 1849 the earl of Dalhousie, as governor general, annexed the Punjab to British India; this was followed by Sikkim, due north of Bengal, and Pegu in lower Burma. This was in turn succeeded by the colonization of the Muslim kingdom of Oudh. As a result ‘new’ British India was a third and a half larger than the previous colony.

‘We are making’, one British administrator said, ‘a people in India where hitherto there have been a hundred tribes and no people’. There are various stories of massacre and treachery in this process, although it is worth noting that they are generally associated with native rather than British atrocities, while the tales of heroism all concern the European minority. The self-congratulatory tone in fact concealed much barbarity on the part of the British colonists to the native peoples. Dalhousie, on leaving India, struck a more sober note. ‘No prudent man,’ he said, ‘having any knowledge of Eastern affairs, would ever venture to predict a prolonged continuance of peace in India.’ Yet Dalhousie also wrote, ‘We are perfectly secure so long as we are strong and believed to be so.’ The ambiguous end in Crimea might suggest that the British were not so strong as they used to pretend to be.

The reasons for the Indian War of Independence, and in particular the events of August 1857, were various. They ranged from the evidence of the Crimean campaign that the English were no longer good at war to the reluctance of native troops to serve in Burma and Persia. The East India Company was both a military compound and a commercial power. After the battle of Plassey in 1757, Robert Clive, Commander-in-Chief of British India, took Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, the cities manned by the native infantrymen known as sepoys and controlled by the British. It was not an idyllic posting. The deadly heat burned down, and cockroaches as large as mice scuttled beneath the doors of the Residency in Calcutta. This was the background to the Indian War. Drink was the only solace.

In 1856 and 1857 rumours of mutiny soon spread about the country. The only thing that superseded railway mania in India was religious mania. Here was the problem. It was widely believed and reported in fact that the new cartridges for the Minié weapon had been greased with the fat of pigs and cows, displaying sublime disregard for native custom. The story was untrue but it is a measure of the distrust of the native population for their colonial rulers. The cow is sacred to the Hindu, and the pig is a pollutant to the Muslims. For the Hindu it was a matter of losing caste for ever, in this world and in the next.

On January 1857 a general reported an ‘unpleasant feeling’ among the native soldiers. At the beginning of May eighty-five members of the cavalry stationed in Meerut were sentenced to ten years’ hard labour for having refused to touch the greased cartridges. The Muslims had sworn on the Koran, and the Hindus by the holy waters of the Ganges, that they would have nothing to do with the desecration. In the presence of the entire force the prisoners were stripped of their uniforms and were loaded with chains as if they were common felons. It was for some of them much worse than execution; it was degradation and worse than death. The sepoys erupted in rage, and were seen ‘dancing and leaping about, calling and yelling to each other’. English women and children were the first casualties. The native infantry were heard to call out: ‘Quick! Delhi! Quick! Delhi!’ They were on their way to the old Moghul capital.

On the following Sunday the regiment mutinied, broke open the gaol and released its prisoners before going on to gut the bungalows of the British and to massacre all their inhabitants. The mutineers then made their way towards Delhi, only 40 miles distant. Fear and rumour flew like the wind. Bahadur Shah, king of Delhi, was an ancient pensioner of the British, but was now helpless in the face of several insurrections. The massacres took place in bazaars and cowsheds, on the flat mud roofs and at the bottom of deep wells.

Two miles north of the city were stationed three native infantry regiments, but they attacked their white officers, and hacked many of them to death. The commander-in-chief, General Anson, was far away in the north. He was told that nothing could be done since transport was unavailable. He died of cholera two days later. Trials and executions of Indians followed apace, but it was noticeable that the men met their unhappy fate with great aplomb.

The disturbances moved rapidly through the North West Province; some of the local officials were pursued by rebels, and the province quickly subsided into a state of anarchy.

Cawnpore, on the west bank of the Ganges, had been considered safe within the emollient rule of Nana Sahib, but he no longer felt much reason to support the British and began a policy of condign punishment over his former allies. The sun beat down through the hot days of June and July, and the European contingent were felled by famine and disease. At Cawnpore they were promised safe passage by the Nana, if they laid down their arms and marched to boats waiting for them on the Ganges. Their embarkation was, however, the signal for the slaughter of all the men, women and children that had taken to the water. Only four survived.

The massacre at Cawnpore was a flame that gave the signal to the rebels of Lucknow. In 1857 Sir Henry Lawrence drove into the Residency at Lucknow and came upon a most desperate situation where ill administration and foolish vengeance provoked unrest. The English forces were caught off guard by the native forces and were closely pent and besieged in the Residency. The Residency was well fortified, however, and those within repulsed the siege against them.

Everywhere the English went, blood followed them. It is customary to call the native Indians mutineers or rebels, but they were nothing of the kind. If they had any parallels it was with the forces of Hereward the Wake who fought for their territories against the Norman invaders. This did not seem, of course, a satisfactory or credible version of events at the time. The British public, its appetite for violence not sated by the casualties of Crimea, erupted in a blood lust. One pamphlet of the time declared that as a preliminary measure every single mutineer should be hunted down and killed, adding that ‘India will not be secure so long as a single man remains alive’. The English were ready to create a wasteland and to call it good government. One Englishman suggested that those about to be executed should be forced to lick the blood of those whom they had killed or cut down, in the certain knowledge that the men ‘should leave this world with the conviction that their vile souls were about to migrate into the bodies of cats and monkeys’. Thousands were hanged or mutilated or suffocated or otherwise despatched. Blood and smashed bones were found at the bottom of many local wells. We may say with an Intelligence chief, Henry Hodson, that the whole countryside became ‘a steaming bog … scorpions like young lobsters crawled about in damp bedding’, while the lips of the men were caked with flies.

Months of bloody repression, and of sporadic warfare, were necessary before the disorder was contained. It could not go on for ever. A young officer, John Nicolson, was sent to stiffen the resolve of the British in Delhi, and in the middle of 1857 the assault had begun on the Kashmiri Gate, the Lahore Gate and the Kabul Gate. Once the advance had been successful there was another glut of mayhem, drunkenness and death. Martial law was imposed in the course of which the three sons of the king of Delhi were shot dead. Lucknow, like Delhi, was a wasteland.

The East India Company was relieved of its administrative ‘responsibilities’ – perhaps another way of adverting to the taking of treasure and plunder – and the powers of the Company were transferred to the sovereign with the help of a secretary for India and a Council. Thus India and its people came under the control of Queen Victoria, a hegemony emphasized by her accession to the title of empress of India. The office of secretary of state for India was instituted, with a council of fifteen advisers. In 1861 the Indian and English armies were united.

The prevailing belief that conquest by a ‘superior’ power would lead to ‘order’ was one of the visionary clichés that came to nothing. The governor of Madras, Sir Thomas Munro, had stated in a note composed in 1824 that ‘we should look upon India, not as a temporary possession but one which is to be maintained permanently, until the natives in some future age have abandoned most of their superstitions and prejudices and become sufficiently enlightened to frame a regular government for themselves and to conduct and preserve it’. So crumbled the hopes of a different world. The rebels still alive were forced into Nepal, and the sporadic risings in the rest of India were quickly suppressed. A day of thanksgiving was declared in July 1859 with the words ‘war is at an end. Rebellion has been put down.’ It had been contained. It had been put down. Most of the country remained loyal. The landlords had remained apart from the villagers. The army mutinies were confined to Bengal. The princes were content. Yet there was still a shuddering sense that the British empire had revealed its heart of darkness.

16

A dark world

The life of 1855 was the high water mark of mid-Victorian society. This was the period when Anglo-Saxon studies were revived, when Tennyson derived inspiration from the Arthurian epics and Pugin from the Middle Ages. All were looking backwards at earlier societies that were characterized by an organic unity, a collective will and a shared piety. Many of the most notable writers of the period – Ruskin, Morris, Carlyle – looked back with nostalgia to feudal or semi-feudal ages of England when hierarchy and authority were regarded with reverence. It was all a matter of myth, of course, but the myth mattered. Life mattered. Life was earnest. The High Church revival with John Keble and Edward Pusey shared a rapport with medieval England. At the opening of Macaulay’s History of England, published in 1848, he states: ‘I will relate … how from the auspicious union of order and freedom sprang a prosperity of which the annals of human affairs had furnished no example …’ But the triumph of competitive enterprise and individual attainment was dismissed by Carlyle as ‘Pig Prosperity’. No epoch was so beset by energy and by doubt.

Walter Bagehot, who never did cease to comment on such matters, said that ‘in a period of rapid change such as is confronting men today, the preservation of such continuity with the past, with the standards they are used to, and the social world where they can find their way about, is essential …’ The Victorians were not always talking about Malory or medieval monasteries, but they were still looking for the same permanence, the same security and the same stability. At the Royal Academy Exhibition in 1855 the paintings praised were resplendent with ‘energy’, ‘passion’ and ‘feeling’. George Eliot was talking with a contemporary on God, Immortality and Duty, which may be considered the Holy Trinity of the period. She ‘pronounced with terrible earnestness how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third’. We may think once more of the Crimean soldier fiercely slashing in the fog.

The picture of the family, at a dining table generally of mahogany, lingered well into the Edwardian age. There was no picture without a frame, no chair without upholstery, no screen or curtain without a tassel, no table without a cover, no box without its little objects, no maid without her pinny. Domestic servants became a necessity, and when Seebohm Rowntree completed a survey in York, he reckoned the keeping of at least one servant as a distinctive mark of the middle class as opposed to the lower class. There were visitings and dinings out, and when the moon was high they were known as ‘moons’; hospitality was a social duty, and those who did not mingle with their neighbours were considered to be very odd indeed. You greeted acquaintances with two fingers of the outstretched hand; good friends and family were offered three. Choral societies and learned institutes, social clubs and sporting associations might be patronized by doctors, lawyers, accountants, senior clerks, owners of superior merchandise, company directors and civic officials. These were what we might call, in general, professional people, the whole swathe of middle Britain getting together and spending.

They were not devoid of admirers. The editor of the Leeds Mercury, which might be considered a representative middle-class newspaper, wrote that ‘never in any country beneath the sun was an order of men more estimable and valuable, more praised and more praiseworthy, than the middle class of society in England’. James Mill wrote, as early as 1826, that ‘the value of the middle classes of this country, their growing number and importance, are acknowledged by all. These classes have long been spoken of, and not grudgingly, by their superiors themselves, as the glory of England.’ Henry Brougham evinced the same sentiments. ‘By the people I mean the middle classes, the wealth and intelligence of the country, the glory of the British name.’

But the slow process of social separation and division had begun early. In 1820 an anonymous contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine noticed that ‘it is too evident that the upper orders of Society have been tending, more and more, to a separation of themselves from those whom nature, providence and law have placed beneath them’. There were infinite gradations in these other orders. If we were to begin a disquisition on the upper middle class, the middle class, the lower middle class and the upper lower class we would need volumes which in the end would provide a complex stratification of manners that were in fact unique to each individual; any monolithic ‘class’ was a chimera made by doctrinaires and social statisticians. The movements between levels of class were intricate and, as one writer of the period observed, ‘in the middle classes we note an almost universal unfixedness of position. Every man is rising or falling or hoping that he shall rise or fearing that he shall sink.’ It can also be surmised that the struggle between the ‘working class’ and their supposed superiors was as nothing to the competition between workers who inhabited various levels of life and income.

Yet group activities do provide something of a group identity. Legal, medical and other professional institutions began to emerge, soon to be accompanied by civil and mechanical engineers, by architects and by accountants. In the previous century there had been five principal professions, but now there were twenty times as many constantly vying for status in the guise of dignity and decorum. The modern concept of public service was also becoming evident.

Social decorum was continued in the church where male and female sat on different sides; the more affluent had their own pews, and it was the custom of the poorer sort to remain after the service until their betters had left. Some women were daring enough to wear brown straw mushroom hats as part of their ‘Sunday best’ which became fashionable after 1856. The male of the house wore a tall hat and morning coat, and went to work in a horse-drawn omnibus. This is where he saw his neighbours, although they did not necessarily exchange greetings. Let us say that he worked in the City as an employer of one of those innumerable clerks in black who make so stiff a contrast with the street vendors and the local merchants.

The midday meal, costing from tenpence to one and six, consisted of beef or ham or veal with beer. If the customer was in a hurry he would pick up a pie from a street seller. Chicken bones were thrown into the gutter. If he had more time and money, he might visit a chop-house, from the windows of which he might on occasions be obliged to stare into the fog which was the breath of London. The street lamps were regularly turned on at noon. The American ambassador recorded: ‘I could not see people in the street from my windows. I am tempted to ask, how the English became great with so little daylight.’ The hours were long, up to fifty-two hours per week, but there was an ‘English’ half-day holiday on Saturday when the family might take a steamer or a tram to the parks or greener suburbs, while on Sunday, of course, the church called to the pious or the conventional. Others lolled in bed or made the pilgrimage to the local public house.

The life of the home was granted a less comfortable tone in the description of a cabinetmaker of the period:

The vast majority of them [families] in the towns and cities have no room to be merry in. The bread winner has to be up and off early and home late … His little ones are fast asleep. He gets a peep at them … A look at the wife is a painful one. What is the matter dear, oh nothing. Poor dear she has been at work too. Trying to earn a bite to keep them decent. If this is the case in ordinary times when employ was regular and dad comes straight home and denies himself a glass of ale till he gets there, his shirt wet with sweat and tired with a long walk, where does the merriment come in?

The lower orders were also a besetting problem. Friedrich Engels considered the industrial system to be at the root of all evil, and Walter Scott blamed the steam engine, while Thomas Chalmers directed his anger against the poor laws. Lord Liverpool accused ‘seditious and blasphemous publications’ for weakening ‘among the lower orders the attachment to our government and constitution’. ‘Seditious and blasphemous publications’ were the great cliché of moralists in the early age of mass reading.

To rest, and to do no work, however, was the great sin. The alluring adjective was ‘conscientious’. The severe and steady detail of the pre-Raphaelite painters was conscientious. Painting itself was seen to be the product of labour and study. The patient work of the painter is of the essence, in the minute reproduction of detail and the evidence of arduous technique. Every figure is a study. Ruskin wrote in The Stones of Venice (1851–53) that the power of drawing was accessible to anyone ‘who will pay the price of care, time and exertion’. One of the characters in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) is advised to look upon life and ‘to study its knotty problems closely, conscientiously’. The Victorians were in love with the wrinkled brow and the clenched hand. Ruskin’s moral scrupulosity ended in insanity; madness was for him, in that phrase from The Stones of Venice, ‘the price of care, time and exertion’. The sprightlier minds of the latter part of the century took a different view of the matter. They were not averse to industrialism and science, but they were opposed to seriousness. Whether in the wit of Wilde, the high spirits of Gilbert and Sullivan or the absurdities of Lewis Carroll, knotty problems and conscientiousness are ignored. They are rejecting a world in which the imperatives of George Eliot concerning God and Duty are taken seriously.

The term ‘Victorian’ did not come into general circulation until 1851, the time of the Great Exhibition, as if it were only then that the fruits of civilization were revealed. To be ‘Victorian’ in that period was to be up to date, to take an interest in all that was mechanical and progressive; it was to accept an age in which everything was out of scale with the preceding era. The steam engine, the steamship, the buildings in the cities, were larger and grander than anything that had come before. ‘Victorian’ was modernity itself in the home, with striped wallpaper, patterned Brussels carpets, hourglasses, wax flowers and wax fruit under glass. Harriet Martineau commented upon ‘the spread of a spirit of peace – of a disinclination, that is, for brute violence’. The conditions of housing and sanitation were improving, and being poor was no longer confused with criminality. Duelling was now quite out of fashion. Our ancestors would have been astonished if they had known that ‘Victorian’ would come to mean constricted, brutal or unhealthy. The truth is that nobody can live in an age to which he or she is not assigned. This is the paradox of gazing at Victorian painting or reading Victorian fiction. The reality would be disgusting and unendurable, just as the early twenty-first century might seem to a Victorian.

There are certain particulars which mark out the period. Holidays were coming into fashion, and are recorded in William Powell Frith’s painting Ramsgate Sands (or Life at the Seaside) of 1854. The women are of course fully dressed in shawls and crinolines, together with gloves and bonnets; it is a reminder that the lower classes had neither the time nor the money to take an excursion and would not arrive by the sea for another twentyfive years. The men wore their usual dark suits, with waistcoats, and it was not rare to see top hats between the sand and the sea. No one is swimming. It was indecorous. The people did no more than paddle, but there were entertainers and vendors to catch the attention. No one wanted the sunlight. Even a blush on the cheeks would have been indelicate. There is altogether a sense of defensiveness. It is the Victorian paradox of self-confidence and energy in execution together with the intimation or suggestion of tenuousness. The mingling of land and sea was one of the great tokens of melancholy in the face of eternity signified by Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Dover Beach’, when the waves:

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

The people are crammed together on the sands as if in formation. Yet they do not seem to be enjoying themselves; they are tentative because they owe their hours to work. Work was the key. Work was the appointed calling. They look as if they were ready to return to it at a moment’s notice. Carlyle noted that ‘there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness in work’. It may raise the prospect of salvation.

The moral aspect of painting was never overlooked. Fault was found in Frith’s painting of the seaside, for example, because it contained no vignette of a concerned mother overlooking a convalescent child. The Germans had already scoffed at English artists for a certain nervousness or understatement in the presentation of passion. The most that English painters managed in the depiction of human emotion was the representation of people in which something has been left unsaid, as in William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1853) and Ford Madox Brown’s The Last of England (1855). Some foreign artists appreciated the style. Théodore Géricault had achieved a triumph with The Raft of the Medusa but he left on record his appreciation of English (or Scottish) reticence in David Wilkie’s The Chelsea Pensioners reading the Waterloo Dispatch:

I will speak only of one figure which seemed to me the most perfect, whose pose and expression draw tears, however much one holds them back. It is a soldier’s wife who, thinking only of her husband, searches with an unquiet and haggard eye the list of the dead … There is no crape or mourning; rather the wine flows on every table and the sky is unharrowed by any fatally presaging lightnings. But it reaches a final pathos like nature itself …

In regard to table manners, it is recorded that ‘it is not done to take wine without drinking to another person. When you raise your glass you look fixedly at the one with whom you are drinking, bow your head, and then drink with great gravity.’ Words and phrases also had a life of their own. ‘Nice’ was constant, as was ‘you know’; ‘spoony’ suggested someone who was a bit of a weakling. In an era of rapid and remorseless change there was an abiding sentimentality for the past or ‘bygones’. Very good was ‘A1’ and bad was ‘shoddy’ or ‘very bad shoddy’; ‘bunkum’ was ‘buncum’ and ‘in course’ was used instead of ‘of course’. A ‘hobble’ was trouble. Other topical words and phrases abounded: ‘She would play old gooseberry’, ‘I think he is coming round to cotton to me’. ‘Antediluvian’. ‘Levanted’. ‘A screw loose’. ‘He is a Bohemian who hates the decencies of life’. ‘In a blue funk’. ‘There are moments when we try to give a child any brick on the chimney top’. ‘Chaff’. ‘Poltroon’. ‘Ta-ta’.

The Victorians had their guides, however, in the presence of several writers who can be said to comprise the mind of the nineteenth century. In an age of prose they were considered to be more remarkable than the poets and, compared to them, the novelists were mere entertainers. Thomas Carlyle himself was considered to be a modern prophet who created a language of declamation and lamentation that was intense and original. He was not one to use the language of the herd; the discourse of parliament was for him the defining disgrace of the nation, while electoral reform was no more than ‘shooting Niagara’, with an abysmal conclusion. Why stop short at householders when the beasts of the field do not have the vote? ‘Divine commandment to vote,’ he wrote. ‘Manhood Suffrage (Horsehood, Dog-hood ditto not yet treated of).’ He was profoundly out of sympathy with the middle classes to whom he believed that power had been entrusted, and all the middle-class nostrums from freedom of trade to freedom of speech were anathema to him. His political heroes were strong men with a taste for decisive action and arbitrary rule. He believed that slavery was of no consequence, and that only the strong needed to survive. He was treated as a prophet by some because many in the nineteenth century shared his views and his detestation of ‘Nigger Philanthropists’ and other liberal voices. There was nothing of Shaftesbury or Wilberforce in him; he would no doubt have been horrified if he had known that these two eminent humanitarians would come to represent Victorian civilization more than he ever could.

He discerned correctly that his was a mechanic and utilitarian age based upon calculation and constraint which touched economic theory, religion, education and the physical sciences. The philosophy of the utilitarians would lead only to a ‘greater perfection of Police’. Their network of sensible truths tied down the world and all the people in it. Laissez-faire, the philosophy of the moment, the truism of a thousand clowns, had replaced special responsibility with an impersonal ‘cash nexus’ which lowered human beings to the level of integers. ‘Man’s Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.’ His language is almost always heroic despite himself. He was fierce and eloquent and arresting.

In his deployment of the rhythm and cadences of prose he is not profoundly dissimilar to other writers of the great Victorian generation. Wherever we dig, we strike gold. There is the pellucid brightness of Thomas Macaulay’s prose, which shines with an even light as he converts the disparate facts of the eighteenth century into a convincing if also convenient history. There is George Eliot, with her solemnity touched by tenderness and, as Lord Acton put it, ‘a consummate expert in the pathology of consciousness’. John Ruskin will be of the same company; the structure of his thought reflects a particularly vibrant sensibility concerning architecture and stone. ‘I notice’, he wrote, ‘that among all the new buildings … churches and schools are mixed in due, that is to say, in large proportion, with your mills and mansions, and I notice also that the churches and schools are almost always Gothic and the mansions and mills are never Gothic.’ It may seem commonplace but it deserves some consideration for its analysis of the Victorian age.

Charles Darwin has appeared in this narrative more than once, since he of all writers embodies the purest Victorian spirit. The notion of evolution by natural selection is so fitting to its age that it resembles a great jewel found in a rock; the removal of special creation by a deity meant that the age of miracles had passed, leaving some more comfortless than ever. The imaginative landscape of On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, was equally compelling. It was a dark world indeed, dominated by the necessity of labour and the appetite for power. Even the bees ‘are anxious to save time’, and Darwin extols ‘the more efficient workshops of the north’; nature itself is described as frugal and even miserly with a continual desire ‘to economize’. Darwin also suggests the need for ‘heavy destruction’, with the subtext ‘let the strongest live and the weakest die’. He celebrates the spectacle of violent death with his discourse on the bee. ‘We ought to admire’, he writes, ‘the savage instinctive hatred of the queen bee, which urges her to destroy the young queens, her daughters.’ Combat and slaughter become the principal components of this world. He imagines all life on earth to be derived from one ‘common parent’ or ‘primordial form’; the offspring of this ‘prototype’ then develop into various species of animals or plants which in turn fight among themselves to ‘progress towards perfection’. So ‘evolution’ can be interpreted as a suitable Victorian myth. This is what Charles Dickens, in Dombey and Son (1848), called ‘competition, competition – new invention, new invention – alteration, alteration’. Everything is of a piece.

It carried very far. Beatrice Webb remarked of her mother’s beliefs in My Apprenticeship (1926) that ‘it was the bounden duty of every citizen to better his social status; to ignore those beneath him, and to aim steadily at the top rung of the social ladder. Only by this persistent pursuit by each individual of his own and his family’s interest would the highest general level of civilisation be attained …’ This returns the narrative to the world of work. A French observer remarked that: ‘On entering an office, the first thing you see written up is “You are requested to speak of business only”.’ Carlyle emphasized ‘that the mandate of God to His creature man is: Work!’

‘Men of letters’ were for the Victorians the epitome of a very broad band of learning, from social thinkers and political economists to philosophers and historians. It is something of a paradox that the century which produced the most elegant and voluminous prose should have only a small readership. It was estimated in 1861 that only 5 per cent of all pupils remained in school after the age of eleven; so we can confidently assert deep levels of illiteracy. Yet for the existing reading public the whole spirit of literature could be found in the morally useful where the essayist and the historian could be seen as preachers rather than scholars. In a world so permeated by religion the works of Ruskin, Eliot and Carlyle were prized for their moral exhortation and spiritual comfort. By the 1840s the Gothic novel and the histrionic romance had been superseded by novels that explored spiritual problems of the modern world or inquired into matters concerning social structure and social status. There was no necessary disparity between realism (in the English rather than French mode) and moral elevation. The other grace notes of the Victorian world were seriousness and self-confidence, with a certainty that was close to dogmatism.

This quality of interest could not last in a society where literacy was steadily increasing and where the printed word would soon become ubiquitous. It had led to what John Stuart Mill described as ‘the diffusion of superficial knowledge’. Matthew Arnold wrote to Arthur Hugh Clough that ‘these are damned times – everything is against one – the height to which knowledge is come, the spread of luxury, our physical enervation, the absence of great natures, the unavoidable contact with millions of small ones, newspapers, cities, light profligate friends …’ Here was a Victorian perception – the absence of great natures was keenly felt. It had always been said that the various Reform Acts would eventually create a world of the middle class and the lower middle class in which previous values would no longer apply. When one of the old Whig aristocracy criticized Prince Albert for attending a meeting of the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, the prince replied that ‘one has a duty to perform to the great mass of the working classes …’ This was the prevailing sentiment. The triumph of science and the rise of secularism effectively discontinued the tradition of Ruskin or of Carlyle; we know, even as we read them, that they are whistling in the wind.

17

Quite the fashion

One of the greatest contributions of the Victorian epoch to indigenous English culture is that of the music hall. There was a tradition of popular and often obscene entertainment that goes back to the jigs and comic songs of the Elizabethan stage and to the ‘singing booths’ of the fair. ‘Harmonic meetings’, taverns and ‘free-and-easies’ had their origin in the eighteenth century, but the true age of the ‘halls’ dates from the 1840s with the Canterbury Arms and the Surrey Music Hall, with their attendant aromas of gin, sweat and orange peel. The supper rooms of the 1850s added to the diversity, serving poached eggs on steak and devilled kidneys seasoned with red pepper. The attendant tavern concerts and ‘night cellars’ generally lived up to their reputations; the Cider Cellars in Maiden Lane and the Coal Hole on the Strand were two of the more notorious. The famous song of the Cider Cellars was ‘Sam Hall’, with its refrain ‘damn your eyes!’ The songs were as Victorian as the Crystal Palace.

From Store Street to Hungerford Market the music halls became the major form of popular entertainment. From the 1850s onwards they flourished particularly in the East End where the conditions of living were hard if not harsh. There were four such halls – the Rodney, the Lord Nelson, the Eastern and the Apollo – in Bethnal Green alone.

Specialized performers such as the ‘Lion Comique’, the female ‘serio comic’ acts and the ‘heavy swell’ were always in demand. They tended to cultivate ‘coster songs’ and songs written in a ‘flash’ or Cockney dialect. But much attention was paid to the ‘chairman’ who introduced the acts, made topical jokes and generally encouraged the audience to drink up and enjoy the same. This was known as ‘wet money’ when the price of admission included a drink. Their songs, such as ‘Why Can’t We Have the Sea in London’ and ‘My Shadow is My Only Pal’, have no memorial, but they were the true token of popular sentiment. They were the songs of the poor, the songs of longing. No history of the nineteenth century would be complete without them.

One of the most celebrated of the artists was Dan Leno, born in 1860 in the neighbourhood of St Pancras. Like Charles Chaplin, he began his career as a clog artist. Clog dancing was a Victorian speciality, born out of life in the factories. The operatives in the textile mills tried to keep themselves warm by tapping their feet to the rhythm of the power mills, and soon enough it became part of a dance routine. Clog competitions became popular all over the north of England. Leno excelled with his speed and style to such an extent that he became in part identified with this eccentric form of dancing. He was on stage by the age of four, but did not create his individual act for another seven years, when he was billed as a ‘Descriptive and Irish Character Vocalist’. It was not until 1885, however, that he perfected the act that brought him fame. His first ‘turn’ was that of a harassed woman who sang ‘Going to Buy Milk for the Twins’.

No nostalgic evocation of the ‘good old days’ of the 1860s and 1870s is appropriate here, since the Leno family was often close kin to starvation and hopelessness. Leno’s principal memories are of the long walks from town to town in search of employment. Yet, as in the best pantomimes, his fortune changed in a grand transformation scene. In 1880 he won the award for ‘Champion Clog Dancer of the World’ at the Princess’s Palace in Leeds, beating off competition with his speed and precision. One critic noted that ‘he danced on the stage, he danced on a pedestal, he danced on a slab of slate, he was encored over and over again, but throughout his performance he never uttered a word’.

His stature of 5 feet and 3 inches, his pallid and strained face, his pursed lips, his small husky voice and his sudden leaps backwards became the marks of his performance. He combined a curiously wayward ‘patter’ with sudden bursts of wild capering; he could bawl with the best of them before falling silent with a puzzled expression on his face. He was humanity personified, humanity in its essence, the object of pity and sympathy and exuberant hilarity. The few extant recordings of his act scarcely do him justice, because it was in communion with his audience that he became superb. He became the audience. He retained the utmost fidelity to ordinary familiar life. ‘Whenever he is on the stage,’ a dramatic critic wrote, ‘be it theatre or music-hall, he literally holds the audience tight in his power. They cannot get away from him. He is monarch of all he surveys.’

Max Beerbohm put it best in the Saturday Review:

I defy anyone not to have loved Dan Leno at first sight. The moment he capered on, with that air of wild determination, squirming in every limb with some deep grievance that must be outpoured, all hearts were his … that poor little battered personage, so put upon, yet so plucky, with his squeaking voice and sweeping gestures; bent but not broken; faint but pursuing; incarnate of the will to live in a world not at all worth living in …

In the latter part of the nineteenth century the halls became more ornate, with gilt and plaster, with balconies and stage boxes, just as the public houses of the period became more grandiose with mirrors and lights, so that they resembled the workingclass notion of ‘palaces’ as they were soon called. Other halls were more enlightened. The Cambridge Music Hall in Liverpool, erected in 1866, contained frescoes of ‘Science’, ‘Music’ and ‘The Seasons’. It opened at a time of typhus and an American cotton blockade so that entertainment of even the most puerile kind was welcomed. Drink and the music hall were the solace of the people. It was the will to live in a world not at all worth living in. When all else failed, put on a pantomime.

Dan Leno came to London in 1885 where he began a gruelling life by performing in Bethnal Green, Drury Lane and Westminster Bridge Road. Three music hall performances in one evening were not regarded as excessive (some managed six or seven) and the phrase ‘I must hurry along to my next hall’ became familiar. George Robey recalled that Leno was ‘tearing from hall to hall, night after night. One would see him coming in from his brougham, still dripping with perspiration, and looking so tired.’ But as soon as he appeared on stage with the audience in front of him he was transformed. He was always a busy, restless man, and one theatrical contemporary recalled: ‘I can honestly say that I never saw him absolutely at rest. He was always doing something and had something else to do afterwards, or he had just been somewhere, was going somewhere else, and had several other appointments to follow.’

He played many parts, the majority of which were lower class or lower middle class; as was also said of Charles Dickens, ‘he had the key of the street’. Four of his most familiar roles were as a waiter, shop-walker, muffin man and landlady whose boast or threat was ‘Young Men Taken in and Done For’. They were part of the landscape of Leno’s imagination that was lower-class London in essence, with its fried-fish shops, its public houses, its pawnbrokers, its shellfish stalls, its old-clothes shops and its markets. Nowhere else was he at home.

Dan Leno barely survived the Victorian era which he had so closely represented. His final part as Mother Goose may have contributed to his nervous breakdown, and he was taken to Peckham House Asylum, where he was diagnosed with a syphilitic disorder that had turned his mind. His constitution was not helped by the large quantities of alcohol which he had imbibed over the years since childhood. Alcoholism was the curse of the performing classes, and a large number of artists succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver and related complaints. He was released and, on the vague hope of recovery, continued to perform. In another period of mental confusion, towards the end of his life, he was seen queuing for one of his own shows. His largest audience of the period, however, was the one that accompanied his funeral cortège in the early days of November 1904.

The ribald and boisterous humour of the music hall was by the 1880s diluted by the growing respectability of the increasingly dominant middle class. The comic books and essays were written by what could be called the Punch school of writers that was ironic and even sarcastic without being subversive. The periodical itself was established as a weekly in 1841, nine years after the first Reform Act, and its contributors included Thackeray, Thomas Hood, Douglas Jerrold, Henry Mayhew and assorted members of the circle of humorists who had assembled around Dickens. It was more famous, however, for its multifarious cartoons which satirized the news and politics of the week.

One of its more enduring contributions, still in print more than 120 years later, was The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith. It purported to be the intimate journal of a middle-aged clerk of lowly background, Charles Pooter, who has aspirations towards respectability and even gentility. The Grossmiths both began as stage entertainers, with George Grossmith a principal artist for Gilbert and Sullivan, but they stepped onto the pages of fictional history, in Punch, in the spring of 1888. The initial critical reception was not overenthusiastic, since in certain respects it was perhaps too close to home to seem comic. The references were always up to date. But gradually its reputation spread, so that by the 1890s it was regarded as one of the most important contributions to the late Victorian era.

The Oxford English Dictionary derives many of its phrases from the text, including ‘I’ve got the chuck’, ‘dead cert’ and ‘a good address’. The actual address of the Pooters was ‘The Laurels’, Brookfield Terrace, Holloway (drawn by Weedon Grossmith as the last house in a two-storey terrace with a small front garden), an area of Islington which became heavily populated in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It could be described as a new suburb except for the fact that London soon surrounded it. The narrative could have been written there from observation. The fashion for spiritualism and table-rapping is faithfully recorded, as well as the newspaper question of the day: ‘Is Marriage a Failure?’ The domestic interiors of the suburban house are given in full detail, from the stags’ horns of plaster of Paris painted brown to the blue wool mats on which the vases were placed. Chrysanthemums, bicycles and stuffed birds were the properties of the day. The Grossmiths also drew up an anatomy of ‘home’ as the lodestar of Victorian longing and contentment.

In a different light, The Diary of a Nobody might be considered to be a substantial contribution to the new fashion for ‘realistic’ fiction. George Gissing, the great master of English realism, had written that he wanted to record ‘the essentially unheroic, with the day-to-day life of the vast majority who are at the mercy of paltry circumstances’. This is also the aim and object of the Diary. Here in this constricted circle Gissing and the Grossmiths introduced the same problems of upward mobility, of children and of marriage, and of the slow redefinition of class at the turn of the century.

Here are some apposite remarks from The Diary:

‘Consequences’ again this evening. Not quite so successful as last night, Gowing having several times overstepped the limits of good taste … Pa, at all events, was a gentleman … I had a fit of the blues come on, and thought I would go to see Polly Presswell, England’s Particular Spark … as I am master of this house perhaps you will allow me to take the reins … I do not think such a style modest. She ought to have … covered her shoulders with a little lace … I feel as fit as a Lowther Arcade fiddle, and only require a little more ‘oof’ to feel as fit as a £500 Stradivarius … ‘Oh, I’m going in for manicuring. It’s all the fashion now’.

There were standard features – the one-price hat at three and six, the amateur theatricals, the hand-me-down frock coat, the fondness for fun and after-dinner games, the impromptu song recitals, the irate cab drivers, the annual week at Broadstairs (a little more select than Margate), the endless puns. And so the world went, in what was known as a right little, tight little, island. The phrases and expressions were all new-minted and bring the reader as close as possible to the language of the respectable classes of the late Victorian population, expressing the mild facetiousness and mild distaste, the clinging to standard conventions of good taste, the horror of anything approaching unorthodoxy, which prevailed among them. But The Diary of a Nobody suggests also that the conventions and phrases of the period were open to mockery even by those who employed them.

Wherever we turn we find new institutions and societies and clubs supplying what Dan Leno used to describe, concerning the Tower of London, as ‘a long-felt want’. The Reading Room of the British Museum was opened in 1857 for all those who wished to live in the shadow of the valley of the books. Anyone with any aspirations to scholarship and no other place to find it, from Karl Marx to Oscar Wilde, could acquire a ticket. There had been a reading room attached to the British Museum since 1759, but it was a ‘damp and dark room’ lined with stuffed birds. It emerged in its most familiar form in 1857 until its purpose was taken over by the British Library in 1973. Its circular shape represented by accident or design a giant cranium, but with a dome of 140 feet in diameter and a height of 106 feet, it was also a great feat of Victorian engineering. It is inferior to the Pantheon of Rome by 2 feet, and surpasses St Peter’s and the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.

It became, at the very least, a powerhouse of thought fuelled by all the calculations and results and theories that rose into the mid-Victorian air. Karl Marx came every day for thirty years, scrutinizing the floods and eddies of economic history. Stalin came, Lenin came, Trotsky came, all of them seeking the fount or origin of historical wisdom. The whole of Bloomsbury, in the immediate vicinity of the Reading Room, became magnetized by communist theory, with meetings and events and clubs and committees springing up in the vicinity of the great dome. The middle and late years of nineteenth-century England were capacious enough to tolerate a political enemy in their midst. It is appropriate, therefore, that George Bernard Shaw should leave a third of his estate to what he called a ‘magnificent communistic institution’.

The Reading Room had an almost analgesic effect on the rest of the neighbourhood, since in the adjacent streets emerged theosophical, Swedenborgian, psychic and spiritualist organizations that became at once familiar and appropriate. This is another distinctive aspect of nineteenth-century England. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, for example, established its headquarters in London just opposite the Reading Room.

When the Reading Room was completed the books came flying in by means of donations, wills, outright purchase, but principally by means of copyright legislation which demanded each published book from every publisher. This was of course condemned as ‘high-handed’, but it exemplified the national movement towards bureaucratization and control. As a result the problem of storage was perhaps the greatest dilemma the librarians ever faced. The Reading Room itself could house 303 readers. Another great problem lay in its lighting. Artificial lighting was not allowed, and in heavy fog the Reading Room was closed, banishing its readers to the outer darkness. But in November 1879 a ripple of applause echoed around the dome when the first electric lights were turned on. George Gissing wrote of the ‘sputtering whiteness of the electric light and its ceaseless hum’. But the atmosphere within the dome was heavy, and some people succumbed to what was known as ‘museum megrims’. Algernon Swinburne collapsed and hit his head on his desk.

For many years it was supposed to be a library of last resort to which readers were only admitted if they could not find the chosen book elsewhere. A later century would relax the rules, to no very great advantage. But others crowded in. Charles Dickens remarked on the number of ‘shabby-genteel’ people who were attracted to the books; perhaps the warmth, perhaps the relative comfort, or perhaps the pleasure of participating in what might be called a universal mind, attracted them. It afforded the sensation of being engaged in some vast enterprise of which the individual readers were a part. It was a Victorian experience. George Gissing wrote in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903) that ‘at the time that I was literally starving in London, when it seemed impossible that I should gain a living from my pen, how many days have I spent at the British Museum, reading as disinterestedly as if I had not a care!’

Arnold Bennett described the readers as comprising ‘bishops, statesmen, men of science, historians, needy pedants, popular authors whose broughams are waiting in the precincts, journalists, medical students, law students, curates, hack-writers, women with clipped hair and black aprons, idlers: all short-sighted and all silent’. However it was not altogether silent. The noise of books being opened and paged through, like an autumn rustling of leaves, was familiar. Coughs and sneezes and sniffles abounded in people who were not well nourished. Voices were occasionally raised on the question of a missing book or of a long delay in receiving one. Sometimes a book was dropped. But how were the endless footfalls muffled? There was a perfect Victorian solution. A material called kamptulicon, of cork and rubber, was laid down.

Fictional personages have also been seen here. In Max Beerbohm’s story ‘Enoch Soames’ (set in 1895, published in 1916), the eponymous hero, after making a pact with the devil, reappears a hundred years after his death to see if his name had entered the general catalogue of books. Jonathan Harker, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), studied the maps of Transylvania under the great dome but could not find the location of Count Dracula’s castle. The great period of the Reading Room has been variously estimated but it roughly coincided with the flourishing days of Mudie’s Circulating Library.

Mudie’s Lending Library was situated one minute’s walk from the front gates of the British Museum, on the corner of Museum Street, and can be considered as a sort of commercial adjunct to the great library, where the customers could hire the latest fiction that was not yet available in the Reading Room. The demand was enormous and the latter decades of the nineteenth century were indeed halcyon days for the once great but now forgotten Victorian phenomenon of the three-volume novel.

Charles Edward Mudie opened his first shop in 1842, at the age of twenty-two, and charged his subscribers 1 guinea a year to borrow one volume at a time, and a 2-guinea subscription to borrow four books at a time. He soon discovered that fiction was the opiate of the people. The cost of novels was so high that Mudie’s subscription selling was an immediate success, but his refusal to stock ‘immoral’ books or novels ‘of questionable character or of inferior quality’ made a singular impression on the new fiction offered for sale.

He did, however, have a more benign effect on the popularity of scientific books; he purchased, for example, 500 copies of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. His books were not taken in only by households or individuals; they were delivered to institutes, reading clubs, book clubs, business clubs and others. About three and a half million volumes were in circulation at any one time, and the books travelled over most of Europe, America and the empire. By 1870 Anthony Trollope declared that ‘we have become a novel-reading people … from the Prime Minister down to the last appointed scullery maid’.

Prose of course had also been the medium of first resort in the eighteenth century, but the nineteenth century became the home of fiction. Mudie has some claim to turning the art of reading into a mass market where before it had been a specialized pleasure. Theologians and philosophers, historians and biographers had always commanded attention, but it is possible that the flood tide of books released by Mudie and other circulating libraries helped them to move slowly upwards. Much of the fiction that Mudie delivered was not of the highest quality, and was dismissed by some as trash; nevertheless, the conveyance of the printed word throughout the country had some effect upon literacy and education. There eventually came into being a class known as ‘the common reader’. Henry James described the onset of fiction in alarmist terms. ‘The flood at present swells and swells, threatening the whole field of letters, as would often seem, with submersion.’ Prose itself was linear, consequential, packed with meaning and reference; it could describe, command, elucidate, distribute and cancel. It was the language of power.

Mudie hired out the three-deckers of Thomas Hardy, George Meredith and Henry James even if it was not a form that any one of them would have chosen. It was simply a new way of making money for the publisher – three volumes instead of one, priced at 31 shillings and 6 pence for the set. It also encouraged bulk orders from the publishers and steady sales for the authors. His forms of moral censorship were always an irritant, however, with the assumption that he would stock nothing that could bring a blush to the cheek of a young lady. This disqualified much fiction, especially from the Continent, at a stroke. The single volume came to be considered a low form more fitted for a street stall than the three-volume dignity. The railway bookstalls sold cheap reprints known as ‘yellow backs’, and they made a killing out of ‘shilling shockers’. Some of them were also known as ‘sensation novels’, which can be interpreted in a literal sense. The design of the sensation novel, after all, was ‘to electrify the nerves’. Many of the characters in these novels seem to be in a nervous state and may communicate their fear to the reader. Wilkie Collins, for example, was concerned with doubles and double identity, with monomania and delusion, tracing the paths of unconscious association and occluded memories thirty years before Freud began investigating the subjects.

Yet it was not a format that appealed to other writers who had to wrestle with the three volumes in order to import long conversations, long descriptions, long moral reflections, as well as double plots, to make up the bulk. In 1853 Charles Reade, one of the most successful novelists of the century, complained that ‘the three volume novel is the intellectual blot of our nation – it is the last relic of our forefathers’ prolixity and damned digressive tediousness … The principle of the three volume novel is this – write not what you have to say only – but what you have not got to say as well.’ Yet they were left on tables, draped over sofas, poised on the arms of armchairs and put on the bedroom table. They did not die of malnutrition until 1895, when other forms of literature were emerging.

18

The game cock

Palmerston’s majority at the end of the Indian War of Independence was not as firmly based as it seemed, and his personality was not the cohesive force it once had been. The ‘bundle of sticks’, as his party was called, was no longer firmly in his grasp. United they were unbreakable; individually they could be easily snapped. There is a portrait of Palmerston in this period. ‘He looked like an old gentleman, like a man who has used up his strength in fifty years of uninterrupted struggle but who knows how to cultivate his will power to a certain extent since it must serve instead of the rest of his strength as the whole once did. He looked like someone who is determined to rule to the end … there was no mirth on his lips, no gaiety on his brow.’ At a Royal Literary Fund dinner Turgenev had observed that his face was ‘wooden, hard and insensitive’, an opinion he shared with Victor Hugo. But Palmerston had a strong sense of humour. He said of the Brazilian government that it resembles ‘a Billingsgate fish-woman seized by a policeman for some misdeeds. She scolds and kicks and raves and calls on the mob to help her and vows she won’t go to the lock-up house but will sooner die on the spot; but when she feels the strong grip of the policeman and finds he is really in earnest she goes as quietly as a lamb though still using foul-mouthed language at the corner of each street.’ He still had the gift of turning foreign affairs into a Punch and Judy show, with himself as a frequently pugnacious Punch.

The counter-blow against him came from an unexpected source. In January 1858 an Italian nationalist, Felice Orsini, conceived a plan for the assassination of Napoleon III; largely as a consequence of lax police surveillance he gathered arms and men. Orsini himself travelled to England, where he persuaded a sympathetic gunsmith to build six bombs of Orsini’s own devising. On the discovery of the plot the French people fell into one of their fits of hysterics, largely aimed at the perfidious English. Palmerston, fearful of the charge that the country had become a haven for revolutionaries, and wishing to save face with the emperor, caused a Conspiracy Bill to be introduced. It was defeated on a second reading and ‘Pam’ had a great fall. A journalist, William White, noticed that ‘the “Great Minister”, who but yesterday rode on the top-most crest of the waves of popularity, is sunk so low that there is hardly a man of his former friends to say, “God save him.” Nor do men think of him in their speculations as to the future.’ The pattern of politics was routinely called ‘kaleidoscopic’ after the invention of 1817.

It came as a shock to the opposition as well as to the administration. Disraeli and Derby – known colloquially as ‘the Jew and the Jockey’ – prepared themselves for an unanticipated rule, with Disraeli as chancellor of the Exchequer in the new Conservative administration. Their first step was faltering. Disraeli proposed his own India Bill, including the idea of an Indian council partly elected by the householders of the great English cities. Everybody laughed at him. A contemporary, William Fraser, wrote that ‘no one can form the least idea, from looking at Hansard, of what took place. The cheering, groaning, laughing were beyond belief. We considered ourselves justified in using inarticulate means of rendering the eloquence of the other side nugatory’; rude noises and explosive shouts, in other words, were the order of the day. Derby had become prime minister, but he was still the leader of a minority.

In the summer of 1858, the sanitary health of the capital once more came into open view. It was the summer of the ‘great stink’, where the turbulent flow of faeces and other animal matter created a miasma over the Thames and the city. The effluent from all the houses ran down to the river, where it collected and stagnated; this was the water used for drinking and for washing clothes, which was described as having a ‘brownish colour’. The smell permeated everything. Disraeli was seen in a corridor of the House of Commons doubled up with a handkerchief over his face. Victoria and Albert were about to take a leisure trip on the river but were forced by the smell to turn back. All smell was considered to be disease and recent outbreaks of cholera in London were blamed upon these gaseous eruptions. They rivalled in noxiousness the ubiquitous horse droppings which had for a long time been the characteristic smell of the city.

The foreshores were caked with excrement, and as far upriver as Teddington Lock the sewage was six inches thick and ‘as black as ink’. Like the Crimean War, nobody claimed responsibility for it. It was nobody’s shit. It was the system clogging itself. Yet someone, somewhere, decided that something should be done. An Act of Parliament in 1863 decreed that a vast and intricate network of sewers should be created. A civil engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, was chosen to be the saviour of London, which he duly became with his ingenious schemes of drainage.

The ‘great stink’ can be viewed beside another horror of 1858. The ‘lunacy panic’ of the year was aroused by the sudden awareness of the public, or the newspapers, that apparently normal people had ‘disappeared’ into lunatic asylums, generally at the instigation of greedy relatives. The ease with which it could be done was examined by Wilkie Collins, among others. ‘It is easy to prove that an obnoxious relative is insane,’ Lloyd’s Weekly reported in August 1858, ‘it is easier still to aggravate trivial symptoms by persistent bad treatment’.

In a world of privation and misery, madness could almost become epidemic. The apparent increase in cases of ‘brain disorder’ was widely noted. The Edinburgh Review speculated that it was the result of intense anxiety and competition in both social and commercial life; it noted that madness ‘derived from the extreme tension to which all classes are subjected in the unceasing struggle for position and even life’. It was even rumoured that Victoria had succumbed to the illness of her ancestor and was so violent that she had to be restrained in a padded cell. It was a subject constantly reported in journals, novels and medical textbooks. Together with cholera it can be seen as the defining medical image of the nineteenth century. Its antidote was generally taken in the form of laudanum, known as ‘Battley’s Drops’ or ‘Mother Bailey’s Quieting Spirit’.

Derby remained Conservative prime minister for fifteen months, but the larger action was behind the veil where Palmerston, Russell and other ambitious Liberal leaders vied for mastery. Russell condemned Palmerston for ‘levity and presumption’ but cautioned against any overt opposition to the Conservatives. Derby never had a majority, but he was not devoid of ambition. In March 1859, he and Disraeli introduced a parliamentary suffrage bill that would bring a form of equality to both town and country voters in an effort to bolster the Conservative constituency. But the Liberals and Peelites, working together, voted down the proposal (revived in 1884); Derby was obliged to resign and, at the subsequent April election, the Conservatives found themselves with thirty more seats but still in a minority.

Gladstone had already stated, four years before, that ‘the great characteristic of this singular state of things is that political difference no longer lies between parties but within parties’. On 6 June 1859, the Liberals, Radicals and the rump of what were still known as Peelites came together for a definitive meeting at Willis’s Rooms in St James’s Street where the Liberal party was formally baptized. Nominally they came together over the ‘Italian question’, essentially in support of the Italians over their Austrian masters, but the substance of the meeting can be found in The Times:

Lord John Russell next addressed the meeting and, after strongly deprecating the continuance of the Government in the hands of a minority, which he characterized as most unconstitutional and dangerous, expressed his hearty desire either to cooperate with Lord Palmerston, in the event of that noble Lord being called upon to form an Administration; or to avail himself of his assistance, in the event of his being required to conduct the affairs of the country himself. His Lordship adverted in the course of his speech to the state of the Liberal party, and expressed his opinion that in the event of a Liberal Government being formed it was essential that the three great sections of that party, the old Whigs, the Peelites, and the advanced Liberals should each be represented in it.

From that time forward the Liberals became the dominant party until the era of Disraeli. It can be said with some confidence that there were now only two parties, Liberal and Conservative, the rest of the Peelites dwindling away. The Liberal leaders, Russell and Palmerston, were known by the queen as ‘the two dreadful old men’. The last of the true Peelites was, perhaps, her now ailing husband.

In the same month a vote of no confidence was passed against Derby, and Palmerston became prime minister for the second time at the age of seventy-five. He was a wonder. To some he seemed to be no more than an aged pantaloon capering feebly in the corridors of Whitehall, but some called him ‘Lord Cupid’ for his youthful looks. To them he represented a special kind of English verve, vivacious until the end. He had become a ‘fixture’, a rock of ages. He lured Gladstone into the Treasury, but they were hardly comrades-in-arms. One member of parliament recalled that Gladstone would come to the first cabinet of each session armed with suggestions and proposals. Palmerston would stare down at his official papers and, when Gladstone fell quiet, he would tap the table saying: ‘Now my Lords and gentlemen let us go to business.’ He is also said to have remarked to Lord Shaftesbury that: ‘Gladstone will soon have it all his own way and whenever he gets my place we shall have strange doings.’ It was not a question of policy but of personality, which is the essential matter of politics.

Derby and Disraeli had no wish to deprive Palmerston of office for fear of something worse, so they arranged a three-year ‘truce’ with the prime minister without of course forfeiting the rights of a loyal opposition. Derby advised Disraeli to encourage Palmerston to rely on Conservative support ‘and looking to Palmerston’s increased age and infirmities, the oftener these can be brought into the same lobby in opposition to Radical moves, the better for it’. He conveyed the message to Palmerston that he could rely on the Conservatives whenever he was threatened by Radical demands. By this stage, however, Palmerston’s recovered popularity might have seen him through. He was walking with a colleague by the Crystal Palace. A contemporary observer, Viscount Ossington, noted: ‘The moment he came in sight, throughout the whole building, men and women, young and old, at once were struck as if by an electric shock. “Lord Palmerston! Here is Lord Palmerston! Bravo! Hurrah! Lord Palmerston forever!”’

The principals at Westminster were in any case deeply bound together on the ‘Italian question’ and the perfidy of Italy’s Austrian masters, although no one was very fond of the interested parties. That was always the way with foreign affairs. The general but often ignored rule was to stay out of the way of overseas imbroglios which seemed always to end inconclusively. One writer, John Trelawny, even suggested that foreign policy kept afloat the government in a world of threat ‘with the great apprehensions most men now have of the effect of change at this moment. America, France, Italy, Poland, Hungary – danger everywhere. Who is to open the ball in this dance of death?’ It was in fact Napoleon III who declared war on Austria; he had with him the new ally of Sardinia, which was eager to wrest more Italian territory from the maw of Austria; after defeats at Montebello and Solferino the Austrians were forced to come to terms, with the usual movement of territories from one overlord to another. These were the affairs of the world. The peasant still looked up at the sky in search of rain.

The year 1861 opened with the greetings of the Annual Register: ‘The internal state of the country at the opening of the year 1861 was generally prosperous and tranquil … the state of the agricultural and manufacturing interests … was apparently sound. Whatever demand had temporarily existed for constitutional changes appeared to have now completely subsided.’ Those who prophesied calm and contentment were, however, in a phrase of the period, ‘destined to have the wind in their faces’. In the spring and summer of the year there was yet another French invasion scare which created panic among the more credulous and would have thrown the finances of the country into confusion if Gladstone had not been their implacable guardian. In this year he also abolished the excise duty on paper which, as Gladstone himself put it, propelled ‘into vivid, energetic, permanent and successful action the cheap press of this country. To the most numerous classes of the community it was like a new light, a new epoch in life, when they found that the information upon public affairs … came to them morning after morning …’

The fear of France was succeeded, and superseded, by the fear of disruption with the United States. In May 1861 the Civil War broke out, dividing loyalties and counsel at Westminster. When seven slave-owning states seceded from the Union, the problem for the English administration became acute, rendered even more direct by the splits of public opinion. A significant body favoured the South, with whom trade was easy and profitable; the issue of slavery did not really enter the calculation. Others preferred to support the more ‘modern’ North with its business success and its instinct for economic and social progress. Yet perhaps a majority, or the largest minority, in the cabinet supported the South on the pragmatic grounds that the North would not be able to defeat the Confederacy.

Although the country professed neutrality that stance was seriously compromised when a Northern vessel detained two prominent Southern politicians on their way to England. It was fortunate that slow communications did not heat up the war. The opinion grew that it was imperative to keep out of the struggle, while conveniently forgetting that it was English statesmen and English parliaments who had helped to introduce slavery to those distant territories. The workers supported the North, and the manufacturers the South. The cotton operatives of Manchester and elsewhere were thrown out of work because of the fatal shortage of that commodity, and they might be said to have had mixed feelings on the matter. Palmerston, who himself favoured the Southern cause, was convinced that the North would never win, and made many jokes about the combatants. Dickens favoured the South, too, on the grounds that only its people could keep down the black population. Gladstone declared in one of his moments of mystic foolishness that: ‘Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either, they have made a nation.’ The slow success of Northern arms, however, reminded Palmerston that he would be foolish to support a losing side.

Prince Albert did much to calm the tricky and ambivalent confrontation, but it was almost his last service to his adopted country. In December 1861 he died after a married life of twenty-one years. Only four years before, he had been made Prince Consort as if to solidify his position in English governance. It was said that they had behaved as if they were queen and king, although the queen would not have taken kindly to the suggestion. It would be fair to say that Albert took care of ministerial and managerial matters in which his wife was not wholly interested.

But she had regretted placing such burdens on what she called ‘his poor dear stomach’. He had for many years had a nervous stomach which did not allow him to digest his food properly and provoked painful spasms. It is now suggested that he suffered from abdominal cancer or Crohn’s disease; his teeth were painful and he suffered from gumboils. He may have known that the end was coming, but it was not the kind of news that could be intimated to the queen. ‘I do not hang on to life,’ he told her ‘but you do – very much so.’

Victoria was called to the Blue Room of Windsor Castle where he lay. ‘Oh yes, this is death,’ she said. ‘I know it. I have seen it before.’ He faded slowly, fortified only by brandy. Melbourne had once said to her: ‘English physicians kill you; the French let you die.’ The English doctors were as always confused over symptoms, and used reassuring words as the palliative.

After her husband’s death the queen promptly swathed herself in mourning from which she did not emerge for many years. It was the chrysalis for a black butterfly. She cancelled all her public and private engagements. The whole country was draped in black from the corner shops to the new department stores. Theatres, concerts and all public entertainments were cancelled. The queen totally withdrew from public life for two years, only venturing out to unveil statues or busts of Albert. It was an Arthurian mourning. It was a Tennysonian mourning. She lamented the fact that there was no one to call her Victoria now, and that she had lost the one prop upon whom she wholly relied. She was a little ball of black, of piteous face, to be glimpsed in the back of a landau. She would do nothing, appear nowhere, until there were some who wondered if she had any real purpose at all.

Her ministers faced insuperable difficulties if they ventured to suggest any public engagement. Victoria wrote:

Lord Russell and Lord Palmerston both strongly felt that as a lady, without a husband, with all the weight of Government thrown upon her, with weakened health, quite incapable of bearing the fatigues of representation, she could not be expected to entertain Princes as formerly. Consequently she cannot invite them. It makes her quite ill, to be unable to do the right thing – and yet she cannot do so.

She had an heir, Albert Edward or ‘Bertie’, whom she considered to be less than useless. On one occasion she felt moved to write in her journal: ‘he is not at all in good looks; his nose and mouth are too enormous and he pastes his hair down to his head and wears his clothes frightfully – he really is anything but good looking’.

She would never turn to him for advice or comfort. She entered an almost cataleptic state of grief. If anyone dared to counsel her or advise her she responded with fury. Her only thought was of cherishing the memory of her husband with statues, parks and monuments. It would seem that the gentle training Albert had given her in the art and craft of ruling had largely been wasted, and by the mid-1860s the republicans of England were being given their second wind by virtue of Her Majesty’s stubbornness. It would not be in any case correct to say that she had retired under a stone. Her family network established over Europe would have persuaded her, whether she liked it or not, to participate in the world. She had one reservation. She had written: ‘I am also anxious to repeat one thing and that one is my firm resolve, my irrevocable decision viz that his wishes – his plans about everything, his views about every thing are to be my law!’