4. Mountains in Scotland and in the English Lake 7. The Plantagenet family provided the monarchs District, respectively. of England from 1145 to 1485. "Fee-simple": abso5. The first great stock market crash, commonly lute ownership of their estates. known as the South Sea Bubble. 8. Oliver Cromwell effectively ruled England from 6. The ] 726 novel by the Irish churchman, sati-the beheading of Charles I in 1651 until his own rist, and poet Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). death in 1658. Elizabeth I reigned from 1558 to Charles II reigned from 1660 to 1685. 1603.
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the ruin of us." "A hundred and forty millions of debt!" said Junius;9 "well may we say that we owe Lord Chatham more than we shall ever pay, if we owe him such a load as this." "Two hundred and forty millions of debt!" cried all the statesmen of 1783 in chorus; "what abilities, or what economy on the part of a minister, can save a country so burdened?" We know that if, since 1783, no fresh debt had been incurred, the increased resources of the country would have enabled us to defray that debt at which Pitt, Fox, and Burke1 stood aghast, nay, to defray it over and over again, and that with much lighter taxation than what we have actually borne. On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?
It is not by the intermeddling of Mr. Southey's idol, the omniscient and omnipotent State, but by the prudence and energy of the people, that England has hitherto been carried forward in civilization; and it is to the same prudence and the same energy that we now look with comfort and good hope. Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price, industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by defending property, by diminishing the price of law, and by observing strict economy in every department of the State. Let the Government do this: the People will assuredly do the rest.
1830
9. Pseudonym of a political commentator whose country into debt. letters (1769�72) usually praised William Pitt, earl 1. Noted statesmen and members of Parliament of Chatham (1708-1778). Pitt, as leader of the in Great Britain: William Pitt the Younger (1 759 war against France, which gained Canada for 1806), Charles James Fox (1749-1806), and England, could have been blamed for running his Edmund Burke (1729-1797). THE CHILDREN'S EMPLOYMENT COMMISSION
Although official attempts to regulate child labor began in 1788, when Parliament passed the Chimney Sweepers Act, the more general problem was not addressed until well into the nineteenth century. Government investigations (Select Committees and Royal Commissions) took place in 1816 and the early 1830s and led to numerous legislative measures, but most of their provisions were meaningless because they were not enforced. The Factories Regulation Act of 1833 marks the first significant point of successful intervention: the act both established a minimum age for all workers in textile mills (nine years old) and set limits to the hours that children in different age groups and women could work in a week. More broadly, a Royal Commission was convened in 1842�43 to examine "the mines and collieries of the United Kingdom and all trades and manufactures whatever in which children work together in numbers." The reports of the commission, from which this extract and two illustrations are taken, caused dismay and disbelief when they were made generally available; Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem "The Cry of the Children" (1843) was one of the many public responses to the scandal. In the legislation that followed, girls and women were banned from mine work; although the authors of the bdl had also hoped to prohibit the employment of boys under thirteen years of age, parliamentary debate knocked the age down to ten.
The first illustration shows a hurrier, a worker who dragged a loaded corve, or
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FIRST REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONERS, MINES / 1563
wagon; these weighed between two hundred and five hundred pounds and were attached to the hurrier by a chain. The passageways in the mine (or pit) were sometimes only sixteen inches high. The second illustration presents a thruster, who pushed a con e. The child on the left is a trapper: the youngest workers of all, these five- or six-year-olds sat alone in darkness to open and close the doors that controlled the mine's ventilation system. The extract comes from the evidence collected by Commissioner S. S. Scriven, who visited the mines in the West Riding of Yorkshire in the company of a local doctor and lawyer, and interviewed the child laborers there.
From First Report of the Commissioners, Mines
[CHILD MINE-WORKER IN YORKSHIRE]
Margaret Gomley, living at Lindley Moor, aged 9. May 7:
They call me Peggy for my nick-name down here, but my right name is Margaret; I am about nine years, or going nine; I have been at work in the pit thrusting corves above a year; come in the morning sometimes at seven o'clock, sometimes half-past seven, and I go sometimes home at six o'clock, sometimes at seven when I do over-work. I get my breakfast of porridge before I come, and bring a piece of muffin, which I eat on coming to pit; I get my dinner at
12 o'clock, which is a dry muffin, and sometimes butter on, but have no time allowed to stop to eat it, I eat it while I am thrusting the load; I get no tea, but get some supper when I get home, and then go to bed when I have washed me; and am very tired. I worked in pit last winter; I don't know at what hour I went down, as we have no clock, but it was day-light; it was six o'clock when we came up, but not always. They flog us down in the pit, sometimes with their hand upon my bottom, which hurts me very much; Thomas Copeland flogs me more than once in a day, which makes me cry. There are two other girls working with me, and there was four, but one left because she had the bellyache; I am poorly myself sometimes with bellyache, and sometimes headache. I had rather lake than go into the pit; I get 5d. a-day, but I had rather set cards1 for 5d. a-day than go into the pit. The men often swear at me; many times they say Damn thee, and other times God damn thee (and such like), Peggy.
[Commissioner Scriven's commentary]
I descended this pit accompanied by one of the banksmen,2 and, on alighting at the bottom, found the entrance to the mainway 2 feet 10 inches, and, which extended 500 yards. The bottom was deep in mire, and, as I had no corves low enough to convey me to the workings, waited some time under the dripping shaft the arrival of the hurriers, as I had reason to suspect there were some very young children labouring there. At length three girls arrived, with as many boys. It was impossible in the dark to distinguish the sexes. They were all naked excepting their shifts or shirts. Having placed one into the corve, I gave the signal, and ascended. On alighting on the pit's bank I discovered that it was a girl. I could not have believed that I should have found human nature so
1. I.e., work in a textile factory, where workers (Yorkshire dialect). "5d.": five pence Id. abbreviates programmed looms to weave patterns with a series denarius, "penny" in Latin). of punched cards. "Lake": play truant, or hookey 2. Colliery supervisors who worked above ground.
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An illustration of a "hurrier" in a Yorkshire coalmine, taken from the 1842�43 Children's Employment Commission report.
An illustration of a "trapper" and a "thruster" in a Lancashire coalmine, taken from the 1842� 43 Children's Employment Commission report.
degraded. There is nothing that I can conceive amidst all the misery and wretchedness in the worst of factories equal to this. Mr. Holroyd, solicitor, and Mr. Brook, surgeon, practising in Stainland, were present, who confessed that, although living within a few miles, they could not have believed that such a system of unchristian cruelty could have existed.
1842-43
FRIEDRICH ENGELS
These eyewitness accounts from The Condition of the Working Class (1845) describe conditions of 1844, when Engels (1820�1895), the son of a successful German industrialist, had been living in England, chiefly in Manchester. The book was first translated from the German into English in 1892; this translation is by W. O. Henderson
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ENGELS: THE GREAT TOWNS / 156 5
and W. H. Chaloner (1958). The first two paragraphs are the conclusion of chapter
2, The Industrial Proletariat; the balance is from chapter 3.
From The Great Towns
Industry and commerce attain their highest stage of development in the big towns, so that it is here that the effects of industrialization on the wage earners can be most clearly seen. It is in these big towns that the concentration of property has reached its highest point. Here the manners and customs of the good old days have been most effectively destroyed. Here the very name of "Merry England" has long since been forgotten, because the inhabitants of the great manufacturing centers have never even heard from their grandparents what life was like in those days. In these towns there are only rich and poor, because the lower middle classes are fast disappearing. At one time this section of the middle classes was the most stable social group, but now it has become the least stable. It is represented in the big factory towns today partly by a few survivors from a bygone age and partly by a group of people who are anxious to get rich as quickly as possible. Of these shady speculators and dubious traders one becomes rich while ninety-nine go bankrupt. Indeed, for more than half of those who have failed, bankruptcy has become a habit.
The vast majority of the inhabitants of these towns are the workers. We propose to discuss their condition and to discover how they have been influenced by life and work in the great factory towns.
London is unique, because it is a city in which one can roam for hours without leaving the built-up area and without seeing the slightest sign of the approach of open country. This enormous agglomeration of population on a single spot has multiplied a hundred-fold the economic strength of the two and a half million inhabitants concentrated there. This great population has made London the commercial capital of the world and has created the gigantic docks in which are assembled the thousands of ships which always cover the River Thames. I know nothing more imposing than the view one obtains of the river when sailing from the sea up to London Bridge. Especially above Woolwich the houses and docks are packed tightly together on both banks of the river. The further one goes up the river the thicker becomes the concentration of ships lying at anchor, so that eventually only a narrow shipping lane is left free in midstream. Here hundreds of steamships dart rapidly to and fro. All this is so magnificent and impressive that one is lost in admiration. The traveler has good reason to marvel at England's greatness even before he steps on English soil.
It is only later that the traveler appreciates the human suffering which has made all this possible. He can only realize the price that has been paid for all this magnificence after he has tramped the pavements of the main streets of London for some days and has tired himself out by jostling his way through the crowds and dodging the endless stream of coaches and carts which fills the streets. It is only when he has visited the slums of this great city that it dawns upon him that the inhabitants of modern London have had to sacrifice so much that is best in human nature in order to create those wonders of
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civilization with which their city teems. The vast majority of Londoners have had to let so many of their potential creative faculties lie dormant, stunted and unused in order that a small, closely-knit group of their fellow citizens could develop to the full the qualities with which nature has endowed them. The restless and noisy activity of the crowded streets is highly distasteful, and it is surely abhorrent to human nature itself. Hundreds of thousands of men and women drawn from all classes and ranks of society pack the streets of London. Are they not all human beings with the same innate characteristics and potentialities? Are they not all equally interested in the pursuit of happiness? And do they not all aim at happiness by following similar methods? Yet they rush past each other as if they had nothing in common. They are tacitly agreed on one thing only�that everyone should keep to the right of the pavement so as not to collide with the stream of people moving in the opposite direction. No one even thinks of sparing a glance for his neighbor in the streets. The more that Londoners are packed into a tiny space, the more repulsive and disgraceful becomes the brutal indifference with which they ignore their neighbors and selfishly concentrate upon their private affairs. We know well enough that this isolation of the individual�this narrow-minded egotism� is everywhere the fundamental principle of modern society. But nowhere is this selfish egotism so blatantly evident as in the frantic bustle of the great city. The disintegration of society into individuals, each guided by his private principles and each pursuing his own aims has been pushed to its furthest limits in London. Here indeed human society has been split into its component atoms.
From this it follows that the social conflict�the war of all against all�is fought in the open. * * * Here men regard their fellows not as human beings, but as pawns in the struggle for existence. Everyone exploits his neighbor with the result that the stronger tramples the weaker under foot. The strongest of all, a tiny group of capitalists, monopolize everything, while the weakest, who are in the vast majority, succumb to the most abject poverty.
What is true of London is true also of all the great towns, such as Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds. Everywhere one finds on the one hand the most barbarous indifference and selfish egotism and on the other the most distressing scenes of misery and poverty. Signs of social conflict are to be found everywhere. Everyone turns his house into a fortress to defend himself�under the protection of the law�from the depredations of his neighbors. Class warfare is so open and shameless that it has to be seen to be believed. The observer of such an appalling state of affairs must shudder at the consequences of such feverish activity and can only marvel that so crazy a social and economic structure should survive at all.
* � $ Every great town has one or more slum areas into which the working classes are packed. Sometimes, of course, poverty is to be found hidden away in alleys close to the stately homes of the wealthy. Generally, however, the workers are segregated in separate districts where they struggle through life as best they can out of sight of the more fortunate classes of society. The slums of the English towns have much in common�the worst houses in a town being found in the worst districts. They are generally unplanned wildernesses of one- or two-storied terrace houses' built of brick. Wherever possible these have
1. Row houses.
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ENGELS: THE GREAT TOWNS / 156 7
cellars which are also used as dwellings. These little houses of three or four rooms and a kitchen are called cottages, and throughout England, except for some parts of London, are where the working classes normally live. These streets themselves are usually unpaved and full of holes. They are filthy and strewn with animal and vegetable refuse. Since they have neither gutters nor drains the refuse accumulates in stagnant, stinking puddles. Ventilation in the slums is inadequate owing to the hopelessly unplanned nature of these areas. A great many people live huddled together in a very small area, and so it is easy to imagine the nature of the air in these workers' quarters. However, in fine weather the streets are used for the drying of washing, and clothes lines are stretched across the streets from house to house and wet garments are hung out on them.
We propose to describe some of these slums in detail.
* * a
If we cross Blackstone Edge on foot or take the train we reach Manchester, the regional capital of South Lancashire, and enter the classic home of English industry. This is the masterpiece of the Industrial Revolution and at the same time the mainspring of all the workers' movements. Once more we are in a beautiful hilly countryside. The land slopes gently down toward the Irish Sea, intersected by the charming green valleys of the Ribble, the Irwell, the Mersey, and their tributaries. A hundred years ago this region was to a great extent thinly populated marshland. Now it is covered with towns and villages and is the most densely populated part of England. In Lancashire�particularly in Manchester�is to be found not only the origin but the heart of the industry of the United Kingdom. Manchester Exchange is the thermometer which records all the fluctuations of industrial and commercial activity. The evolution of the modern system of manufacture has reached its climax in Manchester. It was in the South Lancashire cotton industry that water and steam power first replaced hand machines. It was here that such machines as the power- loom and the self-acting mule2 replaced the old hand-loom and spinning wheel. It is here that the division of labor has been pushed to its furthest limits. These three factors are the essence of modern industry. In all three of them the cotton industry was the pioneer and remains ahead in all branches of industry. In the circumstances it is to be expected that it is in this region that the inevitable consequences of industrialization in so far as they affect the working classes are most strikingly evident. Nowhere else can the life and conditions of the industrial proletariat be studied in all their aspects as in South Lancashire. Here can be seen most clearly the degradation into which the worker sinks owing to the introduction of steam power, machinery, and the division of labor. Here, too, can be seen most the strenuous efforts of the proletariat to raise themselves from their degraded situation. I propose to examine conditions in Manchester in greater detail for two reasons. In the first place, Manchester is the classic type of modern industrial town. Secondly, I know Manchester as well as I know my native town and I know more about it than most of its inhabitants.
* >* $ * * 4 Owing to the curious lay-out of the town it is quite possible for someone to live for years in Manchester and to travel daily to and from his work
2. A machine that automatically winds spun yarn directly onto spindles.
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without ever seeing a working-class quarter or coming into contact with an artisan. He who visits Manchester simply on business or for pleasure need never see the slums, mainly because the working-class districts and the middle-class districts are quite distinct. This division is due partly to deliberate policy and partly to instinctive and tacit agreement between the two social groups. In those areas where the two social groups happen to come into contact with each other the middle classes sanctimoniously ignore the existence of their less fortunate neighbors. In the center of Manchester there is a fairly large commercial district, which is about half a mile long and half a mile broad. This district is almost entirely given over to offices and warehouses. Nearly the whole of this district has no permanent residents and is deserted at night, when only policemen patrol its dark, narrow thoroughfares with their bull'seye lanterns.3 This district is intersected by certain main streets which carry an enormous volume of traffic. The lower floors of the buildings are occupied by shops of dazzling splendor. A few of the upper stories on these premises are used as dwellings and the streets present a relatively busy appearance until late in the evening. Around this commercial quarter there is a belt of built-up areas on the average one and a half miles in width, which is occupied entirely by working-class dwellings. This area of workers' houses includes all Manchester proper, except the center, all Salford and Hulme, an important part of Pendleton and Chorlton, two-thirds of Ardwick, and certain small areas of Cheetham Hill and Broughton. Beyond this belt of working-class houses or dwellings lie the districts inhabited by the middle classes and the upper classes. The former are to be found in regularly laid out streets near the working- class districts�in Chorlton and in the remoter parts of Cheetham Hill. The villas of the upper classes are surrounded by gardens and lie in the higher and remoter parts of Chorlton and Ardwick or on the breezy heights of Cheetham
Hill, Broughton, and Pendleton. The upper class enjoy healthy country air and live in luxurious and comfortable dwellings which are linked to the center of Manchester by omnibuses which run every fifteen or thirty minutes. To such an extent has the convenience of the rich been considered in the planning of Manchester that these plutocrats can travel from their houses to their places of business in the center of the town by the shortest routes, which run entirely through working-class districts, without even realizing how close they are to the misery and filth which lie on both sides of the road.
ft *
4 * 4 I will now give a description of the working-class districts of Manchester. The first of them is the Old Town, which lies between the northern limit of the commercial quarter and the River Irk. Here even the better streets, such Todd Street, Long Millgate, Withy Grove, and Shudehill are narrow and tortuous. The houses are dirty, old, and tumble-down. The sidestreets have been built in a disgraceful fashion. If one enters the district near the "Old Church" and goes down Long Millgate, one sees immediately on the right hand side a row of antiquated houses where not a single front wall is standing upright. This is a remnant of the old Manchester of the days before the town became industrialized. The original inhabitants and their children have left for better houses in other districts, while the houses in Long Millgate, which no longer satisfied them, were left to a tribe of workers containing a strong
3. Lanterns that have a hemispherical lens.
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ENGELS: THE GREAT TOWNS / 1569
Irish element. Here one is really and truly in a district which is quite obviously given over entirely to the working classes, because even the shopkeepers and the publicans of Long Millgate make no effort to give their establishments a semblance of cleanliness. The condition of this street may be deplorable, but it is by no means as bad as the alleys and courts which lie behind it, and which can be approached only by covered passages so narrow that two people cannot pass. Anyone who has never visited these courts and alleys can have no idea of the fantastic4 way in which the houses have been packed together in disorderly confusion in impudent defiance of all reasonable principles of town planning. And the fault lies not merely in the survival of old property from earlier periods in Manchester's history. Only in quite modern times has the policy of cramming as many houses as possible on to such space as was not utilized in earlier periods reached its climax. The result is that today not an inch of space remains between the houses and any further building is now physically impossible. To prove my point I reproduce a small section of a plan of Manchester.5 It is by no means the worst slum in Manchester and it does not cover one-tenth of the area of Manchester.
This sketch will be sufficient to illustrate the crazy layout of the whole district lying near the River Irk. There is a very sharp drop of some 1 5 to 30 feet down to the south bank of the Irk at this point. As many as three rows of houses have generally been squeezed onto this precipitous slope. The lowest row of houses stands directly on the bank of the river while the front walls of the highest row stand on the crest of the ridge in Long Millgate. Moreover, factory buildings are also to be found on the banks of the river. In short the layout of the upper part of Long Millgate at the top of the rise is just as disorderly and congested as the lower part of the street. To the right and left a number of covered passages from Long Millgate give access to several courts. On reaching them one meets with a degree of dirt and revolting filth the like of which is not to be found elsewhere. The worst courts are those leading down to the Irk, which contain unquestionably the most dreadful dwellings I have ever seen. In one of these courts, just at the entrance where the covered passage ends, there is a privy without a door. This privy is so dirty that the inhabitants of the court can only enter or leave the court if they are prepared to wade through puddles of stale urine and excrement. Anyone who wishes to confirm this description should go to the first court on the bank of the Irk above Ducie Bridge. Several tanneries are situated on the bank of the river and they fill the neighborhood with the stench of animal putrefaction. The only way of getting to the courts below Ducie Bridge is by going down flights of narrow dirty steps and one can only reach the houses by treading over heaps of dirt and filth. The first court below Ducie Bridge is called Allen's Court. At the time of the cholera [1832] this court was in such a disgraceful state that the sanitary inspectors [of the local Board of Health] evacuated the inhabitants. The court was then swept and fumigated with chlorine. In his pamphlet6 Dr. Kay gives a horrifying description of conditions in this court at that time. Since Kay wrote this pamphlet, this court appears to have been at any rate partly demolished and rebuilt. If one looks down the river from Ducie Bridge one does at least see several ruined walls and high piles of rubble, side by side
4. Confused, haphazard. Manchester (1832), by the British doctor and pub5. Not reprinted here. lic health and education reformer James Phillips 6. The Moral and Physical Conditions of the Work-Kay-Shuttleworth (1804-1877). ing Classes Em-ployed in the Cotton Manufacture in
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with some recently built houses. The view from this bridge, which is mercifully concealed by a high parapet from all but the tallest mortals, is quite characteristic of the whole district. At the bottom the Irk flows, or rather, stagnates. It is a narrow, coal-black, stinking river full of filth and rubbish which it deposits on the more low-lying right bank. In dry weather this bank presents the spectacle of a series of the most revolting blackish-green puddles of slime from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gases constantly rise and create a stench which is unbearable even to those standing on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the level of the water. Moreover, the flow of the river is continually interrupted by numerous high weirs, behind which large quantities of slime and refuse collect and putrefy. Above Ducie Bridge there are some tall tannery buildings, and further up there are dye-works, bone mills, and gasworks. All the filth, both liquid and solid, discharged by these works finds its way into the River Irk, which also receives the contents of the adjacent sewers and privies. The nature of the filth deposited by this river may well be imagined. If one looks at the heaps of garbage below Ducie Bridge one can gauge the extent to which accumulated dirt, filth, and decay permeate the courts on the steep left bank of the river. The houses are packed very closely together and since the bank of the river is very steep it is possible to see a part of every house. All of them have been blackened by soot, all of them are crumbling with age and all have broken window panes and window frames. In the background there are old factory buildings which look like barracks. On the opposite, low-lying bank of the river, one sees a long row of houses and factories. The second house is a roofless ruin, filled with refuse, and the third is built in such a low situation that the ground floor is uninhabitable and has neither doors nor windows. In the background one sees the paupers' cemetery, and the stations of the railways to Liverpool and Leeds. Behind these buildings is situated the workhouse, Manchester's "Poor Law Bastille."7 The workhouse is built on a hill and from behind its high walls and battlements seems to threaten the whole adjacent working-class quarter like a fortress.
Above Ducie Bridge the left bank of the Irk becomes flatter and the right bank of the Irk becomes steeper and so the condition of the houses on both sides of the river becomes worse rather than better. Turning left from the main street which is still Long Millgate, the visitor can easily lose his way. He wanders aimlessly from one court to another. He turns one corner after another through innumerable narrow dirty alleyways and passages, and in only a few minutes he has lost all sense of direction and does not know which way to turn. The area is full of ruined or half-ruined buildings. Some of them are actually uninhabited and that means a great deal in this quarter of the town. In the houses one seldom sees a wooden or a stone floor, while the doors and windows are nearly always broken and badly fitting. And as for the dirt! Everywhere one sees heaps of refuse, garbage, and filth. There are stagnant pools instead of gutters and the stench alone is so overpowering that no human being, even partially civilized, would find it bearable to live in such a district.8
7. The workhouses established by the Poor Laws of the 1830s, because of the strict regimens enforced on inmates, were commonly likened to prisons such as the Bastille in Paris. 8. Cf. another account of Manchester slums of the same decade in Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Mary Barton (1848), chap. 6: Women from their doors tossed household slops of every description into the gutter; they ran into the next pool, which overflowed and stagnated. Heaps of ashes were stepping-stones, on which the passer-by, who cared in the least for cleanliness, took care not to put his foot. Our friends [two factory workers] were not dainty, but even
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ENGELS: THE GREAT TOWNS / 1571
The recently constructed extension of the Leeds railway which crosses the Irk at this point has swept away some of these courts and alleys, but it has thrown open to public gaze some of the others. So it comes about that there is to be found immediately under the railway bridge a court which is even filthier and more revolting than all the others. This is simply because it was formerly so hidden and secluded that it could only be reached with considerable difficulty, [but is now exposed to the human eye]. I thought I knew this district well, but even I would never have found it had not the railway viaduct made a breach in the slums at this point. One walks along a very rough path on the river bank, in between clothes-posts and washing lines to reach a chaotic group of little, one-storied, one-roomed cabins. Most of them have earth floors, and working, living, and sleeping all take place in the one room. In such a hole, barely six feet long and five feet wide, I saw two beds�and what beds and bedding!�which filled the room, except for the fireplace and the doorstep. Several of these huts, as far as I could see, were completely empty, although the door was open and the inhabitants were leaning against the door posts. In front of the doors filth and garbage abounded. I could not see the pavement, but from time to time, I felt it was there because my feet scraped it. This whole collection of cattle sheds for human beings was surrounded on two sides by houses and a factory and on a third side by the river. [It was possible to get to this slum by only two routes]. One was the narrow path along the river bank, while the other was a narrow gateway which led to another human rabbit warren which was nearly as badly built and was nearly in such a bad condition
as the one I have just described.
Enough of this! All along the Irk slums of this type abound. There is an unplanned and chaotic conglomeration of houses, most of which are more or less unhabitable. The dirtiness of the interiors of these premises is fully in keeping with the filth that surrounds them. How can people dwelling in such places keep clean! There are not even adequate facilities for satisfying the most natural daily needs. There are so few privies that they are either filled up everyday or are too far away for those who need to use them. How can these people wash when all that is available is the dirty water of the Irk? Pumps and piped water are to be found only in the better-class districts of the town. Indeed no one can blame these helots9 of modern civilization if their homes are no cleaner than the occasional pigsties which are a feature of these slums. There are actually some property owners who are not ashamed to let1 dwellings such as those which are to be found below Scotland Bridge. Here on the quayside a mere six feet from the water's edge is to be found a row of six or seven cellars, the bottoms of which are at least two feet beneath the low-water level of the Irk. [What can one say of the owner of] the corner house�situated on the opposite bank of the river above Scotland Bridge� who actually lets the upper floor although the premises downstairs are quite uninhabitable and no attempt has been made to board up the gaps left by the
they picked their way, till they got to some steps darkness of the place, and to see three or four leading down . . . into the cellar in which a fam-children rolling on the damp, nay wet brick floor, ily of human beings lived. . . . After the account through which the stagnant, filthy moisture of I have given of the state of the street, no one can the street oozed up; the fireplace was empty and be surprised that on going into the cellar inhab-black; the wife sat on her husband's lair [couch], ited by Davenport, the smell was so foetid as and cried in the dank loneliness. almost to knock the two men down. Quickly 9. I.e., slaves (helots were a class of serfs in recovering themselves, as those inured to such ancient Sparta). things do, they began to penetrate the thick 1. Rent.
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disappearance of doors and windows? This sort of thing is by no means uncommon in this part of Manchester, where, owing to the lack of conveniences, such deserted ground floors are often used by the whole neighborhood as privies.
1845
CHARLES KINGSLEY
The following selection is from chapter 8 of Alton Locke, a novel by Kingsley (1819� 1875). Under the influence of Thomas Carlyle's writings and also as a result of his own observations, Kingsley, a clergyman, became deeply concerned with the sufferings of the working classes. The speaker here, a young tailor, is accompanied by an elderly Scottish bookseller, Sandy Mackaye.
From Alton Locke
[A LONDON SLUM]
It was a foul, chilly, foggy Saturday night. From the butchers' and greengrocers' shops the gaslights flared and flickered, wild and ghastly, over haggard groups of slipshod dirty women, bargaining for scraps of stale meat and frostbitten vegetables, wrangling about short weight and bad quality. Fish stalls and fruit stalls lined the edge of the greasy pavement, sending up odors as foul as the language of sellers and buyers. Blood and sewer water crawled from under doors and out of spouts, and reeked down the gutters among offal, animal and vegetable, in every stage of putrefaction. Foul vapours rose from cow sheds and slaughterhouses, and the doorways of undrained alleys, where the inhabitants carried the filth out on their shoes from the backyard into the court, and from the court up into the main street; while above, hanging like cliffs over the streets�those narrow, brawling torrents of filth, and poverty, and sin�the houses with their teeming load of life were piled up into the dingy, choking night. A ghastly, deafening, sickening sight it was. Go, scented Belgravian!1 and see what London is! and then go to the library which God has given thee�one often fears in vain�and see what science says this London might be!
# ft *
We went on through a back street or two, and then into a huge, miserable house, which, a hundred years ago, perhaps, had witnessed the luxury, and rung to the laughter of some one great fashionable family, alone there in their glory. Now every room of it held its family, or its group of families�a phalanstery2 of all the fiends�its grand staircase, with the carved balustrades rotting and crumbling away piecemeal, converted into a common sewer for all its inmates. Up stair after stair we went, while wails of children, and curses
1. Inhabitant of Belgravia, a wealthy residential posed by the French socialist Charles Fourier district of London. (1772-1837). 2. A kind of model cooperative community pro
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DICKENS: HARD TIMES / 1573
of men, steamed out upon the hot stifling rush of air from every doorway, till,
at the topmost story, we knocked at a garret door. We entered. Bare it was of
furniture, comfortless, and freezing cold; but, with the exception of the plaster
dropping from the roof, and the broken windows, patched with rags and paper,
there was a scrupulous neatness about the whole, which contrasted strangely
with the filth and slovenliness outside. There was no bed in the room�no
table. On a broken chair by the chimney sat a miserable old woman, fancying
that she was warming her hands over embers which had long been cold, shak
ing her head, and muttering to herself, with palsied lips, about the guardians3
and the workhouse; while upon a few rags on the floor lay a girl, ugly, small
pox-marked, hollow-eyed, emaciated, her only bedclothes the skirt of a large
handsome new riding habit, at which two other girls, wan and tawdry, were
astitching busily, as they sat right and left of her on the floor. The old woman
took no notice of us as we entered; but one of the girls looked up, and, with
a pleased gesture of recognition, put her finger up to her lips, and whispered,
"Ellen's asleep."
"I'm not asleep, dears," answered a faint unearthly voice; "I was only praying. Is that Mr. Mackaye?"
"Aye, my lassies; but ha' ye gotten na fire the nicht?"
"No," said one of them, bitterly, "we've earned no fire tonight, by fair trade or foul either."
1850
3. Members of the local Board of Guardians, the body that supervised the workhouse. CHARLES DICKENS
The following selection is from chapter 5 of Hard Times, a novel by Dickens (1812� 1870). The picture of Coketown was based on his impressions of the raw industrial towns of central and northern England such as Manchester and, in particular, Preston, a cotton-manufacturing center in Lancashire.
From Hard Times
[COKETOWN]
It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of buildings full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the
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1 556 / INDUSTRIALISM: PROGRESS OR DECLINE?
same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.
These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. The rest of its features were voluntary, and they were these.
You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there�as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done�they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamented examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital1 and the cemetery, and what you couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchasable in the cheapest market and salable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.
1854
1. Maternity hospital. ANONYMOUS
In 1965 A. L. Lloyd, a collector of British folk songs, heard "Poverty Knock" from a weaver who had learned it sixty years earlier. The song dates from before that.
Poverty Knock1
REFRAIN 2
Poverty, poverty knock! Me loom is a-sayin' all day. Poverty, poverty knock! Gaffer's" too skinny" to pay. the foreman's / stingy
1. The sound of a 19th-century loom. 2. Repeated after each stanza.
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ANONYMOUS: POVERTY KNOCK / 157 5
Poverty, poverty knock! Keepin' one eye on the clock. Ah know ah can guttle0 eat When ah hear me shuttle Go: Poverty, poverty knock!
Up every mornin' at five. Ah wonder that we keep alive. Tired an' yawnin' on the cold mornin', It's back to the dreary old drive.
5 Oh dear, we're goin' to be late. Gaffer is stood at the gate. We're out o' pocket, our wages they're docket0 docked We'll 'a' to buy grub on the slate.3
An' when our wages they'll bring,
10 We're often short of a string.4 While we are fratchin' wi' gaffer for snatchin',5 We know to his brass0 he will cling. money
We've got to wet our own yarn By dippin' it into the tarn.0 pool15 It's wet an' soggy an' makes us feel groggy, An' there's mice in that dirty old barn.
Oh dear, me poor 'ead it sings. Ah should have woven three strings, But threads are breakin' and my back is achin'.
20 Oh dear, ah wish ah had wings.
Sometimes a shuttle flies out, Gives some poor woman a clout. Ther she lies bleedin', but nobody's 'eedin'. Who's goin' t'carry her out?
25 Tuner6 should tackle me loom. 'E'd rather sit on his bum. 'E's far too busy a-courtin' our Lizzie, An' ah cannat get 'im to come.
Lizzie is so easy led.
30 Ah think that 'e teks her to bed. She alius was skinny, now look at her pinny.0 pinaforeIt's just about time they was wed.
3. On credit, as recorded on a piece of slate. 5. Cheating. "Fratchin' ": quarreling. 4. Not paid for all our work. "String": a piece of 6. The man who maintains the loom, cloth.
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1 1576
HENRY MAYHEW
In 1849 Mayhew (1812-1887) was asked by the Morning Chronicle to be the metropolitan correspondent for its series "Labour and the Poor." His interviews of workers and of street folk, later published as a book, convey a vivid sense of the lives of London's poor.
From London Labour and the London Poor
[BOY INMATE OF THE CASUAL WARDS]1
I am now seventeen. My father was a cotton-spinner in Manchester, but has been dead ten years; and soon after that my mother went into the workhouse, leaving me with an aunt; and I had to work in a cotton factory. As young as I was, I earned 2s. 2d..2 a-week at first. I can read well, and write a little. I worked at the factory two years, and was then earning 7s. a-week. I then ran away, for I had always a roving mind; but I should have stayed if my master hadn't knocked me about so. I thought I should make my fortune in London�I'd heard it was such a grand place. I had read in novels and romances,�halfpenny and penny books,�about such things, but I've met with nothing of the kind. I started without money, and begged my way from Manchester to London, saying I was going up to look for work. I wanted to see the place more than anything else. I suffered very much on the road, having to be out all night often; and the nights were cold, though it was summer. When I got to London all my hopes were blighted. I could get no further. I never tried for work in London, for I believe there are no cotton factories in it; besides, I wanted to see life. I begged, and slept in the unions.3 I got acquainted with plenty of boys like myself. We met at the casual wards, both in London and the country. I have now been five years at this life. We were merry enough in the wards, we boys, singing and telling stories.
I live a roving life, at first, being my own master. I was fond of going to plays, and such-like, when I got money; but now I'm getting tired of it, and wish for something else. I have tried for work at cotton factories in Lancashire and Yorkshire, but never could get any. I'm sure I could settle now. I couldn't have done that two years ago, the roving spirit was so strong upon me and the company I kept got a strong hold on me. Two winters back, there was a regular gang of us boys in London. After sleeping at a union, we would fix where to meet at night to get into another union to sleep. There were thirty of us that way, all boys; besides forty young men, and thirty young women. Sometimes we walked the streets all night. We didn't rob, at least I never saw any robbing. We had pleasure in chaffing4 the policemen, and some of us got taken up. I always escaped. We got broken up in time,�some's dead, some's gone to sea, some into the country, some home, and some lagged.5 Among them were many
1. Short-term poor shelters. parishes. 2. Two shillings, two pence (s. for solidus and d. 4. Making fun of. for denarius, Latin for "shilling" and "penny," 5. Were transported to one of Britain's penal col- respectively). onies or were arrested (slang). 3. Shelters for the poor maintained by two or more
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BESANT: THE "WHITE SLAVERY" OF LONDON MATCH WORKERS / 1577
young lads very expert in reading, writing, and arithmetic. One young man� he was only twenty-five�could speak several languages: he had been to sea. He was then begging, though a strong young man. I suppose he liked that life: some soon got tired of it.
I often have suffered from cold and hunger. I never made more than 3d. a- day in money, take the year round, by begging; some make more than 6d. . . . but then, I've had meat and bread given besides. I say nothing when I beg, but that I am a poor boy out of work and starving. I never stole anything in my life. I've often been asked to do so by my mates. I never would. The young women steal the most. I know, least, I did know, two that kept young men, their partners, going about the country with them, chiefly by their stealing. Some do so by their prostitution. Those go as partners are all prostitutes. There is a great deal of sickness among the young men and women, but I never was ill these last seven years. Fevers, colds, and venereal diseases, are very common.
1851
ANNIE BESANT
In 1873 Besant (1847�1933) left the Church and her marriage to an Anglican clergyman to become active in feminist and socialist causes. When she heard about the high dividends and low wages at the match factory of Bryant and May, she wrote a series of articles, including this one published in the magazine Link, that led to a public boycott and a strike of fourteen hundred match workers.
The "White Slavery" of London Match Workers
Bryant and May, now a limited liability company, paid last year a dividend of 23 per cent to its shareholders; two years ago it paid a dividend of 25 per cent, and the original .5 shares were then quoted for sale at .18 7s . 6d.' The highest dividend paid has been 38 per cent.
Let us see how the money is made with which these monstrous dividends are paid.* * *
The hour for commencing work is 6.30 in summer and 8 in winter; work concludes at 6 P.M. Half-an-hour is allowed for breakfast and an hour for dinner. This long day of work is performed by young girls, who have to stand the whole of the time. A typical case is that of a girl of 16, a piece-worker; she earns 4s. a week, and lives with a sister, employed by the same firm, who "earns good money, as much as 8s. or 9s. per week." Out of the earnings 2s. is paid for the rent of one room; the child lives on only bread-and-butter and tea, alike for breakfast and dinner, but related with dancing eyes that once a month she went to a meal where "you get coffee, and bread and butter, and jam, and marmalade, and lots of it." . . . The splendid salary of 4s. is subject to deduc
1. Eighteen pounds, seven shillings, six pence (s. for solidiis and d. for denarius, Latin for "shilling" and "penny," respectively).
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1 556 / INDUSTRIALISM: PROGRESS OR DECLINE?
tions in the shape of fines; if the feet are dirty, or the ground under the bench is left untidy, a fine of 3d. is inflicted; for putting "burnts"�matches that have caught fire during the work�on the bench Is. has been forfeited, and one unhappy girl was once fined 2s. 6d. for some unknown crime. If a girl leaves four or five matches on her bench when she goes for a fresh "frame" she is fined 3d., and in some departments a fine of 3d. is inflicted for talking. If a girl is late she is shut out for "half the day," that is for the morning six hours, and 5d. is deducted out of her day's 8d. One girl was fined Is. for letting the web twist around a machine in the endeavour to save her fingers from being cut, and was sharply told to take care of the machine, "never mind your fingers." Another, who carried out the instructions and lost a finger thereby, was left unsupported while she was helpless. The wage covers the duty of submitting to an occasional blow from a foreman; one, who appears to be a gentleman of variable temper, "clouts" them "when he is mad."
One department of the work consists in taking matches out of a frame and putting them into boxes; about three frames can be done in an hour, and Vid. is paid for each frame emptied; only one frame is given out at a time, and the girls have to run downstairs and upstairs each time to fetch the frame, thus much increasing their fatigue. One of the delights of the frame work is the accidental firing of the matches: when this happens the worker loses the work, and if the frame is injured she is fined or "sacked." 5s. a week had been earned at this by one girl I talked to.
The "fillers" get Vid. a gross for filling boxes; at "boxing," i.e. wrapping papers round the boxes, they can earn from 4s. 6d. to 5s. a week. A very rapid "filler" has been known to earn once "as much as 9s." in a week, and 6s. a week "sometimes." The making of boxes is not done in the factory; for these 2Vtd. a gross is paid to people who work in their own homes, and "find your own paste." Daywork is a little better paid than piecework, and is done chiefly by married women, who earn as much sometimes as 10s. a week, the piecework falling to the girls. Four women day workers, spoken of with reverent awe, earn� 13s. a week.
A very bitter memory survives in the factory. Mr. Theodore Bryant, to show his admiration of Mr. Gladstone2 and the greatness of his own public spirit, bethought him to erect a statue to that eminent statesman. In order that his workgirls might have the privilege of contributing, he stopped Is. each out of their wages, and further deprived them of half-a-day's work by closing the factory, "giving them a holiday." ("We don't want no holidays," said one of the girls pathetically, for�needless to say�the poorer employees of such a firm lose their wages when a holiday is "given.") So furious were the girls at this cruel plundering, that many went to the unveiling of the statue with stones and bricks in their pockets, and I was conscious of a wish that some of those bricks had made an impression on Mr. Bryant's conscience. Later on they surrounded the statue�"we paid for it" they cried savagely�shouting and yelling, and a gruesome story is told that some cut their arms and let their blood trickle on the marble paid for, in very truth, by their blood. . . .
Such is a bald account of one form of white slavery as it exists in London. With chattel slaves Mr. Bryant could not have made his huge fortune, for he could not have fed, clothed, and housed them for 4s. a week each, and they
2. William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), leader of the Liberal Party from 1868 to 1875 and from 1880 to 1894 and prime minister four times.
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CHEW: A LIVING WAGE FOR FACTORY GIRLS AT CREWE / 1579
would have had a definite money value which would have served as a protection. But who cares for the fate of these white wage slaves? Born in slums, driven to work while still children, undersized because underfed, oppressed because helpless, flung aside as soon as worked out, who cares if they die or go on the streets,3 provided only that the Bryant and May shareholders get their 23 per cent, and Mr. Theodore Bryant can erect statues and buy parks? Oh if we had but a people's Dante, to make a special circle in the Inferno for those who live on this misery,4 and suck wealth out of the starvation of helpless girls.
Failing a poet to hold up their conduct to the execration of posterity, enshrined in deathless verse, let us strive to touch their consciences, i.e. their pockets, and let us at least avoid being "partakers of their sins," by abstaining from using their commodities.
1888
3. Become prostitutes. ent levels, or circles, for different kinds of sinners, 4. In his Inferno the Italian poet Dante Alighieri with each sin carrying its own specific (1265-1321) describes hell as divided into differ-punishments. ADA NIELD CHEW
Born on a farm in North Staffordshire, Chew (1870�1945) left school at the age of eleven to help her mother with taking care of house and family. In her early twenties she worked as a tailor in a factory in Crewe. She wrote a series of letters to the Crewe Chronicle about working conditions in the factory. When her identity was discovered, an uproar ensued, and she was fired. She became active in politics and continued to write for political causes.
A Living Wage for Factory Girls at Crewe, 5 May 1894
Sir,
�Will you grant me space in your sensible and widely read paper to complain of a great grievance of the class�that of tailoresses in some of the Crewe factories�to which I belong? I have hoped against hope that some influential man (or woman) would take up our cause and put us in the right way to remedy�for of course there is a remedy�for the evils we are suffering from. But although one cannot open a newspaper without seeing what all sorts and conditions of men are constantly agitating for and slowly but surely obtain- ing�as in the miners' eight hour bill1�only very vague mention is ever made of the under-paid, over-worked "Factory Girl." And I have come to the conclusion, sir, that as long as we are silent ourselves and apparently content with our lot, so long shall we be left in the enjoyment [?] of that lot.
The rates paid for the work done by us are so fearfully low as to be totally
1. Bill limiting miners' work shifts to eight hours.
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1 58 0 / INDUSTRIALISM: PROGRESS OR DECLINE?
inadequate to�I had almost said keep body and soul together. Well, sir, it is a fact which I could prove, if necessary, that we are compelled, not by our employers, but by stern necessity, in order to keep ourselves in independence, which self-respecting girls even in our class of life like to do, to work so many hours�I would rather not say how many�that life loses its savour, and our toil, which in moderation and at a fair rate of remuneration would be pleasurable, becomes drudgery of the most wearisome kind.
To take what may be considered a good week's wage the work has to be so close and unremitting that we cannot be said to "live"�we merely exist. We eat, we sleep, we work, endlessly, ceaselessly work, from Monday morning till Saturday night, without remission. Cultivation of the mind? How is it possible? Reading? Those of us who are determined to live like human beings and require food for mind as well as body are obliged to take time which is necessary for sleep to gratify this desire. As for recreation and enjoying the beauties of nature, the seasons come and go, and we have barely time to notice whether it is spring or summer.
Certainly we have Sundays: but Sunday is to many of us, after our week of slavery, a day of exhaustion. It has frequently been so in my case, and I am not delicate. This, you will understand, sir, is when work is plentiful. Of course we have slack times, of which the present is one (otherwise I should not have time to write to you). It may be said that we should utilise these slack times for recruiting our bodies and cultivating our minds. Many of us do so, as far as is possible in the anxious state we are necessarily in, knowing that we are not earning our "keep," for it is not possible, absolutely not possible, for the average ordinary "hand" to earn enough in busy seasons, even with the overtime I have mentioned, to make up for slack ones.
"A living wage!" Ours is a lingering, dying wage. Who reaps the benefit of our toil? I read sometimes of a different state of things in other factories, and if in others, why not those in Crewe? I have just read the report of the Royal Commission on Labour. Very good, but while Royal Commissions are enquiring and reporting and making suggestions, some of the workers are being hurried to their graves.
1 am afraid I am trespassing a great deal on your space, sir, but my subject has such serious interest for me�I sometimes wax very warm as I sit stitching and thinking over our wrongs�that they, and the knowledge that your columns are always open to the needy, however humble, must be my excuse.
I am, sir, yours sincerely, A CREWE FACTORY GIRL Crewe, 1 May 1894
Editor's note: Our correspondent writes a most intelligent letter; and if she is a specimen of the factory girl, then Crewe factory proprietors should be proud of their "hands." We shall be glad to hear further from our correspondent as to the wages paid, the numbers of hours worked, and the conditions of their employment. Crewe Chronicle, 5 May 1894
1894
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THE "WOMAN QUESTION" / 1581
THE "WOMAN QUESTION": THE VICTORIAN DEBATE ABOUT GENDER
"The greatest social difficulty in England today is the relationship between men and women. The principal difference between ourselves and our ancestors is that they took society as they found it while we are self-conscious and perplexed. The institution of marriage might almost seem just now to be upon trial." This assertion by Justin M'Carthy, appearing in an essay on novels in the Westminster Review (July 1864), could be further extended, for on trial throughout the Victorian period was not only the institution of marriage but the family itself and, most particularly, the traditional roles of women as wives, mothers, and daughters. The "Woman Question," as it was called, engaged many Victorians, both male and female.
As indicated in our introduction to the Victorian age, the Woman Question encompassed not one question but many. The mixed opinions of Queen Victoria illustrate some of its different aspects. Believing in education for her sex, she gave support and encouragement to the founding of a college for women in 1847. On the other hand, she opposed the concept of votes for women, which she described in a letter as "this mad folly." Equally thought-provoking are her comments on women and marriage. Happily married herself until the death of Prince Albert in 1861, Victoria was nevertheless aware of some of the sacrifices marriage imposed on women. Writing in 1858 to her recently married daughter, she remarked: "There is great happiness . . . in devoting oneself to another who is worthy of one's affection; still, men are very selfish and the woman's devotion is always one of submission which makes our poor sex so very unenviable. This you will feel hereafter�I know; though it cannot be otherwise as God has willed it so."
Many of the queen's female subjects shared her assumptions that woman's role was to be accepted as divinely willed�as illustrated in the selections from Sarah Ellis's popular work of 1839, The Women of England, a manual of inspirational advice now usually classified with more practical books like Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) as "domestic conduct literature." The required "submission" of which the queen wrote was justified in many quarters on the grounds of the supposed intellectual inferiority of women. As popularly accepted lore expressed it: "Average Weight of Man's Brain 3'/2 lbs; Woman's 2 lbs, 11 ozs." In the minds of many, then, the possessors of the "shallower brain" (to borrow a phrase from the speaker of Ten- nyson's "Locksley Hall," 1842), naturally deserved a dependent role. In reminding wives of their range of duties, another nineteenth-century conduct book available in many editions, The Female Instructor, recommended that a wife always wear her wedding ring so that whenever she felt "ruffled," she might "cast [her] eyes upon it, and call to mind who gave it to [her]." In this climate it would follow that a woman who tried to cultivate her intellect beyond drawing-room accomplishments was violating the order of Nature and of religious tradition. Woman was to be valued, instead, for other qualities considered especially characteristic of her sex: tenderness of understanding, unworldliness and innocence, domestic affection, and, in various degrees, submissiveness.
By virtue of these qualities, woman became an object to be worshipped�an "angel in the house," as Coventry Patmore described her in the title of his popular poem (1854-62). In a similar vein John Ruskin insisted in his highly influential and much- reprinted essay "Of Queens' Gardens" (1865) that men and women "are in nothing alike, and the happiness and perfection of both depends on each asking and receiving from the other what the other can only give": the powers of "a true wife," he felt, made the home "a sacred place." A number of feminists as well as more traditional thinkers held this ideal view of woman's character, but, as George Eliot argues in her essay on Mary Wollstonecraft (see above), the exalted pedestal on which women were placed was one of the principal obstacles to their achieving any alteration in status.
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1 58 2 / THE "WOMAN QUESTION"
That woman's position in society and in marriage was taken as a natural, and thus inevitable, state also stood in the way of change. Echoing the arguments of Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill, the feminist writer Mona Caird contended in 1888 that the institution of marriage was socially constructed and had a specific history: far from being a relationship ordained by God, marriage was an association that could and ought to be reinvented to promote freedom and equality for both partners.
Caird recognizes that the type of marriage she envisions is a distant ideal: to move toward it, she calls for a "gradual alteration of opinion which will rebuild [established institutions] from the very foundation." Earlier in the century those established institutions appear to have left some women, married and unmarried alike, dissatisfied and unfulfilled. It is commonly said that boredom was a particular problem for Victorian women, but generalizations about underoccupied females in this era need to be severely qualified. In the mid-Victorian period, one-quarter of England's female population had jobs, most of them onerous and low paying. At the same time other women earned their livings by working as prostitutes (the existence of this "Great Social Evil," as the Victorians regarded it, being one indication that the "angel in the house" was not always able to exert her moralizing influence on her mate or her male children). While the millions of women employed as domestics, seamstresses, factory workers, farm laborers, or prostitutes had many problems, excessive leisure was not chief among them. To be bored was the privilege of wives and daughters in upper- and middle-class homes, establishments in which feminine idleness was treasured as a status symbol. Among this small and influential segment of the population, as the novelist Dinah Maria Mulock emphasizes, comfortably well-off wives and daughters found that there was "nothing to do," because in such households the servants ran everything, even taking over the principal role in rearing children. Freed from demanding domestic duties, such women could not then devote their unoccupied time to other labors, for there were few sanctioned opportunities for interesting and challenging work, and little support or encouragement for serious study or artistic endeavor. If family finances failed and they were called on "to do" something, women from these classes faced considerable difficulties: their severely limited choice of respectable paid occupations meant that many sought employment as governesses. Frequently taken up as a topic in novels of the period, the complex and compromised social position of the governess is, for instance, a notable feature of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847). Bronte's character, however, does not limit her criticism to her own impoverished plight when she expresses her frustration with the social attitudes that governed the behavior of women of her class more broadly:
Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
George Meredith, in his Essay on Comedy (1873), develops the same argument; the test of a civilization, he writes, is whether men "consent to talk on equal terms with their women, and to listen to them." Yet at least two reviewers of Jane Eyre, both women, regarded such proposals as tantamount to sedition. Margaret Oliphant called the novel "A wild declaration of the 'Rights of Women' in a new aspect," and Elizabeth Rigby attacked its "pervading tone of ungodly discontent."
In some households such discontent, whether godly or ungodly, led to a daughter's open rebellion. One remarkable rebel was Florence Nightingale, who found family life in the 1850s intolerably pointless and, despite parental opposition, cut loose from home to carve out a career for herself in nursing and in hospital administration.
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SARAH STICKNEY ELLIS / 1583
As chronicled by Sir Walter Besant, similar drives for independence produced extraordinary changes for women during the late Victorian period, making a wide variety of professional opportunities available to them. The era also witnessed the arrival of the much-debated phenomenon of the "New Woman": frequently satirized as simply a bicycle-riding, cigarette-smoking, mannish creature, this confident and assertive figure burst onto the scene in the 1890s, often becoming the focus of attention in articles, stories, and plays (the character of Vivie in Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession [ 1898] is a good example of the type), and, indeed, the author of literary works herself. Women of course had begun to be published before Victoria's reign, and many women became successful novelists. And yet embarking on such a career was never an easy choice. The selections from Harriet Martineau's autobiography included here suggest some of the obstacles, internal and external, against which the aspiring woman writer struggled. Inevitably, some female writers were hacks, and they provide George Eliot with easy targets for ridicule in her essay "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" (1856). Nonetheless, women emerge as major novelists during the period, as illustrated in the careers of the Bronte sisters and Eliot herself.
It is instructive to compare the texts collected below with Eliot's judicious essay on the Woman Question, inspired by her rereading of Mary Wollstonecraft�and with her fiction. For these issues engaged Eliot's attention in her novels as well, as is demonstrated in her highly complex portrait of Maggie Tulliver, the bookish early- Victorian heroine of The Mill on the Floss (1860). To be sure, not all her female characters are frustrated and discontented; as a realist Eliot recognized that many upper- and middle-class women apparently found their leisurely lives fully enjoyable. In Middlemarch (1871�72), for example, Celia Brooke Chetham rejoices in her comfortable life as wife and mother on a country estate. Yet to her sister Dorothea (whom Celia regards with affectionate indulgence as an eccentric misfit), the traditional womanly lot in life is as painfully frustrating as Florence Nightingale had found it. It was on behalf of such women as Dorothea that John Stuart Mill developed his argument in The Subjection of Women (1869), a classic essay that should be read in conjunction with the selections in this section. Also revealing in this context are some of the extracts above from Tennyson's 1847 poem The Princess ("The woman's cause is man's") and from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1857), a novel in verse that portrays the life of a woman poet (book 1 describes how the typical girl's education constricts a woman's mind, and book 2 features Aurora's defense of her vocation as a poet).
For additional texts on the Woman Question, go to Norton Literature Online.
SARAH STICKNEY ELLIS
In 1837 the essayist Sarah Stickney (1812?�1872) married William Ellis, a missionary, and began to work with him for the temperance movement and other evangelical causes. Ellis's 1839 book on women's education and domestic roles became a best seller, going through sixteen editions in two years. In the 1840s she founded a girls' school that put into practice her belief that feminine education should cultivate what she called "the heart" rather than the intellectual faculties of her pupils.
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From The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits
[DISINTERESTED KINDNESS]
To men belongs the potent�(I had almost said the omnipotent) consideration of worldly aggrandizement; and it is constantly misleading their steps, closing their ears against the voice of conscience, and beguiling them with the promise of peace, where peace was never found.
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How often has man returned to his home with a mind confused by the many voices, which in the mart, the exchange, or the public assembly, have addressed themselves to his inborn selfishness, or his worldly pride; and while his integrity was shaken, and his resolution gave way beneath the pressure of apparent necessity, or the insidious pretenses of expediency, he has stood corrected before the clear eye of woman, as it looked directly to the naked truth, and detected the lurking evil of the specious act he was about to commit. Nay, so potent may have become this secret influence, that he may have borne it about with him like a kind of second conscience, for mental reference, and spiritual counsel, in moments of trial; and when the snares of the world were around him, and temptations from within and without have bribed over the witness in his own bosom, he has thought of the humble monitress1 who sat alone, guarding the fireside comforts of his distant home; and the remembrance of her character, clothed in moral beauty, has scattered the clouds before his mental vision, and sent him back to that beloved home, a wiser and a better man.
The women of England, possessing the grand privilege of being better instructed than those of any other country, in the minutiae of domestic comfort, have obtained a degree of importance in society far beyond what their unobtrusive virtues would appear to claim. The long-established customs of their country have placed in their hands the high and holy duty of cherishing and protecting the minor morals of life, from whence springs all that is elevated in purpose, and glorious in action. The sphere of their direct personal influence is central, and consequently small; but its extreme operations are as widely extended as the range of human feeling. They may be less striking in society than some of the women of other countries, and may feel themselves, on brilliant and stirring occasions, as simple, rude, and unsophisticated in the popular science of excitement; but as far as the noble daring of Britain has sent forth her adventurous sons, and that is to every point of danger on the habitable globe, they have borne along with them a generosity, a disinterestedness, and a moral courage, derived in no small measure from the female influence of their native country.
It is a fact well worthy of our serious attention, and one which bears immediately upon the subject under consideration, that the present state of our national affairs is such as to indicate that the influence of woman in counteracting the growing evils of society is about to be more needed than ever.
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1. Female advisor or mentor.
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COVENTRY PATMORE / 158 5
In order to ascertain what kind of education is most effective in making woman what she ought to be, the best method is to inquire into the character, station, and peculiar duties of woman throughout the largest portion of her earthly career; and then ask, for what she is most valued, admired, and beloved?
In answer to this, I have little hesitation in saying�for her disinterested2 kindness. Look at all the heroines, whether of romance or reality�at all the female characters that are held up to universal admiration�at all who have gone down to honored graves, amongst the tears and lamentations of their survivors. Have these been the learned, the accomplished women; the women who could solve problems, and elucidate systems of philosophy? No: or if they have, they have also been women who were dignified with the majesty of moral greatness.
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Let us single out from any particular seminary3 a child who has been there from the years of ten to fifteen, and reckon, if it can be reckoned, the pains that have been spent in making that child proficient in Latin. Have the same pains been spent in making her disinterestedly kind? And yet what man is there in existence who would not rather his wife should be free from selfishness, than be able to read Virgil without the use of a dictionary?
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I still cling fondly to the hope that some system of female instruction will be discovered, by which the young women of England may be sent from school to the homes of their parents, habituated to be on the watch for every opportunity of doing good to others; making it the first and the last inquiry of every day, "What can I do to make my parents, my brothers, or my sisters, more happy? I am but a feeble instrument in the hands of Providence, but as He will give me strength, I hope to pursue the plan to which I have been accustomed, of seeking my own happiness only in the happiness of others."
1839
2. I.e., independent, impartial. 3. School (in the early 19th century, often specifically a private school for girls). COVENTRY PATMORE
Originally published between 1854 and 1862, The Angel in the House, a long poem about courtship and marriage by Coventry Patmore (1823�1896), became a best seller in the United States and later in Britain. Dedicated to the author's first wife, Emily Augusta Andrews, the poem celebrates their fifteen years of married life. (She died in 1862, and Patmore, who lived another three decades, remarried twice.) The poem, popular among Patmore's contemporaries (including Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin), fell out of favor in later years. Feminist critics such as Virginia Woolf criticized The Angel in the House both for the sentimentality of its ideal of woman and for the oppressive effect of this ideal on women's lives. Since Woolf, the phrase "the angel in the house" has often been used to encapsulate a patronizing Victorian attitude toward women, for which the poem is cited as prime evidence.
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From The Angel in the House The Paragon When I behold the skies aloft Passing the pageantry of dreams, The cloud whose bosom, cygnet-soft, A couch for nuptial Juno1 seems, 5 The ocean broad, the mountains bright, The shadowy vales with feeding herds, I from my lyre the music smite, Nor want for justly matching words. All forces of the sea and air, 10 All interests of hill and plain, I so can sing, in seasons fair, That who hath felt may feel again. Elated oft by such free songs, I think with utterance free to raise 15 That hymn for which the whole world longs, A worthy hymn in woman's praise; A hymn bright-noted like a bird's, Arousing these song-sleepy times With rhapsodies of perfect words, 20 Ruled by returning kiss of rhymes. But when I look on her and hope To tell with joy what I admire, My thoughts lie cramp'd in narrow scope, Or in the feeble birth expire; 25 No mystery of well-woven speech, No simplest phrase of tenderest fall, No liken'd excellence can reach Her, the most excellent of all, The best half of creation's best, 30 Its heart to feel, its eye to see, The crown and complex of the rest, Its aim and its epitome. Nay, might I utter my conceit,0'Twere after all a vulgar song, fancy, idea 35 For she's so simply, subtly sweet, My deepest rapture does her wrong. Yet is it now my chosen task To sing her worth as Maid and Wife; Nor happier post than this I ask, 40 To live her laureate2 all my life. On wings of love uplifted free, And by her gentleness made great, I'll teach how noble man should be To match with such a lovely mate; 45 And then in her may move the more The woman's wish to be desired,
1. In Roman mythology the wife of the chief god the married life of women. (Jupiter) and a goddess presiding especially over 2. I.e., to be the one who celebrates her in poetry.
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RUSKIN: OF QUEENS' GARDENS / 1587
(By praise increased,) till both shall soar, With blissful emulations fired. And, as geranium, pink,� or rose type of flcnver 50
Is thrice itself through power of art, So may my happy skill disclose New fairness even in her fair heart; Until that churl shall nowhere be Who bends not, awed, before the throne 55 Of her affecting majesty, So meek, so far unlike our own; Until (for who may hope too much From her who wields the powers of love?) Our lifted lives at last shall touch 60 That happy goal to which they move; Until we find, as darkness rolls Away, and evil mists dissolve, The nuptial contrasts are the poles On which the heavenly spheres revolve.
1854-62
JOHN RUSKIN
Ruskin (1819-1900) began his career writing about art but eventually became one of England's fiercest social critics. In 1864 he delivered two lectures in the industrial city of Manchester�the first, "Of Kings' Treasuries," supporting the development of public libraries in the name of "noble education" and the second, "Of Queens' Gardens," on the special powers and duties of women. Published together the following year as Sesame and Ldies, the essays were considered ideal reading matter for middle- class young women and enjoyed exceptional sales for the remainder of the nineteenth century. In recent years "Of Queens' Gardens," with its assertions about the distinct differences between men and women, and their respective roles in the two separate spheres of public and private life, has become a classic text for the examination of Victorian ideology.
From Of Queens' Gardens
Now their separate characters are briefly these. The man's power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest, wherever war is just, wherever conquest necessary. But the woman's power is for rule, not for battle,�and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision. She sees the qualities of things, their claims, and their places. Her great function is Praise; she enters into no contest, but infallibly adjudges the crown of contest. By her office, and place, she is protected from all danger and temptation, The man, in his rough work in open world, must encounter
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1 582 / THE "WOMAN QUESTION"
all peril and trial;�to him, therefore, must be the failure, the offence, the inevitable error: often he must be wounded, or subdued; often misled; and always hardened. But he guards the woman from all this; within his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has sought it, need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause of error or offence. This is the true nature of home�it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home; it is then only a part of that outer world which you have roofed over, and lighted fire in. But so far as it is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods, before whose faces none may come but those whom they can receive with love,�so far as it is this, and roof and fire are types only of a nobler shade and light,�shade as of the rock in a weary land, and light as of
the Pharos1 in the stormy sea;�so far it vindicates the name, and fulfils the praise, of Home.
And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round her. The stars only may be over her head; the glowworm in the night-cold grass may be the only fire at her foot; but home is yet wherever she is; and for a noble woman it stretches far round her, better than ceiled with cedar, or painted with vermilion, 2 shedding its quiet light far, for those who else were homeless.
This, then, I believe to be,�will you not admit it to be?�the woman's true place and power. But do not you see that, to fulfil this, she must�as far as one can use such terms of a human creature�be incapable of error? So far as she rules, all must be right, or nothing is. She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise�wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation: wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but that she may never fail from his side: wise, not with the narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, but with the passionate gentleness of an infinitely variable, because infinitely applicable, modesty of service�the true changefulness of woman. In that great sense�"La donna e mobile," not "Qual pium' al vento";3 no, nor yet "Variable as the shade, by the light quivering aspen made";"1 but variable as the light, manifold in fair and serene division, that it may take the colour of all that it falls upon, and exalt it.
1864 1865
1. A lighthouse that was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (its island is now part of the city of Alexandria). The phrase "rock in a weary land" alludes to Isaiah 32.2. 2. Cf. Jeremiah 22.14. "Ceiled": roofed over. 3. "Women are as fickle as feathers in the wind," the first two lines of the famous aria by the womanizing Duke in Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto (1851). 4. Sir Walter Scott, Marmion (1808) 6.30.
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1 589
HARRIET MARTINEAU
Martineau (1802�1876), who grew up in the town of Norwich, suffered a painfully unhappy childhood and adolescence both because of recurring illnesses and because of the strict and narrow lifestyle of her middle-class Unitarian family. A prolific author, she produced many kinds of books�history, political and economic theory, travel narratives, fiction, translation. She was best-known for her collection of instructive stories, Illustrations of Political Economy (1832�34); but she also dealt with a wide variety of other issues, such as slavery in the United States (she was an early supporter of the abolitionists). Her Autobiography, written in 1855, was published in 1877. In the first selection she is eighteen years old.
From Autobiography
When I was young, it was not thought proper for young ladies to study very conspicuously; and especially with pen in hand. Young ladies (at least in provincial towns) were expected to sit down in the parlour to sew,�during which reading aloud was permitted,�or to practice their music; but so as to be fit to receive callers, without any signs of bluestockingism1 which could be reported abroad. Jane Austen herself, the Queen of novelists, the immortal creator of Anne Elliott, Mr. Knightley,2 and a score or two more of unrivalled intimate friends of the whole public, was compelled by the feelings of her family to cover up her manuscripts with a large piece of muslin work, kept on the table for the purpose, whenever any genteel people came in. So it was with other young ladies, for some time after Jane Austen was in her grave; and thus my first studies in philosophy were carried on with great care and reserve. I was at the work table regularly after breakfast,�making my own clothes, or the shirts of the household, or about some fancy work: I went out walking with the rest,�before dinner in winter, and after tea in summer: and if ever I shut myself into my own room for an hour of solitude, I knew it was at the risk of being sent for to join the sewing-circle, or to read aloud,�I being the reader, on account of my growing deafness.3 But I won time for what my heart was set upon, nevertheless,�either in the early morning, or late at night. I had a strange passion for translating, in those days; and a good preparation it proved for the subsequent work of my life. Now, it was meeting James at seven in the morning to read Lowth's Prelections4 in the Latin, after having been busy since five about something else, in my own room. Now it was translating Tacitus,5 in order to try what was the utmost compression of style that I could attain.�About this I may mention an incident while it occurs. We had all grown up with a great reverence for Mrs. Barbauld6 (which she fully deserved from much wiser people than ourselves) and, reflectively, for Dr. Aikin,7 her
1. Female intellectualism or literary activity (from tures oil Hebrew Poetry, 1753�70), by Robert the so-called bluestocking clubs of the 18th cen-Lowth (1710�1787), an English bishop and tury�informal gatherings of women with literary scholar. "James": James Martineau (1805�1900), interests and select men of letters; as the derisive Harriet's younger brother, who later became a name implies, some of the men attending habitu-renowned Unitarian preacher and moral philosoally wore unconventional blue worsted rather than pher. silk stockings). 5. Roman historian (ca. 55�ca. 120), whose writ2. Major characters from, respectively, the novels ings offer a model of concise prose. Persuasion (1817) and Emma (1815) by Austen 6. Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825), poet and (1775-1817). writer of prose for children. 3. Martineau's hearing problems worsened in ado-7. John Aikin (1747-1822), English physician, lescence, and she became almost entirely deaf. author, and biographer; he collaborated with his 4. Praelectiones de Sacra Poesi Herbraeorum (Lec-sister in some publications.
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1 582 / THE "WOMAN QUESTION"
brother,�also able in his way, and far more industrious, but without her genius. Among a multitude of other labours, Dr. Aikin had translated the Agricola8 of Tacitus. I went into such an enthusiasm over the original, and especially over the celebrated concluding passage, that I thought I would translate it, and correct it by Dr. Aikin's, which I could procure from our public library. 1 did it, and found my own translation unquestionably the best of the two. I had spent an infinity of pains over it,�word by word; and I am confident I was not wrong in my judgment. I stood pained and mortified before my desk, I remember, thinking how strange and small a matter was human achievement, if Dr. Aikin's fame was to be taken as a testimony of literary desert. I had beaten him whom I had taken for my master. I need not point out that, in the first place, Dr. Aikin's fame did not hang on this particular work; nor that, in the second place, I had exaggerated his fame by our sectarian estimate of him.9 1 give the incident as a curious little piece of personal experience, and one which helped to make me like literary labour more for its own sake, and less for its rewards, than I might otherwise have done.�Well: to return to my translating propensities. Our cousin J. M. L., then studying for his profession in Norwich, used to read Italian with Rachel1 and me,�also before breakfast. We made some considerable progress, through the usual course of prose authors and poets; and out of this grew a fit which Rachel and I at one time took, in concert with our companions and neighbours, the C.'s, to translate Petrarch.2 Nothing could be better as an exercise in composition than translating Petrarch's sonnets into English of the same limits. It was putting ourselves under compulsion to do with the Italian what I had set myself voluntarily to do with the Latin author. I believe we really succeeded pretty well; and I am sure that all these exercises were a singularly apt preparation for my after work. At the same time, I went on studying Blair's Rhetoric3 (for want of a better guide) and inclining mightily to every kind of book or process which could improve my literary skill,�really as if I had foreseen how I was to spend my life.
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At this time,�(I think it must have been in 1821,) was my first appearance in print. * * * My brother James, then my idolized companion, discovered how wretched I was when he left me for his college, after the vacation; and he told me that I must not permit myself to be so miserable. He advised me to take refuge, on each occasion, in a new pursuit; and on that particular occasion, in an attempt at authorship. I said, as usual, that I would if he would: to which he answered that it would never do for him, a young student, to rush into print before the eyes of his tutors; but he desired me to write something that was in my head, and try my chance with it in the "Monthly Repository,"�the poor little Unitarian periodical in which I have mentioned that Talfourd4 tried his young powers. What James desired, I always did, as of course; and after he had left me to my widowhood soon after six o'clock, one bright September morning, I was at my desk before seven, beginning a letter to the Editor of the "Monthly Repository,"�that editor being the formidable prime minister of his sect,�Rev. Robert Aspland.5 I suppose I must tell what that first paper was,
8. A biography of Julius Agricola (40-93 c.E.), 3. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1784), Tacitus's father-in-law and a Roman senator and by Hugh Blair (1718-1800), a Scottish divine and general. Aikin's translation, which went into sev-professor of rhetoric, which expressed 18theral editions, was first published in 1774. century ideals of prose stvle. 9. Aikin, like Martineau, was a Unitarian. 4. Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795-1854), 1. Martineau's younger sister. English lawyer and author. 2. Italian poet (Francesco Petrarca, 1304�1374). 5. A Unitarian divine (1782-1845).
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MABTINEAU: AUTOBIOGRAPHY / 159 1
though I had much rather not; for I am so heartily ashamed of the whole business as never to have looked at the article since the first flutter of it went off. It was on Female Writers on Practical Divinity. I wrote away, in my abominable scrawl of those days, on foolscap paper,6 feeling mightily like a fool all the time. I told no one, and carried my expensive packet to the post-office myself, to pay the postage. I took the letter V for my signature,�I cannot at all remember why. The time was very near the end of the month: I had no definite expectation that I should ever hear any thing of my paper; and certainly did not suppose it could be in the forthcoming number. That number was sent in before service-time on a Sunday morning. My heart may have been beating when I laid hands on it; but it thumped prodigiously when I saw my article there, and, in the Notices to Correspondents, a request to hear more from V. of Norwich. There is certainly something entirely peculiar in the sensation of seeing oneself in print for the first time:�the lines burn themselves in upon the brain in a way of which black ink is incapable, in any other mode. So I felt that day, when I went about with my secret.�I have said what my eldest brother was to us,�in what reverence we held him. He was just married, and he and his bride asked me to return from chapel with them to tea. After tea he said, "Come now, we have had plenty of talk; I will read you something; " and he held out his hand for the new "Repository." After glancing at it, he exclaimed, "They have got a new hand here. Listen." After a paragraph, he repeated, "Ah! this is a new hand; they have had nothing so good as this for a long while." (It would be impossible to convey to any who do not know the "Monthly Repository" of that day, how very small a compliment this was.) I was silent, of course. At the end of the first column, he exclaimed about the style, looking at me in some wonder at my being as still as a mouse. Next (and well I remember his tone, and thrill to it still) his words were�"What a fine sentence that is! Why, do you not think so?" I mumbled out, sillily enough, that it did not seem any thing particular. "Then," said he, "you were not listening. I will read it again. There now!" As he still got nothing out of me, he turned round upon me, as we sat side by side on the sofa, with "Harriet, what is the matter with you? I never knew you so slow to praise any thing before." I replied, in utter confusion,�"I never could baffle any body. The truth is, that paper is mine." He made no reply; read on in silence, and spoke no more till I was on my feet to come away. He then laid his hand on my shoulder, and said gravely (calling me 'dear' for the first time) "Now, dear, leave it to other women to make shirts and darn stockings; and do you devote yourself to this." I went home in a sort of dream, so that the squares of the pavement seemed to float before my eyes. That evening made me an authoress.
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While I was at Newcastle [1829], a change, which turned out a very happy one, was made in our domestic arrangements. 4 * 4 I call it a misfortune, because in common parlance it would be so treated; but I believe that my mother and all her other daughters would have joined heartily, if asked, in my conviction that it was one of the best things that ever happened to us. My mother and her daughters lost, at a stroke, nearly all they had in the world by the failure of the house,�the old manufactory,�in which their money was placed. We never recovered more than the merest pittance; and at the time, I, for one, was left destitute;�that is to say, with precisely one shilling in my
6. A thirteen-by-sixteen-inch sheet of paper.
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1 582 / THE "WOMAN QUESTION"
purse. The effect upon me of this new "calamity," as people called it, was like that of a blister upon a dull, weary pain, or series of pains. I rather enjoyed it, even at the time; for there was scope for action; whereas, in the long, dreary series of preceding trials, there was nothing possible but endurance. In a very short time, my two sisters at home and I began to feel the blessing of a wholly new freedom. I, who had been obliged to write before breakfast, or in some private way, had henceforth liberty to do my own work in my own way; for we had lost our gentility. Many and many a time since have we said that, but for that loss of money, we might have lived on in the ordinary provincial method of ladies with small means, sewing, and economizing, and growing narrower every year; whereas, by being thrown, while it was yet time, on our own resources, we have worked hard and usefully, won friends, reputation and independence, seen the world abundantly, abroad and at home, and, in short, have truly lived instead of vegetated.
1855 1877
ANONYMOUS
In early January 1858 a letter appeared in the London Times above the signature "One More Unfortunate." This individual, who claimed to be a prostitute, described her respectable upbringing and her experience as a governess, lamented her disgrace, and called on men to be more compassionate in their reform efforts. Responding in part to this piece, another letter, also apparently from a prostitute and titled "The Great Social Evil," was then published on February 24, 1858. Although it is impossible to establish definitively whether the letter writers were genuinely who they said they were, the story of how the second correspondent came to be a prostitute, which appears in the following extract, would have seemed extremely plausible to contemporary readers. It is instructive to compare this selection with Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem Jenny (1870), in which a speaker muses on the life and thoughts of a young prostitute, and the account of the early days of Mrs. Warren's profession in Bernard Shaw's 1898 play of that name.
The Great Social Evil
To the Editor of the Times
Sir,�another "Unfortunate," but of a class entirely different from the one who has already instructed the public in your columns, presumes to address you.
I am a stranger to all the fine sentiments which still linger in the bosom of your correspondent. I have none of those youthful recollections which, contrasting her early days with her present life, aggravate the misery of the latter. My parents did not give me any education; they did not instil into my mind virtuous precepts nor set me a good example. All my experiences in early life were gleaned among associates who knew nothing of the laws of God but by
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ANONYMOUS: THE GREAT SOCIAL EVIL / 1593
dim tradition and faint report, and whose chiefest triumphs of wisdom consisted in picking their way through the paths of destitution in which they were cast by cunning evasion or in open defiance of the laws of man.
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Let me tell you something of my parents. My father's most profitable occupation was brickmaking. When not employed at this he did anything he could get to do. My mother worked with him in the brickfield, and so did I and a progeny of brothers and sisters; for, somehow or other, although my parents occupied a very unimportant space in the world, it pleased God to make them fruitful. We all slept in the same room. There were few privacies, few family secrets in our house.
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I was a very pretty child, and had a sweet voice; of course I used to sing. Most London boys and girls of the lower classes sing. "My face is my fortune, kind Sir, she said" was the ditty on which I bestowed most pains, and my father and mother would wink knowingly as I sang it. The latter would also tell me how pretty she was when young, and how she sang, and what a fool she had been, and how well she might have done had she been wise.
Frequently we had quite a stir in our colony.1 Some young lady who had quitted the paternal restraints, or perhaps, been started off, none knew whither or how, to seek her fortune, would reappear among us with a profusion of ribands, fine clothes, and lots of cash. Visiting the neighbours, treating indiscriminately, was the order of the day on such occasions, without any more definite information of the means by which the dazzling transformation had been effected than could be conveyed by knowing winks and the words "luck" and "friends." Then she would disappear and leave us in our dirt, penury, and obscurity. You cannot conceive, Sir, how our young ambition was stirred by these visitations.
Now commences an important era in my life. I was a fine, robust, healthy girl, 13 years of age. I had larked with the boys of my own age. I had huddled with them, boys and girls together, all night long in our common haunts. I had seen much and heard abundantly of the mysteries of the sexes. To me such things had been matters of common sight and common talk. For some time I had trembled and coquetted on the verge of a strong curiosity, and a natural desire, and without a particle of affection, scarce a partiality, I lost what? not my virtue, for I never had any. That which is commonly, but untruly called virtue, I gave away.
You reverend Mr. Philanthropist�what call you virtue? Is it not the principle, the essence, which keeps watch and ward over the conduct, over the substance, the materiality? No such principle ever kept watch and ward over me, and I repeat that I never lost that which I never had�my virtue.
According to my own ideas at the time I only extended my rightful enjoyments. Opportunity was not long wanting to put my newly-acquired knowledge to profitable use. In the commencement of my fifteenth year one of our beribanded visitors took me off, and introduced me to the great world, and thus commenced my career as what you better classes call a prostitute. I cannot say that I felt any other shame than the bashfulness of a noviciate introduced
1. I.e., neighborhood, group of streets.
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1 582 / THE "WOMAN QUESTION"
to strange society. Remarkable for good looks, and no less so for good temper, I gained money, dressed gaily, and soon agreeably astonished my parents and old neighbours by making a descent upon them.
Passing over the vicissitudes of my course, alternating between reckless gaiety and extreme destitution, I improved myself greatly; and at the age of 18 was living partly under the protection of one who thought he discovered that I had talent, and some good qualities as well as beauty, who treated me more kindly and considerately than I had ever before been treated, and thus drew from me something like a feeling of regard, but not sufficiently strong to lift me to that sense of my position which the so-called virtuous and respectable members of society seem to entertain. Under the protection of this gentleman, and encouraged by him, I commenced the work of my education; that portion of education which is comprised in some knowledge of my own language and the ordinary accomplishments of my sex;�moral science, as I believe it is called, has always been an enigma to me, and is so to this day.
$ * *
Now, what if I am a prostitute, what business has society to abuse me? Have I received any favours at the hands of society? If I am a hideous cancer in society, are not the causes of the disease to be sought in the rottenness of the carcass? Am I not its legitimate child; no bastard, Sir? Why does my unnatural parent repudiate me, and what has society ever done for me, that I should do anything for it, and what have I ever done against society that it should drive me into a corner and crush me to the earth? I have neither stolen (at least not since I was a child), nor murdered, nor defrauded. I earn my money and pay my way, and try to do good with it, according to my ideas of good. I do not get drunk, nor fight, nor create uproar in the streets or out of them. I do not use bad language. I do not offend the public eye by open indecencies. I go to the Opera, I go to Almack's,2 I go to the theatres, I go to quiet, well-conducted casinos, I go to all places of public amusement, behaving myself with as much propriety as society can exact. I pay business visits to my tradespeople, the most fashionable of the West-end.3 My milliners, my silk-mercers,4 my boot- maker know, all of them, who I am and how I live, and they solicit my patronage as earnestly and cringingly as if I were Madam, the lady of the right rev. patron of the Society for the Suppression of Vice.5 They find my money as good and my pay better (for we are robbed on every hand) than that of Madam, my Lady; and, if all the circumstances and conditions of our lives had been reversed, would Madam, my Lady, have done better or been better than I?
I speak for others as well as for myself, for the very great majority, nearly all of the real undisguised prostitutes in London, spring from my class, and are made by and under pretty much such conditions of life as I have narrated, and particularly by untutored and unrestrained intercourse of the sexes in early life. We come from the dregs of society, as our so-called betters term it. What business has society to have dregs�such dregs as we? You railers of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, you the pious, the moral, the respectable, as you call yourselves, who stand on your smooth and pleasant side of the great gulf you have dug and keep between yourselves and the dregs, why don't you
2. Assembly rooms, the scene of social functions. 4. Dealers in textiles. 3. The affluent area of central London and loca-5. A society founded in 1802. tion of fashionable shops and theaters.
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ANONYMOUS: THE GREAT SOCIAL EVIL / 1595
bridge it over, or fill it up, and by some humane and generous process absorb us into your leavened mass, until we become interpenetrated with goodness like yourselves? Why stand on your eminence shouting that we should be ashamed of ourselves? What have we to be ashamed of, we who do not know what shame is�the shame you mean? I conduct myself prudently, and defy you and your policemen too. Why stand you there mouthing with sleek face about morality? What is morality? Will you make us responsible for what we never knew? Teach us what is right and tutor us in good before you punish us for doing wrong. We who are the real prostitutes of the true natural growth of society, and no impostors, will not be judged by "One more Unfortunate," nor measured by any standard of her setting up. She is a mere chance intruder in our ranks, and has no business there.
* � Hurling big figures at us, it is said that there are 80,000 of us in London alone�which is a monstrous falsehood�and of this 80,000, poor hardworking sewing girls, sewing women, are numbered in by thousands and called indiscriminately prostitutes; writing, preaching, speechifying, that they have lost their virtue too.
It is a cruel calumny to call them in mass prostitutes; and, as for their virtue, they lose it as one loses his watch who is robbed by the highway thief. Their virtue is the watch, and society is the thief. These poor women toiling on starvation wages, while penury, misery, and famine clutch them by the throat and say, "Render up your body or die."
� � ft
Admire this magnificent shop in this fashionable street; its front, fittings, and decorations cost not less than a thousand pounds. The respectable master of the establishment keeps his carriage, and lives in his countryhouse. He has daughters too; his patronesses are fine ladies, the choicest impersonations of society. Do they think, as they admire the taste and elegance of that trades- man's show, of the poor creatures who wrought it, and of what they were paid for it? Do they reflect on the weary toiling fingers, on the eyes dim with watching, on the bowels yearning with hunger, on the bended frames, on the broken constitutions, on poor human nature driven to its coldest corner and reduced to its narrowest means in the production of these luxuries and adornments? This is an old story! Would it not be truer and more charitable to call these poor souls "victims?"�some gentler, some more humane name than prostitute� to soften by some Christian expression, if you cannot better the unchristian system, the opprobrium of a fate to which society has itself driven them by the direst straits? What business has society to point its finger in scorn, and to raise its voice in reprobation of them? Are they not its children, born of its cold indifference, of its callous selfishness, of its cruel pride?
Sir, I have trespassed on your patience beyond limit, and yet much remains to be said, which I leave for further communication if you think proper to insert this. The difficulty of dealing with the evil is not so great as society considers it. Setting aside "the sin," we are not so bad as we are thought to be. The difficulty is for society to set itself, with the necessary earnestness, self-humiliation, and self-denial to the work. But of this hereafter. To deprive us of proper and harmless amusements, to subject us in mass to the pressure of force�of force wielded, for the most part, by ignorant, and often by brutal
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1 582 / THE "WOMAN QUESTION"
men�is only to add the cruelty of active persecution to the cruelty of the passive indifference which made us as we are.
I remain your humble servant, ANOTHER UNFORTUNATE
1858
DINAH MARIA MULOCK
In 1857 Mulock (1826-1887) published her best-known novel, the Victorian best seller John Halifax, Gentleman. This work was followed the year after by A Woman's Thoughts on Women and subsequently by other, sometimes more overtly feminist, novels. In 1864 she married George Craik, a partner in the publishing firm Macmillan; her works often appear under the name Dinah Maria Craik.
From A Woman's Thoughts about Women
[SOMETHING TO DO]
Man and woman were made for, and not like one another. Only one "right" we have to assert in common with mankind�and that is as much in our hands as theirs�the right of having something to do.
� *
But how few parents ever consider this! Tom, Dick, and Harry, aforesaid, leave school and plunge into life; "the girls" likewise finish their education, come home, and stay at home. That is enough. Nobody thinks it needful to waste a care upon them. Bless them, pretty dears, how sweet they are! papa's nosegay1 of beauty to adorn his drawing-room. He delights to give them all they can desire�clothes, amusements, society; he and mamma together take every domestic care off their hands; they have abundance of time and nothing to occupy it; plenty of money, and little use for it; pleasure without end, but not one definite object of interest or employment; flattery and flummery2 enough, but no solid food whatever to satisfy mind or heart�if they happen to possess either�at the very emptiest and most craving season3 of both. They
have literally nothing whatever to do. 4 * *
* * $
And so their whole energies are devoted to the massacre of old Time. They prick him to death with crochet and embroidery needles; strum him deaf with piano and harp playing�not music; cut him up with morning visitors, or leave his carcass in ten-minute parcels at every "friend's" house they can think of. Finally, they dance him defunct at all sort of unnatural hours; and then, rejoicing in the excellent excuse, smother him in sleep for a third of the following day. Thus he dies, a slow, inoffensive, perfectly natural death; and they will
1. Posy: small bouquet of flowers. dessert). 2. Nonsense (literally, a sweet and insubstantial 3. Seasoning, salt and pepper.
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MULOCK: A WOMAN'S THOUGHTS ABOUT WOMEN / 1597
never recognize his murder till, on the confines of this world, or from the unknown shores of the next, the question meets them: "What have you done with Time?"�Time, the only mortal gift bestowed equally on every living soul, and excepting the soul, the only mortal loss which is totally irretrievable.
# #
But "what am I to do with my life?" as once asked me one girl out of the numbers who begin to feel aware that, whether marrying or not, each possesses an individual life, to spend, to use, or to lose. And herein lies the momentous question.
� ft �
A definite answer to this question is simply impossible. Generally�and this is the best and safest guide�she will find her work lying very near at hand: some desultory tastes to condense into regular studies, some faulty household quietly to remodel, some child to teach, or parent to watch over. All these being needless or unattainable, she may extend her service out of the home into the world, which perhaps never at any time so much needed the help of us women. And hardly one of its charities and duties can be done so thoroughly as by a wise and tender woman's hand.
ft ft *
These are they who are little spoken of in the world at large. * * * They have made for themselves a place in the world: the harsh, practical, yet not ill- meaning world, where all find their level soon or late, and where a frivolous young maid sunk into a helpless old one, can no more expect to keep her pristine position than a last year's leaf to flutter upon a spring bough. But an old maid who deserves well of this same world, by her ceaseless work therein, having won her position, keeps it to the end.
Not an ill position either, or unkindly; often higher and more honourable than that of many a mother of ten sons. In households, where "Auntie" is the universal referee, nurse, playmate, comforter, and counselor: in society, where "that nice Miss So-and-so," though neither clever, handsome, nor young, is yet such a person as can neither be omitted nor overlooked: in charitable works, where she is "such a practical body�always knows exactly what to do, and how to do it": or perhaps, in her own house, solitary indeed, as every single woman's home must be, yet neither dull nor unhappy in itself, and the nucleus of cheerfulness and happiness to many another home besides.
# ft ft
Published or unpublished, this woman's life is a goodly chronicle, the title page of which you may read in her quiet countenance; her manner, settled, cheerful, and at ease; her unfailing interest in all things and all people. You will rarely find she thinks much about herself; she has never had time for it. And this her life-chronicle, which, out of its very fullness, has taught her that the more one does, the more one finds to do�she will never flourish in your face, or the face of Heaven, as something uncommonly virtuous and extraordinary. She knows that, after all, she has simply done what it was her duty to do.
But�and when her place is vacant on earth, this will be said of her assuredly, both here and Otherwhere�"She hath done what she could."
1858
.
1 598
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
In 1854 Nightingale (1820�1910) became famous for organizing a contingent of nurses to care for sick and wounded soldiers during the Crimean War, an event that provided an outlet for her passionate desire to change the world of hospital treatment. But Nightingale achieved her dream of an active and productive life only after many years of waiting; at the age of thirty-two she was still living at home, unmarried (having declined several proposals). Some members of her well-to-do family, in particular her mother, strongly opposed her nursing ambitions and pressured her to remain at home. In 1852, so bored with family and social life that she thought of suicide, she began writing Cassandra, which she called her "family manuscript"; it records her frustrations before she escaped into a professional world where there was "something to do." In 1859 she revised the manuscript, and a few copies were privately printed that year, but it was not published until 1928. The title refers to the Trojan princess whose true prophecies went unheeded by those around her because she was judged insane.
From Cassandra
[NOTHING TO DO]
Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity�these three�and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised? Men say that God punishes for complaining. No, but men are angry with misery. They are irritated with women for not being happy. They take it as a personal offense. To
God alone may women complain without insulting Him!
* � *
Is discontent a privilege?
Yes, it is a privilege for you to suffer for your race�a privilege not reserved to the Redeemer, and the martyrs alone, but one enjoyed by numbers in every age.
The commonplace life of thousands; and in that is its only interest�its only merit as a history; viz., that it is the type of common sufferings�the story of one who has not the courage to resist nor to submit to the civilization of her time�is this.
Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.
Then comes intellect. It wishes to satisfy the wants which intellect creates for it. But there is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilization at which we have arrived. The stimulus, the training, the time, are all three wanting to us; or, in other words, the means and inducements are not there.
Look at the poor lives we lead. It is a wonder that we are so good as we are, not that we are so bad. In looking round we are struck with the power of the organizations1 we see, not with their want of power. Now and then, it is true, we are conscious that there is an inferior organization, but, in general, just the contrary. Mrs A. has the imagination, the poetry of a Murillo,2 and has suffi
1. Beings, organisms. 2. Bartolome Murillo (1617�1682), Spanish painter.
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NIGHTINGALE: CASSANDRA / 159 9
cient power of execution to show that she might have had a great deal more. Why is she not a Murillo? From a material difficulty, not a mental one. If she has a knife and fork in her hands for three hours of the day, she cannot have a pencil or brush. Dinner is the great sacred ceremony of this day, the great sacrament. To be absent from dinner is equivalent to being ill. Nothing else will excuse us from it. Bodily incapacity is the only apology valid. If she has a pen and ink in her hands during other three hours, writing answers for the penny post,3 again, she cannot have her pencil, and so ad infinitum through life. People have no type before them in their lives, neither fathers nor mothers, nor the children themselves. They look at things in detail. They say, "It is very desirable that A., my daughter, should go to such a party, should know such a lady, should sit by such a person." It is true. But what standard have they before them of the nature and destination of man? The very words are rejected as pedantic. But might they not, at least, have a type in their minds that such an one might be a discoverer through her intellect, such another
through her art, a third through her moral power?
Women often try one branch of intellect after another in their youth, e.g., mathematics. But that, least of all, is compatible with the life of "society." It is impossible to follow up anything systematically. Women often long to enter some man's profession where they would find direction, competition (or rather opportunity of measuring the intellect with others) and, above all, time.
In those wise institutions, mixed as they are with many follies, which will last as long as the human race lasts, because they are adapted to the wants of the human race; those institutions which we call monasteries, and which, embracing much that is contrary to the laws of nature, are yet better adapted to the union of the life of action and that of thought than any other mode of life with which we are acquainted; in many such, four and a half hours, at least, are daily set aside for thought, rules are given for thought, training and opportunity afforded. Among us there is no time appointed for this purpose, and the difficulty is that, in our social life, we must be always doubtful whether we ought not to be with somebody else or be doing something else.
Are men better off than women in this?
If one calls upon a friend in London and sees her son in the drawing room, it strikes one as odd to find a young man sitting idle in his mother's drawing room in the morning. For men, who are seen much in those haunts, there is no end of the epithets we have: "knights of the carpet," "drawing-room heroes," "ladies' men." But suppose we were to see a number of men in the morning sitting round a table in the drawing-room, looking at prints, doing worsted work,4 and reading little books, how we should laugh! A member of the House of Commons was once known to do worsted work. Of another man was said, "His only fault is that he is too good; he drives out with his mother every day in the carriage, and if he is asked anywhere he answers that he must dine with his mother, but, if she can spare him, he will come in to tea, and he does not come."
Now, why is it more ridiculous for a man than for a woman to do worsted work and drive out every day in the carriage? Why should we laugh if we were
3. Replying (to social correspondence and invita-tuted in 1840. tions) in letters, which would then be mailed; a 4. Embroidery or other needlework with fine wool- uniform rate of a penny for each letter was insti-len yarn.
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1 582 / THE "WOMAN QUESTION"
to see a parcel of men sitting round a drawing room table in the morning, and think it all right if they were women? Is man's time more valuable than woman's? or is the difference between man and woman this, that woman has confessedly nothing to do?
Women are never supposed to have any occupation of sufficient importance not to be interrupted, except "suckling their fools";5 and women themselves have accepted this, have written books to support it, and have trained themselves so as to consider whatever they do as not of such value to the world or to others, but that they can throw it up at the first "claim of social life." They have accustomed themselves to consider intellectual occupation as a merely selfish amusement, which it is their "duty" to give up for every trifler more selfish than themselves.
$ * *
Women have no means given them, whereby they can resist the "claims of social life." They are taught from their infancy upwards that it is a wrong, ill- tempered, and a misunderstanding of "woman's mission" (with a great M) if they do not allow themselves willingly to be interrupted at all hours. If a woman has once put in a claim to be treated as a man by some work of science or art or literature, which she can show as the "fruit of her leisure," then she will be considered justified in having leisure (hardly, perhaps, even then). But if not, not. If she has nothing to show, she must resign herself to her fate.
"I like riding about this beautiful place, why don't you? I like walking about the garden, why don't you?" is the common expostulation�as if we were children, whose spirits rise during a fortnight's holiday, who think that they will last forever�and look neither backwards nor forwards.
Society triumphs over many. They wish to regenerate the world with their institutions, with their moral philosophy, with their love. Then they sink to living from breakfast till dinner, from dinner till tea, with a little worsted work, and to looking forward to nothing but bed.
When shall we see a life full of steady enthusiasm, walking straight to its aim, flying home, as that bird is now, against the wind�with the calmness and the confidence of one who knows the laws of God and can apply them?
$ * >*
When shall we see a woman making a study of what she does? Married women cannot; for a man would think, if his wife undertook any great work with the intention of carrying it out�of making anything but a sham of it� that she would "suckle his fools and chronicle his small beer" less well for it� that he would not have so good a dinner�that she would destroy, as it is called, his domestic life.
The intercourse of6 man and woman�how frivolous, how unworthy it is! Can we call that the true vocation of woman�her high career? Look round at the marriages which you know. The true marriage�that noble union, by which a man and woman become together the one perfect being�probably does not exist at present upon earth.
It is not surprising that husbands and wives seem so little part of one another. It is surprising that there is so much love as there is. For there is no
5. See lago's cynical comments on the role of bear" colloquially means "unimportant matters." women in Shakespeare's Othello 2.1.162: "To 6. Social communication between. suckle fools, and chronicle small beer." "Small
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MONA CAIRD / 1601
food for it. What does it live upon-�what nourishes it? Husbands and wives never seem to have anything to say to one another. What do they talk about? Not about any great religious, social, political questions or feelings. They talk about who shall come to dinner, who is to live in this lodge and who in that, about the improvement of the place, or when they shall go to London. If there are children, they form a common subject of some nourishment. But, even then, the case is oftenest thus�the husband is to think of how they are to get on in life; the wife of bringing them up at home.
But any real communion between husband and wife�any descending into the depths of their being, and drawing out thence what they find and comparing it�do we ever dream of such a thing? Yes, we may dream of it during the season of "passion," but we shall not find it afterwards. We even expect it to go off, and lay our account that it will. If the husband has, by chance, gone into the depths of his being, and found there anything unorthodox, he, oftenest, conceals it carefully from his wife�he is afraid of "unsettling her opinions."
44 4 For a woman is "by birth a Tory"7�has often been said�by education a "Tory," we mean.
Women dream till they have no longer the strength to dream; those dreams against which they so struggle, so honestly, vigorously, and conscientiously, and so in vain, yet which are their life, without which they could not have lived; those dreams go at last. All their plans and visions seem vanished, and they know not where; gone, and they cannot recall them. They do not even remember them. And they are left without the food of reality or of hope.
Later in life, they neither desire nor dream, neither of activity, nor of love, nor of intellect. The last often survives the longest. They wish, if their experiences would benefit anybody, to give them to someone. But they never find an hour free in which to collect their thoughts, and so discouragement becomes ever deeper and deeper, and they less and less capable of undertaking anything.
It seems as if the female spirit of the world were mourning everlastingly over blessings, not lost, but which she has never had, and which, in her discouragement she feels that she never will have, they are so far off.
The more complete a woman's organization, the more she will feel it, till at last there shall arise a woman, who will resume, in her own soul, all the sufferings of her race, and that woman will be the Saviour of her race.
1852-59 1928
7. Nickname for a member or supporter of the British Conservative Party, which generally sought to preserve the established religious and political order. MONA CAIRD
In several novels and many essays, the feminist writer Caird (1854�1932) explored the position of women in Victorian society. The Daughters ofDanaus (1894) features a heroine whose desire to pursue a musical career conflicts with her family ties and responsibilities. Caird's article "Marriage," which appeared in the Westminster Review
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1 582 / THE "WOMAN QUESTION"
in 1888, inspired a heated exchange in the journals of the 1890s. Her essays on the subject of marriage were later collected and published as The Morality of Marriage, and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Woman (1897).
From Marriage
We come then to the conclusion that the present form of marriage�exactly in proportion to its conformity with orthodox ideas�is a vexatious failure. If certain people have made it a success by ignoring those orthodox ideas, such instances afford no argument in favour of the institution as it stands. We are also led to conclude that modern "Respectability" draws its life-blood from the degradation of womanhood in marriage and in prostitution. But what is to be done to remedy these manifold evils? how is marriage to be rescued from a mercenary society, torn from the arms of "Respectability," and established on a footing which will make it no longer an insult to human dignity?
First of all we must set up an ideal, undismayed by what will seem its Utopian impossibility. Every good thing that we enjoy to-day was once the dream of a "crazy enthusiast" mad enough to believe in the power of ideas and in the power of man to have things as he wills. The ideal marriage then, despite all dangers and difficulties, should be free. So long as love and trust and friendship remain, no bonds are necessary to bind two people together; life apart will be empty and colourless; but whenever these cease the tie becomes false and iniquitous, and no one ought to have power to enforce it. The matter is one in which any interposition, whether of law or of society, is an impertinence. Even the idea of "duty" ought to be excluded from the most perfect marriage, because the intense attraction of one being for another, the intense desire for one another's happiness, would make interchanges of whatever kind the outcome of a feeling far more passionate than that of duty. It need scarcely be said that there must be a full understanding and acknowledgment of the obvious right of the woman to possess herself body and soul, to give or withhold herself body and soul exactly as she wills. The moral right here is so palpable, and its denial implies ideas so low and offensive to human dignity, that no fear of consequences ought to deter us from making this liberty an element of our ideal, in fact its fundamental principle. Without it, no ideal could hold up its head. Moreover, "consequences" in the long run are never beneficent, where obvious moral rights are disregarded. The idea of a perfectly free marriage would imply the possibility of any form of contract being entered into between the two persons, the State and society standing aside, and recognizing the entirely private character of the transaction.
The economical independence of woman is the first condition of free marriage. She ought not to be tempted to marry, or to remain married, for the sake of bread and butter. But the condition is a very hard one to secure. Our present competitive system, with the daily increasing ferocity of the struggle for existence, is fast reducing itself to an absurdity, woman's labour helping to make the struggle only the fiercer. The problem now offered to the mind and conscience of humanity is to readjust its industrial organization in such a way as to gradually reduce this absurd and useless competition within reasonable limits, and to bring about in its place some form of cooperation, in which no man's interest will depend on the misfortune of his neighbour, but
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CAIRD: MARRIAGE / 1603
rather on his neighbour's happiness and welfare. It is idle to say that this cannot be done; the state of society shows quite clearly that it must be done sooner or later; otherwise some violent catastrophe will put an end to a condition of things which is hurrying towards impossibility. Under improved economical conditions the difficult problem of securing the real independence of women, and thence of the readjustment of their position in relation to men and to society would find easy solution.
When girls and boys are educated together, when the unwholesome atmosphere of social life becomes fresher and nobler, when the pressure of existence slackens (as it will and must do), and when the whole nature has thus a chance to expand, such additions to the scope and interest of life will cease to be thought marvellous or "unnatural." "Human nature" has more variety of powers and is more responsive to conditions than we imagine. It is hard to believe in things for which we feel no capacity in ourselves, but fortunately such things exist in spite of our placid unconsciousness. Give room for the development of individuality, and individuality develops, to the amazement of spectators! Give freedom in marriage, and each pair will enter upon their union after their own particular fashion, creating a refreshing diversity in modes of life, and consequently of character. Infinitely preferable will this be to our own gloomy uniformity, the offspring of our passion to be in all things exactly like our neighbours.
The proposed freedom in marriage would of course have to go hand-in-hand with the co-education of the sexes. It is our present absurd interference with the natural civilizing influences of one sex upon the other, that creates half the dangers and difficulties of our social life, and gives colour to the fears of those who would hedge round marriage with a thousand restraints or so-called safeguards, ruinous to happiness, and certainly not productive of a satisfactory social condition. Already the good results of this method of co-education have been proved by experiment in America, but we ought to go farther in this direction than our go-ahead cousins have yet gone. Meeting freely in their working-hours as well as at times of recreation, men and women would have opportunity for forming reasonable judgments of character, for making friendships irrespective of sex, and for giving and receiving that inspiring influence which apparently can only be given by one sex to the other.1 There would also be a chance of forming genuine attachments founded on friendship; marriage would cease to be the haphazard thing it is now; girls would no longer fancy themselves in love with a man because they had met none other on terms equally intimate, and they would not be tempted to marry for the sake of freedom and a place in life, for existence would be free and full from the beginning.
The general rise in health, physical and moral, following the improvement in birth, surroundings, and training, would rapidly tell upon the whole state of society. Any one who has observed carefully knows how grateful a response the human organism gives to improved conditions, if only these remain constant. We should have to deal with healthier, better equipped, more reasonable men and women, possessing well-developed minds, and hearts kindly disposed
I. Mr. Henry Stanton, in his work on The Woman ably imperfectly recalling the name of Theodore Question in Europe, speaks of the main idea con-Stanton (1851-1925), the editor of Tfte Woman veyed in Legouve's Histoire des Femmes as follows: Question in Europe: A Series of Original Essay's �"Equality in difference is its key-note. The (1884). Histoire Morale des Femmes (Moral History question is not to make woman a man, but to com-of Women), by Ernest Legouve (1807�1903), was plete man by woman" [Caird's note], Caird is prob-published in Paris in 1849.
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1 582 / THE "WOMAN QUESTION"
towards their fellow-creatures. Are such people more likely to enter into a union frivolously and ignorantly than are the average men and women of today? Surely not. If the number of divorces did not actually decrease there would be the certainty that no couple remained united against their will, and that no lives were sacrificed to a mere convention. With the social changes which would go hand in hand with changes in the status of marriage, would come inevitably many fresh forms of human power, and thus all sorts of new and stimulating influences would be brought to bear upon society. No man has a right to consider himself educated until he has been under the influence of cultivated women, and the same may be said of women as regards men.2 Development involves an increase of complexity. It is so in all forms of existence, vegetable and animal; it is so in human life. It will be found that men and women as they increase in complexity can enter into a numberless variety of relationships, abandoning no good gift that they now possess, but adding to their powers indefinitely, and thence to their emotions and experiences. The action of the man's nature upon the woman's and of the woman's upon the man's, is now only known in a few instances; there is a whole world yet to explore in this direction, and it is more than probable that the future holds a discovery in the domain of spirit as great as that of Columbus in the domain of matter.
With regard to the dangers attending these readjustments, there is no doubt much to be said. The evils that hedge around marriage are linked with other evils, so that movement is difficult and perilous indeed. Nevertheless, we have to remember that we now live in the midst of dangers, and that human happiness is cruelly murdered by our systems of legalized injustice. By sitting still circumspectly and treating our social system as if it were a card-house which would tumble down at a breath, we merely wait to see it fall from its own internal rottenness, and then we shall have dangers to encounter indeed! The time has come, not for violent overturning of established institutions before people admit that they are evil, but for a gradual alteration of opinion which will rebuild them from the very foundation. The method of the most enlightened reformer is to crowd out old evil by new good, and to seek to sow the seed of the nobler future where alone it can take root and grow to its full height: in the souls of men and women. Far-seeing we ought to be, but we know in our hearts right well that fear will never lead us to the height of our ever-growing possibility. Evolution has ceased to be a power driving us like dead leaves on a gale; thanks to science, we are no longer entirely blind, and we aspire to direct that mighty force for the good of humanity. We see a limitless field of possibility opening out before us; the adventurous spirit in us might leap up at the wonderful romance of life! We recognize that no power, however trivial, fails to count in the general sum of things which moves this way or that�towards heaven or hell, according to the preponderating motives of individual units. We shall begin, slowly but surely, to see the folly of permitting the forces of one sex to pull against and neutralize the workings of the other, to the confusion of our efforts and the checking of our progress. We shall see, in the relations of men and women to one another, the source of all good or of all evil, precisely as those relations are true and noble and equal,
2. Mrs. Cady Stanton believes that there is a sex stimulated to their utmost only by men [Caird's in mind, and that men can only be inspired to their note], Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815�1902), highest achievements by women, while women are prominent American women's suffragist.
.
BESANT: THE QUEEN'S REIGN / 1605
or false and low and unjust. With this belief we shall seek to move opinion in all the directions that may bring us to this "consummation devoutly to be wished,"3 and we look forward steadily, hoping and working for the day when men and women shall be comrades and fellow-workers as well as lovers and husbands and wives, when the rich and many-sided happiness which they have the power to bestow one on another shall no longer be enjoyed in tantalizing snatches, but shall gladden and give new life to all humanity. That will be the day prophesied by Lewis Morris4 in The New Order�
"When man and woman in an equal union Shall merge, and marriage be a true communion."
1888
3. Cf. Shakespeare's Hamlet 3.1.65-66. 4. Welsh poet (1833-1907). WALTER BESANT
Besant (1836�1901) was a literary critic, historian, and novelist. His history The Queens Reign (1897) celebrated the improvements that he felt he had witnessed during his lifetime.
From The Queen's Reign
[THE TRANSFORMATION OF WOMEN'S STATUS BETWEEN 183 7 AND 1897 ]
Let me present to you, first, an early Victorian girl, born about the Waterloo year;1 next, her granddaughter, born about 1875.* * *
The young lady of 1837 * * * cannot reason on any subject whatever because of her ignorance�as she herself would say, because she is a woman. In her presence, and indeed in the presence of ladies generally, men talk trivialities. * * * It has often been charged against Thackeray2 that his good women were insipid. Thackeray, like most artists, could only draw the women of his own time, and at that time they were undoubtedly insipid. Men, I suppose, liked them so. To be childishly ignorant; to carry shrinking modesty so far as to find the point of a shoe projecting beyond the folds of a frock indelicate; to confess that serious subjects were beyond a woman's grasp; never even to pretend to form an independent judgment; to know nothing of Art, History, Science, Literature, Politics, Sociology, Manners�men liked these things; women yielded to please the men; her very ignorance formed a subject of laudable pride with the Englishwoman of the Forties. * * * There was something Oriental in the seclusion of women in the home, and their exclusion from active and practical life.
1. I.e., 1815, the year Napoleon Bonaparte was British novelist. The character of Amelia Sedley, in defeated by British and Prussian forces at the Bat-his novel Vanity Fair (1848), is cited by Besant as tle of Waterloo. typical of the "insipid" women of the 1840s. 2. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863),
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1 582 / THE "WOMAN QUESTION"
Let us turn to the Englishwoman�the young Englishwoman�of 1897. She is educated. Whatever things are taught to the young man are taught to the young woman. If she wants to explore the wickedness of the world she can do so, for it is all in the books. The secrets of Nature are not closed to her; she can learn the structure of the body if she wishes. At school, at college, she studies just as the young man studies, but harder and with greater concentration. * * * She has invaded the professions. She cannot become a priest, because the Oriental prejudice against women still prevails, so that women in High Church places are not allowed to sing in the choir, or to play the organ, not to speak of preaching. * * * In the same way she cannot enter the Law. Some day she will get over this restriction, but not yet. For a long time she was kept out of medicine. That restriction is now removed; she can, and she does, practice as a physician or a surgeon, generally the former.3 I believe that she has shown in this profession, as in her university studies, she can stand, inter pares,4 among her equals and her peers, not her superiors. There is no branch of literature in which women have not distinguished themselves. * * * In music they compose, but not greatly; they play and sing divinely. The acting of the best among them is equal to that of any living man. They have become journalists, in some cases of remarkable ability; in fact, there are thousands of women who now make their livelihood by writing in all its branches. As for the less common professions�the accountants, architects, actuaries, agents� they are rapidly being taken over by women.
It is no longer a question of necessity; women do not ask themselves whether they must earn their own bread, or live a life of dependence. Necessity or no necessity they demand work, with independence and personal liberty. Whether they will take upon them the duties and responsibilities of marriage, they postpone for further consideration. I believe that, although in the first eager running there are many who profess to despise marriage, the voice of nature and the instinctive yearning for love will prevail.
Personal independence: that is the keynote of the situation. Mothers no longer attempt the old control over their daughters: they would find it impossible. The girls go off by themselves on their bicycles;' they go about as they please; they neither compromise themselves nor get talked about. For the first time in man's history it is regarded as a right and proper thing to trust a girl as a boy insists upon being trusted. Out of this personal freedom will come, I daresay, a change in the old feelings of young man to maiden. He will not see in her a frail, tender plant which must be protected from cold winds; she can protect herself perfectly well. He will not see in her any longer a creature of sweet emotions and pure aspirations, coupled with a complete ignorance of the world, because she already knows all that she wants to know. Nor will he see in her a companion whose mind is a blank, and whose conversation is insipid, because she already knows as much as he knows himself. Nor, again, will he see in her a housewife whose whole time will be occupied in superintending servants or in making, brewing, confecting things with her own hand.
3. The first woman to have her name placed on 4. Among equals (Latin). the British Medical Register was Elizabeth Black-5. Modern bicycles (with wheels of equal size and well (who earned her degree in the United States), pneumatic tires) began to be manufactured in the in 1859; it took another two decades for women to late 1880s and became extremely popular in gain the right to study and take the required exam-Europe and the United States. inations in medicine in Great Britain.
.
EMPIRE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY / 160 7
EMPIRE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
Great Britain during Victoria's reign was not just a powerful island nation. It was the center of a global empire that brought the British into contact with a wide variety of other cultures, though the exchange was usually an unequal one. By the end of the nineteenth century, nearly one-quarter of the earth's land surface was part of the British Empire, and more than four hundred million people were governed (however nominally) from Great Britain. Queen Victoria's far-flung empire was a truly heterogeneous entity, controlled by heterogeneous practices. It included Crown Colonies such as Jamaica, ruled from Britain, and protectorates such as Uganda, which had relinquished only partial sovereignty to Britain. Ireland was a kind of internal colony whose demands for home rule were alternately entertained and discounted. India had started the century under the control of a private entity, the East India Company, but was ruled directly from Britain after the 1857 Indian Mutiny (the first war of Indian independence), and Victoria was crowned empress of India in 1877. Canada, with its substantial European population, had been virtually self-governing from the middle of the nineteenth century onward and was increasingly considered a near- equal partner in the imperial project; Australia enjoyed a parallel status, despite its inauspicious earlier history as the site of British penal colonies. By contrast, colonies and protectorates with large indigenous populations, such as Sierra Leone, or with large transplanted populations of ex-slaves and non-European laborers, such as Trinidad, would not gain autonomy until the twentieth century.
The scope of imperial enterprise at the close of the Victorian era is especially astounding given Britain's catastrophic loss of its American colonies (historians generally view the American Bevolution of 1776 as marking the end of the first British Empire). But although empire was never a central preoccupation of the government during the first half of the nineteenth century, the second empire had continued to grow; Britain acquired a number of new territories, greatly expanded its colonies in Australia and Canada (which saw large-scale British emigration), and steadily pushed its way across the Indian subcontinent. A far more rapid expansion took place between 1870 and 1900, three decades that witnessed "the new imperialism"�a significantly different British mode of empire building that would continue until World War I (1914�18). Britain's rivalry with its European neighbors was an instrumental factor: the balance of power in Europe had shifted in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War (1870�71), leading to competition for new territories. Particularly fierce was "the scramble for Africa," as the partitioning of that continent was called. Expansion did not go unchallenged�the British fought both with indigenous peoples and with other European powers or settlers in numerous conflicts�but it progressed at an astonishing pace nonetheless.
To summarize Britain's attitude toward its imperial activities over the centuries is no easy task. The historian Sir John Seeley famously remarked in The Ex-pansion of England (1883) that "we seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind," but many would now argue that economic motives were always present, and that Britain was driven to claim territories outside its national borders primarily by the urge to obtain raw materials such as sugar, spices, tea, tin, and rubber; to procure markets for its own goods; and to secure trade routes. From this perspective Britain's enhanced national pride in its expanding physical size, and thus ever-increasing political and military clout, was an important side effect of commercial growth but did not instigate its exploits overseas. To look at the British Empire in this way is to see it at its most naked, and to confront head-on the desire for financial profit that occasioned the physical violence and cultural devastation that so often accompanied its arrival in, and occupation of, another land. As Marlow comments in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too
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160 8 / EMPIRE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
much." But Conrad's storyteller cannot leave it at that, adding, "What redeems it is the idea only." As we try to understand, if not redeem, the British Empire, we must investigate some of the principal ideas that collected around this huge and diverse phenomenon, and that underwent significant shifts over the decades of Victoria's reign.
Joseph Chamberlain asserts in "The True Conception of Empire" (1897) that the balance sheet dictated what early-nineteenth-century Britons thought about their relationship with the colonies: having in the previous century "appeared rather in the light of a grasping and absentee landlord desiring to take from his tenants the utmost rents he could exact," Britain, shaken by its American losses, worried that some of its overseas enterprises would prove a financial drain. Yet India was another story, and by 1800 the importance to British prosperity of the trading opportunities in that continent was already viewed as axiomatic. In managing its businesses, however, the East India Company grew progressively more entangled with issues of Indian administration and politics; in its turn the British government became increasingly concerned with overseeing, and ultimately taking over, these functions. From this state of affairs a notion of trusteeship began to emerge�a belief that Britain had the responsibility to provide good government for the Indian people. Underlying this conviction was the assumption that Britain would thereby bestow the benefits of its culturally and morally superior civilization upon a lesser people (Thomas Babington Macaulay's confident pronouncements in his 1835 "Minute on Indian Education" evince this sentiment with particular succinctness). Evangelical Christianity played a contributory role as well, and not just through the missionaries who worked in India beginning in the early nineteenth century. More broadly, for the majority of Britons who believed that Protestantism was the one true faith, and that it was their religious duty to bring the potential for salvation to as many souls as possible, the imposition of British rule was divinely sanctioned. But there was still no widespread popular or governmental enthusiasm for the idea of imperialism as Britain's special destiny, and various factors, not least England's long and troubled relationship with Ireland, ensured that many viewed the project of colonial rule with suspicion throughout the middle years of the century. With the rise of the new imperialism, however, preexisting ideas about Britain's superiority, now bolstered by supposedly "scientific" theories supporting the notion of its evolutionary advancement, were channeled into a romantic vision of the British Empire as a tremendous force for the good not only of the residents of Great Britain or those overseas of traditionally "British" descent but of the whole world. In the last three decades of Victoria's rule (and well into the twentieth century), a large proportion of British people took pride simultaneously in the global supremacy of their empire and in what they perceived to be their generous and selfless willingness to pick up the thankless, but necessary, task of imperial rule ("the white man's burden," as Rudyard Kipling would call it in another context). Only if we appreciate just how genuinely many Britons believed that they and their country were performing a noble duty can we begin to make sense of the feelings of outraged surprise and betrayal (often accompanied by virulent racism and vicious reprisals) that erupted when subjugated peoples periodically rose up against British control.
The British Empire had an incalculable physical and psychological impact on the individuals and cultures it colonized, but it also significantly changed the colonizers themselves, both at home and abroad. The need to concentrate on the imperial mission affected in theoretical and practical ways the consolidation of a specifically British identity: the conflicted relations and characteristic differences between people from the various parts of the British Isles (politically dominant England and long- conquered Wales, Scotland, and Ireland) appeared less significant when set against the much more obvious inequities of power and greater cultural, racial, religious, and linguistic differences across the globe. A number of similar processes worked to solidify nationhood more generally. For instance, members of the working class in Great Britain only rarely connected their subordination to the English ruling class with that suffered by colonized peoples: they were much more likely to understand their identity
.
EMPIRE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY / 160 9
through those "ties of kindred, of religion, of history, and of language," as Chamberlain puts it, that bound them to other historically British citizens, however privileged. Intensified competition with the empire-building powers of continental Europe after the Franco-Prussian War also played an important role, as did the mounting stridency of other nationalist movements abroad. In the last quarter of the century, the patriotic fervor celebrating the achievements of the British nation as a whole increased dramatically� a phenomenon undoubtedly assisted by the growth both in the size of the reading public (literacy was practically universal in Britain by 1900, thanks to the progressive extension of elementary education) and in the number of flag-waving newspapers, periodicals, and books available for it to consume.
The citizens of Great Britain were thus welded into a more cohesive whole. But few of them were ready to accept the peoples of the colonies (and especially indigenous nonwhite populations) as truly "British," despite the inclusive rhetoric of empire (the "one imperial whole" that Alfred, Lord Tennyson salutes in his poem on the opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition of 1886). Of course, there were exceptions: recounting his experiences on a visit to Britain for that same exhibition, the Indian T. N. Mukharji remembers that on one occasion in London, "somebody called me a foreigner. 'He is no foreigner!' cried several voices, 'He is a British subject as you and I.' " To J. A. Hobson, the author of the influential Imperialism: A Study (1902), the importance of this casual affirmation of shared subjecthood was negligible, given that "not five per cent of the population of our Empire are possessed of any appreciable portion of the political and civil liberties which are the basis of British civilisation." Writing after Britain's imperial confidence had been severely damaged by the unanticipated length and difficulty of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 in South Africa, Hobson in his meticulous analysis aimed not only to cast serious doubt on imperialism's putative financial benefit to Britain but also to demonstrate the overall falsity of the empire's claim to support the extension of self-government in its territories. In exposing the repeated misrepresentations and self-servingjustifications at the heart of the British Empire, Hobson joined voices with others around the globe, such as the West Indian intellectual J.J. Thomas, and entered a tradition of anti- imperial critique that was to grow exponentially in the twentieth century.
It is instructive to consider the following discussions of Britain's relationship with other parts of the world, and its understanding of its own identity, in the context of a number of other selections. The popularity of Edward FitzGerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859) testifies to the Victorians' fascination with what they saw as the exotic appeal of distant cultures; Tennyson's poem "Locksley Hall" (1842) also reflects on "yonder shining Orient." Matthew Arnold's prose writings frequently address the issue of national character, while John Henry Newman sets forth an ideal of English manliness in his "definition of a gentleman" in Discourse 8 of The Idea of a University (1852). Versions of this ideal from the apex of Great Britain's period of national pride appear in two highly popular poems, W. E. Henley's "Invictus" (1888) and Kipling's "If' (1910); Kipling's other poems and his novella The Man Who Would Be King (1888) are also essential reading for those interested in the intensification of imperial enthusiasm at the end of Victoria's reign. At the same time we should heed the warning of the postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak against limiting any investigation of empire and national identity only to those writings that seem overtly concerned with the topic. "It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature," she insists at the beginning of an analysis of Charlotte Bronte's
Jane Eyre (1847), "without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English." In other words, images, explanations, and justifications of this massive enterprise were continually created and reflected throughout the pages of a wide range of Victorian texts.
For additional texts on the subject of empire, see "Victorian Imperialism" at Norton Literature Online.
.
1 1610
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
The historian, essayist, and parliamentarian Macaulay (1800�1859) served as a member of the supreme council of the East India Company from 1834 to 1838, and in that capacity he oversaw major educational and legal reforms. His "Minute," or official memorandum, was written to rebut those council members who believed that Indian students should continue to be educated in Sanskrit and Persian as well as in English; Macaulay's party carried the argument.
From Minute on Indian Education
We now come to the gist of the matter. We have a fund to be employed as Government shall direct for the intellectual improvement of the people of this country. The simple question is, what is the most useful way of employing it?
All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary or scientific information, and are, moreover, so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them. It seems to be admitted on all sides that the intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at present be effected only by means of some language not vernacular amongst them.
What, then, shall that language be? One half of the Committee maintain that it should be the English. The other half strongly recommend the Arabic1 and Sanscrit. The whole question seems to me to be, which language is the best worth knowing?
I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic.�But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the Committee who support the Oriental plan of education.
It will hardly be disputed, I suppose, that the department of literature in which the Eastern writers stand highest is poetry. And I certainly never met with any Orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But, when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of
1. Actually Persian, the language (written in Arabic script) of the Mogul dynasty that had ruled much of India since the 16th century.
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MACAULAY: MINUTE ON INDIAN EDUCATION / 1611
physical or moral philosophy the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same.
How, then, stands the case? We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessarily to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West. It abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us; with models of every species of eloquence; with historical compositions, which, considered merely as narratives, have seldom been surpassed, and which, considered as vehicles of ethical and political instruction, have never been equalled; with just and lively representations of human life and human nature; with the most profound speculations on metaphysics, morals, government, jurisprudence, and trade; with full and correct information respecting every experimental science which tends to preserve the health, to increase the comfort, or to expand the intellect of man. Whoever knows that language, has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth, which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations. It may safely be said that the literature now extant in that language is of far greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world spoken together. Nor is this all. In India, English is the language spoken by the ruling class. It is spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of Government. It is likely to become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East. It is the language of two great European communities which are rising, the one in the south of Africa, the other in Australasia; communities which are every year becoming more important, and more closely connected with our Indian empire. Whether we look at the intrinsic value of our literature or at the particular situation of this country, we shall see the strongest reason to think that, of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would be the most useful to our native subjects.
* � � * * * It is said that the Sanscrit and Arabic are the languages in which the sacred books of a hundred millions of people are written, and that they are, on that account, entitled to peculiar2 encouragement. Assuredly it is the duty of the British Government in India to be not only tolerant, but neutral on all religious questions. But to encourage the study of a literature admitted to be of small intrinsic value only because that literature inculcates the most serious errors on the most important subjects, is a course hardly reconcilable with reason, with morality, or even with that very neutrality which ought, as we all agree, to be sacredly preserved. It is confessed that a language is barren of useful knowledge. We are told to teach it because it is fruitful of monstrous superstitions. We are to teach false history, false astronomy, false medicine, because we find them in company with a false religion.
� � �
In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am opposed. I feel, with them, that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to
2. Special.
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1612 / EMPIRE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
* * *
1835 1835
WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL
One of the first war correspondents, the Irish-born Russell (1820�1907) became famous for his dispatches to the London Times during the Crimean War (1854�56) and later reported on the American Civil War (1861�65). After the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny (1857�59), a rebellion of native troops and peasantry, later referred to in India as the First War of Indian Independence, Russell traveled to northern India to report on the revolt's suppression by British troops. More sympathetic toward the Indians than most Victorians, Russell debunked many of the most shocking rumors about the rape, torture, and killing of British people and criticized the cruelty of indiscriminate British reprisals. In the following excerpts he reflects on the fate of the British community at Cawnpore, which surrendered to the Indian rebels and was subsequently massacred.
From My Diary in India, In the Year 1858�9
[CAWNPORE]
February 12th.�4 4 4 The scenes where great crimes have been perpetrated ever possess an interest, which I would not undertake to stigmatise as morbid; and surely among the sites rendered infamous for all time, Cawnpore will be pre-eminent as the magnitude of the atrocities with which it is connected. But, though pre-eminent among crimes, the massacre of Cawnpore is by no means singular or unprecedented in any of the circumstances which mark turpitude and profundity of guilt. We who suffered from it think that there never was such wickedness in the world, and the incessant efforts of a gang of forgers and utterers of lies have surrounded it with horrors needlessly invented in the hope of adding to the indignation and burning desire for vengeance which the naked facts aroused. Helpless garrisons, surrendering under capitulation, have been massacred ere now; men, women, and children have been ruthlessly butchered by the enemies of their race ere now; risings, such as that of the people of Pontus under Mithridates, of the Irish Roman Catholics against the Protestant settlers in 1641, of the actors in the Sicilian vespers, of the assassins who smote and spared none on the eve of St. Bartholomew,1 have taken place before, and have been over and over again
1. All incidents in which culturally or religiously dominant population. Mithradates VI, the ruler of distinct minorities were attacked by members of a Pontus, a kingdom of northeast Asia Minor, led his
.
RUSSELL: MY DIARY IN INDIA, IN THE YEAR 1858-9 / 1613
attended by inhuman cruelty, violation, and torture. The history of mediaeval Europe affords many instances of crimes as great as those of Cawnpore; the history of civilized nations could afford some parallel to them even in modern times. In fact, the peculiar2 aggravation of the Cawnpore massacres was this, that the deed was done by a subject race�by black men who dared to shed the blood of their masters and mistresses, and to butcher poor helpless ladies and children, who were the women and offspring of the dominant and conquering people. Here we had not only a servile war and a sort of Jacquerie3 combined, but we had a war of religion, a war of race, a war of revenge, mingled together in a contest in which the insurgents were also actuated by some national promptings to shake off the yoke of a stranger, and to reestablish the full power of native chiefs, and the full sway of native religions. There is a kind of God's revenge against murder in the unsuccessful issue of all enterprises commenced in massacre, and carried on by cruelty and bloodshed. Whatever the causes of the mutiny and the revolt, it is clear enough that one of the modes by which the leaders, as if by common instinct, determined to effect their end was, the destruction of every white man, woman, or child who fell into their hands�a design which the kindliness of the people, or motives of policy, frustrated on many remarkable occasions. It must be remembered that the punishments of the Hindoo are cruel, and whether he be mild or not, he certainly is not, any more than the Mussulman,4 distinguished for clemency towards his enemies. But philosophize and theorize as we may, Cawnpore will be a name ever heard by English ears with horror long after
the present generation has passed away.
* * *
Februar)' 13th.�* * * The difficulty, in my mind, was to believe that it [Cawnpore] could ever have been defended at all. Make every allowance for the effects of weather, for circumstances, it is still the most wretched defensive position that could be imagined. Honour to those who defended it! Pity for their fate! Above all, pity for the lot of those whom the strong arms and brave hearts failed to save from the unknown dangers of that foul treachery! It was a horrible spot! Inside the shattered rooms, which had been the scene of such devotion and suffering, are heaps of rubbish and filth. The intrenchment is used as a cloaca maxima5 by the natives, camp-followers, coolies, and others who bivouac in the sandy plains around it. The smells are revolting. Bows of gorged vultures sit with outspread wings on the mouldering parapets, or perch in clusters on the two or three leafless trees at the angle of the works by which we enter. I shot one with my revolver; and as the revolting creature disgorged its meal, twisting its bare black snake-like neck to and fro, I made a vow I would never incur the risk of beholding such a disgusting sight again.
a � *
armies to massacre Roman and Italian residents in Asia in 88 B.C.E. In 1641 in Ulster, a county in northern Ireland, dispossessed native Irish Catholics rose up against English and Scottish Protestant settlers. Sicilians rebelled in 1282 against Charles I, the French-born king of Naples (son of Louis VIII and brother of Louis IX of France). In 1572, on the evening before the feast day of St. Bartholomew (August 24), some Catholic nobles in the French royal court began a massacre of
Huguenots (French Protestants), giving new impetus to a lengthy religious civil war.
2. Particular. 3. Peasant rebellion; the term derives from the 1358 uprising of peasants, known derisively as "Jacques," against nobles in northern France. 4. Muslim. 5. Largest sewer (Latin), after the main sewer draining northeast Rome (which even in the classical period was covered).
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1614 / EMPIRE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
February 14th.�* * 4 All the country about Cawnpore is covered with the finest powdered dust, two or three inches deep, which rises into the air on the smallest provocation. It is composed of sand, pulverized earth, and the brick powder and mortar of the dilapidated houses; whatever, in fact, can turn into dust. As the natives shuffle along, their pointed slippers fling up suffocating clouds of this unpleasant compound, and when these slippers are multiplied by thousands, the air is filled with a floating stratum of it, fifteen or eighteen feet high, and extending over the whole of the station. Even in the old days, when the roads were watered, the station of Cawnpore had a bad notoriety for dust. What an earthquake to shake to pieces, what a volcano to smother with lava and ashes, has this mutiny been! Not alone cities, but confidence and trust have gone, never more to be restored!
Among those heaps of dust and ashes, those arid mounds of brick, those new-made trenches, I try in vain to realize what was once this station of Cawnpore. The solemn etiquette, the visits to the Brigadier and the General en grande tenue, the invitations to dinner, the white kid-gloves, the balls, the liveries, the affectation of the -plus haut des hauts tons, the millinery anxieties of the ladies, the ices, and champagne, and supper, the golden-robed Nana Sahib,6 moving about amid haughty stares and ill-concealed dislike. "What the deuce does the General ask that nigger here for?" The little and big flirtations, the drives on the road�a dull, ceremonious pleasure�the faded fun of the private theatricals, the exotic absurdities of the masonic revels, the marryings and givings in marriage, the little bills done by the rich bunneahs,7 the small and great pecuniary relations between the station and the bazaar, the sense of security�and then on all this exaggerated relief of an English garrison- town and watering-place, the deep gloom of apprehension�at first "a shave of old Smith's,"8 then a well-authenticated report, then a certainty of disaffection� rolling like thunder-clouds, and darkening the glassy surface of the gay society till it burst on it in stormy and cruel reality. But I cannot.
"Ah! you should have seen Cawnpore in its palmy days, when there were two cavalry regiments here, a lot of artillery, and three regiments of infantry in the cantonments.9 Chock full of pretty women! The private theatricals every week; balls, and picnics, and dinners every evening. By Jove! it's too horrible to look at it now!" And so, indeed, it was. But one is tempted to ask if there is not some lesson and some warning given to our race in reference to India by the tremendous catastrophe of Cawnpore? I am deeply impressed by the difficulty of ruling India, as it is now governed by force, exercised by a few who are obliged to employ natives as the instruments of coercion. That force is the base of our rule I have no doubt; for I see nothing else but force employed in our relations with the governed. The efforts to improve the condition of the people are made by bodies or individuals who have no connection with the Government. The action of the Government in matters of improvement is only excited by considerations of revenue. Does it�as the great instructor of the people, the exponent of our superior morality and civilization�does it observe treaties, keep faith, pursue a fixed and equitable policy, and follow the precepts of Christianity in its conduct towards states and peoples? Are not our courts of law con
6. A dispossessed Hindu ruler who took at least 8. An unconfirmed report (military slang) of an nominal charge of the rebel forces at Cawnpore incident from Lieutenant Colonel George Acklom and who was seen by many British as the master-Smith at his post at Fatehgarh, sixty miles from mind behind the massacres. "En grande tenue": in Cawnpore. full military dress (French). "Plus haut des hauts 9. Permanent military stations in British India. tons": the highest of high fashions (French). "Palmy": prosperous. 7. The receipts written up by wealthy merchants.
.
COOK: THE ENGLISHMAN / 1615
demned by ourselves? Are not our police admitted to be a curse and a blight upon the country? In effect, the grave, unhappy doubt which settles on my mind is, whether India is the better for our rule, so far as regards the social condition of the great mass of the people. We have put down widow-burning,1 we have sought to check infanticide; but I have travelled hundreds of miles through a country peopled with beggars and covered with wigwam villages.
1858-59 1860
1. Suttee, the custom of a Hindu widow willingly immolating herself on her husband's funeral pyre; it was outlawed by the British in 1829. ELIZA COOK
A mainly self-educated poet of working-class origins, Cook (1818�1889) published her first collection of verse when she was seventeen; many of her poems, such as "The Englishman" (1851), were widely popular. Beginning in 1849, Cook edited her own periodical, Eliza Cook's Journal, which proved a great success with her middle- class audience. Poor health forced her to discontinue publication of the journal in 1854, and in later life she produced far fewer poems than in her prolific youth.
The Englishman
There's a land that bears a world-known name, Though it is but a little spot; I say 'tis first on the scroll of fame, And who shall aver it is not. 5 Of the deathless ones who shine and live In arms, in arts, or song, The brightest the whole wide world can give To that little land belong. 'Tis the star of earth, deny it who can, io The island home of an Englishman.
There's a flag that waves o'er every sea, No matter when or where; And to treat that flag as aught but the free Is more than the strongest dare. 15 For the lion spirits that tread the deck Have carried the palm1 of the brave; And that flag may sink with a shot-torn wreck, But never float over a slave. Its honour is stainless, deny it who can, 20 And this is the flag of an Englishman.
There's a heart that leaps with burning glow, The wronged and the weak to defend; And strikes as soon for a trampled foe
1. Palm branch, symbol of victory. "Lion spirits": the lion is the national emblem of Britain.
.
161 6 / EMPIRE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
As it does for a soul-bound friend. 25 It nurtures a deep and honest love, The passions of faith and pride, And yearns with the fondness of a dove To the light of its own fireside. 'Tis a rich rough gem, deny it who can, 30 And this is the heart of an Englishman.
The Briton may traverse the pole or the zone And boldly claim his right; For he calls such a vast domain his own, That the sun never sets on his might. 35 Let the haughty stranger seek to know The place of his home and birth; And a flush will pour from cheek to brow While he tells his native earth. For a glorious charter," deny it who can, privilege40 Is breathed in the words "I'm an Englishman."
1851
CHARLES MACKAY
A successful journalist and poet, Mackay (1814�1889) also served for several years as the editor of the Illustrated London News. In the song collection The Emigrants, issued as a musical supplement to that periodical and frequently reprinted, Mackay focuses on emigration from Britain to Canada, a colony that had achieved self- governing status by the 1850s. During that decade, on average more than three hundred thousand people a year left the British Isles; these emigrants, large numbers of whom were fleeing poverty, hunger, and political upheaval in Ireland and Scotland, headed overwhelmingly to the United States and Canada.
From The Emigrants A Series of Songs for a Musical Entertainment
II. CHEER, BOYS! CHEER! I Cheer, boys! cheer! no more of idle sorrow, Courage, true hearts, shall bear us on our way! Hope points before, and shows the bright to-morrow, Let us forget the darkness of to-day! So farewell, England! Much as we may love thee, We'll dry the tears that we have shed before; Why should we weep to sail in search of fortune? So farewell, England! farewell evermore! Cheer, boys! cheer! for England, mother England! io Cheer, boys! cheer! the willing strong right hand, Cheer, boys! cheer! there's work for honest labour� Cheer, boys! cheer!�in the new and happy land!
.
MACKAY: THE EMIGRANTS / 1617
II Cheer, boys! cheer! the steady breeze is blowing, To float us freely o'er the ocean's breast; The world shall follow in the track we're going, The star of empire glitters in the west. 5 Here we had toil and little to reward it, But there shall plenty smile upon our pain, And ours shall be the mountain and the forest, And boundless prairies ripe with golden grain. Cheer, boys! cheer! for England, mother England! io Cheer, boys! cheer! united heart and hand!� Cheer, boys! cheer! there's wealth for honest labour� Cheer, boys! cheer!�in the new and happy land!
III. FAR, FAR UPON THE SEA. I Far, far upon the sea, The good ship speeding free, Upon the deck we gather young and old; And view the flapping sail, 5 Spreading out before the gale, Full and round without a wrinkle or a fold: Or watch the waves that glide By the stately vessel's side, And the wild sea-birds that follow through the air. io Or we gather in a ring, And with cheerful voices sing,
'Oh! gaily goes the ship when the wind hlows fair.'
II Far, far upon the sea, With the sunshine on our lee,� sheltered side
We talk of pleasant days when we were young, And remember, though we roam, 5 The sweet melodies of home �
The songs of happy childhood which we sung. And though we quit her shore, To return to it no more,
Sound the glories that Britannia yet shall bear; io That 'Britons rule the waves,' 'And never shall be slaves.'1
'Oh! gaily goes the ship when the wind hlows fair.'
ill Far, far upon the sea, Whate'er our country be, The thought of it shall cheer us as we go. And Scotland's sons shall join, 5 In the song of 'Auld lang Syne,'2 With voice by memory soften'd, clear and low,
1. Allusion to the refrain of "Rule, Britannia" 2. Long ago (Scots); the title of a famous Scottish (1740), a song with words by James Thomson and song whose lyrics were composed or given standard music by Thomas Arne. form in 1 796 by Robert Burns.
.
1618 / EMPIRE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
And the men of Erin's Isle,� Ireland Battling sorrow with a smile, Shall sing 'St Patrick's Morning,'3 void of care; io And thus we pass the day As we journey on the way;�
'Oh! gaily goes the ship when the wind blows fair.'
1855
3. A title shared by a number of traditional Irish folk songs. ANONYMOUS
In 1845 potato blight severely damaged the crop in Ireland. Its return over the next several years caused widespread famine and disease, killing 1.5 million people and leading another million to emigrate. The British government's wholly inadequate response to the famine, which included exporting grain from Ireland while Irish people starved, contributed to the long-standing bitterness against British rule. Some came together in 1858 to advocate the use of force to liberate Ireland; taking their name from a group of legendary Irish warriors, they called themselves the Fenians, or Irish Bepublican Brotherhood, forerunners of the Irish Bepublican Army. Often thwarted by British infiltration of their ranks, the Fenians organized a rebellion in March 1867 that the British easily quelled. The Nation, a newspaper established in 1842 to promote Irish self-government, published the following statement around the time of that uprising.
[Proclamation of an Irish Republic]
The Irish People to the World
We have suffered centuries of outrage, enforced poverty, and bitter misery. Our rights and liberties have been trampled on by an alien aristocracy, who, treating us as foes, usurped our lands, and drew away from our unfortunate country all material riches. The real owners of the soil were removed to make room for cattle, and driven across the ocean to seek the means of living, and the political rights denied to them at home, while our men of thought and action were condemned to loss of life and liberty. But we never lost the memory and hope of a national existence. We appealed in vain to the reason and sense of justice of the dominant powers.
Our mildest remonstrances were met with sneers and contempt. Our appeals to arms were always unsuccessful.
To-day, having no honourable alternative left, we again appeal to force as our last resource. We accept the conditions of appeal, manfully deeming it better to die in the struggle for freedom than to continue an existence of utter serfdom.
All men are born with equal rights, and in associating to protect one another and share public burthens, justice demands that such associations should rest upon a basis which maintains equality instead of destroying it.
We therefore declare that, unable longer to endure the curse of Monarchical
.
ARNOLD: ON THE STUDY OF CELTIC LITERATURE / 1619
Government, we aim at founding a Republic based on universal suffrage, which shall secure to all the intrinsic value of their labour. The soil of Ireland, at present in the possession of an oligarchy, belongs to us, the Irish people, and to us it must be restored. We declare, also, in favour of absolute liberty of conscience, and the complete separation of Church and State.
We appeal to the Highest Tribunal for evidence of the justness of our cause. History bears testimony to the intensity of our sufferings, and we declare, in the face of our brethren, that we intend no war against the people of England�our war is against the aristocratic locusts, whether English or Irish, who have eaten the verdure of our fields�against the aristocratic leeches who drain alike our fields and theirs.
Republicans of the entire world, our cause is your cause. Our enemy is your enemy. Let your hearts be with us. As for you, workmen of England, it is not only your hearts we wish, but your arms. Remember the starvation and degradation brought to your firesides by the oppression of labour. Remember the past, look well to the future, and avenge yourselves by giving liberty to your children in the coming struggle for human liberty.
Herewith we proclaim the Irish Republic,
THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT.
1867
MATTHEW ARNOLD
The following selection comes from a series of lectures on Celtic literature delivered by Arnold (1822�1888) in his capacity as professor of poetry at Oxford. Historically, the Celts were an ancient people who settled in Europe; their linguistic descendants survived in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Like many of his contemporaries, Arnold thought that national character was determined by "race"; as the critic Lionel Trilling remarks in his 1949 study of the British writer, "Arnold was at pains to show that the English are an amalgam of several 'bloods'�German, Norman, Celtic," each of which carried its own special characteristics and required the balance of the other components that made up English identity. At the end of his lectures, Arnold called on Oxford University to create a professorship of Celtic "to send .. . a message of peace to Ireland."
From On the Study of Celtic Literature
And as in material civilisation he has been ineffectual, so has the Celt been ineffectual in politics. This colossal, impetuous, adventurous wanderer, the Titan of the early world, who in primitive times fills so large a place on earth's scene, dwindles and dwindles as history goes on, and at last is shrunk to what we now see him. For ages and ages the world has been constantly slipping, ever more and more, out of the Celt's grasp. "They went forth to the war," Ossian says most truly, "but they always fell."1
1. A quotation from the poem "Cath-Loda," one of the works that the Scottish poet James Macpherson
.
1620 / EMPIRE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
And yet, if one sets about constituting an ideal genius, what a great deal of the Celt does one find oneself drawn to put into it! Of an ideal genius one does not want the elements, any of them, to be in a state of weakness; on the contrary, one wants all of them to be in the highest state of power; but with a law of measure, of harmony, presiding over the whole. So the sensibility2 of the Celt, if everything else were not sacrificed to it, is a beautiful and admirable force. For sensibility, the power of quick and strong perception and emotion, is one of the very prime constituents of genius, perhaps its most positive constituent; it is to the soul what good senses are to the body, the grand natural condition of successful activity. Sensibility gives genius its materials; one cannot have too much of it, if one can but keep its master and not be its slave. Do not let us wish that the Celt had had less sensibility, but that he had been more master of it. Even as it is, if his sensibility has been a source of weakness to him, it has been a source of power too, and a source of happiness. Some people have found in the Celtic nature and its sensibility the main root out of which chivalry and romance and the glorification of a feminine ideal spring; this is a great question, with which I cannot deal here. Let me notice in passing, however, that there is, in truth, a Celtic air about the extravagance of chivalry, its reaction against the despotism of fact, its straining human nature further than it will stand. But putting all this question of chivalry and its origin on one side, no doubt the sensibility of the Celtic nature, its nervous exaltation, have something feminine in them, and the Celt is thus peculiarly3 disposed to feel the spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy; he has an affinity to it; he is not far from its secret. Again, his sensibility gives him a peculiarly near and intimate feeling of nature and the life of nature; here, too, he seems in a special way attracted by the secret before him, the secret of natural beauty and natural magic, and to be close to it, to half-divine it. In the productions of the Celtic genius, nothing, perhaps, is so interesting as the evidences of this power: I shall have occasion to give specimens of them by-and-by. The same sensibility made the Celts full of reverence and enthusiasm for genius, learning, and the things of the mind; to be a bard, freed a man,�that is a characteristic stroke of this generous and ennobling ardour of theirs, which no race has ever shown more strongly. Even the extravagance and exaggeration of the sentimental Celtic nature has often something romantic and attractive about it, something which has a sort of smack of misdirected good. The Celt, undisciplinable, anarchical, and turbulent by nature, but out of affection and admiration giving himself body and soul to some leader, that is not a promising political temperament, it is just the opposite of the Anglo-Saxon temperament, disciplinable and steadily obedient within certain limits, but retaining an inalienable part of freedom and self-dependence; but it is a temperament for which one has a kind of sympathy notwithstanding. And very often, for the gay defiant reaction against fact of the lively Celtic nature one has more than sympathy; one feels, in spite of the extravagance, in spite of good sense disapproving, magnetised and exhilarated by it. The Gauls4 had a rule inflicting a fine on every warrior who, when he appeared on parade, was found to stick out too much in front,�to be corpulent, in short. Such a rule is surely the maddest article of war ever framed, and to people to whom nature has assigned a large
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