Victorian Values

Personalities and Perspectives in Nineteenth Century Society

Gordon Marsden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317886815
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Victorian Values is an absorbing portrait of Victorian society and culture, presenting different aspects of the age through profiles of representative or pioneering figures - among them Dickens, Pugin, Mary Kingsley, Lord Leighton, Gladstone and Joseph Chamberlain. It illuminates Victorian attitudes to a range of issues from education, health and self-help to civic ideals and sexual identity. Widely used and enjoyed by students, teachers and general readers alike, it has now been extended with four new essays and the Introduction, comparing the Victorian age with our own, has been updated and rewritten.

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Introduction

Gordon Marsden

Queen Victoria
Woodcut by Sir William Nicholson, c. 1899. (HT Archives)

‘The past is a foreign country,’ remarks a character in L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go Between, ‘they do things differently there.’ But did they? And should we? No period from the past has been more enthusiastically plundered to promote the present in the past fifteen years than the Victorian era. The supposed values and principles that underpinned its society have been rediscovered and recommended in that period by a motley mix of academics, journalists and politicians, including the prime minister of Great Britain who ended up attaching her name to a pivotal period of twentieth-century British history, thus emulating the great queen herself. (Would Victoria have been amused? Given her way with over-assertive chief ministers such as Gladstone, one suspects not.)

The way in which re-examinations of the Victorian period and explanations for Britain’s supposed industrial decline were linked in the 1980s with a resurgence of enthusiasm for the enterprise culture on both sides of the Atlantic was most carefully charted at the time in a Past and Present (No 123) article by Simon Raven. His account of how this debate turned and progressed from influential academic works from historians such as Correlli Barnett, Martin Wiener and Harold Perkin centre-stage, to the political think-tanks and research institutes of British and North American industry, and finally to the front benches and cabinet offices of government, is a powerful if controversial underlining of the use (or misuse) of history for political polemic.

The political purpose underlying the propagation of Victorian values in the 1980s was in most cases transparent. If self-help, self-reliance, entrepreneurship, individual charity (rather than a state dole), law and order, family discipline and a stricter sexual morality were the principles that enabled the Victorians to make hitherto undreamed of progress, and were responsible in Britain’s case for a ‘golden age’ of power and influence, were they not an endorsement for a similar philosophy of Mrs Thatcher’s Britain? And if the values that made Britain great in the second half of the nineteenth century were essentially those of an imperialist ethos, was it not perhaps time for more confidence and less guilt about the latter’s legacy, a confidence that had translated itself into that Gaullist assertiveness that was a hallmark of much of Mrs Thatcher’s dealings with the rest of the world from Galtieri to the Common Market (and which seemed to have been emulated in President Reagan’s way of seeing the world beyond America over the same period)?

Even if such a summary had been an adequate assessment of the values of Victorian society, it would still be open to us to reject them – as so many intellectuals and others enthusiastically did in the years succeeding the Great War, notably Lytton Strachey in his wicked sideswipe at the period’s great figures, Eminent Victorians. And, in addition, many were keen to challenge this view of Victorian society – among them James Walvin in his book on Victorian Values, produced to accompany the 1987 Granada Television series of the same name. The authors of the pieces that make up our book cast their own light on this particular debate while observing the caveat judiciously made by Professor Asa Briggs in his Foreword, which introduced the original series in History Today.

Professional historians have long pointed out how difficult it is to generalise about Victorian values … had not ‘the good Queen’ lived so long we would have divided the nineteenth century in a different way and no-one could have talked of Victorianism. As it is we rightly distinguish between early, middle and late Victorian.

But beyond the narrower political polemic, there are very good reasons why Victorian society should have come to hold so great a fascination for us today, considerations that were strongly to the fore when the original decision was made to commission for History Today a series of articles to mark the 150th anniversary of Victoria’s accession. Chief among these has been the collapse of confidence in many aspects of post-war society and culture, most searingly in the areas of architecture and urban planning. This revolt against the Modern Movement and its disciples has spread from the grumblings of the man on the Clapham omnibus (a splendidly Victorian artefact) to enlist the support of the chattering classes and finally enjoy the patronage of the heir to the throne himself.

If parallels are to be sought between then and now, one of the most intriguing that might be investigated is that between Prince Charles and Prince Albert – both intelligent, sensitive men seeking to break out of the constitutional straitjackets imposed upon them, and to establish for themselves a role as orchestrators of vigorous social and cultural debate – and both attracting bitter and snide opposition from entrenched establishments in doing so.

The parallel begins to break down, of course, when one compares the uxorious bliss of Albert and Victoria with the marital problems and breakdown that have dogged the Prince of Wales in the past ten years, culminating in the trauma of the death of his former wife. The immediate royal reaction to this, to pull up the drawbridge at Balmoral – and the public dissatisfaction it provoked – has uncanny echoes with the premature death of Albert, when the grief-stricken withdrawal of Victoria from public life – often to that same gloomy, neo-Gothic royal refuge – provoked a severe crisis of confidence in the monarchy. Britain in the late 1860s came as close to a sentiment of republicanism as it has ever done – until, perhaps intriguingly, the present day.

It is perhaps too early to say whether the extraordinary public outpouring of grief at the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the criticism of the Royal Family that has followed in its wake, will indeed result in sweeping changes and responses similar to those that put the monarch – and the monarchy – back on the road to popularity in late-Victorian Britain. But even before the traumatic events of September 1997, the debate that had opened up about the future of the monarchy in Britain on the back of the break-up of Charles’s and Diana’s marriage had prompted historians to look more closely at the invention of tradition – both state and royal – in late-Victorian Britain. As historians such as David Cannadine and William Kuhn have argued in recent books, albeit from different perspectives, there is plenty of scope here to hold up Victorian values to illuminate today’s clouded royal mirror.

Controversy about the separation of the public from the private, the presentation of the formal and the preservation of the informal, and the role of the monarchy in a changing British state, was as relevant in the 1860s and 1870s as they are in the late 1990s. Now, perhaps, a new British prime minister has in the wake of Diana’s death gently encouraged the monarchy down the road of modernisation and less formality: Tony Blair’s Victorian counterpart was another new prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who coaxed the widowed queen out of seclusion with a ‘makeover’ that went in the opposite direction, and a title ‘Empress of India’ that bestowed antiquity on a new global reality: the British Empire.

It is no coincidence that with the increasing interest (arguably accentuated by post-modernism) among historians in such questions as the invention of tradition and the construction of identity in Britain (to which Linda Colley’s brilliant book on the forging of a British identity in the wake of the eighteenth-century Hanoverian settlement gave a strong boost) has come, particularly in the last ten years since the first ‘Victorian Values’ series was originally published in History Today, an ever-more lively debate about the relationship of Empire to those values.

The invention of monarchical tradition, the construction of British identity, the reflection of both in the construction of a popular ideology for an acquired empire – this holy trinity of historical relationships has come centre-stage into nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British studies. It has been stimulated as more and more of our contemporary debate has focused on the nature of a twenty-first-century British monarchy (if there is to be one) and on the future for Britishness and indeed for the Union, with pressures both from above – towards greater integration in the European Union – and from below, with devolution initiatives for Scotland, Wales and, potentially, the English regions.

Bernard Porter, in a perceptive ‘Cross-Current’ piece for History Today in August 1996, pointed out how many of the assumptions about the role of monarchy and the late-Victorian/Edwardian creation of a role for the state had been underpinned by the mechanisms of that Empire and by the noblesse oblige cast of mind that its administrators brought with them. Investigating how far that imperial ethos was a creation of or an impetus for the values of late-Victorian Britain has correspondingly been a magnet for historians.

Economic and commercial history has been prominent in this new research. Peter Cain and Tony Hopkins, with their two 1993 volumes British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914 and British Imperialism: Crisis and Destruction, 1914–1990, brought to fruition more than a decade of careful argument and sustained analysis to challenge the idea that ‘trade followed the flag’. In the first volume particularly they were at pains, as Theo Barker observed in his review of the books in History Today, ‘to argue that the British empire grew in response to the needs of British commerce and the financial sources which supported iť. The packed seminar room I squeezed into at a subsequent American Historical Association session on the books and their implications was testimony to the intense interest generated on both sides of the Atlantic by their description of the network of connections between Britain and its informal as well as formal empire – the former particularly of interest to those seeking comparative clues to the rise and fall of the Pax Americana in a post-Vietnam world.

At the same time, the revival of narrative in historiography has found its echoes in studies of the makers of Victorian empire: number-crunching and tales of derring-do have been blended as strands in this 1990s coverage. Books like Edward Ingram’s Empire Building and Empire Builders, Frank McLynn’s controversial Stanley: Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and the strong narrative thrust of Lawrence James’s Rise and Fall of the British Empire, have been complemented by exploration of the explorers in other media – most recently with the Livingstone exhibition and accompanying essay/catalogue from the National Portrait Gallery in London and the BBC’s television magnum opus on the life of Cecil Rhodes. The latter – although panned by the critics and a flop with the viewers – did, for all its flaws (far fewer in the accompanying book by Antony Thomas than in the series itself), at least attempt to tease out, via the life of one of the most extraordinary figures of Victorian imperialism, the strange amalgam of greed, low cunning, high cant, guilty nobility and lost idealism that seems to be emerging as historians reassess Victoria’s ‘empire-builders’.

The acceptance that this kaleidoscope of mixed motives could co-exist in such characters is a product perhaps of a coming of age in nineteenth-century imperial studies. Thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis: thus time after time history proceeds, and the study of Victorian imperialism has been no exception. Eulogised in British schools almost to the eve of Suez as the selfless discharging of the White Man’s Burden (and articulated by teachers with maps of red in the manner so brilliantly captured by a playwright such as Dennis Potter), demonised in the wake of decolonisation by a generation of 1960s historians who sought to point out, quite rightly, the havoc wrought on traditional social and tribal structures, particularly in Africa, by the arbitrary boundaries of colonial administrators, it is perhaps only now, a generation removed from that ‘wind of change’, that we can assess the pluses and minuses of Empire more dispassionately.

The recent fiftieth anniversaries of Independence in the Indian subcontinent revealingly caught that new sense of distance’s objectivity both in the response of academics (assessing a Raj which, though it covered in one form or another a period of nearly two centuries, was centrally a late-Victorian creation) and in the official and popular reflections and commemorations in India and Pakistan themselves.

Despite this move away from a black-and-white verdict in historiography on the values of Victorian empire, the area remains sensitive and controversial. Those who seek to become new guardians of the flame can be fiercely contested: anyone in any doubt of that needed only to look at Max Beloff’s assault on the choice of the University of Texas as the editorial base for the new Oxford History of the British Empire, due to be published this year. Beloff’s concern that its contributors would misunderstand the imperial ethos and reshape its history in line with fashionable American political correctness reverberated in the article he wrote reviewing the state of Imperial studies for the January 1996 issue of History Today and was subsequently elaborated on a BBC TV ‘Newsnighť programme that took up the controversy. In a Sunday Times article reviewing the affair, Beloff drew support from Jan Morris, who in her own trilogy has been as influential a populariser of nineteenth-century imperial history as A. L. Rowse was on sixteenth-century Elizabethan England – ‘of course the Empire was exploitative, but there were also administrators who did a lot of good.’

Inevitably historical trends reflect contemporary angst, a point well made by Gareth Stedman Jones in his commentary on the changing historiography of nineteenth-century Britain in a May 1991 article for History Today. But the truth is also that the angst was there at the time. One of the strengths of this Second Edition has been the ability to include a new article by Denis Judd which focuses on the cracks in the Imperial façade of self-confidence that were observed even at its zenith, the Diamond Jubilee of June 1897 (whose recent centenary has given further impetus to a fin-de-siècle obsession in popular Victorian studies). In focusing on the response to the Jubilee from the Empire’s own bard, Rudyard Kipling, via his poem Recessional, Judd rightly identifies that angst: ‘the lines are stirring yet disturbing, containing a series of measured and sober warnings against patriotic and imperial excess within a framework of thoughtful introspection … behind the bold, brash and frequently self-congratulatory front that the Diamond Jubilee celebrations presented to the world, lurked in almost unquantifiable measure, pessimism and insecurity’. Even as the global triumph of Victorian values was being hymned in London, there were intimations of the Last Post that the Great War would start to usher in.

The dismantling of Empire took less than a generation, the rejection of many of the values that sustained it arguably begun the generation before when Lytton Strachey penned his iconoclastic work, Eminent Victorians. But such was the power and pull of that lost world that nostalgia for it was not long emerging.

The handmaidens of the reaction against Modernism have been the heritage and conservation movements – and in Britain the spectacular growth in membership and influence of organisations like the National Trust, as well as of more specialist campaigning groups such as the Georgian Group and the Victorian Society itself, is a further example of the phenomenon.

Closely associated with the restoration of Victorian artefacts to popular esteem was an attack on the 1960s and its cultural and social legacies. Not every young (or old) fogey lovingly restoring a black-leaded fireplace with its Staffordshire figures or dusting off the antimacassar has been a denouncer of the decade and all its works; but in many cases the banishing of formica and conti-board has brought with it a soured reappraisal of some of the benefits of the permissive society. Whether condemned by the moral majority for their sexual mores or sneered at by their children for their naivety and lack of style, the 1960s generation was placed on the psychological defensive – and part of that process involved an apotheosis of Vict...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword Asa Briggs
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 ‘Kindness and Reason’: William Lovett and Education
• 3 ‘Cultivated Capital’: Patronage and Art in Nineteenth-Century Manchester and Leeds
• 4 Dickens and his Readers
• 5 Pugin and the Medieval Dream
• 6 New Men? The Bourgeois Cult of Home
• 7 Titus Salt: Enlightened Entrepreneur
• 8 Samuel Smiles: The Gospel of Self-Help
• 9 Building Bridges: George Godwin and Architectural Journalism
• 10 Gladstonian Finance
• 11 Ministering Angels: Victorian Ladies and Nursing Reform
• 12 Josephine Butler: Feminism’s Neglected Pioneer
• 13 Joseph Chamberlain and the Municipal Ideal
• 14 Herbert Spencer and ‘Inevitable’ Progress
• 15 Stewart Headlam and the Christian Socialists
• 16 William Morris: Art and Idealism
• 17 Mary Kingsley and West Africa
• 18 Attic Attitudes: Leighton and Aesthetic Philosophy
• 19 ‘Commanding the Heart’: Edward Carpenter and Friends
• 20 The Quest for Englishness
• 21 Diamonds are Forever? Kipling’s Imperialism
• Notes on Contributors
• Index