History of England 1-6

That is why one of the defining images of the age was the railway crash. The epitome of the new world, of time and speed, of ever-increasing momentum, was also the image of death and disaster. In Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed a hare is seen running before the Great Western Railway train as it crosses the viaduct at Maidenhead. Contemporaries would have known or recalled the old proverb that to see a hare running before you portends calamity. ‘We have seen a hare. We shall have no luck.’ The steam engine itself became a metaphor. There was journalistic talk of a ‘new improved patent, steam-engine way of passing a bill through the Lords’. The new entrepreneur measured, according to John Stuart Mill, ‘the merit of all things by their tendency to increase the number of steam-engines and make human beings as good as machines’. Yet it seemed that in the game of life it was necessary to train the mind and body ‘like a steam-engine to be turned to any kind of work’. There was great admiration for the power of machines and for the people who maintained them. An early historian of the cotton trade, Alfred Wadsworth, wrote ‘that the new machinery spread quickly in England because the whole community was interested in it’. Carlyle denounced the new respect for ‘steam intellect’. The references are everywhere.

But there was another Victorian way of looking at the world. Even as George Stephenson surveyed the railway world of 1850, the power and extent of which had changed the English landscape for ever, he told friends in Newcastle: ‘as I look back upon these stupendous undertakings it seems as though we have realised the fabled power of the magician’s wand’. For many this was a world of fairy magic, of sudden transformations, of spells and enchantments; the mundane had grown marvellous. The burning down of parliament in October 1834 had been described at the time as ‘a perfect fairy scene’. When Fanny Kemble visited the newly excavated Edge Hill tunnel she felt ‘as if no fairy tale was ever half so wonderful’.

To recognize endless novelty and change demanded some resort to images of magic and enchantment, as if only by such means could it be understood. The lighting of the streets by gas, the building of the tunnel under the Thames, the factory machinery that could replace the work of a thousand hands, all were seen in terms of wonder. The age of electricity had become a rival to gas, too, although it was said by Arthur Young in his Travels of the 1880s that the new electrical telegraphs created ‘a universal circulation of intelligence, which in England transmits the least vibration of alarm from one end of the Kingdom to the other’. Nothing seemed very far from chaos.

In her diary for 1882 Beatrice Webb pronounced the times as exemplifying the spirit of benevolence, where ‘social questions are the vital questions of today: they take the place of religion’. Social reports and surveys now lay beside sentimental novels and sensation novels and, although most of the world passed by, some stopped to consider the ragged child or the lean and drunken mother. Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (1889–1903) provided a less idiosyncratic account than Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, published forty years earlier, when individuals, rather than classes, were the object of study. The anecdote had given way to the statistic, representing a sea change in the representation of social history. Booth surmised, for example, that 30 per cent of the London population were in poverty, of whom about a third were ‘very poor’. ‘Very poor’ in the 1880s meant one small degree above destitution. But he believed that if poverty was definable it might also be curable; he also intimated the conclusion that the government itself must incur the responsibility for removing the areas of ‘occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals’, painted black, from the maps of London.

But he did not necessarily blame ‘the poor’ themselves for their condition, which had been the standard response of earlier generations. They might be ‘hard working’ and ‘struggling’ but the economic conditions of the period were fatally opposed to them. It had nothing to do with laziness or drink, but the factory gates had been closed against them. There was a growing recognition that the poor were not an original or permanent part of society, and that the conditions of many of them might be remedied. It was generally believed that the improvements of the nineteenth century, from water provision to sanitation, had in fact ameliorated the worst conditions. The poorer parts of town were known for ‘glitter and gas’, with the chop-houses, the gin shops, the cook shops and the burlesque shows together with the ballad singers, the organ grinders, the travelling bands and the stentorian tones of the costermonger.

But a glance at one of Charles Booth’s ‘poverty maps’ quickly disabused any false optimism. Black marked ‘lowest class, vicious, semi-criminal’, while dark blue registered ‘very poor, casual. Chronic want’. Even the people of the stratum above, coloured light blue, were obliged to live on 18 shillings to a guinea a week. The East End was the heart of darkness, over a third of its population living below ‘the margin of poverty’. Conditions may indeed have improved since the 1840s and 1850s, but the very poor felt more deprived in comparison with others. An economist, J. A. Hobson, wrote in 1891: ‘the rate of improvement in the condition of the poor is not quick enough to stem the current of popular discontent’.

If the problem was not one of individual fecklessness, or even of bad luck, the blame was laid upon that increasingly popular term, ‘the system’, with a new recognition of, or concern for, ‘unemployment’. Trafalgar Square became the centre of meetings and demonstrations on behalf of this new element in the state. A Mansion House fund for the relief of the unemployed was established, but it could do ameliorative work only. The ‘unemployed’ became the shadow world to be regarded with trepidation. No one knew what to do with them. There was an even lower category, ‘the residuum’, which spread contagion everywhere. But the unemployed remained at the forefront of public consciousness.

The plight of the ‘labouring poor’ or the ‘deserving poor’ was not yet to be alleviated by collective means; there were some 700 philanthropic societies that worked in a generally uncoordinated and ad hoc manner. Certain streets, certain districts, even certain individuals became the focus of concern in a society which had no ‘safety net’ to catch those who had fallen out of the system. Instead there had been in place since 1869 the Charity Organisation Society which Henry James believed to be ‘so characteristic a feature of English civilization’. It was as practical and pragmatic as any other English society, but it did try to bring together the multifarious charities which were in danger of bumping into each other in the street.

Lothair, the titular hero of Disraeli’s novel published in 1870, remarked that ‘it seems to me that pauperism is not an affair so much of wages as of dwellings. If the working classes were properly lodged, at their present rate of wages, they would be richer. They would be healthier and happier at the same cost.’ The same insight had occurred to other enthusiasts for ‘model dwellings’, some of whom were rich philanthropists who began a course of slum clearance and new building still to be found in English cities.

The queen travelled to the East End in the spring of 1887 to open the ‘People’s Palace’, which was a concert room, a library and a singing gallery all in one. She heard what she called ‘a horrid noise (quite new to the Queen’s ears) “booing” she believes it is called’. Salisbury told her, in way of an apology, that ‘London contains a much larger number of the worst kind of rough than any other great town in the island … probably Socialists and the worst Irish.’

The East End of London had also become in the popular mind a place of mystery and of darkness. It was ‘the abyss’; it was ‘darkest London’ and ‘the nether world’. It was the city of dreadful night. It came to represent the essence of Victorian London and has been seen as such in a thousand television dramas. In the summer and autumn of 1888, however, it became the object of more particular attention. Two industrial disputes made a powerful impression, as if they were heavy with the weight of the future like dark clouds prophesying rain. The girls who worked in the Bryant and May match factory in Bow walked out of their jobs when two girls were dismissed for insubordination at the beginning of July 1888. The girls went on strike, and achieved some very prominent support. Their dismissal drew attention to their working conditions in a positively unhealthy environment. White phosphorus used in the manufacture of lucifer matches, for example, provoked a debilitating condition known as ‘phossy jaw’. They were the pale and unhealthy slaves of the industrial process. Seven hundred of them walked out of their place of employment, the Fairfield Works, and the factory was closed. They were vigilant for their cause, and their first protest march was to Fleet Street rather than to Westminster. They gained the support of journalists, MPs and the members of the various socialist parties that operated in the capital.

A prominent unionist, Tom Mann, wrote later:

the girls were soon organised into a trade union. Their case was conducted with great skill. A club was formed, which was used as an educational and social centre, and a spirit of hopefulness characterised the proceedings. The girls won. They had a stimulating effect upon other sections of workers, some of whom were also showing signs of intelligent dissatisfaction.

Most of the girls were of Irish ancestry and their shared culture was of great effect in the East End. And it was a defining moment for English trade unionism itself, and set the terms for a great dockers’ strike in the East End of the following year. Engels described the activity of the match-girls as ‘the light jostle needed for the entire avalanche to move’, soon to be demonstrated.

Meanwhile a shadow had fallen over the East End which claimed the nation’s attention. The brief reign of Jack the Ripper, from August to November of that year, aroused popular terror on an unprecedented scale. It was as if all the presumed darkness of the area had become concentrated in this elusive anonymous figure, and the fact that he was not captured led to the fugitive suspicion that the neighbourhood itself had killed the women. It was a catalyst for the nervous worn-out excitement that characterized the period.

Strike followed strike in the context of popular socialism and the demand for ‘democracy’ of some form or other. By 1887 the various unions in the cotton trade came together. A strike for a nine-hour day among engineering workers was successful even without the intervention of trade unions. In the same year Ben Tillett, a working docker, formed the Tea Operatives and General Labourers Union at Tilbury Docks. These working men became central in the emergence of what became known as the ‘new unionism’. It was designed to organize those trades which the old unionism had neglected or forgotten, under the principles of a legal minimum wage and a compulsory eight-hour day. The old unions, known as ‘the aristocracy of labour’, had ignored the poorer workers, the sweated labour, the unskilled workmen. John Burns and Tom Mann of the Social Democratic Foundation accused their own union, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, of ‘selfish and snobbish desertion’ of the poor workers. In that year, too, the Labour Electoral Association urged: ‘working men must form themselves … as centres to organise the people’.

In 1888 the Miners’ Federation was formed. When Will Thorne started the National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers Union at Beckton Gas Works in the early summer of 1889, he recalled that ‘the news spread like wildfire in the public houses, factories and works in Canning Town, Barking, East and West Ham, everyone was talking about the union’. To their surprise their demand for an eight-hour day was conceded without a struggle. The Great London Dock Strike took place in the same summer, when the dockers walked out for the sake of the ‘dockers’ tanner’; they were part of the wave of action which had begun with the match-girls in the year before. Ben Tillett had organized the poorer-paid employees of the dock, and when he called them out on strike they were soon joined by workers on both sides of the Thames. Their demands were a wage of sixpence per hour and a minimum of four hours for those unloading cargo.

They were one of the most exploited groups of workers, who relied upon casual labour and an inhumane system of crowding around the dock gates to see who would be hired. Ben Tillett stated: ‘we are driven into a shed, iron-barred from end to end, outside of which a foreman or contractor walks up and down with the air of a dealer in a cattle market, picking and choosing from a crowd of men, who, in their eagerness to obtain employment, trample each other underfoot, and where like beasts they fight for the chances of a day’s work’.

It was one of the last aspects of an earlier era to remain beside the Thames. But it was soon removed. For the first time since 1797, the Port of London was closed. Cardinal Manning, and the Salvation Army, became involved in the negotiation; Manning became a familiar figure in incidents of social dispute and G. K. Chesterton gave a memorable description of him resembling ‘a ghost clad in flames’ as the people in Kensington High Street dropped to their knees before him. We may presume that some of the kneeling crowd were the Irish poor, hoping for some measure of wage reform to alleviate their bitter poverty. The crisis was settled in September, with the unanticipated emergence of the dockers’ union as a force for the new century. Once again the conscience of the middle class was awakened and £18,000 was contributed to the union funds. And then the strike was finally won when £30,000 was sent by the labour unions of Australia to their comrades in need.

Engels wrote in December 1889: ‘the people are throwing themselves into the job in quite a different way, are leading far more colossal masses into the fight, are shaking society much more deeply, are putting forward much more far-reaching demands …’ The Annual Register put it differently: ‘For … almost the first time the representatives of the skilled workmen showed a readiness to throw in their lot with, and to support, unskilled labour …’ This was essentially the face of new unionism. It was designed to assist those who obtained no help hitherto, and it combined an economic with a political message. The old union leaders dressed like the employers; they wore expensive overcoats, gold watch-chains and tall hats. The new unionists simply looked like workmen. It was said that it was easy to break one stick, but not fifty sticks in a bundle. And the cry went up, from Liverpool to London: ‘Unionism for all!’ The movement even affected life at Westminster. A group of seventy radical Liberals voted together on social issues and even elected their own whip. It was in the spring of 1890 that the first ‘May Day’ demonstration was held in England, with ‘dense crowds as far as the eye could see marching up with music and banners, over a hundred thousand …’ That, at least, is what Engels saw. This was the period, too, when Joseph Chamberlain recommended a united Unionist front against the threat of socialism as well as of Home Rule for Ireland, and by the time of the next general election he had formed a coalition under the Conservative leadership of Lord Salisbury.

The Gladstonian Liberals had compounded the confusion by concocting a group of radical measures that was known as the Newcastle Programme. They included an act for Employers’ Liability for Accidents, Home Rule for Ireland, triennial parliaments, a local veto on the sale of alcohol, the disestablishment of the Church in Ireland and Scotland, as well as various other assorted measures which were designed to increase the Liberal vote for the election of 1892. It was significant only in the sense that, despite Gladstone’s sense of righteous mission on the subject, Home Rule was only one among other issues. It might seem, in fact, that the whole subject had been forgotten by everyone except the immediate protagonists. In a speech at the Mansion House Salisbury announced that he had never seen Ireland so peaceful. The vigour and calculation of Balfour’s rule as Irish secretary impressed all, at least all those who were ready to be impressed, as a great token of imperium in action. The majority of the English, as usual, treated the whole business with indifference.

In the 1880s and 1890s, too, the advent of socialist tracts and pamphlets marked a change of political tone. Engels connected the new dispensation to the gradual collapse of Britain’s imperial power. He insisted that the loss of Britain’s industrial and trade monopoly, so much a feature of the 1850s and 1860s, was ‘the secret of the present sudden emergence of a socialist movement here’. This was by no means the principal or only explanation, but it was part of the transvaluation of all values that characterized the years before the First World War. The poorly paid or the unemployed were really no longer viewed as a threat; they were being socialized, and those who had become attached to a union were also becoming part of the community. That may be one of the reasons why the middle class furnished the new unions with funds; it may have been done out of pity and charity but there may also have been an iota of self-defence. This covert form of self-preservation was one of the elements in what sceptics called ‘claptrap morality’.

In one of Gladstone’s speeches an observer noted that ‘his head looked like a white eagle perched on a black stump’. He refused all talk of resignation. He did, however, decide to migrate to the South of France for a holiday. When Gladstone returned from Biarritz in February 1892, his ministers were eager for news of his intentions, but he ‘talked almost entirely of trees’. His ministers were now impatient for him to be gone, as soon as possible, but he remained aloof. Rosebery said that he was in a condition of ‘righteous wrath’ and was still resolved to lead his party into the election of that summer. There were many, including the queen, who were astonished by the spectacle of a man in his eighties wishing to administer the nation and the empire – and this was for the fourth time. At the beginning of June 1892, Gladstone refused to take up the cause of legal eight-hour days because he was too busy with Irish affairs. Yet all was not well. He was being driven through the streets of Chester a few days later, when an old woman hurled a piece of hard gingerbread at him; it struck his left eye, and from the time of that blow his eyesight began to diminish. The election campaign was about to begin.

He did not win the election of July 1892, but he did not lose it; he gained the largest number of seats but did not command a majority without the support of the Irish Nationalists. Salisbury refused to resign and ensconced himself in the Commons waiting for a parliamentary vote of no confidence to eject him. In the middle of August he eventually received his quietus, and Gladstone returned with a minority government which he regarded as ‘too small’. Victoria was in any case horrified at the result. She declared that the incoming government would be filled by ‘greedy place-makers who are republicans at heart’. She could not yet bring herself to ‘send at once for that dreadful old man … whom she can neither respect nor trust’. Of course she had to resign herself to the situation and to the constitutional proprieties, but she disliked him. She thought the relationship between them was a sham, and that he was a sham.

Nevertheless, his inner will, combined with external victory, seemed to revive him a little. A contemporary journalist, Henry Lucy, noted that ‘in appearance he looks younger rather than older as the weeks pass. His voice has gained in richness and vigour, while his mind seems to have grown in activity and resource.’ In effect Gladstone ran a government with Irish Nationalist support, a most difficult position to maintain. Yet this late bloom could not last. He grew angry and on more than one occasion threatened to resign. Lord Acton described him as ‘wild, violent, inaccurate, sophistical, evidently governed by resentment’.

One of the more significant results of the election of 1892 was the election of Keir Hardie to the seat of West Ham South. He stood as an independent but he soon became involved in the creation of an Independent Labour party which would stand apart from Liberals as well as Conservatives. He had already created a surprise at Westminster by arriving in a cloth cap and tweed jacket, and his clothes perhaps marked his sense of vocation. The inaugural conference of the Independent Labour party was opened on 14 January 1893. Its purpose was to create a party majority on the necessity of labour reform, which meant they were more intent upon alliance with the trade unions than with the myriad socialist parties which had really become talking shops.

Gladstone was still in the thrall of Home Rule. He had given his assent to the Newcastle Programme but his heart was not in it. Chamberlain pressed him for the details of the imminent Home Rule Bill: ‘How long are you going to allow ducks and drakes to be made by the Irish party of all your British legislation?’ Gladstone introduced his Second Home Rule Bill in February 1893. He and Chamberlain were now pitted against each other as in some tableau of age and relative youth. ‘I say that never in the history of the world’, Chamberlain declaimed, ‘has a risk so tremendous been encountered with such a light hearted indifference to its possible results’. The Second Reading was carried for Gladstone, with the help of the Irish Nationalists, by a margin of forty-three votes. The members of the Stock Exchange marched in formation and burnt the bill in front of the Guildhall. The bill slowly went forward, but not without great bitterness and recrimination. A fist fight broke out on the floor of the Commons, much to the horror of the public gallery. The bill was already expiring but the House of Lords killed it by a majority of ten to one. There was no public outcry. English indifference effectively put the bill out of its misery, and Gladstone was heard to mutter: ‘I can do no more for Ireland.’ It seemed that he could do no more for anyone, and there were constant whispers that it was really time for him to go.

The final moment, for him, came when he delivered a letter of resignation to the queen at the beginning of March 1894. She accepted it in good spirits and seemed not at all perturbed by his resignation. ‘Mr Gladstone has gone out,’ she told the archbishop of Canterbury with a laugh. ‘Disappeared all in a moment.’ He was deeply upset by her lack of concern and of any attempt at commiseration or congratulation. He had stumbled a weary way and had become only the queen’s donkey. At a melancholy and lachrymose cabinet meeting, whose tears he did not appreciate, he gave his colleagues notice of his decision. Without the captain of so many years the ship seemed to drift. No one seemed capable of command.

On 15 March Lord Rosebery travelled to Windsor and kissed hands with the queen. She liked him well enough, even though she had no time for the party he represented. Rosebery had the advantage of being, in the queen’s eyes, the least objectionable Liberal. She said only that ‘she does not object to Liberal measures which are not revolutionary & she does not think it possible that Lord Rosebery will destroy well-tried, valued and necessary institutions …’ Rosebery was the Whig non plus ultra, regarding Conservatives as vulgar and other less aristocratic Liberals with only distant affection. He had also gained attention and admiration in the country for his handling of a long and complicated coal strike. So he became the chosen one. He had shown much promise in the cabinet but now, at the pinnacle of his career, he spoke with an uncertain voice. He was not sure what to do. His predecessor had so dominated the party that serious questions of policy had not been debated. Yet he was witty, and articulate, with an enviable ability to turn a phrase. In demeanour and dress he was of the 1890s. He was not Gladstone or Disraeli, or even Salisbury; he was not solid or necessarily reliable. He even looked flirtatious, and there were strange rumours about his relationship with his private secretary, the older son of the marquess of Queensberry.

When out of temper, he was irritable and impatient. The Spectator described him as a ‘butterfly Prime Minister, ephemeral in his essence’. In fact the Rosebery administration lasted for only fifteen months. The burden of his office proved too much for him, and he made the unpardonable blunder of stating that ‘the majority of Members of Parliament elected from England proper are hostile to Home Rule’. So the last eighteen months of frantic negotiation and political planning had in effect been for nothing. The new prime minister had no fire. He had no fight in his belly. He never really knew what he wanted, and the irritation he felt against other people was in reality irritation with himself. The cabinet was always in a state of indecision and disarray; he was now considered both too aloof and too flippant. He informed the queen, in the formal third person, that ‘Lord Rosebery in the meantime is shut up in a House almost unanimously opposed to his ministry and, for all political purposes, might as well be in the Tower of London.’ He could not have succeeded because he was oversensitive, resentful of opposition and inclined to paranoia. ‘He is’, Rosebery told the queen, ‘as Prime Minister more unfortunately situated than any man who ever held that high office.’ He could not sleep, and remained awake for nights at a time brooding and worrying. ‘I am unfit for human society,’ he told a colleague. This was not a good sign for a prime minister. Yet his sense of duty forced him forward.

On 19 February he summoned the cabinet and read out a prepared statement: ‘I cannot call to mind a single instance in which any individual in the party or the Ministry has spoken even casually in my defence within the walls of Parliament … The difficulties to which I allude have been hard to bear, indeed I could not undertake to face another session like the last.’ It was a strangely maudlin report from any prime minister, and confirmed his unfitness to govern. He was all bluster and self-pity. He was persuaded not to resign, for the time being, but a week later his body capitulated where his mind did not. He collapsed with influenza and the debilitating effect of the illness stayed with him. He said that he understood why people in public life committed suicide. On 21 June the secretary for War, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, was censured by the Commons over a shortage of cordite, and on the following day Rosebery persuaded his cabinet to resign en bloc as a matter of confidence. A few hours later the queen sent a message inviting Salisbury to form another administration.

At the subsequent election in July 1895 a Liberal majority of forty-three was transformed into a Unionist majority of 152, which must be recorded as one of the most considerable reversals in English political history. Rosebery and his colleagues felt nothing but relief. When Chamberlain joined the new government, the pact between the Conservative and Liberal Unionists was sealed, and a formidable coalition emerged. Rosebery admitted that the Liberal party had become ‘all legs and wings, a daddy-long-legs fluttering among a thousand flames’. He always did have a talent for phrase-making. He had also invented a phrase, ‘the clean slate’, which might have been intended for Salisbury himself, who remained as prime minister for the next seven years.

27

Lost illusions

In the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895, the heart of the late Victorian world was stripped bare. Wilde’s Irishness set him apart in England, and ensured that he looked from a distance at the customs and conventions of his adopted country. Of all people he recognized the follies of Victorian society and the vices it concealed. The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) was so funny that English audiences forgot – at least for the duration of the play – that they were laughing at every institution and value they held sacred. But of course it is a mistake to reveal to your contemporaries that their ideals are illusions and their understanding all vanity.

Like many of his generation, as a young man he donned the cloak of aestheticism, commonly known then as ‘art for art’s sake’. Art was to be divorced from morality and, as a result, had no social or political content to convey. Since Britain was going through another phase of its long industrial revolution (some historians have referred to it as the second industrial revolution), in which objects were made by machines rather than by craftsmen or artists, the divorce or disengagement from social circumstances might have been predicted.

After achieving fame, in the 1880s, as the popular spokesman of the Aesthetic Movement, Wilde became the unofficial leader of the Decadent movement of the 1890s, which can roughly be dated from the publication of the first magazine version of The Picture of Dorian Gray in June 1890. He has been identified therefore as a writer of the fin de siècle, who delighted in artifice and parody, celebrated style and pastiche, and mocked the values of previous decades. In Wilde’s time the end of Victorianism (and all it had come to represent) was in sight but nothing had taken its place. It was a time of spiritual, moral, social and artistic chaos, when even the most formidable conviction began to crumble, slide and eventually dissolve. It could be said that he lived in a worn-out society, theatrical in its art, theatrical in its life, theatrical even in its piety. The meanings of the nineteenth century had been hollowed out. Everything seemed to be on display, like the halls of Swan and Edgar’s. Wilde knew by heart the lesson of Balzac’s villainous hero Vautrin: ‘There are no longer any laws, merely conventions: nothing but form’. He responded to the theatricality around him by turning his conversation into an art, his personality into a symbol, and his life into a mystery play.

The fin de siècle of the nineteenth century was in part represented by the Yellow Book which flourished in the 1890s as the leading journal for aestheticism, decadence and symbolism – a trinity of terror for those who maintained a solid mid-Victorian sensibility. In March 1894 its first editorial announced that the aim of the magazine was ‘to depart as far as may be from the bad old traditions of periodical literature … It will be charming, it will be daring, it will be distinguished.’ It was not greeted with any great enthusiasm, and was discounted by some as a pile of ‘hysterical and nonsensical matter’. Its first art editor was Aubrey Beardsley, and he has been considered the progenitor of the startling yellow covers which were already associated with the more flamboyant French fiction of the era. Among the contributors in its short life were Max Beerbohm, Henry James, H. G. Wells and William Butler Yeats. It represented the gay death of the nineteenth century.

It might be presumed that Oscar Wilde was on the list of the Yellow Book’s contributors, but in fact he never took part in the enterprise and professed to despise it. Nevertheless Wilde remained, and still remains, the defining figure of the last years of the century, simply because he turned its values on their head. He was the ‘Other’ of late Victorian culture, dominated as it was by jingoism, John Bullism, Pooterism and black and white Puritan morality. He was enamoured of ‘beauty’ and ‘art’ rather than ‘truth’ and ‘reality’, which he regarded as second-rate, and baneful fictions.

We could easily extend the list of binary opposites further – Wilde was queer, rather than straight, and through his openly homosexual lifestyle he boldly challenged middle-class domesticity. He was concerned with surfaces rather than depths, the body more than the soul, and aesthetics instead of ethics. He was ‘serious’ about everything Victorians regarded as ‘trivial’, and vice versa. His addictions to ambiguity, indeterminacy and inconsistency were no less subversive. Rather than excavating and expressing a single, monolithic self, in his life and writings he effortlessly invented and discarded identities, referring to insincerity as ‘a method by which we can multiply our personalities’. His mercurial genius naturally expressed itself in the drama and the dialogue, in the paradox and in the parable, genres and forms in which he could perform a number of his selves and present a debate between doctrines rather than a single view. It is no surprise, then, that many commentators portray Wilde as a confirmed Nietzschean engaged in a furious war against Victorian morality, and in the transvaluation of late nineteenth-century middle-class Christian values.

Wilde was so much the master of his period that he could effortlessly adopt all its disguises and convey all its effects. He delighted in trying out and testing the limits of each literary form. He brought hilarious and provocative comedy back to the English stage, from which it had been exiled for many years. He invented the prose poem in English, and was a pioneer of symbolic drama. He was also one of the first authors to write a ‘French’ novel, Dorian Gray being French in subject and style, if not in language. That novel was fiercely satirical of English middle-class mores. The 1890 magazine version attracted outraged and outrageous reviews, in a large part because of its homoerotic overtones, which would have been even more pronounced had the publisher not censored Wilde’s radical and explicit typescript. Yet the outcry did not stop Wilde adding new chapters to the story the following year, for its publication as a novel in book format, in which he characterizes England as ‘the native land of the hypocrite’, and the English as a race that ‘balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy’.

In 1891 Wilde also composed his political essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ for the Fortnightly Review, in which he attacked the ‘stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism’ that pervaded English culture. Wilde rails against English public opinion, which, he says, exercises a ‘tyranny’ over art, politics and ‘people’s private lives’ through the press.

‘The Soul of Man’ expresses Wilde’s commitment to an anarchistic form of socialism. Its attacks on hypocrisy were however directly related to Parnell, and at the journalists and MPs who hounded him out of politics after his relationship with the married Kitty O’Shea became public knowledge at the end of 1890. Wilde’s criticism is a token of his staunch support for Irish Home Rule and of his essential Irishness – something recognized by everyone who knew him well, from the English Alfred Douglas to his compatriots Shaw and Yeats. Wilde’s Irishness allowed him to understand, and satirize, the English of the late Victorian period, because he was an insider-outsider, a man who shared their language but did not share the values and vision that informed and were propagated by that language.

On this language issue Wilde made some interesting pronouncements. ‘French by sympathy,’ he described himself in the winter of 1891, ‘I am Irish by race, and the English have condemned me to speak the language of Shakespeare.’ During his American lecture tour of 1882 he also declared: ‘I do not know anything more wonderful, or characteristic of the Celtic genius than the quick artistic spirit in which we adapted ourselves to the English tongue. The Saxon took our lands and left them desolate. We took their language and added new beauty to it.’ So English–Irish relations offer a political context for Wilde’s paradoxes and his lush prose poetry. He was a colonial subject inverting and embellishing the language of the ruler, exposing its hidden prejudices and doublespeak. It is no coincidence that Wilde (like Samuel Beckett) wrote in French as well as English, and that in the early Nineties he contemplated becoming a French citizen when his French-language play Salomé was banned by the English censor from the London stage. ‘I am not English,’ he told a journalist at this time. ‘I am Irish – which is quite another thing’ – a pointed comment at a time when Ireland was nominally part of a ‘United Kingdom’.

Even as an Irishman Wilde set out to defy late Victorian stereotypes. On the English stage, and in the press, the Irish were often presented as feckless, drunken, sentimental and dirty ‘Paddies’. Wilde, like Parnell, always presented himself as calm, urbane, impeccably dressed; he also discarded his native brogue soon after matriculating at Oxford. Wilde’s philosophical and historical outlook, which was rigorously intellectual and scientific rather than emotional and intuitive, can also be seen in this context. ‘England is the land of intellectual fogs,’ he told Shaw, and he felt it was Celts like themselves who, contrary to popular prejudice, were best placed, because of their disinterested minds, to blow those fogs away.

In his 1895 appearances at the Old Bailey, Wilde seemed to revel in presenting himself as the subversive ‘Other’ of the late Victorian bourgeoisie, challenging, from the witness box, the ‘seven deadly virtues’ so dear to their heart. Rather than being diligent, he boasted in the courtroom of frittering his time away in restaurants. Where the bourgeoisie were thrifty, he proudly announced he spent £50 a week at the Savoy. Instead of associating with respectable members of his own class he socialized and slept with young men from the gutter. In preference to a noble life guided by notions of duty and responsibility, he declared that pleasure was the only thing one should live for, and self-realization the primary aim of existence. The fact that Wilde realized himself through homosexual rather than heterosexual relationships naturally made things much worse. At his first trial, the Pooterish men who comprised the jury – there was a stockbroker, a bank manager and several ‘gentlemen’ from Clapton – must have thought that the seven deadly sins were being paraded before them.

Wilde’s eventual conviction for ‘gross indecency’ caused a moral panic in late Victorian England. The nature of his offence was abhorrent to the respectable; moreover the trials had suggested that Wilde was a leading figure in a vast network of gentlemen who not only loved other men, but preferred men from the lowest orders. Only six years before Wilde’s trial, in what became known as the ‘Cleveland Street Scandal’, a brothel of boys working for the Post Office was revealed as the trysting place for members of the aristocracy, and even of the royal family. It was as if the hierarchies of power and society had been subverted and made rotten to the extent that aristocracy itself might be seen as a gigantic confidence trick. It was one of the first occasions, outside the enchanted realm of fiction, when the private lives of gentlemen, the staple of society, were investigated and found to be false and hollow.

These scandals and trials also represented, albeit in subliminal fashion, the overturning of sexual roles which the ‘New Woman’ and the loosening of the matrimonial laws pointed towards. It is no coincidence perhaps that Wilde himself was a supporter of the ‘New Woman’ to such an extent that soon after his conviction Punch announced: ‘THE END OF THE NEW WOMAN – The crash has come at last.’ The New Woman was the representative of advanced and adventurous ideas not unconnected in the public mind with decadent sexuality. The emancipated woman, as she was also known, challenged the conventional ideas of marriage, respectability, and legal and educational inequality. Cartoons in the satirical press were filled with images of women riding bicycles or wearing bloomers or sporting wire-framed spectacles; they were considered mannish or part of a ‘shrieking sisterhood’. Many wanted careers rather than continuous childbirth. It is interesting to note then that it is women who are the true protagonists of Wilde’s dramas, from Salome and Mrs Erlynne to Lady Bracknell and the Courtesan-Saint. They are witty and unafraid. They control the worlds Wilde portrays. They manipulate and dominate the men. So much has been said of Victorian patriarchy and the subjugation of women that it might be interesting to inquire into Victorian matriarchy and the subjugation of men. Females were the lawgivers of society – from the mansions of the West End depicted by Wilde to the back alleys of the East End – and their power was all the greater for being largely unacknowledged.

28

The terrible childbed

Salisbury’s cabinet prompted the great war at the end of the century. The Cape of Good Hope, known familiarly as the Cape Colony, was a British colony whose inhabitants were largely Afrikaners. The Orange Free State and Transvaal were neighbouring republics established by the Boers, the first Dutch-speaking settlers in southern Africa, in their quest for self-defence and self-definition. This led directly to the First Boer War, in which the British were soundly defeated and were forced to accept Boer control of the Transvaal under British suzerainty.

The discovery of diamonds made the Cape Colony rich under its prime minister, Cecil Rhodes, but then, fifteen years later, gold similarly transformed the fortunes of the Transvaal. English settlers rushed in with so great a thirst for the gold stuff that they soon formed the majority of the adult white population of what was still a Boer republic under the presidency of Paul Kruger. The English, known as ‘Uitlanders’, were obliged to pay 90 per cent of the taxation. They were susceptible to hastily imposed taxes, but they had no role in the government and no equality with the Dutch. So two hostile white tribes lived in the midst of a much greater black population. The tensions grew apace as the mining of gold became more and more successful.

This was the scene when plans were formed to invade the Transvaal and seize it for Britain. Leander Starr Jameson led a band of mercenaries into the territory in order to foment a rebellion among the Uitlanders and the rest of the British settlers. Five hundred men, with six Maxim guns, had invaded Kruger’s republic in order to overawe his people of the rifle and the Book. News of them reached the Boer government of Pretoria within a day, and they were still nowhere near their destination of Johannesburg, approximately 34 miles away. The raid, at the very end of 1895, was a complete failure from the start. Jameson and the other conspirators were surrounded and captured by the Boers who dispatched them to London for condign punishment. On the news of the defeat the Kaiser sent a telegraph to Kruger, congratulating him on his victory. The British press reacted furiously against this German slight, with headlines like ‘Get Ready’, ‘England Yet’ and ‘Hands Off’. The music hall refrain of the period was ‘We’re not going to stand it’. It served the German purpose, however, to whip up its own public opinion in response and to justify an increase in its naval power.

The Jameson Raid was financed and authorized by the magnate who had made a fortune out of diamonds, Alfred Beit, and by Cecil Rhodes himself. Yet it was generally believed to have been despatched at the instigation of the British politicians at Whitehall, particularly that of the colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain. Salisbury, as prime minister, might have been suspected of knowledge if not of complicity, but it seems that he was only vaguely aware of the plans for the raid.

The lack of support for the British raid, which had all the characteristics of an invasion, and the universal obloquy which it attracted, emphasized what Arthur Balfour and others called ‘our national isolation’. The isolation had suddenly become more intense. Kruger and the Transvaal were the heroes of the hour, and the British were condemned as mischievous, incompetent, weak and, more precisely, conspiratorial. It seems probable that, after all, Chamberlain and the Whitehall gang had been in close contact with Rhodes and Beit. They were everywhere denounced.

These were the conditions leading to the Second Boer War, which was waged from 1899 to 1902. Some were ready and eager for battle. Jan Smuts, for the Boers, declared: ‘our volk throughout South Africa must be baptized with the baptism of blood and fire before they can be admitted among the great peoples of the world’. Kruger realized from the logistics of the Jameson Raid that his military forces, largely volunteer, were not altogether adequate. So he set about creating a viable military presence in the Transvaal. He was buying arms from Germany and elsewhere; Chamberlain informed Salisbury that Transvaal ‘had a stock of artillery, rifles and ammunitions of all sorts enough to furnish a European army’. The English were more conciliatory, and had appointed Alfred Milner as high commissioner for Southern Africa and governor of Cape Colony as a more sympathetic figure than his predecessor. Nevertheless, he was an English imperialist who considered himself to be part of ‘a superior race’ who ought to govern southern Africa.

His aspiration was strengthened with a petition of 21,000 British subjects, the Uitlanders, asking their home country to intervene in the tortuous affairs of Southern Africa. Milner and Kruger met at Bloemfontein to attempt to settle their differences. Milner’s military secretary wrote: ‘the conference goes on its rather weary way … meanwhile our Uitlanders will lose patience and upset the game’. Kruger, as rugged as an African hippo, remained obdurate; Milner believed that he would have to put more effort into ‘screwing’ Kruger. This was Chamberlain’s word. He might draw inspiration from events elsewhere. The English military had recently enjoyed some success. At the beginning of September 1898, Kitchener destroyed the Mahdist army at Omdurman; two days later the British and Egyptian flags were flying over the palace at Khartoum, which for Kitchener at least was some revenge for the death of Gordon. The victory was followed by a successful confrontation with the French in Fashoda, where the French sailed away to avoid a fight. All this put some spirit into the military authorities, and they were growing increasingly impatient with the negotiations between Kruger and Milner. It was said that Kruger would ‘bluff up to the cannon’s mouth’, a phrase of Cecil Rhodes; at the same time the typewriters of the English press were growing hotter in their calls for action.

The death of Gladstone, in 1898, intervened. He had returned to Hawarden Castle to entertain the colonial premiers who had come to England for the Diamond Jubilee. In his old age his major preoccupation had changed from Irish Home Rule to the prevalence of jingoism which swept the press and the music halls and filtered into streets with the orange peel and the bunting. He had never really been interested in imperial attitudes. He was suffering from facial neuralgia which soon metamorphosed into cancer. He died on 19 May 1898, at the age of eighty-eight, and in the spirit of the new age was taken on a London Underground train before his funeral at Westminster Abbey. For some he represented one of the last obstacles to the steady progress of the state, and for others one of the last memorials to a once resplendent nation.

The time had come to call Kruger’s bluff. He had organized a ‘foreign brigade’, among them troops from Ireland, Africa, Germany and Prussia. In retaliation the British brought on the forces of the empire: Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders and Indians. Milner wrote in a memo that ‘the case for intervention is overwhelming’. The British had become the white helots, ‘Uitlanders’ who had no rights. British regiments were despatched from Bombay and Calcutta, and Smuts sent a secret memorandum in which he stated: ‘South Africa stands on the eve of a frightful blood-bath.’ They would either be a defeated and hated race, the pariahs of Africa, or the sturdy founders of a United South Africa. Salisbury wrote in a memorandum: ‘I feel convinced that the Dutch leaders in Transvaal, Orange State, and Cape Colony, have got an understanding together and have agreed to make a long pull and a strong pull to restore Dutch supremacy in South Africa. If that is their view, war must come; and we had better take it at a time when we are not quarrelling with anyone else.’ He had written two months before: ‘I see before us the necessity for considerable military efforts – and all for people whom we despise, and for territory which will bring no profit and no power to England.’ For Salisbury it was largely a question of prestige rather than power. It was to determine the identity of what was known as ‘Boss’ in southern Africa.

The Boers delivered an ultimatum, but on the same day the British troopships made landfall at Durban before they moved inwards into Africa. War was declared on 11 October. The Boers, without uniforms and with precious little leadership, had the initial advantage. They knew the country; they knew the places for ambush and retreat which were denied to the 20,000 British and the 10,000 Indians who followed them. The Boers were also very good shots, accustomed as they were to hunting the springbok and the wildebeest. The same readiness and proficiency were not evident on the British side. The physical condition of the volunteers was appalling: when 12,000 came forward in Manchester, 8,000 were rejected as unfit. The most significant failure of the British in South Africa was the poor quality of the troops, at a time when army standards had been deliberately lowered. It was considered shameful and revived the ‘Condition of England’ question in the more direct terms. A correspondent in London wrote to Milner: ‘People walked along speaking in whispers and muttering, while ever echoed round the shrill and awful cry of “Terrible Reverse of British Troops”.’

As garrison commander Robert Baden-Powell, aware of the large number of Boer forces, set up his headquarters at Mafeking to facilitate the arrival of British ships and to deter the population from aiding the Boers. At the beginning of October 1899 it was surrounded and shelled. No one then believed that ‘the Siege of Mafeking’ would endure 217 days. There was bad news elsewhere. ‘Mournful Monday’ was followed by ‘Black Week’ at the beginning of December which claimed 3,000 lives. An epidemic of enteric fever was meanwhile killing fifty soldiers a day who occupied Bloemfontein. Nowhere was safe. ‘What’s them ’ere blokes on that bloomin’ hill?’ The English tents were on the slopes of Mount Impati, in the British colony of Natal, and now the Boers had crept out of cover to remove them. The English repulsed them, but at the cost of fifty-one dead and more than two hundred wounded. It was the beginning of a war played out to the accompaniment of drums, mountain guns, the Boers’ ‘Long Toms’, rumbling carts, 94-pounders, the snorts and whinnies of the horses and pack mules.

When the English retreated into Ladysmith from the mountain it was reported that ‘they came back slowly, tired and disheartened and sick with useless losses’. The siege of Ladysmith then began. It was not a little war. Mafeking, Ladysmith and Kimberley were for that period the arsenals of empire in an otherwise hostile terrain. It was a great war fought from an impossibly long distance. It riveted the attention of the world, much of which was wishing and hoping for the demise of the British empire. In the ensuing battle of Ladysmith the British were driven back into the town, with many dead or injured, where they endured a siege of 118 days.

The bad news of Ladysmith, and subsequent defeats, shook the nation as it had never been shaken before. Victoria had said: ‘we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat’, but even her confidence was modified. ‘No news today,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘only lists of casualties.’ The public reaction was more severe. Something had gone terribly wrong. The prime minister, Salisbury, seemed sanguine and almost listless, feeling that from the start he had been outwitted by ‘Milner and his Jingo supporters’. Yet he saw the point. Any defeat would cast a shadow over the country’s imperial supremacy, to which, of all recent prime ministers, he most fervently subscribed.

As for the public, it was a calamitous awakening. The editor of The Times commented at a later date that ‘our national life and thought never were the same again’. The veil of British mastery had been torn, revealing blunder after blunder. To the rest of the world it revealed that the British were as bad they had always believed them to be – blustering and hypocritical and essentially incompetent. One commentator, Karl Pearson, noted: ‘the spirits of one and all, whatever their political party or their opinions might be, were depressed in a manner probably never experienced by those of our countrymen now living’. A diplomat, Cecil Spring-Rice, remarked in December 1899: ‘One lies alone with a living and growing fear staring one in the face.’

One phrase, ‘splendid isolation’, had been taken up and circulated, but it steadily grew out of favour; it suggested an absence of policy rather than any positive contribution. In a speech to his Birmingham constituents in the spring of 1898 Chamberlain declared:

Now the first point I want to impress on you is this – it is the crux of the situation – since the Crimean war, nearly fifty years ago, the policy of this country has been a policy of strict isolation. We have had no allies. I am afraid we have had no friends … All the powerful states of Europe have made alliances, and as long as we keep outside these alliances – as long as we are envied by all and suspected by all – and as long as we have interests which at one time or another conflict with the interests of all – we are liable to be confronted at any moment with a combination of Great Powers … We stand alone.

It was one of the most important speeches on foreign policy made by an English politician. He spoke the truth as he knew it, and it did not need an omniscient observer to realize that, to the rest of the world, England was in danger of being overwhelmed. Her isolation, and the insignificance of her relatively small army, were well known. The dissensions among her politicians and the dangers of her street-bred masses were discussed, and the perils of her navy in defending the British empire throughout the world were obvious. Germany was the virile European state, and Russia was making its way to China and to India. There was hostility between the United Kingdom and the United States, and a civil servant in Pretoria remarked: ‘the fall of England shall be the crown of the end of the nineteenth century’.

At the end of January 1900 the two houses of parliament met for their last session in the reign of Victoria, who had been on the throne for sixty-six years. This was the parliamentary session in which Chamberlain, as colonial secretary, was almost universally reviled for the failures of the Boer War. He held back his head, and his eyes were closed. It was said that he looked like a soldier under fire.

Yet the mood of war soon changed. As in other recent British wars, initial defeats were succeeded by a national revival. Only a few days after Chamberlain’s speech on foreign policy, Field Marshal Roberts swept on to Bloemfontein, and the advance continued to Pretoria and Johannesburg. Within forty-eight hours came the relief of Kimberley and the liberation of Ladysmith; on 17 May 1900, Mafeking, besieged by the Boers, was relieved. Baden-Powell had held out for 217 days. It was perhaps the greatest victory of the war, and Baden-Powell became a national hero. The church bells rang, the schools closed for the afternoon, and the people danced around makeshift bonfires. Much of the anxiety, which had been the most deleterious of all responses to the war, was lifted. It was a time of ‘dancing, jumping, screaming in a delirium of unrestrained joy’. The effect was tremendous, greater than the celebrations of 1918 or 1945. London went ‘maficking’.

No one then knew or cared about the camps that Kitchener had constructed for the women and children of the enemy, but they soon became known as ‘concentration camps’, and were reviled as a new horror of war. Even the new leader of the Liberal party, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, spoke out against ‘methods of barbarism’, a phrase which delivered a huge shock to the members of his own party and to interested observers who believed that the imperial path was the way to glory.

The guerrilla war itself, at which the Boers were supremely adept, ended at the Peace of Vereeniging in May 1902. The independence of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal were ceded to the British, but only with the promise of self-government and, in the immediate future, with copious funds for the restoration of the Boer farms, withered in the conflict, together with a general reconstruction and restocking of the two republics. England had been humiliated, its army had been ill-equipped and ill-trained, its policy of civilian incarceration had been condemned by the major nations. It was a terrible childbed for the twentieth century.

Salisbury had said: ‘you may roughly divide the nations of the world as the living and the dying’. The living nations had enlisted science and industry, railways and weapons, that increased their range and power. The dying nations – well, they were obvious. Spain, China, Portugal, Turkey, were apparently all in the throes of senescence. Surely that could not be said of England?

In 1896 Lord Northcliffe established the Daily Mail; it boasted of a readership from Brighton to Newcastle, and at the same time there was some loss of interest in local or what were known as ‘provincial’ affairs. This was also the year when Marconi sailed to England to persuade the General Post Office to take his wireless. The first cinema picture was shown in the West End, and cars were no longer enjoined to bear a red flag in front of them. The world was winning through despite the best endeavours of its statesmen.

In the halls of the old establishment, however, gloom and monotony prevailed as the wheels of administration and empire seemed to grind slowly. Joseph Chamberlain, the most vigorous member of the cabinet, complained: ‘There is little backbone in politics and the great majority are prepared to swallow anything and to stick to the machine.’ The queen herself was perceptibly slowing down, and a visitor reported ‘intense monotony’ at court, where there was ‘a curious charm to our beloved Sovereign in doing the same things on the same day year after year’. The prime minister, the marquess of Salisbury, was becoming more distant from his colleagues and from the affairs of state. He was generally aloof, unwilling to engage with his cabinet or to propose new policies. He had always supposed that new policies were bad policies and his generally weary and negative view of the war added to the twilight world. One backbencher noted: ‘of all futile expedients, party meetings always struck me as being the most futile’. The voice of the Church was muted in the land. Lord Rosebery, stricken with inanition and a sense of failure, had finally abandoned the leadership of the Liberal party in the autumn of 1896. The parliamentary sessions of the next two years were recognized to be the dullest of a dull series. It culminated in the general election of 1900, known as the ‘khaki election’, based upon the ongoing Boer War. Lord Salisbury and his allies, the Liberal Unionists, returned once more to government.

Not everything revolved around politics. There was activity of every kind in other areas of national life. There was a vogue for the ‘new’ in implicit deference to the new century just below the horizon. There was the ‘new woman’ and the ‘new humour’, the ‘new hedonism’ and ‘l’art nouveau’. The ‘new’ was embraced in every aspect of life, in the department stores, in bikes and bloomers. The Kodak camera appeared in 1888. Families became smaller; more space and time and money were left for popular luxuries and distractions from the working day such as theatres, racecourses, pleasure gardens, fairs and music halls. The first motor-car race was held between London and Brighton on Motor-Car Day of 14 November 1896. Seventeen out of thirty cars finished the course. The defining phrase of the period was ‘we moderns’, perhaps given an ironical emphasis, but it was a genuine reaction to the coming death of the century.

Three months before the Second, or Diamond, Jubilee of June 1897 the queen had travelled to the Riviera to meet the members of her multifarious family. But there was a problem. The familiar royal household refused to let the munshi, her Indian servants, dine with them. In one of those acts of fury of which she alone was capable, the queen swept everything off her desk in a gesture of anger; ink-pots, papers, pens and blotting papers were hurled to the ground. It was evidence of the violent fury that she was never able to shake off. The munshi went with her to the South of France.

Envoi

The queen returned from a visit to Ireland in the spring of 1900, and on her return to Windsor Castle she was greeted by the boys of Eton College singing patriotic songs. She leaned out of the window, repeating many times ‘Thank you, thank you.’ The boys were astonished to see one of her Indian servants handing her a whisky and water. On two separate days she reviewed from her carriage a march past from two of the regiments returning from South Africa. The stress of the war had burdened her, and those who knew her best noticed the change. Her lady in waiting, Lady Churchill, remarked to her maid that the queen looked to be ‘a dying woman’. But Lady Churchill died first, of a heart attack, and the queen lamented: ‘that it should happen here is too sad’ and ‘the loss to me is not to be told’. On New Year’s day she had the strength to visit soldiers in a convalescents’ home. They were some of the last of her subjects she ever saw. In the middle of January 1901 she seemed confused, and on the following day took to her bed. At about four in the evening the queen’s doctor, Sir James Reid, announced to the family that she was slowly sinking into death. A little while later she opened her eyes and whispered: ‘Sir James, I am very ill.’ She was later heard to murmur, according to her daughter, Princess Louise: ‘Oh I don’t want to die yet. There are several things I want to arrange.’ But there was no time left. There was nothing more to arrange. She died at 6.30 that evening, and with her died an era.

Bibliography

Adelman, P., Victorian Radicalism: the Middle-class Experience, 1830–1914 (London, 1984)

——, Peel and the Conservative Party, 1830–1850 (London, 1989)

——, Gladstone, Disraeli and Later Victorian Politics (London, 1997)

Altick, R. D., The English Common Reader: a Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago, 1957)

Anderson, O., A Liberal State at War: English Politics and Economics during the Crimean War (London, 1967)

Annear, R., The Man Who Lost Himself: the Unbelievable Story of the Tichborne Claimant (London, 2003)

Anthony, Barry, The King’s Jester (London, 2010)

Aspinall, A., Lord Brougham and the Whig Party (Manchester, 1939)

Barbary, J., The Crimean War (London, 1972)

Baron, X. (ed.), London 1066–1914: Literary Sources & Documents (vols 2 & 3) (Robertsbridge, 1997)

Batho, E. C., Dobrée, B., & Chapman, G. (ed.), The Victorians and After, 1830–1914 (London, 1938)

Battiscombe, G., Shaftesbury: a Biography of the Seventh Earl 1801–1885 (London, 1974)

Beales, D. E. D., From Castlereagh to Gladstone (London, 1971)

Bédarida, F., A Social History of England, 1851–1975 (London, 1979)

Bell, H. C. F., Lord Palmerston (London, 1936)

Bentley, M., Politics without Democracy: Great Britain, 1815–1914: Perception and Preoccupation in British Government (Oxford, 1985)

Best, G., Mid-Victorian Britain, 1851–1875 (London, 1971)

Bew, J., Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny (London, 2011)

Biagini, E. F., Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge, 1992)

Black, J., The English Press 1621–1861 (Stroud, 2001)

Blake, R., Disraeli (Oxford, 1969)

Bloom, C., Victoria’s Madmen: Revolution and Alienation (Basingstoke, 2013)

Boase, T. S. R., English Art, 1800–1870 (Oxford, 1959)

Bodelsen, C. A., Studies in Mid-Victorian Imperialism (London, 1960)

Bradford, S., Disraeli (London, 1982)

Brady, A., William Huskisson and Liberal Reform: an Essay on the Changes in Economic Policy in the Twenties of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1928)

Briggs, A., Victorian People: a Reassessment of Persons and Themes, 1851–67 (Chicago, 1955)

——, The Age of Improvement 1783–1867 (London, 1959)

——, Victorian Cities (London, 1963)

——, Iron Bridge to Crystal Palace: Impact and Images of the Industrial Revolution (London, 1979)

——, Victorian Things (London, 1988)

Brock, W. R., Lord Liverpool and Liberal Toryism, 1820 to 1827 (Cambridge, 1941)

Brown, D., Palmerston: a Biography (New Haven, 2010)

Buckley, J. H., The Victorian Temper: a Study in Literary Culture (London, 1952)

Burn, W. L., The Age of Equipoise: a Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation (London, 1964)

Bury, J. P. T. (ed.), The New Cambridge Modern History. Volume X, The Zenith of European Power: 1830–70 (Cambridge, 1974)

Buxton, S., Finance and Politics: an Historical Study, 1783–1885 (London, 1888)

Cecil, H. P., & Blake, R., Salisbury: the Man and His Policies (Basingstoke, 1987)

Chamberlain, M. E., Lord Aberdeen: a Political Biography (London, 1983)

Chambers, J. D., & Mingay, G. E., The Agricultural Revolution, 1750–1880 (London, 1966)

Checkland, S. G., The Rise of Industrial Society in England, 1815–1885 (London, 1964)

Clapham, J. H., An Economic History of Modern Britain (3 vols) (Cambridge, 1926–1938)

Clark, J. C. D., From Restoration to Reform: the British Isles 1660–1832 (London, 2014)

Coleman, B. I., Conservatism and the Conservative Party in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, 1988)

Colley, L., Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London, 1994)

——, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (London, 2002)

Collins, M., The Likes of Us: a Biography of the White Working Class (London, 2004)

Colloms, B., Victorian Visionaries (London, 1982)

Conacher, J. B., The Aberdeen Coalition, 1852–1855: a Study in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Party Politics (London, 1968)

——, The Peelites and the Party System, 1846–52 (Newton Abbot, 1972)

Conrad, P., The Victorian Treasure-House (London, 1973)

Cookson, J. E., Lord Liverpool’s Administration: the Crucial Years 1815–1822 (Edinburgh, 1975)

Cowling, M., 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution: the Passing of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1967)

Crawley, C. W. (ed.), The New Cambridge Modern History: Volume 9, War and Peace in an Age of Upheaval, 1793–1830 (Cambridge, 1965)

Crosby, T. L., The Two Mr Gladstones: a Study in Psychology and History (New Haven, 1997)

David, S., Prince of Pleasure: the Prince of Wales and the Making of the Regency (London, 1998)

Davidoff, L., & Hall, C., Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (London, 1987)

Davis, H. W. C., The Age of Grey and Peel (Oxford, 1964)

De-la-Noy, M., George IV (Stroud, 1998)

Deane, P., The First Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1965)

Deary, T., Dangerous Days on the Victorian Railways: a History of the Terrors and the Torments, the Dirt, Diseases and Deaths Suffered by Our Ancestors (London, 2014)

Dodds, J. W., The Age of Paradox: a Biography of England, 1841–1851 (London, 1953)

Egremont, M., Balfour: a Life of Arthur James Balfour (London, 1980)

Emerson, R. W., English Traits (London, 1906)

Englander, D., Poverty and Poor Law Reform in Britain: from Chadwick to Booth, 1834–1914 (London, 1998)

Ensor, R. C. K., England, 1870–1914 (Oxford, 1936)

Evans, E. J., The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain 1783–1870 (London, 1983)

——, Britain before the Reform Act: Politics and Society, 1815–1832 (London, 1989)

Eyck, F., The Prince Consort: a Political Biography (London, 1959)

Feiling, K., The Second Tory Party, 1714–1832 (London, 1938)

Feuchtwanger, E. J., Disraeli, Democracy and the Tory Party: Conservative Leadership and Organization after the Second Reform Bill (Oxford, 1968)

——, Democracy and Empire: Britain, 1865–1914 (London, 1985)

Flanders, J., Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (London, 2006)

Fontane, T., Journeys to England in Victoria’s Early Days (London, 1939)

Ford, B., Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 1992)

Francis, M., & Morrow, J., A History of English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1994)

Freeman, M. J., Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven, 1999)

——, Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World (New Haven, 2004)

Garfield, S., The Last Journey of William Huskisson (London, 2002)

Garvin, J. L., & Amery, J., The Life of Joseph Chamberlain (6 vols) (London, 1932–1969)

Gash, N., Politics in the Age of Peel: a Study in the Technique of Parliamentary Representation, 1830–1850 (London, 1953)

——, Mr. Secretary Peel: the Life of Sir Robert Peel to 1830 (London, 1961)

——, Reaction and Reconstruction in English Politics, 1832–1852 (Oxford, 1964)

——, Sir Robert Peel: the Life of Sir Robert Peel after 1830 (London, 1972)

——, Aristocracy and People: Britain, 1815–1865 (London, 1979)

——, Lord Liverpool: the Life and Political Career of Robert Banks Jenkinson, Second Earl of Liverpool, 1770–1828 (London, 1984)

Gilbert, A. D., Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740–1914 (London, 1976)

Gillespie, F. E., Labour and Politics in England, 1850–1867 (London, 1966)

Gleadle, K., British Women in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke, 2001)

Goodway, D., London Chartism, 1838–1848 (Cambridge, 1982)

Guedalla, P., The Queen and Mr. Gladstone (London, 1933)

Guedalla, P. (ed.), Gladstone and Palmerston: Being the Correspondence of Lord Palmerston with Mr. Gladstone, 1851–1865 (London, 1928)

Gunn, S., The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority and the English Industrial City, 1840–1914 (Manchester, 2000)

Halévy, E., A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century (6 vols) (London, 1949–52)

Hall, C., McClelland, K., & Rendall, J., Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000)

Hamer, D. A., Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery: a Study in Leadership and Policy (Oxford, 1972)

Hamilton, J., London Lights: the Minds that Moved the City that Shook the World, 1805–51 (London, 2007)

Hammond, J. L., & Hammond, B. B., The Age of the Chartists, 1832–1854: a Study of Discontent (London, 1930)

Hanham, H. J., Elections and Party Management: Politics in the Time of Disraeli and Gladstone (London, 1959)

——, The Nineteenth-Century Constitution 1815–1914: Documents and Commentary (London, 1969)

Harris, J., Private Lives, Public Spirit: a Social History of Britain 1870–1914 (Oxford, 1993)

Harrison, J. F. C., The Early Victorians, 1832–1851 (London, 1971)

——, Late Victorian Britain, 1870–1901 (London, 1990)

Hay, W. A., The Whig Revival, 1808–1830 (Basingstoke, 2005)

Hayes, P. M., The Nineteenth Century, 1814–80 (London, 1975)

Heffer, S., High Minds: the Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain (London, 2013)

Hewitt, M., An Age of Equipoise?: Reassessing Mid-Victorian Britain (Aldershot, 2000)

Heyck, T. W., The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (London, 1982)

Hibbert, C., George IV (London, 1976)

——, The Great Indian Mutiny 1857 (London, 1978)

——, Victoria (London, 1979)

Hill, R., Toryism and the People, 1832–1846 (London, 1929)

Hilton, B., Corn, Cash, Commerce: the Economic Policies of the Tory Governments 1815–1830 (Oxford, 1977)

——, The Age of Atonement: the Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford, 1988)

Himmelfarb, G., Poverty and Compassion: the Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (New York, 1991)

——, The Spirit of the Age: Victorian Essays (New Haven, 2007)

Hinde, W., George Canning (London, 1973)

——, Castlereagh (London, 1981)

Hobsbawm, E. J., The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York, 1962)

——, Industry and Empire: an Economic History of Britain since 1750 (London, 1968)

——, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (London, 1975)

Hollis, P., Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England (London, 1974)

Hone, J. A., For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London 1796–1821 (Oxford, 1982)

Hoppen, K. T., The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886 (Oxford, 1998)

Houghton, W. E., The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven, 1957)

Hurd, D., & Young, E., Disraeli, or the Two Lives (London, 2013)

Iremonger, L., Lord Aberdeen: a Biography of the Fourth Earl of Aberdeen, K.G., K.T., Prime Minister 1852–1855 (London, 1978)

James, R. R., Rosebery: a Biography of Archibald Philip, Fifth Earl of Rosebery (London, 1963)

Jay, R., Joseph Chamberlain: a Political Study (Oxford, 1981)

Jenkins, R., Gladstone (London, 1995)

Jenkins, T. A., The Liberal Ascendancy, 1830–1886 (Basingstoke, 1994)

——, Parliament, Party and Politics in Victorian Britain (Manchester, 1996)

Jenkins, T. A., Disraeli and Victorian Conservatism (Basingstoke, 1996)

Jones, W. D., Lord Derby and Victorian Conservatism (Oxford, 1956)

Jupp, P., Lord Grenville, 1759–1834 (Oxford, 1985)

Kitson Clark, G. S. R., Peel and the Conservative Party: a Study in Party Politics 1832–1841 (London, 1964)

——, The Making of Victorian England (London, 1965)

——, An Expanding Society: Britain 1830–1900 (Cambridge, 1967)

Klingender, F. D., Art and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1947)

Landes, D. S., The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, 1969)

Leonard, R. L., The Great Rivalry: Disraeli and Gladstone (London, 2013)

Longford, E., Victoria R.I. (London, 1964)

——, Wellington (London, 1992)

Lynd, H. M., England in the Eighteen-Eighties: Toward a Social Basis for Freedom (London, 1945)

MacDonagh, O., Early Victorian Government, 1830–1870 (London, 1977)

Mackay, R. F., Balfour, Intellectual Statesman (Oxford, 1985)

MacLeod, C., Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and British Identity, 1750–1914 (Cambridge, 2007)

Magnus, P., Gladstone: a Biography (London, 1954)

Mandler, P., Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals 1830–1852 (Oxford, 1990)

Marriott, J. A. R., England since Waterloo (London, 1913)

Marsden, G., Victorian Values: Personalities and Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Society (London, 1990)

Martin, K., The Triumph of Lord Palmerston: a Study of Public Opinion in England before the Crimean War (London, 1963)

McWilliam, R., The Tichborne Claimant (London, 2006)

Mitchell, L. G., Lord Melbourne, 1779–1848 (Oxford, 1997)

Moneypenny, W. F., & Buckle, G. E., The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield (6 vols) (London, 1910–1920)

Murphy, P. T., Shooting Victoria: Madness, Mayhem, and the Rebirth of the British Monarchy (London, 2012)

Newsome, D., The Victorian World Picture: Perceptions and Introspections in an Age of Change (London, 1997)

O’Brien, C. C., Parnell and His Party, 1880–90 (Oxford, 1957)

O’Gorman, F., The Emergence of the British Two-Party System 1760–1832 (London, 1982)

O’Kell, R., Disraeli: the Romance of Politics (Toronto, 2013)

Pakenham, T., The Boer War (London, 1979)

Palliser, D. M., Clark, P., & Daunton, M. J., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain (3 vols) (Cambridge, 2000)

Parry, J. P., Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party, 1867–1875 (Cambridge, 1986)

——, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1993)

Parsons, G., Moore, J. R., & Wolffe, J. (eds), Religion in Victorian Britain (5 vols) (Manchester, 1988–1997)

Paterson, M., A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain: a Social History of Queen Victoria’s Reign (London, 2008)

Pearce, E., Reform! The Fight for the 1832 Reform Act (London, 2003)

Pelling, H., The Origins of the Labour Party, 1880–1900 (Oxford, 1966)

——, Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain: Essays (London, 1968)

Perkin, H. J., Origins of Modern English Society (London, 1985)

Plumb, J. H., The First Four Georges (London, 1966)

Pollard, A., The Victorians (London, 1970)

Porter, A. N., & Louis, W. R., The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume 3: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999)

Prest, J. M., Lord John Russell (London, 1972)

Ramsay, A. A. W., Sir Robert Peel (London, 1928)

Read, D., Cobden and Bright: a Victorian Political Partnership (London, 1967)

——, Peel and the Victorians (Oxford, 1987)

Reay, B., The Last Rising of the Agricultural Labourers: Rural Life and Protest in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1990)

Robbins, K., John Bright (London, 1979)

Roberts, A., Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London, 1999)

Robson, R. (ed.), Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain: Essays in Honour of George Kitson Clark (London, 1967)

Royle, E., Chartism (London, 1980)

Royle, T., The Kitchener Enigma (London, 1985)

——, Crimea: the Great Crimean War 1854–1856 (London, 1999)

Russell, C. A., Science and Social Change: 1700–1900 (Basingstoke, 1983)

Saintsbury, G. E. B., The Earl of Derby (London, 1892)

Schivelbusch, W., The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the 19th Century (Oxford, 1980)

Searle, G. R., Entrepreneurial Politics in Mid-Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1993)

Shannon, R., Gladstone (2 vols) (London, 1982–99)

——, The Age of Disraeli, 1868–1881: the Rise of Tory Democracy (London, 1992)

——, The Age of Salisbury, 1881–1902: Unionism and Empire (London, 1996)

Shenton, C., The Day Parliament Burned Down (Oxford, 2012)

Slater, G., The Growth of Modern England (London, 1932)

Smelser, N. J., Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: an Application of Theory to the Lancashire Cotton Industry, 1770–1840 (London, 1959)

Smith, E. A., Lord Grey, 1764–1845 (Oxford, 1990)

——, George IV (New Haven, 1999)

Smith, F. B., The Making of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1966)

Somerset, A., The Life and Times of William IV (London, 1980)

Southgate, D., The Passing of the Whigs, 1832–1886 (London, 1962)

Stansky, P., Ambitions and Strategies: the Struggle for the Leadership of the Liberal Party in the 1890s (Oxford, 1964)

——, Gladstone: a Progress in Politics (New York, 1979)

Stewart, R., The Foundation of the Conservative Party, 1830–1867 (London, 1978)

Swartz, M., The Politics of British Foreign Policy in the Era of Disraeli and Gladstone (London, 1985)

Sweet, M., Inventing the Victorians (London, 2001)

Taylor, A. J. P., The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford, 1954)

Temperley, H. W. V., The Foreign Policy of Canning, 1822–1827 (London, 1966)

Temperley, H. W. V., & Penson, L. M., Foundations of British Foreign Policy from Pitt (1792) to Salisbury (1902); or, Documents, Old and New (Cambridge, 1938)

Tholfsen, T. R., Working Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England (London, 1976)

Thompson, D., The Chartists (London, 1984)

Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1980)

Thompson, F. M. L., English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1963)

——, The Rise of Respectable Society: a Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900 (London, 1988)

Thornton, A. P., The Imperial Idea and Its Enemies: a Study in British Power (London, 1959)

Trevelyan, G. M., British History in the Nineteenth Century (1782–1901) (London, 1922)

——, History of England (London, 1926)

——, Lord Grey of the Reform Bill: the Life of Charles, Second Earl Grey (London, 1952)

Turner, M. J., The Age of Unease: Government and Reform in Britain, 1782–1832 (Stroud, 2000)

Vernon, J., Politics and the People: a Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge, 1993)

——, Rereading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1996)

Vincent, J., The Formation of the Liberal Party, 1857–1868 (London, 1966)

——, Disraeli (Oxford, 1990)

Walpole, S., A History of England: from the Conclusion of the Great War in 1815 (6 vols) (London, 1900–1912)

——, & Lyall, A. C., The History of TwentyFive Years: 1876–1800 (London, 1904–1908)

Webb, R. K., Modern England: from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (London, 1969)

Webster, C. K., The Foreign Policy of Castlereagh, 1812–1815: Britain and the Reconstruction of Europe (London, 1931)

——, The Foreign Policy of Palmerston, 1830–1841: Britain, the Liberal Movement and the Eastern Question (London, 1951)

Weintraub, S., Victoria (London, 1996)

Williams, W. E., The Rise of Gladstone to the Leadership of the Liberal Party, 1859 to 1868 (Cambridge, 1934)

Williamson, J. A., The Evolution of England: a Commentary on the Facts (Oxford, 1931)

Wilson, A. N., Victoria: a Life (London, 2014)

Wilson, B., Decency and Disorder: the Age of Cant 1789–1837 (London, 2007)

——, The Making of Victorian Values: Decency and Dissent in Britain, 1789–1837 (New York, 2007)

Winstanley, M. J., Gladstone and the Liberal Party (London, 1990)

Wise, S., Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-doctors in Victorian England (London, 2012)

Woodham Smith, C., Queen Victoria: Her Life and Times 1819–1861 (London, 1995)

Young, G. M., Early Victorian England, 1830–1865 (London, 1934)

——, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (London, 1936)

Young, G. M., & Handcock, W. D., Victorian Essays (London, 1962)

Ziegler, P., Addington: a Life of Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth (London, 1965)

——, King William IV (London, 1971)

——, Melbourne: a Biography of William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne (London, 1976)

Index

Aberdeen, George Hamilton Gordon, 4th earl of: and Wellington’s resistance to parliamentary reform, ref1; replaces Palmerston as foreign secretary, ref1; forms government, ref1; character, ref1; and Crimean War, ref1, ref2, ref3; resigns, ref1, ref2; Russell condemns government, ref1

Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg, 1st Baron, ref1, ref2

Adams, Henry Brooks: The Education of Henry Adams, ref1

Adelaide Gallery, London, ref1

Administrative Reform Association, ref1, ref2

Adullamites (Liberal group), ref1, ref2

Afghan War, Second (1878–80), ref1

Agricultural Holdings Act (1875), ref1

agriculture: prices, ref1; improvements, ref1; unrest, ref1; and depopulation, ref1; life and conditions, ref1; and political power, ref1

Albert Hall, ref1

Albert, Prince Consort: courtship and marriage, ref1; Melbourne’s jealousy of, ref1; critical view of Victoria, ref1; visits Birmingham, ref1; opposed to Palmerston’s policies, ref1; admires Peel, ref1, ref2; and Don Pacifico affair, ref1; accused of conspiracy, ref1; on maladministration in Crimean War, ref1; on Victoria’s criticism of Palmerston, ref1; death, ref1

alcohol: effects, ref1

Alexandria: bombarded (1882), ref1, ref2

Alma, Battle of (1854), ref1

Althorp, John Charles Spencer, Viscount (later 3rd Earl Spencer), ref1, ref2

Amalgamated Society of Engineers, ref1

analytical engine (Babbage’s), ref1

Anglicanism see Church of England

Anglo-Catholicism, ref1

Anning, Joseph, ref1

Anning, Mary, ref1

Annual Register, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Anson, General George, ref1

Anti-Corn Law League, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Anti-League, ref1

Arbuthnot, Charles, ref1

Ardwick, Manchester, ref1

Argyll, George Campbell, 8th duke of, ref1

army: reforms under Cardwell, ref1

Arnold, Matthew, ref1, ref2; Culture and Anarchy, ref1; ‘Dover Beach’ (poem), ref1; Essays in Criticism, ref1

Arnold, Thomas, ref1

Arrow (ship), ref1

art: and human emotion and behaviour, ref1

art nouveau, ref1

Artisans’ Dwellings Act (1875), ref1

Ashanti people (West Africa), ref1

Asquith, Herbert Henry, ref1

Atlantic cable, ref1

Attwood, Thomas, ref1, ref2, ref3

Austria: war in Italy, ref1; war with France (1860), ref1; belligerence, ref1

Babbage, Charles, ref1

baby-farming, ref1

Baden-Powell, Lieut. General Robert, ref1

Bagehot, Walter, ref1, ref2; The English Constitution, ref1

Bahadur Shah, king of Delhi, ref1

Bailey, Philip James: Festus, ref1

Balaclava, Battle of (1854), ref1

Balfour, Arthur James, ref1, ref2, ref3

Balkans: crisis (1876), ref1

Baring, Alexander, ref1

Baring, Sir Evelyn (earl of Cromer), ref1; Modern Egypt, ref1

Bazalgette, Joseph, ref1

Bean, John William, ref1

beards and moustaches, ref1

Beardsley, Aubrey, ref1

Beaumont, Gustave de, ref1

Beckett, Samuel, ref1

Bedchamber Crisis, ref1

Beerbohm, Max, ref1, ref2; ‘Enoch Soames’ (story), ref1

Beeton, Isabella Mary: Book of Household Management, ref1

Beit, Alfred, ref1

Bell, Alexander Graham, ref1

Bell, Andrew, ref1

Bennett, Arnold, ref1

Bentham, Jeremy, ref1

Bentinck, Lord George, ref1, ref2, ref3

Berlin Congress (1878), ref1, ref2

Besant, Annie, ref1, ref2

Bible, Holy: critical study of, ref1

Birmingham: workshops, ref1, ref2; governance, ref1; Prince Albert visits, ref1; population, ref1; Joseph Chamberlain in, ref1

Birmingham Political Union, ref1, ref2

Birmingham Star, ref1

Bismarck, Prince Otto von, ref1, ref2

Black Dwarf (periodical), ref1

Blackwood’s Magazine, ref1

Blondin, Charles, ref1

‘Bloody Sunday’ (13 November 1887), ref1

Boer Wars: First (1880), ref1; Second (1899–1902), ref1, ref2

Bolívar, Simon, ref1

Booth, Charles: Life and Labour of the People in London, ref1

Bowring, Sir John, ref1

Boycott, Captain Charles Cunningham, ref1

Bradford, ref1, ref2

Bradlaugh, Charles, ref1, ref2, ref3

brass bands, ref1

bread: prices, ref1

Bright, Sir Charles, ref1

Bright, John: criticizes Reform Bill, ref1; opposes Corn Laws, ref1; and Chartist protests, ref1; and Aberdeen’s concern over Russo-Turkish war, ref1; and Gladstone’s reform proposals, ref1; on Gladstone’s legislation, ref1; on public speeches, ref1; death, ref1; condemns bombardment of Alexandria, ref1

Brighton, ref1; Pavilion, ref1

Britain: popular disaffection and unrest, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8; birth-rate and population increase, ref1; corruption condemned, ref1; constitution, ref1; improved trade, ref1, ref2; manufacturing dominance, ref1; colonial possessions, ref1; social reforms, ref1, ref2, ref3; individual physique, ref1; economic boom (1844–), ref1; emigration to America, ref1; in Crimean War, ref1; economic decline (1841), ref1; (1870), ref1, ref2; collective activities, ref1; radicalism develops, ref1; isolation in Boer War, ref1

British and Foreign Schools Society, ref1

British Museum: Reading Room, ref1

Brontë, Charlotte: visits Great Exhibition, ref1; Shirley, ref1

Brougham, Henry, Baron: defends Queen Caroline, ref1; anti-slavery, ref1; on urban life, ref1; on middle classes, ref1; Discourse on the Objects, Advantages and Pleasures of Science, ref1

Brown, Ford Madox: The Last of England (painting), ref1

Brown, John, ref1, ref2, ref3

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, ref1

Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, ref1

Bryant and May match factory, ref1; women strike, ref1

Buckle, G. E., ref1

Buksh, Mahomet (munshi), ref1

Bulgaria: revolts against Turkey, ref1

Bullen, Frank, ref1

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, ref1, ref2, ref3; The Last Days of Pompeii, ref1, ref2

Burdett, Sir Francis, ref1

Burke, Edmund, ref1, ref2, ref3

Burns, John, ref1, ref2

Butler, Samuel: Erewhon, ref1; The Way of All Flesh, ref1

Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron: on cant, ref1; political poetry, ref1; Don Juan, ref1

Cambridge University: religious restrictions, ref1

Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry, ref1, ref2

canals, ref1

Canning, George: attends lectures on finance, ref1; political achievements, ref1, ref2; supports South American independence movement, ref1; favours Catholic emancipation, ref1; on Corn Law, ref1; illness after duke of York’s funeral, ref1; succeeds Liverpool as prime minister, ref1, ref2; death, ref1; loses seat in Parliament, ref1

cant: as national characteristic, ref1

Canton, first Battle of (1857), ref1

Cape Colony, ref1

Cardigan, James Thomas Brudenell, 7th earl of, ref1, ref2

Cardwell, Edward, ref1, ref2, ref3

Carlyle, Thomas: on rise of machines, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; praises Gladstone, ref1; time-spirit, ref1; on Manchester cotton mills, ref1; criticizes Great Exhibition, ref1; on public opinion, ref1; nostalgia for medievalism, ref1; on ‘pig prosperity’, ref1; language, ref1; moral content, ref1; on work imperative, ref1; Chartism, ref1

Caroline, queen of George IV, ref1, ref3, ref4

Carroll, Lewis, ref1

Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount: as foreign minister, ref1; controls Commons, ref1; on Holy Alliance, ref1; Shelley satirizes, ref1; and attack on Prince Regent, ref1; hassled by London mob, ref1; opposes taxation, ref1; non-involvement in European revolutions, ref1; and George IV’s reaction to wife’s death, ref1; suicide, ref1

Catholic Association (Ireland), ref1, ref2, ref3

Catholic emancipation: as political issue, ref1, ref2, ref3; accepted, ref1, ref2

Catholic Relief Bill (1829), ref1

Catholics: stand for election, ref1; Peel supports, ref1; hierarchy and bishoprics re-established in England and Wales, ref1; see also Anglo-Catholicism

Cato Street Conspiracy (1820), ref1

cattle plague, ref1

Cavendish, Lord Frederick, ref1

Cawnpore, ref1

Cecil, Lord David, ref1

Central Board of Health: established (1848), ref1

Ceylon (Sri Lanka): mortality, ref1

Chadwick, Edwin: Report on the Condition of the Labouring Classes of Great Britain, ref1

Chalmers, Walter, ref1

Chamberlain, Joseph: reorganizes Birmingham, ref1; rise to prominence, ref1; relations with Gladstone, ref1; on Irish problem, ref1; in Gladstone’s cabinet, ref1; political principles, ref1; on Salisbury’s cabinet, ref1; forms coalition under Salisbury, ref1; questions Gladstone on Home Rule Bill, ref1; and Second Boer War, ref1, ref2; on British isolation, ref1

Chapman, Elizabeth, ref1

Charity Organisation Society, ref1

Chartists, Chartism: as protest movement, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7; General Convention (1839), ref1, ref2; National Petition, ref1; influence on social reform, ref1; call for general strike (1843), ref1; Kennington Common demonstration (1848), ref1; protest at Sunday Trading Bill, ref1

Cheltenham, ref1

Chesterton, G. K., ref1

Childers, Hugh Culling Eardley, ref1, ref2

children: legislation on labour, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; education, ref1

China: and Second Opium War, ref1

cholera: outbreaks, ref1, ref2

choral societies, ref1

Chorley, Henry, ref1

Christian Socialism, ref1

Christianity: prevalence, ref1

Church, Richard William, dean of St Paul’s, ref1

Church of England (Anglican): lacks enthusiasm, ref1; and dissenting churches, ref1; and Catholic emancipation, ref1; and Anglo-Catholicism, ref1; materialism, ref1; ritualism, ref1; and educational reform, ref1

Church of Ireland: disestablished, ref1

churches: one hundred new, ref1; attendance and decorum in, ref1

Churchill, Jane, Lady, ref1

Churchill, Lord Randolph, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

cigarettes: introduced, ref1

cinema: beginnings, ref1

cities and towns: conditions, ref1, ref3; politics, ref1, ref2

Clapham Sect, ref1, ref2

Clarence, William, duke of see William IV, King

Clarendon, George William Frederick Villiers, 4th earl of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

class (social): divisions, ref1, ref2, ref3

Clerk Maxwell, James: A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, ref1

Clerkenwell Explosion (1867), ref1

Cleveland Street Scandal (1889), ref1

Clive, Robert, Baron, ref1

Clough, Arthur Hugh, ref1

cooperative movement, ref1

Cooperative Wholesale Society, ref1

coal mines: working conditions, ref1

Cobbett, William: radicalism and reform proposals, ref1, ref2; denounces Six Acts, ref1; on Castlereagh’s suicide, ref1; resists inauguration of police force, ref1; on demonstrations following parliamentary reform, ref1; on effect of parliamentary reform, ref1; condemns development of modern transport, ref1; on spa towns, ref1; Rural Rides, ref1, ref2

Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, ref1, ref2, ref3

Cobden, Richard: opposes Corn Laws, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; on Peel, ref1; loses seat in Parliament, ref1; taunts Conservatives over Palmerston, ref1

Cockburn, Sir Alexander, ref1

Codrington, Admiral Sir Edward, ref1

Coercion Acts (‘Gagging Acts’, 1817), ref1; (1833), ref1

Cole, Henry, ref1

Colenso, John William, bishop of Natal, ref1

collectivism, ref1

Colley, General Sir George, ref1

Collins, Wilkie, ref1, ref2, ref3; The Woman in White, ref1

Colonial Society, ref1

Combination Acts (1799), ref1; (1825), ref1

Commons, House of: effect of 1832 Reform Act on, ref1; see also Parliament

Comte, Auguste, ref1

concentration camps: in South Africa, ref1

Concert of Europe, ref1

Conservative party: as name, ref1, ref2; under Peel, ref1; supports Corn Laws, ref1; forms government under Derby, ref1; as cohesive party, ref1; and reform proposals, ref1; government under Disraeli (1874), ref1; election defeat (1880), ref1, ref2; election victory (1895), ref1; pact with Liberal Unionists, ref1; see also Tory party

Conspiracy Bill (1858), ref1

Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869), ref1

corn: shortage, ref1; prices fall, ref1

Corn Law (1815), ref1

Corn Laws: utilitarians attack, ref1; repealed (1832), ref1, ref2, ref3; campaign against, ref1, ref3; Peel and, ref1, ref3; and Irish famine, ref1

Corporation Act (1828), ref1

Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, ref1

courts of law: reformed, ref1

creation: ideas on, ref1

Crimean War (1854–6), ref1, ref3, ref4

Crimes Act (1887), ref1

Croker, John Wilson, ref1

Cromwell, Oliver, ref1

Cross, R. A., ref1

Crosse, Andrew, ref1

Crystal Palace see Great Exhibition

Cudworth, W. M.: Rambles Round Horton, ref1

Cumberland, Ernest Augustus, duke of, ref1

Cummings, A. N.: ‘On the Value of Political Economy to Mankind’, ref1

Cyclopaedia of Useful Arts, ref1

Cyprus: Britain acquires, ref1

Daily Mail: established, ref1

Daily News, ref1, ref2

Daily Telegraph, ref1

Dalhousie, James Andrew Broun Ramsay, 1st marquess of, ref1

Dalton, John, ref1

Darwin, Charles, ref1, ref2, ref3; On the Origin of Species, ref1, ref2, ref3

Dassett, Charles Edward, ref1

Davis, Jefferson, ref1

Davy, Humphry, ref1

death rates, ref1

debt: imprisonment discontinued, ref1

Defenders, the (Ireland), ref1

Delhi: in Indian Mutiny, ref1

Denmark: and loss of Schleswig-Holstein, ref1

de Quincey, Thomas: ‘The English Mail Coach’, ref1

Derby, Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley, 14th earl of (earlier Lord Edward Stanley): as colonial secretary, ref1; earldom, ref1; heads Conservative party, ref1; political programme, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; forms government (‘Who? Who? ministry’), ref1; calls summer election (1852), ref1; resigns (1852), ref1; on impending Russo-Turkish war, ref1; on war in China, ref1; as prime minister (1858–9), ref1; truce with Palmerston, ref1; and demand for electoral reform, ref1, ref2; third ministry (1866–8), ref1; on maintaining good relations with USA, ref1; resigns (1868), ref1; on Disraeli’s relations with Victoria, ref1; death, ref1

Derby, Edward Henry Stanley, 15th earl of: on Gladstone, ref1; as foreign secretary, ref1; resigns over Disraeli’s eastern policy, ref1; entertains Gladstone, ref1

Dickens, Charles: fictional characters, ref1; death, ref1; denounces English Sunday, ref1; on telegraph, ref1; Melbourne warns Victoria against, ref1; describes early Victorians, ref1; false bookshelves, ref1; on failure of ‘system’, ref1; parodies ‘hard facts’ education, ref1; on the poor, ref1; popular appeal, ref1; on readers at British Museum, ref1; favours South in American Civil War, ref1; Bleak House, ref1; Dombey and Son, ref1, ref2; The Old Curiosity Shop, ref1; The Pickwick Papers, ref1

difference engine (Babbage’s), ref1

Disraeli, Benjamin (1st earl of Beaconsfield): on Lord Liverpool, ref1; on nature of Whigs, ref1; on composition of Commons, ref1; on workhouses, ref1; on Irish question, ref1; on Peel’s shyness, ref1; enters parliament, ref1; overlooked by Peel, ref1; launches Young England movement, ref1; opposes Peel, ref1; on ‘two nations’, ref1; as protectionist, ref1; on industrial Conservatism, ref1; on Palmerston, ref1; manner, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; as party leader, ref1; on Catholicism in England, ref1; caricatures Palmerston, ref1; as chancellor of exchequer under Derby, ref1, ref2, ref2; budget defeated, ref1; on British dislike of coalitions, ref1; on Aberdeen, ref1; and Russo-Turkish war, ref1; on Crimean War, ref1; on failure of Aberdeen’s government, ref1; Gregory accuses of charlatanism, ref1; on upholding aristocracy, ref1; in ‘great stink’, ref1; parliamentary suffrage bill defeated (1859), ref1; truce with Palmerston, ref1; on role of Conservative party, ref1; on Gladstone’s support for reform, ref1; as leader in waiting, ref1, ref2, ref3; on reform following death of Palmerston, ref1; opposes parliamentary reform, ref1, ref2; political instincts, ref1; political practices, ref1, ref2; proposes enlarging franchise (household suffrage), ref1, ref2; appearance, ref1, ref2, ref3; caricatured, ref1; legislation, ref1, ref2; as prime minister (1868), ref1; relations with Victoria, ref1, ref2, ref3; rivalry with Gladstone, ref1; silence on Gladstone’s Irish Land Bill, ref1; on England as domestic country, ref1; election success (1874), ref1; health problems, ref1, ref2; receives earldom and leaves Commons, ref1; purchases Suez Canal shares, ref1; suggests Victoria become empress of India, ref1; and Balkan crisis (1876), ref1; Joseph Chamberlain mocks, ref1; attends Berlin Congress (1878), ref1, ref2; on Zulu war, ref1; Gladstone attacks in Midlothian campaign, ref1; on power of words, ref1; dissolves parliament (1880) and loses election, ref1; death, ref1; Coningsby, ref1, ref2; Endymion, ref1, ref2; Lothair, ref1; Sybil, ref1; Tancred, ref1

Dissenters (Nonconformists): as low church religion, ref1; Lord Liverpool legislates for further toleration, ref1; excluded by Test and Corporation acts, ref1; serve on town councils, ref1; oppose Corn Laws, ref1; influence, ref1; and public education, ref1; support Gladstone, ref1

Dissenters’ Marriage Bill (1836), ref1

Douglas, Lord Alfred, ref1

dress: and class, ref1, ref2

drink (alcoholic): effect, ref1

Dudley, John William Ward, 1st earl of, ref1

dyes (synthetic), ref1

East India Company: rule in India, ref1; powers transferred to Crown, ref1

Eastern question, ref1

Ecclesiastical Titles Bill (1851), ref1

Eden, Emily, ref1

Edinburgh Review, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

education: of working classes, ref1; reform, ref1, ref2

Edward, Prince of Wales (Albert Edward; ‘Bertie’): Victoria’s attitude to, ref1; death of son, ref1; typhoid fever, ref1; tour of India, ref1

Egypt: British intervention in, ref1, ref3

elections: conduct of, ref1, ref2, ref3; see also general elections

electoral reform: Cobbett advocates, ref1, ref2; movement for, ref1, ref2; and 1830 election, ref1; Grey advocates, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; Wellington opposes, ref1; William IV and, ref1, ref2, ref3; Tory attitude to, ref1, ref2; Bright on, ref1, ref2; Russell supports, ref1, ref2; and inadequacy of franchise, ref1; Gladstone promotes, ref1, ref2, ref3; Disraeli opposes, ref1, ref2; Palmerston attacks Gladstone over, ref1; Conservative party’s proposals for, ref1; Derby and demand for, ref1, ref3; and Victoria, ref1; Salisbury on, ref1; see also Parliament; Reform Acts and Bills

electric light, ref1

electricity: development, ref1

electro-magnetic theory, ref1

Elementary Education Act (1870), ref1

Elgin, James Bruce, 8th earl of, ref1

Eliot, George: on Evangelicalism, ref1; on early Victorians, ref1; ideas and beliefs, ref1, ref2; prose style, ref1; moral content, ref1; Felix Holt, ref1

Ely, Jane, Lady, ref1

Emancipation Bill (1825), ref1

Emerson, Ralph Waldo: English Traits, ref1, ref2

empire: and treatment of black population, ref1; attitude to, ref1, ref2; administrative difficulties, ref1; expansion, ref1; Primrose League supports, ref1

energy: sources and development, ref1

Engels, Friedrich: on history of trade unions, ref1; on workingclass conditions, ref1; condemns industrial system, ref1; on working class becoming bourgeois, ref1; on popular demonstrations, ref1; on collapse of Britain’s imperial power, ref1

Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, The, ref1

entertainment (popular), ref1; see also music hall

Escott, T. H., ref1

Ethiopia: Napier invades, ref1

Eugenie, empress of Napoleon III, ref1, ref2

Europe: revolutions (1820), ref1; (1848), ref1; nineteenth-century wars, ref1

Evangelicals: and utilitarians, ref1; on social and political issues, ref1; religious earnestness, ref1; influence, ref1

Evening Standard, ref1

evolution, theory of, ref1

exhibition halls, ref1

Exmouth, Edward Pellew, 1st Viscount, ref1

Eyre, Edward John, governor of Jamaica, ref1

Fabian Society, ref1

factories: labour conditions, ref1, ref2; reforms, ref1

Factory Acts (1819; Cotton Factory Act), ref1; (1833), ref1; (1847), ref1

Factory Education Bill (1843), ref1

family: size, ref1; idealized, ref1

Faraday, Michael, ref1, ref2

Fashoda incident (1898), ref1

Fenian brotherhood, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Ferdinand I, emperor of Austria, ref1

Ferdinand II, king of Naples, ref1

Ferdinand VII, king of Spain, ref1

Feynman, Richard, ref1

fiction: popularity, ref1

Fielden, John, ref1

financial crises (1825), ref1

Fitzgerald, Vesey, ref1

food prices, ref1

food riots, ref1

Forster, William Edward, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Fortnightly Review, ref1, ref2

fossils, ref1, ref3

France: and July monarchy (1830), ref1; opposed by quadrilateral alliance, ref1; Napoleon III forms Second Empire, ref1, ref2; universal male suffrage, ref1; alliance with Britain in Crimean War, ref1; supposed invasion threat to Britain, ref1, ref2; war with Austria (1860), ref1; defeated by Prussia (1870), ref1

franchise: demands for expanding, ref1, ref2; extended under legislation (1832), ref1; (1867), ref1, ref2, ref3; (1884), ref1; (1885), ref1; see also electoral reform

Fraser, William, ref1

Fraser’s Magazine, ref1, ref2

free trade: Lord Liverpool embraces, ref1; utilitarians and, ref1; Huskisson advocates, ref1; and Corn Laws, ref1; Peel advocates, ref1, ref2, ref3; and public well-being, ref1; and Irish famine, ref1; under Russell, ref1; see also protectionism

Friends, Society of (Quakers), ref1, ref2

Frith, William Powell: Ramsgate Sands (or Life at the Seaside; painting), ref1

Froude, J. A., ref1, ref2

Fruits of Philosophy, The (pamphlet), ref1

gas lighting, ref1, ref2

Gaskell, Elizabeth: Mary Barton, ref1, ref2; North and South, ref1

general elections: (1818), ref1; (1826), ref1; (1830), ref1; (1831; ‘Dry Election’), ref1; (1832), ref1; (1834), ref1; (1837), ref1; (1841), ref1; (1852), ref1; (1857), ref1; (1865), ref1; (1868), ref1; (1874), ref1; (1880), ref1, ref2; (1885), ref1; (1886), ref1; (1892), ref1; (1895), ref1; (1900; ‘khaki election’), ref1

geology, ref1, ref2

George, Henry: Progress and Poverty, ref1

George III, King: decline and death, ref1, ref2; visits Ireland, ref1

George IV, King (earlier Prince of Wales): as Regent, ref1; approves of Holy Alliance, ref1; criticized, ref1, ref2; petitioned by Hampden clubs, ref1; paranoia and obesity, ref1, ref2; unpopularity, ref1; accession to throne, ref1; opposes Catholic emancipation, ref1; accepts Catholic emancipation, ref1, ref2; decline and death, ref1

Géricault, Théodore: The Raft of the Medusa (painting), ref1

Germany: belligerence, ref1; unification, ref1, ref2

Gilbert, Sir William Schwenck, and Sir Arthur Sullivan, ref1

Girls’ Own Paper, ref1

Gissing, George, ref1, ref2, ref3; In the Year of Jubilee, ref1; The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, ref1

Gladstone, Catherine (W. E.’s wife), ref1

Gladstone, Herbert, ref1, ref2

Gladstone, William Ewart: serves under Peel, ref1, ref2; advocates government purchase of railways, ref1; preoccupation with Ireland and Home Rule, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11; as ‘Peelite’, ref1; visits Rome, ref1; financial policies, ref1; attacks Disraeli’s financial measures, ref1; manner and style, ref1; as chancellor of exchequer under Aberdeen, ref1; encounters with prostitutes, ref1, ref2, ref3; praises Aberdeen, ref1; and Russo-Turkish war, ref1; and cost of Crimean War, ref1; isolation in Crimean War, ref1; on intra-party differences, ref1; as chancellor under Palmerston and Russell, ref1, ref3, ref4; on American Civil War, ref1; promotes electoral reform, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; loses parliamentary seat (1865), ref1; and Palmerston’s death, ref1; popularity, ref1, ref2, ref3; advises Salisbury on diplomatic method, ref1; Cranborne’s (Salisbury’s) wariness of, ref1; outmanoeuvred by Disraeli over reform, ref1; on pacification of Ireland, ref1; rivalry with Disraeli, ref1, ref2; Victoria dislikes, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; election victory (1868), ref1; convictions and principles, ref1; Emily Eden portrays, ref1; legislation and reforms, ref1, ref2; and educational reform, ref1; anxiety over health, ref1; on European problem, ref1; public speaking tours, ref1, ref2, ref3; loses popular support, ref1; austerity policy, ref1; dissolves Parliament (1874) and loses election, ref1; debates in Commons, ref1; increased amiability, ref1, ref2; on Bulgarian atrocities, ref1; moral impulses, ref1, ref2; in Midlothian campaign (1879), ref1; on Eastern question, ref1; election victory and premiership (1880), ref1, ref2; Lord Derby describes, ref1; accepts Home Rule for Ireland, ref1; ageing, ref1, ref2; intervenes in Egypt, ref1; and Gordon in Sudan, ref1; resigns (1885), ref1; mocks Liberal–Parnellite coalition, ref1; returns to power (1886), ref1; and Salisbury’s government, ref1; holiday in South of France, ref1; refuses retirement, ref1; eyesight diminishes, ref1; forms minority government (1892), ref1; final resignation (1894), ref1; death, ref1; Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, ref1

Goderich, Frederick John Robinson, Viscount (later 1st earl of Ripon), ref1

Gold Coast: mortality, ref1

Golden Dawn, Hermetic Order of the, ref1

Goldsmith, Oliver, ref1

Gorchakov, General Michael, ref1

Gordon, General Charles George, ref1, ref2

Gordon, Lord George: riots (1780), ref1

Gothic novel, ref1

Graham, Sir James, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Grand National Consolidated Trade Union, ref1

Granville, Granville George Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Great Exhibition (1851), ref1, ref2

‘great stink’ (1858), ref1

Greece: war of independence, ref1

Green, T. H., ref1

Greg, W. R., ref1

Gregory, Sir William, ref1

Grenville, William Wyndham, Baron, ref1

Greville, Charles Cavendish Fulke, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7; Memoirs, ref1

Grey, Charles, 2nd Earl: on public lack of respect, ref1; political career, ref1; urges parliamentary reform, ref1, ref2, ref2, ref3; Wellington replies to, ref1; as prime minister, ref1; dissolves parliament (1831), ref1; increases majority (1831), ref1; forms new government (1832), ref1; ministry declines, ref1; resigns over Ireland question, ref1

Grey, General Charles, ref1

Grossmith, George and Weedon: Diary of a Nobody, ref1

habeas corpus: abolished (1817), ref1

Haggard, Sir H. Rider, ref1

Hampden clubs, ref1

Harcourt, Sir William, ref1, ref2

Hardie, Keir, ref1, ref2

Hardy, Thomas, ref1, ref2, ref3

Hartington, Spencer Compton Cavendish, marquess of (later 8th duke of Devonshire; ‘Harty Tarty’), ref1, ref2, ref3

Hartmann, Sadakichi, ref1

harvests, ref1, ref2

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, ref1, ref2

Haydon, Benjamin Robert, ref1

Hazlitt, William, ref1, ref2, ref3

Herries, John Charles, ref1

Hertford, Isabella Ingram-Seymour-Conway, marchioness of, ref1

Hill, Rowland, ref1

Hilton, Boyd: The Age of Atonement, ref1

Hobhouse, John Cam, ref1

Hobson, J. A., ref1

Hodson, Henry, ref1

Hogg, John, ref1

Holland, Elizabeth, Lady, ref1

Holland, Henry Richard Vassall Fox, 3rd Baron, ref1, ref2

Holy Alliance (Russia–Austria–Prussia), ref1

Holy League, ref1

Home Rule Bill (1886), ref1; Second (1893), ref1

Home Rule League (Ireland), ref1

homosexuality, ref1, ref2

Hood, Thomas, ref1

Hoskins, W. G., ref1

Household Words (magazine), ref1

Houses of Parliament see Parliament

housing: for poor, ref1

Hugo, Victor, ref1, ref2

Hunt, Henry (‘Orator’), ref1, ref2

Hunt, William Holman: The Awakening Consciousness (painting), ref1

Huskisson, William, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; killed in railway accident, ref1

Hyndman, Henry Mayers, ref1, ref2

Illustrated London News, ref1, ref2

Imperial Federation League, ref1

imperialism, ref1; see also empire

income tax, ref1, ref2, ref3

Independent Labour party, ref1

India: British rule in, ref1, ref2; under Mughals, ref1; Victoria becomes empress, ref1

Indian War of Independence (‘Indian Mutiny’, 1857–8), ref1

industrialization, ref1

Inglish, Sir Robert, ref1

Inkerman, Battle of (1854), ref1

internal combustion engine: first manufactured, ref1

Ireland: union with England, ref1, ref2; George IV visits, ref1; Catholicism, ref1, ref2, ref3; Church tithes, ref1; and Coercion Acts, ref1, ref2; famine, ref1, ref2; absentee landlordism, ref1; tenancy system, ref1; Gladstone’s preoccupation with, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11; as government concern, ref1; harvests improve (1847), ref1; Young Ireland revolution (1848), ref1; Victoria visits, ref1, ref2; immigrants seen as threat, ref1; Fenian activities, ref1; affected by British agricultural depression, ref1; home rule question, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref7, ref8; disorder and revolt in, ref1; land reform, ref1

Irish Coercion Act (1881), ref1

Irish Land Bill (1870), ref1

Irish Land League, ref1, ref2

Irish Nationalists: support Gladstone, ref1

Irish Republican Army (IRA), ref1

Irish University Bill (1873), ref1

Irving, Edward, ref1

Isandlwana, Battle of (1879), ref1

Italy: Austrian intervention in, ref1; unification, ref1

Jack the Ripper, ref1

Jamaica: and treatment of black population, ref1

Jamaica Bill (1839), ref1

James, Henry, ref1, ref2, ref3

Jameson, Leander Starr, ref1

Jamieson, Anna Brownell, ref1

Jeffrey, Francis, ref1

Jerrold, Douglas, ref1

Jews: and anti-Semitism, ref1

jingoism, ref1

Joule, James, ref1

Karim, Abdul (munshi), ref1, ref2

Keats, John, ref1

Keble, John, ref1, ref2

Kemble, Fanny, ref1, ref2

Kenealy, Edward, ref1

Kent, Edward, duke of, ref1

Kent, Princess Victoria Mary Louisa, duchess of, ref1, ref2

Khartoum, ref1, ref2

Kingsley, Charles, ref1, ref2; Alton Lock, ref1, ref2; Yeast, ref1

Kingsley, Henry, ref1

Kitchener, General Horatio Herbert, ref1, ref2

Kodak camera, ref1

Kossuth, Lajos, ref1

Kruger, Paul, ref1

labour: conditions, ref1; see also children; women

Labour Electoral Association, ref1

Ladysmith, ref1, ref2

laissez-faire, ref1

Lancaster, Joseph, ref1

Land Act (Ireland, 1881), ref1

land ownership, ref1

language and words, ref1

Lardner, Dionysius, ref1

laudanum, ref1

Lawrence, Sir Henry, ref1

Lee, James Prince, bishop of Manchester, ref1

Leeds, ref1, ref2, ref3

Leeds Mercury, ref1, ref2, ref3

Lenin, Vladimir, ref1

Leno, Dan, ref1, ref2

Leopold I, king of the Belgians, ref1

Liberal party: takes over from Whigs, ref1; reorganized (1859) and dominance, ref1; fragmented under Gladstone, ref1; Joseph Chamberlain’s aims for, ref1; election victory (1880), ref1, ref2; election success (1885), ref1; radicalism (Newcastle Programme), ref1

Lichfield House compact, ref1, ref2

Lieven, Antoinette, princesse de, ref1, ref2

literature: respect for, ref1

Liverpool: death rate, ref1

Liverpool, Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd earl of: political career, ref1, ref3; survives 1826 election, ref1; controls House of Lords, ref1; embraces free trade, ref1; ministry, ref1, ref2; Methodism, ref1; and Castlereagh’s decline, ref1; opposes Catholic emancipation, ref1; death, ref1; qualities, ref1; on working class, ref1

Liverpool Mercury, ref1

Lloyd’s Weekly, ref1

local government: and Municipal Corporation Act (1835), ref1; reformed (1871), ref1

Local Government Acts (1888, 1894), ref1

London: street life, ref1; riots (1820s), ref1; docks, ref1; great fire predicted for March 1842, ref1; fogs and condition, ref1; condition of poor in, ref1, ref2; underground railway first opened, ref1; insanitary conditions, ref1; mass demonstrations, ref1, ref2; government, ref1; dock strike (1888), ref1

London County Council (LCC), ref1

London Electrical Society, ref1

London Philanthropic Society, ref1

London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination, ref1

London Working Men’s Association, ref1

Londonderry, Charles William Stewart, 3rd marquess of, ref1, ref2

Lords, House of: passes Reform Bill (1831), ref1; Commons occupies chamber after fire, ref1; see also Parliament

Lord’s Day Observance Society, ref1

Louis Philippe, king of the French, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Louis-Napoleon see Napoleon III, emperor

Louise, Princess, ref1

Lovett, William, ref1

Lowe, Robert, ref1, ref2

Lucan, George Charles Bingham, 3rd earl of, ref1

Lucy, Henry, ref1

Luddites and Luddism, ref1, ref2

Ludwig I, king of Bavaria, ref1

lunatic asylums, ref1

Lushington, Colonel (of Tichborne case), ref1

Lyell, Sir Charles: Principles of Geology, ref1, ref2

Lyme Regis, ref1

Lyttelton, Sarah, ref1

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Baron: on Whigs and Tories, ref1; on Reform Bill, ref1; condemns universal suffrage, ref1; prose style, ref1; History of England, ref1, ref2

McCormack, Mrs (‘Widow McCormack’), ref1

machines: social effect, ref1, ref2, ref3

Mafeking, ref1, ref2

Mahdi, the (Mohammed Ahmed), ref1, ref2

Malthus, Revd Thomas Robert, ref1, ref2, ref3

Manchester: weavers and spinners’ protest march, ref1; conditions, ref1, ref2; local government, ref1; population, ref1; cotton manufacture affected by American Civil War, ref1, ref2; death rate, ref1; see also Peterloo Massacre

Manchester Political Union, ref1

‘Manchester school’: supports free trade, ref1

Mann, Thomas, ref1, ref2

Manning, Cardinal Henry Edward, archbishop of Westminster, ref1, ref2

manufacturing system, ref1

Marconi, Guglielmo, ref1

Martin, John: The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (painting), ref1

Martineau, Harriet, ref1, ref2

Marx, Karl, ref1, ref2

matches and match workers, ref1, ref2

Maxwell, James Clerk see Clerk Maxwell, James

May Day demonstrations, ref1

Mayhew, Henry, ref1, ref2, ref3; London Labour and the London Poor, ref1, ref2

Maynooth: Catholic seminar receives government grant, ref1

Mechanics Institutes, ref1

medievalism: as inspiration, ref1

Mehmet Ali, pasha of Egypt, ref1

melancholy, ref1

Melbourne, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount: on Whigs, ref1, ref2; on George IV’s marriage to Caroline, ref1; quits Wellington’s cabinet, ref1; on William IV, ref1; on Grey’s resignation, ref1; summoned by William IV to form government (1834), ref1; upholds judgement on Tolpuddle Martyrs, ref1; first government, ref1; qualities and manner, ref1, ref2; condemns Reform Act, ref1; reinstated as prime minister (1835), ref1; supported by Palmerston, ref1; on Palmerston, ref1; and accession of Victoria, ref1; as adviser and confidante to Victoria, ref1, ref2; resigns and rescinds resignation, ref1; and Chartist agitation, ref1; fall from power, ref1; resentment of Prince Albert, ref1; on English and French doctors, ref1

Memoirs of a Social Atom, ref1

mental illnesses, ref1

Meredith, George, ref1

Methodism, ref1

Metropolitan Board of Works, ref1

Metropolitan Police: created, ref1, ref2

Metropolitan Political Union, ref1

Metropolitan Underground Railway, ref1

Metternich, Prince Clemens Lothar Wenzel, ref1, ref2

middle class: patronizes Mechanics Institutes, ref1; voting rights and influence, ref1; characteristics and ideals, ref1, ref2, ref3; Carlyle’s lack of sympathy for, ref1; respectability, ref1; funds union movement, ref1

Middlesbrough, ref1

Midlothian campaign (1879), ref1

Mill, James, ref1

Mill, John Stuart: on Morning Chronicle, ref1; on poor relief, ref1; on diffusion of knowledge, ref1; on increase of machines, ref1; Considerations on Representative Government, ref1; Principles of Political Economy, ref1

Milman, Revd H. H., ref1

Milner, Alfred (later Viscount), ref1, ref2

Miners’ Federation, ref1

Mines and Collieries Act (1842), ref1

mob, the, ref1

Monroe Doctrine (US), ref1

Moral Reform Union, ref1

Morley, John, ref1, ref2, ref3

Morning Chronicle, ref1

Morris, William: on Great Exhibition, ref1; nostalgia for medievalism, ref1; and Socialist League, ref1

motor cars, ref1, ref2

Mudie, Charles Edward: Lending Library, ref1

Municipal Corporation Act (1835), ref1, ref2

Munro, Sir Thomas, ref1

Murray, John, ref1

music hall, ref1

Namier, Lewis, ref1

Napier, Sir Robert, ref1

Naples: revolution, ref1; Gladstone visits, ref1

Napoleon I (Bonaparte), emperor of the French, ref1

Napoleon III, emperor of the French (earlier Louis-Napoleon): as president of France, ref1; becomes emperor, ref1, ref2; institutes universal male suffrage, ref1; policy on Holy Land, ref1; as supposed threat to Britain, ref1, ref2; state visit to England (1855), ref1; assassination attempt on, ref1; war with Austria, ref1; capture by Prussians (1870) and exile, ref1

National Association for Women’s Suffrage, ref1

National Education League, ref1

National Gallery of Practical Science, ref1

National Liberal Federation, ref1

National Reform Association, ref1

National Reform Union, ref1

National Society (Church of England), ref1

National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers Union, ref1

Navarino Bay, Battle of (1827), ref1

navvies, ref1

navy: reforms, ref1

nervous hysteria: as Victorian characteristic, ref1

‘new, the’: vogue for, ref1

New Lanark, ref1

‘New Woman’, ref1, ref2

Newcastle Daily Chronicle, ref1

Newcastle Programme, ref1, ref2

Newman, John Henry, Cardinal, ref1, ref2

newspaper press: excise duty on paper abolished, ref1

Nicholas I, tsar of Russia, ref1

Nicholson, John, ref1

Nightingale, Florence, ref1

Nonconformism see Dissenters

North America: emigration to, ref1

Northcliffe, Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount, ref1

Northcote, Sir Stafford (later 1st earl of Iddesleigh), ref1, ref2

Northcote–Trevelyan report (on civil service examinations), ref1

Northern Star (newspaper), ref1

Norwich Union Society, ref1

novels see fiction

Oastler, Richard, ref1

Obscene Publications Act (1857), ref1

occult and psychic, ref1, ref2

O’Connell, Daniel, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

O’Connor, Arthur, ref1

O’Connor, Feargus, ref1, ref2

Old Moore’s Almanack, ref1

Omdurman, Battle of (1898), ref1

Opium War, Second (1856–60), ref1

optimism, ref1

Orange Free State, ref1

Orsini, Felice, ref1

Orton, Arthur, ref1

Osborne House, Isle of Wight, ref1, ref2

O’Shea, Kitty, ref1

Ossington, John Evelyn Denison, 1st Viscount, ref1, ref2

Ottoman Empire (Turkey): and Greek independence, ref1; Palmerston sees as threat, ref1; supposed decline, ref1; and Balkan crisis (1876), ref1; wars with Russia (1853–5), ref1, ref2; (1877), ref1

Overend, Gurney and Company: collapses (1866), ref1

Owen, Robert: opens New Lanark factory, ref1; establishes Grand National Consolidated Trade Union, ref1; Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System, ref1

Oxford Movement (Tractarians), ref1

Oxford University, ref1

Pacifico, Don David, ref1

Paine, Tom, ref1

Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount: supports Canning, ref1; quits Wellington’s cabinet, ref1; in Grey’s cabinet, ref1; as foreign secretary, ref1, ref2, ref3; marriage to Emily Lamb, ref1; supports Melbourne, ref1; on benefits of commerce, ref1; refuses office other than foreign secretary, ref1; resumes as foreign secretary under Russell, ref1, ref2; qualities, ref1; and Don Pacifico affair, ref1; approves of Napoleon III’s assumption of imperial crown, ref1; joins Conservatives, ref1; Disraeli mocks, ref1; Victoria warns Derby against, ref1; election speech on French-English differences (1852), ref1; as home secretary under Aberdeen, ref1; on Russo-Turkish war, ref1; resigns and resumes office (1853), ref1; urges alliance with Turkey against Russia, ref1; on Russian threat, ref1; as prime minister in Crimean War, ref1, ref2; and Second Opium War, ref1; wins 1857 election, ref1; physical decline, ref1; verbal style, ref1; defeated over Conspiracy Bill, ref1; in opposition, ref1; returns as prime minister (1859), ref1; Victoria deprecates, ref1; public recognition, ref1; and American Civil War, ref1; and Victoria’s withdrawal from public life, ref1; visits regions, ref1; neutrality in foreign affairs, ref1; attacks Gladstone over reform proposals, ref1; on Schleswig-Holstein question, ref1; death, ref1; election victory (1865), ref1; Cranborne (Salisbury) admires, ref1

Papers for the People, ref1

Paris, Treaty of (1856), ref1, ref2

Paris Commune (1871), ref1

parishes: and administration of poor relief, ref1

parks (public), ref1

Parliament: and cant, ref1; burnt down (1834), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; unruly behaviour, ref1; businessmen and professionals in, ref1; and ‘great stink’, ref1; Bagehot on, ref1; and household suffrage, ref1; rejects Bradlaugh for refusing Oath of Allegiance, ref1; see also electoral reform

Parnell, Charles Stewart, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Pater, Walter, ref1

Patmore, Coventry: The Angel in the House, ref1

Pearson, Karl, ref1

Peel, Sir Robert: attends lectures on finance, ref1; on national political sentiment, ref1; political career and achievements, ref1, ref2, ref3; opposes Catholic emancipation, ref1, ref2, ref3; as home secretary under Wellington, ref1, ref2; accepts Catholic emancipation, ref1, ref2; creates Metropolitan Police, ref1; and passing of Reform Bill, ref1, ref2; heads Tory party, ref1; proposes reform of factory working hours for children, ref1; and decline of Whig government, ref1; forms government (1834–5) and resigns, ref1; character, ref1; supports Melbourne, ref1; opposes Corn Laws, ref1, ref2; Victoria’s view of, ref1; premiership (1841) and administration, ref1; lowers taxes on corn, ref1; reintroduces income tax, ref1; and Corn Laws, ref1, ref2; reforming principles, ref1, ref2; advocates free trade, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; on Birmingham, ref1; on railway management, ref1; introduces 1845 ‘great budget’, ref1; and Irish famine, ref1, ref2; and party rebels, ref1; resigns, ref1, ref2; remains in Parliament, ref1; accident and death, ref1

Peep-o-Day Boys, ref1

penal system: changes, ref1

penny post, ref1

Perceval, Spencer: assassinated, ref1; son protests in parliament, ref1

Peterloo Massacre (Manchester, 1819), ref1, ref2

philanthropic societies, ref1

Phoenix Park, Dublin, ref1

photography, ref1

Piedmont: revolution, ref1

Pinney, Anna Maria, ref1

Pitt, William, the Younger, ref1

Pius IX, Pope: re-establishes Catholic Church in England and Wales, ref1

Place, Francis, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Plug Riots (or Plug Plot Riots, 1842), ref1

Poland: civil war (1863), ref1

police: resistance to establishment of, ref1, ref2; anti-crowd actions, ref1

Police Act (1839), ref1

Polytechnic Institution, London, ref1

poor, the: conditions, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; rural, ref1; relief, ref1; numbers, ref1; and children, ref1

Poor Law: reform, ref1, ref2; (New, 1834), ref1, ref2, ref3; commissioners, ref1

Poor Law Board: established (1847), ref1

Pope, Alexander: Windsor Forest, ref1

population: increase, ref1, ref2

Port of London: closed (1888), ref1

Portugal: revolution, ref1

post see penny post

Praed, Winthrop Mackworth, ref1

Primrose League, ref1

prisons: treadmills introduced, ref1

professions, ref1

prostitution, ref1, ref2

protectionism: and Corn Laws, ref1; Peel opposes, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; Bentinck supports, ref1; and agricultural workers, ref1; Conservatives divided on, ref1, ref2; Derby supports, ref1; Disraeli’s attitude to, ref1; Argyll on, ref1; see also free trade

Prussia: and unification of Germany, ref1; defeats France (1870), ref1

public health, ref1

Public Health Act (1875), ref1

public services: regulation and inspection, ref1

Pugin, Edward Welby, ref1

Punch (magazine), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Punjab: Dalhousie annexes, ref1

Pusey, Edward, ref1

Quadruple Alliance (1815), ref1, ref3

Quakers see Friends, Society of

Quarterly Review: on rise of Conservatives, ref1; on Derby’s government, ref1

Raglan, Lord Fitzroy James Henry Somerset, Baron, ref1, ref2, ref3

Railway Regulation Act (1844), ref1

railways: development and effect, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; first fatal accident, ref1; control and management, ref1; install telegraph system, ref1; investment and speculation in, ref1, ref2; in art, ref1; excursions, ref1; as image of the day, ref1

Reade, Charles, ref1

Redistribution of Seats Act (1885), ref1

Reform Acts and Bills (1831–2), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; (1867), ref1, ref2, ref3

Reform League, ref1

register of births, marriages and death: created (1836), ref1

Reid, Sir James, ref1

religion: and church attendance, ref1; pervasiveness and variety, ref1, ref2; and belief, ref1; and biblical criticism, ref1; see also Christianity; Church of England; Oxford Movement

revolutions of 1848, ref1

Reynolds’ News, ref1, ref2

Rhodes, Cecil, ref1, ref2

Ribbonmen (Ireland), ref1

Richmond, Charles Gordon Lennox, 5th duke of, ref1

Richmond, Charlotte Lennox, dowager duchess of, ref1

Ridgeway, Battle of (1866), ref1

rinderpest (cattle plague), ref1

Roberts, Field Marshal Frederick Sleigh, ref1

Roberts, William Prowting, ref1

Robertson, Frederick, ref1

Robey, George, ref1

Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, ref1

Rocket (steam locomotive), ref1

Roebuck, John Arthur (‘Tear ’em’), ref1, ref2

Roman Catholic see Catholic

Roman Catholic Relief Act (1791), ref1

Rosebery, Archibald John Primrose, 4th earl of, ref1, ref2

Rosebery, Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th earl of: castigates Disraeli over Turkey settlement, ref1; and Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign, ref1; and Bright’s criticism of bombardment of Alexandria, ref1; on minority government (1885), ref1; and Gladstone’s prediction on Ireland, ref1; as chairman of London County Council, ref1; on Gladstone’s retaining power in old age, ref1; character and qualities, ref1; as prime minister (1894–5), ref1; collapse, ref1; on Liberal party, ref1; gives up leadership of Liberals, ref1

Rothschild, Nathan, ref1

Rothschild family, ref1

Rowntree, Seebohm, ref1

Royal Academy: Exhibition (1855), ref1

Royal Commission on the Health of Towns (1843–4), ref1

Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (1832), ref1

Royal Navy see navy

Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, ref1

Ruskin, John: character, ref1; criticizes Great Exhibition, ref1; nostalgia for medievalism, ref1; style, ref1; moral content, ref1; imperialism, ref1; on Tichborne case, ref1; The Stones of Venice, ref1

Russell, John, 1st Earl (earlier Lord John Russell): proposes Test Act (1828), ref1; introduces 1831 Reform Bill, ref1; health failure and resignation, ref1; and Irish question, ref1; and Whig weakness, ref1; leads party in Commons, ref1; opposes changes to Reform Act, ref1; political ambitions, ref1; and Melbourne’s indecisiveness, ref1; pledges to repeal Corn Laws, ref1; debating, ref1; Peel supports, ref1; succeeds Peel as prime minister, ref1; reforms, ref1; and Victoria’s view of Palmerston, ref1; orders Palmerston to resign, ref1; condemns pope’s re-establishment of Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales, ref1; resigns (1852), ref1; as foreign secretary under Aberdeen, ref1; and outbreak of Crimean War, ref1; resigns over Crimean War (1854), ref1; in Palmerston’s government, ref1; in opposition, ref1; and reorganization of Liberal party, ref1; Victoria deprecates, ref1; and Victoria’s withdrawal from public life, ref1; as foreign secretary under Palmerston, ref1; succeeds Palmerston as prime minister (1865), ref1; electoral reform proposals, ref1; resigns Liberal leadership, ref1

Russell, William Howard, ref1

Russia: in Crimean War, ref1; claims on Poland, ref1; wars with Turkey (1853–5), ref1, ref2; (1877), ref1

Sacramental Test Act (1828), ref1

St Barnabas church, Pimlico, London, ref1

St Paul’s Cathedral: condition, ref1

Salford: army barracks bombed by Fenians, ref1

Salisbury, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd marquess of (earlier Viscount Cranborne): on telegraph, ref1; on industrial Conservatism, ref1; on tensions between constitution and democracy, ref1; on Disraeli’s parliamentary reform proposals, ref1; on English resignation, ref1; as secretary of state for India, ref1; Joseph Chamberlain attacks, ref1; as foreign secretary, ref1; on Gladstone’s premiership (1880), ref1; on Irish troubles, ref1; as successor to Disraeli, ref1; succeeds Gladstone as prime minister, ref1, ref2, ref3; leads minority government, ref1; accepts Randolph Churchill’s resignation, ref1; and Irish question, ref1; and Chamberlain’s coalition, ref1; on peace in Ireland, ref1; resigns (1892), ref1; forms government (1895), ref1; and Jameson raid, ref1; and Second Boer War, ref1, ref2; on living and dying nations, ref1; character and appearance, ref1; returned to government (1900), ref1

Salvation Army, ref1

San Stefano, Treaty of (1878), ref1

sanitation: improvements, ref1, ref2

Saturdays: leisure afternoons, ref1

Scarlett, General James Yorke, ref1

Schleswig-Holstein, ref1

schools: and child education, ref1

science: intelligentsia lacks interest in, ref1; nonconformists dominate, ref1; popular appeal, ref1; Victorian concern with, ref1

Scott, Sir Walter, ref1

Scottish Labour party: established, ref1

Seacole, Mary, ref1

seaside: and leisure, ref1; towns, ref1

Sebastopol, ref1, ref2, ref3

servants, ref1

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th earl of (earlier Lord Ashley): labour reform, ref1n; criticizes Victoria, ref1; criticizes Peel for non-cooperation, ref1; on employment in mines, ref1; on condition of working class, ref1; criticizes ritualism in Church of England, ref1; on Russo-Turkish war, ref1; humanitarianism, ref1; and Palmerston’s view of Gladstone, ref1; denies help to Derby, ref1

Shaw, George Bernard, ref1, ref2, ref3

Sheffield, ref1

Sheffield Female Anti-Slavery Society, ref1

Sheffield Mercury, ref1

Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, ref1

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, ref1; The Mask of Anarchy, ref1

Sidmouth, Henry Addington, Viscount: on distress in country, ref1; drinking, ref1; fears insurrection, ref1; on political economy, ref1

Sierra Leone: mortality, ref1

Sinope, Battle of (1854), ref1

Six Acts (1819), ref1

Six Points, ref1

slavery: abolition (1833), ref1, ref2; female petitions against, ref1

Smiles, Samuel, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; Self Help, ref1

Smith, Sydney, ref1

Smuts, Jan Christian, ref1, ref2

Snow, John, ref1

social conditions: legislation on, ref1

Social Democratic Federation, ref1, ref2, ref3

socialism, ref1, ref2

society: manners and behaviour, ref1

Society for the Diffusion of Intellect, ref1

Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, ref1, ref2

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, ref1

South America: independence movement, ref1

Southey, Robert, ref1, ref2

Spa Fields, ref1

Spain: revolution, ref1; and loss of South American possessions, ref1

spas, ref1

Spectator (magazine), ref1

speed: as novelty, ref1, ref2

spiritualism, ref1, ref2

sport, ref1

Spring-Rice, Sir Cecil, ref1

Spurgeon, Charles, ref1

Stalin, Josef, ref1

stamp duty (on newspapers), ref1

Stanhope, Lady Hester, ref1

state, the: and individual liberty, ref1; assumes new powers, ref1

steam power, ref1, ref2

steel manufacture, ref1

Stephenson, George and Robert, ref1, ref2, ref3

Stewart, Charles see Londonderry, 3rd marquess of

Stirling, J. H.: The Secret of Hegel, ref1

Stockmar, Baron Christian, ref1

Stockport Cotton Jenny Spinners Union Society, ref1

Stockton–Darlington Railway, ref1

Stoker, Bram: Dracula, ref1

Strachey, Lytton, ref1; Eminent Victorians, ref1

street ballads, ref1

strikes (industrial), ref1, ref2, ref3

Sudan: uprising, ref1, ref2

Sunday Trading Bill (1855), ref1

Swing, Captain (fictional): and agricultural riots, ref1

Taine, Hippolyte, ref1

Tamworth Manifesto (1834), ref1

taxation, ref1, ref2

Tea Operatives and General Labourers Union, ref1

Tel-el-Kebir, Battle of (1882), ref1

telegraph (electric): developed, ref1, ref2; on railways, ref1

telephone: invented (1876), ref1

Temple Bar, ref1

Ten Hours Bill (1847), ref1

Tennyson, Alfred, 1st Baron: inspired by Arthurian epics, ref1; on black population, ref1; ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, ref1; Morte d’Arthur, ref1; ‘The Passing of Arthur’, ref1

Thackeray, William Makepeace: on Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed, ref1; contributes to Punch, ref1; Vanity Fair, ref1

Thames, river: cleansing, ref1, ref2; embankment, ref1; and ‘great stink’ (1858), ref1; tunnel, ref1

theatre: and political ideas, ref1

Theosophy, ref1

Thompson, George, ref1

Thorne, Will, ref1

Tichborne, Roger, ref1

Tierney, George, ref1

Tillett, Ben, ref1

Times, The: printed by steam power, ref1; on Peel’s resignation, ref1; on result of 1841 election, ref1; on Peel’s circle, ref1; on Aberdeen’s government, ref1; on mismanagement of Crimean War, ref1, ref2; on Florence Nightingale, ref1; on Disraeli’s view of working classes, ref1; on conduct of Commons business, ref1; and Salisbury’s party leadership in Lords, ref1; on Boer War, ref1

Tolpuddle Martyrs, ref1, ref2

Torquay, ref1

Tory party: differences from Whigs, ref1, ref3; calls general election (1818), ref1; mocks 1831 Reform Bill, ref1; attitudes to reform, ref1; belief in superiority of governing classes, ref1; members vote against Corn Laws repeal, ref1; see also Conservative Party

Town Improvement Company, ref1

towns see cities and towns

Tractarianism see Oxford Movement

Tracts for the Times, ref1

Trade Union Act (1871), ref1

trade unions: banned under 1799 Combination Act, ref1; beginnings, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; accepted, ref1; development, ref1; funded by middle class, ref1

Trades Union Congress (1888), ref1

Trafalgar Square, London: as centre of demonstrations, ref1, ref2

transport: undeveloped, ref1

Transvaal: Boers in, ref1, ref2; gold in, ref1; in Second Boer War, ref1; ceded to Britain, ref1

Trelawny, John, ref1

Trevithick, Richard, ref1

Trollope, Anthony: on novel-reading, ref1; on unsanitary Thames, ref1; The Duke’s Children, ref1; Phineas Redux, ref1

Trotsky, Leon, ref1

Turgenev, Ivan, ref1

Turkey see Ottoman Empire

Turner, J. M. W.: Rain, Steam and Speed (painting), ref1, ref2

Twiss, Horace, ref1

unemployment, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; see also poor, the

United States of America: cotton production, ref1; emigration to, ref1; Civil War breaks out (1861), ref1; effect on cotton manufacture, ref1, ref2

utilitarians: and Evangelicals, ref1

Vansittart, Nicholas, ref1

Vereeniging, Peace of (1902), ref1

Victoria, Queen (earlier Princess): birth, ref1; on Lord John Russell, ref1; journeys through England (as princess), ref1; temper, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; upbringing and character, ref1; complains of Palmerston, ref1; accession, ref1; relations with Melbourne, ref1, ref2; and Bedchamber Crisis, ref1; and Melbourne’s fall over Jamaica Bill, ref1; courtship and marriage to Albert, ref1; and 1841 election, ref1; criticized, ref1; assassination attempts on, ref1, ref2; opposed to Palmerston’s policies, ref1, ref2; visits to Ireland, ref1, ref2; and Don Pacifico affair, ref1; affronted by re-establishment of Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales, ref1; opens Great Exhibition, ref1; on Lord Derby, ref1; at Napoleon III’s state visit, ref1; rumoured madness, ref1; and death of Albert, ref1; withdraws from public life, ref1; and demand for electoral reform, ref1; good relations with Disraeli, ref1, ref2, ref3; distaste for Gladstone, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; rejects Gladstone’s suggestion for royal residence in Ireland, ref1; favours Prussians over French, ref1; and John Brown, ref1; regains public sympathy, ref1; opposes women’s rights, ref1; and Disraeli’s purchase of Suez Canal shares, ref1; sees telephone at Osborne House, ref1; on administration of Empire, ref1; letter from Gladstone on state of Ireland, ref1; speech in parliament on economic depression (1880), ref1; on lawlessness in Ireland, ref1; on fall of Khartoum, ref1; on Gladstone’s campaigning in 1886 election, ref1; golden jubilee (1887), ref1; booed in East End, ref1; on Gladstone in old age, ref1; accepts Gladstone’s resignation, ref1; on Rosebery and Liberal party, ref1; Diamond Jubilee (1898), ref1, ref2; on Boer War, ref1; ageing, ref1, ref2; visits Riviera, ref1; death, ref1; threatened by Fenians, ref1

Victoria Park, London, ref1

Victorian: as term, ref1

Vienna, Congress of (1815), ref1

Vigilance Association for the Defence of Personal Rights, ref1

Wadsworth, Alfred, ref1

Wakefield, E. G.: A View of the Art of Colonisation, ref1

Ward, Lord Dudley, ref1

Watt, James, ref1

Webb, Beatrice, ref1; My Apprenticeship, ref1

Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st duke of: as national hero, ref1; disparages Prince Regent, ref1; on Babbage’s calculating machines, ref1; on George Canning, ref1; on foreign intervention, ref1; illness after duke of York’s funeral, ref1; on ‘impractical’ government, ref1; supports maintaining Ottoman Empire, ref1; as prime minister, ref1; agrees to Catholic emancipation, ref1; poor relations with George IV, ref1; opposes parliamentary reform, ref1; resigns, ref1; on passing of Reform Bill, ref1, ref2; fails to form government (1832), ref1; heads Tory party, ref1; declines to form government (1834), ref1, ref2; on Melbourne’s first government, ref1; deputizes for Peel as prime minister, ref1; declines Victoria’s appeal to replace Melbourne, ref1; as leader in Lords, ref1; on Peel’s reaction to Irish famine, ref1; declines cabinet post under Russell, ref1; pessimism on national defence, ref1; on Derby’s government, ref1; funeral, ref1

Wells, H. G., ref1, ref2

Wesleyan Methodist anti-slavery petition (1833), ref1

West Africa: mortality, ref1

Weymouth, ref1

Whig party: differences from Tories, ref1, ref2; and reform, ref1, ref2; develops unity, ref1; Disraeli on, ref1; election victory (1832), ref1; introduces New Poor Law, ref1; radicals in, ref1; opposes Peel, ref1; election victory (1837), ref1; opposes Corn Laws, ref1; becomes Liberal party, ref1; see also Liberal party

White, William, ref1

Wigston, Leicestershire, ref1

Wilberforce, William, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Wilde, Oscar: parodies earnestness, ref1; wit, ref1; reads at British Museum, ref1; life, style and ideas, ref1; trials and conviction, ref1, ref2; The Importance of Being Earnest, ref1; The Picture of Dorian Gray, ref1; Salomé, ref1; ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, ref1

Wilhelm II, kaiser of Germany: telegram to Kruger, ref1

Wilkie, David: The Chelsea Pensioners reading the Waterloo Dispatch (painting), ref1

William IV, King (earlier duke of Clarence): on Whigs and Tories, ref1; accession, ref1; character and qualities, ref1; calls on Grey to form government, ref1; and Grey’s parliamentary reform, ref1, ref2, ref3; contempt for Victoria’s mother, ref1; invites Melbourne to form government, ref1; dismisses Melbourne and invites Peel to form government, ref1; reinstates Melbourne as prime minister, ref1; supports Tories, ref1; prejudice against Melbourne, ref1; death, ref1; political achievements, ref1

William, Prince of Prussia, ref1

Windham, Colonel Sir Charles Ash, ref1

wireless, ref1

Wiseman, Cardinal Nicholas Patrick Stephen, archbishop of Westminster, ref1, ref2

Wollstonecraft, Mary: A Vindication of the Rights of Women, ref1

women: rights and status, ref1, ref2; employment conditions, ref1, ref2, ref3; dress and fashion, ref1, ref2; anti-slavery petitions, ref1; equal pay demands, ref1; match-girls’ strike, ref1; emancipation, ref1

Wood, Charles (1st Viscount Halifax), ref1, ref2

Wood, Nicholas, ref1

Woolf, Virginia, ref1

workhouses, ref1

working class: and religious worship, ref1; disenfranchised, ref1, ref2; and parliamentary representation, ref1; hatred of governing classes, ref1; and Chartism, ref1; poverty and starvation, ref1; behaviour, ref1, ref2; Chadwick’s report on, ref1; conditions and improvement, ref1, ref2; Engels on, ref1; political leanings, ref1; see also trade unions

Yeats, William Butler, ref1, ref2

Yellow Book (magazine), ref1

York, Frederick Augustus, duke of: death and funeral, ref1

Young, Arthur, ref1; Travels, ref1

Young, G. M., ref1

Young, Thomas, ref1, ref2

Young England Movement, ref1

Young Ireland, ref1

Zulu war (1879), ref1

1. Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd earl of Liverpool, by Sir Thomas Lawrence.

2. George IV, king of the United Kingdom and Hanover.

3. 1815 Bread Riot at the entrance to the House of Commons caused by the implementation of the Corn Laws.

4. The 1819 Peterloo Massacre at St Peter’s Field, Manchester.

5. Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh and 2nd marquess of Londonderry.

6. Caroline of Brunswick, consort of George IV, 1820.

7. The arrest of the Cato Street conspirators in 1820. The name comes from their meeting place near Edgware Road in London.

8. A model of the analytical engine, a calculating machine invented in 1837 by Charles Babbage.

9. Mary Anning, pioneer fossil collector and palaeontologist of Lyme Regis, Dorset.

10. The Rt Hon. George Canning, MP.

11. Arthur Wellesley, the duke of Wellington.

12. William IV, king of the United Kingdom and Hanover.

13. The Rt Hon. Earl Grey.

14. An illustration of Daniel O’Connell for The Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography.

15. The title page to The Life and History of Swing, The Kent Rick Burner, 1830.

16. A young Queen Victoria in 1842.

17. Prince Albert in 1840.

18. William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne.

19. Robert Peel.

20. A photograph of Lord John Russell.

21. Lord Palmerston.

22. The Rt Hon. W.E. Gladstone.

23. Benjamin Disraeli.

24. The ‘Rocket’ locomotive designed by George Stephenson in 1829.

25. Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway painted before 1844 by Turner.

26. The royal family in 1846.

27. The Great Exhibition of 1851 held in a purpose-built Crystal Palace in Hyde Park.

28. The Relief of the Light Brigade, 25 October 1854.

29. Mary Jane Seacole.

30. On Strike, c. 1891, by Hubert von Herkomer.

31. An illustration of music-hall performers for The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 1876.

32. Ramsgate Sands (or Life at the Seaside) by William Powell Frith.

33. The cover of The Illustrated London News depicting Mr Hawkins addressing the jury during the trial of the Tichborne Claimant.

34. Annie Besant, from Bibby’s Annual.

35. A descriptive map of London poverty, compiled and coloured by Charles Booth.

36. The key for Charles Booth’s poverty map.

37. A photograph of Lord Rosebery.

38. A group of Boer commandos armed with the German Mauser rifle, 1895.

39. Oscar Wilde.

40. Queen Victoria, empress of India, and Abdul Karim (munshi), 1894.

DOMINION

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning novelist, as well as a broadcaster, biographer, poet and historian. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers Thames: Sacred River and London: The Biography. He holds a CBE for services to literature and lives in London.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Non-Fiction

The History of England Vol. I: Foundation

The History of England Vol. II: Tudors

The History of England Vol. III: Civil War

The History of England Vol. IV: Revolution

London: The Biography

Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

The Collection: Journalism, Reviews, Essays, Short Stories

Lectures Edited by Thomas Wright

Thames: Sacred River Venice: Pure City Queer City

Fiction

The Great Fire of London

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

Hawksmoor Chatterton First Light

English Music The House of Doctor Dee

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem Milton in America

The Plato Papers The Clerkenwell Tales

The Lambs of London The Fall of Troy

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein Three Brothers

Biography

Ezra Pound and his World T. S. Eliot

Dickens Blake The Life of Thomas More

Shakespeare: The Biography Charlie Chaplin

Brief Lives

Chaucer J. M. W. Turner

Newton Poe: A Life Cut Short

First published 2018 by Macmillan

This electronic edition published 2018 by Macmillan

an imprint of Pan Macmillan

20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

Associated companies throughout the world

www.panmacmillan.com

ISBN 978-1-5098-8131-4

Copyright © Peter Ackroyd 2018

Cover images: Portrait of Queen Victoria, 1859 (oil on canvas) (detail of 192754), Winterhalter, Franz Xaver (1806–73) (after) / Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK The Stapleton Collection Bridgeman Images

The right of Peter Ackroyd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.

Peter Ackroyd

THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND

VOLUME VI

INNOVATION

Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

1. The sun never rises

2. Home sweet home

3. The lie of the land

4. Plates in the air

5. The most powerful thing

6. Demands for reform

7. The Terrible Twins

8. What happened to the gentry?

9. Car crazy

10. Little hammers in their muffs

11. The Orange card

12. The black sun

13. Forced to fight

14. The regiment of women

15. The clock stops

16. England’s Irish question

17. Gay as you like

18. Labour at the summit

19. Where is the match?

20. Get on, or get out

21. Crash

22. The rituals of suburbia

23. Now we can have some fun

24. The country of the dole

25. The Fasci

26. The bigger picture

27. The Spanish tragedy

28. This is absolutely terrible

29. The alteration

30. The march of the ants

31. Would you like an onion?

32. The pangs of austerity

33. The cruel real world

34. An old world

35. The washing machine

36. Plays and players

37. Riots of passage

38. North and south

39. Elvis on a budget

40. This sporting life

41. Old lace and arsenic

42. The new brutalism

43. The soothing dark

44. In place of peace

45. Bugger them all

46. The first shot

47. The fall of Heath

48. The slot machine

49. Let us bring harmony

50. Here she comes

51. The Falklands flare-up

52. The Big Bang

53. The Brighton blast

54. Was she always right?

55. Money, money, money

56. The curtain falls

57. The fall of sterling

58. One’s bum year

59. Put up or shut up

60. The moral abyss

61. A chapter of accidents

62. The unhappy year

63. The princess leaves the fairy tale

Bibliography

Index

List of illustrations

1. Edward VII (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)

2. King George at the opening of the Festival of Empire in 1911 (World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)

3. A tram in Yarmouth (Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo)

4. The Boy Scouts in 1909 (Hulton Archive / Stringer)

5. Emmeline Pankhurst in 1914 (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)

6. Herbert Henry Asquith (Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo)

7. David Lloyd George (Bettmann / Contributor)

8. The British Empire Exhibition, 1924 (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)

9. Flappers in 1925 (General Photographic Agency / Stringer)

10. The General Strike of 1926 (Vintage_Space / Alamy Stock Photo)

11. A Butlin’s poster from the 1930s (Retro AdArchives / Alamy Stock Photo)

12. Members of the Bloomsbury Group in 1928 (© Tate)

13. Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (Masheter Movie Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)

14. George VI on the day of his coronation (Hilary Morgan / Alamy Stock Photo)

15. Winston Churchill in 1940 (Keystone-France / Contributor)

16. The Empire Windrush arriving in Tilbury (PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo)

17. The birth of the National Health Service (World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)

18. Rationing in 1949 (Popperfoto / Contributor)

19. The coronation of Elizabeth II (Shawshots / Alamy Stock Photo)

20. The Suez Canal in October 1956 (John Frost Newspapers / Alamy Stock Photo)

21. Harold Wilson (Popperfoto / Contributor)

22. The premiere of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (Frank Pocklington / Stringer)

23. Mary Quant (Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo)

24. The 1966 World Cup final (Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo)

25. The Beatles (Keystone Press / Alamy Stock Photo)

26. The queen watching television in 1969 (Joan Williams / Shutterstock)

27. A British family watching television in the 1970s (Homer Sykes / Alamy Stock Photo)

28. The three-day week (J. Wilds / Stringer)

29. The miners’ strike of 1984 (Manchester Daily Express / Contributor)

30. Margaret Thatcher (peter jordan / Alamy Stock Photo)

31. Princess Diana (Tim Graham / Contributor)

32. Tony Blair (Dan White / Alamy Stock Photo)

33. The Millennium Dome (Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo)

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my research assistants, Murrough O”Brien and Thomas Wright, for their invaluable assistance in the preparation of this volume.

1

The sun never rises

The greatest shock of the Second Boer War was not the protracted and bloody guerrilla warfare, but the wretched condition of the British troops.* The conscripts were malnourished and sickly, their morale low. After the war was over in 1902, an inquiry revealed that 16,000 servicemen had died of disease, due to poor rations and constitutional weakness. Many of the English soldiers had been press-ganged by penury, but around 60 per cent of the volunteers had been rejected as unfit for service. This finding prompted further investigations into the ‘deterioration of certain classes of the population’, though they came at least fifty years too late.

Investigations into the military conduct of the war were equally disturbing. It had taken almost half a million British troops to subdue a Boer population similar to that of Brighton, at a cost of £250 million. The publication of these inquiries prompted the government to create a Committee of Imperial Defence to coordinate the armed forces, and stemmed the tide of English jingoism. In 1900, during the triumphant opening phase of the war, a wave of imperialist enthusiasm had carried the Conservative and Liberal Unionist coalition to power at the so-called ‘khaki election’. The Tory-dominated coalition secured a large majority over the Liberals, defying the ‘swing of the pendulum’ law of British politics.

As the war continued, those who had previously felt imperial pride expressed disappointment and shame. The working classes even declared their admiration for the Boer rebels. ‘What’s the good of talking about the Empire on which the sun never sets,’ one Londoner put it, ‘when the sun never rises on our court?’ By the end of the decade, patriotic platitudes concerning the ‘Great Empire’ provoked laughter.

Were the British army’s deficiencies symptomatic of a wider national degeneration? In the nineteenth century, many people had believed that English enterprise and integrity had helped to bring order to the distant territories and diverse cultures of the British Empire; at the beginning of the new century, they no longer believed these boasts. After the Boer War, it was customary for politicians to speak of the ‘consolidation’ or ‘integration’ of existing colonies, dominions and ‘spheres of economic influence’. It was thought that strengthening political and economic ties within the empire was crucial if England were to survive as a great power, at a time when Germany, Japan and the United States of America were flourishing.

Some politicians argued that the creation of a system of ‘self-governing dominions’ within the empire was the only way to secure unity, given the limited capacity of British troops and increasing nationalist sentiment in territories under British control. In the late nineteenth century, India’s educated elite had developed political theories based on the principle of ‘representative national institutions’. In Ireland, popular support for ‘Home Rule’ had been paramount for decades, and anti-English sentiment became more intense.

Similar criticism could be heard in England. The burning of thousands of Boer homes and farms by British troops, and the construction of 8,000 ‘concentration camps’ to house the evicted Boers, provoked outrage, and when around 20,000 women and children died in the camps, the anger grew. Then news reached England that the government had allowed 50,000 Chinese labourers to work in South African mines for paltry wages and in appalling living conditions. On the opposition benches, Liberal politicians took up the cry of ‘Chinese slavery’. Imperial expansion had been justified by the argument that Britain was bestowing civilization on ‘primitive’ societies. At the end of the nineteenth century, the English viceroy of India had boasted of importing ‘the rule of justice’ to the country, along with ‘peace and order and good government’. But in the wake of the Boer War, many observers regarded Britain’s ‘civilizing mission’ as an excuse for exploitation.

After 1900, the English were also forced to confront their economy’s diminishing international status. In the Victorian era, English manufacturers had dominated world trade. A combination of technological innovation and cheap labour had allowed goods to be produced inexpensively in England; the availability and expansion of imperial markets, as well as mastery of the seas, had ensured they could be safely sold around the world. Meanwhile, Britain’s colonies had commissioned elaborate engineering projects from English firms, with money borrowed from the City of London. The United Kingdom had been responsible for a third of the world’s manufacturing in the 1870s, but in the early 1900s this figure fell to 10 per cent.

England could no longer claim to be the ‘workshop of the world’ – that title was now contested by Germany and the United States, which had been strengthened by unification in the second half of the nineteenth century and had developed modern production methods during recent wars. By 1900 the United States produced more coal and iron than England, while Germany’s mining technology, electrical engineering and chemical industries were superior. Part of England’s problem was that it had industrialized long before its rivals, and neither the government nor the representatives of capital and labour had the vision or the will to reinvigorate the manufacturing sector. England was technologically sclerotic, unable to add to its imperial territories and shut out from many international markets by the tariffs of foreign governments. Her staple export industries of iron, wool, shipbuilding and coal had entered their senescence. To compound the problem of declining exports, England was increasingly dependent on foreign imports. After 1900 there was a balance-of-payments deficit, with more money leaving the country than coming in. Over the next fourteen years, economic growth halved.

At the beginning of 1901, The Annual Register described the outlook for England as ‘full of misgivings’. A few weeks later, on 22 January, the nation’s anxiety was compounded when Queen Victoria died. As the news spread across the country, church bells tolled, theatrical performances were abandoned and traffic halted, as people poured onto the streets. For many, despair was coupled with bewilderment. It is sometimes said by foreign observers that monarchism is the religion of the English, yet by no means everyone in the country was a believer: the novelist Arnold Bennett thought that Londoners ‘were not, on the whole, deeply moved, whatever journalists may say’.

All the commentators agreed, however, that the queen’s death marked a transition in the country’s history. ‘We are less secure of our position,’ announced The Times. ‘Our impetus’ as a ‘nation may be spent’. Soon after Victoria’s death, the passing of the ethos of Victorianism was also predicted. In his parliamentary address, the Tory leader of the Commons, Arthur James Balfour, announced ‘the end of a great epoch’.

It was not long before another pillar of the Victorian establishment fell. In July 1902, Lord Salisbury resigned as prime minister on the grounds of bad health, his gargantuan weight placing an inordinate strain on his legs and heart. Ever since the split of the Liberal party over Irish Home Rule in 1886 and the defection of the Liberal Unionists to the Conservatives, the Tory grandee had controlled political life, holding office for all but three of those sixteen years. A Tory aristocrat of the old school, he abhorred the democratic tendencies of the modern age, seeing his party’s mission as representing the landed ‘governing’ class and maintaining the status quo in their interest. ‘Whatever happens will be for the worse,’ was his most famous political pronouncement, ‘and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.’ Some observers saw, in the manner of Salisbury’s passing in the following year, an omen of the imminent collapse of the British Empire; others regarded his death as confirmation that the Victorian era had ended.

Nevertheless, Conservatives in the Salisbury mould endeavoured to deny the demise of the old order. To Tories, the Victorian verities, including laissez-faire economics and politics and the centrality to national life of the aristocracy, the crown, the Anglican Church and the empire, were sacred. Though the Liberals represented the commercial and Nonconformist sections of the English population, an influential aristocratic element within them was even more passionately committed to free-market capitalism than its rival party.

The passivity within the two parties reflected the inertia in the political system. The ‘first-past-the-post’ system of British elections made it virtually impossible for a new party to achieve an electoral victory. As a consequence, the Tories and the Liberals had shared power for decades. The right to vote was limited to males who paid an annual rent of £10 or owned land worth the same amount, which meant that 40 per cent of English males, as well as the entire female population, were excluded from the franchise. Since MPs were unpaid, only the wealthiest men could afford to stand for election to the Commons. Once elected, MPs devised legislative proposals that were modified or rejected by an unelected, Tory-dominated House of Lords, before being submitted to the monarch for approval. In addition to being the head of Britain’s church, army and aristocracy and one of its biggest landowners, the ostensibly ‘constitutional’ monarch actually enjoyed extensive executive powers known as the ‘royal prerogative’, which included the freedom to dismiss and appoint prime ministers.

In contrast to the English politicians, the country’s intellectuals celebrated the end of Victorianism, and eagerly devised plans for a brave new world. H. G. Wells compared Queen Victoria to a ‘great paper-weight that for half a century [had] sat upon men’s minds … when she was removed their ideas began to blow about all over the place haphazardly’. Radicals such as Wells used ‘Victorian’ as a pejorative term; a fairer, more rational era was coming. The Liberal economist J. A. Hobson remarked on the way increasing numbers of people suddenly appeared ‘possessed by the duty and desire to put the very questions which their parents thought shocking, and to insist upon plain intelligible answers’. What is the role of the state? What is the purpose of the empire? Why should women and the working classes be excluded from the electoral process? And what are the causes and cures of economic and social inequality?

Attempts to answer these questions produced a plethora of political and cultural movements. Socialist, anarchist and feminist groups were founded, while trade unions flourished. Some intellectuals turned to religious philosophies such as theosophy, or took up single-issue political causes including anti-vivisection and anti-vaccination. Many reformers looked to science to point the way to a brighter future. While different radicals promoted different means, the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb believed they were all working towards the same end: ‘The whole nation’, she wrote, is ‘sliding towards Social Democracy’.

The men who replaced the falling giants of the Victorian establishment did not quite match their stature. Victoria was succeeded by her eldest son Edward who, at the age of almost sixty, ‘got his innings at last’, in the words of the young Tory MP Winston Churchill. Born in 1841, Edward had a distinctly nineteenth-century appearance, with a thick moustache and rotund figure. He had a taste for cigars, women, gossip, jokes and military uniforms, but his greatest passion was food. The tone of his reign was set when his coronation had to be delayed as a result of an illness brought on by overindulgence. The new king’s conspicuous consumption was a source of embarrassment to the court, at a time when a large percentage of his subjects lived in poverty.

Edward was also animated by the conviviality, energy and exuberance that was characteristic of the Victorian era. Eyewitness accounts describe him as ‘roaring like a bull’ as he vented the ‘hereditary Hanoverian spleen’. Many of his political views also marked him out as a man of the previous century. In imperial affairs he deplored the idea of granting autonomy to the colonies. Yet compared to his fervently Tory mother, Edward was more neutral in party-political terms, and less inclined to interfere in the affairs of government and parliament. On the other hand, the new king was eager to exercise a decisive influence over the government’s diplomacy. As the speaker of a variety of continental languages and as a man who prided himself on being a ‘good European’, he was better qualified than most modern English monarchs to do so.

Victoria had not been amused by the hedonistic lifestyle of her eldest son, yet Edward’s amiability, elegant dressing and fondness for public appearances gained him numerous admirers. When his coronation eventually took place, it was enthusiastically celebrated, and he remained a popular king throughout his reign. The author J. B. Priestley, who grew up in the ‘Edwardian age’, recalled the enthusiasm the monarch inspired throughout the country, and believed Edward to be the most popular English king since Charles II. The overwhelmingly right-wing English newspapers presented the king as an icon through whom they could enjoy vicarious power and pleasure.

Like the succession to the throne, succession to the office of prime minister was a family affair. When Lord Salisbury retired in 1902, there was no election; instead he appointed his nephew, Arthur Balfour, as premier. This was by no means the first occasion on which Salisbury had promoted a relative within his government, and nothing better illustrates the hegemony of England’s aristocratic governing caste, or the essential identity of the Conservative party.

Balfour offered a striking contrast to the king whose government he led, with his languid posture and subtle intelligence. His most famous publication was a philosophical tract called A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, and his taste for philosophic inquiry was accompanied by a genius for rhetoric. Yet this mastery of the parliamentary medium often made it difficult for others to identify his message. Balfour never appeared to advocate or condemn a point of view; instead of proposing a course of action, he preferred to analyse all possible options until none seemed viable. As a patrician Tory he had little interest in altering the status quo, yet there was something idiosyncratic about his suspicion of all forms of political passion. It was as though he was petrified by the prospect of anarchy, and he laboured to keep it at a distance through irony, oratory and even coercion. As chief secretary for Ireland in the 1880s he had been known as ‘Bloody Balfour’ for his draconian policies. ‘To allow’ the Home Rulers to ‘win’, he had said, ‘is simply to give up civilisation … and authority’. Balfour regularly defended Conservative ‘values’, but he felt no enthusiasm for any specific political issue. Politics was an art to be pursued for its own sake rather than a means of getting things done.

Many of Balfour’s critics dismissed the prime minister as effete and ineffectual, while others lamented his lack of interest in the people he governed. It was said that he had never read a newspaper in his life. With little interest in the ‘lower orders’, and nothing but contempt for a middle class ‘unfit’ for anything ‘besides manufacturing’, the Tory prime minister epitomized the hauteur of the governing aristocratic elite. Was this the leader to face the challenges of a new era?

2

Home sweet home

Beyond the palace and parliament lay numberless streets of newly built houses. They were semi-detached or detached two-storey red-brick buildings, with slate roofs and bow windows, timber frames, casement windows and small front gardens. Peering over the hedges that protected the privacy of these new homes, the passerby could discern carefully arranged window displays behind lace curtains. In their tidiness, cleanliness and air of modest comfort, the homes of the ‘suburbs’ seemed to proclaim a prosperous and content population. During Edward’s reign, the suburban population exploded: in 1910, there were almost a million people living in ‘outer London’.

The new houses were given names like ‘Fairview’, or ‘The Laurels’ – the name of the home of the archetypal suburbanite Charles Pooter, hero of George and Weedon Grossmith’s late-Victorian classic, The Diary of a Nobody. They were typically clustered in squares or along truncated streets. Nearby there would be a park, a bowls or tennis club and a row of shops. Men in dark suits and bowler hats would leave the houses for work, umbrella in hand; young mothers would push perambulators, and boys from the grocer’s and newsagent’s would make their deliveries. Few children could be heard playing in the streets. This was the deep consciousness of ‘middle England’.

The suburbs were characterized by a removal from the commercial and industrial concerns of urban centres. Pervaded by a spirit of rural and romantic make-believe, with their tree-lined streets and patches of grass, they formed cityless cities for those who could afford to escape the tumultuous streets of the centre. The more leafy and spacious the suburb, the higher the house prices and the higher the percentage of owner-occupiers. A house in the green south London suburb of Balham cost over £1,000 to buy or 12 shillings a week to rent, prices that only the middle classes could afford.

At the lower end of the suburban cohort were skilled craftsmen and artisans, who had authority at work and were addressed by their ‘betters’ as ‘Mr’ rather than just by their surnames. This group also included shopkeepers, tradesmen, publicans, teachers, boarding-house keepers and small-scale merchants. They generally rented houses in the ‘inner suburbs’ and sometimes kept a servant – a necessity in the labour-intensive Edwardian home, as well as a status symbol to demonstrate that they were a level above semi-skilled or unskilled factory workers or labourers. Members of the lowest of the ‘servant-keeping classes’ felt too superior to mix with the working people in the public house but could not afford to frequent middle-class restaurants. In fact, they often struggled to maintain their social status, which was everything in Edwardian England – slipping down the scale and moving from the inner suburbs to the inner city was perceived as tragic and irreversible. Bankruptcy, loss of employment and the sickness or death of a family member might be the cause of this misfortune.

Clerks in city offices were more secure in their social position; so too were civil servants, bookkeepers and assistant managers, who earned between £300 and £700 a year. Such people kept two or more servants and could afford to buy houses in inner suburbs, such as Chorlton and Withington just outside Manchester. Yet more leafy outer suburban areas were beyond their means, though not their aspirations. The most attractive and genteel suburbs were colonized by the upper middle classes – manufacturers and wholesalers, along with the accountants, architects, solicitors, barristers, doctors, vets, bankers, actuaries and surveyors who comprised the professional classes. As the nineteenth century had progressed, they had become increasingly powerful and well-organized, with the creation of associations for each occupation. They could afford to keep several servants and privately educate their children. After schooling, boys would often take up the same professions as their fathers; girls were encouraged to become shorthand writers or governesses while they awaited marriage.

Suburbanites could commute to work in the city along the recently established transport links, which included electric trams and omnibuses, as well as overground and underground trains. Balham, for example, was connected to the City of London via underground stations at Kennington and Stockwell, and Didsbury was connected to Manchester Central Station by an overland train. Trams were the cheapest way to travel, with special ‘workman’s fares’ for early-morning journeys allowing passengers to travel up to ten miles for a penny. Yet precisely because trams were popular with workers, the middle class tended to shun them and instead take the train.

Whenever a new train station was built just outside a city, estate agents’ offices would emerge nearby, offering land to speculators, construction firms and private buyers. In 1907, Golders Green in north London was connected to the City by the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway; immediately afterwards, the armies of builders arrived. ‘All day long’, remarked a local paper in 1910, ‘there is a continuous hammering which reminds one of distant thunder’, as the tiled, gabled and half-timbered ‘semis’ grew up around the station, the railway line and the roads. There was no development plan and local authority control was virtually nonexistent, so the houses were built close together to maximize profits. It was a sprawl that failed to take into consideration either the quality of life of the new inhabitants or the preservation of the countryside. By 1914 it was impossible to believe that Golders Green had been full of trees and hedges only a decade before.

The unrelenting development of these outer cities gave the impression that the English population was also expanding. Yet the low-density housing of the suburbs, in contrast with the high blocks of flats on the Continent and the older terraces in English cities, revealed a different demographic trend. The new houses suited England’s relatively ageing population. For the first time on record, the increase in England’s population slowed during the Edwardian period. Between 1900 and 1910 the birth rate decreased from thirty-six to twenty-four per 1,000 population; it was only the declining death rate and increasing immigration into the country that kept the population growing.

Declining birth and death rates meant that England was no longer the young, vigorous country it had been at the beginning of Victoria’s reign. In 1841 half of the population had been under twenty, but by 1914 the figure was less than a third. This development provoked further concerns about the robustness of the nation, while increasing immigration prompted xenophobia, with many complaining that England was ‘falling to the Irish and the Jews’. Popular anxiety over the racial ‘deterioration’ and ‘adulteration’ of the supposedly Anglo-Saxon English would inform the 1905 Aliens Act, which was introduced by the Tories to reduce immigration into Britain from outside the empire.

The keynotes of suburban life were privacy, domesticity and respectability. The privet hedge at the front of the semi-detached houses and their fenced back gardens ensured that the suburban family’s ‘home sweet home’ became their castle. Suburbanites could live undisturbed by their neighbours, with whom they might exchange no more than a few words. And yet everyone was aware of their social and economic status – the size of one’s house and its presentation proclaimed one’s ranking. The most affluent families set the standards to which all denizens of a suburb aspired: ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, a phrase coined in 1913, was the aim of suburban life. Everyone in a suburb was also aware of a neighbour’s transgressions from genteel standards of morality, such as an unwanted pregnancy. A group-monitored respectability pervaded these outer cities, and the word ‘respectable’ became synonymous with the suburban middle class.

The aspirational character of middle-class suburbanites offered an obvious subject for literary caricature. ‘We live our unreal, stupid little lives,’ a suburban character comments in a story by the upper-middle-class author Saki, ‘and persuade ourselves that we really are untrammelled men and women leading a reasonable existence.’ Other authors mocked the supposedly unsophisticated cultural societies such as drama, singing, art and flower arranging that proliferated in the new neighbourhoods, together with the tennis, bowls and golf clubs that monopolized so much of the suburbanite’s leisure time. The suburbs themselves were also denigrated and denounced. In his 1910 novel Howards End, E. M. Forster described a stain of ‘red rust’ spreading out into the countryside around London.

Some intellectuals championed suburbia. The radical Liberal MP Charles Masterman predicted that the suburbs would become the major urban form of the twentieth century, replacing the countryside as the breeding ground of a new ‘English yeomanry’. Animated by the Victorian values of self-help, laissez-faire and individualism, it was believed that suburbanites were distinguished by their drive, ambition, worldliness and agnosticism. The suburban middle class was also on the rise as a political force. Partially enfranchised by the reform acts of the 1860s and 1880s and then fully enfranchised in 1918, their electoral choices would determine who governed England throughout the twentieth century. In acknowledgement of the growing power of that class, the 1911 census made the occupation of the male head of the household, rather than the land he owned or his family connections, the main criterion of social position.

Yet the new population had its limitations. Neither political consciousness nor a sense of solidarity could flourish in the suburbs, where private interests took precedence over public concerns. In the absence of a strong community spirit and a compelling code of public ethics, religious observance also declined. It was not that atheism was spreading among suburbanites; it was just that they dedicated their time to their families, to leisure activities and to spending money. Sundays in the suburbs were spent playing golf, tennis and bowls rather than going to church. Most members of the middle class remained Christian in their outlook, but they increasingly did not feel the need to affirm this by attending church. Their indifference to the established Church of England set the tone for the entire nation, and for the coming century. While the Anglican Church would continue to influence English culture in the decades ahead, its popular appeal and political power would be severely diminished.

3

The lie of the land

Beyond the suburbs lay the old villages of rural England, whose decay was constantly lamented. Over 1 million English people still worked the land, but they represented a dwindling percentage of the workforce. In 1851 a quarter of English males were agricultural labourers, but by 1911 the figure fell below 5 per cent. England was now an overwhelmingly urban nation, with over three-quarters of the population living in towns and cities – a development that alarmed those who believed that the health of the English people was threatened by urban living.

Rural labourers lived in six main areas of the country – the grazing counties of the northwest, north-east and southwest, and the arable counties of East Anglia, the Midlands and the southeast. The agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century had ravaged the arable sector. In 1870 arable goods had accounted for half of the national agricultural produce, but by 1914 that figure had fallen below 20 per cent. Improvements in transport and preservation allowed producers as far away as New Zealand to export their goods to England; half of all food consumed in the country was imported.

Wages for those who worked the land were low at the start of Edward’s reign. The average pay for a sixty-five-hour week was around 12 shillings, a sum which the social reformer Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree described as ‘insufficient to maintain a family of average size in a state of merely physical efficiency’. Rural wages would increase by 3 per cent between 1900 and 1912, well behind the general 15 per cent increase in the cost of living over the same period. Where possible, agricultural labourers would rear their own animals for slaughter and cultivate their own allotments.

The English peasantry owned none of the land it cultivated. After the enclosures of the previous centuries, almost every rural acre belonged to private aristocratic landlords. Even in Ireland, where great swathes of the land had been appropriated by the British from the native Catholic population in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the situation was more favourable to agricultural labourers, after the 1903 Wyndham Land (Purchase) Act offered subsidies to tenants who wanted to purchase land from landlords. Agricultural labour in Edwardian England was often characterized as cheerless toil for someone else’s benefit, while living conditions for the peasantry were frequently desperate. It is hardly surprising that so many labourers either joined unions and agitated for an improvement in their lot or left the land for towns and cities. With the country population decreasing, the traditional rural way of life, with its ancient trades, crafts and pastimes, slowly died out. Village festivals became less frequent and public houses shut down, while bread and meat were now bought from the baker’s and butcher’s vans that came from the nearest town.

On their journeys to England’s cities, emigrant rural workers would often meet wealthy townspeople travelling in the opposite direction by motor car. Upper-middle-class Edwardians decided to move to the country in order to return to the ‘simpler’ way of life that had been evoked in the works of such Victorian writers as John Ruskin. The magazine Country Life, founded at the end of the 1890s, exerted an even larger influence, with its promises of ‘peace, plenty and quiet’ for the ‘country-loving businessman’. Nostalgia for a largely imaginary version of traditional rural life would be a prominent feature of the urban middle-class imagination throughout the twentieth century. The more country life was destroyed, the greater influence the ideal of that traditional life exercised on the English psyche.

While rich city folk often claimed to love traditional rural life, they were not prepared to forgo modern comfort. Instead of renovating the dilapidated cottages left vacant by the city-bound peasants, they generally built their own ‘cottagey’ homes replete with modern conveniences. Numerous ‘riverside’ housing developments sprang up along the Thames, with regular railway services allowing their inhabitants to commute to the City. The new houses were in the countryside but not of it. The sounds of a piano or a tennis party would issue from them; city talk now filled the country lanes.

When the rural workers arrived in a city, they found streets upon streets of indistinguishable houses and shops. The majority of the workingclass men who inhabited inner cities were semi-skilled or unskilled labourers employed in factories or in the construction industry for a weekly wage. Others, still lower down the social and economic scale, assumed more precarious occupations, such as scavenger, knife grinder or hawker. According to the 1911 census, the leading occupational category for workingclass men and women in England was domestic service, with some one and a quarter million people employed as servants. The number of people in domestic work reinforced the Conservative idea of England as an ‘organic’ hierarchical society in which everyone had a place and knew it.

Workingclass people who were not live-in domestics often resided in the ‘two-up, two-down’ terraced city houses constructed during Victoria’s reign. These cheaply built ‘workers’ cottages’ were poorly insulated and lacked running water, though many were now lit by gas. Family life centred on the ground-floor room at the back of the house, which served as a kitchen and living room. The front room downstairs displayed the family’s best furniture and was used only on special occasions. There was a small garden at the back with an outdoor toilet; the garden could be used to grow vegetables or as a yard where work tools might be stored.

Just under half of the working classes were officially classified as impoverished. While the national income increased by 20 per cent over Edward’s reign, real wages dropped by around 6 per cent. When working husbands failed to bring in enough money to cover their family’s needs, their wives were forced to pawn the family’s possessions. In the first decade of the new century there were 700 pawn shops within ten miles of the City of London.

The ever-present fear of the working class was the penury that might come as a consequence of unemployment, ill health, a wage cut or injury at work. When the rent on a terraced house could no longer be paid, a once respectable family had to look for accommodation among the crowded and squalid slums of the ‘residuum’. It is thought that 35,000 people were homeless in London in 1910. They tramped the streets during the night and waited by the gates of the public parks until they opened, when they fell asleep on the benches. The workhouses offered little in the way of refuge. Their occupants would earn meagre meals by picking oakum and breaking stones all day, like prisoners – and any negligence could be punished by imprisonment.

The working classes were often described by middle-class observers as a different race – stunted, sickly, violent, exhausted and addicted to stimulants such as tobacco and alcohol. But while drink was condemned by genteel reformers as the ‘curse of the working classes’, drinkers often referred to it as ‘the shortest way out of the slums’. Religion was not one of the preferred stimulants of the ‘masses’ – less than 15 per cent of the urban working class regularly attended religious services. Some clergymen were concerned that the workers were regressing to paganism, while more acute observers believed they had never fully converted to Christianity in the first place. It may be significant that the denominations that retained some of their workingclass allegiance combined an other-worldly ethos with an interest in earthly, political concerns. Keir Hardie, who had become the first ever ‘Labour’ MP in 1892, was an ardent Nonconformist who declared that ‘the only way to serve God is by serving humanity’. The Anglican Church, meanwhile, was regarded with indifference by the workers, hardly surprising given its reputation as ‘the Tory Party at prayer’.

4

Plates in the air

Poor wages, fear of penury and conspicuous social and economic inequality made the workers anxious and angry. In a country where there was segregation at public baths between working people and the ‘higher classes’, class hostility was inevitable. In 1900 the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) was established by socialist bodies including the Fabians and the Independent Labour Party (ILP), along with various trade unionists who were determined to secure their legal status and right to strike. The general aim of the union-backed LRC (or the Labour party, as it would be called from 1906) was to further workingclass interests in the Commons, by sponsoring parliamentary representatives who would, in Keir Hardie’s words, form ‘a distinct Labour group … and cooperate with any party promoting legislation in the direct interests of labour’. It conceived a programme of ‘gradualist’ socialism, designed to improve Britain’s existing economic, social and political system. Reform, rather than revolution, was its purpose.

The parliamentary rise of ‘Labour’, and the electoral challenge it posed to the Liberal party, are striking in the history of twentiethcentury politics. As early as 1901, the Fabian Sidney Webb argued that the emergence of a party of labour threatened the Liberal party’s status as ‘the political organ of the progressive instinct’ and as the main opposition to the Tories. Yet in the five years following its formation, ‘Labour’ was merely a parliamentary pressure group, with no aspirations to challenging the Liberals. It had only two MPs, one of whom was the redoubtable Hardie, known for wearing a cloth cap in parliament rather than the customary silk top hat. The sight of him at Westminster was a shock to many: ‘A Republic,’ wrote one journalist, ‘has insinuated itself in the folds of a monarchy.’ Hardie was lambasted by the overwhelmingly Conservative newspapers for his republican views. From the back benches, he advocated increasing as well as graduating income tax (which only 7 per cent of the population currently paid) to subsidize a programme of social reforms, designed to improve the conditions of the working class.

For the moment, no one listened to the voice of Labour. Balfour’s administration, which lasted from 1902 to 1905, showed little interest in introducing social legislation, while the idea of raising taxes was abhorrent to most Tories. Nevertheless the government did pass the 1903 Unemployed Workmen Act, which at least acknowledged that the state ought to address the problem of unemployment. The government’s most ambitious piece of domestic legislation was the 1902 Education Act, which provided funds, from local ratepayers, for denominational religious instruction; it also united the voluntary elementary schools run by the Anglican and Catholic churches with those administered by school boards. But the act provoked outrage on the Liberal benches. It was discriminatory against Nonconformists, they claimed, since it was predominantly Anglican schools that were to be subsidized by rates.

While the Education Act proved controversial, the political cause célèbre of Balfour’s tenure was protectionism. In 1902 a group of Liberal Unionists and Conservatives tried to persuade his government to impose tariffs on all imports coming into Britain from outside the empire. Their proposals effectively called for the end of laissez-faire economics and free trade – two of the great Victorian verities. The Liberal party united in opposition to the proposal, on the grounds that unfettered competition was natural, moral and patriotic.