AN AGE OF EXPANSION
In 1897 Mark Twain was visiting London during the Diamond Jubilee celebrations honoring the 60th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s coming to the throne. “British history is two thousand years old,” Twain observed, “and yet in a good many ways the world has moved farther ahead since the Queen was born than it moved in all the rest of the two thousand put together.” And if the whole world had “moved” during that long lifetime and reign of Victoria’s, it was in her own country itself that the expansionist movement was most marked and dramatic, a movement that brought England to its highest point of development as a world power. ‘We have been living, as it were, the life of three hundred years in thirty” was the impression formed by Dr. Thomas Arnold during the early stages of England’s industrialization. By the end of the century--after the resources of steam power had been more fully exploited for fast railways and iron ships, for looms, printing presses, and farmers’ combines, and after the introduction of the telegraph, intercontinental cable, an aesthetics, and universal compulsory education--a late Victorian could look back with astonishment on these developments during his lifetime.
Because England was the first country to become industrialized, her transformation was an especially painful one, but being first had a compensation : it was profitable. An early start enabled England to capture markets all over the globe. Her cotton and other manufactured products were exported in English ships, a merchant fleet whose size was without parallel in other countries. The profits gained from her trade led also to extensive capital investments in all continents so that after England had become the world’s workshop, London became, from 1870 on, the world’s banker.
The reactions of Victorian writers to the fast-paced expansion of England were various. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59) relished the spectacle as wholly delightful. During the prosperous 1850’s Macaulay’s essays and histories, with their recitations of the statistics of industrial growth, constituted a Hymn to progress as well as a celebration of the superior qualities of the English people--”the greatest and most highly civilized people that ever the world saw.” And later in the century there were lesser jingoists whose writings confidently pointed out the reasons for further national self-congratulation. More representative, perhaps, was Tennyson, whose capacity to relish industrial change was only sporadic. Much of the time he felt instead that leadership in commerce and industry was being paid for at a terrible price in human happiness. In their experience a so-called “progress” had been gained only by abandoning the traditional rhythms of life and traditional patterns of human relationships which had sustained mankind for centuries.
THE EARLY PERIOD (1832-1848): A TIME OF TROUBLES
The early phase has been sometimes characterized as the Time of Troubles. In 1832 the passing of a Reform Bill had seemed to satisfy many of the demands of the middle classes, who were gradually taking over control of England’s economy. The bill extended the right to vote to all men owning property worth ten pounds or more in annual rent. In effect the voting public hereafter included the lower middle classes but not the working classes (the latter had to wait their turn until 1867 when a second Reform Bill was passed). Because it broke up the monopoly of power that the conservative landowners had so long enjoyed (the Tory party had been in office almost continuously from 1783 until 1830), the Reform Bill represents the beginning of a new age.
In the early 1840s a severe depression, with widespread unemployment, led to rioting. Workers and their families in the slums of such cities as Manchester lived like packs of rats in sewer, and the conditions under which women and children toiled in mines and factories were unimaginably brutal. Elizabeth Barrett’s poem The Cry of the Children (1843) may strike us as hysterical exaggeration, but it was based upon reliable evidence concerning children of five years of age who dragged heavy tubs of coal through low-ceilinged mine passages for 16 hours a day. Life in early Victorian mines and factories was much like Thomas Hobbes’s “state of nature”: “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
In response, many remedies were called for. One of the most striking was put forward by the Chartists, a large organization of workingmen. In 1838 the organization drew up a “People’s Charter” advocating the extension of the right to vote, the use of secret balloting, and other legislative reforms. For ten years the Chartist leaders engaged in agitation to have their program adopted by Parliament. Their fiery speeches, addressed to large mobs of discontented people, alarmed those who were not themselves suffering from hunger. In Locksley Hall, Tennyson seems to have had the Chartist mobs in mind when he pictured the threat posed by this time of troubles: ‘slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion, creeping nigher, / Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire.”
In 1846 the Corn Laws--tariffs on imported grain, which kept food prices artificially high, to the benefit of landowners--were repealed by Parliament, and the way was paved for the introduction of a system of Free Trade, whereby goods could be imported with the payment of only minimal tariff duties. Although Free Trade did not eradicate the slums of manchester, it worked well for many years and helped to relieve the major crisis of the Victorian economy. In 1848, when armed revolutions were exploding violently in every country in Europe, England was relatively unaffected.
The Time of Troubles left its mark on some early Victorian literature. Vivid records of these conditions are to be found in the fiction of Charles Kingsley (1819-75), Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65), and Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81), a novelist who became Prime Minister. For his novel Sybil (1845) Disraeli chose an appropriate subtitle, The Two nations--a phrase that pointed up the line dividing the England of the rich from the other nation, the England of the poor.
THE MID-VICTORIAN PERIOD (1848-70): ECONOMIC PROSPERITY AND RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
The second phase of the Victorian age had many problems, but it was a time of prosperity. On the whole its institutions worked well. Even the badly-bungled war against Russia in the Crimea (1854-56) did not seriously affect the growing sense of satisfaction that the challenging difficulties of the 1840s had been solved or would be solved by English wisdom and energy. The queen and her husband, prince Albert, were themselves models of middle-class domesticity and devotion to duty. The aristocracy was discovering that Free Trade was enriching rather than impoverishing their estates; agriculture flourished together with trade and industry. And through a succession of Factory Acts in parliament, which restricted child labor and limited hours of employment, the condition of the working classes was also being gradually improved. When we speak of Victorian complacency or stability or optimism, we are usually referring to this mid-Victorian phase. “Of all the decades in our history,” writes G. M. young, ‘a wise man would choose the eighteen-fifties to be young in.
In 1851 Prince Albert opened the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park where a gigantic glass greenhouse, the Crystal Palace, had been erected to display the exhibits of modern industry and science. The Crystal palace was one of the first buildings constructed according to modern architectural principles in which materials such as glass and iron are employed for purely functional ends. (Much late Victorian furniture, on the other hand, with its fantastic and irrelevant ornamentation, was constructed according to the opposite principle). The building itself, as well as the exhibits, symbolized the triumphant feats of Victorian technology.
Generally, however, most mid-Victorian poetry and critical prose was less preoccupied with technology, economics, and politics than with the conflict between religion and science. This conflict was not, of course, altogether a new one. Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), like much mid-Victorian literature, carries on the religious debates of earlier decades. These debates, in their earlier form, had been generally between the Utilitarians, the followers of Jeremy Bentham (1772-1832) and the philosophical conservatives, the followers of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bentham and his disciples were reformers of a distinctive cast of mind. Their aim was to test all institutions in the light of human reason in order to determine whether such institutions were useful--that is, whether they contributed to the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers. This “Utilitarian” test was an extremely effective method of correcting inefficiencies in government administration: the drastic remodelling of the Civil Service in Victorian England was a tribute to Benthamite thinking. But could such a test be applied to religious institutions and beliefs? Was religious belief useful for the needs of a reasonable person? To the Benthamites the answer was evident: religious belief was merely an outmoded superstition.
Opponents of Utilitarianism argued that Bentham’s view of human nature was unrealistically narrow, that man had always needed a faith as profoundly as he had needed food. These anti-Utilitarians were of two types. The first were those such as Carlyle, who abandoned institutional Christianity yet sought to retain some sort of substitute religious belief--a quest that is vividly described in his spiritual autobiography, Sartor Resartus. Others, led by John Henry Newman, argued that only a powerful, dogmatic, and traditional religious institution could withstand the attacks of