one of the main sources of our knowledge of the conditions of
factory life at the time. Its pages bring before the reader in
the vivid form of dialogue the kind of life that was led by the
victims of the new system. Men and women who were old at twenty,
from all the industrial districts, from Manchester, from Glasgow,
from Huddersfield, from Dundee, from Bradford, from Leeds, passed
before their rulers with their tale of weariness, misery, and
diseased and twisted limbs. A worsted spinner of Huddersfield,
Joseph Hebergram, aged seventeen, described his day’s work at the
age of seven. His hours were from five in the morning to eight
at night, with one solitary break of thirty minutes at noon. All
other meals had to be taken in snatches, without any interruption
of work. “Did you not become very drowsy and sleepy towards the
end of the day and feel much fatigued?” “Yes; that began about
three o’clock; and grew worse and worse, and it came to be very bad
towards six and seven.” “What means were taken to keep you at your
work so long?” “There were three overlookers; there was one a head
overlooker, and there was one man kept to grease the machines, and
there was one kept on purpose to strap.” His brother, who worked in
the same mill, died at sixteen from spinal affection, due to his
work, and he himself began to grow deformed after six months of it.
“How far do you live from the mill?” “A good mile.” “Was it very
painful for you to move?” “Yes, in the morning I could scarcely
walk, and my brother and sister used, out of kindness, to take me
under each arm, and run with me to the mill, and my legs dragged on
the ground; in consequence of the pain I could not walk.” Another
witness, an overseer in a flax spinning mill at Dundee, said that
there were nine workers in the room under his charge who had begun
work before they were nine years old, and that six of them were
splay-footed and the other three deformed in other ways. A tailor
at Stanningley, Samuel Coulson, who had three daughters in the
mill, described the life of his household when the mill was busy.
In the ordinary time the hours were from six in the morning to
half-past eight at night; in the brisk time, for six weeks in the
year, these girls, the youngest of them “going eight,” worked from
three in the morning to ten or half-past ten at night. “What was
the length of time they could be in bed during those long hours?”
“It was near eleven o’clock before we could get them into bed after
getting a little victuals, and then at morning my mistress used to
stop up all night, for fear that we could not get them ready for
the time; sometimes we have gone to bed and one of us generally
awoke.” “Were the children excessively fatigued by this labour?”
“Many times; we have cried often when we have given them the little
victualling we had to give them; we had to shake them, and they
have fallen asleep with the victuals in their mouths many a time.”
Another witness, Gillett Sharpe, described how his boy, who had
been very active and a good runner, gradually lost the use of his
limbs at the mill. “I had three steps up into my house, and I have
seen that boy get hold of the sides of the door to assist his
getting up into the house; many a one advised me to take him away;
they said he would be ruined and made quite a cripple; but I was
a poor man, and could not afford to take him away, having a large
family, six children under my care.”
--and so on, and so on. Sadler forced the horrible tale upon
Parliament. Unhappily, being pitted against Macaulay at Leeds in the
General Election of 1832, he lost his seat, though Manchester sent an
appeal signed by 40,000 factory-workers: and he never returned to the
House of Commons. He died in 1835 at fifty-five, worn out by his work
on behalf of these poor children.
VII
His mantle descended to Lord Ashley: and Ashley, after bitter defeats,
won on the mine-children what had been lost in the cotton-mills. For
the mines took an even more hideous toll of childhood than did the
mills. Listen to this, extracted from the Report of the Commission of
1840–1842, which shocked all England by its disclosures--
In every district except North Staffordshire, where the younger
children were needed in the Potteries, the employment of children
of seven was common, in many pits children were employed at six,
in some at five, and in one case a child of three was found to be
employed. Even babies were sometimes taken down into the pits to
keep the rats from their fathers’ food. The youngest children were
employed as trappers; that is, they were in charge of the doors in
the galleries, on the opening and closing of which the safety of
the mine depended. For the ventilation of the mine was contrived
on a simple principle; there were two shafts, one the downcast,
the other the upcast. A fire was lighted at the foot of the upcast
to drive the air up the shaft, and air was sucked down through the
downcast to fill the vacuum. This air was conducted by means of a
series of doors through all the workings of the mine on its passage
to the upcast, and these doors were in the charge of a little boy
or girl, who sat in a small hole, with a string in his or her hand,
in darkness and solitude for twelve hours or longer at a time.
“Although this employment,” reported the Commission, “scarcely
deserves the name of labour, yet as the children engaged in it are
commonly excluded from light, and are always without companions,
it would, were it not for the passing and re-passing of the coal
carriages, amount to solitary confinement of the worst order.”
Children were also employed to push the small carriages filled
with coals along the passages, and as the passages were often
very low and narrow, it was necessary to use very small children
for this purpose. “In many mines which are at present worked, the
main gates are only from 24 to 30 inches high, and in some parts
of these mines the passages do not exceed 18 inches in height.
In this case not only is the employment of very young children
absolutely indispensable to the working of the mine, but even the
youngest children must necessarily work in a bent position of
the body.” As a rule the carriages were pushed along small iron
railways, but sometimes they were drawn by children and women,
“harnessed like dogs in a go-cart,” and moving, like dogs, on all
fours. Another children’s task was that of pumping water in the
under-bottom of pits, a task that kept children standing ankle-deep
in water for twelve hours. In certain districts children were used
for a particularly responsible duty. In Derbyshire and parts of
Lancashire and Cheshire it was the custom to employ them as engine
men, to let down and draw up the cages in which the population of
the pit descended to its depths and returned to the upper air. A
“man of discretion” required 30_s._ a week wages; these substitutes
only cost 5_s._ or 7_s._ a week. Accidents were, of course,
frequent,--on one occasion three lives were lost because a child
engineman of nine turned away to look at a mouse at a critical
moment,--and the Chief Constable of Oldham said that the coroners
declined to bring in verdicts of gross neglect from pity for the
children.
VIII
Do you ask “What has all this to do with literature, or what has
literature to do with these things”? I answer that, as a matter of
mere history, literature in the nineteenth century did immensely
concern itself with these things: and I add that, as literature deals
with life, so if it deserve a place in any decent state, it _should_
deal with these things. And to this again I add, because they dealt
righteously and unsparingly with these things, Shelley, Dickens,
Carlyle, Ruskin--yes and, later, William Morris--live on the lips of
men to-day. For they let in light upon dark places; not only revealing
them to the public conscience, but, better still and better far,
conveying light and waking eyesight in the victims themselves.
Denunciation has its uses: and if you want to hear denunciation, listen
to Carlyle--
British industrial existence seems fast becoming one huge
poison-swamp of reeking pestilence physical and moral; a hideous
_living_ Golgotha of souls and bodies buried alive; such a
Curtius’ gulf, communicating with the Nether Deeps, as the Sun
never saw till now. These scenes, which the _Morning Chronicle_
is bringing home to all minds of men,--thanks to it for a service
such as Newspapers have seldom done,--ought to excite unspeakable
reflections in every mind. Thirty-thousand outcast Needlewomen
working themselves swiftly to death; three million Paupers rotting
in forced idleness, _helping_ said Needlewomen to die: these are
but items in the sad ledger of despair.
Thirty-thousand wretched women, sunk in that putrefying well of
abominations; they have oozed-in upon London, from the universal
Stygian quagmire of British industrial life; are accumulated in the
_well_ of the concern, to that extent. British charity is smitten
to the heart, at the laying-bare of such a scene; passionately
undertakes, by enormous subscription of money, or by other enormous
effort, to redress that individual horror; as I and all men hope
it may. But, alas, what next? This general well and cesspool once
baled clean out to-day, will begin before night to fill itself anew.
Yes, denunciation has its uses: and public exposure is salutary, or at
least sanitary, though its first revelations sicken to such despair as
Carlyle’s. But the true operation of light is upon the sufferer’s own
eyes, the promise in its salutation is for them. Listen to this one
sentence from Porter’s _Progress of the Nation_, published in 1851--
In 1839, 1840 and 1841, 40 per cent. of the men and 65 per cent.
of the women married or witnessing marriages in Lancashire and
Cheshire could not sign their names
--and at this time Leonard Horner, Inspector of Factories, reported
that in an area of thirty-two square miles comprising Oldham and
Ashton, with a population of 105,000, there was not a single public day
school for poor children. Consider these millions of children who grew
up to be men and wives in purlieus not once penetrated by so much as
a glint of the romance, the poetry, that as we look back--you a short
way, Gentlemen--I a long one--we see as Heaven lying about us in _our_
infancy. _There_ lay the soul’s tragedy--
The singers have sung, and the builders have builded,
The painters have fashioned their tales of delight;
For what and for whom hath the world’s book been gilded,
When all is for these but the blackness of night?
There lay the tragedy: there the seat of cure: and if, with so much
left undone, it has become possible from this desk to preach, without
serious rebuke, that humanism can be taught even in our Elementary
Schools, and, further, that to see it is so taught may well concern
even a great University, these humanitarians of the nineteenth
century were the men and women who invaded the borders of Zabulon and
Nephthalim, until for them which sat in darkness, in the region and
shadow of death, light is sprung up.
IX
But I recall myself to my purpose; which in two following lectures
shall be as literary, as merely critical, as I can keep it. To-day I
have set out the theme and tried to show you how it had perforce to
occupy men’s minds and--since artists and imaginative writers must
have feelings as well as intellect--almost to dominate our literature
and art in the last century. In that domination of interest you will
find implicit, and will easily evolve for yourselves, the reason why
the novel in particular, being a social form of art and lending itself
in so many ways to episode, discussion, even direct preaching, became
political as it never was in the days of Richardson and Fielding, Scott
and Jane Austen. The preponderance of the theme being granted, I next
propose to examine how it took possession of two persons of genius: a
man and a woman; the man assertive, personally ambitious, full of fire
and opulent phrase: the woman staid, self-abnegating, to me wearing
the quiet, with the intensity, of a noble statue. I can conceive, if
one would trace in literature the operation of a compelling idea, no
two exponents more essentially disparate than Benjamin Disraeli and
Elizabeth Gaskell.
DISRAELI
I
For two reasons or (shall we say) against two main obstacles, both
serious, Benjamin Disraeli found it hard to gain the ear of Parliament
and, having gained it, had yet a long fight before attaining office.
To begin with, his race and reputation were against him. He was a
Jew, and he had written novels. He was admittedly clever to excess:
but cleverness, specially when tainted by literary skill, is, of all
others, the reputation which our British Senate most profoundly (and
perhaps on the whole wisely) distrusts. That the House “hates a man
who makes it think” was the observation of a cynic, no doubt. But I
have also heard it said by one long a member of it, that a speaker
there must always count on somebody--he knows not whom--who knows the
subject more thoroughly than he. Its instinct being for solidity, it
shrinks from brilliance as a danger: and this was specially true of
the party to which Disraeli allied himself--upon which, we may say, he
thrust himself--a Jew, an adventurer, an ambitious, esurient fellow
without any stake in the country. What had a party, which didn’t in the
least object to being called stupid, to gain by the support of such an
outsider?
And it is obvious that, for Parliamentary success, Disraeli had to
overcome something more serious--a certain bumptiousness of manner, a
youthful confidence and ease in Sion, helped out by elaborate ringlets,
mannerisms and a foppish dress very much overdone: an opulence of
speech and waistcoat, both jarring on the very men--and probably most
upon these--into whose less-oiled heads he was fighting to drive some
ideas. There is a great deal of tactlessness in the story of Disraeli,
right up to the moment of Peel’s fall. But the story witnesses not
only to a growing mastery, won by amazing courage, over the House
but--better--to a discipline won over himself.
II
Now as Disraeli, being a novelist, was naturally suspect among the
party with whom he had chosen to cast his political lot, so his
books were naturally suspected and unjustly treated by his opponents
throughout his lifetime: and for this again we may decide that he was
largely to blame. He was, as you know, the son of a man of letters:
as he puts it, “born in a library, and trained from early childhood
by learned men who did not share the passions and prejudices of our
political and social life.” In his early work, such as _The Young Duke_
or _The Infernal Marriage_, we find, with all its excess--the excess of
youth--a hard literary finish. Let me quote from the last-named story a
few sentences for specimen:
The next morning the Elysian world called to pay their respects to
Proserpine. Her Majesty, indeed, held a drawing-room, which was
fully and brilliantly attended.... From this moment the career
of Proserpine was a series of magnificent entertainments. The
principal Elysians vied with each other in the splendour and
variety of the amusements which they offered to the notice of their
Queen. Operas, plays, balls and banquets followed in dazzling
succession. Proserpine who was almost inexperienced in society,
was quite fascinated. She regretted the years she had wasted in
her Sicilian solitude: and marvelled that she could ever have
looked forward with delight to a dull annual visit to Olympus; she
almost regretted that, for the sake of an establishment, she could
have been induced to cast her lot in the regal gloom of Tartarus.
Elysium exactly suited her.
Now that, in its way, is as neat as can be. You perceive at once that
the style is literary and controlled. Nor, even in the tumultuous close
of _Vivian Grey_, his first work, can you fail to perceive that, though
exuberant, it was at first controlled. He says:
I have too much presumed upon an attention which I am not able to
command. I am, as yet, but standing without the gate of the garden
of romance. True it is that, as I gaze through the ivory bars of
its golden portal I would fain believe that, following my roving
fancy, I might arrive at some green retreats hitherto unexplored,
and loiter among some leafy bowers where none have lingered before
me. But these expectations may be as vain as those dreams of youth
over which we have all mourned. The disappointment of manhood
succeeds to the delusions of youth: let us hope that the heritage
of old age is not despair.
Analyse that, and you will find it youthful, orientally luxuriant, but
well bridled, on the whole, to the cadence of good prose. Press your
analysis a little further, and you will detect the voice of a born
rhetorician even in its first sentence. Let me add but two words to it:
I have too much presumed, Mr. Speaker, upon an attention which I am
not able to command.
--and you have the House of Commons before you, with Peel and
Macaulay, Palmerston and Lord John Russell, listening. Even so early
his vocation can be detected as calling, enticing Disraeli away from
the stern discipline of letters to the easier success of rhetoric,
from the sessions of silent thought to the immediate response of an
auditory, whether in Parliament or at the foot of the hustings. As
even the noblest, most impassioned sentences of Cicero, addressed to
Senate or law-court, wear a somewhat artificial, attitudinising air
to us in comparison (say) with a colloquy of Socrates meditated and
colloquially reported by Plato, so, speaking as one who has recently
had to search for true prose, as we conceive it, among the speeches of
British orators, I promise but a thin harvest to the researcher: the
simple reason being that oratory plays to the moment, literature to
thoughts and emotions carried away, reconsidered, tested, approved on
second thought and in solitude. Not forgetting many purple patches in
Chatham, his son, Fox, Sheridan, Canning, Bright, Lincoln, Gladstone
and Disraeli himself, I yet assure you that nowhere--save with the
incomparable Burke--you will find great gleaning on that many-acred
field. And Burke, our glorious exception, was “the dinner-bell of the
House” when he rose to speak. I fancy that the most of our legislators
when lately seeking re-election would have avoided a Burke--and wisely.
I shall have more to say of this before I conclude. For the moment I
am but concerned to point out to you that Parliamentary practice laid
a double trap for Disraeli as a writer: the first inherent in that
practice, the second a peculiar temptation for him.
“It is only by frequent and varied iteration,” says Herbert Spencer
somewhere, “that unfamiliar truths can be impressed upon reluctant
minds”: and who has ever served, for example, on a County Council and
not felt the iron of that truth penetrate his soul? How true must it
have been of a young man, brilliant but suspected, kept out of office
on suspicion, preaching a new creed not so much to the benches opposite
or into the necks of a distrustful ministry, but hammering it, rather,
upon the intelligence of supporters scarcely less distrustful while
infinitely more stupid! Can any conceivable task tempt more to that
redundancy which destroys a clean literary style?
Now for the man himself.--He was an Oriental and proud of it (let
_Tancred_, in particular, attest), of a race but lately admitted to the
House of Commons and, if for that reason only, challenged to display
himself in debate. With a courage perhaps unexampled in Parliamentary
story he let himself go, took the risk, triumphed. But the dyer’s hand
must inevitably acknowledge, sooner or later, its trade. Now of all
practitioners in English writing, a man of Oriental mind and upbringing
has to beware of this--that no Occidental literature, since Greece
taught it, will suffer ornament as an addition superinduced upon style:
and, after some experience, I put it quite plainly--if harshly, yet
seriously for his good--to any Indian student who may be listening to
these words--that extraneous ornament in English is not only vapid,
but ridiculous as the outpouring of a young Persian lover who, unable
equally by stress of passion and defect of education to unburden his
heart, betakes himself to a professional letter-writer; who in his turn
(in Newman’s words)--
dips the pen of desire into the ink of devotion and proceeds to
spread it over the page of desolation. Then the nightingale of
affection is heard to warble to the rose of loveliness while the
breeze of anxiety plays around the brow of expectation.
“That,” says Newman, “is what the Easterns are said to consider fine
writing”: and Disraeli, yielding to that Oriental temptation, will give
you, again and again, whole passages that might have been hired, to
depict the stateliest homes of England, from any professional penman in
any Eastern bazaar.
Speaking, in the Preface to _Lothair_, of his early work, Disraeli
himself admits that much of it (and _Vivian Grey_ in particular)
suffers at least from affectation. “Books written by boys, which
pretend to give a picture of manners and to deal in knowledge of
human nature, _must_,” he says, “be affected. They can be, at the
best, but the results of imagination acting on knowledge not acquired
by experience. Of such circumstances exaggeration is a necessary
consequence, and false taste accompanies exaggeration.” Yes, but
_Lothair_ appeared in 1870, when its author had been Prime Minister,
and had certainly acquired by experience much knowledge of the world
and human nature: and the trouble is that in this very book the
youthful exaggeration not only persists but has exaggerated itself
ten-fold, that the Eastern flamboyancy is more flamboyant than
ever. Take, for example, the following description of the ducal
breakfast-table at Brentham--
The breakfast-room at Brentham was very bright. It opened on
a garden of its own, which at this season was so glowing, and
cultured into patterns so fanciful and finished, that it had the
resemblance of a vast mosaic. The walls of the chamber were covered
with bright drawings and sketches of our modern masters and frames
of interesting miniatures, and the meal was served at half-a-dozen
or more round tables which vied with each other in grace and
merriment....
--as well, one may pause to observe, as in rotundity. These
half-a-dozen or more round tables were
brilliant as a cluster of Greek or Italian republics.... After
breakfast the ladies retired to their morning room.
We have already been told what they did there--
One knitted a purse, another adorned a slipper, a third emblazoned
a page. Beautiful forms in counsel leant over frames glowing with
embroidery, while two fair sisters more remote occasionally burst
into melody, as they tried the passages of a new air which had been
communicated to them in the manuscript of some devoted friend.
On the other hand
the gentlemen strolled to the stables, Lord St. Aldegonde lighting
a Manilla cheroot of enormous length. As Lothair was very fond of
horses, this delighted him.
--the cheroot, apparently.
The stables at Brentham were rather too far from the house, but
they were magnificent, and the stud worthy of them. It was numerous
and choice, and, above all, it was useful. It could supply a
readier number of capital riding horses than any stable in England.
[Advt.] Brentham was a great riding family. In the summer season
the Duke delighted to head a numerous troop, penetrate far into the
country, and scamper home to a nine o’clock dinner. All the ladies
of the house were fond and fine horsewomen. The mount of one of
these riding parties was magical. The dames and damsels vaulted
on their barbs and genets and thorough-bred hacks with such airy
majesty: they were absolutely overwhelming with their bewildering
habits and bewitching hats.
Now, whatever else we say of that, it belongs--does it not?--to the
_Arabian Nights_ rather than to English acres and the line of English
fiction. It is Bluebeard bewitching his guests--his next bride among
them--with a delicious _fête-champêtre_. Nay, can you not imagine our
poor English Duke gripping the back of his ducal head in the endeavour
to recognise himself as leader of this cavalcade? It almost defies
parody. Even Thackeray could but make fun of it, in _Codlingsby_, by
opposition of scene rather than by caricature of style; by transferring
the style merely and maliciously to an old clothes shop in Holywell
Street, as thus--
They entered a moderate-sized apartment--indeed Holywell Street is
not above a hundred yards long, and this chamber was not more than
half that length--and fitted up with the simple taste of its owner.