Victorian Britain
Content
VICTORIAN BRITAIN
When we describe Great Britain in the Victorian period, words like stability, progress, prosperity, reform, and Imperialism come to mind. The British had grounds for some satisfaction because evidence of great economic growth and technical progress seemed to abound. Despite the continued existence of widespread poverty, teeming, miserable slums and poor working conditions in many industries, the British could take some real pride in the obvious fact that the vast majority of British subjects were better fed, better housed, and enjoyed more of life's amenities than ever before. Politically, Great Britain enjoyed remarkable stability. From the moment of her accession, Queen Victoria (r. 18371901) showed the qualities that were to remain with her throughout her reign: a strong sense of duty, a conviction of moral righteousness, and a deep feeling for her country, “since it has pleased Providence to place me in this station,” she wrote in her diary, “I shall do my utmost to fulfill my duty towards my country; I am very young, and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced, but I am sure, that very few have more good will and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.” Queen Victoria’s marriage to the earnest young German prince, Albert of SaxeCoburgGotha, helped to establish the modern role of the British monarchy. Victoria and Albert quickly grasped the significance of the monarchy's new functions, which combined a small amount of political manipulation with an unlimited responsibility as the emotional and ceremonial focus of a people in social turmoil. It was Albert whose growing domination over his wife forced Victoria to take an interest in matters that had previously bored her, such as science and literature and even industrial progress.
The Crystal Palace: 1851
In 1849, Albert hit upon the idea of the Great Exhibition, “to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task of applied science and a new starting point from which all nations, will be able to direct their further exertions.” The prince's idea was approved by the Royal Society, and won the financial backing of industry and the general public, who subscribed £200,000 as guarantee. A Royal commission of architects and engineers was appointed to plan the building and exhibits. Out of 234 plans submitted, the commission, urged by the prince, eventually picked the most original design of all, a massive greenhouse designed by the head gardener of a northern duke. Joseph Paxton, however, was no mere gardener, but an engineer, railroad director, newspaper promoter, and imaginative architect in glass and iron. He offered a building 1,848 feet long, 308 feet broad, and 66 feet high, tall enough to cover the old elm trees already occupying the chosen site in Hyde Park. It was composed of massproduced and standardized parts, including over 6,000 15foot columns and over one million square feet of glass. It could be erected in seventeen weeks; and it could be, and was, dismantled and reerected in another part of London when the exhibition was over. In spite of many fears expressed over the building's durability, it survived until 1936. Inside it was a place of light illuminated by gas and electricity. The building overflowed with new wonders: the American Isaac Singer displayed a sewing machine, Alfiied Krupp of Essen displayed the world's largest cast iron cannon and the French displayed a machine that could stamp out 1,000 medals per hour. The British displayed new railway
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locomotives, held the world's first international photographic competition, and allowed visitors to send messages to Edinburgh by electric telegraph for a nominal charge. Progress seemed to be on the march. Prince Albert’s opening speech stressed the theme of human dominance over nature. He described the exhibition as a sign that “man is approaching a more complete fulfillment of that great and sacred mission which he has to perform in this world: to conquer nature to his use.” Not content with that, however, he also connected British economic success with the divine will: “In promoting [the progress of the human race], we are accomplishing the will of the great and blessed God.” (Spielvogel, p. 713) The Great exhibition of 1851 was a hymn of praise for the Idea of progress. Prince Albert, the royal consort of Queen Victoria, gave a speech at the opening ceremonies that attracted a great deal of attention and approval. He struck a note of optimism for the power of science — “Science discovers laws of power, motion and transformation; industry applies them to raw matter, which the earth yields in abundance, but which become valuable only by knowledge.” It was now possible to conquer nature by culture; that is, by the application of human knowledge and skill. (Loader) The London exposition made a great impact on most observers around the world. Many people resented the British Empire, many European nations chose to reject the British political system as a model, but everyone envied and admired British wealth. The economic historian Paul Kennedy has calculated that “with 2 of the world's population., Great Britain controlled about 45 of the world's industrial capacity.” (Kennedy, p. 151) These figures indicate that Britain was by far the wealthiest society on earth. It was also the world's most dynamic society. The Victorians were the first people to experience vast social and technological transformations as a constant factor in their lives. The British could certainty point out some stunning examples of economic and technical progress. The British justly boasted that their small kingdom was the "Workshop of the World." By 1850 such boasting was simple fact. The world was flooded with cheap, British products ranging from WattBoulton steam engines to Manchester cotton shirts. Other British products included household utensils from Birmingham, Josiah Wedgwood China, steam engines and ships, and the finest steel cutlery. The British economy was the wonder of the world, the engine that dragged an unwilling world into a new age. Britain exported over 170 million pounds sterling worth of products annually. The value of British trade was twice as high of that of its nearest competitor France, and three times as high as that of the United States. (Hobsbawn) Great Britain could also point out some examples of progress in dealing with the social misery of the 1830s and 1840s. One of the most striking examples lay in the declining death rate. Advances in public health such as the provision of clean water to the population of London, the improvements In sewage disposal, and improvement in the diet were bringing a close to a period dating back to the ancient world, when the urban populations of Europe would be vulnerable to epidemic diseases such as cholera. Far greater medical advances were in store: by 1851 Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch were well on their way to making stunning advances in bacteriology that would lead to the identification of the microorganism responsible for cholera, typhus, malaria., tuberculosis, diphtheria and bubonic plague.
Prosperity and Political Stability
By 1851 Great Britain was also the world's shipper, the center of the world's insurance and banking. It was also the source of much of the world's capital for investment. Most of the railways in the United States for example were built with British capital. More importantly,
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Britain's wealth was not limited to the upper classes alone. Beginning in the 1850s the industrial working class at last began to share in the general prosperity. The reason for this was largely the result of a great economic boom that that began about 1850 and lasted until the beginning of a worldwide economic constriction that began about 1873. During the years of prosperity, however, the British GNP increased by 3.2 per cent per year. Workers enjoyed a steady rise in real wages (30 per cent overall for the 2nd half of the 19th century). The British working class made some real political progress as well: labour unions were legalized; the right to strike was gradually recognized by all governments. One result, a very important result, was that Great Britain, alone of all European countries did not develop a powerful socialist movement. Great Britain alone of all European nations did not experience a major revolutionary upheaval during the 19th century. The prevailing mood, even in the British working class was confidence in the nation and its political institutions. In the revolutionary year 1848, when thrones toppled in France, Italy, and Germany, Britain remained an island of political stability. As the German economist Werner Sombart commented, “Against roast beef and apple pie, all dreams of socialist Utopias come to nothing.” This brings up an interesting historical problem. How did the British manage to deal with an industrial revolution that literally changed everything without seeing a great political upheaval occur at the same time? The British would have responded that the British political system provided a means for gradual reform. A number of reform bills (1832 and 1867) extended the vote to people in the lower middle class and working classes; in principle at least, it was possible for the British to address social problems through a peaceful process of reform within Parliament without reverting to violence. On the other hand, politics is only part of the story. HOW DO PEOPLE DEAL WITH SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES ON THIS SCALE? People try to make sense of changing conditions, they try to bring the dynamic under some type of control, ultimately, they try to create new standards, new responses. In many ways, Victorians wanted a sense that these tremendous forces of change had been brought under control but not eliminated. Change was not bad in itself, especially if it led to obvious, palpable improvements in the human condition.
VICTORIANISM
In the mid 19th century of Western Europe and the United States, the response to social change was a middle class complex of values and attitudes that we call Victorianism. One of the most distinctive aspects of Victorianism was the process by which other social classes came to accept the classic middle class virtues of self improvement, temperance, thrift, duty and character. In other words, it was the Middle Class (NOT THE ARISTOCRACY) who would set the tone for all of society in the midnineteenth century. The spread of Victorian morality ended the age of the aristocratic rake. Above all, Queen Victoria was the great symbol of this change. Queen Victoria replaced William IV, a royal rogue of the highest order, in 1837 and she set the behavior of the Royal family squarely on the side of propriety. For example, when it became known Lord Palmerston, head of the Liberal Party during the 1850s fathered seven children out of wedlock, Queen Victoria maintained an icy relationship with him. When her sensibilities were offended, the Queen often would respond with a chilly, “We are not amused.” And that was that! By the 1860s even a hint of such carryings on, could spell the end of a political career. British nobles ceased dueling, gambling and other traditional
4
vices, or at least practiced them in private. The English peerage accepted middle class styles in clothing as well — knee pants and other finery associated with the aristocratic Dandy were also relics of a passing age. The middle class frock coat, the emblem of the businessman, became the uniform of the Lords of England too.
VICTORIAN MORALITY: SEXUAL PRUDERY
In many ways, the control of nature lay at the heart of Victorian ideology: we can control nature by spanning continents with railways. However, are we equally able to control the impulses of our own natures? Can we control our own impulses towards sexual license or intemperance in the use of alcohol? It is more difficult to understand Victorian morality than to ridicule it. Several generations of writers have spilled an ocean of ink debunking Victorian prudery. Marxists have analyzed it as a function of capitalism and class domination. Feminists have indicted Victorian morality as an instrument of sexual politics: a way in which men kept their wives in servitude in much the same way that Victorian corsets and bustles kept the female body imprisoned. Why did the Victorians feel so uncomfortable about human sexuality? A lady or gentleman of the 19th century simply could not discuss the topic in polite company. One Victorian critic saw the primary virtue of Charles Dicken's novels as the fact that “In forty volumes or more you will not find a single phrase which a mother need withhold from her married daughter.” Victorian prudery led to such absurdities as the separation of the works of female and male authors on library shelves and the use of euphemisms for every reference to the body. Victorianism was an international phenomenon, not merely a British one and it was in the United States that a British visitor noticed that the “limbs” of a grand piano in a girl's school were decently covered by little knit trousers lest they lead adolescent minds down the path towards impure thoughts. It was the Victorians who gave the word “immorality” its present connotation of defying sexual convention rather than telling lies, or practicing fraudulent bookkeeping. Counterparts to all this could easily be found in the France of Napoleon III or the United States of Abraham Lincoln. Germany was also a nation of good, solid middle class people, but the Germans never developed a set of attitudes that we could describe as Victorian prudery. Why all this prudery? One part of the answer is that it reflects a profound sense of anxiety associated with developments in the world of science. Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859 and the book caused a sensation. We often discuss the argument between scientists and the organized churches over the theory of evolution. But Darwin's book did something else: it suggested that humanity was part of the natural world. If we are descended from lower animals what part of that animal nature remained? Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote: Can it be that Man Who trusted God was love indeed, And love creation's final law — Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shrieked against his creed — Simply dies the death of all animals? 0 life as futile, then, as frail. . . What hope of answer, or redress? Behind the veil, behind the veil.
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Darwin's idea of nature was very different from that of Isaac Newton and the other thinkers of the 18th century Enlightenment. It was not the orderly work of the Creator. It was also not the heroic, authentic Nature that the romantics admired. Instead, it was an eternal struggle for survival, "Red in tooth and claw." What Karl Marx and the Social Darwinists admired in Darwin, respectable Victorians abhorred. When social Darwinists spoke about the “survival of the fittest,” many Victorians were appalled that human success should be judged by the same standards as that of animals. If human nature is the way that Darwin portrayed it, human nature needs to be restrained, disciplined, and curbed. For many people in the Victorian period, sex represented everything that was base and irrational in human nature. There were those Victorians like Dr. Bowdler, a well todo physician and part time social reformer who added a new verb to the English language, “Bowdlerize” by editing a family edition of Shakespeare, “in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” Dr. Bowdler also provided a guide to the Bible indicating passages that should be read once (Song of Solomon etc.) and then ignored. Purity was the standard for the lady and restraint became at least the professed ideal for the gentleman, who in the sexual as well as the business world, was expected to postpone immediate gratification for ultimate domestic bliss. Thomas Huxley, Darwin's defender was also a good Victorian and his anatomical charts were published without genitals. For members of “polite society” good breeding meant that people should remain ignorant about the facts of life. Children came via the Stork. Museum curators added strategic figleafs to classical statues. Good Victorians believed that if we hide all expressions of sexuality, we can eliminate the troubling thoughts they might engender. Decent people did not read French literature. That good Victorian Sigmund Freud forbade his sister to read Gustave Flaubert's great novel of feminine liberation, Madame Bovary because decent people simply did not read French literature. Is it even necessary to point out that all this public posturing certainly did not mean that the Victorians were avoiding sexual activity? Victorians were people like us, who try but often fail to live up to our standards. The flourishing trade in pornography — the infamous 'French Postcards" that so shocked our ancestors, indicates the fact that not all Victorians were able to live up to society's norms. Prostitution was widespread. One London street was so famous for its streetwalkers that it was described as the "Western equivalent of an Eastern slave market." The London police kept records of 70,000 registered prostitutes. It was obvious that someone was keeping them employed. Part of the explanation lies in the medical realities of the nineteenth century. In an age before antibiotics, venereal diseases could well lead to long illness and death. More than a few famous figures died of Syphilis: the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and Al Capone, for example. Uncurable until the discovery of penicilin, Syphilis was the equivalent of AIDs today.
The Bourgeois Family
If a twentyfirst century returned to Victorian England in a time machine, the traveler would immediately notice any number of differences between our world and theirs; the smells London would be remarkable to the modern sensibility: horsedung and straw in the streets, the smells of fatty foods frying, and the sweaty smell of workers and servants who had no access to bathing beyond the kitchen tap to name two. The smell of flaring gas from the street lighting system before electricity arrived would have been very noticeable. Arguably, the noise pollution
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of the Victorian age might surpass the streets of modern New York. There would be no jet aircraft or boom boxes, but the clatter of hundreds of thousands of horse hooves drawing cabs, carriages, and freight wagons created an assault on the ears. Before the 1870s, one would be surprised at the darkness of the evening away from the gaslighted main streets. On the other hand, one might well notice that everyone wore very wellmade hats and welltailored clothing, even workers. The Rail Service was excellent and completely dependable. The Royal Post provided four or five swift deliveries per day and the postmen wore resplendent uniforms—red coats with gold piping. One would notice that the populace was remarkably homogenous aside from a few Lascar sailors or visitors from India. The sight of an African American or a Native American on the sidewalk would have been considered exotic. One would have also noted “the terrifying inadequacy of medical and dental care.” Terrible teeth, toothache pain, halitosis were manifest in public every day. Along with this evidence one would see children’s coffins being trundled in glasssided hearses along the cobblestone streets testifying to the prevalence of infant mortality. One would see ragamuffin children, children working as chimney sweeps, and active in every sort of labor imaginable. One would also have noticed the everpresent evidence of class distinctions and deference to the social hierarchy. Cockney’s would instinctively “knuckle their foreheads” in the presence of a Lady or a Gentleman. A dozen things at once would show us that the Victorian Age was utterly alien to our own. “But the greatest, and the most extraordinary difference [would be] the difference between women, then and now.” (A. N. Wilson, pp. 30708) No age ever praised the virtues of family life more thoroughly than our Victorian ancestors. The Victorian family was patriarchal, bound by unspoken rules and the wife was seen as the domestic angel who provided a safe haven for her husband and a strong, moral example for the children. Although the middle class wife was in no way the equal of her husband in the sense that she shared access to education or political and civil rights, she did exert power over other people. The Victorian wife was the household manager, responsible for the moral instruction of the servants as well as the children. Families were large, and the average wife spent “about 15 years in a state of pregnancy and nursing children in the first year of life.” After infancy, children were expected to be seen but not heard. The alternative would have been bedlam. Victoria and Albert's marriage was a true lovematch. Victoria gave birth three times in the first three years of marriage, six times in her first eight years of marriage. In all, the Royal couple had nine children. Although all of her children lived to adulthood, she did not enjoy childbearing: “What you say of the pride of giving life to a soul is very fine my dear,” she wrote to her oldest daughter, "but I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic.” Feminist scholars have deconstructed the language of patriarchy in Victorian literature and culture. They have also pointed out that even the fashions in respectable feminine clothing reflected the strict boundaries imposed on women. We should remember however, that all those hoop skirts, corsets, and petticoats were also outward signs of wealth and social status —of “respectability.” Armored as she was, the middle class wife could scarcely have done physical labor even if she wanted to do so. It is perfectly legitimate to read the message of female subservience writ on the page of female fashions, but I would also suggest that something else is work here: that profound Victorian fear of the natural personality. It is not really necessary to deconstruct the message of patriarchy in Victorian literature; it was everywhere. Young women were taught to aspire to ideal of femininity popularized by writers like the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson:
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Man for the field and woman for the hearth: Man for the sword and for the needle she: Man with the head and woman with the heart: Man to command and woman to obey; All else confusion. (Spielvogel) Victorian psychology taught that men were more animalistic than women, more tied to their primitive natures. Perhaps the most Victorian of all novels might be Robert Louis Stevenson's classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: the novel of a man who gives in to the beast within us all. Victorians like Dr. Thomas Bowdler believed that it was impossible to overstate the importance of morality; indeed good behavior and good morality was the only defense available to society in a time of economic and political upheaval. One must be ever vigilant lest the beast within burst the bonds of law and custom. Edmund Burke expressed the idea well: “Manners are of more importance than law. The law touches us but here and there and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, and insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in.” (Gertrude Himmelfarb, p. 282). Because of this, men's sexual escapades were tolerated as inevitable; those of women were never tolerated. All of this amounted to a double standard. Women were expected to live a life of utter purity, yet young ladies at finishing school were taught to flirt and manipulate the men in their lives. The Victorians elevated genderdefined roles to the status of universal truths, at least for middle class women. Many respectable women aspired to the ideal of domesticity expressed by one book of advice to young wives: Where want of congeniality impairs domestic comfort, the fault is generally chargeable on the female side. it is for woman, not for man, to make the sacrifice. She must be plastic herself, to mold others. There is, indeed, something unfeminine in independence. It is contrary to nature, and therefore it offends. A really sensible woman feels her dependence. She does what she can; but she is conscious of inferiority, and therefore grateful for support. She knows that she is the weaker vessel, and that as such she should receive honor. (Spielvogel) Many middle class wives were caught in a nowin situation. For the sake of her husband's career, she was expected to maintain her public image as the idle wife, freed from demeaning physical labor and able to pass her time in ornamental pursuits. In many ways, the great symbol of all this was Queen Victoria herself.
When we describe Great Britain in the Victorian period, words like stability, progress, prosperity, reform, and Imperialism come to mind. The British had grounds for some satisfaction because evidence of great economic growth and technical progress seemed to abound. Despite the continued existence of widespread poverty, teeming, miserable slums and poor working conditions in many industries, the British could take some real pride in the obvious fact that the vast majority of British subjects were better fed, better housed, and enjoyed more of life's amenities than ever before. Politically, Great Britain enjoyed remarkable stability. From the moment of her accession, Queen Victoria (r. 18371901) showed the qualities that were to remain with her throughout her reign: a strong sense of duty, a conviction of moral righteousness, and a deep feeling for her country, “since it has pleased Providence to place me in this station,” she wrote in her diary, “I shall do my utmost to fulfill my duty towards my country; I am very young, and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced, but I am sure, that very few have more good will and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.” Queen Victoria’s marriage to the earnest young German prince, Albert of SaxeCoburgGotha, helped to establish the modern role of the British monarchy. Victoria and Albert quickly grasped the significance of the monarchy's new functions, which combined a small amount of political manipulation with an unlimited responsibility as the emotional and ceremonial focus of a people in social turmoil. It was Albert whose growing domination over his wife forced Victoria to take an interest in matters that had previously bored her, such as science and literature and even industrial progress.
The Crystal Palace: 1851
In 1849, Albert hit upon the idea of the Great Exhibition, “to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task of applied science and a new starting point from which all nations, will be able to direct their further exertions.” The prince's idea was approved by the Royal Society, and won the financial backing of industry and the general public, who subscribed £200,000 as guarantee. A Royal commission of architects and engineers was appointed to plan the building and exhibits. Out of 234 plans submitted, the commission, urged by the prince, eventually picked the most original design of all, a massive greenhouse designed by the head gardener of a northern duke. Joseph Paxton, however, was no mere gardener, but an engineer, railroad director, newspaper promoter, and imaginative architect in glass and iron. He offered a building 1,848 feet long, 308 feet broad, and 66 feet high, tall enough to cover the old elm trees already occupying the chosen site in Hyde Park. It was composed of massproduced and standardized parts, including over 6,000 15foot columns and over one million square feet of glass. It could be erected in seventeen weeks; and it could be, and was, dismantled and reerected in another part of London when the exhibition was over. In spite of many fears expressed over the building's durability, it survived until 1936. Inside it was a place of light illuminated by gas and electricity. The building overflowed with new wonders: the American Isaac Singer displayed a sewing machine, Alfiied Krupp of Essen displayed the world's largest cast iron cannon and the French displayed a machine that could stamp out 1,000 medals per hour. The British displayed new railway
2
locomotives, held the world's first international photographic competition, and allowed visitors to send messages to Edinburgh by electric telegraph for a nominal charge. Progress seemed to be on the march. Prince Albert’s opening speech stressed the theme of human dominance over nature. He described the exhibition as a sign that “man is approaching a more complete fulfillment of that great and sacred mission which he has to perform in this world: to conquer nature to his use.” Not content with that, however, he also connected British economic success with the divine will: “In promoting [the progress of the human race], we are accomplishing the will of the great and blessed God.” (Spielvogel, p. 713) The Great exhibition of 1851 was a hymn of praise for the Idea of progress. Prince Albert, the royal consort of Queen Victoria, gave a speech at the opening ceremonies that attracted a great deal of attention and approval. He struck a note of optimism for the power of science — “Science discovers laws of power, motion and transformation; industry applies them to raw matter, which the earth yields in abundance, but which become valuable only by knowledge.” It was now possible to conquer nature by culture; that is, by the application of human knowledge and skill. (Loader) The London exposition made a great impact on most observers around the world. Many people resented the British Empire, many European nations chose to reject the British political system as a model, but everyone envied and admired British wealth. The economic historian Paul Kennedy has calculated that “with 2 of the world's population., Great Britain controlled about 45 of the world's industrial capacity.” (Kennedy, p. 151) These figures indicate that Britain was by far the wealthiest society on earth. It was also the world's most dynamic society. The Victorians were the first people to experience vast social and technological transformations as a constant factor in their lives. The British could certainty point out some stunning examples of economic and technical progress. The British justly boasted that their small kingdom was the "Workshop of the World." By 1850 such boasting was simple fact. The world was flooded with cheap, British products ranging from WattBoulton steam engines to Manchester cotton shirts. Other British products included household utensils from Birmingham, Josiah Wedgwood China, steam engines and ships, and the finest steel cutlery. The British economy was the wonder of the world, the engine that dragged an unwilling world into a new age. Britain exported over 170 million pounds sterling worth of products annually. The value of British trade was twice as high of that of its nearest competitor France, and three times as high as that of the United States. (Hobsbawn) Great Britain could also point out some examples of progress in dealing with the social misery of the 1830s and 1840s. One of the most striking examples lay in the declining death rate. Advances in public health such as the provision of clean water to the population of London, the improvements In sewage disposal, and improvement in the diet were bringing a close to a period dating back to the ancient world, when the urban populations of Europe would be vulnerable to epidemic diseases such as cholera. Far greater medical advances were in store: by 1851 Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch were well on their way to making stunning advances in bacteriology that would lead to the identification of the microorganism responsible for cholera, typhus, malaria., tuberculosis, diphtheria and bubonic plague.
Prosperity and Political Stability
By 1851 Great Britain was also the world's shipper, the center of the world's insurance and banking. It was also the source of much of the world's capital for investment. Most of the railways in the United States for example were built with British capital. More importantly,
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Britain's wealth was not limited to the upper classes alone. Beginning in the 1850s the industrial working class at last began to share in the general prosperity. The reason for this was largely the result of a great economic boom that that began about 1850 and lasted until the beginning of a worldwide economic constriction that began about 1873. During the years of prosperity, however, the British GNP increased by 3.2 per cent per year. Workers enjoyed a steady rise in real wages (30 per cent overall for the 2nd half of the 19th century). The British working class made some real political progress as well: labour unions were legalized; the right to strike was gradually recognized by all governments. One result, a very important result, was that Great Britain, alone of all European countries did not develop a powerful socialist movement. Great Britain alone of all European nations did not experience a major revolutionary upheaval during the 19th century. The prevailing mood, even in the British working class was confidence in the nation and its political institutions. In the revolutionary year 1848, when thrones toppled in France, Italy, and Germany, Britain remained an island of political stability. As the German economist Werner Sombart commented, “Against roast beef and apple pie, all dreams of socialist Utopias come to nothing.” This brings up an interesting historical problem. How did the British manage to deal with an industrial revolution that literally changed everything without seeing a great political upheaval occur at the same time? The British would have responded that the British political system provided a means for gradual reform. A number of reform bills (1832 and 1867) extended the vote to people in the lower middle class and working classes; in principle at least, it was possible for the British to address social problems through a peaceful process of reform within Parliament without reverting to violence. On the other hand, politics is only part of the story. HOW DO PEOPLE DEAL WITH SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES ON THIS SCALE? People try to make sense of changing conditions, they try to bring the dynamic under some type of control, ultimately, they try to create new standards, new responses. In many ways, Victorians wanted a sense that these tremendous forces of change had been brought under control but not eliminated. Change was not bad in itself, especially if it led to obvious, palpable improvements in the human condition.
VICTORIANISM
In the mid 19th century of Western Europe and the United States, the response to social change was a middle class complex of values and attitudes that we call Victorianism. One of the most distinctive aspects of Victorianism was the process by which other social classes came to accept the classic middle class virtues of self improvement, temperance, thrift, duty and character. In other words, it was the Middle Class (NOT THE ARISTOCRACY) who would set the tone for all of society in the midnineteenth century. The spread of Victorian morality ended the age of the aristocratic rake. Above all, Queen Victoria was the great symbol of this change. Queen Victoria replaced William IV, a royal rogue of the highest order, in 1837 and she set the behavior of the Royal family squarely on the side of propriety. For example, when it became known Lord Palmerston, head of the Liberal Party during the 1850s fathered seven children out of wedlock, Queen Victoria maintained an icy relationship with him. When her sensibilities were offended, the Queen often would respond with a chilly, “We are not amused.” And that was that! By the 1860s even a hint of such carryings on, could spell the end of a political career. British nobles ceased dueling, gambling and other traditional
4
vices, or at least practiced them in private. The English peerage accepted middle class styles in clothing as well — knee pants and other finery associated with the aristocratic Dandy were also relics of a passing age. The middle class frock coat, the emblem of the businessman, became the uniform of the Lords of England too.
VICTORIAN MORALITY: SEXUAL PRUDERY
In many ways, the control of nature lay at the heart of Victorian ideology: we can control nature by spanning continents with railways. However, are we equally able to control the impulses of our own natures? Can we control our own impulses towards sexual license or intemperance in the use of alcohol? It is more difficult to understand Victorian morality than to ridicule it. Several generations of writers have spilled an ocean of ink debunking Victorian prudery. Marxists have analyzed it as a function of capitalism and class domination. Feminists have indicted Victorian morality as an instrument of sexual politics: a way in which men kept their wives in servitude in much the same way that Victorian corsets and bustles kept the female body imprisoned. Why did the Victorians feel so uncomfortable about human sexuality? A lady or gentleman of the 19th century simply could not discuss the topic in polite company. One Victorian critic saw the primary virtue of Charles Dicken's novels as the fact that “In forty volumes or more you will not find a single phrase which a mother need withhold from her married daughter.” Victorian prudery led to such absurdities as the separation of the works of female and male authors on library shelves and the use of euphemisms for every reference to the body. Victorianism was an international phenomenon, not merely a British one and it was in the United States that a British visitor noticed that the “limbs” of a grand piano in a girl's school were decently covered by little knit trousers lest they lead adolescent minds down the path towards impure thoughts. It was the Victorians who gave the word “immorality” its present connotation of defying sexual convention rather than telling lies, or practicing fraudulent bookkeeping. Counterparts to all this could easily be found in the France of Napoleon III or the United States of Abraham Lincoln. Germany was also a nation of good, solid middle class people, but the Germans never developed a set of attitudes that we could describe as Victorian prudery. Why all this prudery? One part of the answer is that it reflects a profound sense of anxiety associated with developments in the world of science. Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859 and the book caused a sensation. We often discuss the argument between scientists and the organized churches over the theory of evolution. But Darwin's book did something else: it suggested that humanity was part of the natural world. If we are descended from lower animals what part of that animal nature remained? Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote: Can it be that Man Who trusted God was love indeed, And love creation's final law — Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shrieked against his creed — Simply dies the death of all animals? 0 life as futile, then, as frail. . . What hope of answer, or redress? Behind the veil, behind the veil.
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Darwin's idea of nature was very different from that of Isaac Newton and the other thinkers of the 18th century Enlightenment. It was not the orderly work of the Creator. It was also not the heroic, authentic Nature that the romantics admired. Instead, it was an eternal struggle for survival, "Red in tooth and claw." What Karl Marx and the Social Darwinists admired in Darwin, respectable Victorians abhorred. When social Darwinists spoke about the “survival of the fittest,” many Victorians were appalled that human success should be judged by the same standards as that of animals. If human nature is the way that Darwin portrayed it, human nature needs to be restrained, disciplined, and curbed. For many people in the Victorian period, sex represented everything that was base and irrational in human nature. There were those Victorians like Dr. Bowdler, a well todo physician and part time social reformer who added a new verb to the English language, “Bowdlerize” by editing a family edition of Shakespeare, “in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” Dr. Bowdler also provided a guide to the Bible indicating passages that should be read once (Song of Solomon etc.) and then ignored. Purity was the standard for the lady and restraint became at least the professed ideal for the gentleman, who in the sexual as well as the business world, was expected to postpone immediate gratification for ultimate domestic bliss. Thomas Huxley, Darwin's defender was also a good Victorian and his anatomical charts were published without genitals. For members of “polite society” good breeding meant that people should remain ignorant about the facts of life. Children came via the Stork. Museum curators added strategic figleafs to classical statues. Good Victorians believed that if we hide all expressions of sexuality, we can eliminate the troubling thoughts they might engender. Decent people did not read French literature. That good Victorian Sigmund Freud forbade his sister to read Gustave Flaubert's great novel of feminine liberation, Madame Bovary because decent people simply did not read French literature. Is it even necessary to point out that all this public posturing certainly did not mean that the Victorians were avoiding sexual activity? Victorians were people like us, who try but often fail to live up to our standards. The flourishing trade in pornography — the infamous 'French Postcards" that so shocked our ancestors, indicates the fact that not all Victorians were able to live up to society's norms. Prostitution was widespread. One London street was so famous for its streetwalkers that it was described as the "Western equivalent of an Eastern slave market." The London police kept records of 70,000 registered prostitutes. It was obvious that someone was keeping them employed. Part of the explanation lies in the medical realities of the nineteenth century. In an age before antibiotics, venereal diseases could well lead to long illness and death. More than a few famous figures died of Syphilis: the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and Al Capone, for example. Uncurable until the discovery of penicilin, Syphilis was the equivalent of AIDs today.
The Bourgeois Family
If a twentyfirst century returned to Victorian England in a time machine, the traveler would immediately notice any number of differences between our world and theirs; the smells London would be remarkable to the modern sensibility: horsedung and straw in the streets, the smells of fatty foods frying, and the sweaty smell of workers and servants who had no access to bathing beyond the kitchen tap to name two. The smell of flaring gas from the street lighting system before electricity arrived would have been very noticeable. Arguably, the noise pollution
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of the Victorian age might surpass the streets of modern New York. There would be no jet aircraft or boom boxes, but the clatter of hundreds of thousands of horse hooves drawing cabs, carriages, and freight wagons created an assault on the ears. Before the 1870s, one would be surprised at the darkness of the evening away from the gaslighted main streets. On the other hand, one might well notice that everyone wore very wellmade hats and welltailored clothing, even workers. The Rail Service was excellent and completely dependable. The Royal Post provided four or five swift deliveries per day and the postmen wore resplendent uniforms—red coats with gold piping. One would notice that the populace was remarkably homogenous aside from a few Lascar sailors or visitors from India. The sight of an African American or a Native American on the sidewalk would have been considered exotic. One would have also noted “the terrifying inadequacy of medical and dental care.” Terrible teeth, toothache pain, halitosis were manifest in public every day. Along with this evidence one would see children’s coffins being trundled in glasssided hearses along the cobblestone streets testifying to the prevalence of infant mortality. One would see ragamuffin children, children working as chimney sweeps, and active in every sort of labor imaginable. One would also have noticed the everpresent evidence of class distinctions and deference to the social hierarchy. Cockney’s would instinctively “knuckle their foreheads” in the presence of a Lady or a Gentleman. A dozen things at once would show us that the Victorian Age was utterly alien to our own. “But the greatest, and the most extraordinary difference [would be] the difference between women, then and now.” (A. N. Wilson, pp. 30708) No age ever praised the virtues of family life more thoroughly than our Victorian ancestors. The Victorian family was patriarchal, bound by unspoken rules and the wife was seen as the domestic angel who provided a safe haven for her husband and a strong, moral example for the children. Although the middle class wife was in no way the equal of her husband in the sense that she shared access to education or political and civil rights, she did exert power over other people. The Victorian wife was the household manager, responsible for the moral instruction of the servants as well as the children. Families were large, and the average wife spent “about 15 years in a state of pregnancy and nursing children in the first year of life.” After infancy, children were expected to be seen but not heard. The alternative would have been bedlam. Victoria and Albert's marriage was a true lovematch. Victoria gave birth three times in the first three years of marriage, six times in her first eight years of marriage. In all, the Royal couple had nine children. Although all of her children lived to adulthood, she did not enjoy childbearing: “What you say of the pride of giving life to a soul is very fine my dear,” she wrote to her oldest daughter, "but I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic.” Feminist scholars have deconstructed the language of patriarchy in Victorian literature and culture. They have also pointed out that even the fashions in respectable feminine clothing reflected the strict boundaries imposed on women. We should remember however, that all those hoop skirts, corsets, and petticoats were also outward signs of wealth and social status —of “respectability.” Armored as she was, the middle class wife could scarcely have done physical labor even if she wanted to do so. It is perfectly legitimate to read the message of female subservience writ on the page of female fashions, but I would also suggest that something else is work here: that profound Victorian fear of the natural personality. It is not really necessary to deconstruct the message of patriarchy in Victorian literature; it was everywhere. Young women were taught to aspire to ideal of femininity popularized by writers like the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson:
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Man for the field and woman for the hearth: Man for the sword and for the needle she: Man with the head and woman with the heart: Man to command and woman to obey; All else confusion. (Spielvogel) Victorian psychology taught that men were more animalistic than women, more tied to their primitive natures. Perhaps the most Victorian of all novels might be Robert Louis Stevenson's classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: the novel of a man who gives in to the beast within us all. Victorians like Dr. Thomas Bowdler believed that it was impossible to overstate the importance of morality; indeed good behavior and good morality was the only defense available to society in a time of economic and political upheaval. One must be ever vigilant lest the beast within burst the bonds of law and custom. Edmund Burke expressed the idea well: “Manners are of more importance than law. The law touches us but here and there and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, and insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in.” (Gertrude Himmelfarb, p. 282). Because of this, men's sexual escapades were tolerated as inevitable; those of women were never tolerated. All of this amounted to a double standard. Women were expected to live a life of utter purity, yet young ladies at finishing school were taught to flirt and manipulate the men in their lives. The Victorians elevated genderdefined roles to the status of universal truths, at least for middle class women. Many respectable women aspired to the ideal of domesticity expressed by one book of advice to young wives: Where want of congeniality impairs domestic comfort, the fault is generally chargeable on the female side. it is for woman, not for man, to make the sacrifice. She must be plastic herself, to mold others. There is, indeed, something unfeminine in independence. It is contrary to nature, and therefore it offends. A really sensible woman feels her dependence. She does what she can; but she is conscious of inferiority, and therefore grateful for support. She knows that she is the weaker vessel, and that as such she should receive honor. (Spielvogel) Many middle class wives were caught in a nowin situation. For the sake of her husband's career, she was expected to maintain her public image as the idle wife, freed from demeaning physical labor and able to pass her time in ornamental pursuits. In many ways, the great symbol of all this was Queen Victoria herself.
