Victorian Britain

I

Introduction

Victorian Britain, historical period covering the reign of Queen Victoria, 1837-1901.

II

Perspectives

Victoria, Queen of England, who came to the throne in 1837 and died in 1901, is one of the few monarchs in history to give her name both to an adjective, Victorian, and to a noun, Victorianism. Historians speak too of a “Victorian age”. Her reign was the longest in English history, and went through different phases. She herself celebrated two jubilees, the Golden in 1887 and, ten years later, the Diamond, a new way of describing a rare event, a 60-years jubilee. For her, however, if not for her people, the biggest break of her reign came in 1861, when her husband, Albert, born in Coburg, Germany, died of typhoid. She immediately went into seclusion, a grieving widow who worshipped his memory, emerging reluctantly but ultimately in imperial majesty. In 1867 she was proclaimed Empress of India, and her Diamond Jubilee was an imperial as well as a national event. A new, greatly enlarged British Empire spanned the continents, and more than a fifth of the world’s population were claimed as the Queen’s subjects. Meanwhile, through her marriage to Albert, her first cousin, she had acquired a network of European connections. The marriages of their nine children linked the British royal house to German, Russian, Danish, Greek, and Romanian royal families. Her impressive funeral was as much of a European event as her Diamond Jubilee had been an imperial event, with the German Emperor William II (the Kaiser), her grandson, forming as prominent a figure as her son and heir, Edward VII. There was a sense not only in London but in all the capitals of the world that an age had come to an end, a stronger sense than there had been when the 19th century itself drew to a close.

Interpretations of the long reign of Victoria and of the longer century to which she belonged—she was born, like Albert, in 1819—have varied substantially according, above all, to time and place, but also according to the standpoint both of individual politicians and historians. There have been many vantage points during and after the reign and many interpreters. Both “Victorian” and “Victorianism” became labels of distaste—or worse—as well as of pride: indeed, they already were before Victoria died. The century itself, which went through as many phases as there were in her reign, could be described as “wonderful” or “wasteful”, and for some historians its problems were more striking than its achievements.

From two 20th-century British prime ministers, both Conservatives, there were strongly contrasting judgements. Harold Macmillan considered the Victorian age as an interruption in Britain’s history; Margaret Thatcher, praising what she thought of as “Victorian values”, believed that these were “the values when our country became great”. The first new 20th-century prime minister, Arthur James Balfour (later Earl), also a Conservative, born in the 19th-century year of revolutions, 1848, confessed that the middle years of the Victorian age, its “high noon” between at one end the building of the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition (1851) which was housed in it, and at the other end the second Reform Act of 1867, extending the vote to a sizeable section of the urban working classes, did not “greatly appeal to him”. He preferred to look back, he said, to the long wars against Napoleon, from George Eliot to Jane Austen, from the painter Sir Edwin Landseer, painter of the great deer The Monarch of the Glen, to Sir Joshua Reynolds, Founder-President of the Royal Academy in 1768, from the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson to William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and John Keats.

Balfour was concerned with tastes and styles as well as with values, and consideration of these has greatly influenced how the age of Victoria has been judged. Balfour was placing it within the context of what some historians have come to call “a long [19th] century” that started in France with the revolution of 1789 and stretched up to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, a historical climax and a historical break.

By the end of that war and in the decade that followed, the Victorians were out of fashion, and Lytton Strachey, born in 1880, wrote wittily but astringently about them, including the Queen herself, in Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1921). He, in turn, was to go out of fashion, and soon after the end of World War II there were many signs of a Victorian revival. Victorian houses, which H. G. Wells, a critical Victorian, forecast that no one would ever want to live in, themselves became fashionable soon after he died in 1946. Two years later, a knowledgeable and sensitive literary critic, Humphry House, author of The Dickens World (1941), gave a remarkable broadcast called “Are the Victorians coming back?” and another critic, Basil Willey, observed that there were many 20th-century “displaced persons” who wanted to get back into the Victorian age to seek there for a stability and a confidence which the 20th century had lost.

There never was great stability in the Victorian age. Indeed, the Victorians were like late-20th-century people in at least one respect: they had to cope with unprecedented change. No two decades were the same, and the change affected ways of living and working as much as ways of thinking and feeling. They were divided in their reactions to it, individually and collectively. The most penetrating historian of Victorian England, G. M. Young, himself a Victorian survivor, writing of what he called his favourite decade, the 1860s, began one of his many essays with the question, “If you fell asleep and woke up in the 1860s what would you discover?”, to which he gave the proper answer that it all depended on where you woke up. Victorian society was, for all the change that was taking place, a stratified, hierarchical society with a great gap between rich and poor. There were big regional differences too, the biggest of them between North and South. Young’s most stimulating book on the Victorians, difficult to read because it has as many allusions in it as insights, was written before World War II. It was called Victorian England, Portrait of an Age (1936), and though the portrait has aged it still catches all the light and colour of the age that it is describing.

Whatever the subsequent—or earlier—interpretations of the reign or the century may be, those that set out to provide a portrait or to produce a synthesis have to take account not only of a long-living Queen and her relationship with her subjects, or in the case of the century of a calendar of recorded events, but with a number of great themes, each of which is associated with change and which requires interpretation. They are all interconnected.

Eight stand out: (i) Population growth in total numbers and in distribution. (ii) The growth of material wealth, uneven in terms of social classes, affecting the environment as well as social relationships. (iii) The basis of that material growth in industry and the relationship of industry to agriculture and of town and city to countryside with a new local, regional, and national map. (iv) The political system that through interests and opinions registered sometimes belatedly, that and other social relationships and which expressed continuity as much as change (Britain never became a complete democracy). (v) What has come to be called a “communications revolution”, “a long revolution” not restricted to Britain, which alone, apart from Tsarist Russia, never underwent a political revolution. New modes of communication involved not only transportation, railways, and steamships but the Press and the development through technology of social inventions, like the telegraph and, to a lesser extent, the telephone, which altered perceptions of both time and of space. (vi) A growth of literacy, and, after 1870, again belatedly, elementary schooling under the terms of the first National Education Act of that year. (vii) The building of an impressive physical infrastructure of drains, pipes, and wires below ground—on parts of which we still depend—carrying water, sewage, gas, and electricity. (viii) A redrawing of the map of the world, partly as a result of international trade, partly as a result of the conversion of material strength into power. The power of empire was reflected in the large areas of the world depicted in red in 19th-century atlases.

These were not the only themes in a long reign, all of which when seen in perspective were related to trends, some quantitatively measurable, some encapsulated in “isms”. The age and the century were drawn to statistics, the statistics of “progress” and, at the beginning of the reign, of poverty. As the statistician George Richardson Porter put it in 1837, the first year of the Queen’s reign: “Any work which should faithfully record the onward progress of England should partake of the nature of a periodical so great are the changes which occur and so rapidly are they bound to succeed each other.” The “isms” rested not on facts but on interpretations or ideologies. Alongside Victorianism, and used far more often, were socialism, capitalism, imperialism, each with its own history. The most important of the interpreting adjectives was “modern”, used comprehensively to incorporate the “isms” of the age as well as the facts and the attitudes of contemporaries. It also incorporated the images of the period, including photographs, the most significant cultural novelty.

What in later perspectives stand out as items in trends or processes then stood out as novelties (still photographs, moving pictures, studio photographs, snapshots, cinema, television). The railways were one of the first. In the 1890s they came in clusters. In an article in a popular new periodical of the 1890s, Answers, it was observed that “the Jubilee reign has been a phenomenal period in the history of progress… but Jubilee year has broken the record”. The article was called “A Free Trip into the Future” and it forecast that by 1925, a curious date to choose, “society will be completely revolutionized, and 1897, the period of their inception stamped as the greatest year in all history”. The previous year, 1896, would have been a better year to choose, for that saw the launching of what became one of the first large-scale popular newspapers, the Daily Mail, the first cinema show in London’s West End, and the first motor rally between London and Brighton. (Automobiles were to affect 20th-century society in a very different way from railways in the 19th century.) And in the same year Guglielmo Marconi arrived in London with a batch of wireless patents. (Wireless was not thought of then in terms of broadcasting—the technology had not been developed—but the idea of broadcasting, including television, was already alive, related more to the telephone than to “the Marconi system of telegraphy without wires” which the Answers article described as “an invention only a few weeks old”.)

Such inventions, as interpreted in periodicals and newspapers, were encouraging people to look far into the future in a way that they had not done when the century or the reign had begun. Most of the comparisons were with the past, and one of the most influential books of the early years of the Queen’s reign was Past and Present (1843) by Thomas Carlyle, rightly described as “prophetic”, although Carlyle was writing like an Old Testament prophet, not like a popular forecaster of the 1890s or 1990s. History was a Victorian and a 19th-century preoccupation, and as the reign and the century were surveyed and assessed as each was coming to an end, attempts were being made at many different levels to place both of them within the whole span of human—and pre-human—history. They acquired a strategic importance both for the learned and for the popular public as the first half of the century and the first phase of the reign had done for Albert, deeply interested in science and technology, when he planned and interpreted human history and scientific and technical achievement at the opening of the Great Exhibition of 1851.

For the biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, theorist of evolution through natural selection, a dominating idea of the age, the 19th century had to be compared “not with any previous century, or even with the last millennium, but with the whole historical period—perhaps even the whole period that has elapsed since the Stone Age”.

It was during the 19th century—and within the reign of Victoria—that the span of human history, which Wallace was describing was enormously lengthened as a result of geological and biological studies. Wallace’s fellow biologist, Charles Darwin, was one of a remarkable group of “eminent Victorians” who daringly studied both “the origin of species”, the title of his great work of 1859, and “the descent of man”, following in the wake of eminent geologists such as James Hutton and Charles Lyell, who studied “the age of the Earth”. The word “prehistory” was a Victorian invention. The daring of the discourses lay in the fact that often non-explicitly they were challenging the Biblical account of the history of the Earth and of the descent of man as set out in the Biblical book of Genesis. In parallel, the Bible was critically examined by historians and theologians who came to treat it as a text. There were attempts on both sides to avoid confrontation, but conflict between religion and science often reached beyond “scientists” (a new word in 1840) to the greatly enlarged Victorian reading public.

By the end of the century and the reign, the drama of confrontation had been followed by attempts to achieve reconciliation; and while scientists had become more specialized in their approach to their subject, a larger section of the reading public had become more apathetic when religious preachers attempted to stir them to greater energy and activity in their religion. None the less, Victorian religion remained a religion of “mission”, both domestic and foreign, carrying various versions of Christianity into every corner of the world, in the words of a favourite hymn, “from Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand”. Preachers were as prominent as traders or adventurers on the distant frontiers of empire, where they themselves confronted not only “paganism” in Africa but ancient, “traditional” religions in Asia. By the end of the century, anthropologists had entered the scene also, most of them following an evolutionary approach in their research.

The year 1859, when Darwin’s The Origin of the Species was published, stands out as a landmark year in mid-Victorian Britain, particularly in literature, as prominently as the year 1896 stands out in late-Victorian Britain. Other books published in that year included Essay on Liberty by John Stuart Mill, a powerful plea for the exchange of ideas in a liberal society, the immensely popular Self-Help by Samuel Smiles, written many years before and inculcating what were described as “old-fashioned lessons” but influencing many people’s lives, and the translation of the poem, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, by Edward Fitzgerald, transporting his readers far away from “workaday” England to an exotic Persia. It was always possible to escape from the Victorian age through romance, fantasy, and “nonsense”, although there remained a distinctive Victorian flavour to all three of them, not least Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll, and a number of other books. Carroll was one of many Victorian pseudonyms, however: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a mathematics don at Oxford University, living and working in “the city of dreaming spires”, which figured as prominently on the Victorian map as industrial Manchester or Birmingham, mercantile Liverpool or Bristol, and metropolitan London, a genuine world city.

III

Time and Place

There are two maps to consult—the map of England and the map of Britain. The names were used somewhat arbitrarily and the words “United Kingdom” were seldom used. An undivided Ireland, constitutionally linked to the rest of the British Isles, had a disproportionately large representation in Parliament, but large numbers of Irish people resented the Act of Union of 1800 on which this was based, and struggled unsuccessfully to have it repealed. Irish politics were of crucial importance to the rest of Britain at particular times, 1846 and 1886 in particular, but the economic and religious differences between England and Ireland, seldom visited by Victoria, were always there, not just at moments of crisis. Scotland was different from England also, and it had its own internal contrast between Highlands and Lowlands. Unlike most of Ireland, however, with the exception of Belfast, it had been substantially industrialized and Glasgow stood out as a great Victorian city, a city of empire, as London was, in the last phases of Victoria’s reign. The Queen herself chose to spend a great deal of time in the Highlands, where she kept a journal. Balmoral Castle, to which her ministers had to travel when she commanded it, had been redesigned totally by Albert.

There were religious differences between England and Scotland also, the latter mainly Calvinist but with a strong Roman Catholic minority. The Church of Scotland was Presbyterian. In Wales, Calvinism was preached not through any kind of overarching religious establishment but through the chapel. Along with Scotland—and Ireland—it was felt by the end of Victoria’s reign to be part of a “Celtic fringe”. England itself had its internal religious divisions. Methodism, for example, was strong in Staffordshire, Derbyshire, and the West Riding of Yorkshire. The Baptists and other dissenting groups were relatively strong in East Anglia.

The biggest divide in England, though, was that between North and South (as there was in Ireland, and the United States). The two halves of the country represented different ways of life. The “Northerners” seemed to be different from “other people”. They were well described by Elizabeth Gaskell, biographer of Charlotte Brontë, herself a Northerner (with a Northern Irish father). Mrs Gaskell, whose husband was a Unitarian minister, was writing about Manchester in particular in her novel North and South, published in 1855. “Cottonopolis”, as it was sometimes called, was at the centre of a cluster of cotton textile towns, looking across the Atlantic for their raw material: it provided them with financial services, including a bustling cotton exchange. Making money was the main activity of Mancunians and of Lancashire millowners, and it did not need Mrs Gaskell to point that out. What she did succeed in doing, however, was to focus specifically on the psychological and social relationships between millowners and their employees, whom they usually thought of as “hands”. They themselves often lived frugal lives, but there was a sharp contrast between their detached villas with gardens attached and the long rows of working-class houses in the long rows of “Coronation Streets” where workers lived near to their place of work. Time was announced by factory hooter. The same was true of the smaller cotton towns, where the smoking chimneys of textile mills dominated the townscape.

In both city and town the word “class” was a key word in a new vocabulary. So, too, was “union”. They were both used in an influential book by Friedrich Engels, friend of Karl Marx, who lived in Manchester and generalized about class on the basis of his Manchester experience. He called it—and it was written in German and became a classic Marxist text—The Condition of the Working Class in England; most later readers would have ignored the time tag he added—in 1844. On the basis of what he saw and felt, class conflict in Manchester would culminate, he predicted, in a proletarian revolution which he welcomed and which the proletariat would be bound to win.

Had Engels been living in Birmingham, England’s second industrial city, he might not have offered the same analysis or reached the same conclusion. There was not as wide a gulf between employers (“capitalists”) and workers (“proletariat”) there as there was in Manchester. Birmingham was a city not of large mills but of small workshops, in which a wide variety of “trades”, some skilled, were pursued. It seemed easier to become the owner of a workshop in Birmingham than a millowner in Manchester, and when times were bad employers and employed often suffered and worked together in a spirit of harmony, not conflict. Like Engels’s picture of Manchester, this was too one-sided—he left out Manchester’s enthusiasm for painting and music and the strength of voluntary organizations there. None the less, contrasts drawn between the two cities helped to shape the political as well as the economic history of the Victorian age. Manchester stood for free trade, secured by the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws in 1846, and Birmingham provided the setting for a protectionist revival in the late decades of the century. Joseph Chamberlain, whose political career began as Mayor of Birmingham from 1873 to 1876, where he implemented what he called “a civic gospel”, was to take up the cause of protectionism and undermine the “gospel of free trade” soon after the Victorian age was over.

It was not only the contrast between Manchester and Birmingham that stood out in that age but the contrast between Manchester and a city that was geographically nearer to it, Liverpool. There, politics were shaped largely by religious differences. Popular Protestantism with a strong anti-Roman Catholic thrust existed in many smaller towns, but in mercantile Liverpool, which was a city before either Manchester or Birmingham was incorporated as a city, it was the main source of local politics and of voluntary social organizations. Yet social contrasts were as marked in Liverpool as they were in Manchester. It was said of Liverpool, the first English city that was seen by Americans when they arrived in England and the last city that emigrants from Britain saw before they crossed the Atlantic, that “two communities dwell side by side [there] within sound of the same bells…as wide apart as if they lived in separate quarters of the world”.

Liverpool and Manchester were the first two cities in England to be linked by railway, the first in a series of links that changed the map of Britain more than anything else in the Victorian age. Indeed, the first arrival of the railway in any town or city was hailed as a landmark event. The economic effects of the arrival were immediate—cheaper goods in greater volume, including perishable goods, and access to wider markets—and although the social effects were long-term, there was immediate access also to interaction, public and private, further broadened by developments in telegraphy and above all, by the penny post that began in 1840. Speed, an exciting new experience, greatly reduced the significance of distance.

By the mid-1850s there was a railway and telegraph network unifying the country. Places outside it seemed to be standing still or even moving backwards: Oxford tried to resist it and kept the railway station as far away as possible from the city and the university; William Wordsworth fought against the railway invading the Lake District, yet bought railway company shares himself. Already the Lake District was attracting tourists. Nature had a special appeal to the Victorians.

Wherever the railway went, the interiors of towns and cities were transformed as much as the relationships between them. The phrase “two sides of the track” pointed to the social contrasts that Engels focused on and which persisted through the whole Victorian age. By the end of the age, “suburbia” had been brought into existence with more common characteristics than the first industrial towns and cities had shared—lower population densities; detached or semi-detached houses with names; small gardens; more emphasis on private life—and suburbs were being linked to “city centres”, in London by underground railway. It was possible before the advent of the motor car for the better off to work further away from their homes.

The position of London on the map had changed by then, as it also had done on the mental map. It was a feature of the railway network that national lines all converged on London but to different railway stations, not one. “Cross-country” journeys were often difficult. It was an equally important feature of the broader communications system that national newspapers, dependent on national advertising, diminished the power and influence of local newspapers, many of them weeklies not dailies, themselves economically dependent on “classified advertisements”. During the middle years of Victoria’s reign, “the provinces” had enjoyed a degree of cultural autonomy. By the end of the reign, “all eyes were on London”, and cheap railway transport made it possible for crowds as well as individual families to visit the metropolis. They could also visit the other new centres on the map, the holiday resorts, fashioned to meet the needs of different social classes. Brighton, which had begun to grow before the Victorian age through the patronage of Victoria’s uncle, George IV, was now accessible to crowds on “day trips”. So, too, was Blackpool, near to the textile towns of Lancashire. Nearby Southport was as different from it as early-Victorian Manchester was from early-Victorian Birmingham.

IV

The Phases of the Reign

The qualifying words “early” and “late” must necessarily be used in relation to a reign that lasted for so long that few people living at the end of it could remember its beginning. For a different reason, however, they are useful words. There was as sharp a contrast between different phases of the reign as there was between the different parts of towns and cities. None the less, to make too much of the phases would be dangerous. They are best thought of in terms of “framework” or “scaffolding”. Different historians would choose different dates for the phases, although they would all seek to identify the continuities as well as the changes between phases and they would all want to place them within a non-national context. The continuities and changes in European history are different not least in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the Emperor, Francis Joseph, reigned for even longer than Victoria, from 1848 to 1916, without giving his name to an adjective or an “ism”.

The first phase in British Victorian history, early Victorian, is usually said to have lasted from the Queen’s accession to the throne to the Great Exhibition of 1851. It was ushered in not with economic prosperity but with economic depression, the deepest depression since industrialization had begun. Early industrialization was associated with booms and slumps, trade cycles that in this phase of its history were related to harvests as well as to mills, workshops, ports, and stock exchanges. The effects of the depression, which reached its most severe point in 1842, were social and political. Millowners often faced bankruptcy and some indeed became bankrupt. Profits fell. Operatives faced unemployment and the numbers of the unemployed rose to higher figures than ever before. Many of them starved. The worst off were the handloom weavers, already victims of the machine before Victoria came to the throne.

The two great political movements of this phase in the reign—Chartism and the Anti-Corn Law League—changed the pattern of politics. They were both national organizations with strong local roots and they both put pressure on Parliament. The Chartists, with their Six Points, wished it to be totally changed in composition and conduct: they were the first openly declared working-class movement, and the Points included universal male suffrage and annual Parliaments. The Anti-Corn Law Leaguers, preaching the gospel of free trade, wanted Parliament to change national economic policy. Free trade, they argued, would settle the problems both of businessmen and workers at the same time. Manufacturers could export more goods: workers would enjoy the benefits of cheap bread, the staple diet. The only people in the way were “the landlords”, whom they denounced in bitter language as “vampires”: they were, it was said, a cruel oligarchy who dominated Parliament.

The language of both the Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League, tinged with romanticism, was very different from the measured language of the next phase in Victoria’s reign, which began with the Great Exhibition. By then, the fortunes of the two great political movements had diverged. Parliament paid no attention to three Chartist national petitions (1839, 1842, and 1848), and in 1846 it repealed the Corn Laws, not so much because of the campaigns waged by the Anti-Corn Law League but because a Conservative prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, who had already in his ministry from 1841 to 1846 followed free trade policies, was converted to Corn Law repeal by the Irish potato plague and the famine that went with it. And the fact that he only carried repeal at the expense of splitting his party was a sign of Parliamentary statesmanship. To people with the vote, there seemed to be no signs of leadership, let alone statesmanship, in the Chartist movement, which reached its peak in a year of revolutions in 1848 when Britain, the most industrialized country in the world, to the satisfaction of the Queen and large numbers of her subjects, avoided one. Engels had been wrong, and so too had Thomas Carlyle, who as a prophet feared a revolution of the kind that Engels would have welcomed.

The Great Exhibition, an international exhibition, was designed to present Britain as “the workshop of the world”. The fruits of free trade were on display. So, too, was the gospel of work. Crowds poured into the Crystal Palace to share in the delight. They came from all parts of the country, some of them visiting London for the first time. For some of them, it was also their first journey in a railway train (there had been a great railway boom in the 1840s). Not all the delight came from the Exhibition. There was ample entertainment on offer outside the Crystal Palace, which itself offered entertainment as well as instruction.

There was one absent figure in 1851, Sir Robert Peel, who was thrown off his horse and killed on Constitution Hill in the year before the Exhibition opened, and already there were statues of him in public parks, some named after him and paid for in part from the “pennies of the poor”, a sign that the first phase of the Queen’s reign was driving to a close. The man who was most obviously present was Albert, a great admirer of Peel, who tried to place the Exhibition in historical perspective. Interested both in the sciences and the arts, he was the most eloquent spokesman of the culture of his age. He wrote music as well, and revered the German composer Felix Mendelssohn, who had died in 1847, the year when his oratorio Elijah, conducted by himself, had been an enormous success at the Birmingham Music Festival.

At the Exhibition, where there was talk of Britain setting an example, and when prayers were offered thanking God for singling the country out for His blessings, the language was the language of harmony; and although one other gospel proclaimed in the Palace designed by a self-made man, Joseph Paxton, the “gospel of peace” (Paxton vobiscum), did not long survive the Exhibition—in 1854, Britain was at war with Russia, the only other country in Europe which had escaped revolution in 1848, for opposite reasons to Britain—the gospel of self-help did. Paxton, who was the Duke of Devonshire’s gardener when he produced his design of the Crystal Palace on a piece of blotting paper, was the example, and a very different politician from Peel, Lord Palmerston, old and experienced enough to be now called “Lord Evergreen”, was more than prepared to sing the praises of self help when he claimed—in a Parliamentary debate on his foreign policy, the subject that interested him most—that “we have shown the example of a nation in which every class of society accepts with cheerfulness that lot which Providence has assigned to it, while at the same time each individual of each class is constantly trying to raise himself in the social scale not by injustices and wrong, not by violence and illegality, but by persevering good conduct and by the steady and energetic exertion of the moral and intellectual faculties with which the Creator has endowed him”. Large-scale schemes of social transformation, “organic” or “utopian”, which had been proposed in early-Victorian England were not now in vocal demand in mid-Victorian Britain. Improvement was the order of the day.

Palmerston could use statistics to justify such an approach to politics. All sections of the population were better off, except the poorest (and they were kept outside most political equations, dismissed as “the residuum”). Businessmen were better off along with skilled workers. Farmers and even landlords were better off too, despite the repeal of the Corn Laws. High prices seemed to underwrite optimism: they were widely attributed to gold rushes, one of them in Australia in a new state, Victoria, named after the Queen.

In such rare conditions of shared prosperity, it was easy for English people to be complacent and they shared many signs of complacency, some made fun of by the country’s most popular novelist, Charles Dickens, who invented an unforgettable character, Mr Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend, to express the national sense of being not only better off economically but better in all respects, not least morals and politics, than all foreigners: other countries were a “mistake”. Some of the complacency was made to seem precarious during the horrors of the Crimean War, inefficiently being waged, it was said, which abruptly shattered the “gospel of peace” and brought Palmerston back to power as prime minister in 1855. Yet little was done to learn ”the lessons” of the war, and there was no great demand for large-scale remedies, including a widening of the suffrage, until after Palmerston died ten years later. That was to open up a new phase, the prelude to what came to be called late-Victorian England. There had, however, been the one great change before Palmerston’s death that mattered to Victoria herself—the death of her husband in 1861, so that if the reign were to be divided into two, not three, labelled parts, that would have been the break.

Within a three-fold division, the move from mid-Victorian to late-Victorian England is best placed at some point in the 1870s, a decade of doubt and hesitation rather than of complacency, when much that had been valued in mid-Victorian England, including “character”, work, “respectability”, and thrift, was called into question, and when there were intimations of much in the late-Victorian decades still to come. Because the late-Victorian years covered a longer period than the early- or mid-Victorian years, it is perhaps most sensible to see them in terms of “decades” or “generations” than as being all of one piece. Yet summing up what was happening to culture and society, a readable social anatomist of Victorian society, T. H. Escott, spoke of “old lines of demarcation” being obliterated and of “ancient landmarks of thought and faith” being removed. “The idols which were revered but a little time ago have been destroyed.”

The first sign of a change of direction and mood came before the 1870s, in 1867, the year of the passing of the second Reform Act, which granted the vote to a substantial section of the urban working classes. There was uncertainty about what would be the outcome. Benjamin Disraeli, Peel’s great opponent in the Parliamentary debates on the repeal of the Corn Laws, introduced the measure, but by the time that it passed, so many amendments had been made that the Act bore little resemblance to the first Bill. Its passing was rightly regarded as a “leap in the dark”, and the first politician to benefit from it was the man who had emerged as Disraeli’s great rival, the Liberal William Ewart Gladstone, who had supported Peel in the 1840s and who, after Peel’s death, was an outstanding figure among “the Peelites”, the Parliamentary group who guarded Peel’s political inheritance.

The rivalry between Gladstone and Disraeli, temperamentally as well as politically completely different, was to last until Disraeli’s death in 1881, and while it lasted, the extended electorate was divided as the electorate had never been before since the days of William Pitt and Charles Fox; so divided, indeed, that W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, composers of the libretto and music of the characteristically late-Victorian Savoy operas, could make one of their characters sing that “every little boy or girl alive” was born either a little Liberal or a little Conservative.

The passing of the Ballot Act in 1872, one of the measures demanded by the Chartists in their Six Points, put the electorate in a new position. So too did the gradual elimination of corruption at times of general elections. As political parties became more highly organized, the pattern of politics after “the leap in the dark” changed in the 1870s and 1880s. Queen Victoria enjoyed a close relationship with Disraeli, but treated Gladstone with suspicion and hostility; but she was in no position to dictate politics to highly organized political parties. The word “democracy” shocked her, but a move towards democracy went on, reaching its next climax in 1884 and 1885 when, by a third Parliamentary Reform Act, more new electors, this time from the countryside, were given the vote than urban electors had been in 1867.

If the turn in direction in the 1870s had been above all intellectual (and religious), the turn in the 1880s was political—and dramatic. After the Reform Act of 1884, the Gladstonian Liberal Party split into two when Gladstone introduced an Irish Home Rule Bill, thereby keeping Liberals out of office for the larger part of 20 years. Yet it was a different kind of split from the split of the Conservative Party in 1846. Gladstone’s opponents included people from opposite ends of his party—Whigs, looking back over the years to Fox, and Radicals who had devoted much of their energy and their talent for denunciation to Whiggery. The Whigs were led by a great aristocrat the Duke of Devonshire, and some of the Radicals by Joseph Chamberlain, a forceful politician renowned for his candour, who had been prepared to push ahead with his “unauthorized” programme. Together, Whigs and Radicals in opposition to Gladstone—or to any further Home Rule bill—formed a union and eventually joined a Conservative government headed by the third Marquess of Salisbury, 11 years younger than the Queen, who had resigned from Disraeli’s government in 1867 after objecting to Disraeli’s political tactics. He was to be the last of Victoria’s prime ministers and was to be succeeded by his nephew, Arthur James (later Earl) Balfour.

The story of aristocratic power continuing throughout the Victorian age did not mean that the aristocracy was free from problems in the late-Victorian years. Indeed, from the 1870s onwards there was a continuing economic threat to aristocratic income. Land ownership, as the Victorian writer Oscar Wilde put it, had ceased to be a pleasure and had become a burden. Throughout the rest of the reign, prices and rents fell, and some land passed out of economic use. But not all landlords or farmers suffered during what was called, misleadingly, a great depression. As adaptable farmers proved, by moving from “corn to horn” or from wheat fields to market gardens and dairies, in order to meet the growing demands of the urban market, they might prosper through their enterprise. So, too, could industrialists, who, confronted with foreign competition, invested abroad rather than in Britain.

Late-Victorian England, unlike mid-Victorian England, was a divided society, divided in terms of interests, with a strong City of London interest, prestigious and specialized, and knowing that the strength of the world economy depended on a gold standard maintained by the privately owned Bank of England. There were also strong professional groups, with more occupations seeking to establish professional status. The increasing number of industrial problems were in part concealed, although the language of politics became more strident than it had been in the middle years of the century. The great French historian of England, Élie Halévy, who resumed his History of the English People in 1895, having broken it off earlier in the century, was so conscious of a change both in tone and in political issues that he concluded that the years he was now trying to cover and which he himself had lived through did not really belong to the British 19th century at all.

Halévy was particularly interested in socialism and in religion, when he dealt with the economy but he was shocked to find collusion in the late-Victorian age, tacit though it might be, between unionized workers and their employers. Neither wanted to rid industry of restrictive practices that kept productivity low. Both were unmoved by free trade as a gospel. The annual rate of growth of the British gross national product had been around 2 per cent, but now, as British capital moved overseas, and Britain became “the world’s banker”, there were many signs of industrial obsolescence, and of lack of interest in research and training. Britain’s economic lead as “the workshop of the world” at the time of the Great Exhibition had turned into a handicap.

There were other economic changes too. Unskilled workers were becoming more organized, and some of them were more prepared to turn to the State for support than the skilled workers who had created the rich and relatively well-managed trade unions of the mid-Victorian years. The gap between the wages of the skilled and unskilled had narrowed. In another dramatic event of the 1880s, the London dockers had waged a successful strike in 1889, and in the same year a group of writers of various hues of socialism, but all committed to a gradualist approach to labour politics, produced a volume of Fabian Essays covering various aspects of socialist policy.

One of the essayists was the Irish-born playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw, who broke sharply with mid-Victorian reasoning when he argued, as Oscar Wilde did, that the poor were right to be discontented: “The virtues of the poor may be readily admitted and are much to be regretted. The best among the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented and rebellious. They are quite right to be so.”

Just how many poor there were, in a land of plenty, became a matter of concern both to socialists and to statisticians in late-Victorian England. H. M. Hyndman, the leader of a small socialist group, the Marxist Social Democratic Federation, was one of the first. Charles Booth, coming from a rich Liverpool mercantile family, was the most ambitious, as he set out in the late 1880s with a team of helpers to investigate poverty in London, “the arithmetic of woe”. Seebohm Rowntree, son of a Quaker chocolate manufacturer, published Poverty, A Study of Town Life in the year Queen Victoria died. It was to be followed later at various points in the 20th century by three other Rowntree surveys, revealing, when taken together, just what changes had taken place, including the development of a “welfare state”, in the statistics of poverty—and why.

Rowntree was a post-Gladstonian Liberal, a new Liberal who believed in active social politics that Gladstone, who died in 1898, had not wished to pursue. None the less, like all Liberals, he clung to the gospel of free trade as did most socialists. It was a portent, however, when, before the reign ended, in February 1900 a conference was held in London at which trade unionists, who now included unskilled labourers, and socialists of various persuasions, one the Independent Labour Party, led by a Scot, Keir Hardie, agreed to form a Labour Representation Committee with another Scot, Ramsay MacDonald, as Secretary. Temperamentally different from Hardie, he was to become the first Prime Minister from the Labour Party in 1924.