THE AGE OF REFORM ( 1830s – 1900 )

 

‘It was only yesterday,’ exclaims one of Thackeray’s char­acters, ‘but what a gulf between now and then. Then was the old world. Stage-coaches, more or less swift riding horses, packhorses, highwaymen ... But your railroad starts a new era ... We who lived before railways and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark.’

Certainly, since the opening in 1825 of the first public railway, the Stockton and Darlington, the whole tenor of English life as well as the English landscape had been trans­formed. By 1852 there were only a few market towns and coastal resorts without a railway station; twenty years later all these had been provided with one. By 1875 nearly five hundred million passengers were being transported each year, and all London’s main termini, except Blackfriars (1886) and Marylebone (1899), had been completed. Some were horrified by the change the railways brought about. The Duke of Wellington, who survived until 1852, com­plained that ‘people never acted so foolishly as we did in allowing for the Destruction of our excellent and commodi­ous [post roads] in order to expend Millions Sterling on these Rail Roads ... the vulgarest, most indelicate, most injurious to Health of any mode of conveyance’ that he had seen in any part of the world. Yet there were advantages as well as regrets. The railways helped the new towns to grow, and as they grew, so did the capacity of their inhabitants to enjoy fresh food: the sponsors of the London to Birmingham line’s London terminus at Euston noted with pride that it was built on the site of a warren of cowsheds and cow-cellars from which the nearby households had pre­viously been supplied with tainted and watered milk instead of the fresh milk that could now be brought in from the country. Moreover, as it became possible for people to travel beyond the confines of the enclosed communities they had rarely been able to escape before, they discarded their previous suspicions of the outside world and learned both that their fellow countrymen were much like themselves and that social justice, as the reformers encouraged men and women to think, was a national concern.

Among these reformers was William Cobbett, who died in 1835. A farmer’s son and former sergeant-major, whose Rural Rides is a vivid and revealing portrait of England in the early nineteenth century, Cobbett had become one of the most influential of the anti-establishment radicals. His contemporary, Jeremy Bentham, a leading proponent of parliamentary reform, had found wide support for his belief that legislation must aim to achieve ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’; and Robert Owen, the Welsh social reformer whose sympathetic management of the New Lanark cotton-mills had induced other owners to introduce more enlightened methods into their own concerns, had strenuously supported the Factory Act of 1819 which gave a measure of protection to children employed in industry. Thereafter the pace of reform had begun hesitantly to quicken. As Home Secretary from 1822, Robert Peel had introduced a series of measures lessening the severity of the criminal law, which as late as 1819 had still recognized as many as 223 offences as punishable by death; and in 1829 he saw the Metropolitan Police Bill, which proposed the creation of the capital’s first professional police force, pass both Houses without serious opposition, paving the way for a paid constabulary in all the counties of England. In 1829 Roman Catholics were at last granted full civil and political rights by the Roman Catholic Emancipation Act. And, at the general election of 1830, the Whigs under Lord Grey were returned to power after more than half a century in opposition and turned their minds to the problem of par­liamentary reform.

Although the Tories were traditionally opposed to the measure, it had long been generally conceded that parlia­mentary reform was overdue. Only about one person in every hundred had a vote; and, while several large towns such as Manchester — whose population with that of Salford had already risen to 84,000 by 1801 — had no representative in Parliament at all, there were several places far smaller which had two. There were also various so-called rotten or pocket boroughs, like Satton which was no more than a park and Dunwich which had for centuries been submerged beneath the North Sea. These were mostly in the hands of landowners who nominated Members as they chose. George Selwyn, for example, the rich and witty Member for Gloucester who would travel anywhere to watch a good hanging, owned the pocket borough of Luggershall in Wiltshire. He agreed to sell it to General Simon Fraser when it seemed that Fraser, who was standing for Inverness-shire, might be defeated by his opponent, Lord George Gordon.

Fraser consulted his father, Lord Lovat, who in turn spoke to the Duke of Gordon, Lord George’s elder brother. Between them they decided it would be cheaper to buy Selwyn’s seat than to bribe all the electors of Inverness-shire. So Luggershall was bought and presented to Lord George Gordon who accordingly agreed to withdraw from Inverness-shire so as to leave the field clear for Simon Fraser. Nobody regarded the transaction as anything out of the ordinary.

It was in order to prevent such deals by the abolition of rotten boroughs, to grant seats to new towns which lacked them and to give the vote to certain additional holders, of property that Lord Grey’s government brought forward their modest Reform Bill in 1831. The member of the gov­ernment mainly responsible for drafting the Bill was Lord John Russell, son of the 6th Duke of Bedford, a clever and persuasive little man whose heart was set on reform both political and educational. Despite a persuasive speech by Russell in the Commons, the Bill was defeated. Grey there­fore resigned and appealed to the country; the Whigs were returned again with a large majority; and the Bill, somewhat amended, was again presented to the Commons who now passed it. The government could not, however, get it through the Lords; and it was not until Lord Grey went to see the King, George IV’s brother William IV, that the problem was resolved. Grey proposed that the King should create a sufficient number of new peers to ensure the passage of the Bill. The King, naturally reluctant to do so — since such a measure would threaten the whole fabric of the Upper House — was saved from the necessity by the Tories’ submis­sion. Their leader, the Duke of Wellington, advised accep­tance of the Bill which eventually became law in May 1832.

The next year a whole series of reforms were enacted. Many of them were proposed by the 7th Earl of Shaftes­bury, the indefatigable philanthropist in whose memory was erected the statue by Alfred Gilbert known as Eros at Piccadilly Circus and after whom Shaftesbury Avenue was named. Shaftesbury concerned himself with a wide variety of causes, from the plight of lunatics to the laws relating to the employment of women and children in factories and mines, from the treatment of chimney sweepers’ climbing-boys to the education of the poor and the eradication of slums. It was, indeed, largely due to Shaftesbury’s efforts that some of the worst abuses in society were brought to the attention of a generally complacent middle class.

While Shaftesbury was concerning himself with the plight of the English poor, other reformers were struggling to abolish slavery and to complete the work of William Wilberforce, the rich merchant’s son and close friend of Pitt, who had done so much to kill the slave trade itself in 1807. Their efforts met with success in 1833 when — in the year that Shaftes bury’s Factory Act made it illegal to employ children below the age of thirteen for more than 48 hours a week — slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire.

Much as was achieved by Lord Grey’s government and those of his successors, Melbourne and Peel, radicals had cause to complain that progress was not proceeding fast enough and that some innovations were positively deleteri­ous. The Mines and Collieries Act of 1842, it was admitted, went some way towards dealing with the exploitation of women and children in coal mines by prohibiting the employment of women underground as well as boys under ten. But the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 did little to ameliorate the miseries of the destitute. Before the passing of this Act, poor relief had been administered by the system known as the Speenhamland System from the place in Berkshire where the justices had originally devised it. By this method exceptionally low wages had been supple­mented from parish rates, a system which, far from reliev­ing poverty, encouraged employers to keep wages low. The Poor Law which abolished it, however, instead of offering relief to paupers, by giving them sufficient money to survive in their own homes, forced them into workhouses, and was far from an agreeable alternative, since conditions in work­houses were deliberately rendered so unpleasant that most poor people did all they could to avoid entering them. Charles Dickens’s description of workhouse fare as consti­tuting ‘three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays’ — while not intended to be taken as exact — was not far from the truth; and the bowl of soup and small piece of bread which the poor boys are given in the large stone hail in Oliver Twist was not an unusual meal under a system by which children under nine years of age were dieted ‘at discretion’.

There was widespread dissatisfaction with the new Poor Law and with the Reform Act which, while welcomed by the propertied middle classes, was a profound disappoint­ment to radicals and the militant working class. There was dissatisfaction also with the failure of attempts to develop trade unionism; and this general discontent ensured that unrest continued throughout the 1 830s and helped to increase support for the movement for political reform known as Chartism.

This movement took its name from a People’s Charter drawn up in 1838 by a group of radicals who demanded of the government universal male suffrage and vote by secret ballot, equal electoral districts, annual parliaments, an end to property qualifications for Members of Parliament, and the introduction of salaries for them. Support for these six demands was loudly voiced at meetings held both by day and night all over the country. One such gathering at Halifax attracted a crowd of 200,000. ‘It is almost impossi­ble to imagine the excitement caused,’ one Chartist wrote of these rallies. ‘Working people met in their thousands and tens of thousands to swear devotion to the common cause

...The processions were frequently of immense length...

The meetings themselves were of a still more terrific charac­ter.’ In 1839 there was a threat of a general strike; and later on that year when 7,000 men, mostly miners and iron-workers, marched through the streets of Newport, Monmouthshire, demanding the release of a Chartist orator from the local gaol, soldiers opened fire on them and at least twenty-two were killed.

There were riots, too, in renewed protest against the Corn Laws whose effects were exacerbated by a series of poor harvests. In 1839 an Anti-Corn Law League was founded to denounce the Laws as benefiting landowners at the expense of workers; and speakers propounding the views of the League, and raising funds for its propaganda, travelled all over the country in the steps of Richard Cobden, a Sussex farmer’s son who, in his own words, ‘lived in public meetings’, and John Bright, the son of a Quaker mill owner from Lancashire. In the opinion of a Tory landlord, expressing a general view, the League was ‘the most cunning, unscrupulous, knavish, pestilent body of men that ever plagued this or any other country.’ But it was a Tory Prime Minister, Robert Peel, who, after a poor harvest in England and the failure of the potato crop in Ireland, was persuaded in 1846 that the Corn Law must be repealed. The decision came too late. In Ireland, where potatoes were the staple diet, about a million people per­ished of starvation or disease and a further million emi­grated, many of them to America where they nurtured a hatred of England shared by most of the Irish people who remained behind. The decision split the Tory party. Although he steered the repeal through Parliament, Peel was obliged to resign, and many of his followers joined the Whigs — now the developing Liberal Party soon to be dom­inated by the towering figure of William Ewart Gladstone —while the remaining Tories, or Conservatives as they were now more generally known, regrouped themselves under Benjamin Disraeli, a Christianized Jew of mixed Italian and Spanish descent who had attacked the government’s pro­posal to repeal the Corn Laws in a series of brilliant speeches. Disraeli poured such scorn upon Peel that his victim, a shy, awkward man with an aloof manner and an excessive sensitivity to ridicule, was observed more than once to change colour dramatically as he listened, to laugh loudly and defensively in pretence of amusement, or to pull his hat down over his eyes and his nervously twitching face.

Upon Peel’s resignation in 1846, the Liberal Lord John Russell became Prime Minister; and it was his government which had to deal with the continuing problems presented by the Chartists who were planning to organize a massive demonstration in London and to present a petition to Parliament containing even more signatures than the three million appended to an earlier petition of 1842. The demon­stration was planned for 1848, the year of revolutions on the Continent where the King of France was forced to abdi­cate and the Austrian Empire and Germany were both in uproar. It was hoped by the Chartist leaders that revolution might break out in England, too. The Royal Family were advised to leave London for the safety of their house at Osborne on the Isle of Wight. Already the lamps outside Buckingham Palace had been smashed and shouts of ‘Vive Ia republique!’ had been heard. But Lord John Russell’s government, of which the pugnacious Lord Palmerston was a senior member, stood firm. Immense numbers of police were brought into London; 150,000 special constables were enrolled; yeomanry regiments were called up. Feargus O’Connor, the Irish orator and journalist, a leading figure in the Chartist movement, urged the crowds to disperse. Another Chartist leader gloomily conceded that the govern­ment had proved too strong for the workers. Thereafter Chartism gradually declined. And Queen Victoria, in tears and shivering with fright before she left for Osborne, ex­pressed her profound relief that the trouble was over, that the workmen, misled by professional agitators and the ‘criminals and refuse of London’, remained loyal after all.

Queen Victoria, who had succeeded her uncle, William IV, in 1837, was then twenty-nine years old, the mother of six children and the happy wife of Prince Albert of Saxe­Coburg and Gotha whom she manifestly adored. Although well instructed in her rights and duties by her first Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, the Queen was not content to be a mere figurehead and interfered in the processes of govern­ment far more insistently than her ministers thought seeming or the constitution allowed. An emotional and selfish woman, difficult, demanding and capricious, she was imperious, though innately shy, finding throughout her life official engagements unusually tiring as they not only bored her but made her nervous. Often she had to restrain herself from giggling. She had little cause, however, to be unsure of herself in the presence of ministers, for she had many varied talents of her own. Her intellect was limited, but she had an astonishingly good memory. She was hardworking, well-informed and shrewd. Her judgements, however, were never tentative, never in doubt. Incapable of lying or dis­sembling herself, she was also incapable of understanding that there were degrees of reprehensibility. A thing was right or it was wrong; a person was good or bad; and, once her mind was made up, she had absolute confidence in her opinion. She played the part of Queen and Empress with an instinctive and formidable distinction.

The monarch had, and has, every constitutional right to make suggestions; yet Queen Victoria often overstepped the limits of constitutional propriety, writing to her royal rela­tions on political matters without the knowledge of the Cabinet, corresponding with generals without reference to the War Minister, and with former Prime Ministers behind the backs of their successors, threatening to abdicate if the government pursued policies of which she disapproved, on occasions actively supporting and encouraging the opposi­tion, and reacting angrily at any hint of criticism. Although Prince Albert is justly given credit for helping to guide the Queen towards the creation of a new English monarchical tradition which placed the throne above party, he, too, was prone to the kind of constitutional indiscretion encouraged by his adviser, Baron Stockmar, who was of the dangerous

opinion that the monarch was the ‘permanent Premier’ and t he Prime Minister merely ‘the temporary

head of the Cabinet’.

Although never much liked in the country at large, Prince Albert was generally respected by the Queen’s ministers; and after his premature death, which laid her prostrate with grief, it was considered only appropriate that his memory should be honoured by the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, the highly expensive monument in which the tatue of the Prince is seen holding the catalogue of the Great and encourage .Exhibition of 1851 which he had done so much to The Great Exhibition of over 100,000 objects from all over the world was held in a specially constructed Crystal palace designed by Joseph Paxton on the lines of a conser­atory he had created for the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth in Derbyshire. The Crystal Palace was after­wards removed to Sydenham where it served as the first home of the Imperial War Museum whose new premises —part of the old Bethlem Royal Hospital in Lambeth — now contain a model of the original Palace burned down in 1936. The Exhibition held here in 1851 was a notable success, attracting over six million visitors and making a handsome profit which, with the help of funds voted by Parliament, paid for the transformation of a large part of Kensington where Exhibition Road, Queen’s Gate and Cromwell Road — all names chosen by Prince Albert himself — were built soon afterwards. Also built on land purchased by the Great Exhibition Commissioners in the I 850s were the Albert Hall, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, and the Geological Museum.

At the same time the University Museum was built in Oxford. At the strong instigation of John Ruskin, whose Stones of Venice was published in 185 1-3, this museum was built in the Gothic style, the style chosen also for the Houses of Parliament, rebuilt after their destruction by fire in 1834. Thereafter Gothic was selected for numerous churches, country houses and collegiate buildings throughout the country, from G. E. Street’s Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand and William Butterfield’s Keble College, Oxford to Alfred Waterhouse’s Manchester Town Hall and George Gilbert Scott’s Midland Hotel, St Pancras Station.

When in 1831 work had begun on the huge Gothic Harlaxton Manor in Lincolnshire to the designs of Anthony Salvin and its owner Gregory Gregory, there had been little enthusiasm for this style. The architect of the Gothic Houses of Parliament, Charles Barry, would have preferred to have submitted a Renaissance design; and when in the 1860s new government offices were required along Whitehall Lord Palmerston received vociferous support when he insisted that they should be in Itafianate rather than in the Gothic style, which Sir George Gilbert Scott at first proposed. But by the time Ruskin had resigned his Professorship of Fine Arts at Oxford in 1884 and retired to the seclusion of Brantwood he had succeeded in changing a whole generation’s attitude to architecture. Despite the out­rageous prejudice of some of his statements, he had ulti­mately convinced most of his countrymen that the Gothic style which he had so passionately championed — and which was so grandly exploited for the creation of Allerton Park, North Yorkshire — was a style far better suited than any other to reflect the glories of the British past. By his defence of J. M. W. Turner, whose work was at first derided by the critics, Ruskin had also taught the public to recognize the genius of the most original landscape painter of the nine­teenth century; while by his advocacy of Holman Hunt, Millais, Rossetti and the other Pre-Raphaelites, he had encouraged a revolt against the conventional academic painting of the day.

A social reformer, as well as author and artist, Ruskin concerned himself also with national education, the organi­zation of labour, the foundation of training schools, old-age pensions, and the building of decent homes for the working class. Moreover he supported the kind of industrial experi­ments advocated by William Morris whose revival of hand­icrafts and views of house decoration, as exemplified by the decorations and furniture in his own houses — the Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent, Kelmscott House, Hammer-smith and Kelmscott in Oxfordshire — were revolutionizing English taste.

Many of Ruskin’s reformist ideas were ridiculed in his time and dismissed out of hand by successive governments. Lord Palmerston, who was brought to power when the Conservative government of Lord Aberdeen revealed its incompetence during the Crimean War against Russia in 1854-6, was for most of his time in office preoccupied with foreign affairs, with the suppression of the mutiny of the native soldiers of the Indian army in 1857, with the prob­lems presented by the struggles for the unification of Italy and with the conflicts precipitated by the opium trade in China — a trade which a Parliamentary Committee had deemed it ‘inadvisable to abandon since it engendered so important a revenue’. Britain’s overseas possessions, of which the Queen was so proud and which covered so many thousands of square miles marked in pink on the maps of schoolroom walls, were still, after all, widely regarded as being held to serve the business interests of British mer­chants and manufacturers and to provide the mother country with raw materials, even though, since the loss of the American colonies, there had grown up a new concep­tion of Empire as being not merely a means to riches through trade but a political organization of peoples involv­ing responsibilities as well as rights.

From 1867, however, when Disraeli — who became Conservative Prime Minister for the first time the next year —  was largely instrumental in pushing through the second Reform Act, which almost doubled the electorate, until 1894 when his rival, Gladstone, retired at the age of 84, the pace of reform, much of it inspired by the writings of J. S. Mill, equalled that of the Shaftesbury era. The Education Act of 1870 introduced universal elementary education; the Trade Union Act of 1871 gave unions legal status and a later Act the right to picket peacefully; the Ballot Act of 1872 made voting secret, putting an end to bribery and intimidation. Long overdue reforms were instituted in the Army by Edward Cardwell as Secretary for War from 1868 to 1874; in public health by Sir Edwin Chadwick; and in hospital administration by Florence Nightingale, who having trained in Prussia and France, had gone out to nurse the sick and wounded and badger the medical department in the dreadful hospitals of the Crimea. There were reforms also in land tenure and poor relief; in the constitution of the universities and in the treatment of prisoners.

From time to time the attention of the public was diverted from this erratic march of progress by the outbreak of wars and the progress of events in the now huge British Empire. There was intermittent fighting along the frontiers of India whose imperial crown the Queen assumed in 1876; there was fighting in Afghanistan after the assassination of the British Resident in Kabul; there was trouble, too, in Egypt from whose bankrupt Khedive Disraeli bought a controlling interest in the Suez Canal on behalf of the gov­ernment and presented the shares to the Queen, as though they were a personal gift, with the words, ‘You have it, madam, the entire interest of the Khedive is now yours. There was fighting in the Sudan where General Gordon perished attempting to evacuate Egyptian forces from Khartoum and Kitchener at last established British author­ity by his victory at Omdurman. In Zululand a British force was destroyed at Isandhlwana; in South Africa peace came only after further humiliating defeats at the hands of the Dutch settlers, the Boers, had been revenged by General Roberts. And, as always, there was trouble in Ireland.

By the 18 80s Gladstone had come to the conclusion that the demands for Irish Home Rule, that is to say, for an Irish parliament responsible for the island’s domestic affairs, made by Charles Stewart Paine!! and other Irish Members of Parliament, must be met. The Queen was horrified, writing to the Prince of Wales to express her dissatisfaction with her ‘dreadfully Radical Government ... and the way in which they truckled to the Home Rulers — as well as the utter disregard of all my opinions which after 45 years of experience ought to be considered.’ She had never liked or trusted the Irish; and Gladstone’s suggestion that she should spend as much time there as she did at her beloved Scottish home, Balmoral, was an absurd idea, just such a one as might have been expected from this ‘wild incompre­hensible ... half-mad firebrand’. If only Disraeli had lived all would have been different. But Disraeli had died in 1881 and now lay buried in the village churchyard near his country house at Hughenden.

Had he and his party wished it, Disraeli might have per­suaded the Queen to regard Home Rule with less hostility. By his ingratiating tact and fulsome flattery, by the impres­sion he gave of needing to consult her and have the advice of her astute mind, he contrived on occasions to change it. He recognized himself that he often ‘laid it on rather thick’ with his coaxing blandishments. But, as he said to Matthew Arnold, ‘You have heard me called a flatterer, and it is true. Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel.’ But he never underestimated the Queen’s astuteness; he grew genuinely fond of her —even though he declined to see her when he was dying on the grounds that she would only want him to take a message to Albert — and, in treating her with elaborate courtesy, he was behaving towards her as he did to all women he liked. Gladstone, a man of the utmost moral rectitude who hated dissembling, could not bring himself to treat the Queen in such a way. He addressed her, so she said, as though she were a public meeting and was quite incapable of following the advice of his wife who sensibly said to him, ‘Do pet the Queen, and for once believe you can, you dear old thing.’ But it was not in Gladstone’s nature to do so. He was a man of remarkable political and administrative ability as well as a splendid and powerful orator. There was great nobility in his character; yet there was in his manner something of the pious humbug. In a telling comment the Liberal politician and journalist, Henry Labouchère, said of him that he did not object to Gladstone ‘always having the ace of trumps up his sleeve, but only to his pretence that God had put it there’. It was to this aspect of Gladstone’s character that the Queen took exception; and when his Home Rule Bill was defeated by a combination of Conservatives and dissidents in his own party, the Queen accepted his resignation, and the Marquess of Salisbury as his Conservative successor, with unconcealed satisfaction. Upon Gladstone’s death in 1898 she declined to express any grief. ‘No, I did not like the man,’ she declared with characteristic honesty. ‘How can I say I am sorry when I am not?’ It was left to her eldest son to pay the widow due respects: he kissed Mrs Gladstone’s hand at the funeral and, to his mother’s annoy­ance, played the part of pall-bearer. Three years later the Queen, too, was dead; and the age to which she had given a name died with her.

The term Victorian was already in use in 1875 when Victoria had over a quarter of a century to live. It has been taken to imply a regard for hard work and thrift, strict morality and family virtues; in one dictionary it is defined as ‘exhibiting the characteristics popularly attributed to the Victorians, especially prudery, bigotry or hypocrisy’.

The Queen’s eldest son, with whom she had so often found fault, and who now succeeded her as Edward VII, was unarguably a Victorian by birth but very far from being a Victorian by nature. He seemed, indeed, a highly appro­priate figure to preside over the society that drifted — as apparently unconcerned as the Titanic steaming towards the icebergs of the north Atlantic — into war with the Germany of the nephew whom he so much disliked, Kaiser Wilhelm II.

 

 

 

NATIVES                              ROMAN BRITAIN                                  ANGLO-SAXON              NORMAN RULE 

 

Crown and People            Twilight of Middle Ages                  Tudor England           Early Stuart England

 

EMPIRE AND INDUSTRY         THE AGE OF REFORM                             20th century

 

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