Victoria's Madmen

Revolution and Alienation

C. Bloom

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137318978
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Victoria's Madmen is the story of those who were outcasts by temperament and choice; the non-conformists of the Victorian Age. Clive Bloom's readable account of the dark underbelly of Victoria's Britain captures the unrest bubbling under the surface of strait-laced Victorian society.

ONE

MANYPEEPLIA UPSIDOWNIA

In the sewers something stirs. The Victorian age appears to us so stable and so assured, and yet voices from subterranean depths proclaimed strange futures from deep in the labyrinth; Victoria Imperatrix: an empress of a world of strange shadows. This is the story of those Victorian political, personal and cultural struggles from which the modern world emerged and here are those Victorian individuals whose often strange ideas created the atmosphere of changing times. This book concentrates on two neglected aspects of Victorian Britain – personal alienation and social revolution – and how these forces had a profound affect both on the conduct of individuals and on the very idea of the society that these individuals inhabited.

Above all, this is the story of a number of extraordinary men and women, some of whom are remembered (but whose more extreme ideas are marginalised as aberrations) and some of whom are now all but forgotten and were literally considered mad by most, if not all, of their contemporaries and whose mainly utopian ideals were pursued against the prevailing norms of the day: Victorians against the Victorian age. This community of dreamers included social visionaries, artists, politicians and seekers of spiritual enlightenment, all of whom were considered out-of-step, eccentric, downright dangerous or morally corrupt during their lifetime.

The Victorian age has long been seen by historians as one far more diverse in every respect than earlier commentators liked to think. The monolith of steam and class conflict, antimacassars and aspidistras has long since given way to a more subtly nuanced picture. Indeed, Philipp Blom has pointed out that:

To most people who lived around 1900 this nostalgic view with its emphasis on solidity and grace would have come as a surprise.

Nevertheless, this newer Victorian landscape is also oddly traditional, inasmuch as the sense of the period has still been partially created by the leading voices of the age rather than those in partial or complete shadow.

It is true that historians have backdated the period called the ‘Victorian Age’ before Victoria’s accession to her uncle’s William IV’s reign in which the Reform Act of 1832 frames the ‘true’ beginning of the Victorian period: ‘Victorianism before Victoria’. This period is itself seen as being followed by a ‘middle’ period symbolised by Victorian prosperity and the Great Exhibition, and then a ‘late’ period where things reach their apotheosis. Such periodisation also sees the century as divided into three economic and constitutionally different periods, leading from individualism to collectivism.

Such discussions of periodisation and meaning were often framed in the nineteenth century by the expression ‘spirit of the age’, a phrase invented in the eighteenth century by David Hume but endlessly repeated by writers such as William Hazlitt, John Stuart Mill, Edward Bulwer Lytton and Thomas Carlyle. For Mill, the period was one of ‘transition’ and ‘intellectual anarchy’, where the old ways had been outgrown but new ways were not yet available, whilst for Carlyle, it was an age caught between scepticism and belief, and for Bulwer Lytton, it was an age of bleak utilitarianism, the age of romanticism having passed with the death of Lord Byron. Benjamin Disraeli saw the age as one of social and economic strife divided between ‘two nations’, yet these two nations were not entirely made up just of divergent classes, but also of divergent and irreconcilable thought processes.

Indeed, the nineteenth century might be divided between three groups: those who represented the old Georgian decadence; the young Turks eager for reform; and a third group who felt an allegiance to the world of their grandparents or great-grandparents, but who were forced to exist in the world of reforming moralism and priggishness. In the end, the young Turks won and created the lasting view of the age. Those other few who existed in the cracks between the old order and the new Victorianism were, I contend, the makers of the future, its habits and social outlook, but were ignored in their day as cranks.

Here are Victorian revolutionary thinkers and the sometimes bizarre ideas held by those whose politics or lifestyles grated against the mainstream thought of their times and the attitudes of their contemporaries. Some were shunned as mad, some were actually sent to asylums, some became gurus for a new generation, while others dreamt their fantasies in print and in secret. William Morris in his utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890) speaks of ‘the unlucky nineteenth century’, his heroes those who opposed the crass utilitarian progress of his age and instead formed an ‘alternative history’ of the century, made up from those who were ‘artist[s] … genius[es] and … revolutionist[s]’. Such revolutionary thinkers and their radical tendencies spill uneasily into the Edwardian period and beyond.

The story includes celebrities such as Oscar Wilde and T.E. Lawrence; writers such as H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and the lesser known Edward Fawcett; the many revolutionaries and radicals of the times from Karl Marx, Annie Besant, Charles Bradlaugh, Dan Chatterton, Beatrice Webb and Eleanor Marx to the dubious charms of Oswald Mosley; the messiahs ‘Octavia’ and ‘Jezreel’; the occultist Aleister Crowley and his Scarlet Woman; murderers like Richard Dadd and Jack the Ripper; early town planners and ecologists such as Ebenezer Howard, John Hargrave, Harold Booth and Archibald Belaney; Indian nationalists and anti-imperialists such as Mohandas Gandhi, Shapurji Saklatvala and Vinayak Savarkar; the Latvian anarchists who killed three policemen in the East End of London; the Green Shirts of the Kibbo Kift and many more: ideas and people tumble into the twentieth century with new and dangerous ideas developed in the mental laboratory of the Victorian age.

In the nineteenth century the unrealised self and the unrealised state where the infinite potential of the future was to be found existed as much inside one’s head as outside in the world, and where revolutionaries thought they either embodied the future in their own person or were bringing it about by preaching the gospel of what they had witnessed in the politics they embraced. Such visions were their visions, often hallucinatory, but intended to liberate the individual and set society free. This is the story of extremes of thought, action and mind, chosen by people living at breaking point within their social position, personal history and culture in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain; men and women motivated by certainties granted to them by outward logic or inner illumination, travelling light, as it were, stripped of those Victorian certainties that provided the social, emotional and intellectual foundations they wished to destroy. They had no guiding god, nor maps beyond those which they imagined and through which they travelled as a visionary company and as the salvation of the world.

Within the supposedly stable world of Victorian ideals lurked their opposites and in that grand antithesis was created the age that would follow and would obliterate the apparently solid foundations of the past. We are, of course, the products of what went before, but the attempt to denigrate or actually obliterate our Victorian foundations, as was the case with town planners, the media, films, thinkers and academics up to the 1970s makes for problematic history. We are, as Matthew Sweet pointed out in his book Inventing the Victorians, the inheritors of a world that we consider at best embarrassing and at worst something to be denied altogether. Sweet’s argument – that we are nearer to the Victorian sense of the world than we like to think – is convincing, but my point is that we are also nearer that part of the Victorian age that the very Victorians refused to countenance.

It is these countervailing tendencies of the nineteenth century that became the orthodoxies of the twentieth century. As Blom has pointed out:

Modernity did not rise virgin-born from the trenches of the Somme. Well before 1914, it had already taken a firm hold … The War acted not as a creator, but as a catalyst, forcing old structures to collapse more quickly and new identities to assert themselves more readily.

The peculiar Victorian ‘essence’ is for many of us still one of coal steam, factories, imperial adventures, spices, fog and antimacassar oil, gas light, workhouses, uniformed servants, middle-class propriety and colourful musical halls. On the one hand, Victoria gave her name to an era, but on the other to a sensibility and an emotion: Victorian and Victorianism. Yet even during her lifetime, the terms were being confused and confounded. As much as ‘Victorian’ designates the period from Victoria’s accession in 1837 to her death in 1901, conjuring in its wake everything from the London of Dickens to the bridges of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, so later Victorianism also seems to designate a claustrophobic attitude of mind hardly conducive to anything other than a narrow consensus and conformity of thought.

Thus, we might talk of a neglected Victorianism: Victorianism after Victoria, not the conservative world of dull conformist values and black-frocked uniformity, but a period extending into the future of the First World War and beyond, in which the roots of systems which had begun deep in the nineteenth century, but had never been allowed to grow, finally took shape above the surface and ushered in the modern world.

Victorianism therefore has a multiplicity of meanings stretching from the most conventional to the republican revolutionary. We now think of Victorianism in terms of its conformity, its imperialism and its industrialisation, but the term might equally cover those who embraced revolution, communism or the occult. It was only in the last few decades of the twentieth century that historians looked further than the stereotype of Victorian Britain, but often this was merely to discover the salacious and prick the pompous image of imperial complacency.

Victorianism has a wide embrace and a long life, a life that in many respects did not finish until the 1960s when those born in the previous century finally died and their ideas faltered and were extinguished, but whose legacy was passed on in feminism, anti-imperialism, occultism, environmentalism and bohemianism, and again caught the imagination of a generation bored with inertia and complacency. Above all, Victorianism is about the life of ideas and how these flourished beyond the nineteenth century and became the language of counter-cultural modernity.

It is this ‘alternative’ Victorianism that is so elusive and so fascinating, a set of conditions of thought far more wild, adventurous and non-conformist than might be expected from reading traditional histories. Indeed, a period scandalised by its own wayward children and their strange ideas is hardly likely to advertise its aberrations. The very term ‘Victorianism’ created the grounds for a number of visionary thinkers born into but emotionally divergent from the very age in which they lived, many of whom found their rightful place in the historical movement of ideas long after the specific circumstances of their own lives were forgotten. This was far more than simple futurology or wish fulfilment; it was the notion of a new era and a new spiritual dispensation – of the new person of the future rising from the ashes of a defunct, corrupt civilisation. It was a vision of a New Jerusalem, created by those ‘strong enough to build up the world again … [a] world brought to its second birth’, as William Morris believed.

Central to many was the problem of faith, as the evangelism of eighteenth-century non-conformism gave way to a more diffuse sense of spiritual well-being and purpose: socialism and women’s suffrage, patriotism and conservatism, painting and architecture were all soaked in evangelism, and the obsession with occultism and esoteric lifestyle was a direct result of evangelism’s restless search for spiritual guidance.

When Arthur Sullivan wrote the hymn ‘The Lost Chord’ in 1877, it proved to be an instant favourite with the public. Containing the lines ‘all perplexèd meanings [turned]/Into one perfect peace’, the lyrics appealed to those looking for certainties that were no longer available and could no longer be couched in the language of Christian faith. This desire for certainty and quietude was repeated later in sentimental but nevertheless powerfully emotional musical hall anthems such as ‘The Holy City: Jerusalem’ written by Stephen Adams in 1892:

New earth there seemed to be.

I saw the Holy City

Beside the tideless sea.

The light of God was on its streets,

The gates were open wide,

It was the new Jerusalem

That would not pass away.

For most thinking Victorians, the period hung between the problems of doubt and belief, science and the spirit, social reform or revolution, and these in turn led to a certain dynamic. The ‘new Jerusalem’ was waiting to be built in the future and the new world would be ushered in over the wreck of old beliefs. This wreck, left after the destruction of old certainties, would lead some to explore the edge of insanity as others might explore the world in search of new physical discoveries. The inward life became more and more attractive to those whose inclinations did not send them into far distant deserts, jungles or mountains. The world was all inside your head. This realisation would effectively allow the future to be born from the margins of Victorian consciousness rather than from imperial action.

It would be ridiculous to argue that the tales in this book offer a completely alternative story to mainstream Victorian history. For too long, however, these particular voices have been muffled in contempt, disregard or unthinking adulation, but they do speak to a different and complementary Victorianism no less rich than the story of the age’s main achievements and interesting principally in their implications for a future which came to self-realisation in the twentieth century. This tale of conflicted existential heroes and heroines is no less a myth, but it is different because it was the myth of self-determination propagated by those actually involved.

The challenges to Victorian conformity came from every direction, not least of which was Darwinism, but the challenges to the age outlined in this book were so extreme that they existed at the outer limits of the admissible and often embraced only one true believer. Many of the emergent ideas, especially those of a religious nature or those of cooperative socialism, stood in direct contrast to Darwinian progress – some of a political bent (like socialist democracy, communism and anarchism) could not exist without its prognoses.

The Victorian period as defined here was above all a period exemplified by its ‘isms’; the times marked by a search for a way of life different from that inherited from the past which those very ‘isms’ embodied. At the margins, antithetical systems arose, took root, gestated and waited to be born. Ideas heralded coming times and the new person whose modernity was expressed by adherence to one or a combination of the following: anarchism, hedonism and individualism, bohemianism and avant-gardism; collectivism, syndicalism, suffragetism, communism and socialism; vegetarianism, nudism and sun worship; Zionism and anti-semitism; Islamism; medievalism, Christian gothicism, atheism and secularism; spiritualism, theology and social Darwinism; demon worship; free love and drug addiction; fairies and woodcraft – all of these were powerful ideologies at one time or another. All the ideologies loudly preached the idea of the future as the possibility of the seeds that existed hidden inside the nineteenth century. You chose your necessary ideological poison and consequently your damnation or salvation.

The aim of all this motion, all this expenditure of energy, largely ignored by those at the centre of government or at the top of society, was to create the one event or crisis that would bring the past to a halt and usher in the future; to defy the past with its policemen, magistrates and established ways of tradition and history, and to combat these with the promissory note of times to come. In this future world all would be well, everyone healed, the soul at rest at last. Yet the event, whether a bomb exploding, a pistol pointed, a book written, a canvass covered or a speech made, also defied the future, demanded that it conform to the will of individual perception that was being expressed at the time. What was the future world to be?

The new world order was to be a radical break from all that went before it. The stable world of Victorian proprieties was to be shaken to its foundations. Nothing less would do. Nineteen years after the death of Queen Victoria, the writer Gerald Gould could predict in the nascent Communist Party of Great Britain that ‘there is going to be a revolution in Great Britain’. It was an extraordinary prediction and one almost unthinkable before 1900, except by a huddle of fanatical cultists of one sort or another. The First World War, the Great War as it was, was not the decisive break with the past, but the culmination of imperial rivalries as well as revolutionary forces and the release of those pent-up revolutionary movements that had gestated throughout the previous century.

The break may be seen in the new modernism that rapidly emerged in the early years of the twentieth century. As Owen Hattersley reminds us, the movement in painting, literature, dance, music and cultural habits generally ‘had no interest in the continuity of … civilisation and the uninterrupted parade of progress’. Instead, the old ‘encrustation’ of the past was ditched for the functional ‘bare concrete’ of experie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Manypeeplia Upsidownia
• 2 Radical Lunacy
• 3 The Shock of Vril
• 4 Massacre at Trafalgar
• 5 Sherlock Holmes and the Fairies
• 6 Knocking on Heaven’s Door
• 7 Tinker Bell on Mars
• 8 Chatterton’s Scorcher
• 9 The Death Machine of Hartman the Anarchist
• 10 Russia on the Clyde
• 11 Smoked Salmon and Onions
• 12 Imagined Worlds Made Real
• 13 Playing Cricket in the Corridors
• 14 The Collective Dreams of Bees
• 15 The Way of the Ego
• 16 Vegetarian Revolutionaries
• 17 On the Frontier
• 18 The Lifting of the Fog
• 19 The Crusade
• 20 The Sound of Distant Drums
• Bibliography
• Index