High Minds Read online

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  Prologue: Dr Arnold of Rugby

  PART ONE: THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND

  1. The Angry Forties: Poverty, Agitation and Riot

  2. Noblesse Oblige: Politics and the Aristocracy

  3. The Ascent of the Bourgeoisie: Radicalism and the End of the Corn Laws

  4. Chartism: The Rise of Working-class Politics

  PART TWO: THE VICTORIAN MIND

  5. The Godly Mind: National Apostasy and the Victorian Church

  6. The Doubting Mind: Struggles in the Sea of Faith

  7. The Rational Mind: Intellectuals and the Growth of Secularism

  8. The Political Mind: High Principle and Low Ambition

  9. The Progressive Mind: The Great Exhibition and Its Legacy

  10. The Heroic Mind: Albert and the Cult of the Great Man

  PART THREE: THE TRANSFORMATION OF BRITAIN

  11. The Leap in the Dark: Reform and the Coming of Democracy

  12. Broadening Minds: The Battle for Education

  13. The End of Privilege: Inventing the Meritocracy

  14. The Rights of Women: Divorce, the Vote and Education

  PART FOUR: THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN

  15. The Pursuit of Perfection: Victorian Intellectuals and the New Britain

  16. Doing Good: Philanthropists and the Humane Impulse

  17. The Way We Live Now: The Creation of the Victorian City

  18. A Glimpse of the Gothic: Founding a National Style

  19. The Reforming Mind: Parliament and the Advance of Civilisation

  Epilogue

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Picture Section

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Britain in the 1840s was a country wracked by poverty, unrest and uncertainty, where there were attempts to assassinate the Queen and her prime minister, and the ruling class lived in fear of riot and revolution. By the 1880s it was a confident nation of progress and prosperity, transformed not just by industrialisation but by new attitudes to politics, education, women and the working class. That it should have changed so radically was very largely the work of an astonishingly dynamic and high-minded group of people – politicians and philanthropists, writers and thinkers – who in a matter of decades fundamentally remade the country, its institutions and its mindset, and laid the foundations for modern society.

  Simon Heffer’s major new book explores this process of transformation. It traces the evolution of British democracy. It shows how early laissez-faire attitudes to the lot of the less fortunate turned into campaigns to improve their lives and prospects. It analyses the birth of new attitudes to education, religion and science. And it shows how even such aesthetic issues as taste in architecture were swept in to broader debates about the direction that the country should take. In the process, Simon Heffer looks at the lives and deeds of major politicians, from the devout and principled Gladstone to the unscrupulous Disraeli; at the intellectual arguments that raged among writers and thinkers such as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Butler; and at the ‘great projects’ of the age, from the Great Exhibition to the Albert Memorial. Drawing heavily on previously unpublished documents, he offers a superbly nuanced insight into life in an extraordinary era, populated by extraordinary people – and how our forebears’ pursuit of perfection gave birth to modern Britain.

  About the Author

  Simon Heffer was born in 1960. He read English at Cambridge and took a PhD at that university in modern history. His previous books include: Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, Nor Shall My Sword: The Reinvention of England, Vaughan Williams, the highly successful Strictly English and A Short History of Power. In a career of nearly 30 years in Fleet Street he has written columns for and held senior positions on the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator.

  High Minds

  The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain

  Simon Heffer

  To Mark Jones, in admiration and with gratitude

  Estote ergo vos perfecti!

  Matthew 5:48, quoted from the Vulgate

  by Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy

  Fired with the great spirit of the nineteenth century – at least with that one which is vulgarly considered its especial glory – he resolved to make haste to be rich.

  Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke (p. 112)

  But is it indeed an error to suppose mankind capable of great improvement? And is it really a mark of wisdom to deride all grand schemes of human amelioration as visionary?

  J. S. Mill, speech on perfectibility, 2 May 1828

  Do you mean to build as Christians or as infidels?

  John Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive (p. 88)

  In a progressive country change is constant: and the great question is not whether you should resist change which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles, and arbitrary and general doctrines. The one is a national system; the other, to give it an epithet, a noble epithet – which it may perhaps deserve – is a philosophic system.

  Benjamin Disraeli, speech at Edinburgh, November 1867

  This question is no longer a religious question, it has become a political one. It is indeed the question of questions; it has become paramount to every other question that has been brought before us. From the moment that you intrust the masses with power their education becomes an absolute necessity.

  Robert Lowe, speech on the Third Reading of the Reform Bill, House of Commons, 15 July 1867

  Quand on fait des omelettes il faut croquer des oeufs.

  Samuel Butler, unused epigraph for The Way of All Flesh

  And not by eastern windows only,

  When daylight comes, comes in the light;

  In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

  But westward, look, the land is bright.

  Arthur Hugh Clough, ‘Say Not, the Struggle Naught Availeth’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Extracts from the papers of Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, in the Royal Archives have been used by gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen. I am also indebted to Miss Pamela Clark of the Royal Archives, and her colleagues, for their help. Dr Owen Walton was also extremely helpful in pointing me to certain key areas of research. I am grateful to the staff of the British Library for access to a number of manuscript collections there, notably the papers of W. E. Gladstone, Sir Robert Peel and Florence Nightingale, among many others. Mr Frank Bowles and Mr John Wells in the Manuscript Department of the Cambridge University Library also gave great assistance, as did other of their colleagues. I am particularly grateful to Matheson and Co for permission to quote matter relating to Sir James Fitzjames Stephen from the Parkes papers in the Cambridge University Library. Reproductions of paintings by Samuel Butler, and quotations from the Samuel Butler Collection, appear by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge. I should particularly like to thank Mrs Kathryn McKee and Miss Rebecca Watts for their help in using the Collections at St John’s. Royal Holloway, University of London, gave me access to the papers of Thomas Holloway and to material concerning the foundation of Bedford College, and I am grateful to the college and to Vicky Holmes for the help she gave me with those collections. I must thank Imperial College, University of London, for access to the archive of the 1851 Commis
sion, and to Angela Kenny for facilitating it. Jacky Cowdrey guided me through the archives of the Royal Albert Hall, for which I thank her. Sue Sturrock helped me with an enquiry at the Royal College of Music, and I am also most grateful to Miss Laura Ponsonby for allowing me to see the archive of Sir C. Hubert H. Parry, and for her hospitality when I visited it.

  Modern authors owe a considerable debt to those who have ensured that many primary sources are now available online. Millbank Systems, who have made more than 200 years of Hansard available, merit my particular gratitude.

  Mrs Pat Ventre and Mr Gavin Fuller helped find some material for me, for which I thank them. I am also grateful to Mr Murdoch MacLennan, Chief Executive of Telegraph Media Group, for granting me the sabbatical from my duties on that newspaper during which I began the research for this book, and to the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, for allowing me to lodge with them for the year in which that work started.

  Dr Frank Prochaska gave me much useful advice and pointed me towards much useful material about the mid-nineteenth century. The Revd Mark Jones, the Revd John Witheridge and Dr Karina Urbach all did me the inestimable service of reading the manuscript, for which I thank them profusely. I am grateful to Mr Fergus Shanahan for reading the proofs at a late stage.

  I was guided towards returning to the subject of the Victorians by my agent, Georgina Capel, whose support throughout this process, from conception to birth, has been magnificent. I am deeply grateful to my publisher at Random House, Nigel Wilcockson, not just for his tolerance and forbearance during the production of this book, and his insightful suggestions about its structure, but also for his intelligence and expertise on its subject matter which made my job as author far easier than it might otherwise have been. The book was superbly copy-edited by Mary Chamberlain and indexed by Kate Faulkner.

  My wife, Diana, read the proofs at a late stage and applied an invaluable, and sharp, pair of eyes as well as a keen intelligence to the book. But my real and greatest debt is to her for her constant support, understanding and companionship throughout the three years this book was in the making. My sons, Fred and Johnnie, also played their part, and I thank them all profoundly for their considerable roles in making this book possible.

  Simon Heffer

  Great Leighs

  3 June 2013

  PREFACE

  In the four decades between the rise of political consciousness that manifested itself in Chartism, and the return of William Ewart Gladstone to Downing Street in 1880 after his Midlothian Campaign, when he sought to prove the depravity of Lord Beaconsfield’s administration by illustrating its failings in foreign policy, British life changed almost beyond recognition. Although poverty, disease, ignorance, squalor and injustice were far from eliminated, they were beaten back more in those forty or so years than at any previous time in the history of Britain. This was despite, and because of, a population growing faster than at any previous time in the country’s history. A nation that might have been overwhelmed by industrial change, rapid expansion and social upheaval instead saw the challenges of modernisation and embraced them.

  This book is partly the social history, partly the intellectual history, and partly the political history of those years. It is not strictly a linear account of events between 1838 and 1880: it takes the great themes of that period and seeks to use them as the illustration of a spirit, or cast of mind, that transformed a wealthy country of widespread inhumanity, primitiveness and barbarism into one containing the germs, and in some measure the evidence, of widespread civilisation and democracy. A sense of earnest, disinterested moral purpose distinguished many politicians, intellectuals and citizens of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, and drove them to seek to improve the condition of the whole of society. A constant theme in the writings of one of the period’s greatest intellectuals, Matthew Arnold, and a notion shared by many educated people of the time, pervades this book. It is that even if a state of human perfection was unattainable, its pursuit was perhaps the noblest enterprise a Christian soul (and, in some cases, non-Christian ones) could undertake. If that pursuit did not finish at the goal, it at least made everything better.

  The mid-nineteenth century was an era of declining religious observance, but one in which religion still underpinned almost all the great institutions of the nation, dominated education and coloured intellectual discourse. It was one of rigid class distinctions, through which those with talent and good fortune could move if they applied themselves to the task of doing so: and eventually the State extended to many men in the working class the privileges of democracy. It was an era that prized education, but which took a lamentably long time to ensure that most people in England and Wales received one – Scotland was far ahead in that respect – and to see that the teaching offered by the great public and grammar schools was equal to the demands of a modern industrial nation. It encouraged private philanthropy, yet laid the first foundations of a welfare state. It looked fervently to the future, but its vernacular architecture was of the feudal, medieval past. Landed and rich families controlled its ruling class, yet reformed great institutions such as the Army and the Civil Service to create promotion by merit. It was a society that systematically rejected the notion of political, legal and property rights for women, and deplored their attempts to have an education, yet had a Queen as head of state who from time to time behaved in an autocratic manner far from the notion of the constitutional monarchy expounded at the time.

  This book omits two aspects of the British experience in the nineteenth century, both of which would be books in themselves: empire and foreign affairs – though the terms were almost synonymous for much of the period – and the unrest in Ireland, save for the effect of the Potato Famine on the repeal of the Corn Laws. The new ideas it describes and discusses prevailed throughout the United Kingdom, though certain currents on which this book concentrates – such as the wave of religious doubt caused by questioning of the 39 Articles of the Church of England, and the drive to provide education to the masses – were necessarily played out in an English context, since the Scottish Kirk was a different animal and that nation had, since the seventeenth century, set an example of extending education to all. Scotland had also pioneered divorce, something on which it took England and Wales until the 1850s to catch up. In its exploration of British social, intellectual and political life the book relies heavily on the diaries, letters and speeches of the men and women who either inspired, influenced or executed change. It shows people as the main actors of the period, and not government, though government passed laws that enabled people of drive and energy to make the changes a civilised and contented society required. Three times in the decades covered by this book – 1842, 1848 and 1866–7 – political instability in Britain was so serious that it seemed to some to be threatening revolution. That it was avoided – and was, each time, less of a threat than before – was not least because of the measures enlightened government took to break the stranglehold of a narrow governing class on the country, and to find ways of engaging, economically and politically, with those who would otherwise be revolutionaries. Enlightenment came throughout the period from a cadre of intellectuals, thinkers and writers whose freedom of speech and thought slowly changed attitudes, greatly to the country’s benefit.

  When Queen Victoria ascended the throne in June 1837 Britain was a country of rising prosperity, with a growing empire, and a burgeoning middle class made more affluent by industrialism. However, it was also beset by terrible, and destabilising, social problems. There was little or no attempt to regulate public health. Cholera outbreaks were frequent because of the failure to treat sewage, and because no one knew cholera was a water-borne disease. Hospitals and housing for the poor were primitive and squalid. Food was unnecessarily expensive because of import tariffs, and often adulterated or diseased; and water unsafe to drink. Cities teemed with prostitutes, the girls driven to vice by the threat of starvation. Boys and men often lapsed into crime, and were p
unished with a savagery little diminished from medieval times.

  The destitute lived in workhouses where families were broken up. Extreme poverty had been, to all intents and purposes, criminalised by the 1834 Poor Law Act. The mentally ill were still treated cruelly. Women were the property of their husbands. Only a small proportion of adult men could vote. For the minority with the suffrage, there was no secret ballot. Entry to the Civil Service and promotion for officers in the Army could, and usually had to, be bought. There was little in the way of formal local government to provide or oversee basic services, and no sense of municipal or civic pride in many of the cities expanded by the Industrial Revolution. Travel was slow and so expensive that most people never strayed more than a few miles from home. Even communication by letter (for those who could write) was erratic and expensive, until the introduction of the penny post in May 1840. With minor exceptions, in England and Wales only rich males could attend school, and only a small proportion of them went on to a university. Many poor people were illiterate and without means to improve themselves. There were scarcely any libraries, museums or art galleries to which they could gain admission. Workers in the factories that comprised Britain’s manufacturing might were only just beginning to have their labour regulated: children as young as eight were working twelve-hour days. Matters were even worse in the mines, where women and girls worked in bestial conditions with men and boys to provide the coal to stoke Britain’s furnaces. Taxation restricted the availability of newspapers and therefore freedom of speech, and with that the growth of opposition to the established order. Writers and commentators attacked the misgovernment of the country – what Thomas Carlyle, the age’s foremost polemicist, called ‘the condition of England question’. The Chartist movement, with its six-point reform plan for Britain, seemed to promise revolution if its demands were not met.