This book on the life and work of William Thomas Thornton (1813â1880) grew out of earlier research on the history of the classical wage fund doctrine in nineteenth-century political economy. What became apparent while examining William Thorntonâs pivotal role in the theoretical debates in the 1860s and 1870s around the wage fund doctrine was the lack of documentation concerning his past, almost as if all records of it had been carefully and deliberately erased. A handful of memoirs were produced by people connected with William Thornton at various stages of his life. As useful as these reminiscences are in constructing a better understanding of many areas of Thorntonâs endeavour, none of these (sometimes, vivid biographical accounts) can lay claim to being either exhaustive or reliable. Gaps in Thorntonâs life story certainly prompted his close friend, Leslie Stephen, to insert colourful titbits on Thornton in his own biographical reminiscences, ever mindful that âlittle has been told of Thorntonâs private lifeâ (Stephen 1900 3: 187 n.2). Indeed, the details of William Thorntonâs exotic ancestry, family alliances and early years remain little visited and surprisingly elusive for someone of his standing within Victorian middle-class society. Beyond a few perfunctory fragments of biographical information, most accounts of the manâs life and work remain superficial at best; they lack the personal testimonies of his colleagues and acquaintances. Nor does the available literature attempt to place him in the relevant intellectual and social milieu; the stages of his intellectual development in relation to events occurring in Victorian intellectual and cultural life are completely bypassed. Biographical details of his father, mother, siblings and other relatives are either incomplete or incorrect. Thornton did not help matters by his own silence concerning his childhood and adolescence, education, family background and professional career. Beyond a few biographical fragments, no vivid anecdotes bearing on the development of his emotional life have been left to posterity, including details of the lessons he learned during his youthful sojourn on the Continent, relations with his parents and siblings and the depression that followed the deaths of three children from tuberculosis. Although occasional insights into his social milieu are provided by some of his private correspondence with well-known Victorian personalities of the day, his own writing seldom intrudes upon his personal experiences, his personality or his private life.
The dearth of family memoirs and letters, diaries, unpublished manuscripts and other biographical information that customarily form the nucleus of any comprehensive biographical study poses a number of interesting challenges. For one thing, there has been little reason to fuss or fret over what to include, what to omit and how to shape the account as the small amount of available biographical material has generally meant that every shred of available evidence has been marshalled in reassembling Thorntonâs life story. The lack of such conventional biographical sources as diaries, letters and personal memoirs should not be taken as an indication that the Thorntons were infrequent letter writers or of a disinclination for personal record-keeping. There are several personal letters between family members that point to a pattern of fairly regular correspondence, particularly when a family member was either travelling or living abroadâwhich, at one time or another, could include a number of Thorntons. Nor is it apparent that the Thorntons formed the habit of systematically discarding letters and other private papers after a family member had died; there remain a sufficient number of such extant documents to rule out this practice. Perhaps some family members were less certain of the significance of their lives to want to retain their correspondence, or quite simply, it never occurred to them that their letters might be worth keeping, and so they were casually discarded after being read. Fortunately, there have been a number of important survivals, including the small cache of letters that Williamâs father, Thomas Thornton, wrote to his sister, Elizabeth, while he was stationed in the Levant during the 1790s, which contain a number of intimate revelations about Thornton family members that are nowhere matched in other surviving personal letters presently available. In addition, several surviving letters that Thomas Thornton wrote to Robert Tweddell shed light on his activities and connections while he was working in Turkey as a private merchant. Williamâs uncle, Sir Edward Thornton, a high-profile British diplomat, appears to have kept all his official correspondence, now preserved in the Thornton collection in the British Library. Yet, as important as these documents may be in shedding light on crucial aspects of nineteenth-century British foreign policy, they nowhere intrude upon family matters. For present purposes, several letters that William Thornton received from prominent Victorian figures have survived, as have a number of letters he wrote to key Victorian personalitiesâmost notably, John Stuart Mill who was instrumental in advancing both Thorntonâs professional and literary careers at different stages of his life. There remain, however, significant gaps in the correspondence. Most noticeably, there are very few extant letters between Thornton and other family members. Their absence constitutes the single greatest obstacle to the prosecution of an exhaustive account of his whole life. The earliest specimen of Thorntonâs penmanship was a rather formal letter he wrote to his Aunt Moore from the Moravian settlement where he completed his schooling. Outside of this letter, another that he wrote to his Aunt Moore during his sea voyage to Constantinople and one that his aunt wrote to her nephew in the mid-1840s, there is no sign of any other surviving correspondence between Thornton and family members. He obviously, at one time or another, did manage to write letters to his siblings, children, his wife and extended family members, but these have either been lost or were discarded at some unspecified time. From time to time, William is mentioned in letters between other Thornton family members, but these typically consist of passing references to his activities that hardly constitute a basis from which an evaluation of his experiences and way of life can be made. Nor does it appear that Thornton kept a diary or personal journal detailing his own introspections, personal feelings and thoughts. For instance, Thornton evidently derived aesthetic pleasure from art, sculpture and music, but no letters or memoirs of a personal nature survive corroborating these artistic hobbies. Other family members, however, kept a diary. Georgina Danvers, Edward Zohrab Thorntonâs wife, intermittently kept a diary during the period she, Edward and their children were living in India, which gives a vivid account of life on the Indian frontier during the heyday of the Raj. In retirement, Sir Edward Thornton began writing a personal memoir. Although the memoir was never brought to completion, the unfinished manuscript contains useful snippets on the Thorntons, as does the autobiographical portrait prepared by Williamâs grandson, Dudley William Carmalt Jones. Even though William himself never appeared to confide in a diary or personal journal, this should not be seen as evidence of his suppressing his inner feelings. In fact, he was a very demonstrative person, who poured out his personal feelings and remorse on several occasions in his poetical works, as discussed below. Such outpourings prompted several critics to suggest that Thornton would have been better served had he restricted the circulation of his poems to his family and close circle of friends since their revelations were far too intimate for the wider public. Finally, there exist a handful of letters between Thorntonâs siblings and extended family members, providing tantalizing insights into their wider connections. These indicate that members of the Thornton family were able to mobilize the familyâs extensive network of contacts when they were travelling or living abroad for either professional or social reasonsâanother indication of the way in which English middle-class families exploited kinship ties, at home and overseas.
The story of the Thorntons is, to some extent, the story of the Danvers, or, at least, that branch of the Danvers family that, through several marriages, forged close connections with the Thorntons during the nineteenth century. William himself, his son and elder brother all married a Danvers woman. The Danvers family had, at one time, been what might be described as a notable family with a long and distinguished recorded familial history. They could, at intervals, claim extensive landholdings in and around Oxfordshire and count among their kith and kin several prominent figures in British history. By the nineteenth century, however, they were no longer landed gentry, but were comfortably well-off in the ranks of the professional middle classes. The decision made by several Danvers women to marry Thornton men is suggestive of the change in fortunes of each family, with the relative decline in the stocks of the Danvers matched by the rise in the social standing of the Thorntons. As far as it can be ascertained, Williamâs brothers and uncles occupied coveted positions, often with a connection to India, within either the colonial administration or the diplomatic service that produced a very comfortable standard of living. Such positions, accompanied by steadily rising incomes, placed the Thornton men well within the ranks of the professional middle class. In fact, to begin with, it was most likely the standing of Williamâs uncle, Sir Edward Thornton, within diplomatic and Whitehall circles that opened the door for other Thornton men to be recruited into similar occupations. It is worth remembering, too, that the posthumous reputation of Williamâs father, Thomas Thornton, added lustre to the familyâs reputation because he had forged close ties with the Levant Companyâs establishment in Constantinople over many years and had duly been appointed consul general to the Levant Company in Egypt shortly before his death in 1814. As a result, the Thornton men were on the sort of career paths that made them an attractive catch for the Danvers women. Equally, marriages to members of such a prominent family as the Danvers served to bind the Thorntons more closely into the social world of the English middle classes. These marital alliances were highly valued in the nineteenth century because they enabled two families to solidify and extend their kinship network. This can be seen, of course, in the way in which different members of the Thornton-Danvers family maintained regular contact with each other, thereby creating a sense of an established family with extensive family connections. It is clear from the autobiographical manuscript that Dudley William Carmalt Jones penned, for example, that he had been instilled with a sense of the importance of the Danvers name and took pride in his ancestral heritage. Equally, the Thorntons were always happy to acknowledge their Persian heritage.
William Thornton and his siblings were the products of an interracial marriage at a time when such unions were generally frowned upon. Williamâs father, Thomas, had married Sophie Zohrab, whose family had fled religious persecution in their homeland, Armenia, before initially settling in Constantinople. Again, the Zohrabs had been a prominent family in Armenia before escaping religious persecution. Although they had fallen on hard times, the family took great pride in its own intellectual, cultural and social heritage. Like the Thorntons, the Zohrabs were prominent in diplomatic and imperial circles during the nineteenth century, and it was these commonalities that bound the two families together. Still, in the nineteenth century, it was a particularly brave decision to marry someone of another race, owing to the social stigma attached to such interracial marriages. There is, however, no evidence in the Thornton familyâs extant correspondence to suggest that the liaison between Thomas and Sophie excited anything other than genuine unwavering enthusiasm. In time, Sophie Zohrab and Elizabeth Moore established a close bond, as shown by their warm and spontaneous letters to each other. Whatâs more, Elizabethâs letters to her brother, written after she had learned of Thomasâs intention to marry a Persian lady, signal her acceptance of the match. In spite of the fact that Thornton was of mixed parentage, he seemed to be accepted within Victorian Britain. Nor did William or his siblings ever display feelings of shame or embarrassment about their Persian heritage; in fact, the opposite is more clearly in evidence as William made great efforts throughout his life to keep in touch with his maternal family. The solitary surviving letter that Thornton wrote home from Constantinople reveals that he had forged close relations with members of his motherâs family. Besides keeping in touch with his maternal family, he chose to give his youngest son the middle name âZohrabâ, dedicate his first book of verse to his cousin, Edward Zohrab and include âZohrabâ in the title of his first volume of poems as a form of homage to his motherâs âold historic nameâ. Such actions attest to his immense pride in his maternal lineage. Thornton himself was a tolerant person, accepting of other races and culturesâa trait perhaps attributable to his mixed family heritage.
In addition to the fact that he hailed from âa rather remarkable familyâ, William Thornton himself led an interesting and varied life. However, there are few details of his experiences in England and on the Continent during his formative yearsâthat is, most crucially, from the time of his fatherâs death in 1814 through the 1820s as a schoolboy on the Moravian settlement to his return to London in the mid-1830s, following lengthy stints spent living in Malta and the Levant. Little is known of his childhood or the culture within the family home. Likewise, the story of his all-too-short relationships with his father (who died when he was aged one) and mother (who died when he was aged four) remain shrouded. Furthermore, the details of his relationship with his elder brothers and sisters remain opaque, although it seems he was close to them all. Once Thornton is posted back to London in 1835, the general contours of his life are somewhat easier to trace, particularly when he finds his voice as an author; although, even here, his appearances in archives remain fragmentary, while details of his personal life remain elusive. As a result of these deficiencies in Thorntonâs biographical record, the sequence of the chapters in this book follows a thematic rather than strictly chronological structure. Some chaptersâincluding the first chapter dealing with ancestry and family backgroundâcombine biographical material and intellectual history across a wide arc. Other chapters, focusing primarily on an exploration of Thorntonâs intellectual compositions, follow a firmer temporal progression. Despite gaps in the historical record, this account provides new insights and much new information about Thorntonâs life and work. This telling of William Thorntonâs life story, moreover, corrects several careless mistakes contained in earlier biographical accounts and builds on several recent interpretations of his work. In reassembling the fragments of Thorntonâs life story currently available, it seems inevitable that contemporary understanding of his inner life and final achievement remains frustratingly incomplete. Nevertheless, this book attempts to create a coherent portrait of William Thorntonâs life and times, to show what is weak as well as what is good in his person and in his work and to mould the multifarious parts of his life into a whole.
Until now, Thorntonâs voice has primarily been heard within a small community of scholars working on Victorian political economy, where he is portrayed not inaccurately as having played a seminal role in overturning certain key tenets of the prevailing classical orthodoxy. While neither a universal genius nor a great economist, he was an original thinker whose work provoked a critical reactionâsometimes called a revolutionâin economic thinking in mid-to-late Victorian England. Beyond this, however, his work had a validity that entitled it to be regarded as constitutive of a larger body of work involved in transforming and shaping the period. Renewed scholarly interest in his contributions to Irish land reform (Gray 1999; Kennedy 1996) and Anglo-Indian politics (Stone 1984; Kerr 2007; Ahuja 2009) constitute more tangible evidence of the durability of Thorntonâs wider enterprise. Indeed, what is too little appreciated is that Thornton was an accomplished author who produced a steadily increasing stream of diverse writings from the 1840s until his death in 1880. Although his poetry and philosophical writings never made a lasting impression, his prose writings did occupy a representative place within Victorian letters, contributing admirably to the intellectual firmament of the time. His various public policy proposals enable a better understanding of the manner in which his work was woven into the fabric of mid-Victorian intellectual and public debate. Thorntonâs private correspondence and published writings reveal a character that was the epitome of the Victorian ethosâdevoted father, dutiful husband and loyal friend and colleague. Yet, in the working out of his âdistinctive conservative radicalismâ, as Lipkes (1999: 111) has put it, he was also the embodiment of the rebellious spirit of the age, as shown in the unrestrained and often spontaneous tone of his writings on the seismic events and burning issues of the Victorian eraâthe Crimean War, Irish Land Tenure Reform, Spiritualism, the American Civil War, among the more prominent. âThey are that peculiar amalgam of philosophy, history, politics, and sociologyâ, Himmelfarb (1962: xvi) once wrote, âthat was the distinctive quality of the English essay in the age of the great Reviews. They are the product of a lively, cultivated, interested, and engaged mind, in which all the resources of thought are brought to bear upon any subject, and in which any subject may be made to bear the burden of truthâ. This predisposition to challenge the prevailing current of opinion doubtless endeared Thornton to John Stuart Mill, inarguably his most loyal patron. Despite provoking several exasperated reprimands from the Victorian sage for occasional indecorum, Thornton always remained aware of the fact that Millâs patronage had helped to open many new doors for him. After all, Mill, while suffering his acts of defiance with stoicism, acknowledged his work in shaping and defining public debate on a host of topical issues that refract the uncertainties and ambivalences of mid-Victorian Britain. His humanistic outlook on the conditions and prospects for society and commitment to the casualties of the new industrial order was shared by Mill and his confreres. All that now remains is to unveil this compelling story of an unheralded, dissenting voice within the rich fabric of Victorian life and culture.
References
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