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SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE VICTORIAN AGE
A Survey of Court and Country
by
T. H. S. ESCOTT
_Author of 'England, its People, Polity
and Pursuits,' &c., &c._
New York
Charles Scribner's Sons
153-157 Fifth Avenue
1897
_PREFACE_
It may be well very briefly to explain the relation in which the present
work stands to a survey, not a history, of modern England undertaken by
the same author some years ago. That earlier work was originally published
by Messrs Cassell and Co. in two volumes. It was reprinted, first by them,
secondly by Messrs Chapman and Hall, in a single volume. Into that
re-issue of his _England: Its People, Polity, and Pursuits_ (the labour of
revision being much lightened by the obliging help of Mr Francis
Drummond), the author introduced certain references to social or
legislative changes effected since the original edition of the work
appeared. Without organic disturbance of its plan, and risk of consequent
confusion to the reader, it would have been impossible to bring down that
book to the year 1897. The writer does not in the following pages
pre-suppose any knowledge of his former book on the part of the readers of
his present one. He has, however, held himself absolved from the duty of
repeating in this book minute accounts of institutions fully described in
its predecessor. Such repetition seemed the more undesirable because the
earlier book is still in wide circulation here; while it has been
translated into several European languages, and has been adopted as a text
book in the higher grade State schools of Germany,[1] and of other
countries. The method of workmanship adopted in _Social Transformations of
the Victorian Age_ is identical with that pursued in the case of _England,
Etc._
This new book being, like its predecessor, not a history, but a series of
different views from a common standpoint, the sketches of national life
and character as well as of national institutions at work, have in all
cases been made from personal observation; supplemented by the assistance
of the highest experts in their different departments to whom the writer
had access. Often, he is glad to say, the same private friends who helped
him in the seventies have been able to renew that help in the nineties.
Thus, Sir Charles Dilke, Sir Robert Herbert, Mr Mundella, Mr Archibald
Milman of the House of Commons, and Mr Albert Pell have generally and
specifically repeated the assistance lent to him twenty years earlier. In
most cases it is hoped the assistance given has been acknowledged in its
proper place. In many cases the advantages of this service extend beyond
any particular passage. In all which relates to the new schemes of local
government the writer is particularly indebted to Mr Henry Chaplin or
members of his staff; to Sir Henry Fowler; to Sir Charles Dilke; to the
Rev. J. Charles Cox, LL.D., of Holdenby, as in ecclesiastical matters to
the Rev. A. L. Foulkes of Steventon, and to the Rev. H. W. Tucker, D.D.,
of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. In references to
certain phases of social history, especially about the early railway
period, he has learned much from Lord Carlingford, Mr Markham Spofforth,
Mr J. C. Parkinson, and from Sir W. H. Russell. And finally he would
specially thank several gentlemen of the Education Department, as well as
the Vice-President himself, Sir John Gorst. It is hoped that, as in the
case of the writer's _England_, so in that of his new book, the
collaboration of those who are, in their different provinces, experts, has
ensured a more uniform accuracy than in a volume dealing with such a
variety of subjects would otherwise have been attainable.
T. H. S. E.
_CONTENTS_
PAGE
CHAPTER I
TWO EPOCHS OF VICTORIAN SOCIETY CONTRASTED, 1
CHAPTER II
THE NEW WEALTH, 13
CHAPTER III
TRANSFORMATION BY STEAM, 27
CHAPTER IV
THE ARISTOCRACY OF WEALTH AND ITS MANIFESTATIONS, 39
CHAPTER V
THE RICH MEN FROM THE EAST, 53
CHAPTER VI
SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP AS A MORAL GROWTH OF VICTORIAN ENGLAND, 67
CHAPTER VII
THE NEW ERA IN ENGLISH PARISHES, 77
CHAPTER VIII
THE NEW ERA IN ENGLISH COUNTIES, 92
CHAPTER IX
COUNTY COUNCILS AND CLASS FUSION, 103
CHAPTER X
THE SOCIAL FUSING AND ORGANIZING OF THE TWO NATIONS
OF 'SIBYL,' 115
CHAPTER XI
FROM AN UNTAUGHT GENERATION TO FREE SCHOOLS, 132
CHAPTER XII
THE LADDER OF EDUCATION, 151
CHAPTER XIII
THE GREAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS AS MIRRORS OF THE AGE, 168
CHAPTER XIV
THE NEW OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE, 179
CHAPTER XV
FROM THE OLD SOCIAL ORDER TO THE NEW, 193
CHAPTER XVI
'THE PLAY'S THE THING,' 206
CHAPTER XVII
THE STRANGER WITHIN OUR GATES AND OUR OWN TEEMING
MILLIONS, 220
CHAPTER XVIII
THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AS A LANDMARK OF POLITICAL
PROGRESS UNDER QUEEN VICTORIA, 238
CHAPTER XIX
CROWN, COUNTRY AND COMMONS, 259
CHAPTER XX
ROYALTY AS A SOCIAL FORCE, 274
CHAPTER XXI
CROWN AND SWORD, 290
CHAPTER XXII
FROM WOODEN WALLS TO FLOATING ENGINES, 311
CHAPTER XXIII
TRANSFORMATIONS OF VICTORIAN SCIENCE, 320
CHAPTER XXIV
CECILIA'S TRIUMPHS, 337
CHAPTER XXV
TRANSFORMED AND TRANSFORMING ART, 349
CHAPTER XXVI
POPULAR CULTURE IN THE CRUCIBLE, 362
CHAPTER XXVII
NEWSPAPER PRESS TRANSFORMATION SCENES, 380
CHAPTER XXVIII
TRANSFORMATIONS IN INVALID LIFE, 388
CHAPTER XXIX
TRANSFORMATIONS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT, 398
CHAPTER XXX
THE QUEEN'S SUBJECTS AT PLAY--ACTIVE OR SEDENTARY, 408
CHAPTER XXXI
THE REIGN OF LAW AND ITS TRANSFORMATIONS:--HOME AND
COLONIAL, 422
INDEX 439
Social Transformations
CHAPTER I
TWO EPOCHS OF VICTORIAN SOCIETY CONTRASTED
Difference between English society in the earlier and later years of
the Queen's reign illustrated from the composition of Hyde Park
crowds, first, when the Park was a playground for the Royal children,
and a parade ground for social celebrities, secondly, as it has become
since. Different generations of Victorian Royalty. Great noblemen,
Lord Lansdowne, Lord Eglinton, Lord Shrewsbury, Lord Shaftesbury, The
Duke of Wellington. Statesmen, Earl Grey, Sir Robert Peel. Other
celebrities, social, or intellectual, or literary. The dandies, some
of them sketched by Thackeray, Morgan O'Connell, the original of 'The
O'Mulligan,' Alfred Montgomery, Alexis Soyer, Lord Adolphus
Fitzclarence, 1848-51. Tall forms of Thackeray and Jacob Omnium
overtopping the crowd. The editor of the _Times_, J. T. Delane, on
horseback. The absence in later days of eminent individuals like
these; the old editor and the new. A. W. Kinglake among the last
riders in Hyde Park of veterans who write. Commerce in the Park and in
society represented by 'King' Hudson before and after his fall. Lord
Tollemache, of Peckforton, the last of great nobles familiar to
English crowds.
As it is to-day, so, during the earlier years of the present reign, both
before and after the Great Exhibition of 1851, Hyde Park was the social
parade ground, not only of the capital, but of the Kingdom. Then, as now,
its human panorama was the representative reflection of the social
conditions not less than of the typical personages of the era.
Throughout the later forties or the fifties, the loungers from the
provinces were certainly not less numerous in Hyde Park than to-day.
Foreign visitors were beginning to be a feature in the Metropolitan
summer. But the scale on which the London season half a century ago was
observed was so small as to resemble but faintly its successors known to
the present generation. Society scarcely exceeded the dimensions of a
family party. Hyde Park itself seemed a Royal pleasure ground first, a
popular resort afterwards, to which strangers were, as to the Park at
Windsor, admitted by favour of the first Constitutional Sovereign, to
behold the pastimes of the rising generations of Royalty. The little boy
and girl, steering their ponies through the maze of carriages, horses, or
pedestrians, were the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal. Observers
noted with appreciative criticism the progress made from day to day by the
young riders. Other of the Queen's descendants of age still more tender,
followed with their parents in an open carriage, the exact build of which
had been introduced by the Prince Consort, and were manifestly being
instructed by their father or mother in the art of acknowledging
gracefully the respectful salutations of spectators.
The company crowding the Park, and most familiar to London onlookers
differed from the crowds of succeeding decades, first, in the monotony of
its composition, secondly, in the commanding ascendancy of some among the
individuals whom it numbered. This was a kind of feudal age in our social
development. The monarch was surrounded by subjects, the splendour of
whose station, or the lustre of whose endowments caused them to shine
forth in their exalted firmament, with a light of their own not reflected
by, though comparable with, that of Royalty itself. Two noblemen, during
the first quarter of a century of the Queen's reign, one Scotch, the other
English, seemed to eclipse the rest of the peerage. The Earl of Eglinton,
of the period now referred to, was famous, even among Englishmen, from the
tournament held some years earlier in 1839 at Eglinton Castle, and
described by Mr Disraeli in his last novel, _Endymion_. The lady who had
been the Queen of Beauty upon the occasion, the Duchess of Somerset, was
then a synonym for all which women envy or men admire. When she appeared
in Hyde Park, the crowd gazed at her carriage with the awed admiration
that they bestowed on those born to thrones. North of the Tweed, Lord
Eglinton summed up to his adoring countrymen, in his own person, all the
influence, the dignity, the splendour, the power, and all the other
attributes of greatness with which the principle of birth could be
endowed. What Lord Eglinton was in Scotland, or to the natives of Scotland
in London, Lord Lansdowne[2] had long been to all classes of Englishmen,
not more in his native county than in London. Here, during the earlier
Victorian seasons, he was conspicuous in Hyde Park, generally by his
perfect demeanour of high breeding, specially by this blue coat and
voluminous white neck investment. After him, slowly riding on a horse
whose familiarity can best be expressed to readers of to-day by comparing
it with that sometime attained by the white cob of Mr Lowe, Lord
Sherbrooke, there appeared, in the blue coat and white trousers of the old
regime, the figure before whom all heads instinctively uncovered, the
great Duke of Wellington. On horseback, also, were two other men, second
only in eminence to the Duke himself, Lord Palmerston, and Sir Robert
Peel. The first still wore his years lightly and was as much at home in
the saddle as in the House of Commons. Sir Robert Peel, still a remarkably
handsome man, had the enthusiasm of the equestrian. Those who can recall
the loose connection between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and the steed which
he bestrode, can form an idea of the 'seat' of the great Sir Robert.
Next to the representatives of the reigning family and to the statesmen
who were the props of the young Queen's throne, the attention of the Hyde
Park crowd was fixed upon a little group of gentlemen, remarkable for the
perfection of their toilettes, and for the special attention manifestly
bestowed upon their hair, not as to-day cut down to the scalp, but falling
gracefully over the white collar. These were the dandies. The last of the
tribe has not long passed away. But as a race they have left no
successors. The late Mr Alfred Montgomery had for his associates Count
Alfred D'Orsay, whose Christian name was perpetuated by a dandies' club.
'The Alfred' flourished in Albemarle Street till a decade or two since.
Its founder survived till the nineties, Alexis Soyer, high priest of the
mysteries of the fine art of cookery as well as the original of
Thackeray's 'Mirobolant' in _Pendennis_. Others who sat for their
portraits to the novelist were well known in the fashionable section of
the Hyde Park crowd. Morgan John O'Connell, a leader of dandies, was of
course there. There, too, was that other O'Connell, known by his friends
as Lord Kilmarlcock, from whom Thackeray never denied that he had taken
the traits of The O'Mulligan. Possibly, too, there might have been seen
here Mr Arcedeckne, whom the same novelist has immortalised in 'Harry
Foker,' and who thus early in the Victorian era prefigured the social
friendship since grown more common between the gentlemen who live to
labour, and their comrades who live to enjoy. Still more noticeable among
the Hyde Park loungers on foot, standing not far from D'Orsay and
Montgomery were the two inseparables, the then Sir George Wombwell and
Lord Adolphus, better known as 'Dolly,' Fitzclarence, the latter curiously
like Lawrence's picture of George IV.
The editor of the _Times_, J. T. Delane, scarcely less powerful in the
social and political system than in his own office, would have been
mistaken, by those who did not know him personally, for the plain country
gentleman whose life he liked to lead. His square, neatly compacted
figure, with cleanly shaven upper lip, and penetrating, but pleasant,
expression of eyes, was among the last to enter and to leave the Park. Not
less well known to most Londoners and to many provincials were two of Mr
Delane's literary friends, though not both of them wrote for his paper.
One of these was Thackeray, towering above all the smaller men. The other
was tall Thackeray's taller friend known to his contemporaries as 'Big'
Higgins, still better known to the public at large as Jacob Omnium. The
two were generally to be found together. The eyes of all passengers were
strained, and their tongues silenced as these two tall lumbering figures
manoeuvred slowly up or down the Row; not so much ridden in then as it was
afterwards.
But neither the intellectual workers, nor the social butterflies attracted
more attention than a middle-aged, rather over-dressed lady in a very
gorgeous carriage, which might have become a Lord Mayor, and a big, heavy
man, with drab-coloured, wiry hair, who sometimes sat beside her. The
chariot and its occupants seemed to interest the country visitors in the
Park more than did the distinguished persons already mentioned. The
gentleman was George Hudson, the 'railway King,' who had not only made a
fortune himself, but had been the cause of many others rolling in wealth
scarcely less than his own. Within a few years he was still visible in the
same enclosure, not, however, in the gaudy equipage, but as a pedestrian.
The crash, in fact, had come. King Hudson had fallen on evil days. But
having dragged none down in his descent, nor disclosed any secrets of the
prison house, he kept friends who helped him in his adversity. The house
at Knightsbridge, which is now the French Embassy, knew of course Hudson
no more. Its fashionable assemblages since it became a diplomatic
residence cannot have been more brilliant than those which met there when
Hudson was its master. Nor, indeed, has its social splendour since been
eclipsed by any of those more recent hosts whom commercial success has
incorporated among the sons and daughters of fashion. Hudson's dinner
table, or Mrs Hudson's reception room, were graced, habitually by the
great Duke of Wellington, by the Duke of Cambridge, and occasionally by
other Princes of the blood Royal. Nor, during his decline, did Hudson fail
to carry himself with good humour, and even dignity. His simple, harmless,
almost pathetic vanity had perhaps combined with his shrewd Yorkshire
common sense to support him under his adversities. A sum which realised
L600 a year had been subscribed for him, the trustees of his annuity being
Sir George Elliot, and Mr Hugh Taylor. His wife and his sons were alive.
But he preferred living in a solitary lodging in London. His freedom from
all anxiety made this season of eclipse, he protested, the happiest time
of his life. A courteous recognition from the great Lord Grey in the Park,
or the kindly concession to him of the chair which he had occupied, in
other years, in the smoking room of the Carlton, shed something more than
a transitory gleam of comfort upon his darkened fortunes, and were recited
by the old man with his north country burr to the friends with whom, to
the last, he used to dine. Like another fallen star of a different system,
in an earlier age, Beau Brummell, Hudson passed several years of his
eclipse at a hotel in Calais, where he was visited by more friends than
had ever looked in upon the great dandy of the Georgian epoch during the
twilight hours of his life.
Such, then, were the chief among the more representative figures to be met
with on the brightest and most varied of the social parade grounds of the
capital during the earlier years of the Victorian epoch.
No single element conspicuous in the Hyde Park of the later years of the
Victorian era was absent from that earlier crowd at whose composition we
have glanced. The social prominence of English plutocracy whether
represented by the great money brokers, whom, Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic,
Piccadilly has always known, or by Yorkshire Hudson, whom it knew fitfully
during the short spell of his splendour, has been, from Elizabethan or
still earlier times, a feature and a force in the social economy of the
town. That which, seen between the Magazine and Apsley House, would have
most surprised Hyde Park loungers in the early Victorian days, had they
been able to lift the curtain of the future, is not the fact of the best
coaches of the Four in Hand Club being owned by men whose names have no
English sound, and whose taste for horseflesh is not hereditary; but
rather the vogue now attained by prevailing bicycles. Even here, perhaps,
one ought rather to recognize the reintroduction of a fashion whose idea
is as old as the hobby horse itself than a mode as indisputably modern as
the safety wheel or the pneumatic tyre.
The Princes and Princesses who once rode their ponies between Albert and
Stanhope Gates are now bearing a part in the government of Empires, but
are seldom for long unrepresented in the moving and glittering throng.
The 'city' in the Row is not a novelty. The Church began with Archbishop
Tait to be more prominently represented than was ever known before. The
most emancipated of bygone occupants of Lambeth would scarcely have looked
forward to the time when a cavalcade composed of archiepiscopal children,
led by a Primate himself in the van, with his Chaplain bringing up the
rear, would canter to and fro along the Row. Hyde Park is not to-day
visited by early water drinkers who believe in the virtues of the probably
forgotten spring in Kensington Gardens hard by. But not many hours after
dawn, the novelty, as to early Victorian observers it would have seemed,
may be witnessed of ladies and gentlemen issuing in bands from their
Tyburnian or Kensingtonian homes to gain an appetite for breakfast, and a
store of fresh air for the day's confinement, by making at least once the
circuit of the Park while the roads are at their emptiest, and the
dewdrops still glisten on the flowers.
Something else than the extended popularity of London's most serviceable
'lung' is suggested by the contrast between Hyde Park as it is now, and as
it was three or four decades since. The dandies are not the only feature
in the social landscape one looks for in vain. The commanding
personalities of individuals of either sex which seemed common on every
social plane thirty or forty years since have largely disappeared now. The
levelling influences of a democratic epoch have reduced to a uniformity of
unheroic proportions those who represent in our public places the
interests, the occupations, the achievements, or the society of their day.
It is called a prosaic age. It is certainly, as compared with its
predecessors, a lilliputian one. At the very zenith of his power, Mr
Gladstone in the streets or parks of London, never fixed the attention of
the crowd to the same degree as his political master, the great Sir Robert
Peel. The adroit, accomplished, and singularly successful soldier, who,
since the Duke of Cambridge's retirement, has been Commander-in-Chief,
resembles the Duke of Wellington in stature. Neither Lord Wolseley, nor
any of his contemporaries, compels as yet from street crowds the mute
veneration and awe which the simple fact of his unrivalled pre-eminence as
a subject secured for the Duke of Wellington whenever he set foot in
Piccadilly, or turned his horse's head in the direction of the Horse
Guards down Constitution Hill.
Outside the Royal Family there is no great lady who like an earlier Lady
Jersey is greeted as a queen by crowds to which she can only be a name. In
the same way, the average of efficiency in journalism was never so high as
at present, nor the editing as well as the writing and compiling of
newspapers ever more competently performed. The editor, however, of the
stamp of John Thaddeus Delane does not, nor by the circumstances of the
time could, any longer exist. The responsible head of a great newspaper
office has necessarily become less a creator of public opinion, less even
of an interpreter, which Delane signally was, of middle class English
thought, than the custodian of a commercial interest, the vicegerent of a
proprietor who regards the journal, first, as a great organ of public
opinion; secondly, as the instrument for achieving his own patriotic
purposes in his own way. While Delane was yet living, the able conductor
of another great daily journal was ambitious to fill a place like Delane's
in the social and political system. It was a sad mistake. In journalism,
more than anywhere else, as this gentleman ought to have known, given the
requisite capacity which he undoubtedly had, a man may exercise almost any
power he likes on condition that he himself remains in the background, and
neither in jest nor earnest magnifies his apostleship too much. The
consequence was, in the particular case now spoken of, that after some
years of patient forbearance on the owner's part, his solicitor waited on
the editor one fine morning at his country house, and curtly handed the
gentleman, who thought himself indispensable, a formal note of dismissal.
Stories were told of occasional collision even between Mr Delane and the
proprietary of the great newspaper. These were for the most part doubtless
apocryphal. The one thing which observers knew for certain was that when
the commercial master of the newspaper appeared during the evening in the
same room as its literary controller, Mr Delane generally found that he
had an engagement at his office. Some years after the date at which Hyde
Park retrospectively has been presented, the best, if not the only, well
known man of letters to be observed on horseback was A. W. Kinglake, the
historian of the Crimean war. When he passed away there was left
stout-hearted, short-tempered Anthony Trollope, who, up to the time of
his fatal seizure, pounded his sturdy cob so many times round the
enclosure between Cumberland and Albert Gates, just as a few hours earlier
in his study, whether in or out of the vein, he had completed a fixed
number of words of his new novel. These knights of the pen are followed
(1897) by Frederic Harrison, Leslie Stephen and W. S. Lilly. The last
quarter of a century in London finds us with many adequate representatives
of national industry and achievement. The hero who in any department sums
up the exploits and the tendencies of his age will with difficulty be
found. The fact that it is the day of great successes does not prevent its
being comparatively the age of small men. So long as the veteran Lord
Tollemache, of Peckforton, survived to drive his team in its harness of
untanned leather from Marlborough Gate to Portman Square, the peerage in
its social aspect did not lack one whom Carlyle would have admitted to be
in his way a hero. Since 1890, when Lord Tollemache died, Burke and
Debrett contain no name whose owner is the cynosure of the holiday crowd
in at all the same degree as that last survivor of those noblemen whose
figures at an earlier period of this reign were as well known to the
popular eye as their position or eccentricity was celebrated in popular
talk.