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Malign spirits
At the end of Vanity Fair (1848) William Makepeace Thackeray closes his novel of the mid-nineteenth century with a relevant homily: ‘Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied? – Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.’
Now the time has come to open the box once more, to dust down the puppets and set them on their feet. These are not the characters of the novel, however, but the characters of the Victorian world who surround it, animate it and give it its characteristic flavour of cunning, greed and good spirits.
The previous volume of this sequence ended with a universal peace and the removal of Napoleon Bonaparte from the stage, but the pleasures of peace were never more fleeting. More than twenty years had passed since the First Coalition of 1793 in which the demands of the army and the navy, the requirements of the men and the importunities of the allies had kept the farmers, the industrialists and the merchants busily engaged in the serious business of making money. For corn and cotton, for wheat and weapons, the demand had seemed limitless. But it was not so. The Annual Register of 1815 noted that the signs of ‘national glory’ had been altogether removed by the evidence of ‘general depression’.
Yet Wellington was still the national hero, and Britain the victor in a race that confirmed its new power in the world. Somehow or other it had acquired seventeen new colonies, with an attendant prestige and influence that would last at least fifty years. But it was no good cheering the departing pipers when they had nowhere to go; the most fortunate veterans found employment in their previous trades, but for many disbanded men only a life of penury and vagrancy beckoned. Some put their military training to good use, however, in organizing Luddite marches and directing the rioters who were soon enraged by hunger and want of work.
The post-war depression lasted for some six years, and with little understanding of the arcane principles of economics the populace had to find something, or someone, to blame. It was deemed to be the fault of the government, therefore, or rather of the laxity and profligacy of those who directed it. There was a call for ‘cheap government’, but nobody really knew how to manage the feat. The fear and loathing that the governing class incurred did not dissipate and had much to do with further riots and calls for political and electoral reform.
There were still many who lived in an earlier time. There were gentlemen who drank a couple of bottles of port before bed, even though drunkenness was growing quite out of fashion. The court and high society were venerated by some in a world where commercial wealth and the merchant were creeping forward. The richer neighbours of the London suburbs still kept a cortège of footmen and of carriages driven by coachmen in wigs. The counting houses and mercantile businesses of the City were conducted with exquisite anonymity, using only a brass plate under the bell-handle for advertisement. The streets in the vicinity were just wide enough for two brewers’ drays to pass without colliding. Every man, and woman, knew his, or her, place according to rank, wealth and age.
Yet by the second and third decades of the nineteenth century a new air of earnestness and energy was visible to observers. This was the era in which the characters of Charles Dickens’s novels belong – Martin Chuzzlewit, Nicholas Nickleby, Philip Pirrip known as Pip, and of course Dickens himself, of quick step and bright eye, who would think nothing of walking 30 miles each day. The characters of the fictional world display moral vigour in a manner entirely consonant with a new age. As the Daily News wrote on the day after Dickens’s death, ‘in his pictures of contemporary life posterity will read, more clearly than in contemporary records, the characters of nineteenth century life’. We can see clearly among other essayists and novelists, too, the broad outlines of the nineteenth century, in its brooding melancholy and in its ribald humour, in its poetry of loss and in its fearfulness, in its capacity for outrage or pity and its tendency towards irony and diffidence, in its embrace of the material world as well as its yearning (at least among the serious middle classes) towards spirituality and transcendence. But we cannot get too close to our forebears. Their world is not ours. If a twenty-first-century person were to find himself or herself enmired in a tavern or lodging house of the period he would no doubt be sick – sick with the smells, sick with the food, sick with the breath of others and the general atmosphere all around.
The word of these early years was ‘pluck’, meaning the courage and ability to take on all challenges. It was also known as ‘mettle’ and ‘bottom’, a deep inhalation of breath before the ardour of the Victorian era. They were obliged, in the words of one cleric, ‘to rush through the rapids’. They differed from their predecessors and their successors with their implicit faith in the human will; whatever their various religions might have been, this was the founding principle. They were determined to get to the other side with all the energy they could muster. The cult of independence came with it, immortalized at a later date in the ‘self-help’ preached by Samuel Smiles. It became part of the battle of life, as the phrase was, filled with manifest duty and diligence. Work was the greatest of all disciplines. The qualities needed were determination, hardness, energy, persistency, thoroughness and inflexibility. These were the cardinal virtues of the coming Victorian era.
This was a young society bolstered by the astonishing increase in the birth-rate; a population of 12 million in 1811 had reached 14 million by 1821 and 21 million by 1851; approximately half were under twenty and living in urban or semi-urban conditions. It is impossible fully to explain this significant rise in numbers, unless it be the organic response of a country on the edge of a giant transition, but the decline in infant mortality must have played a part. Where a modern household will tend to comprise three or four members, that of the early nineteenth century contained six or seven; very large families were also common. The religious census of 1851 reported that 7 million people attended a place of religious worship on Sunday, approximately half of them Anglican. Yet the same survey estimated that 5.5 million people did not care to attend a church or chapel at all. England was at a poise or balance which, from the religious point of view, could only go downwards.
The youthfulness may help to account for the vivacity that was everywhere apparent. The creed of earnestness survived for almost a hundred years, at which point it was parodied by Oscar Wilde. Yet the new dance of the day was the waltz, introduced in 1813 and at first considered ‘riotous and indecent’ because of the close proximity of the partners; it swirled and whirled its way through the ballrooms of England, with the barely repressed energy that marked the era.
The victors of 1815 picked over the bones of the world at the congress in Vienna. Europe now consisted of four great powers – Russia, Austria, Prussia and Great Britain – of which three were autocracies and the last scarcely a democracy. A few men held up the globe. One of them, Lord Castlereagh, foreign minister in Whitehall, was intent upon preserving that shibboleth of ages, the balance of power. The might of England itself was not in doubt, and he told the Commons that ‘there was a general disposition to impute to us an overbearing pride, an unwarrantable arrogance and haughty direction in political matters’ which he was not inclined to deny. It was also said of Castlereagh that he was like a top ‘which spins best when it is most whipped’.
The prime minister, Lord Liverpool, had shifted from ministerial place to place but had already been the chief minister since the assassination of Spencer Perceval in 1812. He was a Tory of a kind familiar in the period; he disliked reform or change except of the most gradual kind, and was most concerned to sustain the apparent or nominal harmony of existing society. It was said that, on the first day of Creation, he would have implored God to stop the confusion immediately. He may have dreamed, as did many of his colleagues, of Catholic emancipation and free trade, but these were problems for another day. His job was to keep his supremacy warm. Liverpool made no great impact on his contemporaries, but he did not seem to care. Disraeli called him the ‘Arch Mediocrity’, and that might be considered to be his greatest achievement. The usual truisms about chief ministers were applied to him; he was honest and he was tactful. He was diplomatic, cautious and reliable, all of them tickets to oblivion, and sat quite comfortably in the Lords where it was relatively easy to acquire a reputation for wisdom. In 1827 he retired, from ill health, after fifteen years as chief minister, but no sooner had he left than he was forgotten.
Before he is completely embalmed with platitudes, a little spark of interest may be kindled. Liverpool was prone to weep at moments of stress, overwhelmed by what were called ‘the weaks’. He was considered to be too ‘spoony’ for his own good, a word translated by another generation as ‘wet’. He could not observe the Morning Post without trembling, and a wife of one of his colleagues, Charles Arbuthnot, described ‘a deliberately cold manner’ and a ‘most querulous, unstable temper’. So much for the tactful and equable appearance, which may be merely a mask for deep uncertainty and dismay. The early decades of the nineteenth century are sometimes presented as those of Regency flightiness before the little hand of Victoria firmly grasped the sceptre. But a contemporary, Sydney Smith, reported these years to be characterized by ‘the old-fashioned, orthodox, hand-shaking, bowel-disturbing passion of fear’. Liverpool’s predecessor, Spencer Perceval, had been assassinated, not without public rejoicing. Nothing about the period was secure, with reports of rioting, rumours of conspiracy and revolution, threats of famine and another European war.
Lord Liverpool was a Tory at a time when the party label meant very little. Without any real discipline the two major formations of Whig and Tory were little more than disparate factions under a succession of temporary leaders. In 1828 the duke of Clarence said that the names ‘meant something a hundred years ago, but are mere nonsense nowadays’. The Whigs had fallen from power in 1784 when they ceased to represent comfortable authority and had become an oligarchic faction opposed to the king. The Tories under William Pitt had taken over power and were reluctant to return it. William Hazlitt compared them to two rival stagecoaches that splashed mud over each other while travelling along the same road.
The Tories complained of the Whigs’ negative attitude to the royal prerogative and their appetite for reforms such as Catholic emancipation; the Whigs in turn believed that the Tories were deaf to popular demands and too indulgent to executive power. There was not much else to separate them. Macaulay tried to dignify their respective positions as ‘the guardian of liberty and the other of order’, testifying to his genius in bringing regularity to the world in words. Lord Melbourne, a future Whig chief minister, said simply that the Whigs were ‘all cousins’. It was this lurking unease at a family affair that suborned their position. Byron said it in Canto XI of Don Juan (1823):
Nought’s permanent among the human race,
Except the Whigs not getting into place.
Policy was formed behind the arras or, as it was known, on the back stairs. Cabinets were often convened without any purpose or agenda, and the ministers would look at one another with a blank surmise. No cabinet minutes were kept, and only the prime minister was allowed to make notes, which were not always reliable. If it was not government by department, since departments were still ramshackle affairs, it was government by private committee. There were no party headquarters until the 1830s. The party leaders of the day were highly reluctant to pronounce on public policy. It could be compromising. The poll books of the unreformed electorate were equally bewildering and haphazard, and votes were influenced by one local grandee or one predominant issue.
Liverpool had many nicknames, among them ‘Old Mouldy’ and ‘the Grand Figitatis’. In his defence, he had much to fidget about. The post-war decline and depression aroused an already resentful nation dazed after years of war. The agricultural interest was at odds with the government, since an influx of cheap foreign corn led to a steep decline in prices. But if corn were raised artificially to a much higher price, popular unrest might ensue. What to do? The farmers feared, and many of the people hoped, that the progress of free trade was inexorable. Lower prices and profits threw many out of employment, however, and their number was increased by the influx of veterans from the war. It happened every time, but no one ever seemed to be prepared for it. Work was scarce and wages were low; the only commodity in abundance was unemployment. The threat of violence was never very far.
Riots had begun in 1815, particularly in North Devon, and in succeeding months they filled the country. They were joined by those agitating for industrial reform, and in particular for the relief of child labour. There was a belief abroad that practical and positive change was at least possible. Hence came the stirrings of political reform. And what was to be done with those many millions of people who had been amassed as part of the newly acquired empire? What of the Irish, for example, who had been part of the Union since 1800? One minister, William Huskisson, observed that all parties were ‘dissatisfied and uneasy’.
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In 1815 no one had seen a train on land or a steamboat on water; horse-drawn cabs and omnibuses did not appear on the London streets until thirteen years later. Everybody, except those who were somebodies, walked everywhere. The stagecoach would have been too expensive to use on a daily basis. So the massive crowds made their way forward as best they could. Soon after dawn, among the pedestrians foot-sore and weary, the clerks and office boys were already jostling their way into the City, streaming in from the outlying areas. Apprentices were sweeping their shops and watering the pavements outside, the children and servants were already crowding the bakers’ shops. If you were fortunate you might, in the vicinity of Scotland Yard, see the coal-heavers dancing. Even in the early hours, sex was still the only pleasure of the poor. Alleys and bushes were used as public lavatories as well as for other more intimate purposes, and sexual intercourse with prostitutes was not uncommon for a couple of pennies.
A contemporary Londoner, Henry Chorley, noted that especially in the morning ‘people did their best, or their worst, to show their love of music, and express their gaiety, or possibly their vacancy of mind, by shouting in the streets the songs of the day’. Popular tunes were whistled in the streets or in taprooms or ground out by barrel-organs. Prints were sold in the street, characteristically placed inside upturned umbrellas, and the more enterprising print shops would continually change their displays. Already at work were the coster girls, the oyster-sellers, the baked-potato men and the chestnut vendors. A little later on, just before noon, came the negro serenaders and the glee-singers. The observant walker would know the weavers’ houses of Spitalfields, the carriage makers of Long Acre, the watchmakers of Clerkenwell and the old-clothes stalls of Rosemary Lane. Dog fights, cock fights, public hangings, pleasure gardens and pillories all added to the general air of excitement and display.
The nights became brighter. London at night had been only partly illuminated by oil and candle. But then the twin agencies of gas and steam became visible. Gas introduced into the streets a ‘brilliancy’ which outshone all others. The agitators and advanced political speculators had been right all along. This was an age of progress, after all. The country was in the process of slowly losing its eighteenth-century character. But the bellies of the poor were still empty. Not for the suffering were the taverns and the chop-houses. Even the penny potatoes were out of reach.
In March 1815, a Corn Law was enacted which prohibited the import of foreign corn until the domestic product reached 80 shillings a bushel, and as a result the price soared too high. With no remedy proposed, the poor and the disaffected fell to riot. The members of parliament complained that they were being tossed to and fro like shuttlecocks between battledores. There was in truth little understanding of economic theory, even though in 1807 John Ruskin’s father noted that ‘the one science, the first and greatest of sciences to all men … is the science of political economy’. The farmers themselves might as well have been engaged in high calculus; they relied upon observation and experience, common sense and Old Moore’s Almanack.
The recession gathered pace and Robert Southey remarked in the British Review that it was mournful ‘to contemplate the effects of extreme poverty in the midst of a civilised and flourishing state’. The Corn Law riots in London were ineffective, but Luddism returned to Nottingham. There were riots from Newcastle upon Tyne to Norfolk, in Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. In 1816 gangs of the unemployed surged through Staffordshire and Worcestershire, and it was reported that large numbers of people ‘had been parading the streets and assembling in groups, using the most threatening language’. The Liverpool Mercury marked the end of the year ‘with sorrow in our habitations and with famine in our streets, and with more than a fourth part of the population of the country subsisting on alms’. This was the period when the anger of the public press mounted ever higher with prints such as the Black Dwarf and Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register. They were supported and circulated by radical societies, none more effectively than the network of Hampden clubs which began in London and soon migrated to the north-east. A penny a week subscription was not considered too dear for spreading the word among spinners, weavers, artisans and labourers about state bribery and corruption. There were fears, however, that radicalism might have in its hands an instrument for a mass movement. It was in this period that ‘radical’ was first coined for any group of supposed malign spirits who, according to the vicar of Harrow, encompassed ‘the rejection of Scripture’ and ‘a contempt for all the institutions of your country’. The home secretary called them ‘the enemy’, and for some time any dissident or opposition force was automatically known as ‘radical’.
A larger dilemma had also been identified. In his Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System (1815) Robert Owen noted that ‘the manufacturing system has already so far extended its influence over the English Empire as to effect an essential change in the general character of the mass of the people’. They were becoming specialized machines designed only to accumulate profit for their employers. Machines themselves served to promote and maintain the division of labour, where each worker had a relatively simple and specialized role. Machinery guaranteed uniformity of work as well as uniformity of product, and acted as a check against inattention or idleness. Machinery promoted a rational and regulated system of labour. It had happened silently and almost invisibly. Now the economists and some of the more advanced agriculturalists were eager to understand what was happening, and were ready to open the book of a new world. Among the first audiences at the new technical lectures on finance were Robert Peel and George Canning, two Tories on the rise.
The monarch was in name George III, but he was now gibbering and deluded. The royal master was the Regent, the Prince of Wales, who was described by the duke of Wellington as ‘the worst man I ever fell in with in my whole life, the most selfish, the most false, the most ill-natured, the most entirely without one redeeming quality’. It was in this period of hunger and riot that the Prince Regent began to build the Brighton Pavilion. He was forever blowing bubbles of stone.
Copyright © 2018 by Peter Ackroyd
