An Age of Equipoise? Reassessing mid-Victorian Britain

Martin Hewitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351959148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The Age of Equipoise by W.L Burn was published in 1964 and became a central text in the canon of interpretations of the Victorian period. The book subsequently fell out of favour but recent claims to establish a new interpretative standard have, paradoxically, prompted reviewers to cast back to Burn's work as the orthodox standard against which such claims should be judged. The essays in this volume by British and American contributors all engage, to varying degrees, with the notion of 'equipoise' and how it can help to illuminate the mid-Victorian period in ways which alternative formulations cannot. Some of the chapters develop arguments embedded in Burn's own book; others take up issues largely absent in The Age of Equipoise, such as the position of children, Britain's interaction with the wider world, and the threats the period experienced to its concept of masculine identity. Together the essays demonstrate the intricacy and turbulence of the forces of cohesion in Victorian society, along with the success of that culture in achieving a working, if shifting, modus vivendi. Moreover, they substantiate the argument that, whatever the limitations of Burn's work, 'equipoise' deserves rehabilitation as a powerful conceptual framework for making sense of mid-Victorian Britain. About the Editor: Martin Hewitt is Director of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies and editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture. With Robert Poole he has recently produced an edition of The Diaries of Samuel Bamford, 1858-61 (Sutton, 2000).

CHAPTER ONE

Equipoise and its discontents: voices of dissent during the international exhibitions

Peter H. Hoffenberg

Introduction: equipoise, exhibitions and the Victorian public

‘All London is astir … and some part of all the world’, noted John Ruskin in his diary for the first day of May in 1851.¹ Although the metropolis was in a frenzy over the official opening of the Great Exhibition at Hyde Park’s unprecedented Crystal Palace, the famous art critic remained at home, ignoring the public birth of the international exhibition movement. ‘Sitting in my quiet room, hearing the birds sing’, he began the second volume of his Stones of Venice, while the city’s streets overflowed with goods and people. Among those striding to and fro or in carriages were men and women from overseas nations and kingdoms, Britain’s own colonies, provincial regions and London itself. Metropolitan dandies, merchants and workers mingled with Indian princes, Australian politicians and French businessmen.

Overcoming his initial scepticism about the event, Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote enthusiastically about those crowds on the same day. ‘I should think that there must have been near three hundred thousand people in Hyde Park at once. The sight among the green boughs was delightful … the boats; the flags; the music; the guns; everything was exhilarating.’² Macaulay’s celebratory letter reflected the general sense that this was a moment of triumph for England, free trade and, perhaps, Victorian equipoise. Like all celebrations, though, this one also included its discontents.

The Great Exhibition and its most immediate English successor, the 1862 London International Exhibition, provided moments for various critics to attack what W.L. Burn called ‘the mid-Victorian equipoise’, most particularly the representation of some of its fundamental building blocks, such as political economy, the state, the cultural élite and the working class.³ Voices of dissent included those of Victorian public moralists, among whom was Thomas Carlyle, who called upon a tradition of cultural criticism of the market society, and of those occupying a very different position along the nineteenth-century spectrum, frustrated scientists and advocates of political economy, including Charles Babbage. The working-class, socialist and radical press also participated in the public debate about the mid-Victorian exhibitions. They interpreted the events through class-coloured lenses, at times critiquing organizers and displays with the passion of their anti-aristocratic and anti-capitalist visions of ‘Englishness’.

Burn’s The Age of Equipoise emphasizes a series of disciplines and network of authorities which preserved the sense of order within England between 1852 and 1867. Burn explored the contours of authority and power at that time by asking about the ways in which society was held together with all of its apparent contradictions and complications. Here are the ‘elements of stability’ empowering Victorian confidence; the various structures wove together a seemingly bearable and workable philosophy, which, as we know, was filled with paradoxes and anxieties. What lay beneath the deceptively peaceful surface of the 1850s and 1860s? How did this complex society work if it were neither strictly mechanical nor simplistically functional?⁴

The ‘great’ exhibitions of the mid-Victorian era help us better understand the ways in which Burn’s society functioned. They represented the systems of order which intrigued him. In doing so, the popular shows also revealed to critics the tensions and ironies inherent in that equipoise. Representations of the economy and society were embraced mystifications for some, but also, for others, demystifications of those same ideas and practices. For such critics, the exhibitions were not revelations of Heaven on Earth, but of Hell, most particularly concerning issues such as national identity, the market society and labour. The shows confirmed the power of a cultural élite and the state at the same time that they made those vulnerable to attack. Here were national celebrations which often excluded a significant public role for the largest social group within the nation, the working class. And, in a final irony, the grand spectacles celebrated a view of work which iconized machinery and obscured human labour, the largest source of work during the mid-Victorian era.⁵

Exhibitions are not discussed at length in Burn’s work. He briefly stopped amid discussion of ‘The Day After the Feast’ to suggest that the Great Exhibition was both a symbol of ‘the utilitarian, commercial, middle-class age’ and ‘the culmination of the romantic age’.⁶ His lack of interest in exhibitions is understandable, since, at one level, his work commenced with England in 1852, one year after the Great Exhibition; but at a deeper level, he was more concerned with enduring institutions and ideas, rather than temporary forms of entertainment, or ‘feasts’. Legal and social disciplines, not the cultural world of music halls, museums or their complements, filled his pages. Yet the exhibitions in 1851 at the Crystal Palace and at South Kensington in 1862 were integral parts of the sense of equipoise. The Great Exhibition prefigured that equipoise; the London International revealed many of its tensions.

Was there a celebration of ‘equipoise’ at the 1851 and 1862 exhibitions? Yes, although not necessarily as an explicit objective of the events, as if commissioners and the general public intended the Great Exhibition as a celebration of equipoise itself, rather than of its causes and signs, such as free trade and relative political stability. But it was a self-conscious celebration of the ways in which official commissioners, as representatives of the state and a new cultural élite, linked together the material world and organized not just objects, but also the visitors themselves: not only Victorian things, but also the Victorians. Burn’s sinews of authority and power provided the girders of these ideological structures, just as new building materials provided the superstructure for the Crystal Palace and the later South Kensington halls.

This is not to suggest that exhibitions elided the ideas and spaces of civil society and the public sphere, but that experiencing them helped mediate between the private sphere, those very public ones, and the mid-Victorian state.⁷ Participation in the exhibitions helped create the sense of a Victorian public, particularly if we conceptualize the public as a process, or as Mary Poovey has argued, as a social body being formed and made, rather than the public as a thing or a condition of stasis.⁸ This was the case in large part because visitors participated in the shows by purchasing commodities, consuming food and beverages on the premises, and turning the cranks of working machines. Perhaps even observing and being observed were forms of participation. This was a seductive invitation to help build the mid-Victorian equipoise rather than a unilaterally imposed official ideology. Exhibitions suggested one nexus of a fluid civil society: policed participation, contest within limits and articulated dissent.

Exhibition commissioners expressed a symmetry between the shows and the public. John Forbes Watson, commissioner for British India at a series of exhibitions in England and France, including the London International, argued that the popularity and success of the shows depended on exhibitors and visitors, ‘the real actors in the Exhibitions’.⁹ In a series of letters to The Times, later published as a single volume, Watson addressed characteristics of exhibitions twenty years after the Crystal Palace.¹⁰ He concluded that ‘[everything is done in reference to the public in general’, echoing the Victorians’ obsession with public opinion, and recognizing that that public was increasingly complex and sophisticated. Exhibitions mirrored and shaped the dynamism of an increasingly multifaceted public, while commissioners addressed the relationships between those exhibitions and that ‘public’.

Watson’s public included ‘well defined special classes’ in society and at the exhibitions, such as producers, traders and consumers, but also ‘in a wider sense’, the public included the private community and the state itself. The commissioner suggested that there was a mirroring between society and the exhibitions, that the latter helped create and shape the former as the ‘public’. Watson argued that the interests of the various sections of the public (economic, special, private and the state) were different and conflicting, but that exhibitions could appeal to and reconcile these special classes. In a formulation which hints at Burn’s ‘equipoise’, the commissioner added that ‘[t]he promotion of every one of these interests may, and should, be made the subject of specially devised measures, while preserving harmony’ in the working of the exhibitions and society. The link was Watson’s definition of the public, both inside and outside the exhibition experience and space. The public, or civil society, was formed and represented by participation at the shows.

The exhibitions represented the momentary and often unstable equilibrium of mid-Victorian society, what Burn called the ‘unruffled calm …the outcome of a temporary balance of forces struggling … to better their positions’.¹¹ At the same time, the shows suggested the potential for a more permanent realization of balance, or equilibrium. They represented the apparent counterpoise of various forces and institutions, such as the middle and working classes, the colonies and England. The exhibitions were not only signs of equipoise, but also the living and material experience of such equipoise; not just the idea, but also the social fact of placing and holding society in equipoise. The processes of organizing and visiting the shows revealed the sources of stability which interested Burn; those very processes, or practices, were themselves targets of contemporary criticism, and, to such critics, sources of instability.

Not surprisingly, Thomas Carlyle was among those critics, and, in contrast to Macaulay, he wrote about the Great Exhibition in a far less benign manner, concluding that ‘[s]uch a sanhedrin of windy fools from all countries of the Globe were surely never gathered in one city before’.¹² The critic longed for some ‘silence’ in place of ‘the Wind-dustry involving everything in one inane tornado’. From the other side of the political playing fields, The Friend of the People asked ‘What have exhibitions done for the people?’¹³ The answer for the republican-socialists? Not much, at least for the people, or labourers of England, but plenty for its aristocrats and swindlers.

Conservatives and socialists contested the political economy celebrated by the shows. Exhibition commissioners and executive committees were attacked as part of the governing élite, a ‘Science and Art Clique’ at the heart of the state, or in the words of one MP, as ‘the Kensington Party’, misusing public funds and their own authority at the centre of political power.¹⁴ The Bee-Hive’s banner headline declared the 1862 International Exhibition a ‘FAILURE’, in good part because of the commissioners’ ‘jobbery and robbery’, which lined their élite pockets at the expense of the nation.¹⁵ Those were sustained and systematic voices of dissent during the exhibitions, rather than momentary bursts of public outcry about ephemeral fears, such as the possible visitation of the Plague in 1851.¹⁶ Little if any was heard about those concerns once the Great Exhibition was officially opened.

Exhibitions and markets: the equipoise of political economy?

Representations of the market as an idea and process were at the heart of the exhibitions, reminding contemporaries of the market’s power, promises and failures. Commissioners and merchants hoped that improvements in trade and production would result from touring the commercial collections and studying both the discrete national exhibits and the over-arching worldly treasure chest. Charles Babbage wrote that the Great Exhibition was ‘calculated to promote and increase the free interchange of raw materials and manufactured goods between all the nations’ and, in doing so, would ‘instruct the consumer in the art of judging the character of the commodity’.¹⁷ Shows in 1851 and 1862 offered idealized markets: seemingly limitless in wealth and variety, and, at the same time, founded upon a direct relationship between producers and consumers. One contemporary read the colonial displays at the 1862 London International Exhibition as a sign of a working free-trade empire, the commercial ties foreshadowing future viable political federation.¹⁸

Sir Henry Cole, Keeper of the South Kensington Museum and Executive Commissioner in 1851 and 1862, noted how such shows allowed producers and consumers to compare the economic strengths of participating countries. In a neo-Ricard...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Prologue: reassessing The Age of Equipoise
• 1 Equipoise and its discontents: voices of dissent during the international exhibitions
• 2 Equipoise and the object: the South Kensington Museum
• 3 Spectacular failures: Thomas Hopley, Wilkie Collins, and the reconstruction of Victorian masculinity
• 4 Democracy and the mid-Victorians
• 5 Equipoise and the myth of an open élite: new men of wealth and the purchase of land in the equipoise decades, 1850–69
• 6 Domesticity: a legal discipline for men?
• 7 Helps and Ruskin in the age of equipoise
• 8 ‘The hand of the Lord is upon the cattle’: religious reactions to the cattle plague, 1865–67
• 9 Sensational imbalance: the child acrobat and the mid-Victorians
• 10 Harbouring discontent: British imperialism through Brazilian eyes in the Christie Affair
• Index