History of England 1-6

Gladstone was strengthening his position in the cabinet. He erred on the side of caution in his budgets, with strong rhetoric on the subjects of free trade and the defence of empire. He realized that he had no chance of ousting Palmerston but would have to content himself by waiting for his death, which surely could not be delayed for very much longer. As for further electoral reform, which was supported by Gladstone, the prime minister put it to one side for a while. There was no hurry. Reform had a vexed history. It had been attempted by Russell on two occasions without success, and Palmerston had not redeemed his pledge to introduce it. But it was probably wise to broach the matter once again when the public seemed apathetic, and no great issue would arise. The Reform Act of 1832 had produced none of the predicted effects, and there was no reason to believe that any new act would do so now. In any case it was not wise or expedient to continue to frustrate the industrial working class indefinitely.

Change must come sooner or later. Sooner was more politic. And so the pressure mounted slowly and gradually. In October 1858, Engels wrote to Marx that ‘the British working class is actually becoming more and more bourgeois’. This was not necessarily a comfort to the authorities because it had been clear enough that the more ‘bourgeois’ the worker the more he demanded certain civil rights. Another observer of the mid-nineteenth century can complete the picture. Henry Mayhew wrote:

the artisans are almost to a man red hot politicians. They are sufficiently educated and thoughtful to have a sense of their importance in the State … The unskilled labourers are a different class of people. As yet they are as unpolitical as footmen, and instead of entertaining violent democratic opinions, they appear to have no political opinions whatever; or, if they do possess any, they rather tend towards the maintenance of ‘things as they are’ than towards the ascendancy of the working people.

Palmerston made periodic visits to the regions in order to meet the people, and generally professed himself to be ‘touched’ and ‘comforted’ by their enthusiasm. He was the ‘game cock’, in boxing terms of the time, and had a few rounds still to win. But he was not ready just yet.

19

The unexpected revolution

Viscount Palmerston, and Lord John Russell as foreign secretary in Palmerston’s administration, had observed the abiding principle of foreign affairs by keeping out of trouble. They kept out of Italy and, more important, they had kept out of the United States, where infinite difficulties threatened. When Napoleon III suggested that a European army should cross the Atlantic, there was a moment of horror in the Foreign Office before it was realized that the idea was thoroughly impracticable. The old certainties survived. France was still the enemy, and in any case there was a royal ‘cousinhood’ between England and Germany on a continent where everyone was related to everyone else. But the absence of English entanglement in any European war did not mean that the forces of the country remained entirely idle. There was scarcely a year in which troops and ships were not engaged in warding off threats to the empire from Afghanistan to Zululand. On this, there was a political consensus. ‘The Tory party’, Disraeli claimed, ‘is only in its proper position when it represents popular principles. Then it is truly irresistible. Then it can uphold the throne and altar, the majesty of the empire, the liberty of the nation and the rights of the multitude.’

When Russia claimed its constitutional rights over Poland, in January 1863, the Polish revolutionaries provoked a fierce civil war on which England looked with horror. But it did nothing about it except to issue vague threats. When Russell mildly inquired of the Austrian ambassador whether Austria might use force against Russia, the ambassador returned the question. ‘As I had foreseen,’ he noted, ‘Lord Russell told me that this eventuality had not been examined yet and that, not being ready to answer me, he begged me for the present to consider his question as not having been put.’ Such was the dread of entanglements.

The situation did not change over the next two or three years as German and Austrian armies marched over Europe to proclaim their responsibilities. In an age when the world seemed to be utterly transformed by scientific and commercial advance, Europe itself achieved tumultuous change. Otto von Bismarck was a problem without necessarily being a threat. The kingdom of Italy was united in 1861, anticipating the creation of a united Germany by the controlling will of Bismarck, who forged together the multifarious German principalities and kingdoms under the control of Prussia. It is not the matter for a history of England, unless we engage in the grand game of consequences, but it is significant to note that Bismarck was the real master of the situation and that England played an almost negligible role in the creation of late nineteenth-century Europe.

The London workers had pledged their support to the Polish rebels, and the workingclass solidarity with the various nationalists struggling to be free indirectly advanced their own domestic causes. One expression of this confidence came in the guise of cooperative production, a combination of socialism and self-help, and in 1863 the North of England CoOperative Wholesale Industrial and Provident Society had been able to break the hold of the more exacting wholesalers. This was the period of friendly societies, building societies and savings banks which established their strength on the ideals of thrift, self-help and mutual security. In its beginnings it seemed to promise the slow and non-violent introduction of a socialist commonwealth, but these aspirations proved illusory. The working man and woman did not wish for social revolution, but rather for an improvement in their circumstances.

In the spring of 1864 the new demand for respectability became more influential in political counsels. On 11 May Gladstone explained to the Commons that ‘every man … is morally entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution’ unless incapacitated by ‘some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger’. Gladstone had raced ahead of the pack. He seemed to be proclaiming the vote as a right, not as a privilege. He went on to say that the union of all classes, so much to be desired, should be promoted ‘by a reasonable extension, at fitting times and among selected portions of the people, of every benefit and every privilege that can justly be conferred on them’. Disraeli said that he sounded like Tom Paine. Palmerston accused him of promoting ‘the Doctrine of Universal Suffrage which I can never accept’. Interestingly enough, Palmerston linked Gladstone’s reform policy with his increasingly public role. ‘It is to be regretted’, Palmerston told him ‘that you should, as you stated, have taken the opportunity of your receiving a deputation of working men, to exhort them to set on foot an agitation for parliamentary reform – the function of a government is to calm rather than to excite agitation.’ At the end of May 1864 Punch published a cartoon in which Gladstone is the only rider on a racecourse. Palmerston, as the starter, is calling out: ‘Hi! Gladstone! Democracy! Too soon! Too soon! You mustn’t go yet!’

Gladstone had begun to recognize that the working classes were material which could be worked on. They might be tractable. He was beginning to see the possibilities of a wider public to which in later years he would appeal. To one delegation he stated that ‘the franchise ought to be extended to the working classes’. In the autumn of the year he toured the manufacturing districts, slowly feeling his way into a new territory of democracy. Already the Newcastle Daily Chronicle was alluding to a ‘Great Party of the People’ with Gladstone as its leader. He liked to allude to the great cotton famine of 1862 when the American Civil War deprived the north of that necessary material. Gladstone praised the people of south Lancashire, in particular, for ‘self-command, self-control, respect for order, patience under suffering, confidence in the law, regard for superiors’. These of course were the members of an ideal democracy. He was cheered and feted wherever he went. It is significant, therefore, that when Palmerston met a deputation of working men he was greeted with silence.

Palmerston was more successful in his proper home of parliament. He averted a vote of censure from the Lords on the question of ceding Schleswig-Holstein to the German Confederation, a controversy of infinite moment only to those who were directly involved. Palmerston had said that: ‘Only three people have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business – the Prince Consort, who is dead – a German professor, who has gone mad – and I, who have forgotten all about it.’ In fact the betrayal of Denmark by Britain provoked a great deal of anger and disgust. Was this the way to deal with allies? As a result the Prussians became more confident, and the British lost much influence. Matthew Arnold argued that Palmerston had found the country first in the world’s estimation, but left it badly diminished. The result may not have been as profound as this suggests, but the betrayal of Denmark did much harm.

Palmerston’s survival of the vote of censure was greeted with relief by all sides. No one was yet ready for Benjamin Disraeli, who stood in the wings, awaiting the exit of Lord Derby. Richard Cobden taunted the Conservatives even for considering the departure of Palmerston, who was sometimes considered to be more Conservative than Derby himself.

I think you are very wrong in trying to remove the noble Lord … he throws discredit on reform; he derides the 220 gentlemen who are prepared to vote for the ballot. He spends more money and is far more extravagant than we would allow you to be if you were in office. Besides all this, I have always been of the impression that after he has thoroughly demoralised his own party, he intends, when he makes his political will, to hand over office to you as his residuary legatees.

After Cobden had finished speaking he followed custom by putting his top hat back on his head.

Two books of opposite tendency were issued in 1865. Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution, published in serial form between 1865 and 1867, was a treatise in favour of dullness. The eminent historian of Victorian England, G. M. Young, described Bagehot as ‘the greatest Victorian’ and ‘a man who was in and of his age and who could have been of no other … whose influence, passing from one fit mind to another, could transmit and can still impart that most precious element in Victorian civilization, its robust and masculine sanity’. It was a duty to be dull; it was a sin to be too clever by half, as the saying went. It bred suspicion. As Bagehot wrote, ‘the most essential quality for a free people … is much stupidity’. Do not investigate too much; do not aspire too much. That was the way to preserve liberty. Bagehot believed that it was ‘the dull traditional habit of mankind that guides most men’s actions … that dullness in matters of government is a good sign and not a bad one – in particular dullness in parliamentary government is a test of its excellence, an indication of its success’. Excitement breeds excess. Innovation, let alone revolution, breeds anxiety, trouble and conflict. This is one of the keys to the general stability of Victorian England.

Yet there had been a change. In previous generations the gentlemen of parliament amused or abused their colleagues with speeches which resembled after-dinner conversations. Now the age of the newspaper had arrived, together with its conglomeration of facts and opinions. The orators of Westminster, if they could still be called such, relied upon what Bagehot called ‘the patient exposition, the elaborate minuteness, the exhaustive disquisition’ on such matters as chancery reform and the registration of companies. Bagehot speculated further: ‘Regular business forms a regular statesman – quiet habits, sober thoughts, common aims are his obvious characteristics.’ The great idea was to be, or to appear, ordinary. And ‘if a steady observer really looks at actual life he will see that men never think if they can help it’. This can be taken as a fair summation of ordinary Victorian values.

Rare and singular exceptions can be found to that dispensation. In the same year as The English Constitution began its serialization, James Clerk Maxwell’s A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field also appeared. It is rarely mentioned in the histories of the period largely because it is still very difficult for the layman to understand. Maxwell’s principal achievement was the promulgation of electro-magnetic theory, which has been described as the ‘second great unification theory’, after Newton, in which electricity, magnetism and light were to be viewed as manifestations of the same phenomenon. This in itself might be seen as a quintessentially Victorian discovery, and one of great significance. A fellow physicist, Richard Feynman, wrote in the 1960s that: ‘From a long view of this history of mankind – seen from, say, 10,000 years from now – there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the nineteenth century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics.’ It can be argued that Victorian scientific theory will surpass all the religious and social tenets of its age.

We may note, however, that in the period of Maxwell’s publication of his insights the greater fervour of the time – especially from the 1850s to the 1880s – was devoted to the problems of biblical criticism. The development of a more liberal theology, and freedom of doctrinal decision, made the world unsteady. Any number of causes célèbres provoked bitter fury and sarcasm, and the participants fought one another as if their life depended on it. Heresy trials and court cases were instituted which pitted Nonconformists against Anglicans, Presbyterians against Congregationalists, German against English theologians, bishops against priests. Was the biblical narrative inspired by the Word of God or was it the composite work of scholars in various periods? Was geology a savage assault upon the conventions of Genesis? The bishop of Natal, J. W. Colenso, published a series of examinations of the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua in which he discerned inconsistencies, improbabilities and impossibilities. They could not have been inspired by a deity. Colenso wrote that ‘our duty, surely, is to follow the Truth, wherever it leads us, and leave the consequences in the hands of God’.

The pious, who included the powerful body of Evangelicals and High Churchmen, were outraged. How could a bishop, of all people, propound such views? Bishop Lee of Manchester was afraid for ‘the very foundations of our faith, the very basis of our hopes, the very nearest and dearest of our consolations’. There were calls for a heresy trial, although burning was not an issue any more. The bishop of Cape Town, Colenso’s superior, convoked a synod in the course of which Colenso was deposed as bishop. Colenso then appealed to the Privy Council in London, which declared that he could not be so degraded. Nevertheless the bishop of Cape Town anointed another bishop while Colenso carried on regardless, creating a schism that lasted for decades. A similar pattern became evident in English dioceses where liberal clerics provoked ultraconservative bishops and vice versa. The certainties of the past were in any case being eroded by what were seen to be ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’ solutions.

The decay of religious doctrine is in some subtle way linked with the observations of Thomas Hardy and Rider Haggard that village tradition came to an end in or about 1865. The last links of the old world, and of old England, were finally to be severed. It had happened almost without anyone noticing it. This was the year in which the Fortnightly Review was first published, with the mission (for such it was) to encourage ‘Progress’ and to further illuminate ‘modern minds’ with a broadly scientific and secular outlook.

In this year, also, Matthew Arnold, in ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, one of his Essays in Criticism, wrote that ‘epochs of concentration cannot well endure for ever; epochs of expansion, in the due course of things, follow them. Such an epoch of expansion seems to be opening in this country.’ For Arnold, then, the dissolution of traditional modes of thought promised ‘expansion’. He wrote also that:

in the first place all danger of a hostile forcible pressure of foreign ideas upon our practice has long disappeared; like the traveller in the fable, therefore, we begin to wear our cloak a little more loosely. Then, with a long peace, the ideas of Europe steal gradually and amicably in and mingle, though in infinitesimal small quantities at a time with our own notions. Then, too, in spite of all that is said about the absorbing and brutalizing influence of our passionate material progress, it seems to me indisputable that this progress is likely, though not certain, to lead in the end to an apparition of intellectual life; and that man, after he has made himself perfectly comfortable and has now to determine what to do with himself next, may begin to remember that he has a mind, and that the mind may be made the source of great pleasure.

It is interesting, perhaps, that material progress is regarded as ‘passionate’.

An election, based upon the premise of economic stability and very little else, was held in the spring of 1865. The result was to be expected, with the Whigs under Lord Palmerston gaining a majority over Derby and his Conservatives. ‘I trust God will look mercifully on His poor overburdened creature’, Gladstone wrote of himself, ‘as he trips and stumbles along the road of life.’ He did in fact stumble on this occasion. He was rejected by the electors at Oxford, for being an earnest liberal with a touch of radical about him, and had to hurry north in order to be elected; he had always been in favour among the people of south Lancashire. He was greeted by a crowd of 6,000, whose enthusiasm soothed the wound of Oxford. ‘At last, my friends,’ he said, ‘I am come among you … I come among you “unmuzzled”.’ The interpretation was that Gladstone now was ready actively to promote Reform. Whatever he meant, the word did not appeal to his prime minister.

It was now clear enough that Palmerston could not continue indefinitely, and the observers of the political scene noted that Gladstone was in the process of spreading his wings over the electorate. Yet Palmerston seemed to have been given a magic potion. One dinner companion, Lord Ossington, observed how:

He ate for dinner two plates of turtle soup; he was then served very amply to a plate of cod and oyster sauce; he then took a paté; afterwards he was helped to two very greasy entrées; he then despatched a plate of roast mutton; there then appeared before him the largest and to my mind the hardest slice of ham that ever figured on the table of a nobleman, yet it disappeared, just in time to answer the inquiry of his butler. ‘Snipe, my lord, or pheasant?’ He instantly replied ‘Pheasant!’

It might just have been too much. By the spring of 1865 he was beginning to look his age, and by the autumn he was dead.

He cannot be accused of any startling innovations; he stood by no great cause except, of course, for the prosperity of the country. He was part of the furniture of his age, a solid position which he gained by caution (as a wolf is cautious when stalking prey), good fortune and astute judgement. He has suffered, perhaps, in comparison with Gladstone and Disraeli – without the moral gravitas of the one or the serpentine flexibility of the other. The Education of Henry Adams (1918) describes the political situation more floridly:

The years of Palmerston’s last cabinet, 1859 to 1865, were avowedly years of truce – of arrested development. The British system, like the French, was in its last stage of decomposition. Never had the British mind shown itself so décousu – so unravelled, at sea, floundering in every sort of historical shipwreck. Eccentricities had a free field. Contradictions swarmed in State and Church. England devoted thirty years of arduous labour to clearing away only a part of the debris …

Trollope put it more succinctly in Phineas Redux (1873) when he observed that ‘it is the necessary nature of a political party in this country to avoid, as long as it can be avoided, the consideration of any question which involves a great change’.

The death of Palmerston was considered to be a grave national calamity, but it did take the block away from any form of political or social advancement. Once again political reform was in the air. It had been bottled up and stored for so long that it seemed that it might now explode. ‘The truce is over,’ Disraeli wrote. ‘I foresee tempestuous times, and great vicissitudes in public life.’ A National Reform Union was established in 1864, and next year the Reform League promoted the policy of manhood suffrage. The tight bonds of legislation and conformity had been gradually released. The reduction or abolition of certain privileges, and the removal of religious disabilities, had lightened the atmosphere and freed the way for more humane legislation. Trade unions were slowly accepted as part of the world of work, and municipal reform helped to provide parks, schools and public baths. Sanitary hygiene, after the ‘great stink’ of 1858, had become a national imperative.

Palmerston died in harness, as the saying went. The premiership went from a man of eighty-one to one of seventy-three. Earl Russell, as John Russell now was, accepted the challenge. Some people were surprised that Russell would take up the old burden again but, as the king of Belgium told Victoria, ‘these politicians never refuse’. In any case the sky did not fall, and it was almost as if nothing had happened at all. Derby and Russell carried on like the old partners of rival firms and, naturally enough, the interest moved to the next generation of leaders. Gladstone and Disraeli were in the dressing room, preparing for their parts.

On the day of Palmerston’s death Gladstone had written a letter to Russell acknowledging that the older man was the obvious successor. ‘Your former place as her minister, your powers, experience, service and renown, do not leave room for doubt that you will be sent for.’ In turn Gladstone remained chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons. He had become the most formidable chancellor in English history, and among his cabinet colleagues he was primus inter pares. His fiscal policy was one of undeviating caution. He kept down military expenditure, reducing taxes and tariffs wherever he could prudently do so, and managed to create annual surpluses. He had emphasized ‘the essential and vital connection between the growth of the industry of the country and the legislative process pursued within the last quarter of a century’. It was all part of the programme he had espoused in his speeches across the country. He was the right minister to introduce a new Reform Bill as one of the new administration’s first measures.

Reform was a jack-in-the-box. Whenever you opened the box of change, out it sprang with a grin upon its face. Its motto was ‘Here we are again!’ The atmosphere for change seemed to become more urgent when in March 1866 the bill-broking firm of Overend, Gurney and Company collapsed, setting off a financial panic. Even though Gladstone had been charged with putting forward a bill, he was uncertain how to steer the course. John Bright wrote to him: ‘you have had three months in which to form a bill which any man knowing anything on the subject could have done in a week’. Gladstone finally unveiled his proposals in March 1866, but they pleased nobody; he floundered in debate. Besides, they looked suspiciously like reheated porridge. The nominal majority of the Liberals plunged and the Russell government resigned in June. There were members of his party who suggested an immediate general election, but others believed that it would be unpopular. So the cabinet agreed to a resignation without a dissolution. The Conservatives were in without a fight.

The administration had been outvoted in what had become suspiciously like a game of tit-for-tat. Disraeli had been joined by a group of Liberals who were firmly and almost viscerally opposed to Reform; they were called, and eventually called themselves, ‘Adullamites’, after the cave of Adullam where David sought refuge from Saul. A ‘cave’ became the name for a party within a party. The Conservatives, long starved of office, took over power in the prevailing public expectation that Reform was now out of the question. They had not reckoned on Benjamin Disraeli, who seemed to have an uncanny ability to anticipate and even to shape the political weather.

The government of Russell and Gladstone had fallen on 18 June, and nine days later approximately 10,000 protesters gathered in central London, complete with brass bands and red flags, to protest at this rejection of Reform with shouts and slogans such as ‘Gladstone and Liberty!’ and ‘Gladstone for ever!’ It was clear that he was the central figure of popular hope and expectation.

Mass demonstrations continued in Hyde Park, Victoria Park and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Marches were organized in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and elsewhere. The police attempts to control the protesters met with only partial success, and of course handed the cup of moral victory to those on the streets. But they were nothing like the previous demonstrators of London. The Gordon Riots were a distant memory. These were respectably dressed Londoners who behaved with sobriety and decorum. A few crushed flowers in Hyde Park, and some broken railings, were the extent of the carnage. Matthew Arnold had witnessed the scenes from a balcony along the Bayswater Road and was inspired to write Culture and Anarchy (1869). But the news of anarchy rather than culture spread, causing needless panic. If the public had recalled how peaceable the crowds of Hyde Park had been at the time of the Great Exhibition, they might have rested more easily. Those who had once been drill sergeants now organized the lines of the demonstrators with precision. Some of the protesters wore top hats. Their call was for ‘manhood suffrage’ or ‘household suffrage’, which was not at all the same thing as democracy for all. These were the old measures proposed for half a century. They were really associated with the idea of property, in particular of a house, so that the propertied classes would have a much larger stake in the direction of the country. The women, the poor and the vagrant were implicitly excluded from the process. The sober and well-organized marches and speeches for electoral reform impressed Gladstone, who was more than ever sure that the time for Reform had come. Yet the fact was that he had been defeated over Reform and was out of office.

The earl of Derby, however, also believed that the moment of the Conservatives had come. Standing with him was the arch-manipulator of the time, Benjamin Disraeli. It was Derby’s third minority Conservative government, but he informed his colleagues in the Lords ‘that he did not intend for a third time to be made a mere stop-gap until it should suit the convenience of the Liberal Party to forget their dissensions’. By some act short of magic he was determined to take his minority into a majority, and perhaps conjure together a scheme of reform measures that would attract a large number of adherents.

He was not yet sure from where support for Reform might come. He consulted the leading Adullamites, who were his enemies’ enemies, but they were not about to oblige him; they were, after all, still Liberals, even if they were not reformers. Lord Shaftesbury, who had acquired a reputation as a supporter of humanitarian causes, also declined to assist him. The Conservatives themselves were a heterogeneous assembly including liberal conservatives, conservative liberals and conservative radicals who might or might not be bound together. Yet Reform was a necessity. The failed measures, the false starts and the delaying tactics of those against change had created an opposing momentum which could not be denied for much longer. Derby wrote to Disraeli: ‘I am coming reluctantly to the conclusion that we shall have to deal with the question of Reform.’

Disraeli was not so sure. He had seen other ministers, including Gladstone, come to grief over a question which seemed to have no definite solution. It would require mature consideration but could not be avoided altogether, or else the Tories, Disraeli said, ‘must have dwindled away like the Jacobites or the non-jurors’. ‘I was determined’, he added, ‘to vindicate the right of the party to a free hand, and not to allow them to be shut up in a cage formed by the Whigs and Radicals, confined within a certain magic circle which they were not to step out of at the peril of their lives.’ But the public was apathetic. Nine out of ten cried out: ‘We must have a reform bill!’ but eight out of nine whispered to each other: ‘Does anybody want one?’ This was Bulwer-Lytton’s perception.

Derby would not avoid the issue, however, since as he told Disraeli, ‘the Queen spoke to me about it the other day. She said she is very anxious to see it settled, and that if she could do anything personally to bring opinions together, she would most readily do it.’ This was not quite a royal command, but it could not be easily overlooked. Disraeli dismissed the royal proposal of bringing Conservatives and Liberals together as a ‘phantom’, but he also knew the dangers of advancing upon Reform legislation in unknown territory. No one would believe that the Conservatives were serious unless and until they put forward a scheme bolder than anything Gladstone and Russell envisaged. They could not afford to be ‘outbid’ by the opposition. They had to propose legislation which would put Gladstone and the others in the shade.

Disraeli, however, would eventually emerge with the greater credit, together with the implicit assumption that he would replace Derby whenever the time came. His political agility and astuteness may not have been to the taste of some, but he dazzled or bewildered many others. It was not at all clear what his ulterior plan might be, except that he wanted to stay in power for as long as possible; he surrendered and fudged some positions, in order give the reform legislation a clear path. His goal seems to have been simply to succeed and, in a phrase of the period, ‘to dish the Whigs’ – to beat the Whigs at their own game of widening the electorate. Once the gate had been opened it would never be closed again, and from the muddle and confusion there eventually emerged a working democracy that has never been seriously threatened.

Disraeli was a great improviser, a master of the unexpected and a superb tactician. He proposed a much larger franchise by accepting household suffrage, and with the help of some recalcitrant Whigs batted away any attempt to restrict or hamper the extent of the new electorate. Amendments were added to enlarge the estimate of voters, and in the early summer private members’ bills added to the franchise. The residence requirement was reduced from three years to one. Lodgers ‘of ten pounds value’ were given the vote. In February 1867 Derby addressed the Lords on maintaining good relations with ‘the great Republic on the other side of the Atlantic’, with the obvious implication that republics are not all made up of wolves and hyenas. He announced that Disraeli would be putting forward certain plans that would require ‘mutual forbearance’. On the day that Disraeli was to put forward his proposals Viscount Cranborne, the secretary of state for India, did his sums and concluded that 60 per cent of the constituencies would be given to new voters.

On receiving Cranborne’s message Derby wrote at once to Disraeli that ‘the enclosed, just received, is utter ruin! What on earth are we to do?’ A compromise was reached that satisfied nobody. Yet Derby, strengthened by Disraeli, rejected the compromise. He would introduce household suffrage at whatever cost to the party. It was a matter of honour rather than of principle. Plans were drawn up that any man who could claim two years’ residence and had paid poor rates would be entitled to vote. But this was only the first of several amendments and corrections that steadily widened the scope of the franchise, so that, in the end, Derby had no idea of the number who had been affected. What had begun as a plan to alter the borough franchise had concluded as a scheme for household suffrage.

Disraeli had become the guiding agent of the legislation. He knew or sensed that the Conservatives would follow him as long as he regained the political initiative and refused to be cowed by Whig objections. Gladstone was ignored, therefore, and Disraeli seemed receptive to radical proposals to extend the vote. As the Conservatives had nothing to lose by extending household suffrage, they might as well endorse it with enthusiasm.

Derby was gradually weakened by ill health, but the Conservatives were in any case experiencing a semi-fevered fit of radicalism. They wanted to out-Gladstone Gladstone, a feat they had been longing to perform, and in any case they were bored with the details and the statistics. Disraeli was succinct and sharp, but above all he was unpredictable. Gladstone bored many of his colleagues. They wanted to get it over with, and in the process turn the Conservative party into an infinitely more attractive force than it had been before. ‘No doubt we are making a great experiment and “taking a leap in the dark”,’ the prime minister said after the Reform Bill had passed, ‘but I have the greatest confidence in the sound sense of my fellow-countrymen.’ In fact that ‘sound sense’ meant that the number of Radicals in parliament did not vary between fifty and one hundred; they were not particularly interested in the masses or in manhood suffrage, but in promoting industrial and commercial reform.

This is not unprecedented. Out of a chaos of cross-purposes, mistakes and misunderstandings some of the most enduring legislation has emerged, just as misinterpretations and false conclusions have been more responsible for wars than even the lies of statesmen. So of course there were no identifiable culprits or causes; everything took place in a fog of surmise and speculation. The most successful politicians are those who are able to ride the flood tide of conjecture and false claims. ‘It is a privilege to live in this age of rapid and brilliant events,’ Disraeli once wrote. ‘What an error to consider it a utilitarian age! It is one of infinite romance.’ The Victorian passion for fairy tales never had a better exponent. A contemporary described him ‘as unlike any living creature one has met … The face is more like a mask than ever and the division between him and mere mortals more marked. I would as soon have thought of sitting down at table with Hamlet, or Lear, or the Wandering Jew.’

Nathaniel Hawthorne also sketched a pen portrait of Disraeli at this time.

By and by there came a rather tall, slender person in a black frock [coat], buttoned up, and black pantaloons, taking long steps but I thought rather feebly or listlessly. His shoulders were round, or else he had a habitual stoop in them. He had a prominent nose, a thin face, and a sallow, very sallow complexion, and was a very unhealthy looking person; and had I seen him in America I should have taken him for a hard-worked editor of a newspaper, weary and worn with night-labour and want of exercise, shrivelled and withered before his time. It was Disraeli, and I never saw any other Englishman look in the least like him.

In the end some 938,000 voters were added to the electoral roll in a mixture of last-minute consultations, misunderstandings, mistakes, obstinacies, cowardice and a small amount of plotting. It was the most unexpected revolution in English political history.

It is appropriate that Viscount Cranborne, soon to be known as Lord Salisbury, should enter the narrative at this juncture. He had a command of figures but, more important, he knew how to use them to party advantage. He was short sighted, tall, with a slight stoop; he was not a gloomy man, but he was not sentimental. He never subscribed to the facile notions or the ‘quick fix’ attitudes of Disraeli. He was too intelligent to be charmed by him. Cranborne is one of the few Victorian grandees who can be introduced by his journalism, his pursuit before entering the Commons. He was on common ground with the quarterlies and he admired Palmerston against all the odds, for example, as one ‘of those cynical philosophers who look upon Parliament as more useful for what it prevents than what it performs’. He was admirably blunt in his social and political opinions. ‘The state did not relieve the poor on the ground of philanthropy,’ he said, ‘but on the ground of general order.’ He abhorred parliamentary games and squabbles. He detested the opinionated and the self-important. He was firmly opposed to wider suffrage, with the belief that ‘the laws of property are not very safe when an ignorant multitude are the rulers’. He had no very high opinion of others, which made the familiar methods of electioneering a positive horror; in campaigns he was shy and withdrawn.

Instead, he was a great believer in doing nothing, when nothing seemed the better course. He was for example more and more dismayed as the arch-Liberal, Gladstone, embarked for distant and wilder shores. In any case he would have been happier beside Pitt and Wellington than Disraeli or Derby. He considered most of his celebrated contemporaries to be little better than political charlatans, mouthing the received wisdom with all the conviction of the recently convinced. The doorkeeper of the House of Commons noted in 1863: ‘he is haughty and proud, of intractable temper. He cannot submit to party discipline …’ Another contemporary observed: ‘he had small respect for the opinions of the house of Commons’.

It was whispered that Cranborne might make an ideal prime minister. Just before Salisbury travelled to an international conference Gladstone wrote to him: ‘You should personally know the men who are governing the world, and it is well to know them in circumstances which will allow you to gauge their character, their strength and their infirmities.’ This might be known as diplomacy of the old school, which Salisbury infinitely preferred to the reliance upon bold schemes and duplicitous enterprises. He once told Bulwer-Lytton that ‘English policy is to float lazily down stream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boat-hook to avoid collisions.’

At the end of 1867 Russell, at the age of seventy-five, relinquished his role as leader of the Liberals. As an unreconstructed Whig, he had outlived his time. He had been out of sorts with the leading principles of the age. He had, according to Punch, ‘no particular test of ability, but Debrett’s Peerage, and never knew that to fail’. Now in 1868 Gladstone might have come into his inheritance. In the cause of Reform, however, Disraeli had already outmanoeuvred him with the ‘romance’ of the extended franchise. Gladstone was humiliated by the debacle, and for a while considered retiring from the leadership itself. He seemed genuinely to have feared that Disraeli’s enfranchisement would give the vote to what was called the ‘residuum’ or lowest level of the people. He considered Disraeli capable of anything in pursuit of power. Disraeli had no such qualms, however, and was merely concerned to maintain the Conservative electoral hold upon the counties, where the vote was granted to £12 householders rather than the rural poor. Disraeli knew that he had favoured the most deferential electorate of all. He was not concerned if redundant votes piled up in the cities. His nominal superior was thoroughly in agreement with him. Stanley wrote in his diary that his father, Lord Derby, was ‘bent on remaining in power at whatever cost, and ready to make the largest concessions with that object’.

Both parties would have agreed on this, however. The balance of political power must be maintained at all costs; every version of Reform had been designed to stabilize the political structure, not to overturn or replace it. Yet it was not perhaps as simple as that. One of the consequences of the new Reform was to increase the number of urban representatives in the Commons, overturning centuries of rural predominance. A second and unintended result was the gradual politicization of the towns and cities. Soon enough the parties began to appeal to what they considered to be the urban vote. The Conservatives, in particular, began to organize working men’s associations. With the larger electorate, politics became a sport and a spectacle. Gladstone’s visage appeared on vases and on spoons; Disraeli jugs were placed beside octagonal plates bearing his image. He also became the darling of the cartoonists who could perform endless variations on his distinctive features. Portraits of these newly discovered heroes were to be found on teapots and coffee pots, jugs and snuffboxes. The essence of politics became diluted.

By gradual degrees a new prospect revealed itself. Parliamentary reform had been connected with the rise of what were often known as ‘the masses’. It was not necessarily alarming. Some observers had always distrusted the conventional wisdom that the lower orders were by nature radical and subversive, and now was the occasion to prove them right. Edmund Burke had intimated, for example, that they were in fact instinctively conservative. To use a current analogy, they were the beasts of the field who were content to chew the cud. A phrase arose, under unknown circumstances, that the country was open to a ‘conservative democracy’. At approximately the same time the idea of ‘household suffrage’ had become very appealing to those who wished to create as large an electorate as possible, on the supposition that householders would not be radicals. It could not be called a plan, but rather an instinct. As The Times put it, ‘Disraeli discerned the Conservative working man as the sculptor perceives the angel prisoned in the block of marble.’

Derby took medical advice at this stage and it was advised that he could not survive under the manifold burdens of the office. He had not been faced by the agonies of Reform only. There were problems and outrages far more pressing and dangerous. A conspiracy had been discovered in Ireland, organized by the Fenians, a ‘brotherhood’ which believed that Ireland had a right to independence, and that armed revolution was the only way of achieving it. As a result the suspension of habeas corpus locked up a thousand supposed Fenians for a year. A Fenian army was gathered in the United States and attacked Canada with disappointing results; the battle of Ridgeway in June 1866 was their last stand.

Closer to home they made an attempt on Chester Castle in the search for arms and ammunition. They were not successful. Whenever the queen drove out, she was followed by two of her suite armed with revolvers. A now predictable bombing outrage was attempted at the end of 1867 when the Fenians tried to bomb the notorious prison at Clerkenwell where some of their colleagues were being held. It was again unsuccessful but managed instead to kill several Londoners; there were twelve deaths and over a hundred casualties. This may have been one of the incidents which persuaded Gladstone ‘to pacify Ireland’ at a later date. Rumours abounded. It was reported that ‘one informant speaks of 155 Fenians and republican clubs in London alone, all unknown to the police. Several announced projects for blowing up the houses of parliament and assassinating the queen.’ It was said that a privateer filled with Fenians was coming from New York to kill her. Sticks of dynamite with clockwork mechanisms, known as ‘infernal machines’, were shipped from New York in crates labelled ‘cement’. Alone as she was in spirit, she became frustrated and nervous; she asked that the militia be made ready for any insurrection.

For many, there was worse to come. The rinderpest or cattle plague was spreading through the country. It is noted in a farmer’s diary of 1866 that:

W Carson, Foulsike, has not one of his stock left alive. They are all either dead or destroyed. Sir R Brisco and Captain James insists on destroying all the cattle where the disease breaks out whether they are healthy and well or ailing or recovering. I doubt they are taking the power out of the Almighty hands. I think the Lord will have some compassion on us and leave some alive but Sir R Brisco and Captain James will leave none alive.

In a country which according to the most recent census was still predominantly agricultural, the cattle plague was a catastrophe about which little could be done. It was worse than a plague out of Egypt, and several leading clerics called for a day of prayer and fasting to placate the Almighty.

A violent controversy had also fallen upon the empire when Governor Eyre of Jamaica had been accused of unremitting barbarity in his treatment of the black population. For every man or woman who decried Eyre’s disgusting treatment of the slaves, there was another to cheer him on. ‘We are too tender to our savages; we are more tender to a black than to ourselves,’ Tennyson told Gladstone, ‘niggers are tigers, niggers are tigers.’ This is precisely the kind of comment, from a great man of letters, which emphasizes the extent to which the empire was permeated with racism. What went on in the backstreets of Calcutta, the alleys of Bridgetown or the farmland of south Nigeria could not bear examination. Could it really be said that the empire was under the rule of law? That was one of the reasons why in February 1868 Derby resigned his office under medical advice. He had retained his leadership of his party for twenty-two years, a record that has not yet been rivalled.

It could only be Disraeli now. The queen wrote to her daughter, the crown princess of Prussia: ‘Mr Disraeli is Prime Minister! A proud thing for a Man “risen from the people” to have obtained!’ It might be questionable whether he had in fact risen from the people, as if he had just wiped the coal dust from his face, but the princess knew what her mother meant. In any case he had inherited his minority government from Derby and was obliged to hang on until a general election might improve his fortunes. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole.’

One of the doorkeepers of the House of Commons described Disraeli’s presence in that assembly. He ‘comes up the members’ private staircase, marches across the lobby, solemnly and slowly, generally alone, and speaking to no one as he passes’. On entering the chamber he ‘sits down, folds his arms across his breast and keeps immovably in this position, with his eyes fixed upon the ground until he rises to speak’. He never wore a hat in the chamber, unlike most of his colleagues, ‘for he neither winces nor laughs and seldom cheers; in fact he sits like an imperturbable statue … Though in the midst of his party, he appears not to be one of them, but as separate and as distinct as his race is from all the world.’ When he spoke he always began badly but soon warmed up. His theory of premiership, if such it was, is suggested in his portrait of Lord Roehampton in Endymion (1880): ‘Look to Lord Roehampton; he is the man. He does not care a rush whether the revenue increases or declines. He is thinking of real politics; foreign affairs; maintaining our power in Europe.’ He rarely met his opponent in verbal combat. When Gladstone performed his perorations Disraeli often pretended to be asleep; but he was ever alert. If Gladstone committed an error Disraeli quickly corrected him.

He did manage to pass some congenial legislation. Public hangings were abolished. The railways were improved. The first act of nationalization was passed when the Post Office was given permission to purchase all the telegraph companies; this was an important stage in the structural unification of the country. Yet when Henry James first arrived in London, in 1868, he saw little sign of progress:

The weather had turned wet. The low black houses were as inanimate as so many rows of coal scuttles, save where at frequent corners, from a gin-shop, there was a flare of light more brutal still than the darkness … A sudden horror of the whole place came over me, like a tiger-pounce of homesickness which had been watching its moment. London was hideous, vicious, cruel, and above all overwhelming.

Disraeli would no doubt have known of such dark, far-off things but they did not enter his calculations. He said that, in his audiences with the queen, he never denied nor did he contradict but he sometimes forgot. He was particularly attentive to her majesty. Victoria told her daughter that ‘he is full of poetry, romance & chivalry’. The new prime minister did in any case woo and flatter the queen in ways only he knew how to do, and his regular missives to her on parliamentary affairs were written in a style that combined Coningsby with the Lays of Marmion. He said later that ‘to keep in good humour the Queen is in itself an occupation’. Wilful, self-preoccupied and inherently nervous, she was what all queens should be. So he poured on the charm with profusions of loyalty and obedience. He treated her as the representative of England on earth, which in one sense she was. There were some who believed their relationship to be too congenial. Derby wrote to him that ‘nobody can have managed the lady better than you have; but is there a not just a risk of encouraging her in too large an idea of her personal power and too great indifference to what the public expects? I only ask, it is for you to judge.’ Some called him Mephistopheles. A later generation might have called him Svengali. In any case his only competitor was Gladstone, whom the queen found profoundly unsympathetic.

Time was pressing. He was prime minister and the old unreformed parliament would pass away in May 1868. Yet to leave with the old electoral register still in place would be a parliamentary and political embarrassment. His administration had only been in place for three months. The advice poured in. He consulted the queen, whose distaste for Gladstone or a further dose of Gladstone was well known. He decided to stay as long as circumstances permitted; there was also much parliamentary business to conclude. At the beginning of May, Disraeli moved to adjourn the House and advised the queen to dissolve parliament ‘as soon as the public interest will permit’ This in effect meant that they would wait until the electoral register was completed, which was now expected at the beginning of November. Despite the changes wrought by Disraeli it was widely believed that Gladstone and the Liberals would win again.

The election of November 1868 was hard fought, and the Annual Register declared that ‘it is to be feared that the corruption, drunkenness and demoralization’ were as evident as before. The wealthy member of parliament from Bristol was obliged to address his constituents from behind an open umbrella. The dead cats and dogs of the hustings were not yet finally buried. Nor were the bribes and the blackmail. The result was as expected, with a Liberal majority of 112 votes. Disraeli resigned at once, thus creating a precedent in which the wisdom of the electorate was more important than the procedures of parliament. It was clear enough that Gladstone had captured the loyalty of the public. He appealed to their sense of fair play. ‘Do not wait to continue from year to year the painful – the ignominious, I would almost say, the loathsome process of suspending personal liberty in order to keep large portions of the Irish people down by force.’ He also appealed to the newfound responsibilities of the reformed electorate, ‘now that you are invested with the privileges by which you are to govern yourselves’. That probably clinched the matter. When he was informed of the result he was felling trees on his country estate at Hawarden. He ceased for a moment and declared: ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland.’

20

She cannot go on

Disraeli did not believe that Gladstone was the man of the future. The two men did not believe in one another at all. Their rivalry may have risen in part from the fact that both leaders were members of the House of Commons, but a deeper division was manifest. Gladstone was a man of conviction and principle, while Disraeli was a man of convenience and practicality. That is how it seemed on the surface, and to their contemporaries, but we may be doing an historic injustice to both men by relying on conventional wisdom. Behind Disraeli’s flippancy was a deep devotion to his Jewish faith, or at least a profound belief that he was one of the chosen people. He rated himself as highly as any English aristocrat, and behaved himself as such. He did not try to ape the manners of the aristocracy; he decided to make himself unique. Gladstone, too, had a share of practical and opportunistic politics – however hard he tried to disguise it – and it can be said that he framed his politics with one eye on God and Redemption and the other on the main chance. On taking office Disraeli had speculated on the greasy pole, while Gladstone remarked: ‘I ascend a steepening path, with a burden ever gathering weight. The Almighty seems to sustain and spare me for some purpose of His own, deeply unworthy as I know myself to be. Glory be to his name!’

Gladstone had won a surprisingly easy victory. The results in England were in balance but Scotland and Ireland put the result out of doubt. Disraeli could have given up his political career with honour, but he declined to leave the stage. The death of Lord Derby in the autumn of 1869 seemed only to steady his hand for a long career. There was a puzzle doing the rounds. ‘Why is Gladstone like a telescope?’ ‘Because Disraeli draws him out, looks through him, and shuts him up.’

The Liberal party had indeed been in confusion after Disraeli’s triumph with Reform, and Gladstone himself was baffled by the turn of the events before he came upon another cause that would unite his party. Ireland had become the mother of discontent and violence. But if his ‘mission’ was indeed to pacify the country, he had to proceed gradually and slowly with his new government. He could start with the religious question. ‘The time has come’, he said, ‘when the Church of Ireland as a Church in alliance with the state must cease to exist’. Unlike the Church of Rome, which held the faithful in its grip, the Church of Ireland was almost supernumerary. It took the tithes but did very little in return. All the religious duties and ceremonies of the people were performed under its aegis, but it had precious little authority.

Beyond Ireland, the British seemed more successful and confident. This happy condition was confirmed in 1868 when a British force under Sir Robert Napier invaded Ethiopia and rescued some British hostages. It was considered an affair of honour, but it also provided an intimation of the imperial instinct. This was in fact the period in which a relative indifference to empire changed gradually into positive enthusiasm. The establishment of telegraphic communications with Australia helped to instil a new sense of unity. It also became clear that other countries were struggling to fashion empires of their own, with Germany the prime mover. Germany, Italy and the United States had themselves created a national unity. Why should not Britain and the empire together form a similar union? The extension of the franchise in 1867 created a large mass of urban voters who were fledgling imperialists. One member of the Commons regretted that the new administration did not recognize ‘the great interest which the majority of the people, and especially the working classes, felt in the subject of the relations between the mother country and her colonies’. Another member regretted the implication ‘that the Government were indifferent to the wishes and aspirations of the colonists, and that the House of Commons had no sympathy with their wants and requirements’.

It was in fact widely believed that Gladstone and his colleagues wished to shake off the colonies as an impediment to their domestic demands and to their Irish concerns, but a great petition from working men to the queen stated that ‘we have heard with alarm and indignation that your Majesty has been advised to consent to give up the colonies’. ‘Imperialism’ was not coined until 1878, but it was anticipated a few years before. The Colonial Society was established in the summer of 1868 to counter any move towards separatism, and it was much encouraged by a policy of state-aided emigration to Australia and elsewhere. W. E. Forster, one of the prime agents of the administration, stated: ‘I believe the time will come when by some means or other statesmen will be able to weld a bond together which will unite the English-speaking people in our colonies at present – unite them with the mother country in one great confederation.’ Ruskin delivered a lecture in 1870 in which he emerged as another arch-imperialist. ‘This is what England must either do or perish: she must found colonies as fast and far as she is able. Formed of her most energetic and worthiest men; seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching these her colonists that their chief virtue is to be fidelity to their country and their first aim is to advance the power England by land and sea …’

Edward Cardwell, Gladstone’s secretary of state for war, was tasked with the reform of the army, which he did by imposing professional standards upon its officers and insisting that promotion should depend upon merit rather than money. This further soured the relationship between queen and prime minister, however, since Victoria considered them to be her soldiers. Cardwell abolished flogging in peacetime and prepared an Army Enlistment Act so that men could join for shorter periods. Just as Cardwell was administering the army, Hugh Childers was reforming the navy by a similar process of economy and efficiency. He reduced the strength of squadrons in distant stations and brought the fleet closer to home.

Gladstone was still something of an enigma in office. The writer Emily Eden provided a succinct portrait of him:

I dare say he is very clever, and he is good-natured, doing his best to bring his mind down to the level of mine, but he fails. He is always above me; and then he does not converse – he harangues – and the more he says the more I don’t understand. Then there is something about High Church people that I can’t define, but I feel it when I am with them – something Jesuitical – and they never let themselves go … In short he is not frivolous enough for me. If he were soaked in boiling water and rinsed until he were twisted into a rope, I do not suppose a drop of fun would ooze out.

He stage-managed a debate of four days to discuss three Irish resolutions, one of them bringing the repeal of compulsory Church rates. He forced through an Irish Church Bill which did not only disestablish the Church of Ireland but also disendowed it. Complicated and controversial as the act was, it helped to placate Ireland by removing grievances from both Roman Catholics and Presbyterians. It was designed, also, to begin a process of reconciliation with the Irish. He spoke for three hours and, according to Disraeli himself, not a phrase was wasted.

In truth he did not know much of Ireland, and had never visited it, but he did have a good sense of timing, or perhaps of occasion. He once said that ‘the most striking gift entrusted to me is an insight into the facts of a particular era and their relation to one another’. He had in other words a highly developed and profoundly intuitive historical sense, and relied upon it to choose the time to act.

In 1870 he prepared an Irish Land Bill of true Gladstonian complexity, but he had remained faithful to his promise when tree-felling. The tenants could now achieve recompense for any improvement they made to their dwellings, and could claim compensation if they were evicted for reasons other than non-payment of rent. It made very little difference in the long term, but it cost Gladstone much power and ingenuity to get it through the Lords, who were naturally hostile to any measure in favour of tenants. But it is significant that Disraeli made very little noise about what might have been considered as anti-Tory legislation. He had covered his eyes, ears and mouth. Gladstone had also suggested to the queen that her family should establish a royal residence in Ireland to please the Irish people. Victoria rejected the idea with horror; she had too many gloomy and draughty palaces.

Other acts were passed in the first Gladstone administration, among them W. E. Forster’s Education Act, which allowed a revolution in educational practice as profound as it was beneficial. It would have been unthinkable to have removed the Church schools; they were the primary and often only source of education. The educational system was run by voluntary schools funded by two main religious bodies, the British and Foreign Schools Society (Nonconformist) and the National Society (Church of England).

Instead Forster increased state grants to voluntary schools, but more importantly he established a system of board schools or schools run by local boards of a non-denominational character. The local boards were set up to establish state schools, and in these establishments a daily act of worship of a non-denominational kind was introduced. They were financed by a local rate and, where appropriate, they were subsidized. This was as far as Forster and Gladstone could go, given the fact that a national school system would be inordinately expensive. But they had gone a long way. In 1870, when the Elementary Education Act was passed, there were fewer than 9,000 schools in England. Twenty years later 20,000 schools had been established. A national education system had finally been agreed. It was inevitable. One of the most bitter opponents of Reform, Robert Lowe, confessed: ‘I believe it will be absolutely necessary that you should prevail on our future masters to learn their letters.’ But they had to learn more than letters. They had to learn deference. They had to learn obedience. They had to learn literacy and numeracy or, as Lowe also put it, ‘an education that may fit them for business’. They had to have sufficient schooling, as Tawney said, to understand a command.

Other ameliorative measures were taken by the Gladstone administration. University religious ‘tests’ were abolished. The secret ballot was introduced, so that each voter could cast his vote in confidence, and another bill was passed against municipal corruption. A Mines Regulation Act was also passed, and imprisonment for debt was partially abolished. Much was achieved relatively quickly, despite John Bright’s warning that ‘you cannot get twenty wagons at once through Temple Bar’. The answer was to remove Temple Bar. (Its actual removal took place in 1878.)

With the slow dissolution of the ice of ages, other reforms followed. The civil service came under the aegis of a competitive examination system to help extirpate the nepotism that was still the bane of England. The three common law courts were replaced by a single Supreme Court of Judicature together with the Court of Appeal; the Court of Chancery was also abolished, thus blowing away the burdens of Bleak House (1853) and Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. A Local Government Board took the place of the Poor Law Board; in time this would become the Ministry of Health, as the state consolidated its hold. From this time forward, in fact, local authorities were established to administer local services. The Local Government Board Act of 1871 set up a central department which was responsible for all the affairs of local government from public health to public improvement; there would follow at a later date various housing officers, sanitary reformers and education inspectors. In an epilogue to this list of acts, some of which proved successful and some not, we may add an extract from a letter Gladstone wrote in March 1868: ‘But above all, if we be just men, we shall go forward in the name of truth and right, bearing this in mind – that when the case is proved, and the hour is come, justice delayed is justice denied.’

New bureaucratic offices and new administrators, after 1870, could not but help the formation of a fully fledged state. By the 1880s the word was in full bloom. How far the ‘state’ would interfere with the liberties of the individual was still an open question.

The term was lent more resonance in the summer of 1870 when, in a whirlwind campaign, Prussia thoroughly defeated France. This was what a highly organized and efficient state might be able to do. Bismarck, preparing for a decisive victory over its old enemy, had set a trap for the French by squabbling over the southern German states. In July 1870 the French declared war on Prussia but were thoroughly overmatched by their militarized enemy; the highly professional Prussian army made short work of the disorganized French. Within six weeks victory was assured. At the ultimate battle in Sedan, at the beginning of September, Napoleon III was captured and his wife Eugénie fled to England for exile. The Germans proceeded to elect an emperor of Germany and to take money and territory from France (including Alsace-Lorraine) as the spoils of war. So did the German empire arise from the ruin of France, with the English simply spectators on the side. The fact that Victoria favoured the Prussians, and adduced them as an example of glorious nationhood, did not improve matters. The myth of France as la grande nation had gone for ever. Now, after the collapse of the Second Empire, the Paris Commune of radicals and working classes might be a source of contagion for the working classes of England. But the important fact was simple: the new Germany held the hegemony in Europe, and no one could or would do anything about it.

In the Place de la Concorde, in Paris, the statue of Strasbourg was covered in black crepe and surrounded by garlands as a token of eternal mourning at its ingestion into the German empire. This ‘new world’, as some called it, was a spectacle worthy to be watched by Thomas Hardy’s President of the Immortals.

It had been a hot summer and, as Trollope remarked, ‘people were beginning to complain of the Thames’. Half the cabinet was unwell. ‘Gladstone’, Earl Granville remarked, ‘told Bessborough yesterday that he sometimes felt alarmed for his own head. Cardwell at the last Cabinet sat close into the fire, looking as if he wished to cut his throat.’ Spirits were very low. The historian Froude declared that ‘English opinion is without weight. English power is ridiculed. Our influence in the councils of Europe is a thing of the past.’ Bismarck joked that if the English army invaded Germany, he would send the Berlin police to arrest them. Lord Salisbury put it differently: ‘The fault really lies in the change in the nature of the spirit of the English nation. They do not wish, as they formerly did, for great national position, and they are glad to seclude themselves from European responsibilities by the protection which their insular position is supposed to give them …’

Gladstone wrote an anonymous article in the Edinburgh Review on the European problem. He spoke for a ‘moral empire’ or ‘a new law of nations’ that might afford ‘Public Right as the governing idea of European policy’. As so often with Gladstone the high road did not lead anywhere in particular, and was in any case quite unsuited to circumstances. But he had already emerged as the ‘People’s William’. Some still small voice within him had whispered: ‘William, be a leader.’ He was already aware of the power which the press had acquired, and as early as October 1862 he had embarked on the first of his public speaking tours in the north where his personal presence, his command over large crowds, and his theatrical delivery, worked wonders. If the crowds did not hear anything, they could read it in the following day’s newspapers, made all the more valuable if the reader had been there in person. John Bright had said that a ‘public speech was more read and told more on opinion than a speech in a debate in the House’. Gladstone’s speeches were carefully stage-managed and meticulously planned, taking their cue from Covent Garden and the Haymarket as well as the music halls. These were the spectacles the Victorians understood.

Gladstone could not get enough of it; he revelled in the cheers, shouts and applause in a way that Disraeli, for example, did not. He was sometimes called ‘Mr Merrypebble’ as opposed to a glad stone. Mrs Gladstone was equally impressed. ‘Oh I shall never forget that day!’ she said of a speech in Tyneside in 1862. ‘It was the first time, you know, that he was received as he deserved to be.’ He explored the phenomenon in his study of Homer: ‘The orator’s work’, he wrote, ‘is an influence principally received from his audience (so to speak) in a vapour, which he pours back upon them in a flood … He cannot follow nor frame ideals; his choice is, to be what his age will have him, what it requires in order to be moved by him, or else not to be at all.’ It is the finest description of how a politician can step forward in the spirit or shape of a people.

He gave the impression of supporting the cotton workers. He gave support to the representatives of trade unions and to the ‘junta’ of trade union leaders. He identified himself with the moral and upright working man. Yet it was not until 1871 that a Trade Union Act was published which removed from unions the threat of a charge of conspiracy and granted their funds the protection of the courts.

So much still remained to be done. In 1871, the Medical Officer for Health found a child of three making the notorious Lucifer matches in a hovel in Bethnal Green. Matches provoked a different kind of furore when in the spring of this year the chancellor of the Exchequer, Robert Lowe, proposed an indirect tax on them. This created mayhem, particularly among the match-workers of Bryant and May, whose unhealthy working conditions were not in any case well rewarded. This was the last straw. The tax was hastily withdrawn at the instigation of Gladstone, but the whole issue came to a head seventeen years later.

It was not an easy time. The Liberals were still composed of fragments and they were confronted with a hostile enemy in the House of Lords. Gladstone’s hope for unifying his party still lay in Ireland. But he had perhaps invested too much of his popularity and his credit in that nation, about which the English were largely indifferent. The efforts over disestablishment and land seemed to make very little impression on the Irish, who remained, as English politicians saw it, perpetually ungrateful. Gladstone felt that the best days of his administration were now over. As he told Clarendon, he felt ‘as a bee might feel if it knew that it would die upon its sting’. In the spring of 1872 Disraeli remarked of the Liberal front bench: ‘You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes.’ In the previous year The Times had commented that ‘the conduct of public business in the House of Commons during the present session has been more injurious to its reputation than the shortcomings of years full of passionate incidents. Nothing is done, legislation is at a deadlock.’ The burden of summer had grown too much; two cabinet ministers suffered nervous breakdowns and Cardwell, who had been seen by Earl Granville staring into the fire, was declared to be insane.

Gladstone and the queen were more at odds than ever. Her ‘repellent power’, as he described it, was generally directed at the prime minister. The depths of her own unpopularity were plumbed at the time of the birth and death of the Prince of Wales’s third son. His birth was greeted by Reynolds’ News as ‘Another Inauspicious Event’ but the death of the boy on the next day was heralded as ‘A Happy Release’. ‘We have much satisfaction’, the newspaper reported, ‘in announcing that the newly-born child of the Prince and Princess of Wales died shortly after its birth, thus relieving the working classes of England from having to support hereafter another addition to the long roll of State beggars they at present maintain.’

The froideur between statesman and monarch extended further when he suggested that she might spend more time in London, ‘as likely to be of great utility in strengthening the Throne under circumstances that require all that can be done in that sense, if indeed we can make it a new means of putting forward the Royal Family in the visible discharge of public duty’. She responded with one of those hysterical explosions to which she was prone. Gladstone’s influence was

really abominable … What killed her beloved Husband? Overwork & worry – what killed Lord Clarendon? The same. What has broken down Mr Bright and Mr Childers & made them retire, but the same: & the Queen, a woman, no longer young is supposed to be proof against all & to be driven and abused till her nerves and health will give way with this worry & agitation and interference in her private life.

There is a hint or implication here that Gladstone himself was responsible for the wreck of ministers, let alone of herself, but that was not really a fit and proper subject with which to accuse the old man. She concluded: ‘she cannot go on’. But of course she could, and did. Her accusations did have some merit, however. Bright, Childers and Clarendon were only the most recent public servants who had died or broken down at a relatively young age; among their predecessors were Pitt the Younger, Castlereagh, Fox, Liverpool and Canning, all of whom expired under sixty. It had much to do with the enervating and feverish atmosphere in which they were obliged to live. They had no rest, and were perhaps the early victims of the Victorian sense of duty and hard work. Their successors were in no better condition. The new burdens of empire, the new competitiveness among the industrial nations and the decline of agriculture all added further anxiety to already anxious public servants.

Queen Victoria relied upon the comfort and support of a much esteemed royal servant, John Brown, who treated her as an anxious father might treat a wayward daughter. As she grew more and more alienated from her family, including the heir apparent, she came to rely more and more on the kindness of those around her. It was said that John Brown was almost too kind, and there are unconfirmed reports that they were unofficially married, but these are tales for children.

Gladstone’s own self-imposed moral duty was to rescue Victoria from the depths of inactivity and unpopularity into which she had fallen. His efforts were not welcomed. ‘She looked very well at me and was kind,’ he reported, ‘but in all her conversations with me she is evidently hemmed in, stops at a certain point, & keeps back the thought which occurs.’ Reports had also reached her of her prime minister’s nocturnal encounters with fallen women. For him they seem to have been part of his mission, or vocation, but for an observer they might carry a very different significance.

Her own condition was not perhaps as serious as she imagined. Her private secretary, General Grey, wrote to the Prince of Wales that ‘neither strength nor health are wanting, were the inclination what it should be. It is simply the long, unchecked habit of self-indulgence – that now makes it impossible for her without some degree of nervous agitation to give up even for ten minutes the gratification of a single inclination or whim.’ She certainly could not bear the boredom of Gladstone’s explanations. ‘He speaks to me’, she said, ‘as if I were a public meeting.’

Gladstone himself was seriously contemplating resignation. He told Victoria that he did not wish to spend his old age ‘under the strain of that perpetual contention which is inseparable from his present position’. The failure of his Irish University Bill in 1873, which in effect would have placed Catholic institutions under the control of Dublin University, was simply the last burden. He signalled his intention to resign, but there was the problem of Disraeli. She had called for him to form an administration in place of Gladstone, but he demurred. He would have been more than happy to accept his sovereign’s wish, but not in the circumstances of the present House of Commons. He did not wish to lead another minority government and, privately, he wanted to give more time for his opponents to split even further. He wanted them to carry on, ever more desperate. Gladstone had no choice but to resume his yoke.

The queen had already recovered much of her popularity. What saved her was her son. It might have ended in a long-drawn-out disaster but for the sudden and dangerous illness of ‘Bertie’ on the tenth anniversary of his father’s death. At the end of November 1871, the Prince of Wales contracted typhoid fever at the very time that his father had been stricken with the same sickness. He seemed to be progressing, but then relapsed to the extent that Victoria hurried to Sandringham where he lay. On 11 December a newspaper wrote ominously: ‘The Prince still lives, and we may still therefore hope.’ Three days later, on the anniversary of Albert’s death, the nation waited in suspense. He came through. As he slowly recovered the country was inclined to support the queen. It might be asked how an irate nation intent on criticizing the monarchy should turn into a nation filled with pity for her. Was it because she was no longer seen as a queen but a mother? As a phrase it sounds well worn, but as a human truth it may have some resonance. We must also remember the fickleness and madness of crowds.

Victoria had also come out of hiding. She was driven to St Paul’s with her son and daughter-in-law in an open landau to deliver her thanks. From this time forward she was celebrated as the ‘mother’ of the people. Another consequence seemed to follow. At the Thanksgiving service Gladstone was coolly received by the assembled crowds; Disraeli, on the other hand, was widely applauded. Reasons could be found. Disraeli had begun the forward march to ‘Tory democracy’. Gladstone, despite or because of his victory in the general election, was considered unfairly as a bulwark against change. Disraeli was a ‘character’, considered something of a card, larger than life. A Conservative saw him in the Carlton Club a little while later, as still as marble and staring into space ‘as of one who looks into another world’. ‘I will tell you what he was thinking about,’ another member said to him. ‘He was thinking that he will be Prime Minister again.’ At a speech at the Crystal Palace, in the spring of 1872, he proclaimed that the newly enfranchised voters were Conservative ‘in the purest and loftiest sense’. They were ‘proud of belonging to a great country, and wish to maintain its greatness’. His purpose was to create a coherent political programme at the very moment when Gladstone was in difficulties. He spoke of ‘the three great objects of the Tory Party or, as I will venture to call it, the National Party’. The established institutions of the country were to be maintained; the empire must be sustained and the conditions of the people improved. Imperialism and the status quo were his principal themes. Disraeli cleverly knotted the nation with the monarchy in domestic circumstances. ‘England is a domestic country. Here the home is revered and the hearth is sacred. The nation is represented by a family … and in the hour of public adversity, in the anxious conjuncture of public affairs the nation rallies round the Family and the Throne, and its spirit is animated and sustained by the expression of public affection.’

The affection for Victoria herself was further heartened by a failed attempt on her life just as she returned from the Thanksgiving at St Paul’s to Buckingham Palace. As her carriage made its way through the Garden Gate a young man by the name of Arthur O’Connor brandished a pistol and called out in a weak voice: ‘Take that from a Fenian’. Uncharacteristically Victoria lost her equanimity on this occasion. ‘I was trembling very much, and a sort of shiver ran through me.’ She grabbed the arm of a lady-in-waiting and called out ‘Save me!’ John Brown, the devoted servant, grabbed the boy and held him fast, for which service he was awarded a gold medal. But the threat of assassination only increased the queen’s popularity, despite her confessing that ‘the fright caused by the attempt, the Queen felt for long afterwards’. The boy was taken and sentenced to a period in Newgate. She seemed to be impregnable.

It may be the merest coincidence that the balance of the parties began to swing in favour of the Conservatives. Growing dissatisfaction with the Liberals was manifest when the Liberal chief whip alluded to the danger posed by ‘the apathy and political discontent which is now so prevalent in our majority’.

In this year the postcard was introduced.

21

The Tichborne affair

He was known as ‘the claimant’ in headlines or on newspaper placards. His was the most famous trial of the nineteenth century, eclipsing those of Queen Caroline and Oscar Wilde; he was not only the talk of the town but also the talk of the world. Roger Tichborne was heir to a wealthy baronetcy. In the spring of 1853 he disappeared from England and eventually sailed to South America. In the following year he took ship from Rio de Janeiro, and after surviving a shipwreck he made his way to the Australian outpost of Wagga Wagga. According to the story he maintained, he set up as a butcher under the name of Tomas Castro. It was a good story. The transition from an heir of a baronetcy to a butcher was sufficiently startling in a world where even the slightest gradation in status was a matter of deep controversy.

The Dowager Lady Tichborne, after the death of her husband in 1862 and her younger son in 1866, grew disconsolate. Roger Tichborne, missing, was now the eleventh baronet. She advertised for her eldest son in The Times and elsewhere, her appeal even reaching the inhabitants of Wagga Wagga. Here all became known. Tichborne, or Castro, had already dropped hints about his past, and he was urged on all sides to sail to England and claim his inheritance. On 25 December 1866 he arrived in London. His mother seems to have known him at once. ‘He looks like his father,’ she said, ‘and his ears look like his uncle’s.’ Other members of the family were not so sure and denied any connection with the man. How could close relatives differ so much on the question of identity? Was it a question of inheritance? And why had Tichborne come so late to claim his share? It was a conundrum, made more complex by a report that ‘Roger Tichborne’ was in fact Arthur Orton, a butcher from Wapping. Confusion had been further compounded.

In London the law courts were never far away, and the funds for Tichborne’s claim began to be contributed. A putative baronet was a good investment. But he had also elicited public sympathy. The 1860s was the high point of what was known as ‘sensation literature’, which specialized in money, wills, murder and the dark secrets of apparently respectable families. It exploited the melodrama of the living room. The Tichborne case might have come from the pages of a ‘shilling shocker’, and part of its notoriety came from its coincidence with one of the most powerful fictional fashions of the time. Roger Tichborne, as he was now generally called, brought suit against Colonel Lushington, who was then resident at Tichborne House. The trial was so popular that it had to be moved from the Court of Common Pleas to the more commodious Court of Queen’s Bench, wherein it lasted from March 1871 to May 1872. The Era complained that ‘no one can go into any company whatever without being asked to discuss the matter’. The image of the claimant was modelled by Madame Tussaud and the queue to see it stretched down the street.

Matters other than notoriety were also at stake. The case of the claimant was taken up by radicals and what were known as the ‘artisanal’ class. Here was a poor man, a quondam butcher, who was now being cheated out of his inheritance by a band of aristocrats, landowners and property agents. The fact that he was now a baronet by his own admission did not make any difference. A phrase of the day was ‘Fair play’s a jewel’. As in the case of Queen Caroline, a victim was being hounded by the authorities for the sole reason that he or she challenged their power. The case was discussed in mechanics’ institutes and popular debating societies, at mass meetings and public houses; it became the object of humour in comedies and music-hall acts. A network of publicans set up a fighting fund for him, while the members of other trades from cab drivers to cabinetmakers contributed what they could. Two newspapers were devoted to his cause. The ‘claimant’ himself gave a series of public addresses around the country. He did not wish to be recognized as Sir Roger Tichborne. He claimed only the right to fair trial; he added that he was the victim of a conspiracy. He even led a large march to Wapping, where he was once supposed to have been a butcher.

The trial at bar of the ‘claimant’ for charges of perjury lasted from April 1873 to February 1874 in front of a panel of three judges. The populace, largely in favour of Tichborne, set up a fresh clamour. ‘Never was there a trial in England, I believe, since that memorable trial of Charles I,’ Lord Chief Justice Cockburn said in that year, ‘which has excited more the attention of the English than this.’ Ruskin was more contemptuous. ‘Just think … of that floor of idiotism that spent a couple of years or so of its life in writing, printing and reading the Tichborne trial.’ The claimant was eventually found guilty on two charges of perjury and was sentenced to two periods of seven years which he served in an exemplary manner, winning converts within the prison service itself. That might have been the end of the matter, but the interests of others were now at stake.

The claimant’s barrister, Edward Kenealy, had been disbarred for his behaviour in the courtroom; but his career then took a turn. He established ‘The Magna Carta Association of Great Britain’, invoking the ancient liberties of the English people; he was styled ‘the People’s Friend and the Champion of Poor “Sir Roger”’. He was duly elected as a radical member of parliament for Stoke. The entire episode contradicts the claims that radicalism was dead between the death of Chartism and the birth of socialism. The Tichborne claim had awakened the sympathy of those who opposed compulsory vaccination, the Lunacy Laws and the Contagious Diseases Act, where the duties of the state were supposed to override the rights of individuals. His name was deployed wherever the freedoms of the people were challenged. A banner at one Easter Monday demonstration spelled out ‘Release Tichborne, secure triennial parliaments and the prosperity of the people’.

When he came out of prison he opened a tobacconist’s shop but, popular acclaim having slowly dissipated, he did not succeed in the enterprise and died in poverty near Baker Street. Yet what had created the furore in the first place? The Tichborne case did attract for a while the fugitive interest of the crowds because it represented all that was wild and strange. The most sensational crimes of the period involved fraud or blackmail, and the case of Tichborne brought them into prominence. The reigning obsession was with what lay just below the surface, a world of nervous tension where the conventions of ordinary life concealed the burden of secrets and of irregular relationships. This was a world of confused identities where no one had a secure home. This was the world of Tichborne.

The case was of further interest because the Victorians were preoccupied by theories of heredity and of inherited characteristics. It filtered through the pages of Darwin into the most scandalous weekly. Could a butcher really be a baronet, or a baronet a butcher? It transgressed all the lines of respectable society, if anyone now knew what respectable society was.

22

The angel

‘Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace … they take us body and soul to themselves and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them give us in return?’ Thus spoke Marian Halcombe in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). Wives had no property rights and, as mere spouses, were deprived of their previous identities; at the same time they were incarcerated in the domestic world. The very being or legal existence of the woman was suspended. The husband could take her dresses or her jewels and sell them. She had no rights in the matter. So how can it be that in much social commentary women were mistresses of the house while being legally invisible? In public discourse of the nineteenth century they were disregarded; it was quite a different matter in private. It was one of the great lacunae of the late nineteenth century.

At the close of the eighteenth century Mary Wollstonecraft, the first systematic feminist, had died leaving the world her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which was essentially a plea to middle-class women ‘to endeavour to acquire strength, both mind and body’. It had not gone unobserved; the then nascent trade unions, particularly those of the shopkeepers and box-makers, contained a large percentage of women. Women were of course active and even predominant in the still flourishing cottage industries of wall-hangings and lace-making. The notion of the married woman as keeper of the hearth and the husband as the bearer of the torch – indeed the whole notion of ‘separate spheres’ in the middle-class sense – was not yet born.

By the 1860s, however, the full outline of ‘the working man’ had developed. But what of his wife, his sister, his daughter and even his mother? Could they any longer be denied their identity? And what also of the unmarried woman? The spinsters and widows were objects of concern, but they had at least one advantage: they were, relatively speaking, free. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a married woman owned no ‘real’ property (land being the principal item), and, in principle, no ‘moveable’ property. She was herself the property of her husband under the law – in legal terminology, a feme covert rather than a feme sole. In cases of divorce, which in each separate instance required a special act of parliament, the husband was granted custody of the children as a matter of course. Any money the wife earned became the property of her husband. The very money in her purse was her husband’s. She could not sue or be sued. Her husband could treat her with as much brutality as he wished, confident that the complacency of the courts would overlook this.

It had not always been so. Anglo-Saxon women, when married, had rights and freedoms which under the Normans and their successors they were not to enjoy again until 1870. On issues of property, however, working women were in a superior position to those of the middle or upper classes for the simple reason that they had little of it. In fact many workingclass women availed themselves of the practical advantages of cohabitation, without marriage and with few questions asked, through the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Yet the notion of ‘separate spheres’ became more and more pronounced in public discourse. No one can say precisely when it was first coined, or by whom, but it proved immensely influential. The quintessential mid-Victorian image is of a man looking out of a window with his hands clasped behind his head, and of the woman, sitting in an over-elaborately decorated chair, absorbed in needlework with her head demurely downcast. For the woman the world was home; for the man the world was the outer world itself.

In many occupations, however, the work was separated by task and not by gender. On the Severn and in Shropshire, the men would build the frame for the coracle while the women would sew on the skin; in agriculture the men would cut and the women would gather, while in fishing the men would catch and the women would gut the fish and sell it. Other examples suggest that this duopoly reflected the sexual politics of the time. The butler and the housekeeper, the male coal digger and the female coal heaver, the housemaid and the footman, the male cotton spinner and the female weaver, are examples of separate but interlocking spheres. Male protest only arose when man and woman competed for the same role; hence the savage reactions to the first women doctors.

Victorian women were subject to any number of privations when they appeared in public. Enormous skirts were fashionable in the mid-1850s, and there were cartoons of men being pushed out of the windows of omnibuses by billowing fabric, and of women stuck in doorways. Many of them wore cumbersome crinolines on Sundays, but during the working day they resorted to any number of expedients. The pit girls, for example, wore men’s trousers. The fishwives wore several layers of skirts which were fastened so that the lower legs and feet were left bare; when the time came to prepare the fish for market, they wrapped themselves in large oilskin aprons. The female inmates of the workhouses wore a standard calico chemise, a flannel petticoat and a grey linsey skirt; a shawl, an apron and a pair of wool stockings completed the cheaply manufactured uniform. It was not only cheap; it never changed, and through the decades grew more and more antiquated. They were interchangeable, too, and the women would simply be given the last out of the wash.

Other restrictions prevailed. In the Girls’ Own Paper Mrs Jamieson wrote that in the morning young females must use ‘pure water as a preparatory ablution; after which they must abstain from all sudden gusts of passion, and particularly eschew envy, as that gives the skin a sallow paleness’. The young woman (although the term ‘woman’ was not to be used in demure households according to Dickens) must not stay up late, play cards or read novels by candlelight. Callisthenics, essentially waving the arms about, was the only suitable physical exercise. Female factory workers were in fact prescribed callisthenics as one of the day’s duties.

One of the other duties of the woman was doing the laundry, a job so laborious and so time-consuming that, if females had the means, they paid someone else to do it. In the 1861 census, professional laundry workers numbered 167,607, of whom 99 per cent were women. Home medicine was also the prerogative of women; male doctors and male pharmacists sold the drugs but the women of the house prepared and administrated the dosages. The women were also responsible for preparing home medicines, generally of an herbal nature. It was as much a part of the woman’s role as baking and preparing bread. The advertisements for patent medicines were largely directed at women and women’s fears, as in ‘the jeopardy of life is immensely increased without such a simple precaution as Eno’s Fruit Salts’. Epsom salts and senna leaves were also recommended to keep the ‘system’ in full working order. Advertisements were displayed for small hand-powered electrostatic machines with a pair of contacts for any part of the body including a ‘vaginal attachment’, the latter often used for ‘hysterical’ women. It was part of the medical vocabulary of the age.

Three Contagious Diseases Acts were passed in 1864, 1866 and 1869 that permitted the forced arrest of women deemed to be prostitutes; they were detained in isolation hospitals, for a period of approximately six weeks, where they were exposed to vaginal examination and other internal inspections. This was quite contrary to any belief in individual freedom, or the rights enshrined in habeas corpus, and the loud protests have been said to inaugurate the movement for women’s rights. It was said that young workingclass females, in particular, were being taken off the streets and forced to undergo what seemed to be a form of legalized rape. The acts were repealed in 1884, having done nothing but instil anxiety and outrage in the workingclass population. These were some of the attributes of male power.

The pressure on women increased as the towns and cities multiplied. Those turned off the livings on the land were forced to resort to hand-weaving just when it was challenged by the power loom. Neither poor diets nor hours of work nor conditions of labour managed to halt this movement into the towns. The plight of the women was aggravated by their situation. The men themselves encouraged many pregnancies, even if these augmented the exhaustion of their wives. This had primarily an economic purpose: the larger the number of children, the greater the eventual family income. The abolition of child labour, therefore, was only in part prompted by humanitarian concerns. Labouring children, blameless and exploited through they were, had the power to put their parents out of work, or at least to lower their wages.

The more respectable ladies of the middle-class house rarely had to deal with such conditions, although they were confronted by such forbidding texts as Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) and Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House (1854), books of vastly different tendency, but both of which helped to fasten the fetters on the home-bound wife. Patmore’s verses were not directed at an angel, or woman, or girl, or matron, or matriarch – or indeed at anything that might be recognized as human. The ‘angel of the house’ is a bundle of superterrestrial attributes, about which the female reader can only read and dream or weep:

And if he once, by shame oppress’d,

A comfortable word confers,

She leans and weeps against his breast,

And seems to think the sin was hers.

Virginia Woolf said that it was the duty of any female author to kill the angel of the house.

Mrs Beeton began her famous domestic sermons at the age of twenty-one in The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, but appearances are deceptive. Most of her recipes were lifted from earlier cookery books. She wrote a good and lucid prose, however, and she performed the inestimable service of putting a list of ingredients before the recipes themselves. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, first published in October 1861, contained the recipes but seasoned them with advice on such matters as servants and first aid. It was a vade mecum for any middle-class woman aspiring to respectability. In the opening she quotes from Oliver Goldsmith on the nature of separate spheres:

The modest virgin, the prudent wife or the careful matron are much more serviceable in life than petticoated philosophers, blustering heroines or virago queens. She who makes her husband and her children happy, who reclaims the one from vice and trains up the other in virtue, is a much greater character than ladies described in romances, whose whole occupation is to murder mankind with shafts from their quiver, or from their eyes.

Some might applaud, and others despise, the sentiments.

It would not be too surprising to discover, therefore, that hundreds of thousands of women signed anti-slavery petitions at the time when that cause excited maximum controversy. It could be inferred that they felt immediate or instinctive sympathy with the enslaved. One anti-slavery activist, George Thompson, stated in 1834 that ‘where they existed they did everything … In a word they formed the cement of the Antislavery building – without their aid we never should have been united.’ Wilberforce did not necessarily approve of their presence, however, and stated that ‘for ladies to meet, to publish, to go from house to house stirring up petitions – these appear to me proceedings unsuited to the female character as delineated in Scripture’. In fact Scripture had nothing to say on the subject. Philanthropists could also be bigots.

Two waves of female petitions against slavery, in 1830–31 and in 1833, included those from 108 English, four Welsh, thirteen Scots and four Irish towns and villages. The female members of the dissenting chapels added 15,000 signatures. The Wesleyan Methodist anti-slavery petition in 1833 was signed by 100,000 women. The Sheffield Female Anti-Slavery Society represented the cause as ‘not exclusively a political but pre-eminently a moral one; one therefore on which the humble-minded reader of the bible which enriches his cottage shelf is immeasurably a better politician than the statesman versed in the intrigues of Cabinets’. This is the measure of the Victorian woman, no less practical and earnest than her male counterpart.

Many men demanded equal pay for women not on the grounds of equality but for fear that they would undercut and steal their jobs. In power looming, for example, men were greatly outnumbered by women. Some weaving associations made it a rule not to accept any man unless all the female members of the family working in the trade were union members.

It could even be suggested that the workingclass woman, though disadvantaged in most ways, had some consolations; she was as often as not the true mistress of the home. Having no prospects of a gradual amelioration of her and her family’s position, she was spared the bitterness and frustration of her middle-class contemporaries, and with no land, money or portion to offer it was possible that she could even marry for love. The upper-class woman, on the other hand, though a mere counter in the marriage market, could console herself with the thought that once married she would move to a comfortable home, replete with amusements and distractions; she was spared the worst horrors of child-raising, and she might have the opportunity to travel, write or translate. The middle-class woman, for all her apparent comfort, was arguably the most constricted; she had no real authority, and upon her fell all the force of Victorian moral scrutiny, while the intellectual morsels that passed for an education often served to aggravate longing and resentment. These women often became the mettlesome pioneers of political and social liberation.

One notable opponent of women’s freedom was the most liberated of females. Queen Victoria wrote that she was ‘most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write … [against] this mad wicked folly of “Women’s Rights” with all of its attendant follies on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety …’ We may still consider this to be the conventional wisdom of the period.

One of its most notable challengers, however, was Annie Besant. In 1877 she and Charles Bradlaugh were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act which had been passed twenty years before. Both of them might be described as professional agitators who delighted in turning the law and the world on its head. Bradlaugh was a professed atheist who would soon provoke uproar in the House of Commons, while Besant gained national prominence as a supporter of female workers. She was self-aware and self-confident from the start. ‘I hate affectation of all kind,’ she once remarked. ‘I never could bear those ridiculous women who cannot step over a straw without expecting the man who is walking with them to offer his hand. I always said to the man, “No, no. I have got legs of my own. Don’t trouble yourself.”’ Her personal likes and dislikes were plain.

Besant was said to be absolutely insensitive to the feelings of others. This is unjust but, in the context of her pioneering efforts, it is understandable. She had soon become aware of the social evils all around her through the eyes of a radical lawyer, William Prowting Roberts, a notable Chartist who took on the cause of the coal miner. ‘I have heard him tell how he had seen them toiling, naked to the waist, with short petticoats barely reaching their knees, rough, foul-tongued, brutalized out of all womanly decency and grace.’ This was the horror world of the nineteenth century, the gulf into which all ‘Victorian values’ slipped. Besant married a young priest, but the marriage was not successful as she slowly crept closer to atheism. In the summer of 1874 she gave her first public lecture at the Cooperative Institute in Castle Street off Oxford Street on ‘The Political Status of Women’. From that time forward, while speaking in public, she experienced power and pleasure which would uplift her through all the personal perils of her political life.

Besant and Bradlaugh established a publishing company, one of whose first pamphlets, The Fruits of Philosophy, was prosecuted as an obscene publication. It was a treatise on the methods and virtues of birth control, a subject hitherto so mysterious that 133,000 copies were sold between March and June 1887. The test of obscenity was ‘whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall’. An excerpt from the transcript of the trial may be illuminating:

SOLICITORM GENERAL: It is not whether work of this kind can be submitted to a college of philosophy, but whether it can be sold at the price of sixpence about the streets of London and elsewhere …

ANNIE BESANT: Do you, gentlemen, think for one moment that myself and my co-defendant are fighting the simple question of the sale or publication of this sixpenny volume of Dr Knowlton’s? … We have a much larger interest at stake, and one of vital interest to the public, one which we shall spend our whole lives in trying to uphold … there is no harm in gratifying the sexual instinct if it can be gratified without injury to anyone else, and without harm to the morals of society …

The name of Malthus was brought into the proceedings as testimony to the fact that the population was growing too rapidly and should be curtailed.

ANNIE BESANT: I have put it to you as plainly as I can the meaning of the word obscene, which will govern your verdict: I have pleaded that our intent is good, because it conduces to human and social happiness. I have shown you from Malthus – and he has never yet been disproved – what the law of population is … I have seen four generations of human beings being crowded together in one small room, simply divided into two of three beds, and I will ask you, after such an experience as that, you wonder that I risk even prison and a fine if I can bring some salvation to those poor whose misery I have seen.

She then turned to the other Victorian misery, early death. She stated that the death rate in Manchester was 117 in 1,000, and in Liverpool it rose to 132 in 1,000.

Put before yourselves clearly whether it is either moral or right to allow children to be brought into the world inoculated with the predisposition to be attacked by these preventable diseases, instead of putting, as I believe you ought to do, a check which would effectively relieve the population so terribly overcrowded; and you have to consider whether by refusing to apply such a check, we are not, by the very refusal, making a large class of criminals …

The origins of many Victorian prejudices are here, both in those who attacked a sixpenny pamphlet for encouraging birth control and in those who saw large numbers of children as responsible for a range of deadly diseases, a burden on the world’s resources and a terrible seed of crime. Certain crimes were, according, to Besant, specific. One was the practice of baby-farming, where unwanted children were given into the custody of men, women and even children quite unfit for the task. Besant referred to ‘a child three years of age employed as a ganger over eight other children …’ The prospect here was of early death. Another practice was of ‘overlying’ children, or in other words pressing them or suffocating them to death. Besant told the court that ‘when you consider that the number of these children who, if they had been born in a higher rank, would not have died, is calculated by Professor Fawcett as 1,150,000 you will see what a large and important question this is …’ Besant then cited John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy on the need for ‘plain language’, especially when Mill ‘pressed on all those who marry the duty of limiting their families’.

She continued then to describe the mother of a large and poor family who was labouring at the washtub three or four days after giving birth. ‘What am I to do?’ the woman asked her. ‘There is another mouth to feed. The children are there and must be provided for, and I must get about.’ I must get about. This was the Victorian imperative.

In his summing up the solicitor general, prosecuting the case, said:

this is a dirty, filthy book and the test of it is that no human being could allow that book to lie on his table; no decently educated English husband would allow even his wife to have it, and yet it is to be told to me, forsooth, that anybody may have this book in the city of London or elsewhere who can pay sixpence for it! … The object of it is to enable persons to have sexual intercourse, and not have that which in the order of Providence is the natural result of sexual intercourse.

Besant and Bradlaugh were sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and then deemed not guilty on appeal. There is a mingling here of Low Church piety, mid-century moralism, social prejudice and sexual hypocrisy which seems to be thoroughly Victorian.

23

The empress

Gladstone had been denied the chance of resignation by Disraeli’s refusal to take up the administration. But there were other ways to skin a cat. Gladstone waited for an excuse or an opportunity. When his plans to reduce the army and naval estimates were blocked by the relevant ministers, on the grounds that they could be squeezed no further, it furnished as good a reason as any other. When he announced the dissolution of parliament to his colleagues, it came as a great surprise. The earl of Kimberley wrote in his diary that most of the cabinet ‘had not heard a whisper previously of such an intention on his part’. It was a ‘thunder clap’.

On the morning of Saturday, 24 January 1874, Disraeli opened The Times to read the news that Gladstone had called an immediate dissolution; the paper was filled with Gladstone’s election address, together with his pledge to abolish income tax. Disraeli summoned his senior advisers and, working through the night and day, prepared a manifesto for the Monday newspapers.

Gladstone had not found an issue with which he could identify himself with the electorate. His immediate record had been lacking lustre. His fiscal policy of austerity seemed the last word of an exhausted government. His only slogan was ‘the free breakfast table’, by repealing duties on tea and sugar, but it was not enough. His skills failed him, and Disraeli sailed on with 350 seats (100 of them uncontested). Gladstone could muster 242, and he retired to the back benches.

It was a significant election for other reasons. The Irish nationalists of the Home Rule League became the third-largest party in the form of fifty-eight seats, causing many fervent calculations among the Lords and Commons. It was the first election that employed a secret ballot. This may also have had something to do with the Irish success. Some observers also complimented the liquor trade on its benefactions to the Tory party: where the Liberals and Nonconformists might migrate to the chapel and meeting houses, the Conservatives seemed to have a monopoly on the pubs. That at least is how a disgruntled Gladstone saw it. Lord Hartington, known as ‘Harty Tarty’, took over from Gladstone as leader of the Liberal party in the Commons and Earl Granville in the Lords. They were much closer in background and attitude to the old Whig party, and many Liberal MPs regarded Gladstone as leaning too far towards radicalism. They were glad to be rid of him.

The Conservatives, who had not possessed a majority for thirty-three years, had earned the right to be surprised. But certain things were in their favour. Gladstone had called the election at the worst time of year. Disraeli’s Reform legislation seemed at last to be bearing fruit. The organization of the party itself was also greatly improved. The dominant voice and personality were of course those of Disraeli, and he took the opportunity of sending one of his more vocal opponents, Lord Salisbury, to the India Office. This seemed to satisfy everyone for the time being. Nothing was to be achieved by bluster or bullying. All was conducted formally and with dignity. He mastered his ministers by mood and manners, but not by his policies. His ministers assumed a fertile mind on his part but, as the new home secretary, R. A. Cross, put it, ‘such did not prove to be the case; on the contrary he had to rely entirely on the suggestions of his colleagues and as they themselves had only just come into office, and that suddenly, there was some difficulty in framing the Queen’s speech’.

Disraeli’s métier was not in the detail but in the broad brush and the theatrical sweep. Victoria had long since tired of Gladstone’s manner and matter. She bridled at his nervous formality, viewed his Liberal policies as anti-monarchical, and considered him to be a very dangerous and even mad old man. Disraeli was different. He could have flattered his way out of a condemned cell and stolen the axe. He laid on the praise and congratulation with a very large trowel, and made sure that their respective opinions never clashed. He was hyperbolical to the point of fatuity, and in his correspondence she could become ‘princess of the Faery’ or the ‘Faery Queen’.

Where Gladstone’s first ministry had sprinted forward as if the hurdles were rushing towards it, Disraeli’s second administration at first managed few leaps. He was faced with a meagre opposition, with Gladstone taking what might have been seen as permanent retirement, but in any case he seemed averse to any kind of radical change on electoral reform or anything else. Disraeli was looking old, his pale and emaciated face contrasting oddly with his surprisingly dark hair.

The session of 1875 was more effective. A Public Health Act consolidated previous sanitary legislation on fresh water, street lighting and refuse collection. An Artisans’ Dwellings Act provided the funds for local councils to buy up areas of slum dwellings and rebuild them. Two acts equalized the legal status of employers and employees. An Agricultural Holdings Act compensated rural tenants for the improvements they had made. This was known as ‘suet pudding legislation’, reassuring and necessary, if rather bland, but it was part of Disraeli’s ‘one nation’ attempt to improve the conditions of the working people. The Conservatives under Disraeli did a signal service to the nation’s welfare without gaining much praise, and were happy to continue in much the same vein for the next two years.

In June 1875, Disraeli told the Commons:

permissive legislation is the characteristic of a free people. It is easy to adopt compulsory legislation when you have to deal with those who only exist to obey but in a free country, and especially in a country like England, you must trust to persuasion and example as the two great elements, if you wish to effect any considerable change in the manners and customs of the people.

Government, in other words, was slow and difficult, but by 1876 the principal measures of public health and sanitation had been passed. And in truth Disraeli’s heart was not wholly moved by domestic legislation. Berlin, Paris and Moscow were his orbit, not Manchester, Birmingham or Nottingham.

Inventions seem to have streamed forth in this period. A cable was laid across the Atlantic in 1876, and Graham Bell invented the telephone in the same year. The internal combustion engine was manufactured for sale in 1876. Electric light companies were established in the 1880s, and the turbine engine was invented in 1884. The first motor car drove out in 1885. The observer seems to be in the position of H. G. Wells’s time traveller moving through the factory system into the machine age.

Gladstone seemed to have become more amiable. ‘The Queen’, Granville wrote to him, ‘told me last night, that she had never known you so remarkably agreeable.’ This was the period when he spoke of retirement, and the imminent withdrawal from the fray might have encouraged high spirits. He wrote to Granville: ‘I see no public advantage in my continuing to act as the leader of the Liberal Party.’ Yet he still maintained a formidable presence. Disraeli reported to the queen, on one parliamentary session: ‘Mr Gladstone not only appeared but rushed into the debate … The new members trembled and fluttered like small birds when a hawk is in the air.’

Disraeli was also undergoing a change. Despite the legislative activity, for which he was nominally responsible, he had not proved to be as effective in government as in opposition, and a colleague complained that ‘in the ordinary conduct of business Disraeli shows himself at every turn quite incompetent to guide the House’. He was a born oppositionist, and even his advancement of the Reform Act might be construed as a charge against ‘the enemy’. The truth was that he was wearing out. He was often ill with bronchitis and gout, while the hours spent in the Commons were agony for him. Everyone saw the choice ahead of him – retirement or the House of Lords. Retirement was out of the question, and in 1876 he became earl of Beaconsfield. His last speech in the Commons was devoted to the loyalty owed to the empire. As he left the chamber he took one last look at the scene of his endeavours, and then passed quietly behind the Speaker’s chair; he was wearing a long white coat and ‘dandified’ lavender gloves. A political opponent, Sir William Harcourt, wrote to tell him, that ‘henceforth the game will be like a chessboard when the queen is gone …’

The year before, he had earned the distinction of purchasing a large interest in the Suez Canal from the khedive of Egypt. It was the passage to India, far superior to the Cape route, but it was unfortunately in the hands of the French and the khedive. With his flair for scheming and what his enemies called duplicity, he relied upon the imminent bankruptcy of the khedive himself. Disraeli set Baron Rothschild’s son to expedite negotiations, which were sealed when the Rothschilds agreed to lend the required £4 million. Disraeli wrote to Victoria: ‘It is just settled. You have it, Madame.’ Then he wrote to a confidante: ‘The Fairy is in ecstasies.’ Many of his colleagues deprecated the manner and method of Disraeli’s coup. Stafford Northcote, the chancellor of the Exchequer, remarked: ‘suspicion will be excited that we mean to buy ourselves quietly into a preponderating position, and then turn the whole thing into an English property. I don’t like it.’ Others were more enthusiastic. Derby commented: ‘so far as I can make out the purchase is universally popular. I might say even more, it seems to have created a feeling of something like enthusiasm far in excess of the real importance of the transaction.’ Derby was not sure of the consequences, however, and it was becoming apparent that Disraeli did not have a purposeful foreign policy. It was said that Derby, at the Foreign Office, would not look ahead, and Disraeli could not look ahead. Disraeli’s methods were fitful at best. He conceded to a correspondent that: ‘Turkish and Egyptian affairs get worse every day … we have plenty of troubles ahead, but perhaps they will vanish when encountered.’ This is another example of fairy-tale diplomacy.

Another episode of Disraeli’s fairy tale was manifest in the spring of 1876. During the previous winter the Prince of Wales spent four months travelling in India, and such was the enthusiasm for his visit that it occurred to Disraeli that the queen herself might just as well become empress of India. In truth the suggestion might have come from the queen. It would be a new symbol of British power, making the queen the imperial equal of the tsar of Russia. She revelled in the appointment, and enjoyed wearing the jewels that the princes and princesses of her new acquisition bestowed upon her. To some of her subjects it seemed to be a kind of heathenism and only a fine line from Roman Catholic superstition. Others believed that it was a preparatory move for changing the title of queen to that of empress of the British Isles.

Another name must now be added to the sum of talent and ambition. Joseph Chamberlain came out of Birmingham like a railway train, with which he was contemporaneous; he was a screw manufacturer and a Liberal whose pre-eminent talents of oratory and organization made him mayor of that city in 1873. A few years before, he had joined the Birmingham Education Society, but soon enough he stepped out of that small circle, and in 1867 established a National Education League. Just as Forster was devising his own education bill, Chamberlain asserted that ‘the vast numerical majority of the people of this country are in favour of national, compulsory, free and unsectarian education’. Chamberlain went into battle. His name spread widely enough, and one of his early biographers, Alexander Mackintosh, remarked: ‘he is already hailed amongst working class radicals everywhere as the coming leader of democracy’.

Chamberlain was at this stage in his life a radical Liberal, a dissident who had little affection for what might be called the ministerial Liberals in the House of Commons. He was elected to represent St Paul’s Ward in Birmingham, and began his campaign to change and cleanse the city. Once he had been elected as mayor he set out a programme of public works that was variously designated as ‘municipal socialism’ and ‘gas-and-water socialism’. He promoted the resources of lighting and clean water; he advanced slum clearance and rebuilding, all of which granted him a national reputation as the civic amenities of Birmingham were transformed.

It was now inevitable that he would move towards Westminster. In 1876 he was returned unopposed for Birmingham, and soon enough his talent for, or obsession with, organization prompted him to bring together the radical Liberals in the Commons as a distinct body. He noted that ‘the atmosphere is strange, unsympathetic, almost hostile’. There was soon a definite division between what might be called the conventional Liberals and the devotees of Chamberlain. At a later date Herbert Asquith, one of his opponents, said that Chamberlain ‘had the manners of a cad and the tongue of a bargee’. His language could, in a word of the day, be ‘choice’. He said that Disraeli was ‘a man who never told the truth except by accident’ and of Salisbury that he was ‘the spokesman of a class – of a class to which he himself belongs – who toil not neither do they spin’. Salisbury described this as a ‘Jacobin’ attack.

But the matters of the outer world soon encroached upon private politics. Early in 1876 it became clear that the Balkans were in a state of revolt from the Turkish empire. The great powers of Germany, Russia and Austria brought pressure to bear on Turkey, which was accused of maltreating its Christian subjects. When in 1876 the Bulgarians rose against the sultan and his empire, the retribution was savage; it is estimated that some 12,000 Bulgarians were murdered by Turkey’s irregular soldiers. Disraeli was inclined to take such reports lightly. They were a distraction, and no more. But Gladstone brooded on them, and when he brooded, a whirlwind together with hail and lightning might rise. He asked Disraeli, in his last weeks in the Commons before becoming earl of Beaconsfield, to institute an inquiry. Disraeli was concerned only to preserve British interests, and any talk of justice or humanity was essentially beside the point. ‘What our duty is,’ he said, ‘at this critical moment, is to maintain the empire of England.’

These might have seemed unexceptionable sentiments at a different time and from a different prime minister, but the presence of Gladstone introduced a note of exemplary morality into the debate that could not be dismissed. ‘Good ends’, Gladstone stated, ‘can rarely be attained in politics without passion and there is now, the first time for a good many years, a righteous passion.’ It was almost as if he had been waiting for the moment.

He had for some years believed that politics could only be practised and irradiated by ‘righteous passion’. That was essentially the reason he had become a politician and a minister. It might also have occurred to him that the moral outrage he evinced might also help to renegotiate his popularity with the irate electorate. He should strike while they were hot. The Daily News provided the necessary fuel with gruesome stories of sodomy, beheading, disembowelment and practically everything else. Disraeli dismissed the reports as the frothings of an anti-Tory newspaper and added that ‘oriental people seldom resort to torture but generally terminate their connection with culprits in a more expeditious manner’. This was not one of his better observations.

Within four days, in September 1876, Gladstone had completed a pamphlet entitled Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East; and his daughter confirmed that ‘the whole country is aflame – meetings all over the place’. Two hundred thousand copies were sold within the month, and Gladstone followed his triumph by an open-air meeting in Blackheath where in pouring rain he called out: ‘Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by carrying off themselves.’ Every pause in his speech was the occasion for shouts of ‘Long life to you!’ and ‘We want you!’ By the force of will and intelligence he was able to shape the vast populace into one highly sensitized human being. And at the end of the meeting people called out continually: ‘Lead us! Lead us!’

Disraeli was not impressed. He called Gladstone one of the worst of the Bulgarian horrors, and threatened Russia with the consequences of invading Turkey. This inspired one of the most memorable of music-hall songs:

We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do,

We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money, too!

The acting leaders of the Liberal party, Hartington and Granville, feared that Gladstone might ignite a war between Russia and Turkey in which England would be obliged to take part. The queen described him as that ‘half mad man’. But Gladstone had regained his moral public, and to be in touch with the nation once more was vastly exciting. In the spring of 1877 he entered the realm of controversy by aligning himself with Joseph Chamberlain at the first meeting of the National Liberal Federation in Birmingham. He declared that the Liberal party was alone ‘the instrument’ by which a ‘great work’ could be accomplished. He saw Chamberlain as a fellow worker in that enterprise, ‘expecting to play an historical part, and probably destined to it’. Chamberlain might be described as a fellow missionary, but it was clear enough to Gladstone, as to Chamberlain, that the younger man wished to fashion the Liberal party in his own image. Gladstone was more intent on widening his own franchise by the evident moral challenge he put to his party.

The country itself was split into rival camps, those with Gladstone and the pro-Russians, while others supported Disraeli and Turkey. Disraeli told the queen that ‘in a Cabinet of twelve members there are seven parties or policies as to the course which should be pursued’. Most of the discussion centred on the interests of the various foreign powers involved, but some also on the careers of the ministers engaged in the conversations. Derby said that ‘to the premier the main thing is to please and surprise the public by bold strokes and unexpected moves; he would rather run serious national risks than hear his policy called feeble and commonplace’. The collapse of a conference at Constantinople at the beginning of 1877 led to a war three months later, and it became a matter of intervening in a fight between a serpent and a bear. The forces of the sultan were no match for the power of the tsar, and the Russians surged up to the walls of Constantinople. England, fearful of a wider war, was obliged to send the fleet to Constantinople. Disraeli was concerned with the Eastern Mediterranean and the route to India. He called up the reserves in England, a clear indication of an imminent war. As a result, Lord Derby resigned and Salisbury took his place as foreign secretary.

A treaty between the antagonists was signed at San Stefano in the early weeks of 1878, but as a result a much larger Bulgaria emerged that might threaten its neighbours. There followed more secret talks, more smuggled notes, more bribes and false promises, more betrayals. So in Berlin three months later it was arranged all over again, with a much diminished Bulgaria; England had agreed to defend Turkey against illegal violations, the sultan had agreed to effect necessary social reforms, and in the course of the complicated negotiations Britain was awarded Cyprus. She would return the island if Russia also gave back the land it had seized in Asia. It seemed to be, by the standards of the age, an honourable settlement. The prime minister returned to London as victor ludorum. The armistice was signed in March 1878. It was the first time that the queen had seen a telephone installed in Osborne House.

Yet for many it was not a matter of ‘peace with honour’. Lord Rosebery, a rising Liberal in the Lords, castigated Disraeli and his allies. ‘They have partitioned Turkey, they have secured a doubtful fragment of the spoil for themselves. They have abandoned Greece. They have incurred responsibilities of a vast and unknown kind …’ He had forgotten that Disraeli preferred responsibilities to be as vast and unknown as possible.

The new foreign secretary, the marquess of Salisbury, had travelled with Disraeli to Berlin even though he did not wholly agree with the premier’s Turkish inclinations. But he was even now one of the leading players who already had dreams of premiership. He watched with some scorn the theatrics of Disraeli in Berlin. He informed his wife that Disraeli ‘has not the dimmest idea of what is going on – understands everything crossways – and imagines a perpetual conspiracy’. Of his colleagues in the cabinet he wrote: ‘they are all middle-class men, and I have always observed throughout life that middle-class men are afraid of responsibility’.

That is perhaps why, as foreign secretary, Salisbury became entangled in a number of small wars. He seems to have been partly responsible for the Second Afghan War, which continued for two years and ended with the battle of Kandahar. A more serious conflict arose when English troops invaded the Zulu kingdom at the beginning of 1879. In January the massacre of an entire army column at Isandlwana prompted the dispatch of a further 9,000 troops; it was the largest single strike by a native army, and caused much consternation. Disraeli said: ‘the terrible disaster has shaken me to the centre’. The massacre provoked an equally gruesome revenge which was only partly reported. The bloody crisis continued into the summer, when the Zulu army was beaten at Ulundi. It was generally assumed that they had been defeated by what Charles Kingsley had described in Alton Locke (1850) as ‘that grim, earnest, stubborn energy which, since the days of the old Romans, the English possess alone of all the nations on earth’. But this was mere posturing and pretence, or rubbish derided in the phrase of the time as ‘leather and prunella’. The Zulus had been the victims of greed, racial hatred and bloodlust.

This was not how the empire had been conceived or imagined. The colonies were proving to be graveyards, and not just for the armies hurled into conflicts which they hardly understood. In West Africa half the arrivals perished within three months. In Sierra Leone the mortality stood at 483 per thousand and at the Gold Coast the level stood at 668 per thousand. In Ceylon the mortality was five times higher than that of Britain. Victoria understood the world better than most of her subjects or politicians. At the time of the worst fighting in Afghanistan she wrote that ‘our position in India and in the Colonies must be upheld’. She informed Beaconsfield that ‘if we are to maintain our position as a first-rate Power, we must with our Indian Empire and our large Colonies be prepared for attacks and wars somewhere or other, CONTINUALLY’.

In a letter to Lady Ely she declared: ‘I wish to trust my Government whoever it is but they should be well aware beforehand I never could if they intended to try and undo what has been done.’ According to the novelist Frank Bullen, ‘no youth would dare enter a school and speak against the Empire’. Were he to do so, ‘he would promptly be knocked down’. Adventure novels, short stories and illustrated periodicals continually strengthened the link between empire and heroism or adventure. Much praise was devoted to pride and prestige, but little to commerce, even though the inexhaustible search for trade and markets was the primum mobile of imperialism.

At the close of 1878 Gladstone confided to his diary that he believed in the battle for ‘justice, humanity and freedom’ and added: ‘If I really believe this, then I should regard my having been morally forced into this work as a great and high election of God.’ This would have been a high justification even in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and would no doubt now be regarded as a form of mania except by those who follow on the less regarded path of religious radicalism. Gladstone had the Nonconformists behind him en masse, a force considerably more powerful and significant than radical liberalism. It was of course the sort of sentiment which would alienate and enrage an expedient man such as Disraeli.

This was the spirit in which Gladstone entered the Midlothian campaign of November 1879. It was for him an aspect of his denunciation of Turkish villainy, but he ranged over the whole field of national policy as a fitting prelude to the general election of 1880. He began his campaign at the country seat of Lord Rosebery, which boosted Rosebery’s career considerably, before he travelled between Liverpool and Edinburgh to initiate what were essentially a series of speeches that were part lectures and part sermons. He spoke at Carlisle, he spoke at Hawick and he spoke at Galashiels. It was perhaps the first proper political campaign. As Disraeli had said, ‘we govern men with words’.

Rosebery was waiting for him at Edinburgh station in a four-in-hand carriage to the accompaniment of bonfires and fireworks. ‘I have never gone through a more extraordinary day,’ Gladstone said. He had always been moved by the excitement of crowds, and for two weeks he lambasted the government for financial mismanagement, for virtually purloining Egypt and for making impossible commitments to the Turks in Bosnia. ‘From that time forward,’ he wrote, ‘until the final consummation in 1879–1880 I made the Eastern question the main business of my life. I acted under strong sense of individual duty without a thought of leadership; nevertheless it made me leader again, whether I would or no.’ Posters of him as ‘priest-king’ were pasted over the walls and windows; shop windows were devoted to his display.

So Gladstone was on the attack. He was now seventy-one years old and had seen the empire expand sporadically and haphazardly, obeying its own laws of growth through trade routes and across oceans, challenging here, bribing there, threatening elsewhere. For Disraeli it was all in a day’s work, to be reported to the Fairy Queen, but Gladstone never had an easy conscience. He took a whip to himself after his famous nocturnal conversations with the women of the street, and there is every reason to suppose that his political excitement elicited similar responses. ‘Let every one of us resolve’, he said ‘that he will do his best to exempt himself; ay, that he will exempt himself from every participation in what he believes to be mischievous and ruinous misdeeds.’ There were according to his own letters wild cheers and storms of applause. The towns through which he passed were illuminated by torches and fairy lanterns, by arches and decorations. ‘Remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can be your own.’ For him, Disraeli was the violator of world peace who had offended against every canon of moral justice. Every word was disseminated to a nation that imbibed political campaigns as eagerly as stout. Disraeli professed himself to be tired of his opponent’s rhetoric primarily because he was so often the subject of it. For her part the queen refused even to consider Gladstone to be a serious political figure.

By 1879 the battering had begun taking its toll on Disraeli, for whom recent events were far from satisfactory. The trials of Afghanistan and Zululand have already been mentioned but there were grave difficulties closer to home. Reynolds’ News announced that 1879 offered only a record of disaster, ‘the dullest year we remember in trade and the most disastrous in agriculture’. Rising unemployment had coincided with bad harvests and had culminated in a great depression of trade and in industrial discontent. A wave of strikes from London masons to Lancashire cotton operatives was a token of the winter of 1878 and 1879.

An economic decline had been evident since 1870; unemployment rose by more than 6 per cent in three years. Income tax was raised to sixpence to pay for the mounting cost of Afghanistan and South Africa. Disraeli was worn to the bone after the Berlin conference and seemed to have lost much of his vital elastic power. The depressed agricultural prices in England spelled torment for Ireland. In 1879 the Irish National Land League was established, with Parnell as president and four Fenians on the secretariat. It was yet another tortuous combination in the labyrinth of Westminster politics. In the Commons itself the Home Rule League party Irish MPs who sat in Westminster under Parnell were the significant force. They could effectively hinder all legislation, but more particularly that which concerned Irish affairs.

Deluded by some stray good news, Disraeli dissolved parliament in March 1880, and marched into his own Valley of Death. Gladstone set off on another speaking tour, convinced that his living relationship with the electorate was the most potent tie. The queen described them as ‘mad unpatriotic ravings’. Yet it seemed that nothing could save the Conservatives in the election of 1880. Nothing did. Gladstone’s Liberals gained over a hundred seats, and such was his victory that he was chosen as prime minister once again over the nominal leadership of Hartington and Granville. ‘The downfall of Beaconsfieldism’, he said, ‘is like the vanishing of some vast magnificent castle in an Italian romance.’ The faery lore of the past was still part of the Victorian imagination.

Gladstone took power like some caliph with the combined will of the people. The Conservative grandee Lord Salisbury commented: ‘I was not sorry for the prospect. But such a defeat as this is quite another matter. It is a perfect catastrophe – and may I fear break up the party altogether.’ There was a diversion. One of the members of the new parliament was Charles Bradlaugh, who had combined with Annie Besant in the fight for birth control. He now caused further controversy by refusing to take the official Oath of Allegiance on becoming a member of parliament, and demanded to affirm as an atheist. His stance provoked scenes of mock outrage that would do honour to Gilbert and Sullivan. He lost his plea, and when a by-election followed he submitted successfully for reselection; he entered Westminster with a large crowd and forcibly made his way into the Commons before being ejected into Palace Yard. He tried again on four other occasions, was ejected and then reelected. Bradlaugh was a self-publicist who thoroughly enjoyed his notoriety and even enjoyed his brief imprisonment when it generated further headlines. Having caused considerable embarrassment to Gladstone and the Liberal party, he finally took his seat in 1886. Two years later, in 1888, he secured passage of a new and more accommodating Oaths Act.

Disraeli did not seem to take his downfall too seriously. He must have anticipated it. His only burden was the number of begging letters he received for posts, offices, sinecures and appointments before his final departure from the stage. He was also aware the queen would miss him as much as he missed her; they had formed a warm friendship, and he knew how much she depended on her allies.

His political opponents, therefore, were hardly likely to receive a warm welcome from Buckingham Palace. Of Gladstone, Victoria wrote privately that ‘she will sooner abdicate than send for or have anything to do with that half-mad firebrand who would soon ruin everything and be a Dictator’. She calmed down sufficiently to be persuaded by Disraeli that Gladstone was her only viable candidate and that in any case he was too old to last much longer. Actuarial prophecies did not in fact prevail. He survived in politics for another fourteen years.

Lord Derby played host to Gladstone in the autumn of 1881.

The general impression seems to be, and certainly it is that left on my mind, that he is more agreeable, more light and easy in conversation, than would be expected from his manner in public; no subject comes amiss to him, he is ready to discourse on any, great or small, & that with the same copiousness & abundance of detail which characterise his speaking. He has no humour, rarely jokes, and his jokes are poor when he makes them. There is something odd in the intense earnestness with which he takes up every topic. I heard him yesterday deliver a sort of lecture on the various different ways of mending roads, suggested by some remark about the Liverpool streets. He described several different processes minutely, & as if he had been getting up the subject for an examination … Since the days of Lord Brougham, I have heard nothing like his eager and restless volubility; he never ceases to talk, and to talk well. Nobody would have thought he had cares on his mind or work to do. His face is very haggard, his eye wild …

It is as good a contemporary description as you are likely to find.

Disraeli was no longer so animated or voluble. It may be that he suffered his election defeat with more anguish than he admitted. At a party meeting at his house in Curzon Street in February 1881, he seemed to be a ‘lean, dark, feeble figure’. His last visit to the Lords was in the following month, but he is supposed to have declined a visit from the queen with the words: ‘No it is better not. She would only ask me to take a message to Albert.’ It is more likely that he did not want his sovereign to see him in so shattered a state. He did not rest from his labours, and his private letters are full of political rumours and advice; he attended dinners as before, and often resumed his old animation. But there were times according to his first biographer, G. E. Buckle, when ‘he sat silent and deathlike, a mummy at the feast’. He had conquered his opponents in the Commons many times, but what had it all been for? He caught a chill that developed into bronchitis and he fought with death for three weeks; but he knew intuitively that it was his final battle. ‘I had rather live,’ he said, ‘but I am not afraid to die.’ This he did at his house in Curzon Street in the spring of 1881.

24

This depression

In 1880 the queen’s speech in the first parliament after Gladstone’s victory noted that ‘the depression which has lately been perceived in the Revenue continues without abatement’. Three years later on the same occasion Randolph Churchill, an unruly and rumbustious Tory, attacked the fact that no mention had been made ‘of the marked, continued and hopeless depression of trade in this country’. The word was on everyone’s lips, although no one seemed to know what it was. The House of Lords demanded a Commission on the Depression of Trade ‘to ascertain what this depression is’. No neat solution was found, but the word entered the political vocabulary and has never since left it.

In the autumn of 1880 Gladstone wrote to the queen that:

the state of Ireland is without doubt not only deplorable but menacing. Its distinctive character is not so much that of a general insecurity as that of a widespread conspiracy against property. The evils are distinct; both of them sufficiently grave. There is one most painful feature in the case, namely that the leaders of the disturbed part of the people incite them to break the law, whereas in the times of O’Connell there can be little doubt that in the midst of a strong political agitation they stoutly denounced agrarian crime and generally enforced observance of the law.

The ‘Irish Question’ and its damnosa hereditas was for Gladstone what the ‘Eastern Question’ had been for Disraeli, a perpetual source of mischief and anxiety. With Parnell inside parliament and the Fenians outside, what wolf should be kept from which door? The Home Rule politicians and the activists of the Land League posed a formidable threat that Gladstone only barely grasped. Between 1879 and 1880 agrarian violence and evictions increased threefold. The first man condemned for evicting tenants was called Captain Boycott, and his surname became the nature of his punishment. ‘I am very anxious to see how Gladstone means to get out of this Irish mess,’ Salisbury wrote. ‘It looks very like a revolution. We shall have to reconquer Ireland if we mean to keep her: and is there stuff and fibre in the English constituencies – at present composed – for this? I doubt it.’

The problem of Ireland had never gone away – or was it, rather, the problem of England? There were English land-agents, there were English landowners, there were English absentee landowners, the administration in Dublin Castle was English. The truth was that the English had never gone away. So many acts had been passed, over so many years, but all of them had favoured the English.

The Land League had responded to evictions and the like with rural outrages; this inflamed the situation without remedying it. Perhaps that was its purpose. Yet Gladstone pursued a policy against ‘landlordism’ on the clear understanding that land reform was the panacea for most of Ireland’s problems. His Land Act of 1881 enshrined the ‘three Fs’, fair rents, free sale and fixity of tenure; a judicial authority was established for fixing the fair rents, which cleared the air a little without changing the political weather. Joseph Chamberlain, then president of the Board of Trade, had made it clear that ‘we are agreed that it is impossible to concede the present demands of the Irish party. It is therefore war to the knife between a despotism created to re-establish constitutional law and a despotism not less completely elaborated to subvert and produce anarchy as a precedent for revolutionary change.’ When parliament met early in 1881 a Coercion Act was passed first before the Land Act. Coercion would consign to prison anyone suspected of violence or intimidation.

Parnell’s attempt to stifle the Land Act, while at the same time vilifying Gladstone, earned him a cell in Kilmainham Prison, where he promptly assumed the role of martyr under the Irish Coercion Act. The problem seemed wholly insoluble except by underhand means. The tortuous process whereby Gladstone came to Home Rule would be worthy of Ariadne herself, but it seems likely that from his cell Parnell had offered to bring peace to Ireland on certain secret conditions. On 4 May Parnell and two others were released from prison on condition that they would support the Land Act and on the understanding that Gladstone would protect Irish tenants who had fallen behind in their rent. The Irish secretary, William Forster, promptly resigned in dismay, and Gladstone asked Lord Frederick Cavendish to take his place. Within a few hours of his arrival in Dublin Lord Cavendish was assassinated in Phoenix Park; the assassins hacked him and a companion with long surgical knives. The phoenix is the bird that is reborn in fire, and those of a mythical frame of mind might see the fate of Ireland fringed in flame.

The confusion in the cabinet was compounded in the last months of 1880 by an uprising of the Boers in the Transvaal, a territory that the British had annexed three years before. The dissension, as so often, had arisen over the question of fair or unfair taxation. An English force was caught in an ambush at the battle of Laing’s Nek at the end of January 1881, followed by a thorough defeat in the following month. The small army under General Colley was either captured or killed. Gladstone, who was suffering from a head injury, took to his bed. In effect he surrendered. At a convention in Pretoria Transvaal was declared to be independent but under British ‘suzerainty’. Words like that can mean little or nothing; they can also breed mischief, misunderstanding and eventually conflict. And so it proved in southern Africa.

The administration was acquiring a reputation for weakness, confirmed by the bombing of Salford army barracks in the middle of January by a group of Fenians; it was chosen because it had been the site of the execution of the ‘Manchester martyrs’ in 1867, when the members of the IRA were hanged for the murder of a police officer. It can be seen as one of the first ‘terror bombs’ in England. The ‘Clerkenwell Explosion’ at the end of 1867 must claim, if this is the right word, the primacy. Gladstone was now beginning to recognize the signs of ageing. He thought it could not be right that he ‘should remain on the stage like a half-exhausted singer, whose notes are flat & everyone perceives it except himself’. He ‘would be of no good to anyone’.

On New Year’s Day, 1881, the queen entered her own misgivings:

A poor Government, Ireland in a state of total lawlessness, and war at the Cape, of a very serious nature. I feel very anxious and have no one to lean on. I feel how sadly deficient I am, and how oversensitive and irritable, and how uncontrollable my temper is, when annoyed and hurt. But I am so overdone, so vexed, and in such distress about my country, that that must be my excuse. I will pray daily for God’s help to improve.

God did not necessarily answer her prayers. Just days after the stabbings in Phoenix Park, Gladstone ordered a naval expedition to Alexandria. It was perhaps the most unlikely event of his political career, contradicting all his policies and beliefs on the blessings of nonintervention. The financial situation of Egypt was the fundamental cause. Their funds were under the dual control of the French and English, a humiliating position for Egyptian nationalists who instigated a series of small coups. In February 1882 the British government ordered the removal of a nationalist ministry, and as a result faced the wrath of anti-Western rioters. The fleet was sent in May and, since commanders abhor a vacuum, the bombardment of Alexandria began in July. It was then decided to send a military force, and the nationalist army was thoroughly defeated at Tel-el-Kebir on 13 September. The victory surprised the rest of Europe, and gave an illusion of success which the Second Boer War finally dissolved. The radicals under Gladstone’s nominal leadership were appalled by the Egyptian action. ‘Dizzy had never done worse than, or as bad as, this bombardment,’ John Bright told Rosebery. Rosebery tried to defend the prime minister, but Bright cut him off: ‘Say no more, it’s damnable!’ The opinion spread that Gladstone’s conscience was a movable feast, settling wherever his self-interest led him.

Gladstone realized the advantages, and disadvantages, of winning what was plainly an unholy war. It was a squalid affair, conducted entirely for money, even though he had gall enough to lend it a sense of missionary purpose. But what was to be done now, with Egypt occupied by the British? ‘We have done our Egyptian business’ – he made it sound like going to the lavatory – ‘and are an Egyptian government.’ Soon enough all would be thrown in doubt by an uprising in the Sudan which caused Gladstone more damage than any other event of his life.

Disraeli’s natural successor as Conservative leader in the Lords was always to be Lord Salisbury. Not that he welcomed the appointment. He told the editor of The Times:

you are the first person who has come here to see me in the last few days who is not wanting something at my hands – place, or decoration, or peerage … Men whom I called my friends, whom I should have considered far beyond self-seeking, have come here begging for something, some for one thing, some for another, till I am sick and disgusted. The experience has been a revelation to me of the baser side of human nature.

At the election of 1880 the Liberals had gained 337 seats, with the Conservatives a distant second on 214 and the Home Rulers with a respectable 63. The size of the Liberal majority surprised all those who had not reckoned on the effects of the industrial slump and the agricultural distress. With no convenient benefit in mind, the Liberals turned to Gladstone as the harbinger of their good fortune, whereas Gladstone gave all the praise to God. It may have been piety, or determination, that obliged him to soldier on as prime minister for the next four years; for once, the phrase of soldiering is appropriate. Having attacked the Liberal grandees in his Midlothian campaign, he was obliged to include them in his cabinet for want of better; of the radicals, to whom his rhetoric appealed, only a few were chosen. Eight of the cabinet were tried and confirmed Liberals. Only Joseph Chamberlain and one or two others could be described as Radical. Chamberlain was an oddity. He sported a monocle even while he mocked ‘gentlemen’. But as president of the Board of Trade he managed to guide an Employer Liability Act for industrial accidents even as his radical fervour continued to circulate around South Africa, Ireland and Egypt. These were the great causes to be addressed.

Change was also close to hand. In 1881 H. M. Hyndman formed the Democratic Federation, which was soon known as the Social Democratic Foundation and can be described with only a little exaggeration as Marxism and soda water. But at least in a formal sense, Hyndman introduced socialism into England just at the time that land reform was being promulgated by the American reformer Henry George in Progress and Poverty (1879), where he announced: ‘We must make land common property.’ The spirit of reform spread. The Socialist League went its own way with William Morris in 1884, the year in which the Fabian Society was formed. George Gissing said of the Fabians that they were ‘a class of young men distinctive of our time – well educated, fairly well bred, but without money’. Most of their names are now quite unknown to the public, but without their constant intercessions twentiethcentury English history might have taken a different course. The transition, from old radicalism to new socialism, was as important as the change from Whig to Liberal. It can be said, for example, to have promoted and justified state intervention on a scale never previously seen.

The state had in any case slowly acquired new powers. It had come to regulate factories, mines and lodging houses. Food and drink were more closely monitored, and minimum standards for education and public housing were also promulgated. A large number of officials and administrators now entered the service of what was becoming, to all intents and purposes, a modern state. The managers of it were now professional rather than amateur. This of course meant the gradual eclipse of the principle of laissez-faire which had been in the ascendant for most of the century. The Cobden Prize essay for 1880, A. N. Cumming’s ‘On the Value of Political Economy to Mankind’, reported: ‘we have had too much laissez-faire … the truth of free trade is clouded over by the laissez-faire fallacy … we need a great deal more paternal government – that bugbear of the old economists’. A Radical programme of the time noted the growing intervention ‘of the State on behalf of the weak against the strong, in the interests of labour against capital, of want and suffering against luxury and ease’.

Collective sports, with national cricket and football leagues, with public swimming baths, became the public pastime. Choral societies, and brass bands, and railway excursions, were the mood of the age in which the rules of collective conduct were paramount.

Collectivism can take many forms. In 1884 Randolph Churchill made a speech in which he declared:

Gentlemen, we live in the age of advertisement, the age of Holloway’s pills, of Colman’s mustard and of Horniman’s pure tea; and the policy of lavish advertisement has been so successful in commerce that the Liberal party, with its usual enterprise, has adapted it to politics. The Prime Minister [Gladstone] is the greatest living master of the art of personal political advertisement. Holloway, Colman and Horniman are nothing compared with him. Every act of his, whether it be for the purposes of health, of recreation, or of religious devotion, is spread before the eyes of every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom on large and glaring placards.

It is one of the first examples of the ‘media politics’ that emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century, a tendency that might conceivably have had its origins in the granting of the vote to urban artisans in 1867.

Gladstone was not helped, however, by the group of Tories under the leadership of Randolph Churchill himself. Churchill and his cohorts combined the contempt and bad manners of youth with the vigour of unfulfilled ambition. They paraded the virtues of something known as ‘Tory Democracy’, but when Churchill was asked what it was he replied: ‘to tell the truth I don’t know myself what Tory Democracy is, but I believe it is principally opportunism. Say you are a Tory Democrat and that will do.’ They were, in other words, painfully naive, and not even the name of Churchill could save them from obloquy.

They became known as the ‘Fourth Party’, and were eager to eject the ‘Old Gang’ of Conservative grandees such as Stafford Northcote, who liked nothing better than to cause a fuss. Still some bills struggled exhausted on to the Statute Book, among them a Bankruptcy Act and a Patents Act in 1883; the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act of the same year was designed to eliminate fraud and intimidation.

There was one other piece of unfinished business to do with the franchise. It had been a slow process. Disraeli’s wizardry with the Second Reform Act in 1867 was followed five years later by the Ballot [or Secret Ballot] Act whose name is its nature. The Corrupt Practices Act of 1883 was followed, in 1884, by the Representation of the People Act which applied the same franchise to the counties as to the boroughs. The Third Reform Act, as it became known, extended the vote to agricultural labourers, thereby increasing the electorate threefold. Of course it did not imply universal suffrage; all women and 40 per cent of men were still excluded from the electoral process.

Nevertheless, a great political storm was rising over a new redistribution bill of the following year. A wider franchise was considered to be ‘a good thing’, but for the Conservatives it had to be guarded by a wholesale redistribution of seats to protect the Tory interest. Tory Lords and Liberal Commons fought like stags in the rutting season, yet after some discreet pressure from the queen the two sides met at a house in Arlington Street to ponder over the redistribution of seats, in which manoeuvres Salisbury was the master tactician. The franchise of some seventy-nine towns, with populations under 15,000, was swept away. The rule now was for single-member constituencies to be carved out from the larger towns and cities: 160 seats were abolished and 182 were created. Two million extra voters were enfranchised. The great metropolitan conurbations were divided into roughly equivalent constituencies and great swathes of suburban seats were grouped around them. It was considered to be hubristic. Was not a larger franchise enough? In truth very few people understood the arithmetic of the calculations. If it were done, was the common cry, let it be done quickly.

Salisbury had stood his ground. Gladstone agreed to his terms, and Salisbury’s daughter recorded: ‘My father’s prevailing sentiment is one of complete wonder … we have got all and more than we demanded.’ Salisbury proved himself to be an excellent negotiator, seat by seat. He managed a number of compromises, with consequences which could not have been foreseen. His philosophy was essentially a simple one. ‘Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.’ It may be placed beside another of his maxims: ‘Parliament is a potent engine, and its enactments must always do something, but they very seldom do what the originators of these enactments meant.’ The point was that Salisbury’s conservatism was tacit or unstated. It was the Conservatism of silence as perhaps invoked in ‘the silent majority’. The Redistribution of Seats Act of 1885 in fact created a flood of single-member seats which now dominated the parliamentary process. The country seat was now as potentially powerful as the town or the city seat; the miner and the agricultural labourer had now obtained the vote. As a consequence the landed proprietor lost much of his power of patronage. ‘Media politics’ was accompanied by the makings of a mass electorate.

An unexpected and welcome ally in nursing the new electorate was providentially found in the Primrose League, which had sprung up in 1883. The name was taken from Disraeli’s supposed favourite flower (he probably preferred the orchid), and soon became the largest voluntary society in England, with half a million members by 1887. It was inclusive and heterogeneous, barring only ‘atheists and enemies of the British Empire’. Members (who were known as knights, dames or associates according to the annual subscription fee they paid) swore allegiance to the sovereign, and declared their readiness to maintain ‘religion … the estates of the realm, and the imperial ascendancy of the British Empire’. The league was largely organized by women and became notable for its tea parties, garden parties and bicycle outings. Summer fetes, held at stately homes and attended by prominent Conservative MPs, were the highlight of its social programme. MPs also contributed to the Primrose League Gazette, the organization’s weekly newspaper. With its strong emphasis on hierarchy, honours, imperialism, archaic titles and rituals, the League inculcated in its members the values of deference, nationalism and respect for tradition. As the organization attracted a million less affluent, associate members, by the early 1890s, it might be said to have grafted the Conservative party upon the roots of the middle class and the lower middle class. It represented the growth of imperialist sentiment also, confirmed by the establishment of the Imperial Federation League in 1884. Imperialism, however, had its own disadvantages.

25

Frightful news

The domination of Egypt by Britain after the bombing of Alexandria created difficulties with that country’s neighbours. An uprising in the Sudan was led by its religious leader, the Mahdi or ‘Guided one’, whose forces overwhelmed the British garrisons on two separate occasions towards the close of 1883. The better part of valour may lie in retreat, and the British government decided to abandon Sudan in company with the Egyptian soldiers they had recruited. It was a difficult feat to accomplish, and so Gladstone and his cabinet sent General Gordon to organize the evacuation. Gordon, however, elected to disobey orders, to stay and fight. He was a soldier of the old school – small, stubborn, and self-sufficient. The sword and the Bible were his not always reliable guides, and as a famous warrior he may not have been the best officer to administer a retreat. Evelyn Baring cautioned that ‘a man who habitually consults the Prophet Isaiah when he is in a difficulty is not apt to obey the orders of anyone’.

Gladstone confessed that they had selected Gordon from ‘insufficient knowledge of the man, whom we rather took on trust from the public impressions and from newspaper accounts’. Here is a new and timely account of the power of the press and the importance of ‘impressions’ gathered from the public. The situation would have been unthinkable thirty years before. It was accompanied by a general indifference to the imperial colonists who were treated somewhat as if they were country cousins. ‘When a distinguished colonist comes to London,’ E. G. Wakefield wrote in A View of the Art of Colonisation (1849), ‘he prowls about the streets and sees sights till he is sick of doing nothing else, and then returns home disgusted with his visit to the old country. Nobody has paid him any attention because he was a colonist.’

Gordon’s disobedience to his instructions from Whitehall did not bode well for his expedition to cow the Sudanese. When he arrived in Khartoum, the capital, in February 1884 he announced his intention of keeping and defending the city instead of evacuating it before ceding it to the Mahdi and his followers. When the Sudanese forces advanced and gave siege, he decided to stand and fight against all the odds. For two years he made his last stand in the city, bombarding London with plans to seize the initiative and capture or kill the Mahdi, while the feverish public demanded that a relief force be sent to rescue him from the fate he preferred to ignore. The country seethed. The cabinet could not agree on any action, and Gladstone reported in June 1884 that ‘they have no fresh reason to anticipate the necessity of an expedition for the relief of General Gordon’. They could either reject his proposals and send him home, or they could accept them and send reinforcements. Neither course was chosen.

Gladstone dithered as he found the whole country turning against him. The newspaper placards were huge. When would a relief force be despatched? ‘The Nile expedition was sanctioned too late,’ Baring wrote in Modern Egypt (1908), ‘and the reason it was sanctioned too late was that Mr Gladstone would not accept simple evidence of a plain fact which was patent to much less powerful intellects than his own’. On 26 January 1885, the besiegers broke into Khartoum, where General Gordon waited on the steps of the palace in his white uniform. They cut off his head and threw his body down a well. Two days later, the relief force arrived.

The outcry was immense. The queen sent an open telegram deploring the disaster. ‘These news from Khartoum are frightful,’ she wrote, ‘and to think that all this might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too frightful.’ The message could have been read by any postmaster, and was no doubt intended to be. The cabinet discussed resignation but came to no certain conclusions; they could not see beyond their individual careers, and resignation meant death. The G.O.M. – the Grand Old Man, as Gladstone had been called – became the M.O.G. – the Murderer of Gordon. There had been no more painful disaster for fifty years, and it did much to alienate the British public from the Liberal government. Gladstone himself was covered in anger and hysterical rebuke.

A general sense of instability prevailed. Every member seemed to think that he had been betrayed by one colleague or another over Sudan, over the budget, over Ireland, over the Coercion Bill. Gladstone confided to his wife that it had been ‘a wild romance of politics with a continual succession of hair-breadth escapes and strange accidents pressing upon one another’. When in June 1885 the budget was rejected by the Commons, Gladstone took the opportunity to resign, whereupon Lord Salisbury took over as the Tory premier and remained prime minister for seven months. He had an idea. The Tories had a commanding majority in the Lords, and to act as radicals might not do them any great harm in the country. Disraeli had managed it once. So Salisbury, with the support of Gladstone, considered the possibility that the Tories were perhaps more likely to pass radical measures for Ireland. But it was no more than a chimera, and perhaps he knew as much. He was moved to comment on the nationalist proclamation that ‘we are to have confidence in the Irish people’. He replied that ‘confidence depends upon the people in whom you are to confide. You would not confide free representative institutions to the Hottentots, for example.’

In his short period of office, known by Chamberlain as the Ministry of Caretakers, Salisbury sent a laurel branch to the land across the sea by dropping a crimes bill and by passing a land purchase bill for Irish tenants. But it was not going to be enough. Parnell pressed Salisbury for more. He subtilized his parliamentary tactics to the point that he could effectively curtail all proceedings. His was a double game for the benefit of Ireland. In the subsequent general election of 1885 he was triumphant. The Liberals won 319 seats, the Conservatives 249 and the Parnellites 86, and the balance of power. The results pleased no one except Parnell. The Liberals were the largest party, but that was less singular than the fact that they did not possess a majority. Salisbury led a minority government, and he knew that it could not last long. ‘Somehow I felt the whole thing melancholy,’ Lord Rosebery wrote. ‘Mr G was older, feebler, less victorious by much than in 1880, if victorious at all, and somehow one felt as if one was witnessing the close of that long & brilliant career.’ Gladstone was hoarse and sat silent before the new ministers who themselves did not have very much to say. On Ireland they were bewildered and uncertain, fearing trouble to come. Salisbury explained the inactivity by claiming that by taking office they were fulfilling a duty of honour to the queen. They needed to do nothing more until the time of the general election. So he decided to carry on with the assistance of Parnell.

Gladstone mocked this Irish union with ‘demoralized and dangerous Tories’, but it was not long before he was considering schemes that might unite him with Parnell. Yet Gladstone was in a quandary. Whatever his thoughts about Home Rule, he could not confide them to Parnell alone; it would be unwise and dishonourable. But he could not divulge them to his party without dangerous disruptions and divisions. So he was obliged to remain silent.

In December 1885, however, the Evening Standard published a document that seemed on the face of it to be a plan for Home Rule composed by Gladstone himself. Many doubted its veracity, and others its validity. It became known as the ‘Hawarden Kite’ and it turned out to have been flown by Herbert Gladstone, Gladstone’s son, as a way of diverting opposition. It included the statement that ‘nothing could induce me to countenance separation, but if five-sixths of the Irish people wish to have a Parliament in Dublin, for the management of their own local affairs, I say, in the name of justice, and wisdom, let them have it’. How could he deny the Irish self-government when he had championed it for Italy and Bulgaria? It was necessary, but it was also inevitable. Gladstone would take up once more the cares of office for ‘the creation of an Irish Parliament to be entrusted with the entire management of all legislative and administrative affairs, securities being taken for the representation of minorities and for an equitable partition of all Imperial charges’.

The varying reactions were immediate and profound. His multifarious enemies believed that he had betrayed England. He had betrayed Ireland. He had betrayed both. There was now no chance of cross-party allegiance, and he had painted himself into a corner. He had torn his party in half. He, or Herbert, might have claimed in defence that Gladstone simply wished to gain the initiative and assert his authority. But he continued his policy of obfuscation and silence.

While Salisbury ruled, Gladstone offered to support any Conservative attempt at a Home Rule Bill, but they were still not to be tempted into apostasy. Instead, with the tacit or complicit support of the Liberal Unionists, they adopted a new Coercion Act for Ireland. Parnell, of course, backed off and decided once more to support Gladstone. In a division of January 1886, Salisbury’s Tories were defeated by a potent combination of Liberals and Irish Nationalists. Three days later Gladstone was once more in power. He was summoned to office for the third time, with the implicit declaration that he was to draw up a bill for Irish Home Rule. He declared that ‘the hope and purpose of the new government in taking office is to examine carefully whether it is practicable to try some other method [than coercion] of meeting the present case of Ireland’. Everyone knew what he meant. For him, Home Rule had become inevitable.

One of his first actions was to send to anyone whom he suggested for cabinet office a proposal ‘for the establishment of a legislative body to sit in Dublin, and to deal with Irish as distinguished from imperial affairs’.

But a large number of Liberal MPs, including those of the oldest faction who still liked to call themselves Whigs, abhorred the idea of minimizing the role of parliament and of national as well as imperial disintegration. They rebelled, and their defection provoked the great schism of the Liberal party.

Gladstone seemed to relish the task of drafting a Home Rule Bill over the next few months. One of his private secretaries, Sir Algernon West, wrote of him that:

the intense enthusiasm with which he entered into the subject and the object of the moment was apt to dim, if not obliterate, the little loves and affections which crowd the life of smaller men. The execution of his great work was the one thing in his eyes, and the instruments and tools he used were dearer to him than anything else; and the men associated with him at the moment were always greater than the men who had passed away.

A few trusted civil servants, and a few reliable members of the cabinet, superintended by Gladstone, worked in haste and silence.

When at the end of March the cabinet met to discuss his proposals, which included an Irish government with powers of taxation, Chamberlain and the Irish secretary, Sir George Trevelyan, left the room and did not come back.

On 8 April the Commons whipped itself into a fever of excitement. Every space was taken. Gladstone was greeted with cheers from his admirers, who watched him being driven to Westminster, and by many rounds of applause from his supporters in the Commons. He spoke for three and a half hours, and the ensuing debate continued for sixteen days. At the close of the debate Gladstone rose and exhorted his colleagues: ‘Ireland stands at your bar, expectant, hopeful, almost suppliant …’ He must have known that he would lose. In the event 93 Liberals voted against him and the Home Rule Bill was defeated by 343 votes against 313. There were now Liberals and Liberal Unionists, the latter taking as hard a line on the maintenance of the union as their Conservative colleagues. The Liberal Unionists and the Conservative Unionists were as one on the vital principle of the day, and it would not be long before they formed a party.

Gladstone was not in the least disheartened. He blamed vested interests for his defeat and declared not for the first time that ‘the masses have been right and the classes have been wrong’. Many Liberals, however, blamed him for hitching his party to the wandering star of Irish nationalism which, as he told Rosebery, ‘will control and put aside all other questions in England till it is settled’. He believed the chimera in his own brain to be the overwhelming question.

After Home Rule had been voted down, the queen was asked to dissolve parliament. Let the people decide. The ensuing election battle was fierce. Randolph Churchill derided the Home Rule proposals as ‘this monstrous mixture of imbecility, extravagance and political hysterics … the united and concentrated genius of Bedlam and Colney Hatch would strive in vain to produce a more striking tissue of absurdities’. This was the way many people understood the situation. The United Kingdom, not to mention the Liberal party itself, was to be torn apart in order to ‘gratify the ambition of an old man in a hurry’. Even though he looked old, bent and infinitely wearied, he was engaged once more in a national speaking tour, as if only the balm of popular acclaim could heal his wounded spirit. He noted in his diary on a speech in Liverpool at the end of June that he had spent ‘seven or eight hours of processional uproar and a speech of an hour and forty minutes to five or six thousand people … I went in bitterness, in the heat of my spirit, but the hand of the Lord was upon me.’ His biblical cadence suggests that he was beginning to adopt the role of an Old Testament prophet. The queen was dismayed. She said that it was ‘grievous’ to see a man of seventy-seven ‘behave as he does, and lower himself to an ordinary demagogue … if only he could be stopped’.

The electorate stopped him. ‘Well, Herbert, dear old boy,’ he told his son, ‘we have had a drubbing and no mistake.’ The Conservative Unionists and Liberal Unionists had a combined majority of 118 over the Gladstonians and the Irish Nationalists. At the end of the year he wrote in his diary:

it has been a year of shock and strain. I think a year of some progress; but of greater absorption in interests which, though profoundly human, are quite off the line of an old man’s direct preparation for passing the River of Death. I have not had a chance given me of creeping from this Whirlpool, for I cannot abandon a cause which is so evidently of my fellow men, and in which a particular part seems to be assigned to me.

He was, in other words, not going to give up.

To almost everyone’s amazement, Gladstone seemed ready to carry on. He said that he remained at the disposal of his party and his friends while ‘giving special heed to the calls of the Irish question’. It had become his great cause, the fruit of his moral being. He might be the justified sinner, identifying his existence with a greater good. His anger against the enemy became more pronounced. ‘Ireland is perhaps the most conspicuous country in the world,’ he said, ‘where law has been on one side and justice on the other.’ No government ‘by perpetual coercion’ could stand, when it had been erected by ‘the foulest and wickedest’ means ‘that ever were put in action’.

Salisbury had in the interim created his Conservative cabinet, which Randolph Churchill dubbed ‘Marshalls and Snelgroves’ after the solid but uninspiring department store in London. Churchill was given the offices of chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House, from which eminence it was believed that he would catapult himself into the first office. Salisbury’s duty, as he saw it, was to sit tight and ensure that Gladstone and Home Rule were no longer on the table. It was also his duty, as first minister, to keep his party whole and united. This was not necessarily an easy task, with Randolph Churchill firing off grandiose schemes, vilifying his colleagues and threatening resignation with every twist and turn of his fortunes. Eventually Salisbury decided to silence him by accepting the most recent of his letters and, much to Churchill’s amazement, allowed him to resign. The menace was gone in an instant. Salisbury was now on his own, but he had a solid Unionist majority to comfort him.

Gladstone was still in good spirits, with his devotion to the cause of Irish Home Rule giving him the ballast to survive. He and Parnell had now a ‘union of hearts’ in the Irish cause. But there is always room for the unexpected. Parnell was fatally compromised by being cited in a divorce case; the evidence was overwhelming. John Morley, a Liberal statesman, had said once that ‘Ireland would not be a difficult country to govern – were it not that all the people are intractable and all the problems insoluble.’ Gladstone privately deplored ‘the awful matter of Parnell’, but for a time kept quiet until the public reaction forced his hand. Adultery and divorce were more heinous in Ireland even than in England, and even the most popular politician could not escape the fire. Yet it was Gladstone who threw the burning branch. He wrote to Parnell urging him to resign. Parnell refused, and almost at once Gladstone made sure that his letter reached the Pall Mall Gazette. As far as Parnell was concerned, the case was concluded. Gladstone had cast him into the outer darkness. Those who still voted for him were ‘either rogues or fools’.

The Irish question was the most important for Salisbury’s administration. Salisbury told the Lords that ‘for the moment, the guardianship of the Union supersedes every other subject of political interest’. He had said that: ‘The severity must come first. They must “take a licking” before conciliation would do them any good.’ For that purpose he appointed his nephew, Arthur Balfour, as chief secretary for Ireland. Balfour had a languid and rather vague manner, in the style of the 1880s; with his wispy moustache and his juvenile good looks he could have been taken from the cast of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. But appearances can be deceptive. In Ireland he was known soon enough as ‘Bloody Balfour’. He believed in the Tory policy of coercion, which he proceeded to apply without much remorse or doubt. ‘There are those who talk as if Irishmen were justified in disobeying the law because the law comes to them in foreign garb,’ he said. ‘I see no reason why any local colour should be given to the Ten Commandments.’ Balfour introduced his Crimes Act in the spring of 1887, making boycotting, intimidation and resistance to eviction a criminal offence with a minimum sentence of six months’ hard labour. It was not considered to be a provisional or temporary measure; it was written in stone until such time as any future government might repeal it.

A contrary form of political action began to emerge in England. From 1886 a number of strikes took place in London. John Burns and Tom Mann, both of the Social Democratic Federation, were intent on organizing the engineers and promoting their claims for a fixed living wage. At the beginning of February 1886, the Federation also held a meeting in Trafalgar Square to demand the provision of public works for the unemployed. The crowd in the square grew in size, and on the advice of the police they moved to Hyde Park, but Pall Mall, with its clubs and emporia, lay along its route. The temptation was too great. Windows were smashed and shops looted. Burns told the waiting crowds at Hyde Park: ‘We are not strong enough at the present moment to cope with armed forces, but when we give you the signal will you rise?’ There were loud calls of ‘Yes! Yes!’ London heard the cries. The shops were boarded up and the banks were closed. Bernard Shaw put the response in context. ‘They do not want revolution,’ he wrote in the Pall Mall Gazette. ‘They want a job.’ The ‘unemployed’ and the phenomenon of ‘unemployment’ reached the public vocabulary in this period.

In the autumn of the year demonstrations and parades were banned from Trafalgar Square, which had taken over from Clerkenwell Green as the centre for radical activity. A free speech demonstration took place in the Square on 13 November which became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’, with the police confronting the crowds. Skirmishes and scuffles occurred in Holborn and the Strand until the Life Guards cleared the Square; one hundred were injured and two were killed. It was the largest disruption of the period, though by continental standards it was relatively modest. In 1888 a group of radical agitators attending the annual Trades Union Congress at Bradford pressed for the foundation of an independent Labour party. In the same year Keir Hardie was instrumental in the establishment of the Scottish Labour party. There was no mention of socialism. That was considered too continental and redolent of revolution.

Nothing could be more paradoxical than the fact that the summer of 1887, when public discontent prevailed, marked the golden jubilee of Victoria. The little old lady insisted on wearing her bonnet (although garnished with jewels) as she drove in an open landau through the streets of London to Westminster Abbey. She was surrounded by her royal guards as well as seventeen princes, close relations from the Battenbergs to the Wittelsbachs, and innumerable imperial potentates. According to the Illustrated London News it was ‘the grandest State ceremony of this generation; one, indeed, practically unique in the annals of modern England’. The less she had to do, and the more remote her life became from that of her subjects, the more she was celebrated.

The empire now extended to Buckingham Palace and Balmoral, where two new Indian servants took the place of John Brown. Mahomet Buksh and Abdul Karim were soon to be given the title of munshi, or clerk and teacher. Victoria had decided to learn Hindustani.

George Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee (1894) charts the temperature of the nation at this juncture, and it records a prevailing indifference over the state of the monarchy, despite an intense love of spectacle which the jubilee provoked. Gissing’s characters are of the middle class and lower middle class living in the environs of Camberwell and Denmark Hill in south London, where the young women are sighing for higher status and more income. It is not the world of Anthony Trollope. It is the opposite. It is a world which was largely taken for granted, mild grey like its atmosphere on the borders of the great city. Gissing was a connoisseur of slovenly rooms in these suburbs. ‘The pictures were a strange medley – autotypes of some artistic value side by side with hideous oleographs framed in ponderous gilding.’ An autotype was a photographic print popular in the late nineteenth century; an oleograph was a photographic print made to resemble an oil painting. On tables and chairs:

lay scattered a multitude of papers: illustrated weeklies, journals of society, cheap miscellanies, penny novelettes and the like. At the end of the week, when new numbers came in, Ada Peachey passed many hours upon her sofa, reading instalments of a dozen serial stories, paragraphs relating to fashion, sport, the theatre, answers to correspondents (wherein she especially delighted), columns of facetiae and gossip about notorious people.

The children of a similar family ‘talked of theatres and racecourses, of the “new murderer” at Tussaud’s, of police-news, of notorious spendthrifts and demireps’. A demirep was a female of dubious reputation. In a slightly more elevated household, ‘on the table lay a new volume from the circulating library – something about Evolution … Her aim, at present, was to become a graduate of London University … to prepare herself for matriculation, which she hoped to achieve in the coming winter … She talked only of the “exam”, of her chances in this or that “paper”.’

The setting for the first part of the book was the great public occasion of the year.

She’s going to the Jubilee to pick up a fancy Prince … These seats are selling for three guineas, somebody told me … Thank goodness everyone is going to see the procession or the decorations, or the illuminations, and all the rest of the nonsense … I want to go for the fun of the thing I should feel ashamed of myself if I ran to stare at Royalties, but it’s a different thing at night. It’ll be wonderful, all the traffic stopped … And you know, after all, it’s a historical event. In the year 3000 it will be ‘set’ in an examination paper, and poor wretches will get plucked because they don’t know the date … What have I to do with the Queen? Do you wish to go? Not to see Her Majesty. I care as little about her as you do … I didn’t think this kind of thing was in your way. I thought you were above it … You have heard that Nancy wants to mix with the rag-tag and bobtail tomorrow night? … Now I look at it this way. It’s to celebrate the fiftieth year of the reign of Queen Victoria – yes but at the same time and far more, it’s to celebrate the completion of fifty years of Progress. National Progress without precedent in the history of mankind.

Most people had a clear sense in which the direction of events was moving. ‘Now, before the triumph of glorious Democracy … after all the people have got the upper hand nowadays.’ The phrases of the period ring through the pages of the novel. ‘Look sharp about it. Do you twig? … his temper was that ’orrible.’ A boyfriend was a ‘masher’. A fine man or woman was ‘a great swell’. ‘Oh what a silly you are. Go ahead! What’s the latest?’

Gissing reports the nature of the Jubilee from the level of the streets: ‘At Camberwell Green they mingled with a confused rush of hilarious crowds amid a clattering of cabs and omnibuses, a jingling of tram-car bells. Public houses sent forth their alcoholic odours upon the hot air.’ You can hear the voices: ‘A woman near her talked loudly about the procession, with special reference to a personage whom she called “Prince of Wiles”.’ An argument breaks out among the crowd: ‘We’re not going to let a boozing blackguard like you talk in that way about ’er Majesty.’ The characters often break into the latest music-hall song, sometimes mixed with pathos rather than with humour.

‘Ta-ta.’

26

Daddy-long-legs

The Salisbury government was held together more by Gladstone than by any other Tory grandee. As long as he pursued his dream or vision of Home Rule, and pursued it with determination, the administration would ensure that he remained locked out of office by staying in its place. That at least was the theory. Salisbury himself was still a remote figure, pessimistic or cynical according to taste, temperamentally averse to change of any kind and naturally appalled by social reform and social reformers. Yet it was his government that pushed through some legislation that seemed to Cardinal Manning to be the most radical since the 1830s.

The Local Government Act of 1888 set up popularly elected boards to run the counties and turned the cities into county boroughs. The squires and leaders of local society were at a stroke made redundant, replaced by administrators and bureaucrats who controlled everything from the police to the lunatic asylums. Thus was finally severed the link between the owners of the land and the powers of authority, even though England did not become a fully bureaucratized nation until the Local Government Act of 1894, which imposed elected local authorities for every village with over 300 inhabitants.

London had been an administrative chaos almost from the beginning of its existence, but the County Council Act, as the Local Government Act was known, ordained that it should be administered and governed by the London County Council. The ‘LCC’, as it was everywhere known, became a formidable presence in the capital, beyond the range of government departments and national policymaking. It reflected the contemporaneous taste for municipal socialism in the provision of public baths and wash-houses, parks and allotments and public libraries. It was also responsible for the swathe of ‘council houses’ and ‘council flats’ that was erected in all parts of the metropolis, and thus changed the texture of life in London for the next hundred years.

The first chairman of the LCC was a Liberal. In some respects Lord Rosebery resembled Chamberlain, although he was not himself an advocate of municipal socialism. But he was in advance of his colleagues on social matters, and was part of a new generation approaching the characteristic sentiments of the early twentieth century. He waged war against slum landlords and declared that London was ‘not a unit, but a unity’. His social radicalism was based on the principle of ‘getting things done’. He was what was known as a ‘coming man’, but no one could have known how far he would go.

The perils of the times, in an age of bewildering change, seemed infinite. To reach adulthood was itself an achievement. No one, except a few of the highly favoured, was ever completely well. It was a highly nervous age in which even the huntsmen, in Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children (1880), discuss

the perils from outsiders, the perils from new-fangled prejudices, the perils from more modern sports, the perils from over-cultivation, the perils from extended population, the perils from increasing railroads, the perils from literary ignorances, the perils from intruding cads, the perils from indifferent magnates … Everything is going wrong. Perhaps the same thing may be remarked in other pursuits. Farmers are generally on the verge of ruin. Trade is always bad. The Church is in danger. The House of Lords isn’t worth a dozen years purchase. The throne totters.

It is in part a satirical account of the prejudices of a narrow section of society, but it does disclose the high anxiety, the fear and trembling, that afflicted the supposedly more robust and resourceful members of the Victorian public. Wilkie Collins described ‘these days of invidious nervous exhaustion and subtly-spreading nervous malady’. John Morley stated: ‘all is in doubt, hesitation and shivering expectancy’. In 1888 another writer, Elizabeth Chapman, wrote of ‘a general revolt against authority in all departments of life which is the note of an unsettled, transitional, above all democratic age’. A journalist, T. H. Escott, had perceived ‘old lines of demarcation being obliterated, revered idols being destroyed’. The seismic shift, the change of society, was felt before being properly understood. Among many it provoked nervous exhaustion, tremulousness and fear.